How to Move Your Agency From High Maintenance to High Performance Teams

All right. And my slides will pop on here. You're going to see a black screen for about 20 seconds or so. But I want to look at your chats as this opens up and hear what you say. So what is your biggest challenge or frustration from an agency team perspective? So type it in the chat box and I'll wait to get some replies here. I'm sure there's got to be at least a few frustrations. We all have frustrations, so. So see what they are for you specifically. All right, there's my slides popping up. Let's see. Lack of urgency. Yeah, that happens sometimes, right? We've got things we need to do, but maybe there's not an urgency. Could you get moving? Hiring, quality team members, training. Yeah, absolutely. Training is always a big deal, right, Steve? Absolutely. Motivation. Finding talent is always a big one. I'm sure many people, we always looking for the best talent. Right? The best and brightest talent. Training, understanding internal limitations from staff. What else? I want to get just another minute here and see what some of your responses are because that's going to be the focus for today. Again, about moving your agency from high maintenance to high performance. Staying focused. That's a big one. Here's something, by the way, we don't have official worksheets. Hopefully you got pen and paper that you can take some notes. I'll be sharing some ideas today about this. Here's the first note you can all take. I two words. This is so important when it comes to teamwork. Two words. How can we simplify and how do we get greater focus? Right? Simple simplify and focus. If we could do those two things right as an agency, where and how can we simplify and where and how do we need to focus? Right. I think that's so important for all agencies, folks who stay in the box and only do their name responsibilities, not collaborating. So yeah, maybe not good communication. Getting everyone on board for continued new business. And that's going to be a huge one as we're going to talk about today. So again, we got more people coming in as I speak. But welcome to everyone for our live interactive workshop, moving your agency from high maintenance to higher performance. Some of you may know this is a first of three workshops that I'll be doing this summer. This one is focused around team development, people development, working together, sales and service in particular. Next month in July, I'll be doing one on sales performance and in August, I'll be doing one on productivity and time. So these are all standalone workshops and I will be sharing with You a really exciting opportunity for all of you as agencies to take advantage of at the end of the session and all the sessions. But want to make sure we're giving you great value. So have pen and paper handy and you're going to be taking some notes and make sure that you are ready to type in the chat box. I may be asking you a few questions just to get your your take on some things. So here's what I'll say this on the beginning of this workshop. If your goal as an agency is to sell more and more, retain more, earn more, all by leading more effectively, you are in the right place. So we are going to be talking about today when it comes to transformation and it is such a big word, right? Transformation. How can we as an agency transform in different ways? And I think the word transformation, it is powerful, but it is also a bit abstract, right? What does transformation really mean? What does transformation really look like? And there are certain areas I think of transformation that we can all grasp. If I were to ask about physical fitness and transformation, well, many people would say maybe transformation and physical fitness looks like going from this guy to that guy, right? We're going from a little bit weak to strong and lean and mean. What about a home transformation? And by the way, I've done some home projects the last year at my house. This is not my house, by the way, but an example, a home transformation. Okay? I want to make some improvements, go from this to that, right? That's a pretty cool transformation that people want for a home. What about office, office transformations? Well, hopefully your office doesn't look like this whether you are working from home still or you are at an actual office, a physical office, but maybe it looks a little cluttered and you are not as organized as you want to be. So a transformation from that to clean, simple, focused, organized. Well, what about agency transformation? Because that is we are going to be talking about today. How do we help transform your agency to move from high maintenance to high performance? Well, to set the foundation of this. Everything that we teach and preach and some of you may have heard this in the past from other programs. You've been, some of you are brand new and never heard this. But everything that we do at Sidkins is around the pro fit experience. And obviously you see the word profit. We want all agencies to be more profitable. But about professional fitness, how can you get more professionally agency fit in your office, in your agency today? And there's three characteristics that we always see. I always see and work with agencies that these are all True. From agencies that are getting great success. Certainly when it comes to high performance teams. The first we'll make a note of this is clarity. The best agencies, not surprisingly, are very clear on where they are today, where they want to go and how they're going to get there. They don't say, well, I hope things work out. I hope our teams improve. This is exactly where we are. This is where we're going to go. This is going to be our clarity. And so really, one thing to write down here is can your agency transform from maybe a level of confusion to clarity? Moving from confusion to clarity. A lot of agencies suffer from confusion. Go back a slide. The next one is consistency. You know, consistency is doing the right things, the vital few things very, very well. And unfortunately, a lot of agencies, this is pretty typical. They do things well for a while and they fall off. And we do things good for a while and we fall off because maybe there's too many things to focus on. And we just had this lack of consistency. So we want agencies to transform from some level