How to End the Good Quarter/Bad Quarter Sales Cycle

All right, well, welcome to those of you who are logging in. Good to see some faces. There's a familiar face. Patrick Scanlon. He's connecting to audio. You can't even hear me yet, so I'll wait till he gets connected. Hey, is that Tricia? Welcome. Good to see you again. It's been a long time, right? All right, we've got some, again, familiar faces, some new faces. There's Patrick Scanlan. He's connected now. Pat, good to see you, man. Long time, Long time. Welcome to. Mark. Good to see you. There's Brittany. Brittany, I may speak about you today, just so you know, in a positive way. Of course. In a positive way. Neil, welcome. Derek, Frank. I'm kind of going through. I got a smaller screen here on the side, but. Jeff, welcome. We're going to officially begin in about a minute. I know we got a lot of people that are logging in, so I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to get on board. There's Drew. Drew, good to see you. Welcome. Oh, she's connecting my audio. Drew, good to see you. Welcome. Glad to have you. Here's what I would like to. And again, I can't get to everybody. I'd love to always do a welcome as I see people popping on. Just a couple housekeeping items as we get started here. Certainly, it's nice to see your face. And so you can leave your video on if you want. But as I get started officially, in today's workshop, if you want to turn your camera off, you are more than fine to do that. I know that if you have been through our training programs, we would love to see you interact. But in this case, if you want to turn it off, feel free to do it. But it is good to see so many. Hey, Derek Kimmel is here with us. Hey, good to see you, Derek. Chad, Jeff, welcome. Another thing, too, is this. What I like is we are going to get started in about a minute. Here is. I would like you to use the chat box frequently today to interact. This is live, obviously, number one. Number two, it is interactive. And so here's what I want you to type in the chat box. This is a workshop about consistency. We'll talk about that today, obviously. So here's what I want to hear from you. What's your biggest frustration or challenge when it comes to being consistent? Now, this could be from an agency leadership perspective. You may be running your agency. This could be from your sales team. If you're a sales leader. We have sales leaders on here. Could be us, individual producer or Another professional. What's your biggest challenge when it comes to being consistent in key habits and behaviors, whatever it may be in your agency or in your book of business or in your own life, whatever it is, what's your biggest challenge and consistency? So think about that and type it in the chat box. I want to, before we officially kick off, I want to hear from you and get an idea of what some of the challenges and struggles that that you're dealing with. So let me type put my chat box here. Adam, I'm glad you're excited to be here. I'm excited to do this as well. So good to see you, Nancy. Good to see you again. We get busy and stop doing what made us what we did to make us busy. Yeah, we'll talk about that today. Nancy, you're going to hear some familiar things, obviously being part of our group. Good to see you, Patrick. Balancing between service and selling. Yeah, of course. Mick Fowler. Good to see you, Mick. Other folks, emergencies. Has anybody ever had that where someone else's emergency becomes your emergency? Yeah, I have. Service issues seem to hold us back. Absolutely. Education and training activities based too much. Not, not continuing to prospect. I'm reading that right. Yeah. People that are coming out, we got some more people hopping on again. I was asking what's your biggest frustration or challenge with consistency either in your agency or maybe personally? And I'm always curious to see what that, what those answers are. For those of you that don't know me officially, my name is Brent Kelly. I'm the president here of the Sitkins Group. It is an honor and pleasure to have you all on today. I'm excited here in the month of July, middle of summer to share some insight with you today and some ideas that you can apply in your business. And as you can see, this is the title of this is how to end the good quarter, bad quarter cycle. And you know, some of you are already talking about this and the question I'm asking in the chat box, where do you struggle with consistency? But my guess is you're not alone. And I'm here too, where we have maybe a good quarter and a bad quarter. Good quarter, bad quarter, could it even be good six months, bad six months. Right. These kind of things. But we're just inconsistent and it's frustrating because we start off on the right path, we're doing some of the right things, and then we fall back off and then we've got to restart again and then start over again and then we get results and then we have the same thing. And so as you guys are typing things in here, it's very interesting communication between service and sales, focusing on hot prospects and pipeline management falls off. So a lot of good feedback from you all. And that's going to get going to be the focus today, is going to be around consistency in your business. Now, we at Sidkins have been doing coaching and consulting with agencies for about 40 years. So we've been doing this for a long time. Our mission, our passion is to help agencies, to help producers, to help insurance professionals, to help teams sell even more, retain even more and earn even more than they ever thought possible. That's what we do. That's why we do what we do and why I get up every day. And so that's why hopefully you see my excitement today to