BREAKING NEWS: Assurance IQ SHUT DOWN! Here's Why...

Thousands of life insurance agents are out of a job. And after spending $2.35 billion just five years ago, Prudential has shut down Assurance IQ, which is one of the biggest call centers in the entire country. What on earth is going on? Well, in this video, I'm going to be breaking it down and basically answering, like, why I think this has happened and what it actually means for agents like yourself. So if we haven't met yet, if you guys are wondering, like, who the hell is this guy sitting in a bedroom that looked like it could be anywhere in middle America? Well, my name is Tim Shooker. I'm basically on a mission to build a $100 million life insurance agency with my business partner. We can talk more about that later. But in my free time, in my spare time, I post videos like this on YouTube to the life insurance sales channel to help agents like yourself make six figures over the phone working anywhere in the world. So let's go ahead and jump into this video here. All right? And for those of you guys that aren't, like, familiar with Assurance iq, right, this is basically. It's like this. This company that generates a bunch of leads, and they're kind of like. They're kind of like a remote call center. So they hire. They kind of hire, like, mercenary agents from all across the country, and they'll bring a bunch of people on, like, specifically during Medicare season and different things like that. And then they also have, like, employees that stay on the phones consistently. So they do a lot of, like, live transfer, inbound calls. They basically just generate, like, an app, absolute crazy amount of leads, and then they hire a bunch of agents to work them. And so basically, you know, they were. They started in, like, 2016, and three years later, right? Imagine starting a business, and three years later, it sold for $2.35 billion to Prudential, which you guys know who Prudential is. Massive, massive insurance company. So Assurance, they don't just sell life insurance. They sell all kinds of insurance, right? So I believe they sell anything from, like, homeowners insurance, pet insurance, car insurance, life insurance. I know they do Medicare and ACA and all that kind of stuff as well. So, like, what, like, what actually caused this company to fail? And, like, why are they closing down their doors? So if we look at this article here, it says that basically, you know, so Prudential bought them in 2019 after it founded in 2016, right, by these two guys both named Michael. Sounds fishy. And they never raised any outside capital. They literally just scaled a billion Dollar company in three years, which is. That's insane. Like, that doesn't happen, right? And so basically they sold in, in 2019. And what happened is like, after Prudential bought them, there started to like, come out all these stories and all these like, whispers that they regretted buying them. Like, for example, there's this story here in 2020. Looks like it's in the Wall Street Journal. Let's investigate how Prudential's big tech bet went sour. So Wall Street Journal is going to try to make me pay for that, which I'm not going to do, but we'll get the general picture without it. And so basically they put all this money into this company and basically all of a sudden after they bought it, it was just like a total, it was almost like they immediately regretted their decision. Right? And so I've done a little bit of research into like, what insurance IQ actually does and how their whole business model works. And I want to show this to you guys because I think this is actually why they shut down, right? So anyone that's in the life insurance industry, you guys have heard about the FTC.

Lead rule, right? The lead generation rule, where basically if somebody fills out a form, it can't be sold to like 15 different people, right? And so essentially.

What assurance IQ does is they run ads on Facebook, they run ads in different places and they'll have these forms that people fill out. And so you're basically like you're filling out a form to get a quote. And honestly, I wish I could show you guys this. And I have two of their, their websites because I, I looked at these in the past. But the problem is, so I try to pull up these websites to show you guys what assurance IQ's, you know, pages their little lead quarter thing looks like, and they're already shut down and this news came out like yesterday. So they, they're moving pretty fast. But basically, I'll give you guys the general gist of what these pages actually are. Essentially what happens whenever you go through and fill out one of those pages is at the very end of it. So you fill in, you know, you put in like a bunch of information about why you're shopping for life insurance. These different things, your name, email, phone number. And then as soon as you hit get a quote, they search their whole network of insurance providers, right? And then they basically they, here's what they do. This is what's crazy. They just send you to another quote, your website, right? So this is, this is the game, guys. This is why I think this whole business is failing because you go through this whole thing, you become a lead for assurance iq. Because remember, assurance, they sell insurance too. And then after you become the lead, they send you to another site. Like select quote. Right? You guys may have heard of select quote. Let's look up select quote here.

