The 4 Questions That Unlock Your Agency’s Full Potential

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Welcome back to another episode of the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. I am your host, also vice president of the Sitkins Group. Thanks so much for joining me today. Today's episode I'm going to transition into a recent webinar that I just delivered based on this question. And it was based on what are the four questions that you need to be asking yourself to unlock your agency's full potential? You know, as I'll share on this webinar, which is the audio version, is that there are question that we need to ask ourselves, and not just ask, but to answer and to think about to really unlock our agency's full potential. And I think a lot of agencies get stuck on what do I do and how do I do it? And I'm going to share with you. Those are really important questions and we're going to address that, but we need to first talk about the whys and the who. And so you're going to hear some specific questions on this interview. We did this live in front of the video camera, and although we were unable to scrape the video back out, we were able to capture the audio. So I want to share it in today's podcast. I know you're going to find it valuable.

And welcome to the four questions that will unlock your agency's full potential. You can already see the template of the questions behind me. We're going to dive deeper into those questions. So there's more than just those, those four words. We're going to dive a little bit deeper in those. But I first want to just talk about the word potential, because the title of this webinar is the four questions that will unlock your agency's full potential. I think potential is a very interesting word because on one hand we look at potential and we can think of hope, opportunity, growth, possibilities, right? What may be. And that's exciting. But on the flip side, potential can also be negative, or at least it could be possibly negative when we think of it as what could have been, what should have been. Maybe you've heard the word or even said it to yourself here he or she had great potential, but maybe unfulfilled potential or wasted potential, which is some of the worst things you can say, right, that we had this ability. So today, as I talk about these four important questions that will unlock your agency's full potential, I want you to think about it in terms of you and your agency. Are you where you want to be? And if not why, how are you going to get there? I'm going to reference this entire conversation around an experience that we had just a few weeks ago and I saw that Mick Fowler was on the line. Nick was one of the attendees there. But we had our recently we had our profit networking event. This was a private event. We have our many of our Sickens network members that attend and we had a great experience. I had a great time and it was just an opportunity for smart people to be in the same room and share some ideas and information. And at the end of this webinar, I'm going to talk a lot today about our experience with our members in the network. And if the stuff that I'm saying makes sense to you, resonates with you, you want to learn more about being a private client with Sipkins, I'll share that opportunity at the end with you as well. But we had a really good time in this event. It was two days learning, sharing ideas, and I firmly believe, hopefully you do as well, that I never want to be the smartest person in the room. I just want to be in a room full of smart people. That's exactly what it was. We had great speakers, we had roundtables, we had lunch or dinner ideas that we shared. I will tell you this too. Of all the things that I experienced in those two days at this event, my favorite part personally was day two, which was member interviews. And I want to highlight some of those member interviews with you today. But we brought up some of our most successful agency leaders and had them share what was working in their agency, some things that they were doing particularly well to generate results. A quick aside to that is that if you have not registered, registered, subscribed or listened to my Agent Leader podcast, do so. It's the Agent Leader Podcast because the next few weeks and months I'm going to be releasing excerpts of the this event and these member interviews for you to listen to because it's really, really powerful information. But I love surrounding myself with successful people. Hopefully you do as well and just learning from them, asking them questions. And I always like to learn why you do what you do. You know, who do you surround yourself with or how do you impact the people on your team? And you know, how do you do these things and what do you actually do day in and day out? What are your habits? And so these are important questions to ask. And as I was thinking back on these two days and I was on the airplane looking at my notes, reflecting on what I had learned personally from everyone that I was surrounded with, it struck me that I kind of had a mini EPIPHANY that the reality was that most agency leaders are always looking for answers. Right? And I think maybe the reason why you're on this webinar, hopefully you get an answer. But the most successful agency leaders understand that the best answers come from asking themselves great questions. It's about asking the great questions. And so that's what I want to share with you today, are those questions that will ultimately unlock your potential. I want you to think today about these four questions in relation to your, your agency. What does it mean to your agency when we go through these now? All the questions I'm going to share with you today have significance and impact, right? If you take the time to answer them. Because most agencies, and I'm sure you as well, go, I've heard that question before. But have you really taken the time to reflect and think and answer in terms of your agency? Because let's face it, if you're like me, you're busy, a lot of stuff going on. Take some time to think about this doesn't happen enough. So again, if you got your paper in front of you, we'll take some notes. I want you to spend some time, get away from the email, get away from the phone, get away from the window if it's a beautiful day, I know it's