Let's Get On The Same Page

Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. I'm excited to be with you on my final episode, at least recording wise here for 2019. I wish you and your agency and your family and your friends all a very happy new year and excited to wrap up this season, this podcast season here in 2019 with my final episode entitled let's get on the Same Page. Right, let's get on the same Page. And I'll dive more into that in a little bit. But do want to take just a little bit of time to wish you all a Merry Christmas, a happy New Year, whatever holiday you celebrate. I just hope this year brings you peace and prosperity and you accomplish the things that you want to accomplish. And hopefully some of my content today from an agency perspective will help you do that and help you gain some clarity, help you gain some consistency and to really make true on your commitments that you want to accomplish. And I think this is such a good time of the year. And again, depending on when you're listening to this, I know it's crazy for many of us, certainly in the insurance agency world, because many of you are wrapping up the 2019 with the one ones. And if you're in property and casually, I know that's a crazy time sometimes even right up to Christmas or right after Christmas. But I'm hoping you do get some time, not only with your family and loved ones, but some time to really reflect. And you know, one of the things that I do this time of year on our coaching calls with a private client group is just ask the client the questions of what really worked well for 2019. What are some things that you were really proud of? Because I think sometimes we forget to celebrate our accomplishments. Agency leaders, high level sales producers, goal driven people. If you're listening to this, you probably fit into that category. I think sometimes we're so busy on getting to the next thing, which is what makes you successful, that we do sometimes forget to reflect. Not only just to take some time to appreciate accomplishments of our team or things that you have done individually, but also just to be able to reflect, to say what worked well that we need to replicate next year. It's such a good learning experience. In fact, I would challenge you to just take a look at your calendar and go back if you could. I mean, spend half a day if you can get, if it's possible. I know it's hard for many of you, but don't do any work, don't do any specific things task related and just review and reflect and go Back all the way to last year and look at January and February and go, oh, my gosh, I forgot about that. Wow. I remember that I need to do that again because success leaves clues. Certainly we learn from our failures, but we learn from our successes as well. So I just want to challenge you and hopefully get you excited about looking back and taking some time in 2019, so then you can look ahead with greater clarity in 2020. With that said, I want to dive into my topic today and again titled let's get on the Same page. I was looking back and I've expressed this in different podcast episodes in different ways before, but if I had to, you know, someone said, what do you see overall is one of the greatest frustrations for insurance agencies? Now? It definitely varies. You know, I'm going to hear from some, I'm going to hear, well, it's, you know, we're not having enough sales or organic growth or our biggest frustration is we don't know, you know, we don't have a great client experience. Right. There could be lots of different things, but I really think a lot of all the external frustrations, so to speak, right. The results sometimes, maybe that we're not getting, often start with the fact that our entire team, our entire agency is not on the same page, that we have an agency of individuals doing individual things, trying to accomplish a team goal. And it certainly takes individuals in their unique abilities, in their strength zone, doing what they do well. Right. So we're not going to be doing the same thing, but we're going to be aligned in the same goal. Best analogy I can give. And if you're not a sports fan, not a football fan, I apologize. But it's just easy to understand. You know, we're kind of here at the. Getting near the end of the football season. But, you know, one thing about sports and certainly football is in football, you've got 11 people on the field, and really every person is doing something different on every play, right? Every single person, all 11 are doing something different. Now, you may have your wide receivers and your running back and your offensive linemen that have similar tasks, right, the quarterbacks. But on a particular play, every single person is doing something different. And so why is that? Well, because we have different strengths, right? Our receivers are running a route downfield because they're fast and they're shifty. And our offensive linemen are doing the blocking, right. For example, and the quarterback's throwing the passes. So we have a team goal. We're trying to get a touchdown right at the End of the day, trying to score points, that would be the goal of an offense in football. But we have individual strengths and abilities. And you know, I think you probably get where I'm going with this. But the same thing with insurance agencies. You know, we have agency leaders that maybe have different responsibilities. A lot of that is empowering and equipping their team. You know, it could be anything from just paying the bills. Right. All kinds of things that evolved in leadership and management. We certainly have our production team and you know, my definition of a producer is one who produces. So we're trying to go out and get results. We have our service team which is, you know, doing a lot of the reactive things so important for an agency. Right. For part of that client experience, you may have a loss controller, claims person. Right. Depending on the size of the agency. So the point of it is we have different people in different