Stories of Success - Diebold Agency Interview

Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host, also vice president of the Sitkins Group. Thanks so much for joining me today. And today's episode is going to be another interview from our Profit Net, our networking event that we had live in April in Cape Coral, Florida. Today's interviewees that Roger Sitkin is going to be interviewing is Kevin and Pete Elliott. This is the father and son agency and also Dan Elliott is another owner who's a son he wasn't present at, but Kevin and Pete are going to share some things about their agency. Now, the Diebold Agency is Kevin and Pete's agency located in Michigan. In fact, they've got an office in Detroit now, but for the most part of the locations they have, it's rural Michigan. So small town people always say and with people at the Sitkins Group, oh well, you work with big agencies and big towns. Well, that's true, but we also work with agencies from all over the place. Small towns, big towns, you name it. We look for agencies that just truly care about growth and being their best version and helping them implement their results. Kevin and Pete and their entire agency had done a tremendous job with growth over the many years. In fact, one of their plans that they had in working with the Sitkins team was years back, they just finished this. They had a five year plan to double their agency's revenue from $2.5 million to $5 million, $2.5 million to $5 million last year. They just got through the fifth year and guess what? They achieved it. They doubled their agency. Certainly we're proud at Sitkins that we had an impact and helped them, but they did the work, they're the heroes. They're the ones that do it day in and day out. You're going to hear a lot how they did it on this interview that Roger interviews Kevin and Pete. My big takeaways from this leading into this are a few things. Certainly you're going to learn some things tactically that they did to double their revenue. But you're also going to hear from a culture perspective if you're a family agency. I know many of you listening have family agencies. How do you perpetuate to the next generation? What does that look like? What are some of the obstacles, obstacles they ran into to help them spring forward into the future. And so you get some great takeaways from that. Enjoy the interview. Roger Sitkins interviewing Kevin Elliott and Pete Elliott from our profit net live at Cape Coral, Florida. Enjoy.

We have Kevin and Pete Elliott with us. I think it's pretty obvious if you've been around, that they're not fun guys at all. This will be no cocktails, no James. I'm sorry.

Kevin.

We're gonna have Kevin and Pete talk about some of these things they've gone through. Kevin is obviously a very close personal friend of mine. And it started by. I was giving a speech for auto. Auto Owners Insurance Company in Michigan. What was the city?

Gaylord, Michigan.

Gaylord, Michigan. And he came up afterwards and he went, I gotta join. What you're doing, whatever you're doing, I want to get in on that. And that started a great personal friendship that I absolutely value. Pete's joined the agency. I feel the same way about him, although I like him better. It's a great agency, and as an agency, you're going to hear that it's not as big as some of the other ones have been on the stage today. It's closer to Mark Rollins. He was when he got. When he made the big transition. But you're going to see how families can work together, how father, son can work together, father, daughter can work together. Okay. The agency itself is now just a little over 5 million revenue. And this. This tells me a lot about them, too. They're $5,011,905.64.

Okay.

As much as you've got to know, Kevin, I know he's kind of fun to be around, this guy, as well as anyone I've ever worked with. 29 and a half employees. Figure out who that half person is. Revenue per employee is only $169,895.11. Okay. And the growth rate, they've been averaging 7.77% over the last three years. Revenue per employee is down. Right now, they were up to 195,000. This is in a relatively smaller marketplace where they are in West Ranch, Michigan, because they've hired a couple of staff over the last couple years, a couple of producers. So with that, Kevin, I will start with you. Give us a quick history of the agency, how you joined it. And I know you've had some flashbacks based upon what Mark was saying earlier.