have an opportunity to speak with all of you and help you find ways to begin to transform your business, whatever that may be. And again, I know we've got agency leaders, I can see we have sales leaders, we have producers, we have other professionals. But what does transformation look like for you? And by transformation, I'm sure you've heard that phrase before, that word before, transformation. But it is moving from something or somewhere to something or somewhere else, right. Whatever that may be, that I'm actually transforming myself and my business into a better way of doing things. And we're going to talk about key areas today that are going to help you to be more consistent. And so the three things. And by the way, if you've got a paper and pen handy, please use it. I'm going to ask you to write some things down. It's a great opportunity for you to take some notes and take some things back to your book of business or your agency. But three areas that I'm going to focus on today. Number one, what's the missing link that we see overall or the number one mistake that we see agencies make as far as inconsistency, what happens? And so we'll talk about the difference that some of you already wrote in the chat box, the difference between activities and results and just a different philosophy and strategy. The second thing I'm going to talk about today is this may sound a little strange to some of you unless you've been through our programs in the past, how I'm going to ask you to think and act differently on something. I'm going to tell you to stop renewing accounts. Stop renewing accounts. Some of you are going, okay, what workshop did I show up for here? What do you mean stop renewing accounts? This guy crazy. I'LL explain what I mean by that and what it means for your agency and consistency as well. And number three is I'm going to talk about the number one trap and agency profitability. Where do agencies fall short in profitability and again making them inconsistent. So that's going to be the focus for today. Again, have a pen and paper, make sure you're ready to type in the chat box. I'm going to continue to ask you questions. I'd love to get feedback. This is a real live workshop. This isn't me recorded somewhere. So I want to make sure they have a great discussion and I also share with you at the end of this workshop. We have continued to improve our process and experience and want to give you all an opportunity to continue to work with us at a deeper level. So with that being said, let's get into the stuff of today's workshop. So you see here a missing link I talked about. What is the number one mistake that agencies typically make overall? In consistency or of course being inconsistent or a lack of consistency. However you want to define it, what is it? Well, I think it's this here could be the first, first note you can write down. Too often agencies think that activity is an accomplishment. In fact, they were busy. I got a big busy badge, right? Busy as a badge of honor. They make activity and accomplishment. Hey, we're so busy all this activity going on. But let me ask you a question. This is going to be an obvious question. Do you want results or do you want to be really busy? I think it's pretty obvious, right? You don't have to type that one in the chat box. But do you want to be, do you want to get results or do you want to get really busy? And here's just an example. Have you ever had a day, I certainly have had this as well, that you're just running a million miles an hour. You're going to phone call, to email, to client appointment, to phone call to your phone, right? Whatever it is, you're everywhere. And you get home that day and you get home and someone says, how was your day? Oh, so busy, so busy. Hey, what did you accomplish? I have no idea. But man, I was busy. So busy, right? And so this is oftentimes we see in agencies is that we reward busy to some degree. So I want to share with you two different philosophies and we'll talk about some ways around this that we see between an activity based agency and a results based agency. So let's start with activity based, right? And again Activity is not an accomplishment, but a lot of agencies are activity based. So what happens? Why does this happen? So you can draw on your worksheet or piece of paper. The horizontal line is time, right? A period of time. And our vertical access is the results, the results that we get. At the bottom. You're going to see three areas here. This are pretty typical for agencies, right? We've got a prospect, we've got to go make some sales and we've got servicing stuff we got to do, right? Prospecting, sales and service. We keep it pretty simple. So what happens in an activity based agency? Well, the first thing that any agency has to do, whether you're currently doing it or you're starting things up, is we got to go out and prospect. Right? We got to build new relationships, networking, phone calls, all these kind of different ways, referrals, whatever. We've got to get prospecting up. We've got to do a better job of meeting people, right? Obviously. Well, if we do a decent job of prospect, what happens next? Well, two things hopefully happen. Number one is we're going to get sales. But even before we get sales, we have some service issues, applications and all the kind of stuff that comes with that. So in an activity based agency, we start prospecting really, really hard. Okay. We're going to get focused, we're going to grow this business, we're going to prospect and then we have some service stuff and we start making sales and we go, yay, it worked. The problem is this. The very next thing that happens with activity based agencies or activity based producers