roles and we have to figure out how do we get on the same page. One of the things that we talked about at Sitkins and this came probably, I don't know, maybe it's been a year and a half, close to two years ago now at this point, as we were preparing for one of our CEO FIT programs. This is our leadership program. We have bringing our private clients for a leadership summit for a couple days. And this came directly from Roger Sitkins, who was obviously very wise and very successful. An honor for me to work with him every single day. But we're talking about, you know, getting accountability, getting buy in from an entire team. How do we do that? And Steve, one of the problems is we're trying to get everyone on the same page to do that. We probably should have a business plan that's on one page. What if we could take a business plan and a lot of business plans certainly, you know, there could be details of a business plan. They get very minute and you get into all the specifics. And that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a one page business plan that you could just simply say, this is who we are, this is where we're going. These are the critical things that we need to do. Here are the results that we expect. And here's our main focus day in, day out. If we could put that on one page and we could communicate that, and hopefully your agency is doing some form of monthly team gathering, right. Or whatever that may be. Because I can tell you this, I've never seen an agency over communicate. I just haven't. Right. It's like, well, you know, I've said it before. I mentioned that in our last quarterly retreat or I said that in one of our meetings. Like, yes, say it again. If it's important to you and your agency and the results, it needs to be communicated and communicated and communicated. So back to the one page business plan. So we created a one page business plan that our private client members, the Sidkins Network, use. And on this podcast, I just want to give you an overview because it's one thing to say, well, this is kind of what it looks like and I'm going to help give you some kind of template or guide. And then it's not a thing of how do we execute it. That's certainly what we do, you know, with our clients every single week, every single month as we work together. But let me just give you an overview. And the theme for what we do with our clients is based around professional fitness. And you've heard me say this before. You know, to get profit in your agency, you've got to get profit. What does professional fitness mean? Well, there are a lot of things, just like an app athlete. To get physically fit as an agency leader and agency team, we got to get professionally fit. And to me it really revolves around three Cs, clarity, consistency and commitment. We've got to get clarity on where we're going. Why are we going there? Why is that important? We have to build consistent habits and not 72 different things. But what are the key things that we are committed to be consistent. And then I already used that word, we've got to be committed. What does commitment look like? Who's committing to who as a leader? Am I committing to my team? Is my team committing to me? Are we committed to an outside coach? Whatever it is, let's make commitments because the results that we want are going to improve our lives, improve our business, improve the experience with our clients, all those things that are important to us. If it's important enough for us to say and talk about to do it, let's commit to actually doing it. And I think that's where most agencies, in fact my own life, I see it all the time. I have a lot of ideas that I know would be helpful, but I don't filter, I don't get clarity on them and therefore I don't execute and I make no commitment to it. So let's talk about the one page business plan. The way we have it laid out, it's pretty simple, it's on one page. But let me just give you a visual to think about it. The first part is around clarity. And I mentioned this already, and I'm sure you have heard, and maybe your agency has a mission statement or maybe you have some form of vision statement. But my question to any agency is, who knows it and do they remember it? You know, there's been scenarios, and I've seen this many times where we've got a mission statement that's four paragraphs long or one really long run on paragraph. And if you. You ask anybody in the agency, hey, what's the mission of the agency? Like, I don't know. And the mission to me is pretty simple. I mean, the mission to me is why? And this goes back to Simon Sinek's start with why. I love this question. He says, why do you wake up every morning and why should anybody else care? See, I believe that people today, certainly, I would definitely say the younger generation. I'm not just going to say millennials, but I think younger generations, we don't just want to work for someone or work for something. We want to be part of something, something that matters. And I think it's overlooked oftentimes in the insurance world that, oh, well, you know, we just sell insurance. You do a lot more than that. But why is that so important? What is your mission? What do you want to accomplish? And this doesn't mean when you have a mission statement, that everybody is suddenly going to just buy in on day one and say, rah, rah. Yeah, yeah, yay. But if you're passionate. And again, to go back to what Simon Sinek said so well, is that people don't buy the what and the how, they buy your why. As an agency leader, if you can express, this is why we do what we do. This is why it's so important. And there are some great agencies that do this. They do a really good job of expressing that, you know, whether it's involvement with the community, whether it's an involvement with a certain association or group or nonprofit. Right. Whatever it is, it kind of leads that we do all this so that we can do this right? This is why this is important. It has to be yours, right? Doesn't need to be anybody