Stories of Success - Interview with Mark Rollins

Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Agent Leader Podcast. This is Brent Kelly. I'm your host, also the vice president of the Sitkins Group, and delighted you're joining me on today's episode. And if you've been listening to the Agent Leader podcast at all at any prior episodes, it's typically me sharing some ideas and thoughts and things that'll help agency leaders out there be more profitable, more productive. And I'll continue to do that today, but it's not going to be me. I'm going to be, over the next several episodes, I'm going to be releasing, releasing interviews from our live event, the Profit Net event, our profit networking event in Cape Coral, Florida in April of 2019. And this is an opportunity that we have. We have a two day event, tons of learning and sharing. We bring in agency members that we work with, allow them to network at a really high level, share some new insights, and it's very powerful. And so what I wanted to do though was on day number two, we had, we had several agency members who work with our Sitkins Network directly share some of the things that they're learning, some of their successes, some of their failures. And they were interviewed by Roger Sitkins from the stage. And so the audio is pretty good on these. I'm not going to say it's great, but it's pretty good. And I want to share that with you. I got approval from the Sitkins Group to go ahead and release these interviews for the general public on my podcast because I know they're going to add value to you, your life and your agency and so be looking for those in the upcoming episodes as we move forward. And the first interview that I want to share with you comes from Mark Rollins. Mark Rollins is the owner of the Rollins Agency, I should say former owner. He sold his agency at the end of last year. But Mark is an amazing individual, a great agency leader and someone who I didn't personally work with or coach at Sitkins. It was before I started there, but have gotten to know Mark really, really well over the past year. In fact, we actually text each other every single day. Roger Sitk mentioned that we wanted to form an accountability team and Mark is one of the best implementers and he's highly accountable. And so I joined an accountability team with Mark Rollins, his wife, Roger Sitkins and myself. And so every morning we check in on things that we're working on and to hold each other accountable to move forward. And at Profit Net, I was able to finally meet Mark in person and share A lot of time with Mark and get to ask him questions and learn and even better in person. Just a genuine individual, very successful in the agency world. So what you're going to hear, and this is about a 40 minute interview, is really, really powerful. Mark's going to share his story, kind of how he got in the agency. It's very humorous. I'm sure many of you can relate to that. Then he really gets into some things that he specifically did to gain momentum and get great results. You're going to hear Mark's success story. When he started working with Roger and the Sitkins team, he was doing pretty well. But after he's working with our team and how he was such a great implementer, he's just really good at implementing, Was able to double his agency s reduces clients in half. Just much more productive in revenue per employee. And he's going to share all that and he's also going to share a little about what he's working on now. And so if you're an insurance executive, really any executive, and you're starting to think about the next stage of your life, there's some things on here that Mark's going to share that are going to be very, very impactful. So enjoy, lean in, or if you're on a car ride, sit back and enjoy because Roger is going to interview Mark and he shares some amazing pearls of wisdom. So here you go.

So with that, Mark, let's just get into some of the things that we can talk about here and share. I will tell you, you will learn a ton from this guy. So, Mark, give us just an overview of your career, how you started and what's going on.

Sure. Good morning. My career started in 1980. It was May of 1980. It was May of 1980 and I just graduated from college with a major in insurance and the plan was to get into my family insurance agency.

Thank you.