springtime out there, but just think about some of these questions in relationship to your agency. Now, not only are all these questions important and impactful, but I think it's the order in which we ask the questions that is equally important, right? That is a really important thing to think about. How are we actually asking the question? See, most people start any endeavor, any mission, any type of goal they want to get by asking typically one or two questions, right? They ask, well, how am I going to do this and what do I need to do? Or what do I need to do and how am I going to do this? And those are important questions. We're going to get to those questions today. But great agency leaders, great agency producers, great anything, understand, the first two questions that really need to be asked to be successful are not how and not what, but their why and who. Right? So let's go ahead and get started in these four questions. And before we dive into this very first question, I want to ask you a question. I want you to think, and I'd love for you to respond on the question box and some of you have already responded from you can hear me and where you're from, I'd love for you to type in the question box the answer to this what do you really want? What do you really want? Now, we can make this in terms of the agency. There's probably a lot of things you want in life, and you probably want more than one thing. But just think of what do you really want in terms of your agency? And you can write a word or two or a phrase, but what do you really want? And I'm going to peek up here and take a look at what you really want. I think it's important to define what it is. And by the way, I'm not going to call anybody out. I'm not going to ask you any deeper questions on this. So don't be nervous. I just want you to get thinking and I want to be able to interact with you. On today's call, I've got one answer back. And it said, security. Looking for security. I love that. What else? And again, I'm going to just give you guys 30 seconds. Type in the question box. What do you really want? Whatever you want is okay, by the way. There isn't a bad one. You can want more money, you can want more relationships, you can want whatever it is you want, but what do you really, really want? All right, so we've got security, success, sustainability. I can't read the second part. It says, great. Something. Sorry, Jesse. I don't want to mess something up. Success, Financial freedom. Pat says, financial freedom. That's awesome. More sales and clients. Love that one. Joan. I want to find fulfillment. Great answer. Right? I want to find fulfillment. Louise said, consistent growth. I love that. Mick, I'm going to clip in and see if I want to have my best version of my agency. Yeah, I mean, Mick, you've attended our sessions. We're all about that. Walter said, I want time to manage. That's a great want. Consistent profitability. Love that one. Financial peace and freedom. Brandon, you're ahead of me. We're going to talk about that at the end of this session. Successful producers in our agency. Yeah, Leslie. Absolutely successful producers. So couple things here. This is interesting, you guys all. We didn't rehearse this. You guys are just telling me what you want. Couple of things that I noticed. Number one, I think there might have been some similarities, but every one of you typed in something different. Isn't that interesting? Sometimes we say, well, this is what you want. I'm going to tell you what you want. I don't know what you want. Only you know what you want. Right? And so there's no cookie cutter approach to this. Why it's important that you ask your Questions. And so many times I see this where people are trying to live someone else's dream. Well, this is what my dad told me I should do. This is what this person told me I should do. What do you really want? Now, that's number one. Number two, is this why? Now, this is the important question. We're getting to the meat of this, right? Our first question, why do you really want that? Now, I want you just to think about that for a second and let that marinate whatever you wrote. Financial peace, successful producers, time to make. What do you really want? And here's why I'm going to ask. Question About a year or so ago, actually a year and a half ago, hopefully you can all see this. I read a lot of books. I love reading books and learning, especially about productivity and habits. There's been a lot of books written on habits. This was a new one that I read, I picked up from Dean Graziosi called Millionaire Success Habits. And there are a lot of really good things in this book that I picked up. But what stood out to me was one of the first chapters. And Dean Graziosi talked about something that he had started to implement in his life that he learned from a mentor, which was called Seven Levels Deep. Seven Levels Deep. So the first question I want you to think about is the why question, right? Why do you want to blank whatever you put on that question box or if you wrote down a piece of paper, why do you really want it? And I want to give you a live example of how this works, because it was really powerful. So I read this book. I started to apply some of these things in my own life. And. And we had a CEO FIT camp. This is our leadership camp for our private client members about a year ago. And in the client camp, I thought, okay, what is something I could do that would be different? I like to take risks. That is why I am doing this live right now. We haven't done this before on front of the camera, but I thought, you know what would be fun to do would be to be able to do the Seven Levels Deep exercise with one of our members. And I wasn't sure if anybody was going to participate because we had it in the workbook. But I went ahead and did it. And we had about 15 CEOs or agency leaders in the room. And I explained this exercise called Seven Levels Deep from this book. And I said, who wants to play along? Does anybody want to actually do this in front of the group? And one of our great agency leaders, his name is Kevin Charleston. Terrific guy, fantastic agency, getting great results. Stood up and said, try me. Now, if you don't know Kevin, and you probably don't, Kevin's a big guy. He's a bull rider. He's about 6, 2, 6, 3, I don't know, somewhere in