of chaos or disorganization to consistency on the right behaviors, the right strategies. We'll talk about some of those today. And then commitment. What is a commitment that your agency is going to make? Right. Without commitment, they're all just good ideas. And so commitment comes around. One word to me, accountable accountability. How can agencies be more accountable to themselves? Right. That we all have individual responsibilities, accountable to our team members, which is going to be my focus today, that I'll be sharing. And of course, a commitment to our clients. Right. To do all the things internally so that we can commit to our clients at the highest level possible. So I'm going to ask you our question again. I asked you to be interactive in the chat box, but I just want you to think here about your agency as it exists today. And I want you to. Here's my question to you. If you could define your agency as it exists today in one word. I know that's a challenge in many cases to get to one word. But if there's one word that pops to your mind to define your agency today, could be great, could be good, could be average, could be not so good, could be awful. I mean, just all progress starts by telling the truth. But where? If you had one word to define your agency today, what would it be? So use that little chat box. I just curious to see where you're at today. I'm sure we'll get a variety of answers. There's no wrong answers, by the way. There's just your answers. I just want to get an idea of where you're at. So I heard growing. That's fantastic service. Inconsistent, focused, average. Great. Way to go, Grant. I love that. Leading, trustworthy, evolving. I think we are all evolving. Love that, Drew. Transforming. Joel, you are taking the word. I love that. Inefficient, hungry, incomplete, entitled, yet abundance of opportunity. Which kind of goes to that word complacency. Right? A lot of agencies are complacent. They are doing pretty well. But there is another level, opportunistic, that is good preparing. So you are preparing for things. Irish, you said you are stuck. I think a lot of agencies plateau, right? We do things right and then we plateau disorganized from branch to branch. So maybe that lack of organization that I mentioned. See if I get some more coming in. I got several coming in. So here is my follow up question to this. And again, play along at home, please. It's always we get good information here. Let's think about a year from today. I know that's crazy to think about, but let's go a year from today. So next June, by the way, happy June 1st to all of you out there. But let's look at next year. Year from today. If you could say now this is how I want my agency to be described in one word. What would it be? So what would it be if it had one word? If I could have one word? I'm talking a year from now. Brent, we're having a conversation and you say this is the word that I want to describe my agency. Here's what happened. So. All right. The first one I saw there was executing. So execution. Love that, Drew. Accountable. Amen. Enthusiastic. Yeah. You know, this business should be fun. Matt Hughes. That's two words. Matt, I'm going to give it to you. Explosive growth. Yeah, absolutely. Explosive growth. Hustle, Growing, successful. Smooth. I like that. Elizabeth. Yeah, I want to be smooth. And different things that we're doing. So I just want you to think about whether you typed in the box or not. I just want you to think about your agency's transformation story. What's it going to be? Right? What's it going to be? Because I think we all have a story to tell and we all want to evolve. I thought that was one of the words to a certain point. But what's that going to look like? And what does that mean to you? What would that mean to your team members? What would that mean to your clients? Because it all starts to me with the idea of teamwork and of Course, the focus for today is moving your agency from high maintenance to high performance. Now, while this picture behind me looks nice, it's high maintenance, right? Takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of effort. It probably costs a lot, right? Do different things. And we see that with agencies, there's a lot of agencies that are tend to be high maintenance, right? And I think part of that is a lack of appreciation sometimes for each other. Maybe a lack of proactive communication, maybe a lack of trust. And again, even from an agency perspective, maintenance oftentimes means high cost, not just in money, but high cost in time, right? And so we want to transform from this maintenance to performance. Now, I don't know how many of you are indie fans. I'm not a big car guy, a big car fan, but Indy 500 this weekend, memorial Day weekend, always a big, big event. And I find it interesting. You know this. I love this picture because, yes, it's an Indy car, but think about this. You've got one driver in here, but there are 17 people, 17 people that are making this happen. That is a high performance team, right? You think about that from a sports perspective or an IndyCar perspective, that each person on this team have a specific role or duty to achieve success, right? In this case, it's to win the race. Now, whether they win or not, I don't know. But that's the goal in mind, right? And so we think about performance. I think of agency performance, of better understanding, better appreciation of everyone's roles and responsibilities. Do we really have a good understanding and appreciation for everyone's roles and responsibilities, or is everyone kind of doing their own thing? Right? A clear, productive, proactive communication. That's high performance in agency accountability. I used that word earlier for commitment, accountability. Everybody on this team needs to be accountable. One guy can't say, you know what? I don't think I want to change the tire. Doesn't work, right? Just like an agency, we've got to be accountable to doing the things that we said we were going to do, right? We got to be very, very, very proactive in those areas. And of course, we have to be accountable. I want to share just a story of one of my favorite agencies I get the pleasure to work with again, I get the opportunity to coach and train of agencies and just love this story because it really brings home an agency that understood the power