But my dad and I both said, you know, he's a smaller agency, he has no training program. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with you, so why don't you try to find a job somewhere else? Well, the short story is that didn't work out. So September of that year I showed up for work and I was good. I had my brand new suit on, a new tie, shiny shoes. I had my briefcase that my mom bought for me for graduating from college. And it was a Brooks Brothers attache case. It was about this wide, this deep, this tall. Leather on the outside, leather on the inside. It had two tabs in the front, that locked. So when I put it on my lap or I was on appointment, I would just go click, click. And this baby would open up. And in there, I had my pens, I had my pads, yellow legal pad. I had my calculator. I was ready. I was ready for work. So I walked in here with my briefcase, and I got my little desk, and I sat down. And then my dad called me in and said, son, it's time that we have our orientation. I said, what the hell is this going to be like? Sit in his office, we're comfortable. We're having a nice cup of coffee. And he says, son, let me tell you a little bit about the business. Now, it's a good business. You know, I'm the third generation, you're the fourth, and it's done well for our family, as you know, and it can be good for you. But you need to know a couple things, you know, first of all, you got to work hard, really hard, probably for maybe 15 or 20 years. And if you do that and you treat your customers right and you take care of them and they stay on, something magical happens. The phone rings. No. Someone calls you for insurance, something magical happens. I said, gee, dad, what's that? Well, you get to sit back and relax and live off your renewal commission. Wow, this is cool. Let's get started. 15 or 20 years and I'm out. Oh, this is going to be great. Well, it wasn't exactly like that. As you know, you're in the business. But the next thing he taught me, or he did with maces. Now, son, we have to go down to the post office to get the mail, because that's how everything starts in this agency. So we traced down to the post office. He gave me my own post office key. And we had the big drawer that opened up. It was this deep. And we pulled this stuff out. It took three trips to the desk and put the big envelopes here, he said, and the medium size here, and the little ones here. These are typically checks. You want to keep those separate. And then he had this great little canvas bag, and we put all the mail in there. We traipsed back to the office, and now it's time to open the mail. So, letter opener. Still have that letter opener, by the way? Open the mail. She told me how to put it in piles. And, you know, I joke about it now. And you hear stories of people that have started in the mailroom at the company and become really rich and famous. Well, I started in the mailroom at the Company. I haven't gotten rich and famous, but I did learn so much about the business opening the mail for three months. So that was pretty good. So then it was time to sell. Now we were a $1.5 million revenue agency. My dad had three partners and six legit secretaries. They had the poofed up hair, they all sat at their desk upright. They had an IBM Selectric 82G typewriter. A couple of them had the ones you still had the lever and you hit tick, tick, tick, tick all day long. They all smoked, so they had an X ray at their desk. And as you look down the row of secretaries, you could see these plumes of smoke going up all day long. We had no computers, we had no cell phones, we had nothing that we have today. No electronics. We had no rating system. But we had this six foot wide file cabinet. This thing was awesome. And my dad had built out of wood himself this rack that held six feet of rating manuals. And you'd watch people, they get a prospect and they want to rate automobile policies. They get their pad and they walk to the left side of this rating thing and they start writing stuff down and they flip and then they flip and they go a little further and they flip a little more and they flip a little more and they flip a little more. And at the end they get the premium. They run back in their office, they call the prospect. We can rate your 1975 Chevy for $622 a year. Good. Done. There was always mistakes, right? I remember when I said to my dad, we should get computers in here. Apple came out with it. No, computers make mistakes. Alright, well the next thing he said was, I need you to start to learn how to sell. So he asked me to call every single personal lines client in the agency to sell them a brand new coverage called replacement cost coverage on contents. It didn't exist up until now. You keep shaking your head, you must be old like me. You don't look at it.

So how many of you are having any flashbacks?

Okay, so I started to call.

By the way, the younger people are saying, damn, I'm glad I was born when I was.