is they run into the ITB syndrome. Right, ITB syndrome. What is itb? Well, there are a number of acronyms that I'm going to share today, but this is the first one. Itb. Any have any idea what it stands for? And some of you I know that have been with us before. No. ITB stands for I'm too busy. Oh, I'm just covered up, I'm too busy. Now I've got, I've been prospecting, I've got service issues, I'm out making sales, I'm too busy. What do you think is the first thing that happens when an activity based agency, and certainly a producer gets too busy? Yeah, the prospecting stops. I'm too busy to continue to prospect at the same level. So just type in the chat box. Have you either individually or as an agency or as a sales team, have you ever run into this where the producers in particular the sales team, they're just too busy to get out and say I'm covered up. I'd like to do more of that, but you don't know what it's like. It's crazy here. Just give me a yes if that's ever happened to you or your agency. Yes. Never. Lol. Yes. Yes. Speaking to the choir. Yes. We see it all the time, right? It happens all the time that we have this. I'm too busy, I'm too busy. And again, there could be partial truth and it could be some excuses. Well, what happens after we stop prospecting? Here comes the duh moment, right? Well, of course, Brent, what happens as sales drops off? Well, as you can see here, we can also. We can also trick ourselves, right? Because while our sales are the highest, our prospect is the lowest and it follows each other like a shadow. But here's the interesting thing that I want to point out and where activity based agencies really get in trouble is that whenever they have a level of service, certainly from the sales team, Right. In particular, that level of service never changes. They're always doing all the service stuff. Right. And there's this inverse relationship between prospecting sales up and down. But the problem is, is that we're always busy because we always have service issues and that never changes. And so that's an activity based mindset. In fact, here's something that you want to write down. Maybe this is. You've experienced this. Does every year look the same for you or your agency today? Does every year look about the same? If it does, you're probably falling into one of these traps, right, of being an activity based agency. Well, what's the flip of it? What do we teach at Sitkins? And some of you have heard this, some of you, this is the first time. But what do we teach? We've got to be results based, focused. We've got to be results based. So same graph, same X and Y, same three areas. But let's look at this different. What does this mean philosophically? What does this mean strategically? Well, I did a workshop last month, if you attended. Thank you. We can get it on demand, but I did it on high performance teams, moving from high maintenance teams where there's conflict and we're not on the same page. And service is mad at sales and sales is frustrated with service and you have that conflict. But high performance teams, we've got to have our teams aligned in the same goal. Well, what is the goal that sales and service should always have? Well, I think it's pretty simple. It's roi, retain and obtain ideal clients. Are we retaining and obtaining our Ideal clients? Well, hopefully the answer is yes, but so often they're not. So we've got to be aligned as high performance teams. And to do that, we have to have an sho, a service handoff that producers stay focused. They say, you know, I have an amazing service team that's here to help my clients. In fact, I call the service handoff a service hand up. It's given our clients even better experience with a qualified service professional that as producers we stay out of the way more than we should or we stay out of the way more than we are right now. Because right now we get in the way, we interrupt our service team, all these kind of things. So there's going to always be a level of service from the sales team. Right. But we got to keep it as a moderate or adequate level of service. Well, what does that mean? If I'm a salesperson, in particular, a sales organization or sales team, if I'm going to have a high performance team working with my team, I'm going to have a service handoff to educate my team and my clients. We've got an amazing team to help. What should I be doing as a sales team or as a sales professional? Well, I should be doing constant prospecting activity all the time. It should be my focus every single day and every single week. Who am I meeting, how am I developing and deep in relationships? And by the way, rope is referral only. Production explosion. Referral only. Production explosion. Some of you are going, man, I can't keep up with these acronyms. We have fun with them. But the idea is this, very simple. And my prospecting level as a producer should always be at a very high level. If it's not, we're not a results based agency. We've got producers. By the way, the definition of a producer is one who produces who aren't doing producer stuff. And we wonder, I don't know why we're inconsistent. I don't know why we're not growing. Because here's the result, if we can understand this. There's got to be this relationship, high performance team and focused on it as a sales organization, as an agency, as a producer. You can grow at any level you want. There isn't that, well, I'm out of time, I'm out of capacity. We're doing things the right way with the right people at the right time, and that's results based. One of the best examples I can share with you, a fantastic agency. They're part of our network. They were featured in November of 2020 in Rough Notes magazine. And many of you