Intentionality

Foreign. Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. I'm your host. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode. Super excited to share with you something today that really involves every single thing that you do as an agency leader. Kind of hard to say something that big and broad, but it's true. And here's my question right off the bat, I'm just going to jump in and ask you a question. How much of your time, energy and effort, how much of your time, energy and effort is lived with intention, intentionality versus accidental or reactive? Now listen, I know there are some things, you know, I'm a father of five, run a business, right? I know there are some things that happen that are reactive because they just happen. Things happen, life happens. So we're always going to have a portion of that that's going to be part of our existence. But here's my challenge to you, my challenge to myself, Challenge to our private client members we work with. Challenge to the producers and agency leaders that we work with. How much of the things that we can control are we truly in control of? Because the most unfortunate thing that happens is that we do have aspects that we do have greater control or we can be more intention with that because we live reactively, because we live sporadically, because maybe we just let things happen or hope things may happen, that time goes by and we miss out. You know, the purpose of this podcast, and I've said this many times, is to help you, the agency leader, gain clarity, build consistency, and to make a commitment on becoming your best version possible. And I, I love this topic and I want to share it with you because it really encompasses all things, clarity, consistency, and of course, commitment. I'm going to talk about aspects of that with you today, but how you can be more intentional. I'm going to give you three specific examples, three areas. I know there's more than three, but three things that really jump out in our work with, with agency leaders we work with, with our private clients as part of the Sidkins Network that we have a chance to work very closely with, certainly in relation to this recent event that I went to and organizations that we have the opportunity to have an impact with what that looks like and what that means. Now, I do want to remind you, if I haven't said this before, that if you're an agency leader, your agency is looking to get more intention and results. And by the way, I'm going to share some results today that some of our agency partners have had. In fact, we did a case study over three years. Because there's a direct, there's a direct correlation between intentionality in certain areas and the results that individuals and agencies get. And I want to share that with you. And yes, it is a testament to our agencies we work with, but it also testament to what I'm going to talk about today, which is intentionality. Okay. So I want to share that if you're interested in learning more about if your agency would be a fit, could be a fit, should be a fit. We don't work with every agency. But if you are a high growth, high achieving, you're looking for an agency growth partner to help direct you and guide you and be that partner with you to help your team do things that maybe you always want to do, but you haven't yet. Go to sitkins.comexperience to learn more. Sitkins.comexperience so let's dive in to intentionality. Again I mentioned I want to talk about three areas. This is reinforced just recently as I'm recording. This is a week ago again I was out in the west coast, I was out in Los Angeles having a great conversation with a group of producers and their sales leaders. And this is a high achieving, high growth organization. They're doing incredible things. And I think a big part of this is leadership. This is the agent, leader, podcast and the leader of the organization out there. We were talking the night before I spoke and he was talking about how many times he's mentioned the word intention or intentionality that we've got to be intentional with what we're doing. And I loved it. Right? And I was going to be talking about that and I said I'll make sure I reinforce that even more tomorrow when I speak. And I certainly tried to do this. But here's what I want to start with. I mean, think about this in general. I already mentioned there was going to be some things that are going to happen to you, but what are the things that you can make happen? And there's a difference. Here's my thought. Do something with intention or don't do it. If you're going to do something, do it with intention. And if you don't do it with intention, then don't do it. Go, go do something else. Just walk through the motions of stuff. Right? If you're, I mean if you're gonna go watch tv, watch TV with intention. Meaning that I want to, I intentionally gonna watch tv. Right. That's not a very good example. But the point of it is do anything with intention. Right? Do anything with intentions. I'm Gonna talk about three areas that I believe that agency leaders, producers, insurance professionals, myself, if I'm not careful, we all deal with this, that we struggle with that. I want to help, maybe give you a level of awareness that