Your Two Greatest Investments

Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host. Thanks so much for joining me on this episode. The purpose of every Agent Leader podcast is to help you, the agency leader, whether you're an agency principal, whether you're a sales manager, whether you're a producer, whether you're a service professional, claims person. I don't care if you're an insurance professional looking to get better. Our goal is to help you gain clarity, to build consistency, and to make that commitment to really become your best version possible. Well, today I'm going to talk about the two greatest investments that you can make right now. Amidst all of what's going on in the world with COVID 19 and the distractions and the uncertainty, we're going to talk about two of the greatest investments that you can make. But first of all, I owe you an apology if you are a regular listener. First of all, thank you for being a regular listener. If not, this may not apply to you, but I'm a week late in dropping this episode and some of that is due to the fact that we're doing a lot of new stuff at Sitkins. And so I want to just spend just a minute to first of all share what we're doing and secondly, invite you if you are an agency leader or a manager or salesperson who's looking to become a better version. I've got really exciting news for you. So last week, one of the reasons I'm late in this podcast episode is that we wrapped up a Producer Fit program, which is our producer sales training program for a group that already started with us live. And we took it virtual, had great success with that. And then we launched and got ready to do Our very first 12 session virtual producer Fit Camp, which just started this week. And we are excited about it. Initial feedback has been overwhelmingly, really, really positive. Obviously, we're learning through this just like everyone else is. And our goal again is to make everything our content, the experience, the roundtables, just like you'd be there live. And we can't replicate everything, but we're able to really keep the idea and the experience behind it. So with that being said, our first producer camp completely sold out just in a couple weeks. It was incredible. And so we've launched second producer camp starting June 2nd. So coming up pretty quick, depending on when you're listening to this June 2, we still have some available spots. This one will sell out as well. We're already getting great feedback. We had people on the waiting list, but this is a 12 session experience where you're going to have coaching all the content workbooks drop shipped to you virtual roundtables. We're going to break off and have deep conversations and each week accountability behind it. So just really excited about what we could do with this program. So all that being said, if you're interested, go to to sitkins.com profit sitkins.com profit all right, so let's get to the content for today, which is about what are the two greatest investments that you can and should make right now. Now, I would tell you this. I know COVID 19 is a big deal, has been, and it will continue to be a big deal for a while. I heard a quote recently that was not related to COVID 19 in any way, but boy, it was really applicable when I heard it to what's going on today from leadership expert and pastor Andy Stanley, who said this. He said, a leader can afford to be uncertain, but a leader cannot afford to be unclear. A leader can afford to be uncertain, but cannot afford to be unclear. I thought, wow, that's such powerful truth, right? Because even as a leader, there are things that we in good times that we are uncertain about and we can afford to be uncertain. And right now there are a lot of things that are certainly out of our control. Many things that we simply, even if we wanted to have certainty, we couldn't. But that doesn't mean we can afford to be unclear. That doesn't mean that we can afford to suddenly not be able to work on aspects of ourselves and our business and our relationships that we can control. And so with that all being said, I want to talk about these two important investments, and I certainly have mentioned these in different trainings and podcasts before. Let me give it a little different light to it, a little different spin on it. You know, the two most important investments that you make. Number one is an investment in yourself and number two is an investment in others. And I want to start with the investment in yourself self. I heard a quote now it's been 17 years ago. I was just thinking about this. It's crazy. The quote's way older than that, but comes from the late great Jim Rohn, who said this. He goes, if you work hard on your job, you can make a living. If you work hard on your job, you can make a living. But if you work hard on yourself, you can make a fortune. And I first heard that as a young producer, 25 years old, and I thought, huh, invest in yourself, you can make a fortune. And then my next question was, well, how do I do that? What does that mean? What does that look like? And I started to kind of get this idea of personal professional growth and you learn and you learn more and you learn more. But it became just a very big, very important part of my life. And looking back in 17 years later, I'm going to continue to grow and learn. I'm not anywhere close to where I want to be. But looking back, you start to see some of the amazing progress that happens and the brilliance of that quote. I want to share just three quick things that you can do right now. Again, whether you're an agency principal, a sales manager, producer, ways that you can invest in yourself. And I'm sure you've heard some of these before, but I think it's always good to get a reminder. Maybe some of you haven't heard this before, but the first thing is this. It's simply learning. I just talked about learning, but this is bread for the head. You think about athletes, you think about physical performance, our physical abilities, what we put in our bodies is really important. I mean, garbage in, garbage out. And we can often see that reflection. And this is not to