Day In The Life Of A $60,000,000 Insurance Agency Owner

This is Joe Camper and he owns an insurance agency that's done over $60 million. And today I'm going to interview him to see exactly how he's done.

Alright, so who am I here with?

I am Joe Camper. I am the president of Business Development at Clearview Insurance.

Okay, awesome. And so you do insurance, obviously. What line of insurance are you in?

I'm in the property and casualty space predominantly. That's kind of our bread and. But anything personal lines, commercial, you know, professional lines, you name it, we do it. And then we also dabble in the life insurance side of things. Kind of more of the advanced sales. We're not really doing any of like the term final expense type stuff.

And in terms of like monthly production, where would you say you guys are sitting?

Clearview as a whole. We are on a freaking roll. I'd have to check our January numbers here, but we're averaging around one and a half to 1.6 million in new business sales.

Wow.

Clearview as a whole with everybody again. And that's one thing I always like to point out. You know, it's like, what's your personal stats? And it's like, well, what we're doing here is we're really growing an organization. So the organization as a whole is what I speak about. Right. We're chilling right around 60 million on the books and we are looking to double in the year of 2025. Yes, sir. Let's do it.

So that's on the PNC side. How about on the life side? How much you guys doing?

Life side, dude. Still haven't really kind of figured that one out yet. Again, PNC has kind of always been the bread and butter. And then if the life insurance makes sense or again, even that was one thing I always told my agents is I never wanted them to say no because of where they physically sit. So we do operate at a national scale, which definitely helps with those numbers you just heard. And then I never wanted them to say no because of the product. Regardless of whether they're doing it themselves or not, we still have the ability to do it. Or maybe that's a referral type. Or even again, you have the license so you can just get a commission. Rip. So again, life insurance, I'm still. I don't really have accurate numbers on that side. It ain't anything to freaking ride home about, I'll tell you that.

Mainly PNC.

Mainly 95% PNC. Awesome.

Makes sense.

Well, cool.

So what we're going to do today is Joe's going To give us a little tour of the office, show us the whole operation and kind of tell us, tell us about his business. So without any further ado.

Absolutely, man. Dive right in. Let's go, Joe.

Give us a tour of the office.

Come check it out. So first office here. This is not how we started. I think my first office was the size of this little front office, which this is now the visiting agent office. This is just for anybody that wants to come set up shop and work property. Casual franchisee that works there. And we have actually an integrity partner on the life insurance side, Eric Hamadi, who works here. And then we've also got, you know, just some additional space for. Hey, man, if you want to just come in and, you know, do some business, just change the scenery, right? Get out of the house, get out of your office. This is where the magic happens. But we do a ton of content. And so, yeah, it's a little messy. That's like a $20,000 printer that I got for free. And I was like, nothing. I just figured, I mean, I get it for free and it's worth 20,000 bucks. So who knows, maybe I'll sell it to like a direct mail guy or something.

This is like everyone that films content, the only thing that you see, right, like if you guys see my YouTube videos, you just see a nice background. But then the rest of the room.

Always looks like this.

Yeah, every single person that films content, the rest of the room is a total nightmare.

This is like some of my favorite stuff right here though. Okay, so I got, I'm a big, big Texas Longhorn fan. So we've got signed Sam Ellinger, helmet signed Earl Campbell, jersey signed Earl Campbell, plaque here. I'm also a huge Kobe fan. Not a Lakers, not a Lakers fan. This is a Kobe rookie holographic card, graded mint 8. And then that one's, I think a graded mint 7, I think, which is also another rookie card. And then the OG classic signed Nolan Ryan. So yeah, here's the. Just the front lobby and everything again where we have, you know, carrier meetings, again, trainings actually. We've actually host quite a few trainings here where we'll whiteboard it here, put a bunch of chairs and just get people in here. You know, that's a big thing for us is that's why we love this space. Just really easy to get people in here and collaborate. And again, network, I know it's super cliche, but your network is your net worth smacks with my brother in law who works with Tony. And then we've got Sophie here, also on Tony's team. So this right here is my. We'll call it my wall of trophies and all of our rings and everything. So a segment of that is getting involved in your community. A lot of times people think when they hear community. You know, go set up a booth at, you know, the farmers market or a trade or like chambers of commerce or support the cheerleaders or the football team. Right. Which is all good for me. I found community through men's slow pitch tournament softball. This was our first ever tournament we ever won. So I always hold on to that bat. Here's my office. So this is kind of where I do all of my just kind of calls. A lot of the training and stuff I do, I'll do in the studio. But a lot. I do take a lot of calls in here. You can see here I've got Kobe stuff. I've got a lot of signed. This is actually probably one of my favorites. But this is actually my limited edition black snakeskin mamba ball. My wife got really pissed at me when I bought that. Yeah, well, that's why my wife got pissed when I bought it. It was like over 400 bucks. But it's not bad. But for basketball, it's like, okay, that is the office, man. That's. That's HQ all.