You know, Mark scared the hell out of me this morning because it looked like the same thing I went through. And 1983, I worked for St. Paul Insurance Company for six years. And then my father called. There's an agency for sale 35 miles away from his office. And he said, why don't you come back and take a look at this? I'm down in Houston, Texas, having the time of my Life and I'm single and no care, you know, living paycheck to paycheck, having a ball. I would go up there and take a look at this agency and it's got one employee, it's got 131,000 of revenue and it's got a town of 2,000 people. And I'm like, oh my God, what's going to go on here? I'm single, I'm going to come back here, I don't know what the hell I'm going to do. I went home that afternoon, I drove back to my parents house and my mother said, what do you think? I said I'm going back to Texas, I'm going to take a job with St. Paul back in Minnesota. I said I can't turn the salary down. She looked at me and says, well you're single. She said why don't you just come back and try it and if it doesn't work out you can sell and make a little money on the side. That's kind of a challenge. So that's what I did. And we've gone from 131,000 at that point to a little over $5 million today. So we've done pretty well. Our profit centers. We have three profit centers. One in Detroit, two in northern Michigan. And Roger for years has tried to get me to close our Holt Lake office. We've now we had a partner in there that was causing us some problems. Inactive, not a lot of help. Pete and Dan and my operations officer bought him out on January 1st. We have plans that drags us down because one of our offices does about a quarter million in revenue per employee and the other one does 214,000. Then our link office drives that number down to 169. So we made adjustments so that should go up over the next couple years and we should be back where we were. But listening to Mark, you know, I went through the same thing. We had no computer, we had nothing. In fact I was there a year and a half and I had two employees and both of them thought they owned the agency. And at that time I just got married. I just got married to a wonderful lady. And we had, we had Pete and we had. Dan was just born and they quit. We got into it and they quit. So here I am with the agency. I had to go hire somebody. I'm taking the at computer at home, into my house at night doing my own invoices, doing everything. But we survived and you know, in time of 2000 we ended up doing very well.

Yeah, and as you said, they're just a little over $5 million of revenue. We did a planning session, private planning session, I think was just that a little over five years ago now, maybe four years ago actually. And at that point, our goal was five and five to get to five million of revenue within five years. And we rated about two and a half million when we did that. We'll talk a little bit more about some of those adjustments we made. But as you also heard yesterday, they didn't spend their contingency income. They're exceedingly profitable, what they did. Plus, they just set it aside into a separate company and kept it for a long time. Pete, how about you? Where were you before you joined the agency?

So I started my career with Hanover Insurance. Worked there for about five or six years. Was in commercial underwriting for a little while, but then I moved over to product analytics and then actually kind of carved out my own space in agency analytics, kind of a new department, you know, at the company there we were actually able to find indicators which we could find out whether or not an agency was going to be unprofitable prior to that actually happening because there's such a long lag on it. I then took that left Hanover, moved down to Miami, Florida, where I went to college, consulted for several different companies down in Miami on the agency analytics specifically and how they could manage their agency for us.

Yeah, he really understands that part of it. Okay, but you went from Miami back to Detroit.

Yeah, it wasn't a easy sell for my. My now wife, but did finally convince her to come back, by the way.

It doesn't mean I don't like Miami, Oscar. There's just. I'm saying Miami's nice, and I used to live in Detroit. Okay.

So, yeah, yeah, we made the move back about two and a half years ago. You know, my dad had called me. Probably wasn't pushy about it, but, you know, about once a year he'd call, say, hey, you know, we've got an opportunity here. You need to think about it at that time. You can kind of fill you in a little more. The stock was not really where I wanted it to be. We owned 25% rather than 75% of that specific agency.

The Detroit office was a separate company.

Yeah, separate company, separate contracts. So it wasn't super appealing at that time to come back and take over something that I own 25% of. That changed about three years ago, and that's when we sat down and had those discussions and made the move.

Let me give you One advice for the young people here, we're never going to sell to a big brokerage firm. We're not going to sell unless they sell after I'm gone. So many years ago, I sat down with my partner and I said, let's take our contingency income, let's form an llc. So we formed this llc. Part of our document said, we cannot touch the money in the LLC unless we have 100% that voted at the stockholders. There was only two at the time. We took that money and every year went into the LLC and we paid tax on it. We never touched it. You guys heard of the stock market, right? We put it in the stock market. We had Morgan Stanley borrow it. Okay? Now when I sell the agency to these guys, I'll be fine because that'll just be my fun money. To be honest with you, if you invest like that, you don't have to worry. We're financially independent. We have no debt, zero debt on anything, and we have all that security. Then we had another partner come in and we did the same thing for the last. That's like 18 years. We did this with the contingency money. And four years ago, he had three kids in college at the same time, came to us and said, you know, I really need some of that contingency money. So then we just split that LLC up and everybody took their portion, just shifted it into their portfolio. So the three partners have done very well doing it that way. And I would make a recommendation, you guys, don't touch the contingency money. And right now the contingency money flows into our office and doesn't hit our balance sheet until the 31st of December.