pick on anybody who's struggling with physical, whether it's obesity or whatever else it may be. But the truth of it is that if we put bad stuff on our body, we're not going to have a great body, right? We're not going to be able to perform and use our body like we would like to. The same thing is absolutely true with our head. That's why I said it's bread for the head. What is your bread for the head? What are you learning right now? What are you learning right now? What books have you been reading? What books will you read? How will you learn from those books? What articles? Not talking about news media articles necessarily right now, which is typically hysterical activity and doom and gloomy. I'm talking about those things that help you learn to be a better insurance professional. Are you listening to podcasts like this one? Well, my answer would be yes, because you're listening to me right now. But what other podcasts and things are you listening to? Audiobooks, if people. I don't like to read. Well, pick up an audiobook, right? Have them read it for you. And obviously I'm probably preaching to the choir right now because if you're listening to my voice, you're obviously investing in yourself right now just by finding ways to get better. But the second thing I want to talk about of investing yourself beyond learning is who are you connecting with? And if you want to invest in Yourself, you got to figure out, who are you connecting with. Are you proactively seeking out the right types of connections? There's been a lot of quotes out there as well. It talks about, you know, you're the average of the five people that you hang around with most now. Right now, my guess is that's probably your immediate family with what's going on. But, you know, through, obviously through zoom and phone calls, we can still connect in today's world, even if we're not physically present, that's for sure. But who are those people that will support you? Who are those people that will challenge you? Who are those people that will encourage you? I love to find, you know, again, this idea of being around other people. And a term that we use all the time is find this collective genius that you've. You know, one of the things that we try to do at Sitkins is always put our smart agency leaders and our smart agency producers and roundtables and have them talk and mastermind this philosophy that if you're the smartest person in the room, you probably need to find a new room is really, really important. But who are mentors? Have you sought out mentors? People that have been places that maybe you haven't been before? Have you sought out coaches? I've hired many coaches in my life because they asked me really challenging questions. And by the way, coaches won't put up with your excuses. I can excuse myself that, oh, you know, I know I couldn't do this because of this, and, you know, I can't reach out right now because of that. No, those are excuses. So who are the coaches? What about peers? You know, back to masterminding, you know, are you. Are you reaching out to other insurance agency leaders? Are you part of other mastermind groups where you're learning that they understand your situation? Now, you know, I'm a big advocate of finding people that are ahead of you. But you're going to learn from peers all over the map, right? We have agencies, part of our private client group, you know, that may vary in revenue from anywhere between, you know, a couple million to 30 million plus. Now, obviously, there's certain commonalities. You want to get around people that are similar to yourself. But it's amazing what a new producer or a newer agency owner can also teach someone who's been experienced for a while a new way of thinking, right? Just open those new files in your head. So the first one is, what do you learn? The second one is, who do you connect with is connecting. Number three is preparation. If you want to invest in you, you owe it to yourself to be the most prepared person. Are you proactive or are you reactive? Had a mentor of mine many years ago now, in fact, I was getting ready to give. Well, I was working on. I was doing a lot of speaking at that time. I still do speaking now, but I was doing even more of it. And I call up a mentor and I was just talking about trying to book more gigs and fees and all those kind of things. And he asked me a really important question. He said, brent, he goes, right now, if the best opportunity you could imagine presented itself. And I said, okay, yeah, what do you mean? He's like, well, let's just say there's this huge keynote and there's thousands of people and they're going to pay you a lot of money, a lot of money, right, to do this. He goes, are you prepared right now to deliver that? I said, well, can you give me a week? He said, no, I'm talking like right now. You've got to prepare right now, today. Like your best opportunity is going to happen in the next hour or the next day. Because the minute you wait for that next opportunity, and right now in this world, we don't know when or how or what that's going to look like, but it's going to happen. You're going to have opportunities, things are going to come back to some level of normal. Are you prepared at the highest level for that? Are you prepared if you're an insurance producer, to be able to tell your story at a high level, to ask the best questions? Are you prepared with your clients in different ways? If you're an insurance agency leader, are you fully prepared with your team, with the vision, the mission, understanding critical success factors, processes? I know I'm throwing a lot of things out at you. You want to fine tune those, but are you prepared? Because if you wait, it's too late. And if you're not driving, you may want to write that down. If I wait, it's too late. It's not a scare tactic. It's just an idea that right now, I truly believe right now, certainly in this Covid world that we live in, that this is going to be the great time of separation of elite performers and all the pretenders, the people that kind of hang on because the business is good enough to get by, but the people that