Leading Through Uncertainty

Hey, Brett Kelly here of the Agent Leader podcast. Thanks so much for joining me on today's episode. And I want to do an episode here that is focused on what most people are saying and thinking about right now. And if you're listening to this podcast, you know, sometime in, in mid to late March, you're in the midst of it. And we have no idea how long some of these things are going to go on. But obviously the last week, things have changed abruptly. Not just for me, for everybody, actually. I returned last week from our networking event. Interesting. We had a meeting kind of when all this started to really get serious and got back home before it got too crazy. But in the one week, how much has already changed, evolved? People are thinking, obviously there's fear, there's anxiety, there's uncertainty with the coronavirus and how this impacts their agency, how this impacts their producers, how this impacts their clients, how this impacts their community. You go down the list, right? It's a big deal. And it's one of those things where I certainly don't pretend to have all the answers on this, but it's been a very interesting week. And just having some, some time, like many of you now have some time, maybe you weren't expecting where you're not traveling or you're not on the road doing different things, or certainly not face to face with some of the clients and the people and the meetings that you had. And so it certainly has allowed some time, although there's reactionary things that we're dealing with just to think about what can we do? What should we do? What would it look like? And I've had a lot of really great conversations with our private client members this week, just touching base with them and trying to be ears and eyes for them in certain cases. And obviously they're dealing with things as well, much like you are as an agency leader, whether you're a principal, a sales manager, a producer, or a service person, whatever your role is in insurance agency, it's just this new normal, this new world that we're living in. So I wanted to share just some things. And again, there's probably a more exhaustive list. And as I continue to think about this and have more conversations, I'm sure there'll be more things that I want to talk about. We actually did a, just this morning as I'm recording this, did a private network mastermind. We talked about some of the things that agencies are doing and had them roundtable and share some things. So what I wanted to do is just talk about three Things in particular that you, as an agency leader in any capacity, can begin to do right now because there is a lot of uncertainty of things that we don't know what's going to happen, not even in two weeks, but like tomorrow in some cases that things are changing so quickly and we surely don't know what's going to be happening exactly in three months or six months. Hopefully all this will get. We'll get through this quickly and we'll get to some, you know, some normal again in the near future, but we just. We just don't know. And so I want to share things that. And what can you do as an agency leader proactively? And there are a lot of other things you can do besides these three, but these three things really stand out in the conversations I've had and just doing some thinking about, you know, with what we do know, what can we do? So I want to go through these three. Keep this podcast pretty short for today. I know many of you are just like everybody else, busy doing stuff, but I want to make sure I add some value today and give you a voice and some things to think about. The first thing as an agency leader, again in any capacity is that we just have to be cognizant that we're not the only ones that are dealing with all this stuff. And certainly if you're an agent and you're dealing with clients that are in the service industry, could be other industries as well. Obviously, they're going through all kinds of crazy emotions right now. And so I think it's really important amidst all this noise that people are hearing from the news and what's out there and all the emails we're getting, that we just pick up the phone and we just call our best clients. And certainly we may not be able to get to all the clients, but if we've talked about an 80, 20, that 20% of your clients produce 80% of your revenue. So we gotta make sure that whether it's us personally, our team, that we're picking up the phone and we're calling our best clients and we're not trying to ask for anything. We just want them to know that we're there for them and that we're aware that they're probably going through a lot of emotions right now and that we want to be an ear for them if we can be. You may be leaving voicemails. That's fine. I found it was kind of interesting this week as I actually picked up the phone, just calling our members that more of them actually picked up the phone right away than normally do just because they're not in meetings as much, they're not with clients as much, whatever it may be. And we just had some really good, heartfelt conversations. And I think there's a lot of tactical things. There's going to be a lot of financial things that we don't know yet, certainly with business interruption and other coverages. But we can be just a voice, we can be an ear for them. And so just to do that means a lot. And I think it says a lot about who you are in the agency and how we're going to run business. So just pick up the phone to your clients. This is also true with future ideal clients. Now, I got to be careful here because you say future ideal clients. Are we trying to, you know, get in the door and make a sale? Well, no, that's not. That's not the goal of what we're trying to do at all. But we do have value and education that we can provide to future ideal clients. And so without being more noise, can you pick up the phone and just say, hey, listen, I want to reach out to you. I know we've had some conversations before, and again, this wouldn't be every future ideal client, but your top future ideal clients to provide some insight. And what we found already with some of our agency members is the fact that oftentimes they said, well, geez, our current agency hasn't even reached out to us yet. So it's just again, another way that you can empathize and reach out and educate people that are hurting, that need your help. And I think the last people to pick up the phone and call are your centers of influence. We talk a lot at Sitkins about centers of influence, those influencers in the community and your network and your associations, whatever they may be, that you may have some common clients today. Maybe you don't yet, but what are they looking for? What do they need? What are their stresses? What are their anxieties? How can you help? Maybe you could do a conference call for some of their clients. But as a risk professional, as an insurance advisor, certainly very, very impactful. So the first thing was pretty simple. I would ask, just pick up the phone, call your clients, call your best future ideal clients. Call your centers of influence and reach out and be proactive because you can sit and wait. Oh, things will blow over, this will happen. Or you can be intentional and say, hey, we're here. We're aware of what's going on. We don't have all the Answers. But we do want to make sure that we can provide what we can provide to you. Because people, again, what are people thinking? There's a lot of fear and you need to remain calm and confident. Number two, outside of picking up the phone and calling your clients, future ideal clients and centers of influence, I think it's really important as a team leader