You guys have it so good, believe me. So I started calling and I remember I would call Mrs. Smith. Hello, Mrs. Smith, this is Mark Rollins from the Rollins Insurance Agency and I want to talk to you a little bit about changing your insurance. I want to tell you a story. If you had a fire tonight in your house and your couch was destroyed, the insurance company would give you enough money for a used Couch, you probably wouldn't like that, would you? But with this new endorsement, replacement cost coverage, they'll give you enough money for a brand new couch. Even if that couch you have now is 10 years old. And the good news is this. It's only going to cost $23 more a year. You know, the next person that speaks loses a sale. So I'm waiting. Waiting here. What? So. Jesus. So I'd handle a couple of objections, but then I sold it and I did that for three months. And at the end of three months it was great. Good. I said, dad, there's got to be more to business than this. Well, okay, son, I think what we'll do now is we'll send you to commercial unions commercial line school in Boston. It's four weeks and they'll teach you everything you need to know about commercial insurance. Great. Let's try that. So I did that and then I came back and things were different. But I did get back. I had a desk, I had an office, I had a telephone. He gave me the Yellow Pages and a Hagstrom atlas, which is a map. Some of you young people don't even know what that is. And he said, go ahead, start calling. So I cold called out of the Yellow Pages, I cold called in strip malls. And I don't know if any of you have ever done that or even can imagine doing it, but I'd get to a strip Mall at 10 o' clock in the morning and I start at the left store and just work my way all the way around knocking on the door, is the owner in? Who wants to know? Well, I do. And I had my suit, though. I had the dress in my suit and that Brooks Brothers bag. Now, if I was lucky enough to get someone's policies, this Brooks Brothers bag, honestly, they should bring it back because I could fit in it two stacks this high of insurance policies, eight and a half by 11. So I could bring them back to photocopy them, right. And bring them back to the client that afternoon. I was good at that. Well, for the next 15 years, I got pretty good at being good. Generalist? No. I was an expert. I was an expert with printers. I was an expert with law firms. I was an expert with advertising agencies. I was an expert with contractors, whatever the prospect was, I was an expert. And we had, I think it was called PS4 or some other tools where they would tell you all the risks these clients had and everything that they needed, and I was just perfect. And it was okay. It was round about that time my dad decided he was going to leave the agency and retire. So my brother Chuck and I, we were a 3 million dollar agency at that point. And we story about Roger meeting him. We said to Chuck, why don't we try this out? So we did. So for 15 years, we sat in your seat twice a year plus monthly calls for 15 years. And what we did was like this morning you heard that checklist of 12, and I will tell you, all of my clients had those 12 things in place. Every single one. It's not that hard, but we did it. We came to the meeting, we took notes, we went back and we implemented. We came back, we implemented more and more and more and more. And it was amazing what happened. At the same time, I decided I wanted to create a niche market. So I did. So I created a non profit niche. I'm going to talk about more about that in a minute. But between the nonprofit niche and everything we learned here, my brother and I were able to totally transform our company. We went from 3 million in revenue to 6. We went from 6,000 clients down to 3. We went from 55 employees to 25. We went from 3 offices to 1 office. And here's the big, the big number. Our margin when we started with Roger was 10% on 3 million. When we were finished five years ago, we were 6 million at 40%. And that's 40, 40. That's when we sold our agency. And here I am today.

One of the things that Mark, by the way, I also had a bunch of flashbacks working with my parents when we were going through that. And I had that briefcase too. I think I still have it. I'm not sure when Mark joined us. As you can probably tell, he's an implementer. If he wrote it down, he was going to do it. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. And in the first six months, he implemented so many massive changes that at one of our client meetings, one of our network meetings, it was actually Bonita Springs here in Florida, southwest Florida. Mark did a program called Implementation, the Rapid Implementation of the Rollins Way, or Rollins Rapid Implementation. And he said something that. Would you like to share it?

Go ahead. Okay, you do it.

So he started off with the Rollins Agency. Okay. And then he did this program. And I said, well, Mark, how did you get people to implement so quickly? And he said, I've got a great management line. You got to stop doing that shit. That's what he said. He was on stage and he went, I just told him they got to stop doing that shit. That was before we realized it was high intensity training. But that's not his best picture. But we always have to give him a hard time on this one.

He texts that to me all the time.

Yeah, that's right. So then you went with Brown and Brown when you got into your niche. The nonprofit Mark has, as you can tell from my opening comments, ready. He has one of the biggest, deepest hearts for nonprofits and helping people. He's received several awards within Westchester county, which is huge, as you know, outside the city, for helping other people. And what was it about nonprofit guard that you had such a passion for and why did it work so well?