Select quote.

So select quote number one, term life agency. So if I click get a quote on select quote, I might actually be able to show you guys. This is what happens. We'll just put in fake information. July 6, 1951.

Boom, boom, boom. I'm a male. Boom. I'm 69105. I'm not actually that. Let's just put in a random zip code. Continue. We'll just do 85296. That would be in Arizona. Let's keep going. Do I have life insurance now? No.

I want permanent.

Boom. So that we're basically filling out this whole form. And this is exactly what you do with assurance? Essentially, yes. I smoke cigarettes. Cool. I'm an alcohol abuser. No, no, no.

And then we'll just say, like, Jimmy balloons. Right? Just a random name. Jimmy balloons. Jimmy balloons.

Who cares? @gmail.com.

And then let's put 1, 2, 3, Main Main street, and let's see what happens.

All right, so we're gonna hit next. Now we got to put in a fake phone number. 480-901-1234. Hopefully, that's nobody's phone number. How did I hear about select quote? Doesn't matter. Boom. Okay, so quotes being processed now. Let's see what happens. Oh, interesting. We found other companies that can provide you quotes for life insurance plans. Click 2 to 3 companies below to request additional quotes. So watch what happens. I click view my quote and then guess what it does. It takes me to lifeplans.com, which is basically just another version of select quote. So what ends up happening is these whole companies, their whole business model is based on you becoming a lead one time, and then instead of sending you to an insurance company's website, you, they send you to another quote website. So what happens is they get the lead, they give it to their agents, right? Their agents are going to call these people forever, try to make sales on them, and then they also sell the lead to a bunch of other people. Right? As soon as I fill out this form for select quote and for assurance iq, because they work the same way, they're going to sell this lead to, like, 25 other people, right? So I fill it out one time, I'm getting sold, like, 26 times. And I'm getting called from Assurance and then they get an affiliate. You guys see this here where it says R at the end of the link? This is a referral link. So when I come here, if I scroll to the end of this, there's going to be. This is like the source. The source this is they're tagging me so that they'll pay Select Quote for sending, sending me them, right? They're tagging my browser so that Select Quote gets paid. So Select Quote sells it a bunch of times and then they send it to Life Plan so that I'll fill out another form so that they can sell it a bunch of times. And I'd be willing to bet I'm not going to do it because I don't care enough and I don't really want to spend the time filling out another form. But if I filled out this form, they'd probably send me back to Select Quote. So the whole problem is all of these businesses like Assurance IQ and Select Quote and Life Plans and you know, whoever and their mom that's generating all these leads, they're basically just putting people through like a little, you know, ping pong ball of becoming a lead and filling out forms. So this is how, this is what happens, this is why the leads are so bad in insurance is they're just sending people back and forth filling out all these different forms. So how does this affect assurance? Well, if they can't sell the leads to multiple people, if they can only fill it out one time and they can't sell it to Select Quote and sell it to Life Plans and sell it to all these other companies, that's most of the revenue guys, Assurance Iq, I don't think. I mean granted this is my opinion, this is my, my speculation, but basically from putting the pieces of the puzzle together, they don't make most of their money from selling insurance. They make most of their money from selling leads to other people. Right. And so that is the root of the problem is they, this is my, again, this is my thought, this is speculation, but I think I'm right. The problem that they're going to run into is as soon as this FTC ruling comes in, all of the revenue is just going to go like gone and their only money is going to come from selling insurance, which they do at a decent level. But if you build up all of your expenses as a company to require the lead sales side, I think that's what's causing this problem. Right. So again, I mean Assurance, they hire thousands of agents across the country. I mean, thousands of people are going to be out of a job. And if you're watching this and you used to work at Assurance.

Damn, you know, I'm sorry to hear that for you. Like, I know the, the cool thing about what they did have is they could basically turn like average producers into top producers with their system, right, because they would just send them so many leads and I guess the training must have been pretty good. But ultimately, like everyone that I talked to that worked there, they just weren't really like making as much money as they should have been. So, yeah, I mean, that's kind of my thought on Assurance. This is my speculation as to why they're closing down. Hopefully you guys got value from this video. If you did, leave a, like comment down below and I'll see you in the next one. Take care. Peace.