of moving from high maintenance to high performance. This is Eric Loesch and Hill Shaw, two owners. You can see they're on the COVID of Rough Notes last June. Fantastic. Agency and there are a lot of members on their team. But these two guys are hard workers, right. Like many of you. My guess is if I ask every one of you, are you a hard worker? Right. Do you put yourself out there? Do you try to make things happen? People say, yeah, I'm here to make things happen. Much was true with Eric and Hill. Well, one of the things that we see and they saw is as they began to grow and have some success, they began to form a larger team, right. And they had more people involved. And they realized really quickly is that if we were all working individual, working as individuals, right? A rugged individualist. I am doing this, you are doing that. Let's just go put the grind. So let's be hard. At some point we are going to plateau that because we haven't fulfilled team roles and responsibilities. Clarity on the mission, clarity on the vision, clarity on critical success factors. We're going to have some issues. Now, this agency, just to kind of tell the story of this, in two years as they implemented high performance teams, and I'll talk about that today, what that meant to their agency, they tripled their organic growth rate in two years. It was actually just slightly less than three times, but it was close. In fact, Eric said if it wasn't for Covid, we would be well over three times, but they were very close to three times organic growth rate. They increased the retention by 4%. That's a lot of money, right? That's a lot. And I think the biggest thing is they increase efficiency and teamwork, profitability, and they gain more freedom. That's a word I would ask all of you to write down. It's not just about the money. That's a huge part, but it's about you and your agency's freedom. That's the idea of high performance. There's freedom in that. So hopefully this sounds good to you. And this is again, things we're going to be talking about today. Now, I can tell you, and again, many of you, I see some familiar faces and names. Some of you are brand new to hearing about Sitkins, but we've been doing this for a long time. Here's Roger Sitkins right here. If you don't know Roger, Roger's been doing this for quite a while in the Sitkins group, in fact for about 40 years. So we know a little. We know a little bit about agency performance, right? And what it looks like and what works and what does, and have an opportunity to work with a lot of agencies. And one of the things that we love to do is in person, training and coaching. And we still do some of that. But let's face it, 2020 was pretty interesting for all of us, right? And what we had to do. And even though training and coaching in person is fantastic, I'll tell you one thing, it does cost a lot of time and it costs a lot of money, right, to be able to do that. One of the challenges that we faced at Sitkins for a long period of time is if one producer or one agency leader or one account manager goes to one of our programs and they go, that's it. We want to do this. We want to start to take the next step. We want to have improvement. How do they convey that to the rest of the team? That's oftentimes we run into some stagnation. So we introduced last year again being nudged with COVID now. We had been doing interactive online sessions, but took it to the next level, running programs of all kinds. We understood that we could make a significant impact. And I am sharing this with you because we have learned a lot of lessons, in fact, to give you an idea, just to give you some perspective. This is not in any way a brag thing, but these are facts. We have run 57, I write this down, 57 programs online, interactive live programs from a year and a half ago that had 165 individual sessions and we had 4,900 people register. Right. So we've learned a lot about agency growth, about agency performance and about agency teamwork. And so there's a few things, again, I take some notes on these things. Few things that really stand out for a lot of agencies. It looks kind of like this, right? It's a cycle of craziness. We're doing things for a while, but it's up and down around and it's like we're on a roller coaster, right? In many cases. And here's what we understand. If you don't have buy in from your team, you're never going to get perfect buy in. But if you don't have an understanding and clarity around buying and what we're trying to accomplish, it's going to look like this and what we want to help agencies do. And what I would challenge you to think about is how can I have, remember I said simplify and focus. How can we get greater buy in from the team to simplify the things that we're doing? That's the first thing that we learn. Number two is this new mindset gives you new results. I think the idea of mindset is Often overlooked. Oh, yeah, Mindset. We've got to have a better mindset. Well, but how and what does that look like? Here's something that's absolutely true. Your external results that most agencies want. It could be greater sales growth, it could be higher retention, could be increased profitability. We go down the list, right? External results all start internally. External results all start internally. And so I want to get this and I want to have this. But have you discussed with your team specifically, what's that going to look like? Who's responsible for what, who's accountable for what? And do we have buy in or are we trying to force feed the agency the team members? Here's an idea I had today. Let's go try it, right? So we've got to make sure that we've got internal communication, that we have a common language. You know, I'd ask you right now, does your agency have a common language? And the last one is, you've got to move away from this idea of just individual superstars now. Hey, if you have an individual superstar on your team, kudos, right? You want to have stars. Some of you go, I love to have a superstar, but this is my. This is my favorite guy. Now, again, most of you know who he is. I would say, oh, it's been a while. This is Michael Jordan, who I would argue is the best basketball player of all time. Some may disagree. As I grew up as a fan of the Bulls. I grew up in Illinois in the 80s and early 90s. It was a good time to be a Chicago Bulls