there. And he's a big dude. He wears a cowboy hat, super sharp, super successful. He said, try me. And I said, kevin, why did you join the Sitkins Network? Why did you. Why are you with it? Why are you here? And his first answer was in regards to, well, I wanted to execute some of these strategies that I know that work. I said, great. We want to execute strategies that work. I said, why is that important to you? And he said, well, it'll help our agency grow effectively. We'll have greater profitability. And I said, fantastic. Why is that important to you? And they said, well, it's important to me because then we can provide greater opportunities to our clients and our colleagues, our team members. Now, I continue to ask why, as the name implies, seven levels deep, seven times we got to the seventh level. And this is typically where the magic happens. And talks about it in this book, and I've done it myself with people many times. It was true about the seventh level. We got to the seventh level. Kevin became. Went from logical to emotional. It became really meaningful. His last answer was about leaving a legacy for his family in the community and what that really means to him. Now I can tell you what happens and when you really understand your why is. It goes from a head answer, meaning, this is what I should say, or this is what I think I want to a hard answer, which means, this is my passion. This is my purpose. This is why I do this. As Simon Sinek says in his book, start with why. Why do you wake up every day? And why should anybody else care? That's why it's so vital to know that. Because here's the thing. If you don't really know why it is you're doing, what you're doing, the what and the how become really hard. Because I'm guessing, like, you, like I do, you have hard days, you have challenging weeks, you have people that don't get along with you, you have conflict, you have whatever chaos, and when you run into, you go, forget it. Just forget it. Right? The why answer is your purpose and your passion. It also sets up something that's really important that this particular agency understands so well. Kevin Charleston. I mentioned it's having a culture. It's about having a culture of accountability. It's about having A culture of accountability. This agency, Specialty Risk Insurance Agency, we work with in Missouri, one of the best agencies with accountability I've ever been a part of. And I get to talk to the leadership team every month. And here's the reality. They know who they are. They know what they really want. They know what they stand for. And everybody on their team knows. Right? It's really important, I think, of culture of accountability. There's two words there, culture, which is the language and the behaviors that are normal in our agency. And then there's accountability, which is, are you going to do what you said you were going to do? And when you understand what our culture is all about, our language and behaviors, and that we expect people to do what they said they were going to do, magic happens. Another example of this. I mentioned the profit networking event. On day number two. We had member interviews. Chet Rhodes is a CSO, chief sales officer of a large agency. It's actually part of Hub. It was hdh, very successful, also one of our network members, and he's grown a very profitable agency. In fact, his office has a revenue of over $236,000 per employee. It's pretty impressive, right? That's good numbers. And what's interesting is that Roger Sitkins was interviewing all the members. And I forgot to mention that, but, you know, Roger, our CEO and our founder of Sitkins, was interviewing all these members, and they're sharing the things that they did and succeeded with. And Chet's talking about some of the reasons why they had success. And Roger asked the question, if you had to go back to the beginning when you started your career and started all over again, what would you do differently? And, you know, I was thinking, he's going to say something about, you know, tactics or a certain strategy. And that was all certainly part of his success. But he said, if I had to go back to the beginning, I would have understood the power of my why sooner. Because it took me a long time to understand what that meant. And it's given me greater purpose, greater clarity, more passion, and ultimately, it's helped my results. So I want to ask you again, as you wrap up this particular question, why? Why do you want what you want? And if you want to take it the next level, try that seven levels deep. Find an accountability partner. You can do it yourself, but ask yourself, what do I want? And every time you answer it, say, why is that important to me? Why is that important to me? Why is that important to me? And I promise you, when you dig deep enough, you'll find the heartbeat. And it'll motivate you in different ways that you haven't expected. All right, the first question is why? The second is who? The question is this. And write this down on your worksheet. Who do I need to help me? Who do I need to help me? Because this is probably worth writing down as well. No one succeeds alone. No one succeeds alone. We all need people. The who question is a people question. It's a leadership question. It's an environment question. It's a growth question. The best agency leaders surround themselves both internally and externally with others who share their vision. They communicate openly and they hold each other accountable. I see it every single time. And when I started to think about my conversations when I was on the plane and thinking about agency leaders who have had dynamic success, however you want to define it, but very successful in their business, there's one word that if you could take one word and say, why are all these agency leaders having success? What are they doing? Well, one word. People. People. They surround themselves with people internally on their team. They know the value of that. And externally, they're always trying to learn from others. You know, one of the best examples of this that I can have, we have a brand new Sickens network member started this year, great agency in Pennsylvania, EDH Insurance. I had the opportunity, in fact, they had done some Sickens things years ago, reconnected. I met Jim Lewis, the great sales manager, at an event that