get rough notes. If you don't, you should. It's a great periodical. It's out there in the insurance industry. But there was an article done on this agency in Missouri, fantastic agency we work with. And here's something I'll tell you about this agency. They made a decision. They made a decision. Now, in fact, they've been open technically for nine years. It's a $7 million revenue agency. But they made a decision and have continued to reaffirm that decision, that we are going to be results focused. Our clients are going to get great service, but we are going to be results focused in our sales team. And here's a pretty amazing statistic to share with you from 2019. This was November of 2019 to November of 2020. By the way, there was something called Covid that might have happened during that time. From that one year stand, one year span, they increased their organic growth percentage by 63% from November to November of 19 to 20 by 63%. Again, this is a $7 million revenue agency. Now, there are a lot of things that they did, but if I had to say, what's one thing that really jumps out? They understand that activity does not equal accomplishment. If we're going to grow, if we're going to get the freedom in our agency, freedom financially, freedom in relationships, freedom to do the things that we really want to do, put people in the right positions, then we've got to be results focused. It's fantastic. And go in and read that, read that article in rough notes. Great testimony to a great agency. Here's key number two. I want to share with you today, and I mentioned this one might be perplexing for some of you. We got to stop renewing accounts. What? Stop renewing accounts, Brent. That's our life. Well, of course, I don't mean get rid of customers necessarily. I mean we've got to do things differently. We've got to have a continuation philosophy, a continuation process. Again, this is something that we teach in depth to our Sitkins network members that we've got to move from renewals. This is a transformation that renewals to true continuation. We got to move from just the renewal, 30 day, 60 day, 90 day, here's our renewal process to what does a true continuation process mean and look like? Well, first of all, let me share again why it's so important. Some of this is maybe obvious, but let's face it, the renewal process for most agencies is cluttered and it's frustrating and it makes agencies anxious. It Makes sales and service teams frustrated. The client typically doesn't like the typical renewal process because everything is all at the end, right. And we had this tension. I hope we keep this account, I hope we get some more credits, I hope we don't have too much competition, right? All these kind of things that we hope happens. Now here's the good news. You're still going to renew most of them. But is there a better way than just the renewal process, the renewal strategy? Well, yeah, I think the difference is having a true continuation process where from the moment, whether it's a new client or we're continuing a relationship on day one, there are things in place that help us feel calm, confident and that we know that we are doing the things that are expected to continue that relationship. Right. We know that renewal is simply a day on the calendar. Whether it is September 1st or November 1st or January 1st or February 15th, that is a date on the calendar. But what are we doing as an agency, as a team with the right clients to make sure that from day one we are setting those expectations and delivering upon those expectations. And that starts with this. We have to define what it is the client actually wants and expects. So often we see this with agencies, we certainly see the producers, is that they'll say, you know, what really makes us unique is that we meet and we exceed our clients expectations. I mean we exceed our clients expectations. And I would ask a producer or an agency in some cases and say, well, what are your clients expectations? Or tell me your biggest client, what are their specific expectations of your agency? Well, I mean, you know, stuff we're supposed to do, the stuff that we do and there's no real shared value in that. And so oftentimes there's a disconnect. We hope we're doing the right things, but we don't really know because we haven't defined from the beginning, hey Mr. Ms. Client, what do you expect from us? What must we do to ensure that we'll continue? Because we are long term relationship providers, we want to be your long term risk advisor. What does that look like? What does that mean? Have that conversation and first of all define it. And my guess is maybe you're different. Let me just ask the chat box. Take a, just take a look at your top 10 clients. We'll just keep it pretty simple. Of your top 10 clients, how many right now could you say you specifically have defined what that client expects from you to know that that renewal, that continuation is predictable and guaranteed out of 10 we'd say I know Specifically the things they want. And some of you are doing a good job, which is great. But type in the chat box. How many out of. Just think of your top 10 clients, your 10 best clients. Do you know specifically that you've agreed upon what they want? I'll just be curious to get some feedback. What, what, what number would you guess? If you don't know specifically, what would you say it might be? Out of 10? Type in the chat box. Not all at once. Here they come. All right, got some good ones. Steve. Seven. Fantastic. Well, Steve, obviously you've done some stuff. I love to hear that. I saw three, I saw four, by the way. Don't be embarrassed by this, right? I'm not here to call anybody out. I just want to learn where people