fan because they were really good. But in the 80s in particular, Michael Jor would win all the scoring championships. He would win the mvp. You know, he would just score an abundance of points. He was, he was good. He was great. But guess what? Even Michael would admit, what I really, really want is I won a championship. I want to win a championship. A lot of agencies will see that, that we've got one superstar. But is our team, our agency, really, really winning? And so Michael Jordan went out and found himself some friends. Well, the organization did. And actually they won six championships over eight years. Some of you might know these faces. There's Dennis Robin, he won their second three. And Dennis Robin had a role. It was called play defense and rebound, right? Scottie Pippen, above me. If any of Scottie Pippen, his job was to facilitate play defense, right? Be that long wing out there to help the Bulls. And Michael Jordan could score points, right? And as a team, they were incredible, right? In fact, one year they were 72 and 10 and they won the championship. So the idea I want to bring home is does your agency have too many of these? Saku? And by the way, this is an acronym. If you've been with Sitkins for a while, heard of Sitkins, you know we love acronyms. SOCU is an acronym. Here's what it stands for. For agencies source of all knowledge in the universe. Right. We'll often see that with producers but it could be agency leaders that hey listen, I got all the answers. I do everything in my agency. You know, if you need anything at any time, you ask me. Well, the problem with sec who is obviously is that we can't get the highest level of client experience. We can't grow the agency at the highest level because we haven't built a team. It's an individual approach. I do me, you do you. If it works out, it works out. If it doesn't, it doesn't. And I want to share a story around this about high performance team because the best way to learn is through examples of stories. This is an agency I work with in North Carolina for Fantastic Agency to give you an idea about a $10 million revenue agency. So pretty good sized agency. And we worked together initially and one of the biggest things that we worked on was how do we build a high performance team. And I will tell you, even though in fact the day we were talking about it when I mentioned that a sales and service, the high performance team have to proactively communicate, they have to align, they have to respect each other, they have to trust each other and they've got to work together. You would thought that oh my gosh, this is going to be a problem. In fact, instead of excitement, what I felt like was this. There was tension. Yeah, Brent, the idea of a high performance team sounds good. But quite honestly our sales and service people in particular and leadership, we don't necessarily really agree on lots of stuff. In fact, in some cases maybe there's some animosity right to that and maybe your agency faces, maybe it doesn't. But the idea is we've got to function more as a team. So I want to share with you an acronym that you can all use and begin to think about. Obviously we're not going to solve the world's problems in a workshop today, but we can get you thinking differently about some key aspects of agency development and growth and another acronym to remember. What is the art of high performance high performing teams? Well, the art to me revolves around three things. Number one is alignment. Is your agency aligned? All Going in the same direction. Number two is respect. Do we truly respect each other? What our roles are, what it means to the agency? And I'll talk more about that in a second. And lastly is trust. And without trust, there really is nothing. And so let's go through each of these areas. So write those down, Alignment, respect and trust. And ask yourself, as I go through these, on a scale of 1 to 10, how well is your agency doing somebody? Maybe you're doing really well. Some, maybe not so well. But it comes back to the first one of alignment. You've seen this picture before about this, you know, the IndyCar and the fact that we've got to align in different, different ways. And so my question is right now, would you say that your sales and service team in particular, because this is one of the biggest challenges in agencies right now, would you say your sales and service are aligned? Are they specific, understanding what their roles and responsibilities are and how they work for the success of the agency? Here's something I want you to write down. This is really, really powerful. Okay? It's just a common thing that we share. I'm going to share it with you today. It's just a mindset. Same goal, different roles. The best agencies to work with, they say, we have the same goal, but we've got different roles on how we do it. Because guess what, we're not great at everything. A lot of agencies are really good at a bunch of stuff, but we're not great at the things that we should be great at. So same goal, different role. Well, what's the goal? Well, you may have different goals. Here's a goal that I think you all can use. Here's a goal. How about this? Roi. Roi, not return on investment. That's a good one. But ROI is. We want to retain and obtain ideal clients. The same goal as an agency. Our goal is to retain and obtain ideal clients. We've got different roles in how we do it. So just understand what where you are in that capacity. Number two is respect. We've got to respect each other. And I think this is overlooked a lot of agencies. In fact, I mentioned with one agency that the picture I share with you, there can be some animosity sometimes. Well, you know, what I do is really more important. Or, you know, the service team. I say to the salespeople, well, you don't really understand what I go through. You're out just playing golf all the time or doing fun stuff. I'm doing the real work. And the salespeople are saying, well, you don't know what it's like to go out and face rejection. Right. We have this own thing that we see and sometimes there's a lower level of respect than there should be. Now the best example I can give, and this is my beautiful family. I am biased. I love my, love my family. But one of the things that we have noticed, we have got five kids, if you can't see here, but we have got five kiddos that