So we're about to go live on Joe's podcast. Let's go inside of Joe's Facebook group. What are we going to be giving away, Joe?

Oh, we got $5,000 in life live transfer leads. We've got $1,000 in life live transfer leads dot we've got two chances to win $100 in cash, 50 bucks, and then unlimited flights through Frontier.

Yeah, man.

So I want to kind of talk.

Shop here and get an idea of what the. What the come up was. Like you said in 2018, you were just like a personal producer. Now you're selling Franc, you have a massive agency, and you guys are growing like crazy. Walk me through, what was that journey like? And how did you go from personal producer grinding your face off to now much higher leverage things?

We didn't know what we were doing, man. You know, one thing I did find out, you know, kind of as we were starting to ramp up. Just because you can doesn't always mean you should. That was a big lesson that I learned when I was going from producer to what we're doing now, obviously. But I was a yes man, you know, and that's. I think that's probably why I was grinding my face off so much was like, dude, if my motto was, if it can be insured, I'm your guy.

So you were just like, you weren't niching down and all, doing anything and everything.

And again, it just goes back to, you don't know what you don't know. You know, I come over from Allstate World where you sell auto and home insurance and you have one product. And so I started saying yes. And I always tell this story because if you're listening, facts tell, stories sell. I had this guy never Alex Donahue, Legion of Foam. I'll never forget him. He's here in Round Rock and there's a Nerf gun arena. But also had mobile exposure where he would go to like little kids birthday parties and set up Nerf. And it's kind of like paintball, but with Nerf, right? Yeah, it was like a high risk, right? If you're in pnc, this is what's called excess and surplus lines. So it's basically your high risk insurance goes to excess. And surplus lines, standard carriers that you know of are not going to write it. And so I didn't even know what that meant at that time. I think I was like, ens, cool, whatever. And so I go and I submit it off to this carrier. They end up having to broker it to their broker department. So at this point it's double brokered out. I'm working with these underwriters. It took about a month and a half, 45 pages of accord forms and supplementals, which basically is just bullshit. Standardizes like workflow. You got to like put all this information that maybe doesn't even apply. And I mean, I'm working this thing, man, and I'm thinking, okay, month and a half. I've done so much legwork on this, I'm about to get a pretty freaking paycheck. Well, that binder comes through the day for closing. It's $1,200 a year in the excess and surplus line space. It's all premium financed, so it's not direct bill or anything. So you have to set up a finance agreement. It's all manual renewal, so it doesn't automatically renew every single year. And because it got double brokered out, I got paid 9%, not even including taxes and fees of 1200. So I literally made like less than 100 bucks on this thing. And that was the light bulb moment for me. And listen up here, you know, for me it was that that changed everything. Because, man, I don't need all the carriers in one state. I need the best carriers in all the states. My first actual, like, specializations were auto body shops, real estate investors, and then trucking actually came third. A lot of people say they're for the client. The client doesn't pay you, the carrier does. So go to the carrier and ask them, what business do you want? And so that's where auto body shops came from. Because I knew my carriers just freaking crushed with auto body shops. I never lost an account. People do business with people. Ain't nobody doing business with Clearview. They're doing business with Joe. Right? Or they're doing business with Todd or with Hanky or with Amar or anybody. Like, so that is something also I really learned, like, it doesn't matter that nobody really cares. And also, it's important to have your personal brand because guess what? What if you change companies and then all of that goes away? Because it's. The company is the brand. And it's like, so now regardless of the company, it's Joe. Right? Nobody even knows that like that Redwood freaking got bought or any of that. Like, it's. It's just Joe. Yeah, it's Joe.