I spoke at. We reconnected and now they're part of our network. And I've also had the great opportunity to connect and meet and really get to know, well, John Miles, who's the president of this insurance agency. And John's a sharp guy, very successful, 40 years in the industry. Right. He knows his stuff. He doesn't really have to learn a lot more. He would be successful if he quit now, as far as learning goes. But when John was being interviewed by Roger on the stage, there were several takeaways that were really powerful that I want to share with you today. You know, one of the things that John shared was this. He said, I live by an acronym, abl. May want to write this down. Always be learning. You know, always be learning. See this agency and John in particular, and all the people in the leadership team, they're part of other organizations and learning things. Right? It's not just Sitkins. They're doing other things that can help them. They're always trying to learn from other people and they're very successful. Right. They're a growth agency. Their revenue Per employee is over 200,000. There are 20 million plus. And then you go, I can't even imagine that. And some of you may be thinking, well, that's great for them. They can invest in people, they can invest in resources because they're a big agency. Let me ask you a question. Is it maybe the other way around? Are big agencies big because they can invest in people, or do they invest in things to get big? Just something to think about. Because I can tell you, you can either think big or you can think small. And there's a difference. But John shared, always be learning. Now, the other part of John share was about learning and it's about leading. How are you leading your team now? Whether you're an agency leader or producer, whoever you have influence over, you're leading, right? And there's two parts of leading. I think there's care and there's candor. We've got to care for our people. I think that's missing in today's world. Too often we're so busy with results and this and that that we forget to truly care for our people. And secondly, we got to be able to tell them the truth. So let's start with care for a second. I was able to. Myself and Roger Sitkins were able to see the culture of this agency and what it looks like in person. We were able to go out and do a private producer session for this agency, spent a couple days with their team and producers and leadership team. It was interesting. That was. Roger noticed this right away. I thought, wow, you are right. When we got done with our two days, every producer, at least I think every producer that I could tell, came to either Roger or me and said, thank you, I appreciate it. I was grateful. Whatever it was, they were just. They had the right culture. And John Miles on stage shared something, why this made sense. He says, we live by one word, two words and three words. One word, two words and three words. He says, one word, please, two words. Thank you. Three words. I appreciate you. Does your agency live by those words? Right. Why is this type of agency and others like this, not just surviving, but thriving? They're facing challenges, just like you are today. We're all facing challenges. I mean, market disruption, digital disruption, technology, client expectations, changing, all those kind of things. But what John understands and this agency understands that it's about profits, but it's just as much about people. And it's just as much about people on the other side of this too, which is interesting. We think of culture, this question of who. Who do I Need to be associated with. We think a culture sometimes is soft, especially today's. Oh, that's the nap pods or whatever it may be from different organizations. But he said something was really interesting. He says it's care and it's candor. He said this. Being a great leader is about helping people do the things they don't want to do to help them reach their true potential. Being a great leader is about helping people do the things they don't want to do to help them reach their true potential. When you care about your team, truly care about them as people, and you also care enough about them to give them candor, meaning that you're not living up to who you really are. Don't settle. Don't be average. That is a powerful culture. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to think to yourself. You can write this down on a piece of paper. You don't have to put this in the question box. This is just for you. I want you to think of one person that you need to lead better. And leadership to me is serve and influence. Who do you need to serve better? Who needs more of your time? Who needs more of your thoughts? Who needs more of your ears to listen to whatever it may be? Who do you need to lead better, number one? Number two, the second thing is who do you need to connect with External? Remember, it's about leading and learning. Who do you need to learn from? Is it a person, a coach, a mentor? An organization? Could be a peer in your community. It could be a business leader in your community. I don't know who it is, but who do you need to spend time learning from? Take some time to think about that. Because the best leaders, right? The best leaders invest in people and they invest in themselves. We see that all the time from the best of the best agencies. All right, so we talked about the why and the who. And those are the most popular questions, right? Or at least the most important questions. I should say up front. The popular questions are coming next. The why and the what and the how. So let's talk about the how. Let's go to the how. The question you need to be asking yourself is this on the how. How can we best achieve blank, whatever that is. Now it's going to go back to your why question. But how can we best achieve blank, whatever is that you want, how can we best achieve that? Now, there's a key word that you may have missed that I just put in that question. How can we best achieve blank? Anybody catch it? It's best, right? It's best. There are a lot of things that we can do. I know when I speak with agency leaders, they have countless ideas, right? Countless ideas. How do we increase our intention? How do we increase our profitability? How do we increase our compensation system? How do we, how do we, how