really invest in themselves and say, I owe it to everyone around me to be my best version. You think of my best version as well. That's selfish. No, no, you cannot Give what you do not have. And if you don't invest in your learning, if you don't invest with mentors and peers and coaches and people that you'll connect with, that'll challenge and encourage you. If you don't invest in your preparation, you're letting those around you down whether you like it or not. That's the truth. And I'm raising my hand because I find myself guilty that if I'm not careful, I've got to be aware of how I'm best invest investing in myself and what it means to my livelihood, to my personal life, to all the lifestyle, the results that I want. I've got to be able to invest in myself. So if the greatest investment you can make is into yourself, the next greatest investment you can make is into others, well, how do you invest in other people? I mean, we could talk forever about this. I just want to share three basic ideas. The first way that you can invest at the highest level into others is simply by showing empathy, right? Empathy is not weak. Empathy says, I care enough about this relationship to first of all, just know that I care about you. Right? Caring for people, understanding. What are they thinking, what are they feeling? There's a great quote, I'm sure many of you heard it by Maya Angelou, who said, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And I think that is so. I mean, think about the situations and the conversations you have had. If you know at the heart of heart the person you're talking with doesn't really care about you, do you care about what they tell you? Not really. I mean, if they don't really care about me, why would they offer me advice that's in my best interest? Think about that for a second. If someone doesn't really show they care and isn't demonstrating that they care, why would they do anything else in your best interest? Maybe they will, but why wouldn't it be in their best interest? Right? And how do you best show empathy? Well, I think the best way to show empathy is just to ask questions and listen. And I can tell you, in my own personal relationships, most notably with my wife, I struggle at this. And it's not because I don't care. I do. But I just always think I have the action plan or the answer. And sometimes what people really want is just to be heard. Stephen Covey said it great in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective. People seek first to understand, then to be understood. So this idea of empathy is just the idea of listening first and really putting yourself in their shoes. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? The next way to show that you truly care and to make deposits into others and divest into others is by earning trust through empowerment and through education. Now, every situation is unique, but certainly if you're an insurance professional, you're going to have a conversation right now with your clients and future ideal clients and centers of influence if you don't come in prepared. Now, again, the initial part, and we're kind of through this, where it's just checking on people, I think that's always important. That's why I talk about empathy. But you should also be very well prepared, because when you're prepared, it shows not that you just care, but that you're trustworthy. Right? When you gain and you share knowledge and you've done your homework, people go, wow, you cared enough really to dive deeper into my specific situation. You know, certainly with business owners and we work with a lot of commercial lines producers and benefits producers, people expect that you know about insurance and risk management. They really do. At some point, you better know your stuff. You've got to be educated there. There's no doubt about it. But they really want to make sure and really want that you understand them and their business. That's how you can empower them. You can go deeper into that. Obviously, empowerment and trust also is about doing what you said you were going to do. This is a really good time to look back, certainly with your clients and say, wow, what are some of the things that we promised or be offered or we talked about six months ago, nine months, three months, I don't know when it is that we've not really done that. We haven't really followed through. Maybe we've gotten away with it because, you know, they're not going to go somewhere else right now or whatever the case may be. But what are some areas that we need to go back and look at? What are the things that we talked about? What are the things that we said we were going to do that we didn't do? And here's another question for you, just while I'm thinking of it. If you don't know what they expect of you, now would be a really good time to build trust and empower them is to go ask. Had a client that we work with, one of our private client members, and we were having just a great conversation. He said, you know, I'm going to be very transparent with my clients and say, listen, we've had more time to do some of these reviews and things we've wanted to do for a long time. And in doing this we found some things that we want to talk to you about. Right. And you know, most clients are going to say, well, thank you. Right. But we've got to understand if you want to be able to deliver on what you offer, you first have to understand what it is that they want. And to do that you have to ask. You have to ask. Seems pretty simple, but I would tell you, most agencies, most producers, if you were going to do some type of promise report or stewardship report, which basically is a checklist or checkup on how are we doing, do we deserve to continue the relationship with you? Well, we have to define what those things are. And so again, that's part of just building trust. If you want to invest in other people, ask them and do your research and preparation. Alright? The last thing I'm going to talk about to connect with others, to invest in others is to provide tangible action plans. This kind of goes on to what I said, but we got to turn ideas and