I think that it can work for anyone. So when you're thinking about creating a niche, you've got to find an industry that you're passionate about or you understand and it relates to your core values and aligns with your strengths. I had spent my entire career, and I still do, serving on nonprofit boards. So it was at. At the beginning of my time with Sitkins, after being, you know, 20 year specialist in everything, I really wanted to be a specialist in one industry. I had two nonprofit clients, and those were the ones that I enjoyed being with the most. I liked the people. I liked that they had a cause. I like that if I help them become a better organization, it would be good for their clients and their organization. So it worked well for me. So if you're passionate about construction or home building or baking or whatever it might be law, you're sort of a quasi lawyer. You have to pick that industry. And I poured myself 100% into it. I don't know if I was going to get into it later, but I can do it now. It became so easy for me in this business. I knew all the lawyers that specialize in nonprofits. I knew all the accounting firms. I knew all the service providers. I knew all the consultants. I got myself on panels. And if you want to get on panels, the place to be on a panel is not to be one of the four or five people spewing their smartness. It's to be the facilitator. It's to be the person there at the podium asking the question. Because then you get to follow up and look brilliant. Mary just said that. And I think that's good. And this is why. And you get to do things like that. You organize the questions. All of a sudden you're just out and about in whatever industry you're in, and people look at you and look towards you for help. And if you take the approach that everything that you do all day Long every day in your whole life. But if everything you're doing is helping others, you'll get spades back.

Spades, yeah. And Mark, again, when I was having flashbacks, you were thinking of the two of us standing in front of the people in Nicaragua. One of our trips, one that Elizabeth was on with us. And the people threw a celebration when we had built two homes, cinder block, stucco homes. You dig the foundation by hand and mix the cement on the ground. And we're standing there, and they've got. The kids are dressed in beautiful. We don't know how they got that clean uniforms up there dancing and everything. Mark leans over to me. Mary, this must be your favorite word, but he leans over and said all this shit just because we built a house. He couldn't believe it. But it was really more to stop our tears because we're sitting there watching these people celebrate. We're going. All we did was give them a house. You know, 15 by 17, stucco house and outhouse sometimes. Okay. And it was just unbelievable. So when you have a passion for something, you can turn it into a pretty darn successful business. Mark, you took what you were doing again. He implemented at the highest level. And that's what I have to ask all of you and challenge all of you to do. It's not just writing this stuff down here. It's going back and going from 3 million to 6 million. From 6,000 clients to 3,000 clients. From how many employees? 52.

55 to 25.

55. By the way, that dramatically increases your revenue per employee. Getting rid of people, it's a pretty good number.

And we didn't fire people. It's just as it changed, they just went away. And you don't just go in every day and fire two more people to make your numbers look better. So it was over a 15 year period.

But now you retired, you had a nice liquidity event, and you. And then Jody retired from Chubb. They have a very interesting mixed family, by the way. Mark has three boys, Jody has three girls. It's the Brady Bunch, but it's really the Rollins bunch. And they're really cool kids. I know. I've met all of them. And you have this passion saying, okay, I've been spending an average of 40 hours a week working. And now you have a new program that you've been developing that Brent and I have been able to have a semi front row seat watching. Talk about that. Because everybody in this room, as I said yesterday, everybody in this room will eventually leave, right? Everybody's gonna leave. Go ahead.