Now, were you able to get the companies then to sign the contingency contract just with the llc so it doesn't even touch the agency?

The money came into the agency and just distributed right over the llc.

Okay. You know, I've known about this for a long time, obviously, but kind of reminds me too of Rob Gronkowski from the Patriots. You saw that where in his last contract he made $54 million, didn't spend a penny on his endorsements. I don't know how much he made in his endorsements. I'm sure it was 54 million, but he was really smart to do that. When Rob was a young kid, his brother was the first basement on my son Patrick's college baseball team. So Rob was running around a little nine year old. They always say how tough he was. Those kids or five boys would beat the hell out of each other in the stands non stop. But he was smart. He did it the right way. Other than the financial results you've had in a relatively smaller agency, what's the thing overall, Kevin, you're the most proud of in your agency today?

Well, I'm proud that we set ourselves up, that we member have to sell. I mean, if you take a look, you know, the two boys are coming in buying plus another person's buying company. Young people don't have that opportunity to go into work for a big company. They just don't. And there's a lot of flexibility when you own a company. And there's a huge amount of things that you can do when you own the company that you can't do when you're working for somebody else. And I love that the going to have that opportunity to do that.

Okay, Pete, what about you? What's the thing you're the most proud of in the agency today?

I'd say it's our retention, both of accounts and of employees outside of employees that we want to part ways with. I think we've lost one over your entire career.

Yeah, I've lost. In the last 20 years, we've lost one employee. I mean, we've never stopped our 401k. We have huge bonus programs for our employees. Our producers are paid very well and, you know, we just have a happy place to work. I mean, people love working on an agency.

Yeah.

And I mean on the account side, we're. I mean, even personal lines and small commercial combined, we're still 97, 98% retention annually. And if we lose an account, it's generally a merger situation in which, you know, the buyers are stepping in, you.

Know, and I mentioned yesterday that I Angelo's name in the planning session where he kept saying, we were talking with Julie about, all right, we've got 1600 accounts. 1600 accounts. It was crazy. Even though you like, you know the numbers really well, as far as the technology itself, it's not like you're sitting there and jumping all over, how did you get the team to buy in so well? And the fact that once you went to the new system, you jumped all over having Angela's firm in there. What's that done for you?

Well, it's done. It's, you know, somebody standing to my left told me, do what you do best and delegate the rest. So if you take a look at your whole operation, we had some fantastic people that really sat at the desk and could work with clients. Client, client after client after client after client. It's just like a rotation. And Angela's firm, when we had Missy, she came in, I think she was in our office two or three times, went through our office, A to Z and told us where we were making mistakes and what we needed to do to fine tune it. And our people just bought into it. I mean, when we would come to. I've been around you a long time as part of the Sickens 100, but when we would come to the Sickens 100, we would go back and we would share and at the extreme, networking, we always brought a number of people to stream networking.

But one of the things. And Angela, you might just answer real quick on this too. One of the things that I love about one of your many service is the fact that you can go in remotely every quarter and let them know how well their staff's using their system. Is that correct?

We can run reports that give them the kind of numbers where Roger says, know your numbers. We can give you the numbers. You don't have to spend your time figuring them out. We'll help you get those numbers. I was talking to several last night about running that 80, 20 analysis.

Right.

Those client ranking reports. And I think the other thing we did do, and I think Missy did with you guys is develop an action plan. You can't do everything at once, right. So let's put it in priority order and then go through it. And I think one of the things we do well is get the buy in from the account managers because all the consultants we have have been account manager managers or operations managers. They bend in those seats and it's just you can tell them the same thing we tell them, and with us, they're more likely to buy it than if you guys are telling them the same thing.