else, but to really have a mission. And it could be one sentence, it can be a few words, but what is the purpose of why we do what we do? So having that mission statement so important. Secondly, I think this is equally important is a vision statement. You know, a vision statement may be less tactical, so to speak. It may be a little bit pie in the sky sometimes. But I can tell you that your agency team Wants to know where you want to take them. Now hopefully you've got, and I talk about leadership, you know, leaders build leaders who build leaders, that you've got leaders within your agency. But I can tell you a great leader sees more than others sees. And your job is to say this is where I see this going, you know, and I've been part of agencies, I've seen externally of agencies that you can see on the teams. I don't really know where we're going with all this. I don't really know what the final outcome is. And by the way, do things change? Yeah, of course they do. Right. So this isn't written in stone, but I think it's very important that you can commit to your team and say this, you know, give them clarity. This is where I see this agency going. This is what it's all about. This is who I want us to become. Right. So that we know we're going someplace. So when you can combine a mission, why we do what we do and a vision of where we're going to go. Right. And again, however you do that, that gives your team clarity. We're not guessing. I can tell you this if I don't know something and this is true certainly with agency teams, if we are missing information. And by the way, this doesn't mean you have to share financial and everything. No, obviously there's things as leadership you're not going to share with your team. But if I don't know some of the basic things and I don't feel that I have good direction or meaning behind where the agency is going, I'm probably going to assume the worst. That's just what we do as humans. And going back to what I said earlier is that we don't communicate enough. In fact, I've never seen an agency over communicate. So the best agencies we work with now I see is they're very clear on their mission and their vision and, and they communicate it over and over and over and over again. And that agency knows exactly what they stand for. And by the way, does that impact long term culture? You betcha it does, right? You betcha it does. And the other part of this, just to spend some time on it is it helps you get buy in from your team. It also helps make your team accountable. Now there's a whole different podcast I should probably do on really accountability and how we build more accountability into an agency because it's a huge issue. But one of the first things you can do is, is just express the mission and the vision with energy, with abundance. Right? And this is what it is to say over a period of time. The first part to build culture is to communicate it. If you walk in on day one and say, we've got five new processes we're going to install tomorrow, your team's going to backlash. But if you continue to say, this is where we're going, this is why we're doing it, this is where we're going, this is why we're doing it, this is where we're going, this is why we're doing it. And then you begin to install some types of processes or systems around that. That makes sense. That helps you get to where you want to go. Your team's going to go, oh yeah, that makes sense. It helps you get greater buy in. It helps you get greater accountability. So the first part again is mission and vision of a one page business plan. The second part, and this is also critical, thus the name is having critical success factors. Critical success factors. Part of our CEO FIT program is we try to take all these ideas that an agency leader has that an agency wants to accomplish and a filter to the most important things. You know, one of the things with critical success factors is to build consistency. And this kind of goes back a little bit to the clarity as well, but certainly builds into consistency. Is that too often? And I heard this quote, I need to, I should give credit to who came up with it, but I'll share the code. It's not mine, but it says this. Do not complain about that which you tolerate. Do not complain about that which you tolerate. And I often see this, certainly when it comes with critical success factors is that the agency has never set up specific critical success factors. And by the way, what goes along with that is non optional behaviors. These are the things that we will not accept at this agency. This is not who we are. This will not be tolerated. And if we don't have that, well, what do you stand for? How do we know the key things that we need to do every single week and month, whether it's by department or division or by the agency in whole? Because I believe this, that if you don't stand for something, you really don't stand for anything. And part of that is to say, okay, we know the mission, we know the vision. What are the critical success factors that will help us drive toward that? What are the very few basic things that we need to do exceedingly well all the time? And by the way, this isn't 64 different things. In many cases it might be three or five or maybe seven. But these are the things that we are going to do all the time. And by the way, this is on the one page business plan. My team knows, right, not only is it in front of them, but they know specifically what we stand for and what we don't stand for, what are non optionals. So again these can be lots of different things as agencies have. Again part of this is some of the strategies that we teach at Sitkins. So some of the agencies put these directly on. But the idea that we're going to have a targeted account size or we're going to have a minimum account standard for our agency or one of our critical success factors is that we're always going to be doing growth and development. It could be a number of different things. We are always going to be understanding the power of