if we don't respect each other's roles and every family is different, this is just my situation. But if we don't respect each other's roles and we don't proactively communicate, chaos ensues. Right. I could be, oh, well, are you really doing that? Are you really doing that? And where are you going? So every single week and again, we're not perfect. But I would say most weeks my wife and I on Sunday sit down and do our week. A pre brief. Where are you going to be? Where am I going to be? What are some big things we need to talk about? What are the kids doing? All that kind of stuff so that we don't constantly interrupt each other during the week or frustrated saying, well, I thought you were going to do this and I thought you were doing that and what about that? Well, what does that mean for your agency team? How does that apply? Well, it's the same thing. In fact, this is a resource or tool that our network members utilize all the time. It's a weekly pre brief and debrief agenda. So I would ask you as an agency right now, does your sales and service team, in particular the most important high performance team in the agency, do you have a proactive meeting to start the week that you're talking about things like this? Any red flags where the client visits? What are some claims issues we need to talk about? What are your needs? An account manager? What are my needs as a, as a producer? Right. What's one thing we need to focus on? Hey, by the way, where are you going to be this week, Mr. Producer? Ms. Producer. Right. So we have alignment in those kind of things and respect that we have important things we need to do, but they're different roles. And by the way, we'd also ask, there'd be a debrief. Do you debrief the end? Right. As far as at the end of the week, what worked and what didn't work. Now the point of this again is we want to avoid difficult situations. I mentioned Roger Sitkins. One of my favorite quotes that Roger says, and many of you Know, Roger, is this a problem left unattended becomes a crisis. A problem left unattended becomes a crisis. If we just sweep things under the rug or add whatever, we're not proactively communicating. At some point, we all know we've been there. It comes back and bites us, right? It comes back and gets us. So just understand that. Are you preparing every week? Because I believe this, too. Here's one more thing you can jot down. You have two choices. You either prepare the week or you repair. You either prepare or you repair. And that comes to proactive communication and respect. And the last one, the T is trust. Now, you may not like these guys. I'm not a Bucks fan. I'm not a. I'm not a Patriots fan. This is Tom Brady, by the way. If you don't know, he's only won a lot of Super Bowls, I'll leave it at that. Rob Gronkowski over here. Big Rob, he's the tight end and went with Tom Brady when they went from the Patriots to the Buccaneers. And one another super bowl together, multiple Super Bowls together. My question is this. Two teammates that have worked together for a long period of time, do you think they trust each other? Do you think that if Rob Gronkowski runs a route, Tom Brady knows where he's going to be? Do you think that if there's an audible, they know what it is? Yeah, they know. They are talking all the time. Their communication, it's about trust, right? And here's what I believe. Without trust in an agency, you really have nothing. If you have trust. If there is not trust, you have nothing. Because whatever you say or do, it doesn't really matter. You know what? I don't believe you anyway. You said you were going to do this. You didn't do it. It's about accountability. The A word, accountability. People don't like it. I don't want to be accountable if we don't have accountability. Trust in the agency, any strategy, any process, any idea, it doesn't matter. It usually just falls on deaf ears and people just stop worrying about it. Maybe you've had that in the agency before. See, we believe in the culture and cadence of accountability. And maybe write that down somewhere. What is the culture and cadence of accountability in my team today, in the agency? What's culture? Culture is the normal language and behaviors, or the language and behaviors that are normal, however you want to say it. But it's the language and behaviors in your agency right now, today, that are normal. That's the culture. If your agency could talk, what would it say? And the cadence of accountability is how, how often are we talking about, is it, hey, here's a new idea and here's what we're going to do. Then we talk about it in six months or a year and people go, don't worry, this too shall pass, right? Or is it, hey, we're serious about this and we're going to follow through because we deserve and need trust. So if you look at alignment, you look at respect, you look at trust. Let me share what happened. I mentioned the agency in North Carolina, the picture I showed you. What happened? Well, over a period of time, they went from high resistance to absolutely rejoicing. High performance team meetings. In fact, they look forward to every week. If they don't do a high performance team meeting, there's a lot of conflict, there's uncertainty, right? To know that there's alignment and roles and responsibilities, there certainly is a greater level of respect. They certainly have built over trust, by the way. Trust takes time, but they've built it. And guess what? I do want to share some results because results talk. I just want them to say, well, this agency did a great job, but I want you to see what's possible for your agency. Now this is an agency again, it's around 10 million in revenue, right? So put some perspective on this to based on the size of your agency, you may be bigger, you may be smaller, but here's some stats from building a high performance team that this agency did over the past couple of years. The first one you see is 751,000. By the way, this is not premium. We don't speak premium at Sickens, we speak revenue. Right? Agencies eat revenue. So 751,000 revenue and what? Well, a while back they decided to focus on 100 future ideal clients at this agency. They were going to create a top 100 list. I'm going to talk more about this in my next workshop. But 100 future ideal clients and get the producers to do what producers should do. You know what that