do we, how do we, how do we. On and on and on and on. The reality of it is, is that agency leaders are typically in hysterical activity. They're moving a million miles an hour and have no clear direction because they haven't really thought through a plan. And there could be lots of reasons for that. Let me just ask you, and you can think about this internally. How many of you right now can think of an idea or a plan or a project or something that you started and you thought was a good idea that you never finished, could be in your own life, could certainly be for the agency. We thought about doing this and then we stopped and we thought about doing this and then we stopped. Right? A great example. That's another one of the agencies that was interviewed on stage by Roger Sitkins that was so impactful to me and listening to was the Diebold Agency in Michigan. Now the Diebold Agency has been featured as a Rough notes agency of the month. Very successful agency, a very purposeful agency and longtime friends of Sidkins. And they had Kevin Elliott and Pete Elliott were up on stage and then Dan Elliott wasn't with us, but he's also one of the leaders as well. And years ago they had a five year plan. They sat with Sipkins and said, we want to create a five year plan. We want to double our revenue from 2 1/2 million to 5 million. That's a big endeavor, right? A five year plan to double our revenue from 21 /2 million to 5 million. Pretty cool thing. And to give you the quick answer to the story, did they accomplish it? I wouldn't be telling them that they did. Yeah, they did. Just last year, thereabouts. They got there for five years and they accomplished their mission. They doubled their revenue in five years. And they were talking on stage and I was taking notes and just thinking about it and getting to talk to Kevin and Pete. How do they do that? How do they actually do it? Well, I think there were three things that stood out to me and there's more than this, but these three in particular, number one, focus, intensity. They knew what they wanted, they had a clear objective and they didn't get sidetracked by distractions. And I can tell you as a quick start Personality. This is a hard thing for me personally is what's the goal that we're going for in this case? We got to go from two and a half to five million. How are we going to get there? Number two is differentiating. How do we position ourselves differently? We can't be like every me too insurance agency there. You know, a lot of people think that with Sitkins, oh, you only work with large agencies. You only work with agencies and work on large accounts. This is a small, you know, relatively small agency. Certainly it's grown in Michigan, in rural Michigan. You can do this anywhere. But you've got to be able to differentiate yourself. And they do this really, really well. And the last thing they did was that I think is powerful is that they have a customized name sales process. So you can't double revenue from 2 and a half million to 5 million by winging it. Right. You can't just say, well, you know, we'll hire people in to sell and they'll figure it out. And they'll figure it out. We've got to have some model that we can help our producers in particular succeed with. And so working with Citicons would help them with a customized sales model. You know, I've seen this all the time working with agency leaders and those that have success. There's some commonalities and I just share these. But let me just let me go back and say them again in a different way. Number one, the best agencies, when it comes to how, they understand the how is about priorities. It's the vital few versus trivial many. We have got to figure out what the vital few things are. We can't do everything. We can't be everything to everybody. What do we do well and how do we replicate it? Number two is to understand that we will not be a me too agency. We cannot be a comparison point. We've got to be the point of comparison and the last. What Diebold did is there's gotta be some type of agency way of doing things. A sales process, a continuation process doesn't have to be perfect. We've gotta have something we can model because we can't bring in people to grow and just hope they figure it out. It takes too long. Right. And it's very, very frustrating. So here's the bottom line of the how question for you. The summary. Hope is great. I love hope. I'm an optimistic guy. But you got to have more than hope. Hope is not a strategy. You got to have a certain plan. And that's what great agencies do. Let's get to the last question we talked about. Why? Talked about who talked about how. Now let's talk about the what. Alright, the what. So here's the question. See, most agencies, when they think about what they ask this. What do I need to do? What should I do? Those are important questions. What I'm going to challenge you is ask this. What is it all about? What is it all about? Because you got to get really focused. What's it all about? Instead of saying what do I do next? What's it all about? That's the question I want you to think about. I think four things that agencies do really, really well is they understand. There's four areas that they've got to understand. What's it all about? Number one, it's got to be about results. It's got to be about results. Most agencies are hysterical activity. What is the results? And most agencies. And I'd love to ask you if I, if I could get you on the line, do you know your numbers, your revenue numbers, your organic growth numbers, your retention numbers? Because most agencies are kind of guessing and it's really hard to manage and understand the behaviors and habits that we need to do if we don't know the numbers we're trying to get to. Because it's about results. You probably heard this expression before, what gets measured gets done. Absolutely. What are you measuring to get done? Here's a question behind the question. And there's always. We say this at a producer camp all the time. There's always another question you can ask. So here's the question you can ask yourself. You can ask your production team. You can ask anybody. If you're trying to get results. Should be everybody in your agency. Is what I'm doing right now delivering a result or am I just being busy? That's a really key question of what's it all about. The