are at 447334. So, you know, typically two. So the idea is this, that here's the good news, you're likely going to renew that because even if you don't do this stuff exactly what's expected, you still have a good opportunity. This is a great business. Thank you for this business. But what would it look like if you began to take it to the next level and really understood not just what you valued, but what they valued? So step one is define. Step two is document. We're going to put stuff in writing. Believe it or not, if you walked away from a meeting with a client and you thought you had an idea of what it is that they wanted and they told you some things, my guess is, believe it or not, they will not remember what they said three months or six months or nine months later. I know you think they just think about your insurance stuff all the time. Well, they don't. They're running the business or their life or whatever the case may be, and so they don't. So the next part is a document. When you've talked about and said what must, what does it take? What do you expect? What must we do? We've got to define it. Then we must document that. Put that in writing. As we agreed, here are the three key items, right? For us to maintain and continue a long term relationship together. Put something in writing. It seems obvious, but most agencies and producers don't do it. Then we wonder why we get so freaked out by the renewal. The last part is we have to deliver on what we said we were going to do. And this is where most of us try to deliver, but we're deliver on things that we're uncertain of. This is a sample cover page of a promise report that we have and we Give as a tool for our Sitkins network members, the Promise Report. Maybe you've heard it before as a stewardship report, but a Promise report is basically a checkup at some point of hey, listen, here's what we promised. Here's what we agreed to together, here's what we did, right? And we can also talk about, here's what we're going to do. But think about the difference of defining expectations, putting those in writing and then coming out with your best clients and saying, here's specifically what we agreed to and here's specifically what we did and are doing and here's specifically how we're moving forward to put your client at ease that a, you've done what you said you're going to do. And guess what? You've got a plan moving forward. Here's our plan moving forward. Right? Here's what I want you to write down around this. The goal of a great continuation process. And again, we go very deep with our network members in this. But the goal of it I want you to think about this is to make the renewal a non event. How do I make the renewal non event? It's always a big deal. We've got to move away from that by having a continuation process. And here's the outcome, here's the goal. 99% effective retention. Some of you are thinking 99%, Brian. I mean, we have 92% retention or 93 or 90 or 89 or 94. Those are all great. Again, it's a great business. But we talk at Sidkins with our members about 99% effective retention. Well, what does that mean? Right? What does that mean? Well, let's talk about effective retention because that is important. There's a difference between just retention and effective retention. Effective retention are those clients that you want to keep and that you can keep. So two parts. Do you want to keep every client? My guess is you probably have some that are caustic relationships or difficult relationships that you wouldn't mind if you no longer had that relationship. Life's too short. Number two is those clients that you can keep, right? That you can keep again, part of it. Maybe a business closed down or merged or was acquired, a person moved away or passed away, whatever it is. But after that, those clients you want to keep and can keep, that the idea is a 99% effective retention. If you have a continuation process, it's very doable. Another article and cover feature of Rough Notes magazine. This is Atlas Insurance in Florida. A great team down in Florida and a lot of good insight in this article. But some people go, well, is a 99% effective retention? Is that really doable? Well, I'll tell you, Atlas's retention is 98%. 98%. So let me just ask you, if you were to improve your retention by two points or three points, what would that really mean to your bottom line? What would that really mean to your consistency in your agency? It means a lot. We know it's easier to keep clients right than to find new clients. So let's maximize by actually having a continuation. We're continuing relationships, moving away from renewing accounts to continuing relationships. And again, there's proof the agencies that get focused can absolutely do this. All right, let me get to key number three. And this is the trap that most agencies fall into when it comes to profitability. So what's the trap? We kind of get, sneak in and go, I think this is going to be great. What's a trap? Well, here. Here it is. Key number three is this. We think that every account's a great account. Whether it's a new account we're working on or a current account, Every account is the best account. And so that's how we're going to treat it. And we don't understand the difference in philosophy of profitability. Every client that's part of your agency deserves good service. But is there a better, more efficient way to do things to maximize profitability and to build consistency? Well, the answer is a resounding yes. Now, I know for many of you going, oh, I've heard 8020 before, Brent. I know what 8020 is. I know what you're going to say, here's the thing about 80 20, the 8020 rule. And I'll explain it a little more in detail here in a second. But