is? Produce. Right. So to have these proactive conversations to build the team, get the producers out of the office or be more proactive in sales and relationship that they need to be pipeline development off of just the top 100 board. They wrote in one year, $751,000 in new business revenue. Is that good? Well, I would say for most agencies, yes. Right. Why high performance teams always win the next stat. 56%. This is revenue per relationship. One of the greatest indicators of the size of a book of business by a producer or by agency is the revenue per relationship. Do you and your agency know your current revenue per relationship? By department, by producer? I hope you do. But this agency and their employee Benefits now, their PNC went up about 25% but their employee benefits grew the revenue per relationship in one year by 56%. Huge increase. Why? Producers got focused, service team got focused. Don't interrupt me. All right, let's be proactive, let's be intentional, let's make sure we're writing the right accounts. And by the way, let's round out our best accounts too. That's how you grow revenue per relationship as well. And the last one is organic growth. They increase the organic growth percentage by 29% in one year. It's a big number. It is exciting number. Again, what does that mean? High performance teams. Same goal, different role. Proactive, communication, alignment, respect, trust. And they continue to do this and repeat and replicate. Right. So these are some things that I want you to think about because it is possible for every agency. I asked you earlier, what is going to be your transformation story? What does it look like? You already may be in a really good place. Fantastic. I hope you are. But I think we all have a next level. One of the things that we preach and teach at Sitkins and I love to talk about this because it has been a game changer in our programs is what is your best version possible? Possible, not what another agency is doing. I'm giving you stories and I'll share more of examples so you can think what's possible. What's your best version? What does it look like? What could your agency look like today just by understanding high performance teams? That is a team sport that we're either going to make things happen right or things are going to happen to us. We've got to take this, we've got to take control of our agency. I want to share a few more high performance teams because again, they're different examples and things you can learn from. I mentioned Atlantic Shield. This was the agency I showed earlier again about three times. Organic growth in two years. Why? Understanding high performance teams. These are all have been on the COVID of Rough Notes so doing really, really well overall. We're proud to call them clients and friends. EHD Insurance in Pennsylvania. Great agency. A large agency. There's a lot of stats I could share with ehd but this is one of my favorites. They did in one year 1.14 million in broker of record sales revenue. Okay. Revenue, not premium. Well, how do you do that? Well, a couple Things. First of all, broker of records or agent of records are all the natural outcome of a great process. Right? To have a great process. The process starts, I mentioned earlier internally, understanding what does the process look like. Are sales and service aligned? Because you know what, it's really hard to have high retention and have a great process if sales and service aren't aligned. If we don't understand the roles and the continuation process that we talk about, what it looks like and the expectations and what promises are we making to make sure we keep those promises. And then lastly, a fantastic agency in Missouri. And this number seems big. This is a $4 million revenue agency. Okay? So understand the math on this. They had a 63% increase in sales in one calendar year from November to November. And we tracked it well. Why? A lot of different factors. It's always more than one thing. But for this agency, I mentioned accountability, this agency is accountable to each other. They're accountable to their clients. When they say they're going to do something, they do it right. But they have to be clear to identify what those things are. Again, these are all examples what's possible for you and your agency. And as I mentioned, I want to invite you all just to think about an opportunity that has been just a game changer. It's part of our Sitkins Network and I mentioned some things that we have learned about high performance teams. When you look at the Sitkins Network, this is our all inclusive membership that we've been able to take all of our programs that we used to do in person and we still do some of that. But now to run all of these programs interactive live, we do Q and A for sales training and service training. And we're the only place in the industry that I know of right now that can give an agency an entire team overview so that we have better buying understanding of what is our goals, what are our roles. Robin Jones Gunn. This is also known as an African proverb, but Robin Jones Gunn gets credit for this. I think it's such a great quote. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. If you want to go fast, hey, I'm going to race and race and go fast. And we see this, you can have some success. Absolutely. If you go fast, go along. But at some point with agencies that we see, the most agencies that work with us is at some point, whether It's a million, 3 million, 10 million, 15 million, we hit a plateau because we can only go so fast so far. But we've got to Understand a team approach. Who are you going to surround yourself with? Right? Who are you going to surround yourself with? Just to give you another example, this is Dick Gibbs. I'll get out of the way here. Dick Gibbs, a sales manager for a great agency in the New Orleans area. And you know, one of the things that Dick was struggling with that a lot of people struggle with, I've struggled with this is, hey, how come I'm saying these things? They're not doing it. But then when Brent or Roger or an outside source mentions very similar things, people began to do it. I don't know, credibility reinforcement, a different angle, a different way to do it. But this is what we're doing for agencies every day, which is so exciting that people say, you know what? For the first time my entire