So just going back seven years, we were heavy into Stickins. I told you the numbers. My brother and I were doing great. We were making good money. Our people were happy. We had amazing culture. And I found myself, or we found ourselves. I'll describe it now is I was stuck at the top. I was at the top of my life. Everything was going great. I had a great company. I had great employees. Everything was really, really wonderful. And I didn't know what to do next. I wasn't going to go from 6 to 12. Chuck and I tried that. So we decided to sell the agency because I thought that would be a way for me to get to change things up a little bit. Bit, and sooner or later, you're going to exit. So it took us two years, and we sold to Brown O. Brown. Now, that process itself, selling your agency, I could spend all day talking about it. It's awful and it's wonderful, but it's something you want to prepare for and do it the right way. So we did that. So we had this event, and then I took over as the single leader in the company and we sold it. And for three, three years, I led the office. And we went from 6 million in revenue to 18 million in revenue, 25 people to 80 people. You talk about culture change and trying to bring people in and create a culture. These were mostly acquisitions. Brown and Brown Gallagher, the rest of them, they have money and they want to buy companies. So I started reaching out to all of my colleagues in the area, and we started buying agencies. And then I turned 60 two years ago, and I said, I can't do this anymore. I just can't. I want to find a way out. So I convinced one of my younger partners when Chuck and I were building the business to take over my job, he took it. I wanted to go back into sales and just kind of have fun with my clients. And I did that. And after two months, I was bored. Today, death. No more leadership team meetings. I'm a leadership guy. I like action. I had nothing. So my wife and I decided we were going to leave. I was going to retire. She wasn't sure if she was going to retire or not. But I gave a year and a half notice to retire. And we started thinking about, what are we going to do now? My dad, he failed miserably at retirement. He retired at 65, and 15 years later, he was dead. It sounds crude, but he got bored, lonely. He lost his community of friends. He didn't have a purpose. He didn't know what to do with his newfound time. So basically he drank himself to death. Very sad story. I didn't want that for me. I didn't want it for anybody. So my wife and I googling and researching and trying to figure out what's out there. The only thing we could find was financial planning for retirement. And there's a lot of it. And if you don't have a financial planning, you need one. You should definitely get one. But we were faced with what should we do. So me being a serial entrepreneur on one hand, and on the other hand, I love to help people. We started a new company in January and we have developed a company that's going to coach, help, and inspire post retirement executives and entrepreneurs learn how to move into this time in their life and live it with purpose, passion, and clarity.

I'm just going wild. You know, I've heard this story 27 other times, but it really touches me. You can tell he has a passion for it. He's going to help people tremendously. Mark, one of the things that you've done in this and you're like so many, if not all the people in the room here, you know, we're preaching to the choir. It's about getting better. And so Mark and I, as we said, we've done the accountability team. We've been going through programs together. Some we've gone on our own, but come back and you can tell Mark's committed to being the best he can possibly be. He's committed to being the best version. And someday I hope you get a chance to meet Jody, because she's the same way. She's an amazing lady. And as Mark was developing it, all of a sudden he said, well, I'm going to find some other entrepreneurs. I'm going to find some people I could work with. And you can tell he's very passionate again about what he does, but you've got to be able to get, get on your feet and tell the story. So you just returned from some actually has the same speaking coach and voice coach that Bradley Cooper has. So tell that story.

During my entire career, I had a tremendous number of mentors and I always gravitated towards surrounding myself with people who were smarter than me. So that's one of the reasons why I joined Sitkins100. Because someone said last night about God protects. Who said that? Is he here? What was, what did you say about insurance brokers?

This was fun.

This business is proof that God takes care of idiots.

Yeah. This business is proof that God takes care of idiots.

So what's the other one about not, not everybody's useless. What was the one you said? Not everybody useless.

They can always serve as a bad example.

Yeah, but you're here this morning and you've been here for a couple of days. You took the time away from your family and your company and you spent some money and you stayed in the hotel and you had nice meals, a nice conversation. You're all making nice notes. What are you going to do with the notes? Because if you don't take them back and change, it's worthless. But I saw value in that. I saw value in having mentors. I saw value in, in me mentoring people. The best way to learn everything that you learned today is to teach somebody. When you get back, have an office meeting and teach them what you taught. Get on the airplane and take your five pages of notes and break it down into one page and teach them. So I've always had.

I want to just jump on that for a minute. Our definition of mastery in anything we teach you, definition of master, is that you can go back and teach it to others. So if you didn't write it down, please write that down. Because as the leaders, if you're not mastering this, you know, like little things like if you can't do the 30 second commercial, don't expect them to do it. If you can't do a great job of your executive briefing, don't expect them to do it. You've got to master the stuff, take it back to teach others because they're not here.