and again, whether it's producer in your service team, whether it's an agency leader in your entire team, we should be having some form of daily communication because most of us are now all working from home to some degree. Maybe we've got a few people in the office in and out time to time, but typically we're all in different places now. And I've never seen an agency over communicate. And I don't think it's ever going to be more important than right now that we are consistently communicating. I'm not talking about two hour meetings, but even if it's 15, 20 minutes or we're checking in and we're just leading through example and we're communicating because I will tell you, for a lot of people, if you haven't worked remote, it's new, it's different. Obviously there's interruptions, there's that isolation feeling where you're used to being around people. So you want to be able to make sure that we're having some type of daily communication. And a big part of this too is be able to ask questions. What are they hearing, what are they feeling? What are some frequently asked questions that they're getting? And this is, kind of goes along with this. But there's going to be, clients are going to call with very similar questions. Are we speaking the same language? How should we answer this? How did you answer this? What do we need to do? And as a group, it's going to empower everyone, right? It's going to equip and empower your team to do that by having daily communication. You can't over communicate. I think in a time like this to have something daily, it's really, really important. Outside of some other things that we talk about in our private group about having a high performance team meeting between sales and service and having sales meetings. But my concern for agencies is that we sometimes a lot of these things, again, these are very real situations, these are challenging situations. But if we're not careful and if we let things get away, we can have a slow fade that you know, well, we won't have that meeting. Well, we're not going to have that call. Don't worry about it. And all of a sudden, two, three, four weeks go on and we're not, we're losing communication and we're losing touch and we're losing momentum in whatever area and we're going to have this anyway, just what's going on. But daily communication, understanding frequently asked questions is huge. And number three, this is where most people probably are starting now, maybe your agency has this set up, but technology and what are the technology or technologies that either we have that we're not utilizing, that we need to, that's the great place to start. Or what are some pieces of technology that we don't have, we've talked about it, or we haven't really thought about it before, that we are going to need to utilize and don't just get technology to get technology, but how are we going to use it, why would we use it, how would we leverage it today? And to be real honest and talk to your team about that, what it looks like and feels like, again, in many cases you may already have some technology that you're just simply not utilizing. We often see with agencies, they have technology they just kind of forgot about or put in the back burner. But you know, again, how would we specifically use it? In what capacity and communicate that Right back to what I said before of what we need to do when we move forward on these kind of things. Because what I see, and we've even talked about this at our own group, at the Sitkins Group, is there are some things short term that technology can be leveraged more. Now we've worked at Sitkins remotely, virtually for 10 plus years. So this isn't really new to us. But part of that is okay, technology, short term, yes, there's things we need to do today, but then as we move forward, how can we continue to use that technology? Maybe in ways that we haven't before. Now I'm a big believer. This may be cliche, that every problem is disguised as an opportunity that actually comes from John Adams. Every problem is an opportunity in disguise is what he says. And I think it's true. We're going to have some pains. We're going to have hourly moments, certainly with stuff going on in the economy. I don't think this is going to be a short term fix. But my challenge to you and everyone else out there is how are you going to position yourself today? Be intentional today, Be proactive today on the things that you can control because there's a lot of things that you can't. I'm certainly aware of that. But what are the things that you can control today that are both going to help in the short term and also position yourself to be more profitable and have more production, have deeper relationships in the future. And these are just three things that I'm thinking of. I know there's more than that, but, you know, if I'm sitting here today, I'm going, okay, the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure that if we haven't already, that we're actually picking up the phone. Not just an email, not a generic email, hey, you know, but pick up the phone. It's different. It's impactful to our clients, our future ideal clients, and our centers of influence. That we're going to create some type of custom communication plan for this remote work that we're going to have, hopefully video, but we're going to have ongoing communication, I would say daily at first. And a lot of this is A, to make people comfortable, there's a lot of uncertainty, and B, to make sure that we're learning from each other. Because, you know, even as an agency leader, I was just talking to an agency leader before I recorded this podcast. He's like, I don't know what's going on. And I said, exactly. That's why we need our teams. And they're gonna. They're gonna be help you and we're gonna share some ideas. So communication both as an emotional kind of trigger, but also as a learning trigger as well. And then lastly, technology. What do we have that we're not leveraging? How we're going to do it? How are we going to put it in play? What do we specifically need? Let's not go crazy. But what would be a piece or piece of technology that either we need to leverage or we need to go out and get to make sure that we can continue business as normal as we can. We know it's not going to be normal, but as normal as we can. So just want to share those things with you today. And again, I know there's more things I'd love to hear back from you, things that maybe you're doing in your agency that are helping through this challenging time. But one of the things that I'll share and we shared today on our podcast is that leaders lead. Right? Leaders lead. And even though we don't know all the answers. Right. I'm not going to say you say things that you don't know to make up, but you've got to remain calm and you've got to remain confident because people are looking to you for advice. They're looking for you for security. They're looking for you to someone that they can believe in. Because I'll tell you, there are a lot of people that are scared, a lot of people that are fearful. And whether they say it outwardly or not, you as a leader have an opportunity, right? You have an opportunity to empathize with others around you. You have an opportunity to educate others around you, have an opportunity to equip what tools and resources. And you have an opportunity to empower. And empowering is to give others some strength, some confidence as they move forward. So thanks for being a listener. Next week, if all goes as planned, we'll have Roger Sitkins on to talk about more of deep learning on this podcast. Thanks for being a listener. The Agent Leader Podcast. We'll talk to you soon.