the 8020 rule. And again, these are some of our philosophies and agencies can kind of take them and tweak them. But what are your critical success factors? If I said what are the few things? If I ask you right now, what are the very few things that you know you must do exceedingly well all the time, could you say these are the three things, these are the five things. Because I can tell you if you have too many things, guess what happens. Nothing, right? Nothing gets executed at a high level. So consistency is so important. Now part of consistency is to knowing where and back to where we're going is to have some type of key performance indicators. Now I believe that you certainly can have key performance indicators that are on your one page business plan that's shared with the team. And I think there's a couple different kinds of key performance indicators. There are the results, the outcome stats. Here's where we want to go. For example, here's the revenue of the agency, here's the operating profit, here's the organic growth. Those are typically results, types of things. And by the way, some people are worried about sharing some of those things. Again, you got to choose what's right for you. But I can tell you as part of a team, I want to know how we're growing. I want to know if we're profitable, right? I want to know what our revenue is. I mean just those are things that I think as a team we want to know. Now again, how you want to share that specifically, that's up to you. But I think some of those things can be open because if we're going to have a one page business plan, we should all know where we're at and where we're Going now, I would say even more important than outcome stats are performance stats and performance stats are the stats that drive the outcome. So if you don't feel comfortable sharing the outcome stats, well, what are some performance stats that we could share? Well, what would that mean? Well, what is the revenue per relationship that we have in our agency? And again, this could be done by department, maybe. What is the revenue per producer overall? What is our retention rate? What is our closing ratio? You get a lot of things you could measure, but what are those things that are going to lead to the outcome stats that you want? And these are really important that we have something of key performance indicators that we know where we're going. This goes back to Peter Drucker, the management guru. You know, what gets measured gets managed. I don't believe that your results are something you can manage. I don't believe numbers are something you can manage. Well, we got to get higher retention. Okay, well what do we do for that? There are things in performance indicators you want to maybe dive a little bit deeper in because that's kind of the outcome or boy, our revenue wasn't where it should be. Where do you think it should be? Well, I think it should be higher. Okay, let's go do it. What does that tell me? And we say this to our Sitkins clients all the time, is that you can't manage numbers. You can only manage behaviors and strategies. I think it's important that we know our numbers. We should know our numbers. We should know some of these things I've talked about. But then we got to get in the performance stats and say what are the things that we need to look at that really would drive the behaviors to get to the numbers that we need to get to? Alright, last thing that we have on our one page business plan. So mission vision, critical success factors, and I think some form of key performance indicators that you have on there. The last thing is to give you not just clarity and consistency but to ultimately make a commitment to do the things you said you were going to do. And we have on our one page business plan is the one thing. Now this comes from the book by Gary Keller called the One Thing. And I've mentioned this, I think on several different podcasts. We love this book. I think it's just such a powerful book and concept because I think one of the biggest reasons insurance agencies don't accomplish some of the things they want to accomplish isn't because they're not talented enough. It isn't because they don't have the right processes in many cases, not in, because they don't have the right people. Those things can all be improved, but it's typically because they get distracted and they lose focus. That's why most people don't execute what they really want to do. We get distracted and we lose focus. The best analogy I can give, and I share this, some of the live events events is the lion tamer story. I mean, you think back and some of you are listening, they're like, what is a lion tamer? Because it's been a long time, it was before my time, but I, you know, reading stories and looking at pictures of lion tamer, you know, you have this at the circus. The lion tamer, he's got his big top hat and this coat. And typically lion tamer is standing there and he's got a, he's got two things in his hand. He's got a, a four legged stool or a chair and a whip. And then the lion is kind of perched there, you know, looking at him. But he's got him under control because he's holding that chair and that whip. And you know, I always tell people at live events, you know, these two instruments, which one is the most powerful. And I get a variety of answers, but the reality of it is is that the chair is the most powerful. You know, a chair is not going to stop a lion from eating you. And if a lion really wants to eat you, it will eat you. But what the chair does and why the lion tamer flips it upside down is that the lion sees from four legs on that stool. He doesn't see one stool or one human being to eat for lunch. He sees four legs. As the lion gets distracted, he looks at all four legs, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and doesn't do anything. And I think that analogy fits really well with insurance agencies and agency leaders. Is that because we have so many things that we want to accomplish, so many tasks, so many to