Is Easy Good Enough for Your Agency?

Agency leaders. I have some good news and I also have some not so good news, otherwise known as bad news. Here's the good news that if you do things that are easy, that are normal, that are comfortable in your agency, those things are easy, they're comfortable and quite frankly they're very normal for most agencies. But here of course is the bad news side of the equation is that when you do these things over a period of time, they make your results, your growth, your profitability, the culture of your agency and quite frankly, long term relationships very, very difficult. Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm going to bring some passion and fire to you on today's episode. This good news, bad news scenario of doing easy things, normal things that make your agency results harder, right? Make your relationships harder, your culture harder, your growth harder long term for your agency. And I'm going to share this from some experience I've had. This isn't just heartfelt issue, although it does come from my heart. It certainly comes from tangible work with agencies across the country and just some conversations that we have all the time. And before I get into the content today, I'll remind you that we have a brand new resource, a tool, it's a free tool. This is the one thing that is super easy, that is also effective that I'll talk about today and that is our Agency Transformation Scorecard. It's a very brief survey for your agency. You can take it from anywhere you have the Internet connection and you'll get some instant feedback from our team at Sitkins to see how you fare in key areas. So go to sitkins.comScorecard sitkins.comScorecard we'll make sure we have it in the show notes as well, wherever you're listening or watching from. So want to get into the content today again about this easy, normal, comfortable things that agencies do, things that I see agencies do, that our team see that agencies will often will do and that these things that although they're easy, which by the way, when things are easy, they're easy. That's nice, right? Or comfortable. They're comfortable. They obviously can sabotage in many cases or hinder at best your long term growth, your long term opportunities, your long term results that you as an agency leader are seeking. And I want to first of all give some context to this. And again there's variable stories that come from when I share these different areas that I'm going to touch on and there's more than this. But I want to share some of the key areas that ju out and working with agencies, but also comes from a very recent event that I attended and I was able to participate in the AI Agency intelligence brain share function. So shout out to all the agency intelligence members brain share members. Jason Cass, thank you so much for leading a great event. Thank you so much for allowing me to come in and share. More importantly, listen and learn, right? A lot of I told the group, you know, I mean, when I come and do certainly like two day workshops, a lot of mastermind events, which this one was, I learn much more than what I share. I try to share from my heart and share experiences and share value and the feedback was great. But what I take back is so valuable. And so one of the things that hit me from this event and reminded me oftentimes is that to get better, to take the next step, if we talk about to become that best version possible, we often have to do things that are a bit uncomfortable or unconventional or against the norm, so to speak. So for so many of these agencies we talked to, they realized that, man, I just, I've got to start thinking a little bit different on some of these areas and I have to be willing to get a bit uncomfortable. And that's why I started off talking about, you know, the fact that doing things that are comfortable and doing things that are easy and doing things, quite frankly, that are normal in the independent insurance agency marketplace, those things are easy and comfortable. But what will happen is, and we had some discussions in the room, is that if we continue to do these things, we find out that six months, one year, two years, three years, five years, whatever the time period is, is that many of the long term goals that were set out to achieve or want to set out to achieve, become much, much, much more difficult because we weren't able to get out of some of our comfort zones and do some of things harder upfront. And by the way, let me start off by saying this, and I've mentioned this maybe on previous podcasts, I heard this from John Maxwell. He said this. People don't resist change. People resist being changed. Now think about that for a second. People don't resist change. People resist being changed. Well, why is this so important? Well, if you think about from an agency perspective, and I'm just going to keep things super simple here, you know, if you're looking to increase your organic growth, if you're looking to improve profitability, if you're looking to hire better people on your team, right. If you're looking to create better Relationships, both internally and externally, improve the culture of your agency and become increase the agency valuation. Right. Of your firm. Right. All those things make a lot of sense, right? I think people would like that change. Like, do you want that change? Do you want to improve growth? Do you want to improve profitability? Do you want to improve your agency value? Yes, yes, yes, Brent, give me that change. But here's the thing. To have that change, you have to be changed, right? You have to change certain things and not just yourself, certainly as an agency leader, but obviously change the behaviors and habits of some things with team members on your agency. And that's where the friction, right? That's the rub. So you're going to kind of hear this in these different areas that I want to highlight today. Is that. Right, the easy thing to do is just to avoid it, ignore it, don't do anything. Right? But what will happen is the harder problems will occur down the road, in fact, and I've probably shared this before on the podcast at some point as well, but Roger Sitkins, our CEO, my mentor, has said something that's so profound to me. He said, a problem left unattended will eventually become a crisis. Right? A problem left unattended will eventually become a crisis. So we'll just let it go, we'll let it pass, and eventually it'll get better. Well, we all know that's not the case, right? So I want to hit again. I'm going to hit on a few specific areas of easy, normal, comfortable