Thank you, Kevin. You did like Mark did, like I did. You made an early career decision. You chose parents that opened an insurance company agency. Okay. And now Pete, you and Dan have done the same thing. But what's from your perspective, what was the biggest challenge in getting Pete and Dan to come in? What were the biggest lessons you learned in all that? Well, because by the way, it really works well in their county. It's not perfect. There's no such thing as perfect, but it really works well. What are the biggest lessons?

Well, one of the biggest things you got to be careful of is when you, you get around my wife, who's a saint, you can't talk business all the time because you find out, you know, Pete's in the Detroit office, he comes up to our house for the weekend or deer camp or something, and we're sitting around talking business, and that annoys him. So we've tried to figure out how to do that. One of the things is, for me, I expect more out of my sons than I expect out of anybody else. So I've had a step back. I used to be the sales manager. He fired me as sales manager. One of my sons is a sales manager. I very rarely go to a sales meeting anymore. I go maybe once every two months just to inject my BS into the staff and get them all riled up. So that, that's been a challenge because, you know, I kind of like to know what's going on. And I don't always know what's going on, but they've done a great job in what they've done. And the accounts they're working on right now, the three accounts that they have in their pipeline are all over 200,000 revenue. So, you know, I guess I can't argue with them.

Pete, what about from your perspective? What's been the biggest challenge of having your dad there at the office and doing the transition?

I think the biggest thing is just. And he actually kind of leads by example on this, but it's leaving work at work. We all have pretty strong personalities. And, you know, our phone calls are not always the friendliest. But we'll get off a conference call and then come six o', clock, it's over.

Never happened.

Yeah. It's been amazing to watch how that works. It's tough, but they have the transition. There's no question about it.

Yeah. Because we have some strong disagreements. I'm very open to everything. He's kind of stubborn.

Wait, did anyone else hear a conflict?

I might open.

He's stubborn, but I'm very open. He's stubborn.

So, you know, we, you know.

Did you notice how Pete's lips.

We get in arguments? It's the same with my other son. We can get in arguments at the office. We can shut the door and yell at each other. Open the door. Let's go hunting. Let's go fishing. We're not gonna talk about that crap anymore. So it works out well from that aspect.

Yeah. I mean, even our biggest arguments over an account, it could even be somebody dropped the ball, bad deal. It's over when we walk out of that room.

Yeah. And all kidding aside, Kevin does have a very strong personality, even before he's had his Jameson. But he really does. I mean, he's so damn passionate about everything. That's a positive Statement. And I could see that in a lot of companies it would carry over the wrong way. The good news is he doesn't have the stubborn strong guys on the other side. Between Pete and his brother. You mentioned about getting fired as a sales manager, Pete, what's that done with him no longer as a sales manager and him primarily not attending the sales meetings?

It's done a couple things.

Hold a minute. Let me just have you move your chair over a little bit. Okay, go ahead.

It's done a couple things. It's certainly. We announced it actually at a state of the agency meeting that we had in February after our planning session in January, to the whole staff. And it came from him directly. So from there it kind of empowered Dan and I to just start making decisions. That's been the great thing. You know, we, unless it's an emergency and we feel like we need to bring him in on something, we don't really consult with him on decision making. Dan handles west branch, I handle Detroit, and we make our own decisions. And once that change was made, made and it was communicated by him, everyone kind of just followed in line. There were no problems there at all.

It was pretty neat because that was two Januarys ago now, the planning session. And we actually had to record Kevin making his declaration and then the other.

One on that to the sales meeting comment. And you might take this one personally, but the sales staff is much, much more open with Dan and I than they are with, with my dad. Whether it's intimidates them, whatever it is. But it's, it's more of an open dialogue. We've got producers that have. Were stagnant for a period of time and now they're open to tell us what their issues are and we work through them. And so it's, it's a little bit more collaborative than it was in the past.

Just go do it, Dan.

Well, I'm a quick start. You know, I go to Sitkins, I come back, I go to the sales staff, I say, okay, this is what we're doing. So I figured that's what we're doing for the next year. Nine months later. Shit. They hadn't done it in eight months. But I never followed up. This is what the guys do, they follow up, make sure the stuffs get done. My job now is I just go out, find accounts. My goal is I never want to be. I'm going to find the account, I'm going to write the account, I'm going to hand it off and I'm done with it. Somebody Else, take care and you're doing.