dos, we don't figure out what is the one thing thing. And as Gary Keller says in the book, and I love this, what is the one thing? So that by doing it will make everything else either easier or unnecessary. And I think that's one of the biggest things I try to do in my coaching calls with clients is there's a lot of things that we can do. A lot of things maybe that even you should do and you got to be careful of, should have yourself to death. I should do this, I should do that. But to say, wait a second, let's Take a step back. Of all these things you mentioned, it seems to me that if we do this and we do this first, everything else that you just mentioned will become a little bit easier. In fact, some of them might even become unnecessary because if you fix the initial problem, the rest of them will kind of take care of themselves. Now that doesn't always happen. That doesn't always work that way. I get that. And by the way, I know you have multiple projects, I understand that as well. But to execute what's the one thing? And so I would challenge you, we have this in one page business plan. This is the one part that would potentially change right? Throughout the course of a year. Maybe it's every month, maybe it's every quarter, maybe it's six months, maybe it's just one thing you do work on for the whole year, but the one thing that we are going to fully commit to accomplishing. And in fact, I think it's in the book as well. I love this. And you can put a sign up in front of your desk. Until we accomplish this one thing, everything else is a distraction, right? Until we build performance management with our team, everything else is a distraction. Until we truly understand our 8020 and our agency, everything else is a distraction, right? Until we get a service person to fill this spot that we are really struggling with, everything else is a distraction. I don't care what it is. But you have to realize, wow, this seems to be the key domino that's gonna knock the rest of the dominoes down. So what is that one thing? And that part of it is making a commitment to doing that. It's one thing to say it, it's another thing to do it. So what commitment will you make to the one thing? So that's the one page business plan, right? It's pretty simple. But I will tell you, if you do it right, it'll take some thought. What is the mission and vision of your agency? Why do you want to go where you want to go? Why is that important to you? What are the critical success factors to your agency? Do you know specifically what they are? Can you tell your team? Okay. Of all things team, these things are going to be what we're all about. These are the pillars of who we are and what we do. And we have non optional things. This is not tolerated. This is exactly what we do. This is what we don't do. Can you name what those are? Do you have your key performance indicators for your agency? Not just what the results are, the outcome, but what are the performance stats that would drive that and how do we measure that and communicate that with the team. And then lastly, whether it's month to month or quarter to quarter, what's our one big thing, our one thing that's going to make everything else easier and necessary. And I can tell you, even on coaching calls or just having this in front of you to say, this is our one page business plan. How's it coming? Are we doing the things we want to do? Because if it's worth enough to talk about, if it's worth enough to complain about, if it's worth enough to think through your team that we should do this right, and then you finally just say, this is what we're going to do. I think it's probably worth enough to write down on one page and hand out and make it part of your team's culture. And you know, again, it goes back to all these things of why it's important, buy in accountability and certainly results. Right? It's about results for your agency. So hopefully this is helpful to you. Again, I spent more time on this actually than I thought I would him at the 25 minute mark. And I appreciate you being a listener. I just want to take some time here as I wrap up on a couple things. Number one, from a business perspective, if you're an agency leader, I don't ask this in every podcast, but if you're an agency leader looking to step up your game in 2020, if you want to be part of a private community that is focused on helping agencies gain clarity, to find the right things, to be consistent, to make a commitment to yourself and to your team and your community and to others around you to be your best version, to get the results that you really want. If you're tired of saying we're okay, we're, but we know there's more in us, I would love to talk to you. Our team at siskinds would love to talk to you to see if you would be a fit with our private client group, the Sitkins Network. It's our highest level. We have coaching, we do training, we have resources, we'll equip you, we have networking, we mastermind together all the things to help your agency become the best version possible. Not all agencies are a great fit, but if you're committed to growth, if you are committed to the things that I've talked about today, you potentially would be a great agency and help you get great results moving forward. So number one, my call from a business perspective, in 2020, we'd love to be part of that. Number two is this. I want to thank you for being a listener. If you've listened to one episode or all the episodes, if you've shared it with someone, if you've given me a rating, if you've given me a good rating, if you give me a bad rating, thank you. I appreciate it. I love feedback. The fact that you take the time out of your day or out of your commute, ignore whatever you're doing to listen and become better, because there's a lot of things that you could be doing, a lot of things you could listen to. And I do truly appreciate you. So with that, thank you so much. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. All the best to you in 2000 and 20. Thanks.