things that I see agencies do. And by the way, if these are some things that you do, you're not alone, right? You're not. This isn't to pick on people individually or pick on agencies. We all deal with some of these things. But to me, if I can help you create some awareness in certain areas, what I've learned is that awareness in key areas provides much better action, right? So often we try to take actions, but we haven't taken the time to have great awareness. So I'm hoping this will provide some awareness for you as I share some of these ideas. So let's start off with, number one, the easy thing to do is to avoid accountability in your agency, or at least a depth of accountability in your agency. We talk all the time at Sitkins about a culture and cadence of accountability, and we teach around it and we help our leaders and our sales leaders and the producers and service team members talk about what does accountability really mean when we say culture and cadence? Culture is the language and behaviors that are normal in your agency. What do people say? What do people do? The cadence is the frequency. And oftentimes one or both of these things can be missing when it comes to accountability. And accountability is very simple. It's simply, did I do what I said I was going to to do? Right? So we think about this and the easy thing to do is, well, I know what people are saying and doing aren't exactly what we want or I want. But you know what? So what? They're human. It's normal. It's not a big deal. I don't want to cause friction. I don't want to, you know, upset people. I don't want to anger people. I don't want to inconvenience people. You name it, right? And this could be by a team, it could be by an individual. And of course, the problem with this is that is plenty. I mean, there's many, many problems that result around this. We get frustrated that we don't get the results we want. Sometimes we get frustrated alone, right? We're frustrated. They're not frustrated because we've never had these conversations. Maybe they don't even know what the roles and responsibilities really are to know that they're winning. And by the way, your best performers in your agency, they desire accountability. You probably already know that. You think about some of your best performers, they seek accountability. They like accountability. And it's not because they want to be micromanaged, which by the way, is not what accountability is. It's that they know that they're human. They know that there's going to be flaws. We all have chinks in the armor. We all have flaws in our game and we want to be called out or at least be aware of that when it happens. Hey, listen, we're off track a little bit. Hey, thanks for reminding me. Thanks for getting me back on track. Right. To me, accountability and Carrie Glennon in our office says this all the time is not a four letter word. It's not. It shouldn't be. In fact, accountability should be. Thank you. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Thank you for helping me be more aware of certain areas so that I can perform better and do the things that I want to accomplish as part of this team. That's what any great coach does. So that, to me is the big part of this, is the culture. And then of course, cadence of accountability is the frequency. How often are we having these conversations? Are we having regular meetings? Now? I don't want to get into the tactics of this because it varies so much by department, by type. Of person by where they're at in their experience. I get all that. But part of this is, do we have some form of cadence that we as leaders are communicating with our team of some type of expectation? Not randomly. Right. But we've got a plan of action around that. So to me, it's the easy thing to do around accountability is to avoid it. I mean, that's the simplest thing I can say, is that there are going to be some difficult or challenging conversations. But I do want to say this, and this maybe hopefully reinforce what I mentioned earlier about that the good performers desire and seek accountability. Accountability to me, and this whole piece is an encouragement and a challenge to people in your team. And when we do this in the right way, if we truly believe, and I believe that the number one job of any agency leader, above anything else, and there are a lot of responsibility, is to grow and develop your most important asset, which is your people, and to help grow and develop your most important asset. And I believe that every human being deep in their core truly wants to grow. We may lie about it or make excuses about it, but deep in our core, when we feel that we're not growing as a human being, as a professional, on a team, it causes frustration. We can avoid it, we can make excuses around it, we can hide, we can run from it. Right? But at their deep core, people want that. And as a leader, when you provide that opportunity to say, I want to encourage you and I want to challenge you, to help you become, in our terms, become the best version possible, people will seek that. Now, by the way, if people simply don't, then that's a different issue. And by the way, it's probably a good time to start talking about different opportunities for this person, which probably isn't in your firm. And that goes back to this easy, right? Easy thing, avoid it, easy thing, don't talk about it. Easy thing, hope it goes away. The hard thing is, hey, listen, I want to be really upfront, I want to be really clear. We're going to have a certain standard and we're going to have a frequency of how we have these conversations. Because I owe it to you, and by the way, you owe it to yourself. And if we don't do that, the hard thing is we're talking about the same person again and again. The hard thing is that our culture is not thriving. Our culture is talking about scarcity, not abundance, Right? We're obviously having some internal strife. In many cases, we have our best performers who wonder, well, why are they allowing the poor performers to exist, because that's not what I do. Right. And oftentimes our best people will leave. So I could go on and on about some of the problems with this, but bottom line is, ask yourself, as an agency leader, am I doing something? Some things that are too easy, too normal, too comfortable around accountability, that are easy today or easy this week, that I know that in one month, three months, six months, one, one year and three years will cause me and our team more difficulties, more challenges, make things harder. So the first one is accountability. Secondly.