A great job of that. I want to come back to that one in just a second. The other thing that happened in our original, original planning session, we had Kevin's lovely wife Tina at the planning session because she was integral to the agency at that point. And this was before PETA joined the agency and we made her the president. We fired her not only as sales manager eventually, but as the president needed somebody there really the CEO on a day to day basis that didn't work exactly like we wanted. Why was that?

Well, I brought my wife down because she's in Florida six months anyway, so I figured she might as well come over here because she can get a free meal from Roger. And Roger looked at me and Roger said, what the hell is your wife doing here? I said, she just wants to understand what you do because I always mention your name. And he kind of looks at me and he's kind of dismayed that she's there. We go through the first meeting, hour and a half, he takes me on the hallway and says, why the hell don't we hire as the president? You're useless. So he looks at me, goes, we need to fire you. You just need to go do the finance, you need to go find accounts, and you can't touch the agency any longer. That worked pretty good for a year until my wife decided that she used to be a school teacher. And she doesn't work summers, so she's in Florida in the winter, she doesn't work summers. That only allows her two months in the office. So we had to hire an operations officer to take over.

She was good for a short time, then she just stopped going to the meeting. But it was great. But the key message here is what? Which you've all heard a thousand times from your unique abilities. Do what you do best, delegate the resume. Most of you in this room are struggling with growth and struggle with leadership issues. You probably have a couple of jobs you need to fire yourself from. And I want you to think of that real quick, quickly. What's the one or two jobs you currently get involved in you need to fire yourself from and get someone else to do it. Dan Sullivan, who I refer to a lot, is a great statement. I actually shared it with two people last night. At the end of the day, as you're growing, it's no longer what you have to do, it's who. So I want you to write that down. It's who, not what. John, you built your team on Chad, you're building a team on that is who, not what. You know. I mean, how many of you know what to do? Know what to do? Okay, Mike, we talked about the new BDC and everything. It's who, not what. The what's the easy part. I'm going to give you the what. You're going to learn from other members here. You're going to learn from Brad. You're going to learn and you're going to know the what. But then as are you going to have the structure, the discipline to say, here's who's to going. People do it. That, to me, is crucial. Okay, you love to write new business as much as any producer I've ever met. Okay? As you're doing that with the team being there and you being freed up, what's that done to your whole balance in life and happiness?

Well, you know, I got a lot of hobbies, so these people I know, Mark was up here talking about this retirement planning. I got so damn much stuff to do when I retire. I don't know how I ever keep up with it because I have a hunting lodge, I got a fishing boat. I. I love to go. I just love to do all kinds of stuff.

Fishing boat here and fishing boat in.

Yeah, I got too much shit, so, you know, I have plenty to do, so.

You never have too much shit.

I have plenty. I have plenty to do, so I. I don't know how anybody would have a hard time retiring. And my goal here is when Pete Dan come up to me, me and say, hey, you know, you're not valuable anymore. You need to get the hell out of here. That's when I'm going to step aside. In fact, this is my first year ever, December of 18, my wife went into the office and called an office meeting and said, I just want you guys to know my husband's been gone for a month this year. You guys figure it out. And immediately, Dan, my son, who's kind of like me, a sales guy, he went into the staff and just said, look, we need to plan for, for March and April and May because he's not going to be here. So make sure we get all these meetings done, what needs to be done. And he's not going to be here because my mom already bought him a ticket. So, you know, it works if you plan it.

Well, you've been out there writing a lot of large accounts. Now. What's your average account size you're working on?

You know, I don't work on anything. I try never to work on anything that doesn't generate at least 50 to $100,000 of revenue. I've got a lot of people. We've been very blessed.

Blessed.

We have some very, very good friends. Close, close friends that refer us a lot of business, and they introduce it to a lot of business. That takes time, because you got to go do some things with these people. And, like, the accounts these guys are working on, they were all introduced to these accounts, so we're very blessed for them.

That's a referral trip to Miami.

Tell them the referral trip.

Did golf or whatever. Just over in Naples.