So mastery groups. I was in sitkins for 15 years. Nes expensive. It's less money than Xywave if you buy both packages. And Zywave in my mind, we had it for a long time, didn't use it. What's the hand? We're over five minutes. Five minutes we can extend. I joined a mastermind course. Brendan Burchard is someone who I follow, who teaches you how to take how to build a business like my wife and I are building to put coffee courses online to teach one to many. So I joined his mastermind and I'm surrounding myself with Rachel Hollis. Some of the biggest influencers in the world are part of this mastermind. When you're sitting next to Rachel Hollis at a dinner and if you don't know who she is, check her out. But so many. Dean Graziosi, it's amazing. And then I really started to do my videos because I'm doing a lot of video training and I want to speak, I want to speak in front of a thousand People, if I can, I want to.

I'll jump in.

I want to help as many people as I can not end up like my dad or other people that just don't know what to do. You know, for 21 years, you, you grow up and you have high school and college and you're nurtured, you're taken care of. And then for, for me, for 38 years, I learned so much and I built a nice nest egg and I have experiences and wisdom and everything else. And I'm 62 years old. Next week I know I'm going to live to 100. So I got 21 years, 30, 80. If I live to 100, that's 38 more years to go. What on earth would I do? What are you going to do? You know, you have to start planning now for retirement. We need to change this concept of retirement that it's, take it easy, relax, play golf every day, that's fine for a while, but it's 38 years now. If you're like me, you plan every day, every week, every month, every year, you've got to plan playing out 38 years. You got at least the first 20. How about that? The last 18, you can coast and do nothing. So it's just the masterminds are great. I want to speak. So I heard about Roger Love and you can Google him. And I went online and I got caught up in his courses. So I bought his courses and I went to his session a couple weeks ago and then I joined his mastermind. And these are not inexpensive. These are very expensive. But now he's, if you look and see who he's coached over the years, some of the most famous singers in the world. And he's now, as he's getting older, changing his business model to try to help people like myself that have a cause bigger than me to make me better so the message gets out into the world. So he is helping influencers change the world. And he's my coach. I have his email, I have a cell phone. It's amazing now.

And you went out there and spent how many days with him?

Three days.

Three days. Went to California just for this training. I do tell him the Bradley Cooper connection.

So he, the movie studio or whoever hired Roger Love to train Bradley Cooper had his thing because he didn't know how to sing for the movie Stars Born. And if you've all seen it, he did a pretty good job. So the only time Bradley Cooper had was 7:30 to 9 every morning. So Roger said, okay, I'll fit you in 7:30-9. Five days a week for six months, he went to Roger Lowe's office in Hollywood and learned how to sing. And then he did the movie, and then he had the opportunity to sing at the Academy Awards. So Roger called him. Bradley called up Roger and said, listen, I got to do this thing with Lady Gaga and I want to tune things up. He said, you don't need to tune things up. You got this nailed. No, I want to do it two weeks, every day for five days, 7:30 to 9, he trained again with Roger. And then the next week, he rented a studio, a full studio with the full band. And he and Lady Gaga practiced that one song for five days, four hours a day. You talk about practice, getting ready for a presentation. I mean, that's the way. That's the way you do it. I mean, I practiced everything. We did video in our office. It just makes it easier.

And yet some of us will allow a producer to say, I'm too busy to go out and practice. You know, I mean, I don't know. I saw a lot of hats just going, holy smokes in this Bradley Cooper. And then Lady Gaga, they practice. They're not inherently great at this. Okay, Mark, let's switch back to business for a bit, okay? And please, you know what Mark said about planning to retire. I absolutely flunked semi retirement. That's why we're here. Okay? I have flunks in my retirement, and I have a passion like Mark does, that I want to keep helping people as long as I can keep helping people. We're going to keep doing this. But the whole thing is, you know, again, everybody's going to leave. Let's start planning for it now, start following markhamrollins.com and it's retirement reinvented. Is that correct?

Transformed.

Transformed. Retirement transformed. All right, so now you've got all this knowledge. If we could do a time clock and go back and you were going to.

If I were to start Today, start.

Over 10 things you'd do differently, how.

Much time do we have?

You've got time to do it, don't worry.