you. Their action in these particular. In these particular areas, number one, and I've talked about this in different ways before, but be intentional with your calendar. This is kind of where it all starts, right? Be intentional with your calendar. Now, I will tell you from my own personal experience, I love freedom and I love kind of doing with what I want and having flexibility, and that's how my mindset is. And just kind of my nature. It's just my personality. And some people are like that, some people are not, but I am like that. So to me, to be extremely structured in my calendar is not something that I'm natural to. But what I have realized in working with agency leaders and teams and producers is the fact that when you give yourself some of these structures, starting with your calendar, it creates great freedom, it creates greater creativity when you do it in the right way. Now, I may have mentioned this in this podcast before. This is something that's been around for a while, but I had a mentor of mine years ago at an event that I was at, a leadership event. He said, brent, don't prioritize your schedule. Don't prioritize your schedule. I'm like, what do you mean, don't prioritize? I need to know what's most important. He said, no, no, no, no. He goes, schedule your priorities. And that comes back from. From Stephen Covey as well, as mentioned in his book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is to schedule your priorities. And at a very basic level, but an important level is that if you sit down, this is something we work with agencies, in particular producers in the. In the producer's perfect schedule is to design and plan your week before it begins. This is my intention for the week. Now, by the way, does that mean if you planned every minute of your week, you will hit that? Of course not. That's not reality. That's not what I'm saying. But I am saying that you should have a pretty darn good idea before the week begins of what's most important in your schedule, and that should be scheduled first, and that you allow enough time for your energy and your effort in those particular endeavors. Because if you don't, you won't likely do it, or certainly not do it with intensity, or you certainly won't do it with consistency, all those different words. So start with your calendar. First. Now, however you do this is up to you. You know, we talk with producers about having a Sunday evening review. I don't care if you did this on Saturday or Sunday morning or late Friday even. But again, it's this idea that I am going to be intentional with my week. Have you ever had a week where you got to Wednesday? You're like, I don't know what happened this week. Now again, that, that may just be a phrase that we use because we are going through things quickly and every week is different. I understand that. But to start with intention, to say, hey, for this week to be my best version possible week, what must it look like? What must I be doing in the right areas? Where can I get the greatest impact from this week? And am I designing to schedule my week with intentionality or, or do I have these blank spaces in my calendar that I hope I figure out when I get there? Now, again, I'm not telling you, you need to schedule every minute. For me personally, I like to look at, you know, 60 or 90 minute time chunks of focus of certain areas. Maybe there's two or three things in that block that I'm doing, but there's a focus around that. And I've learned this from a lot of different mentors in my own experience, but it just allows some freedom and creativity within that. But this 90 minute block, for example, is focused on X. And because I know I'm doing that right, because I know the impact it's going to have, I'm going to make sure that's scheduled here, here and here, right? Whatever those things are. Are you doing those things? There's a. I'm gonna mess up this quote a little bit. I should have written it down, but I don't. But it was, it was talking about this idea that when we see blank spaces in our calendar, maybe we don't say this verbally, but internally. Sometimes you're like, got an hour or two to just kind of get some stuff done, right? I don't have anything scheduled. How great does that feel, Right? As a father of five, there's a lot of things I have scheduled, right? But it's like, oh, I don't have any schedule. This is great. And then you get done with the hour, two hours, whatever it is, and you go, oh, I kind of wasted that, or I didn't get as much done, or that's already over. And in these blank spaces, the quote, I heard that blank spaces look like freedom in our calendar, but truly it's jail that's disguised as Liberty because you end up almost feeling regret because you didn't do the things you didn't maximize that time. So it's up to you how you want to do it. But I just want to challenge you as the listener and I would, I would ask you as an agency leader to challenge your team. Hey, listen, what does your perfect week look like? Let's look at your week in advance. How can we design that? What would you design your week? What would it look like? And this is a constant process and you may design a great week ahead of time and really screw it up. Guess what? That's what