second one it's all about is relationships. This is a relationship business. This is a relationship business. This is a relationship business. Did I make my point? I love technology. We need to embrace it and use it. I think technology has allowed the great agencies to build relationships to even higher level. In some cases it's missing such a great opportunity. One of my favorite stories I heard, I love this story. A professor was teaching his nursing school. It was a nursing program. The professor was talking about his experience and they had an ongoing semester. They're learning different things and every Wednesday night they had a lab. So they had a lab. They were coming in, working on stuff. There was always a cleaning person that came in at the clean while they were in there, because it was in the evening. The final examination had all the medical questions. But the last question on the exam was this. Who was the name of the cleaning person that cleans our lab every Wednesday night? And some people were very confused. They said, is this real? Does this count? Is this a real question? And he said, of course it is. It counts just like the rest of the questions. Here's what I want you to understand and what he shared with this group and it was so powerful. He said, you are not in the medical business, you're in the people business. What's it all about? It's about relationships, right? Insurance and risk management. That is your tool of the trade. That is the vehicle that allows you to help people and you get, you get compensated for it. But you, first and foremost, you're in the relationship business. So what's it all about? It's about relationships. Number three, what's it all about? It's about retention. It's not just what you make talk about results and getting results, what you keep. Let me ask you a question and just understand your own numbers. What would an increase of 2%, what would an increase of 3%? What would an increase of 5% mean for the bottom line of your agency's profitability? It would be huge, right? It would be huge. But what are you doing? Do you have an understanding? Because when you think about retention for your agency, too often we think we know our clients expectations, we think we can guess. Well, I think they want that, I think they want that. Other people want that. You've got to ask directly what do they really want, right? Have you established that? And then are you able to deliver? Because it's something you may want to jot down, you cannot meet and you cannot exceed what you have not documented. You just can't. You're guessing. So it's all about what's all about. It's about. It's about retention. The last one is about referrals. It's about results, relationship retention, last. It's about referrals. What would your agency look like if you were 100% referral only? Now some of you are going, that would be awesome. Oh, we couldn't possibly do that. I can tell you agencies do that. We had some members and talk about their experiences that are 100% referral only. And you got to earn it. You also got to be able to ask for it, got to position yourself for it. But why is it that in most agencies about 90% of our clients renew, but only 5 to 10% refer. What does that say about the level of experience that we're providing? What does that mean to us? Now it goes back to results and relationship and retention that lead to referrals. But we have to earn and we have to ask, and I think every agency say, what's it all about? Are we getting a referral? Because if you're not getting referrals, it could be a very good indicator that you're not doing the right things. Right? Here's the bottom line to the what question. The bottom line of the what question is we need to know our numbers so that we can effectively manage the behaviors and strategies around those key areas. One of my favorite books, I don't have that in front of me, but my favorite books is called the One Thing by Gary Keller. And there's been a quote that's kind of been changed over a period of time, so I can't give it proper credit, but I do want to share it with you, at least my version of it. And here's the quote. You don't choose your results. You choose your habits, and your habits choose your results. You don't choose your results. Oh, this is what I want. What are the habits that are going to get me the results that I want? I'm going to share one last story of a Sidkins member and a success story. One of my favorite to share, and I can't wait to release this on my podcast because it is just a powerful testimony to doing the right things. Someone has become a friend of mine, and for the last year, we'd only known each other through text. A longtime friend of Roger Sitkin. His name is Mark Rollins of the Rollins Agency, and we have been texting every day for over the last year because we're accountability partners. I got connected to Roger to be an accountability partner, and I had the privilege of not only just getting to meet Mark or hear him on the stage, but spend some time with him in the hallways and at dinner during our event a few weeks ago. You know, Mark's agency success speaks for itself. And I've shared his numbers on different webinars because they're powerful. But, you know, he had a very successful agency in New York. $3 million in revenue, 6,000 clients, 55 employees. Right. That's pretty good. And after Tusipkin's coaching him, understanding these questions and implementing and being a learner and being a leader and doing the right activities, he doubled the revenue from 3 million to 6 million. He decreased the employees from 55 to 25, not by firing them, but by getting the culture right and the people that want to be there. And obviously what does that do for revenue per employee? And they also reduced the clients from 6,000 to 3,000. So working on the right type of clients, that make sense for the agency. And by the way, Mark sold the agency recently extremely successfully. Not shocking, right? Did pretty well and now he's focused on his next career, which is helping executives understand clarity and purpose in their retirement. By the way, just a quick aside. If you are an executive who is looking for greater purpose, not just financial stuff, a lot of people do that, but clarity and purpose of what you want to do in your next life. Let me connect you to Mark because