the 8020 rule is widely known, right? Most people know it. It's. It's partially understood, I would say, for the most part when I talk to people, but it's rarely actually, and I mean rarely executed. I'm always amazed after I talk to agencies about it or ask if they've gone through this. Yeah, I kind of know what it means. And then we actually look at it and they go, wow, what am I doing? What are we doing as an agency? Now, the 8020 rule comes from Vilfredo Pareto. You might have heard of Pareto's principal, who was an Italian economist back in 1896, discovered or uncovered this. He said, Wow, 20%, the population in Italy owns 80% of the land. That's weird. Then he goes to his garden. He goes, Wow, 20% of the pea pods in my garden have 80% of the total. Peas. You may think that's kind of crazy, but there's been a number of studies where we understand this and this is what I want you to write down. There is a predictable imbalance in the universe. There is a predictable balance in the universe. That 20% of the right activities, the right actions, the right area of focus gives us 80% of the result. It's maximizing your efficiency. It's the idea of working smarter, not harder. You all work hard, but if we work smarter, more efficiently, what would that mean for our business? Now, if you're an agency leader, I would guess, or you understand numbers of your agency, my guess is that 20% of your insurance carriers that you partner with give you 80% of your results. I'm sure that is, we see it all the time. My guess is that if you run a sales team, 20% of your producers give you 80% of your results. Right? My guess, if you run an agency, 20% of your people cause 80% of the problems. We could go down the line here and I will tell you, at Sitkins, we have run. This is not something we just made up. We have run thousands, and I mean thousands of these studies. Now, we do want to say this. If you look at 80 20, it's not always exactly. Didn't have to add to 100. It's not. 20% always equals 80. 20% of your clients is what I'm going to talk about. 20% of your clients could equal 81% or 83 or 74 if you're small, commercial, personal lines, focused, or only 20% might equal 50 or 60% of your revenue. But the bottom line is there's a predictable imbalance. So let me just share, just an overview of 80:20 and what it looks like and we break it down a little bit further. As you can see here, the top clients are the a clients in your agency. You can call them gold or platinum or whatever you call them, but the top 5% of your clients lead to 50% of revenue in your business. 50. You know, we've done thousands of studies. The next 15% give you 30% of your agency's revenue. And most of studies that we see, and of course you can see here, this is the top 20 which leads to 80% of your revenue. Now, what about clients? Well, the bottom, the bottom, the bottom 80% equals 20%. So our majority of our clients, 80% of them, give us 20% of revenue. Doesn't mean they're bad people, are bad businesses. But you just have to understand the math and the priority of some of these things and what it means to your agency. So here's what we see. Here's the trap. Here's what happens in 8020 overall is there's this thing called TP, and I'm going to define TP for you. It's another acronym. It's Our Time, our energy, our problems, Our employees, and our expenses. Our time, our energy, our problems, our employees, and our expenses. Time is our only diminishing asset. We can't get it back. Our employees. Right. Our expenses, our problems. Most of those are all down here. That is where our energy and effort goes. And then we go, why can't we get ahead? Why are we doing this? Why are we inconsistent? Because we haven't maximized idea. And this principle, again, widely known, rarely executed and acted upon. So I want to just ask you, and again, some of you have heard this before, some of you, maybe it's like, wow, I haven't really thought about that. What problems? Just the chart that I just showed you. And understand that 20% of your clients give you 80% of your revenue. What problems does this create? And I want you just to think about that for a second. What jumps to your mind and type it in the chat box. What problems does this create? Does it cause a problem? Maybe you think it doesn't, but what problems would you see this creating? So think about that and type that in the chat box. What problems of having 20% or having 80% give you 20% of your revenue? What problems that create. There's got to be some thoughts here. So type in the chat box. Here they come. Throwing time to type in. All right. Overly reliant on individual clients. We may be spending too much services on the 80%. Yeah, I mean, that's obviously, we hear Trish all the time is the fact of. You know, I would ask people, what if you only had your top 20%, what would you do for them? Oh, we would do this and we would do that. Why don't you? Because I'm spending all my time and energy here. Right. Hard to match revenue with our service efforts. Absolutely. Small accounts waste energy and employee resources. It doesn't mean they're bad people. We have to understand, where are we applying our resources and effort? Taking care of the 80% prevents us from replicating our top 20%. Absolutely. Mick, as you said that, it's just, again, this idea of we all have to prioritize things. You're going to replicate something in your agency, you're going to replicate a way of doing things. Which way do you want to replicate? What clients do you want to replicate? Right. The second part of this is vulnerability and profitability. And some of you already alluded to this. Does this make you vulnerable? I'll just think about this for a second. This isn't to scare