team gets it and we have less friction and we have greater buy in and we have more fun. So I mentioned I'm going to invite you to an incredible opportunity. This is our Sitkins Network all inclusive model. I just want to give you an overview of what we do for agencies and more importantly, what it means for you. I've shared some results, but these are four ongoing programs and I'll give more detail in a minute. Four ongoing programs that include producer training, account manager training, sales leader training, and agency leadership training and coaching. We have monthly monthly sales meetings. Every month we run a sales meeting for your agency. We do leadership and service forums. And here's the big thing. This has been the game changer and how to be able to impact more agencies in 2020 and now into 2021. We can do this now with one flat monthly fee for every single person in your agency. There's no additional cost, there's no gotchas, there's no anything extra. It's just one flat monthly cost for everybody. And here's the big thing, it's 100% guaranteed. Now we don't think we need to worry about that. We feel very confident in what we do and the results that we help provide agencies. But if anytime an agency doesn't feel like we're pulling our weight or they're not getting what they thought, it's guaranteed. And this is what we provide for every agency. I went back earlier, our mission, I mean, I mean this with passion and conviction. Hopefully you can sense it. Our mission is to help agencies sell even more, retain even more, and earn even more than they ever thought possible. And it's so exciting to be part of a team. When you see people go, I get it, and we're doing it so what does it look like? Because you go, okay, what's the cost? What's the investment for this? It starts at 997amonth. If you're an agency, it's $3 million or less in revenue. It starts at 997amonth. Which by the way is on average about the cost of one quarter of one employee. Right. If you look at 48,000 being annual payroll, 997amonth. And Bethany, if you could, if you haven't already, put the link on there so people can check it out. We want this to be a good fit for the right fit. And it's not a fit for everybody. We get that. But for those agencies that want to take their game to the next level and really do something extraordinary, go to this link here. We can type it in the chat box again. Sitkins.com aimgo and here's the big one. We know that. And why this opportunity is really cool is that we know that right now in the summer season, many of you are planning vacations maybe for the first time in a long time, enjoying some time outside recreation, whatever. The majority of our programs are going to begin in September. Right, the very beginning of September. So if you go ahead and sign up and register, you have no payment, nothing through August 15th. Right. We'll still get in touch with you. So have access to some things, but no payments until 8:15. Right. So we'll make sure that every agency that wants a chance, it gets an opportunity to really transform at the highest level. I want to share something with you. I think one of the biggest things that we see with agencies is who do you surround yourself with? And it is really important. I don't know if you have ever heard the story. There is a story of the eagle and the crow. And I just love this story because it says so much about how high will you fly and who are you going to surround yourself with? And I am going to read through this. But the only bird that will dare pack an eagle is the crow. And the eagle does not respond or fight with the crow. It simply opens its wings and begins to rise higher and higher in the sky. The higher the eagle flies, the harder it is for the crow to breathe. And then due to a lack of oxygen, the crow falls away and the eagle is free. What's the moral of the story? I hope and ask that you hang around with other peers as part of our network. Mentors, coaches, other leaders. They're going to help you high fly or high as fly as you possibly can. How high will you fly? Because my guess is you have other people that are pecking at you, trying to hold you back. Oh, it's good enough, you're okay. But my question to you is how fly could you really fly? And here's a question I'll ask for all of you just to answer internally. What's possible? What's possible for you as an agency if you really got serious committed about building a team, as I'll talk next month about sales performance and process and understanding your productivity in your agency. What's really possible? What's possible? I do want to answer just a few questions that we get all the time because often, and if there's further questions again, you can go to the website, learn more about the program itself. But just a few things I want to share with you. Obviously this is some examples of some resources and tools that you get when you join. We have an abundance of resources and tools. A video library. Every program has its own resources and workbooks. So we want to give you everything that we possibly can to make sure that you get results. But one of the questions I get is, okay, Brent, well, is there a contract? And you got this 997amonth. So how long am I committed to? Here's the bottom line. We don't have a contract. Okay? We don't have a contract. You can technically get out whenever you want. If you're not getting value, if you're not growing the agency, get out now. But let me preface with this. This is really important because we believe in what we do and we get results. If you want to join this and you say, well, I'm just going to do it for a month or two or one of the programs, I would highly, highly consider that you don't. All right? And I say that with all love and respect because there is a difference between an event and a process or the process is about long term growth. And I can tell you back to what I mentioned earlier, with clarity, with consistency and with commitment, it is a process. So no, we don't have contracts. If you want to get out, you get out. But I would certainly say I want to transform my agency into 2021 and into 2022. What is that going to look like? We would ask agencies and the agencies that are in this now for a year, you know, for a year. It's a long term relationship, right? And at some point you got to make a decision what's best for