In Naples. So, yeah, so we're going on this golf trip in Naples with two of our large clients. And the client calls me up and he says, you know, Kevin, is there any chance that we can bring this other guy with us? Because I think he could really give you some referrals. I said, yeah, but I'm gonna have to bring my two sons, too. He can't hit a golf ball straight. I thought he could kill somebody, you know? But we brought him, and it turned out to be fantastic, because now this guy and Pete are very good friends. They mesh together. And he's helping Pete get into a ton of accounts right now. And it was just that outing. We spent three days with this guy. I knew him for years. But he connects better with the Pete and Dan than it does with me. I connect better with the older guys. And it's worked out fantastic.

We had fun.

We had a great time, and we didn't kill any houses or anything like that, but, you know, it was fun.

How do you compete against the big boys? I mean, you've got. You two guys are going after these big accounts, and you've got all the big boys around there. What is it about dealing with. You get in and kick butt.

You just got to communicate, you know, we're in. We're slowly working on account. Right now they're paying about 2.5 million premium. Okay. It's with Marsh. Okay. It renewed on the Property. Renewed on January 1st. You guys ever heard of FM? Affiliated FM? They kind of got out of the manufacturing stuff. Well, Marsh doesn't even tell him that the policy is canceled. And he comes to him on right after Christmas and tells the cfo, I can't get you insurance. I gotta fill the. To extend the policy. And it's going to cost you $80,000 to extend the policy for 30 days. He's only paying 380,000 for his property at the time. And when he was done doing that, he came to him in February. Now Marsh had been in to see the CFO yet. This is a new CFO In October, Marsh hadn't been in there yet. Marsh calls him up and says, by the way, I placed your account and your premium is going from 380 to a million two on the property. This is a new CFO. Now he's going to tell the company what just happened. So Andrew, this friend of ours made a phone call. They mashed him, made a phone call. Pete, Dan and I went in, met with him, sat down with him. He goes, well, at least I met you guys before I met Marsh. Marsh is my broker. So we had a nice conversation with him. And we don't bash anybody. When we go, we just say, this is what we do. Either you can work the way we do it or you don't have to work the way we do it. But this is how we do things. And I think our next meeting is with him. The follow up meeting is April 20th, something we have a follow up with the CFO to try to put this thing together for him. But we can't be everything to everybody. And we tell them that going in.

Yeah, I mean the big brokers have obviously a lot to offer. The thing that this meeting, what came up three or four times was the continuity. It seemed like every renewal, it was a new person in the office, first time he had met that person to deliver the renewal. And so I think with our larger accounts that we do have on the books, they appreciate the fact that it's one of the three of us.

Every time, the consistency and the big brokers, you know, it's an account manager, account executive, you know, then they go and the next year it's somebody else. And you know, those relationships aren't that good.

You know, relationship basically about 20 times.

I mean, if you have the only problem with the relationship signs, if you have great relationships with the CFO and he leaves or they merge, then you got to start the thing all over again and maybe somebody else comes in. The only time we've ever lost anything really is a capital purchase where somebody comes in and buys the company or a major bankruptcy. Other than that, we have been very fortunate on our large accounts.

Pete, what's the greatest frustration you've got within the agency today?

At this point it's still communication, although it's gotten a lot better. The high performance team meetings that we've put in place have helped a lot. But with that communication, it's also, we operate in, you know, we're three different agencies and it's trying to have the same message but still operate on our own to a degree, because the northern Michigan location, clientele, people are vastly different than my market in Detroit. So that's been a balance that we've had to strike of. You know, we have to have the same message, the same mission statement, but we have to cater to the needs of the demographics and, you know, the types of business that. That are down there. And that. That has been a struggle.

Kevin, your greatest frustration.

Well, my greatest frustration is pipelines. I mean, it just. I hate when they're not, like, overflowing. I mean, Bill.

Where's.

Bill's got meeting with Bill last night. What a problem. What a nice problem to have. He gets. He can only work on 40% of his referrals. My God, what a problem to have. Roger, I think you can do a private session, help him on that. That's amazing. But I always want to have so many things to work on that I can't get to. And it's kind of frustrating because I still like what I do, but my wife's having me spend more time away with her, and that's something I have to do because I can't live on 25%. So I'm spending more time doing that. But that allows your pipeline to shrink. And I don't like that. That's very frustrating. And some of my producers, my life sales guy, great guy, him, and I get frustrated with each other and yell at each other, and Pete steps in and calms it down. Sometimes his pipeline's not full enough, and then all of a sudden he runs out of stuff and he panics. And you gotta keep that pipeline going, going. You should almost have a day a week where you say, Monday afternoon, I'm gonna work on my pipeline. I'm just. That's my goal.