next week's for. But the challenge and the frustration that people run into is that, oh well, whatever, it's not worth it anyway. They don't do anything and then they go back and you just continue to live in this accidental environment, the reactive environment. I'll see what I need to do when I get there. That's not a very good way to live your life. Now, by the way, I do this with emails now people can challenge me on this and it does depend on your role to a degree. But I even chat when I first was, was, was challenged myself on this. I pushed back. And the more that I realized that I'm like, that's a silly. It's right here's the one example that people live reactive all the time and in their calendar they don't even know it. Email. Or maybe you do know it. Emails, right? If you have 30 minutes, what should you do? Check emails. You got five minutes, go to your phone, check emails. Now you may get sidetracked in Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and Instagram, but ah, don't worry about that. Haha. Right. But emails. So I had years ago at someone challenge, this has probably been seven, eight, nine years ago now at this point someone said I only check my emails once a day. I'm like, well you don't understand because I have people that need me all the time. There's no way I could do it once a day. So I started doing it three times a day. I did it before my true proactive time started. Not the first thing when I woke up, but I had a section later in kind of early in the morning, but later because I wake up early, for me that I had something early, then I did something around lunch and I did something at the end of the day. And that was really hard by the way, because anytime, you know, between there, I wanted to check it and check it and check it. You know what I realized? Not one time and checking the email three times a day with intention. Not reactive, but intention. Hey, this is email time. This is time where I'm going to get back to stuff. I didn't have anybody going, I can't believe you didn't reply back within two and a half hours. Right, didn't have that. When you send an email to someone that is important that I have quotes here, if you're looking on the video, but someone that is a high level professional, do you expect them, like should this be sitting there waiting to return your email? Are they waiting for you? Are they living in your life or are they being proactive and intentional with the stuff they need to do? It's interesting how our mind works, isn't it? So I would just say it's one thing that hits me if I'm looking at my calendar because this seems to be like the number one thing when talking, especially to producers is you get caught up in the email. Always look at email, look at email, look at email. And what it'll do is one email, even if it's not urgent or even that important, can derail you for 30, 60, 90 minutes away from what's really most important that you scheduled intentionally in your calendar. Right. So intentional with your calendar, number one. Number two, intentional with your communication. Intentional with your communication. And listen, I know that you have a lot of conversations every day and, and this is another example. Well, you mean that every time I talk to someone I should be intentional of what I'm going to say, not the passing through conversations that we have, that, that's called life. But I do mean if you're going to make a phone call and I would say intentional with your emails. Back to that again, certainly intentional with appointments, whether it's a meeting with your team, meeting with a CL with a center of influence, you should be prepared and intentional with what you want that outcome of that meeting, that conversation to be. Mentor of mine, author John Maxwell, I always loved. He has stuff very simple. I like his bottom shelf stuff. He said, before I have a conversation, anyone, I ask myself three questions. What do they need to know? How do I want them to feel and what do I want them to do? And even if I can't answer all those specifically, it gives me a process to prepare before every conversation. Hey, what I want them to know, how would I want them to feel and what do I want them to do? Right, and you can have that before any conversation. Well, people, I mean maybe you've done this, I've done this, but you just start randomly Calling someone, whatever, because you're supposed to, or it's on your list or maybe it is on your calendar. And then they answer and you go, oh, hey, hey, I didn't prepare with what I was supposed to say, or I, I forgot, right? Because we're probably distracted. We're doing too many things. So being intentional with your communication, you know, one, I'll give you an example too here certainly. Whether you lead producers or you are a producer and you're listening to this, you know, one of the things that we talk about oftentimes is a 30 second commercial. And this is an example of intentional communication. If someone comes up and says, hey, tell me what you do, or tell me about yourself, or, you know, it's one of those kind of things, we should be prepared to have a pretty good answer for that question, or at least that conversation. And most times we really don't know. And I tell