he's a great resource and a great coach in that area. But you know, Mark got more than just a fantastic payday and I don't know what it was, I'm sure it was good. But by being diligent he was able to get something I think every agency owner is looking for. In fact, I'm looking back at who wrote was Brandon. Brandon, you wrote in your question box, you said financial peace and freedom. I think really ultimately we talked about as siftence coaches, what do agency leaders and high level professionals really want? It's freedom, freedom, financial freedom, as you mentioned, Brandon, could be relationship freedom, working, spending time with the right people, the people you really want to spend time with, which includes, by the way, your family, which leads to, last thing, freedom of time. I was listening to an interview yesterday with it was Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. They were interviewed and it was fascinating. Warren Buffett, richest guy out there, right? Talks about all the things I could buy, anything I want. The only thing I can't buy back is my time. So that's what freedom to me is all about. It gives you options, Freedom gives you options. And you know, if the things that I've shared today and some of the stories and being focused on the why and the who and the how and the what makes sense to you and it resonates with you and you're an agency owner who's wanting some freedom in the areas of money and relationships and time, I want to share with you the invitation right now about our network. And I'll tell you, I mentioned the beginning. I'll be very clear, this may not be right for many of you on this call. And that's okay. There's no hard feelings. We don't work with dabblers. I said that before. We don't, we don't work with dabblers, we work with doers. If you're a doer and you're looking for freedom and success in your life, you can hang with me for a few minutes. I'll be happy to share just a little bit about what we do and give you an opportunity. In fact, Dana, if you could right now, go ahead and pop up the link that people click on anytime and it's just a very, very short, very short application just to get to know who you are so we can learn more about your agency to see if there's a fit. That's typically, that's just the first step that we look at. But you know, we've been working with agencies at Sipkins for 30 plus years and we've developed tools and resources and ideas that help insurance agencies get leaner and stronger fitter. Right. So you can sell even more, retain even more and earn even more. And we have with our sick ins network, our experience, because it's not an event, it's a process is the professional fitness experience. It's only available in our private client group with the Sitkins Network. And it provides you a customized plan. It provides you ongoing coaching with Sitkins coaching. It provides you peer networking, it provides you tools and resources and models to equip your agency and it provides you with an entire team training program in all areas of your agency. You know, the key to professional fitness and why our private members have success is that we help them overcome the greatest gap in performance. And I've talked about this before, there's a huge gap in performance. What makes agencies successful is that they go from knowing to doing. I think most of you right now have enough knowledge to help go be extra successful, whatever you want. Those things that you wrote down and what you want, you have enough knowledge to do that. The challenge is to get over that gap from knowing to doing. And that's really what we help agencies do. Where are areas in the gap that we can help you with? Right. It's like physical fitness. I'll just give you a quick example of this. The best one I could think of is a marathon. Now I don't know if you've ever ran a marathon. I did a marathon. It's been 16 years now. Crazy. I don't know why I did it, but I did it. I got dared into it and I did it. But here's the thing with a marathon. If your goal is to complete a marathon, most people ask these questions, right? What and how? Well, what do I have to do? Well, you Got to run. That's what you have to do. You got to run, like, a lot. Well, how do I do that? Well, you can go online and find hundreds of marathon training programs. But what happens when it's hot in July and August and you have to run 15 miles that Sunday? Or whether you're training for a spring and it's cold or you're tired or you don't feel good or it's been a long day or your kid's been sick? What happens? Quit or you don't do it or you fall short of what you should have been doing? That's because we haven't established the who. Who's going to help you? Who's going to hold you accountable? Who are you going to learn from? Who's going to be your mentor, your mob? Who do you want to share this experience with, and why is it so important to you? That's the difference between average to good to great to elite. Right, to elite. And that's what we try to instill in the professional fitness process of Sitkins Network. So what does it look like? And again, I'll be very brief with this and how this process works. First of all, it's very simple. We work with agencies to figure out where they are at. Right. The first step is we address the why. Why do you want to do what you want to do? And that is by a quick discovery call with one of our coaches. We want to learn about what your vision is, what dangers you have, what opportunities are in front of you, what do you do really well, and how do we help you maximize that? Right. The first is really understanding the why. Next, we are going to help you with the who. We are going to surround you with coaches to help you learn and grow, help you communicate with your team. That's the hard part, right? How do we communicate with our team? Help them share the vision that you have. We're also going to surround you with a peer network. The people that I mentioned today. You get a chance to communicate with them and learn from them. It's really interesting, actually. I just got off a coaching call with one of our members before I hopped on this webinar and we were talking about the event because it's been recent, and he said, I got to tell you something. He goes, it was a great event. He goes, but all the things that was great about