So I came up with a list of 10. I've narrowed it down to five. There's probably 50. But the first thing I would do if I was starting a business today and I was going to be a producer, I'd create a niche. And that doesn't mean three niches or one niche. You use part time, 100%. Devote yourself to a niche. You're still doing the same thing. You're selling insurance but you're doing it to one industry. You become well known, it becomes easier. And I will tell you, you might find this hard to believe, but for the last 15 years, when I was in this niche and I took a book of business from zero, well, not zero, maybe a hundred thousand of revenue to a million five in 15 years in the nonprofit niche, 100% BOR. I didn't quote one account ever, ever. So I had this process. So one is a niche, two is a process. I had a sales process that it was sport for me. You know, everything that I learned here and everywhere else, I just went through my day. Every day like this. I just did the same thing. I just did the same thing. I marketed, I met with people, I networked. I came to a sick kids meeting, Whoop. I went up a little bit. So now I'm up here. And I came back, I went up a little bit, I did another mastermind. I got better. But it was easy. It was sport. It was when I'm going along like this and an opportunity dropped in my lap, I got excited. I had my seven page executive producer briefing. I got out in front of the prospect, 45 minutes, that's the time I booked. At the end of 45 minutes, I was out. And I would do that with a prospect 10 times because it was fun. 15 minutes. Questions. Tell me about your business. Now, I had poured myself into the industry, so I knew everything about how their business worked. So I was asking peer to peer questions of the president, CEO, executive director, never talk about insurance. Then we got a little bit into insurance. Tell me a little bit about how you handle risk. How do you transfer it? You know, I was like, well, I have a broker. Oh, tell me a little bit about that. You know, when was the last time you put it out to bid? Oh, we do it every year. Okay. Have you ever switched? No, no, no, no, no. I get that quote and give it to my current broker. Oh, good, good. That's good. So then I ask more questions. But then I would start to describe the prospect, what it would be like if they did business with me and with my company. And it was magical. I just kept talking and they're like, oh, my God, really? You do all that? That's what I'm going to get from this. That's what he's thinking in his or her head. And there were some times at the end of 45 minutes, I could see they were so rattled they had to do business with us. But their golf buddy, what they. Sometimes they'd say, If I came to you, what am I going to do with my golf buddy? I thought, I don't know, let's take everyone slow down and take it easy. But that's how I got bors. You just build this vision of an experience. People want experiences, right? That's what everyone wants in life, an experience. You don't want to just eat food. You want to have an experience. This meeting is an experience. So that's really important. I think the. I don't again. I know I'm way over my time.

No, no, you're fine.

But I want to hear it. I think that the other thing that I've done, and it's really important, you have to take care of yourself. You have to take care of your body and your mind and your heart. And your. And your soul. You know, the stronger you are and the better you are. You're good for your partner at home, you're good for your kids, you're good for the business. You're good for the world. I started five years ago, an amazing routine. And it wasn't easy, but now it's habit. First thing is, and when I'm done, I'll give you the names of five books that I think are important. I get up at 5am every day, alarm clock. And most times I'm up at 4, 30, 4, 40. Weekends I'll sleep till 6, but five days a week I'm up at 5am the first thing I do is I exercise for 15 to 30 minutes. And I used to belong to the gym, the fancy gym, $300 a month. I had to train her two days a week for 100 bucks. I had $500 of Lululemon outfits. I walked into that gym and I was like, hey, this is it. This is good. I see prospects, I'd see clients. It was a country club. I'd get there at 8 or 7. I now get up. I quit the gym in January and I go to the basement and I work out and I use an app on my phone called Freeletics. F R E E L E T I C S It's body weight. I have no tools, no gadgets, nothing. I have a mat. And I do that for. I just follow what it tells me to do. And it's awful. It was awful at first. Burpees, push ups, squats, jumps, jumping jacks, the stuff you did in the third grade. But I tell you to do it at 60 is tough, so I do that. The next thing I do is 10 minutes of meditation. I started that four years ago. And if you had asked me four years and a day ago, would you ever meditate? Absolutely not.