you, we know this because we work with producers, for the first time, we start to challenge them on this, they don't have very good answers for it. And so when you think about this, and let's just talk about one example of proactive communication with a future client. You may call them a prospect, we call them future ideal clients at Sitkins. But this idea of, well, if someone says, tell me about yourself or what do you do? I think at a minimum, we should know our ideal client, what their key frustration is, what our unique differentiation or process is, and how our clients win by working with us. Like that should be like, you know, hey, you know, typically people come to us when they're frustrated with blank. We help them through a unique process called this, and the result is blank, blank and blank. Right. That would be intentional. And by the way, that part of it comes back to preparation. And I've done podcasts on that as well. But just again, for you to understand, think about how many conversations that you have every day, whether it's zoom, phone in person, again, whether it's with a client, a future client, a center of influence, someone in your office, certainly anything that's scheduled. And sometimes you walk into that conversation and just hope you say the right thing. And by the way, good news, bad news, if you've been doing this for a while or you're a pretty decent communicator, you're good on your feet. Listen, I've been, I've done this. Like, I'm very honest. I try to be as prepared as I can with everything that I can. But there are times you get lucky. That's just not the way you want to live, right? But here's the good news. The good news is you could have that happen and still be pretty good and no one know the difference. The bad news is there could be a huge opportunity when you find out it's too late, or when you're not prepared or intentional, it's too late, right? So just think about the intentionality of your communication and I'm going to give one more here on this podcast today. Be intentional with your commitments. Be intentional with your commitments. It's really easy to float around. I'm going to do this. We're going to do this. I'm going to accomplish this. This is what I'm going to do, right? And we kind of throw them out. And the reason why we can do that A, is because sometimes we just want it to sound good for this person we're talking to or whatever. But the other part of that, in my opinion, is the fact that we don't really have true accountability behind it. So if it goes away, so be it. Easiest example, I've talked about this before, but the New Year's resolution, if you set a New Year's resolution, whether you like it or not, and you quit, and most people do, here's the good news. If you didn't make a commitment, no one knows except a couple people who they don't remember anyway, right? So there's no real commitment to it. So whether you do it or not. So my challenge to you is be intentional with your commitments. If you're going to make a commitment to do something, do it. If you're going to make commitment to prepare, prepare, Right. If you're going to make a commitment to do, you know, have this many appointments, then do it. If you're going to have a commitment for a goal of X, then anything in your power live up to those standards and doesn't mean you'll be perfect. That's not what I'm saying in this, but I will say they just get thrown around. Oh, yeah, I'm going to do this. Well, how are you going to do that? Well, I don't know. I'm just going to do it. Well, who's going to hold you accountable? Well, I don't know. I'll do it. No, you won't. So how many commitments have you made or even micro commitments that you make that really there's no accountability or intentionality with what it is or the commitment behind it? So be intentional with your commitment. Now, I mentioned this, and this is a bit of a brag But I hope you see that it's more than that because it isn't about us. What I'm going to share with you right now is what happens when agencies make a commitment. We did a study, a case study 3 years value impact study with the private client agencies we work with at Sitkins Group. And we did this for a number of reasons. But the biggest reason we did this is the, the word in the study, value impact. My word this year is impact. Any work that we do with clients needs to be done with intention and purpose. It needs to be done with impact. Are they getting results? And of course the agencies, the professionals within the agencies are doing the hard work to make this happen. We want to be a growth partner and an advocate, an educator, equip, empower, do things we can do to help that agency accelerate that faster. Why I share this is that these agencies made a commitment. They made a commitment in what ways? Well, they made a commitment with their wallet. Certainly they're investing in the partnership. They made a commitment to show up to the programs that we run. They made a commitment to show up to the coaching calls that we provide. Right. The in person, whether or online sessions that we do. They make commitments to this. Why? Because they want to get better. This is a commitment they made. Now here's the outcome. And, and this is a list