Pete, if you could start over in this business today, what would you have done differently? What would you do differently?

Not a whole lot.

I just would have come back to the agency sooner. I think that getting the carrier experience, which is something that we do in our agency, most of our producers all worked on the carrier side in some way, shape or form, mainly in underwriting, but in some other areas as well. But I think as soon as you're ready, getting back is important because it takes time. It takes time to learn it. It takes time to develop your network. And then once you get things going, I mean, you can really get to the point where you can't even keep up with the work. But I threw myself back probably four years going, doing some Consulting work and having some fun, and I don't regret it. But, you know, that said, it did put me behind the eight ball a little bit.

Okay, Kevin, if you could start over.

If I could start over. And don't let your ego get to you, but if I could start over, I wish I would have met him earlier in my career, seriously. Because I had made some stupid mistakes. Young. I still make some mistakes now. But you young people need a coach. And I heard some people aren't members here yet. They're thinking of. You're crazy if you don't join. I'm telling you, you are frigging nut cases if you don't join. Because the direction he can help you with, I mean, he can come in and have a meeting with myself and pretty much tell me I'm an asshole in a nice way. Okay? And you know, you are sometimes. And you have to have a coach or someone help you do that. You really do, because, you know, you own the agency. You think you're big dog. Well, I tell you what, you talk to him. You're not such a big dog anymore, and you need someone to help you with that direction. And I believe that that's exactly what.

You had it typed up. Good job. Thank you so much. All right, Pete, what's the one question I should have asked you? I haven't asked you yet?

I would say, what's my biggest kind of concern or fear for the future? And with that, I would actually say it's an opportunity. And it goes back to Wayne's talk yesterday. We're going to see some major changes. I'm going to be in this industry for probably 30, 35 more years. So with that said, I just need to be cognizant of that, on top of it, ahead of it, and partnering with the carriers and the leadership groups that are going to be ahead of the curve there, but viewing it more as an opportunity than a detriment.

Yeah, it's, you know, all the stuff I've been studying really pretty hard for the last two, maybe three years. It is scary out there, but it's exciting. Like Wayne said, it's the best opportunity you have to really make a major impact if you jump on it, because somebody's going to. Kevin.

Well, the one question you haven't asked me is a question everybody asks me all the time. And my clients are, when are you going to retire? And my wife asked me that question, and I, you know, I keep saying.

She'S looking for a good or a bad answer.

Hey, hey. Well, you know, I was down there with a month for a month almost with her, and we haven't killed each other yet, so I guess that's okay. But I have enough hobbies not worry about that. You know, I would like to work for a long time yet, and I don't know how many years that is because I'm not worried about financially. Okay. Just fun to work until I think you got, at some point, say, I don't bring value anymore. I cause more disruption. So it's probably time not to show up. And then I'm going to make sure they pay me for all the fun I want to do.

All right, give him a big round of applause. Thank you so much.

Hey, Brent Kelly here back at the Agent Leader podcast. Hopefully you enjoyed that interview. I'm sure you did. I sure did. And gave you some insight and values that you can take back to your agency right away. Also want to ask you a couple things. Number one, if this podcast is adding value to your life and your agency, please go to itunes or stitcher or wherever you listen and give me a rating. I would much appreciate that. And secondly, if you're an agency leader that's ready to take your game to the next level, you know, these. These member interviews that we are having and giving you, these are from agency owners who are open to coaching, are open to changing, are open to truly being their best version possible, and ultimately being what we call the top 2 percenters that are seeking freedom, financially freedom with relationships, freedom of their time. And if that sounds like something you want to learn more about, reach out to us at the Sitkins Group. You can go to sitkins.com and learn more about our private membership in the Sitkins Network. We'd love to talk with you and see if it's a fit for you. Wishing you all the best in your success.