the event, the opportunity to learn and dive deep with these agency leaders was a game changer. And I said, absolutely. It's not about what we share necessarily. We have some Great content, don't get me wrong. But it's about what we learn from each other, and that's where the network is so, so powerful. Well, the next question we help you address is the how. How do you do this stuff? Because it's hard, right? There are a lot of things that are hard to do. We're going to help you prioritize. We dive really deep into 80, 20, that 20% of things that. That push the button that gets you moving in the right direction. Your agency, we help you with positioning. How do you tell your story differently so you don't sound like any other agency? Right. They all sound and walk the same. We're going to help you position your agency differently. And lastly, we got to give you a process. Want to help you with it. It's your process, not our process. We have templates to give you that help you customize more of those. Is the risk concierge program a complete sales process for agencies, and we help you customize that. Lastly, it's what. What do I actually have to do? Well, we got to get your people doing the right stuff. This is where our training programs come into play, our ongoing training programs. We're going to help you focus on results, get your producers out, spending time in front of people. Get your service team doing the service stuff and your producers doing the producer stuff. You know, understand there's a perfect schedule out there, how to get them on a producer's perfect schedule. Excuse me. And also understanding roles and responsibilities. It's about relationships. It's about retention to get your retention up, and it's about referrals, how to do all those things. Remember, it's about the performance gap, right? Moving from knowing to doing. Now. Right now, some of you are thinking, if you haven't been on a webinar with me before, what's the investment? What does this look like to me? Tell me the cost, Brent. What's it going to mean? Well, first of all, I'm going to tell you there's no cost. And I mean that sincerely. It is an investment. It's a big investment of time, and it's a big investment of your money. Right? When I say time, I don't mean we have to do something every day. It means we're going to get you focused on the right stuff. But it is an investment. Like any great investment, it requires a return, and that's what we give agencies. It's a return on your time. It's a return on your Money. If you don't 3x your results something's going wrong. Right? Something's going wrong. What's the average for agencies? It depends on your agency size. It depends on how many different training programs you want to be part of. But typically for most agencies, it runs about 1500-2500amonth. Be part of our network, and again, we will guarantee a return on your investment on that. And the first step is simply to have a coaching call to fill out a short application and have a discovery call with one of our coaches. Right. Last thing I want to share with you, this is important, is that we don't work with every agency. I mentioned this earlier. We don't work with every. We're getting very focused, intentional. As we continue to grow, we're getting more and more serious about who we want to work with. And once we reach our capacity, we're done. Right? We're done. We have a model in mind that we want to work with. So we're not going to work with every agency. We only have about 25 spots left that we're looking for for this year. So if you want to make sure your territory is open and we give agencies territorial exclusivity so you're not working against a competitor of yours, make sure that's open. Make sure you just fill out the application because that at least block you temporarily for your spot. Right. So I challenge you again, the links on here. Click the link if you're interested. It's a very short. Again, it's a very short application. Takes you a minute or so. Just so we can get to know you, we'll set up a time at your convenience to have a short phone call. If this resonates with you, I certainly would recommend you do that. If it doesn't fit for you, that's okay as well. I do want to share a couple things, though, before I hop off here. Number one is if you want to get learn right away what we do. We have an upcoming producer training camp that we do have some openings for if you haven't joined the network yet. May 15th and 16th in Fort Myers, Florida. Beautiful Fort Myers Beach. And we can send more about that as well. I'll put that in the email. I think, Dana, if you could put that link on there as well. People want to know about our producer training program. We've had some agencies have attended the producer camp and go, okay, we want to join. So if you want to, if you want to kind of check it out first, you're fine to do that. And we'll put a link here for the producer camp, the last thing I'll share with is this, and this is kind of my final call to action to you is that there's a law out there called the law of diminishing intent and it simply states this. The longer that you wait to do something, if it matters to you, if it means something to you, the less likely it is you're ever going to actually do it. This is definitely self serving when I say this, but it was said I mentioned John Miles, president of ehd, had a lot of success and this will be on the podcast that I released so you can verify this is 100% accurate. But we're going back and Roger asked John, what are some things that you would have done knowing what you know today, 10, 15, 20 years ago? And he said, you know, I'm not here to buddy or bread Roger, but I would have joined the network, I would have been part of this earlier because I see what's going to happen now. We think differently, we see differently, we've got momentum, we've got difference in our culture, we've got a balance in our step and that's what we want to help provide you. So if this makes sense to you, click the link. You have to learn more about it. We'd love to have a conversation with your convenience. So I appreciate your time. I know again, your time is your only diminishing asset and you spent 45 minutes with me today and I appreciate that. That means the world to me and I wish you all the best in your success. Thanks so much.