I've got to jump in here. In our last Nicaragua trip together, Mark, we stay in a schoolyard. Some buildings that Mark's. One of Mark's first groups built, they paid for a big community center. And I went out to the outhouse in the morning. You know, we sleep in bunks in the. In the classrooms. And here's Mark sitting up on an old broken chair up in this just trash area, right? And he's sitting there, and he's not moving. I thought, damn, he had a stroke. He died. I didn't know what was going on, and I didn't say anything. And all of a sudden I saw him come out of there. And then next day, same thing. He's out there. So finally I asked him about it, and he said, oh, I meditate. I use Headspace. And I started doing it. I'll tell you, if you don't meditate every day, you're going to start your day in hysterical activity. If you want to be really focused and ready to play, please do that. It's headspace.com great app.

And I have calm as well. Those are the two popular ones, and I use them both. They're interchangeable. So I do that for 10 minutes. Then I journal for 10 minutes. I have my day planner. Right now I'm using Panda Planner. There's so many of them out there. Brent, you use Best Self. Best Self. There's a ton of them. But I plan my day, and in there, it asks me to write three gratitudes. So I do that every morning. The first one, every morning for the last three years, I write my wife's name. And something about her. Now, you talk about deepening a relationship with a person. You write something positive about someone every day for three years. That relationship is bulletproof, and it's deep. So I do that. So I write three of those. I write one affirmation about myself, and then I plan my day. There's things I have to do, but if you don't plan it, it doesn't happen. So that's 10 minutes. And then I do some learning podcast, something like that. And I get my other journal out, and I just write about my day, about this speech, about my weekend, something I'm struggling with. That's one hour every morning. I've been doing that. And that's built over four years now. If you were to take a piece of paper and draw a line across the middle and on the top Write good day. And on the bottom, you write bad day. If I ever skip this routine, bad day, and I can't get out, it's bizarre. People say, well, why do you do. If I don't do it, I'm going to have a bad day. So if I don't do it, I know today's going to suck. If I do it, I'm going to have a good day, and then it's up to me to make it a great day. But I have a good day. I'm bulletproof. Nothing's gonna get me below that line. If I do this one hour routine.

In the morning, Brett, would you agree with that?

I'm just learning. It's an ongoing challenge and growth. But it's those small steps.

There's a trick that I figured out. When I get up in the morning, the first. First thing I want to do, I don't know about you, I want a cup of coffee, right? Who wants a cup of coffee first thing in the morning? Okay, so here's what I did, because I wasn't doing these things. No coffee till I meditate. That was the first hack that I did. Ten minutes of meditation, then I get the coffee, then the exercise. I was still doing the nonsense at the gym. I'd meditate and have coffee and read the papers. So now I don't get my coffee till after I meditate and exercise. And then I'm writing and thinking. So there's tricks to do it. But now it's so natural for me. It just happens. I love it.

What else would you do different in the career? Give us one more.

One more. Create a niche. Become a master of your craft. You're doing that here. Have a unique sales process. Move towards bor. Selling only brand and market yourself. I mean, I printed my own trifold brochures 38 years ago. You don't need to. You have LinkedIn, you have Facebook. You've got video. There's so much you can do. I had a video blog 15 years ago, before there were video blogs. That's another way to draw people in. Invest in yourself. Become an amazing leader. Join nonprofit blog boards. If you are not on a nonprofit board now, you need to go back and get on one. It's where I grew more than anywhere else. Serving on nonprofit boards and leading, becoming the chair of a nonprofit board. You're leading a business that could be changing people's lives. That's serious stuff. So you learn how to lead, read a lot of books, get better at what you want to do, mentor and teach as many people as you can and start planning for retirement now.

Great, Mark. We went well over our timeframe.

I'm sorry.

No, no. Does everybody are glad we did? Yes or no? Absolutely. Please give Mark Rollins, my dear friend, an unbelievable round of applause.

Hey, Brent Kelly here back at the AgentLeader podcast. Hopefully you enjoyed that interview. I'm sure you did. I sure did. And it 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 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.