you. But we want to make sure you continue to get the highest level results. Another Question that we often get is what are the programs? I gloss through them. What are the programs you do? All these online interactive trainings. Some of you that are on right now have been part of these programs. What are they? Well, there's four core programs that we train around and these run about every quarter. And we have agencies that put part of their team in every quarter or they revisit them. It's really exciting because it reaffirms everything that they're doing. But we run programs for producers. Our most well known program is Producer Fit. We produce. We've provided more million dollar producers than any other program. So Producer Fit entirely included. By the way, if you were to attend Producer Fit by itself, it's worth every penny and more is 1197. So just that one program. You can see what happens when you start to have multiple people that can be involved and hear the same message. Account manager fit for service professionals. You know what? Sometimes account managers are left out. Oh yeah, them too. No, they've got to be part of it. They've got to hear the message. They have to understand their importance to the team. And what they do is so crucial and so often they're overlooked. So you have programs for account managers, sales leaders. I know we have some sales leaders on this call right now. As a sales leader, one of the biggest challenges, how do I help develop my team? How do I hold my team to be accountable? And we're going to give you some tools and resources to do that to make your job easier. Will it be easy? No, but make it easier. In fact, I always tell sales leaders what's the number one job of a sales leader? All brand is to grow sales. Well, kind of your number, number one job is to develop and grow your salespeople. And we're going to help you do that with some of the coaching and training we provide and then agency leadership, overall agency leadership. How do we get better buy in? How do we lead more effectively? How do we communicate right to our team? What are our non optional behaviors? How do we put together a business plan? These are all things that we're going to help your agency with. So outside of those four core programs that continually run, we also do a monthly sales meeting, we do leadership forums and you have access to all of our tools and resources. So I just want to give you an idea of what's all part of this. And it's just it really has been a game changer. No other company out there is doing that. We realize for us to really help agencies, we've got to get the whole agency involved. It's an absolute game changer. Last couple of things I want to share. There's a great law called the law of diminishing intent. I heard this a few years ago. Very transformational for me. I was looking at attending a coaching program myself. I am involved just like you are trying to get better and who do I need to surround myself with? And I was like, you know, I think what I am going to do is I am going to wait till later in the year to do it. And this person who was on the phone with one of my mentors, she said, well, you do what you want. Like I am not going to force you and I am not going to force you to do anything. I want it to be the right fit. But she said, here is something I want you to know. The longer you wait to do something that you know you should do now, maybe this isn't it for you, but if it is right, the longer you wait to do something you know you should do, the less likely it is that you will ever actually do it. At some point you go, ah, well, time has passed and I really want you as an agency to live a life of no regrets, that you never look back and go, you know, we could have done that. You know, we should have done that. Time has gone by. Maybe we missed an opportunity because you can have regrets or you can make regrets. Regrets, those things that we don't want. Wisha, shoulda, coulda, woulda regrates are these are the few things that we are going to repeat with excellence and we are going to grow and we are going to have excitement and we are going to have new momentum and we are going to make really cool things happen and we are going to gain freedom. Right? We are going to gain freedom. So just stuff to think about. Here is my final thing and again, you guys can go check it out. I wanted to make sure you understood today the importance of high performance teams. That nothing external, this is where it gets missed. Nothing external happens without internal fortitude, without internal communication, without internal accountability. And I'm sure you've been there before. Why doesn't my team listen? Why won't they buy in? What does it look like? So again, Overview starts at 997amonth. No payment until 8:15. So basically two and a half months of no payment. You get situated, you kind of learn the ropes. We can start getting your teams in. But here's a really important thing. I do want to share this. Our team, we only have so much capacity, even online. Right. So at some point we can't take any more agencies. I'm doing a workshop today and we've had well over 100 registrants. Right. We have a workshop in July, a workshop in August. We're going to continually market this. We have room for 50 agencies. And so again it may seem like a lot, but this will fill up. If you want to get your team involved ready to go, we really would invite you to take advantage of this. I really appreciate you guys time today. I know it is coming off a long weekend. Hopefully I had a great Memorial Day weekend. Be able to honor those that gave everything. There is nothing more important than that. But certainly had some time with your families and loved ones. And as you kick off this summer, you know, my question to you is what's possible for your agency? If you had a truly high performance team, what could you do? And we would love to be part of the solution to help you get there. So I want to thank you all again. Go to this website, you see the link. If you have more information, we will do some follow ups with all of you. And if you would like to please join me for the next two workshops where I talk about sales, performance and also time and productivity for July and August. Thank you all so much. Have a great week. You guys have a great week. Appreciate you very much.