of our private client. These are averages, so understand that. But in 2019, three years ago, prior to the study being done, the average agency we work with was $10.3 million in revenue, 2022. So three years later, that has jumped to 13.7 million. That's a 33% growth rate, which is above average. Growth rates have been Good the last three years, 33% even better. You know one thing that agencies will talk to us about, and you may very well be interested, in fact, I have a good indication that if you're an agency leader of any kind, you are interested in this, which is called agency valuation. Right? The valuation of your agency whether you want to perpetuate soon way off into the future. You don't know if you're ever going to external, internal still the, the agency value is really important in 2019. Now this is based off a 10x multiple. And if you are talking anybody that's looking at agency value right now, we know that certainly external 10x is way, way conservative. But let's just use it right As a number both three years ago and today. So 10x in 2019, the valuation of the agencies we work with was at 16.8 million in 2022, that has jumped to $30.3 million million dollars. An 80% growth rate. And again, why is it working with us? We hope we're part of that. We certainly believe in that. But it's commitment, right? It's intentionality to this. And, you know, big part, of course, the agency evaluation is the profitability behind that. 2019, the agency profitability was 16.3. Now it's up to 22.1 in 2022, which stay 36% growth rate. These are all part of intentionality and commitments and. And going back to this podcast in the very beginning, and the question I ask you is, in what areas, how much of your areas of life and business are you being intentional with? And how much are you letting just float past you? And you look back a year, three years, five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and I'm raising my hand because I've done it. You know, every age I think is different. And, you know, again, whether you're 25, I'm now 45, when I'm 65, I think there's always different areas. But you do and go, gosh, what have I left slip by and why? You know, the thing that we believe at Sitkins Group and working with agency partners is we want you to help you have regrets, find the things you're great at that you can be intentional with, and do them again and again to spur results and the freedom that you really want versus regrets, looking back saying, gosh, if only we would have done that, if only I would have taken that upon myself. Only I would have had that conversation. If only I would have prepared better. We're all going to have that. And I don't want anybody to dwell and live in the past because you know the famous quote, when's the best time to plant an oak tree? 20 years ago, maybe 30 years ago. When's the next best time? Right now? Right? Right now. So I want to challenge you, I want to encourage you as a lesson of this podcast, this isn't to beat you up so much, but to hopefully gain some awareness of where you've been too accidental to begin a path of greater intentionality. So starting now, you're listening to my voice. Where can you be more intentional as a leader, as a producer, as anybody that's in the professional world that's trying to get more out of each and every day and everybody week, where can you be more intentional? And listen, if we can be part of that intentionality, if you, you and your agency think you're a fit for the Sidkins Network. Our best version possible. Experience our private client model to help you have greater coaching, have greater programs and development. Have you network with other people who think like high level thinkers and share like high level sharers. There's a great impact in that. We'd love a chance to talk with you. Go to sitkins.com/experience sipkins.com experience Listen I love doing this podcast. Hopefully you can tell this is from my heart. I had about, oh, I don't know, 18 words on a page. The rest just kind of comes out because I believe in what I do. I believe in what we do. I believe in you as an agency leader and and what you can accomplish not just today, but certainly down the road in the future. There's so much potential. And that word by the way, I can go two different directions. It can be unfulfilled or untapped potential. Or it could be wow. I can't believe how much they met and exceeded the potential. Even thought right. So what's your future going to look like then? Appreciate the opportunity. If this podcast is value to you, go ahead and give me a rating and review somewhere. Wherever you're listening. We appreciate that. We're trying to grow the podcast or give it a share. I wish you all the best in your success. Thanks for listening. The Agent Leader Podcast is brought to you by the fine folks the Rough Notes Company. They are publishers of the insurance industry's leading magazine and technical insurance content. Roughness Magazine Profile successful agencies plus keen insights from respected experts on a host of must know topics. Rough Notes Advantage plus provides the tools to help your agency grow, providing authoritative information on complex coverage issues. Visit them and learn more@roughnotes.com.