So if someone were to, you know, try to follow the same path, it's like personally produce, prove it for yourself.

Yes.

And then you have to build a lead source or kind of for you, it's been organic social media, where you're bringing in all these leads and then just distributing them.

It's organic social media and then outbound efforts. But again, social media, you guys know how the algorithm works. It ain't always going to pop or Facebook goes down. What are we going to do? Right. If all your leads are running through Facebook, it's like, well, shit, like, what happens if it closes down or shuts down for a day? Or you again, the Internet or whatever that might look like. Right. And so for us, we're really heavy on outbound efforts, man.

If you want to build something big, you also have to attract agents. So how do you recommend going about, like, building that brand and creating something that people want to join?

Get behind the camera. If it's uncomfortable, then you're in the right place. And I promise, if you start today, if you keep recording these videos like me and like, we did not get like this behind the camera. I remember my first video, dude, it was like my hand was shaking like this. Now one of my coaches made me. Made us go live. It was my first ever Facebook Live. And I'm like, fuck. And she is like, you have 30 seconds to decide what you're gonna talk about, but you're on camera and you gotta go live. And I'm like, oh, shit. And I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there and y', all, you'd be amazed at just what you're looking at around you that can help you create content. My dog. I was like, oh, dude, I can do pet insurance. I mean, it was cringe. I was like, oh, I gotta delete this. I know. You have to post it. Post it. Dude, I quoted over $17,000 of freaking dog insurance that day from that one. Video is very powerful.

We were talking about as well earlier about how like when you first had your thing was your first kid and the formula that they had to have was like $80.

The elementium. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Talk about that a little bit.

You want to talk about her perspective shift is when did you got like this baby that's like growing in your freaking arms like every single day. It's crazy. You just see it like, oh my gosh, she's like different, right? And she starts to walk. And man, when you have something like that backing your, why yeah, dude, it's crazy. And it's like, okay, she was allergic to Maria's breast milk. She was allergic to all the other formulas we had to get. And it was like we were still barely making money. I was renting out the top floor of my parents house, right? And just trying to figure out this whole thing of being a dad, but also trying to run a scratch freaking insurance agency.

What got you through those tough moments?

End goal. I knew I was there. You saw one of our boards, know why you're here and what you're doing, and I know why I'm here and what I'm doing. And it's to provide. Let's just talk leadership role in general. This can apply to your agency. Maybe you don't have kids and that's totally okay. Did you treat your business like a freaking baby? But man, it just that right there, I knew why I was staying up late. I knew I was waking up early. And that's so important. That's why we start with House of Dreams. Anybody that's watching, if you truly don't feel like, you know, like, what am I even trying to build? Why am I here? What am I doing? You're lacking vision. This is something I got from Cody Askins. I had the dream. I knew what I wanted to do. I had the discipline for sure, which is like the foundation of my House of Dreams. If you're not disciplined anything, there's no point to start building. Right. We all know the foundation is the most important part of the house, but for me, it's like I was lacking vision.

Someone that's, like, in that position, what would your advice be to them?

Reach out.

Yeah.

Seek it out. I will give any and everybody. All of the secrets, all the tricks of the trade. Hey, don't do what Joe did. And you will do in three months what took me three years. But I don't know who you are if you don't hit me up.

Yeah, this is true.

You got to seek it out. All of the people that you probably look up to, or all of the videos, or even Tim or Julian, like, you reach out to them, they will respond. And it's like, it's not a bot. It's not, you know, somebody else running their messenger. So if you reach out to me, I will book a call, I will give you the time of day, and maybe there's synergy there. That's why I do it.

So they want to reach out to you. Hit them up on Facebook. Join Insurance Syndicate.

Yes, sir.

Thank you guys so much for watching.

Awesome. Y' all take it easy.