you, but it's true. The chart that I showed you, the top 5% leads to 50% of agency revenue or producer revenue. If I could just take that, take half of your top 5%, two and a half percent. You have just lost 25% of your revenue. Would you be worried if a really sharp agency or producer came to your area and said I'm going to focus just on his top 5% or her top 5%. Now here's something to think about and this is definitely worth writing down. Your best client is your best competitor's best prospect. I'll say it again, your best clients are your best competitors, best prospects, who are they going to go after? And do you have vulnerability? Are you giving your top 20% enough of your attention? Are you truly being a risk advisor, Are you really deep in the relationships or. I love to, but I can't get to it. Let me give an example of an agency that really got this. This was, this was really cool and exciting. You can see here, this is actually the leadership team of this agency. They're in the mid south, great agency. We had done a number of in person trainings. We'd also done some virtual trainings with them and we got to the end of our training. We shared a number of philosophies and some strategies to look at. And, and for many of you that have been through our programs before, you've heard this, we ask them the question, what's the one thing that's most important to you? Where do you really need to focus? A lot of things you could do right now. But what's really going to move the ball? What's really going to make a difference in your agency? Success. And the agency leader stood up guy right here and said, listen, we're going to do one strategy and we're going to do one strategy really well. We're going to do the ultimate marketing strategy. And this is a strategy that we teach and some of you heard this before. We teach our Sipkins network members. We're going to make sure we're highly focused on the top 20% of our clients. We're going to go see them, we're going to have conversations with them, we're going to add value in different ways and we're going to earn and we're going to ask for referrals. Because if we've written the top 20%, we can write more of them, but we're just not focused. We're too distracted, we're too inconsistent. And so here's a success story. That's pretty cool. This was an agency to get into good size agency, 7, $8 million revenue agency. And this agency, in nine months, they went from 3% organic growth rate, 3%. They were a little bit below average. They were struggling to 9%. They tripled in nine months. Why? Because they actually got focused. Right. They simplified. Here's. Here's two words I want you to write down, and there's questions associated. Are you willing to simplify? And where will you focus? Because too often, where agencies struggle with. When we work with agencies, it's always interesting. They're like, I don't know, Brent, if we can, if we can do all this stuff. We're not asking you to do a bunch of stuff. We're asking you actually do less stuff, do more of the right stuff, simplify all this clutter, find a few key areas and focus. And when you do that, magical things begin to happen. You start to lose this up and down inconsistency. But let's face it, the world is distracting. You have a lot of things coming your way, a lot of thoughts in your mind. The phone's dinging, the pinging ring, and all those kind of things going on. We've got to simplify, reduce the clutter and focus. So here's my question to all of you and just to kind of see where you are as agencies or if you're an individual producer or your sales team. We are in July, as you all know, mid July. Hard to believe. Crazy summer's flying by here and we're 50% of the way, basically through this year. I just want to get feedback from all of you. I know some of you have done this because I know you. But how many of you, whether it's your agency, your sales team, or your individual book of business, are 50% or more to your goal in 2021? I'm just curious to kind of get feedback from you. How are, how is it coming this year? Where are you at? So Nancy said we are. Hey, way to go, Nancy. Very good, Dana. We are. I know some of these names, too, so that's cool. Congratulations. Way to go. Mark Jackson. Yes. Drew Bridges, 62%. That's very cool. Drew, way to go. And your entire team, obviously doing a great job. How else? I'm guessing some people that aren't there maybe don't want to respond, but are you there? And if not, why not? Right. These are some questions to ask yourself. We typically find that the majority of agencies. I see some of these agencies that are coming up, I've been fortunate to be able to work with and be part of some of our training, networking. But most agencies are like, oh, gosh, it's July and we're at 23%. Steve, time to pick up the pace. Right. We're all looking to do that. We're all looking to do that. So what does that mean and look like? And you know, Brittany, you're on this line. I'm not going to. I'm not going to call you out, but I do want to tell your story because it's a powerful story. Now, if you don't subscribe, please do if you're interested. But I run a podcast that comes out about every single week. There are a few times we have some gaps, but about every week, I run a new podcast. I talk to great guests like Brittany. I have conversations with Roger. I share some learnings that we have from agencies we work with. It's the Agent Leader podcast. No cost to you. Just subscribe and listen as you want. But most recent podcast, I had Brittany on, and I want to share Brittany's story because I think it tells a lot. There's a lot to learn from people's stories. You know, I believe this success leaves clues, right? Success leaves