thoughts into actions. I love this concept and it's so true. Ideas without execution is a hallucination. Ideas without execution is a hallucination. And you can have as many ideas and thoughts in your head or about your team members, your clients, your future ideal clients. But if you don't execute on any of them, you're just kind of dreaming, right? So I would just challenge you right now if you want to really invest into others, start to filter through the most important things. What are the tangible deposits that you can make into others? What tools, what resources, what coaching, which is asking questions by the way, will help someone else move closer to their goals, their desired results. Back to, for example, just to use business clients, whether it's gets benefits or commercial lines as an example, I can tell you most business clients care about three things now. They care about more things, but three things are typically at the top of the list. They care about their profitability, they care about clients, their clients certainly right now. And they care about employees and many of them are really hurting in these areas. Now you can't fix everything. I understand that. But are there some things you could do as a risk advisor, which by the way is your job, to offer tangible solutions that will help your clients succeed, to get them to where they want to go. One of our best producers who had a conversation with recently and he said, you know, all I'm having conversations right now, this has been a few weeks ago, he said, all I'm having conversations right now. With my client. Clients is about cash flow because that's what they care about. Going back to empathy and then being able to prepare. Well, what can I do tangibly to help them with cash flow? And again, I can't do everything. But there are certain things that I can begin to look at and have conversations around cash flow. So what is it for you and your clients in your specific situation? So these are just some things to think about. Like I said, you can afford to be uncertain right now, back to what I led off with. You can afford to be uncertain because there's things you can't control that are out of your control. But you can control your investment in yourself, how deep you're going to invest in yourself to be better. You can control how you're going to invest into others by showing empathy, by gaining earning trust, by empowering them, by preparing and by equipping them through tangible action plans. These are all things that you can control. They are in your control. And how. I want to. I want to wrap this up just by a thought. This came up. I mentioned our virtual producer fit, the one that we wrapped up. That was a session that we started live and then we ended virtually, I would say, overwhelming. The theme that just kept coming up was compounding consistency. Compounding consistency. I talked about it during the session and it really kind of. It just took hold. People kept thinking about it. There is nothing more powerful than compounding consistency. The problem with compounding consistency is that it's boring. It is. I mean, it's really boring. You know, to do basic things really well every day isn't very exciting. I mean, it generally isn't, but there's nothing more powerful. And, you know, it's funny, I had another producer I talk with, he said, you know, some of the things that I do every day and I do every week. And again, this has changed and adapted with COVID 19. But just some of the basic things that I do. I try to follow the producer's perfect schedule that you guys teach, he said, and just about being intentional with my time, making sure that I'm having good conversations with my service team. We're preparing certain areas that I'm prepared with my clients and future ideal clients. I mean, just some of the basic things that I do every single week, he goes, they're not that exciting. But you know what is exciting? The results which lead to some of the things that I get to do in my life. It gives me the financial freedom, which is to be able to do what I want with who I want when I want, how I want to do it, right? And that could mean anything to anybody. What's your why? That's something that's a different episode, but like, it allows you to be able to have opportunities and freedom and so compounding consistency isn't exciting, it isn't sexy. But just like money that invests, right? Talking about these investments in yourself, investments into others. When you invest money, unless you have a huge cash flow to go in, right? Or a big, huge deposit, it's just these small investments, right? Every week, every month, however you do that, all of a sudden you look back and go, oh my gosh. It starts off slow, but builds great momentum. That's my dream, my hope for you. Invest in yourself, invest in others. Now. I hope you found this episode helpful. Just kind of sharing things from my heart, my mind. I'm going to be having Roger Sitkins back on with me on my next episode. We're going to talk about some other areas of your agency that I know will be impactful for you during this time and well beyond. Because what I talked about today is certainly really important for COVID 19 allows you to get some control. Hey, you know what? I can't control this, but I can control what I put in my mind and what I'm learning. I can control how I connect with other people, right? In certain ways. And so it's applicable anytime. But certainly right now is one of those times where a lot of people are looking for some clarity and direction. Also want to mention again that Producer Fit Camp is coming up June 2nd. If you're interested in being your best version possible, your production team being your best version possible, it will sell out. Go to sitkins.com looks like profit sitkins.com profit and lastly, at this podcast, this episode, other episodes have added value to you, your agency. I'd love for you to leave me a review on itunes, Stitcher or wherever else you listen to this. It allows us to spread our message and to be able to give value to you. So with that, all the best and your success, thanks for listening.