clues. We say that all the time. So where do you see clues? Let's follow them. And Brittany had a couple of things that she shared in this podcast, and. And I won't go through the whole thing, but she talked about owning her success, that I got to be responsible for me, and I got to have accountability. And the cool thing with Brittany, she attended our producer fit training in January, ended in about mid March. And then we had a. We had a little contest for other producers we had for this event. I think we had 100 plus producers for the first quarter in January that we started. We had about five or six top winners through a little contest that we had. And I did a private mastermind just with the six winners. And I'm on, and we're going through stuff, and I get to Brittany and she's. I got to share something with. It's pretty cool. She goes, we're basically a quarter of the way through this year, and I've already hit my annual goal. I was like, what? She goes, I'm a quarter way through this year, and I hit my annual goal. And Brittany was kind enough to be able to share kind of some of her numbers just to give some perspective on this. She's been in business for four years, but really only producing for about two or so. Right. And Brittany, I probably didn't get that perfect. But a couple of years, you've been really two and a half years really focused on production. And your goal for this year was 75,000 in new business revenue. Nice goal for just a couple of years in the business. And by April, you were at 83,000. Right? At 83,000 today, I think, is what you told me. And you're on pace to do 150,000. That's a pretty cool success story. And, you know, here's me. Success leaves clues. Tell them how you did it, Brittany. What's been most important to you? Well, a few things jumped out. Two things in particular. Number one is this. And this is a tool that we use for. With our. The people that go through our training, our network members called the Greatness Tracker. And the bottom line, without going through all this stuff that would be overly complex right now with the time that we have, is to share the meaning and the purpose behind it. Because what happens with many agencies and many producers is that we look at numbers, and by the time we look at numbers, it's already too late. For example, you know, my goal was to be a hundred thousand in new business revenue. I only got to 80 or 60 or whatever it is. I guess next year I'll need to sell more. Okay, My retention wasn't as high. I'm at, you know, this percent I need to be this. I'm going to start doing better. A hundred thousand in new business revenue. I only got to 80 or 60 or whatever it is. I guess next year I'll need to sell more. Okay, My retention wasn't as high. I'm at, you know, this percent I need to be this. I'm going to start doing better next year, next quarter, whatever the case may be. The problem is, number one, the numbers have already told the story of your activities and behaviors, and there is no real plan of improvement. It is just, I hope I do better. I got to do a little more of this. What Brittany began to really reinforce is something called the Greatness Tracker, which takes specific areas of behavior. Right. Specific areas of behavior. And said, if I can just do these things every week and track myself, some weeks will be Great. Some weeks may not be, but if I can track myself and have an accountability partner behind me to do this, I knew I'll get great results. So Brittany just every week said, what are the key things that I must do to be successful in my business? And did it. And she owned her success. And here's the second part. She surrounded herself with people that would support and encourage her. Now she's got a great team at her agency. It's a fantastic agency. They're part of our network as well. We're working with their producers, their sales team and all that. And it's been. It's fabulous experience. But the great thing with Brittany is she has agency support. She has support from coaches, she has support from mentors, and she has support now from peers as we work with agencies from all over. So my question to you is this. Who are you surrounding yourself with? Jim Rohn said this personally. You are the average of the five people you hang around with most. Who are you surrounding yourself with? Are there people that are upping your game? They are encouraging you, but they are challenging to be better. I see more in you. There is such greatness in you, but you got to pull it out. Because if you surround yourself with those that drag you down, I don't know, things are ok. You are never going to have the level of success that you truly want. You know, the greatest gap in performance is this the gap between what we know and what we actually do. I mentioned the beginning of this workshop. It is about transformation, going from here to here in different areas. And a lot of that is what do we actually know, right? What do we know to what we're actually willing, able and will be consistently going to be doing. And that's the huge area that we want to fill is what's the gap? And by the way, here's gap. Another. Here's my final acronyms, I think gap, right? What are your goals and plans in the next six months and the next year? In the next two years, what are your goals and plans for growth and profit? Gap. Gap. What are your goals and plans for growth and profit? We see with agency often is they're heading in this direction, doing okay, right. But ultimately they want to get to here. I could see my agency in five years or 10 years being here, but my current direction does not match my ultimate destination. We've got to bridge that gap. And a big part of that is understanding.