How David Duford Built An 8-Figure Insurance Agency With YouTube

10, 4.

All right, I think we're live.

Okay, cool. Ladies and gentlemen, we've got the man, the myth, the legend David Deford, known as El Jefe in the streets of Chattanooga, Tennessee, coming to you live here on a Tuesday afternoon in the United States of freaking America. Welcome David Duford to Advanced Agent Marketing. David, how are you, my friend?

Arousing introduction, Julian. Thank you very much.

I tried, I wrote it down and rehearsed it. But yeah, man, love the cowboy hat.

So, yeah, no side note, we had four viewers and after that intro, we now have zero.

Yeah, well, they can eat my intro. That was the best intro ever. So that was pretty good.

I like.

It was phenomenal.

One person joined back.

I'm jumping on two here. So, David.

I know obviously everybody know there's the volume. Everyone knows you for YouTube, they know you for building an agency. Some know you as El Hefe, as we covered earlier, but obviously we've done a ton of stuff together. But for everyone out there, let's say somebody doesn't know you in this, in this industry. Can you give us like a quick synopsis of your story of how you got here and like where you started? Because I think that's always been super inspirational.

Yeah. So I started in final expense in 2011 out of an act of desperation. I had a personal training business that was going down the tubes. Stumbled across Final Expense, realized how much of a great opportunity it was. You know, you're selling a bunch of old people, pretty simple product that, you know, everybody's guaranteed to die. So how could you go wrong? Jumped in, did all right, got away from fundamentals, failed out of the business, then got back part time while working for the man, you know, resolving not to make the same mistakes. Went full time like the day after my wife gave birth to twins and quit the job and you know, shortly thereafter started my agency. Have just slowly been building for about 10 years and more or less doing the same thing since then. So here we are today, fast forward. We got a great business with trainers now, an onboarding team, great presence on YouTube. I was smart enough to jump on that early on and I'm blessed and thankful.

That's awesome.

That's awesome.

So I know, Tim, I know you had lined up a few questions.

Share with us.

Yeah, I kind of, I kind of want to like, because basically what we titled this live as is, you know, how, how you build an eight figure insurance agency with YouTube, which is obviously no joke. I know it's been a lot of time and hard work, but I Mean, I think it would be super valuable to kind of just like dive deep into that story, figure out, you know, what your strategy has been, how you, how like things kind of took off and I got a dog right here trying to get my attention, but just kind of like going back from the beginning and like really telling the whole story as far as how you built the agency.

Yeah, so I, I started selling when I was 26, I'm 38 now. And it dawned on me about 28 years old, that I didn't want to be out here six days a week grinding it out for the rest of my life. At the moment, I enjoyed it, but I only had one kid, I wanted more. And I figured there would come the day where I would have to start making compromises with, you know, having more involvement with my family as my family grew. And so I had a decision where this was about 2013. I was either going to get into Medicare and build a residual income that was what was most important to me at the time. But continue to sell, sell the same people, etc, or transition into final expense, training, recruiting people, etc. And the reason I went with the training side was I looked at the market at the time and it was totally different than now. We didn't have family, first life. I don't even think Cemetery Financial was around. There wasn't. There was maybe one big MLM that was out there recruiting people, but the big emphasis was just on recruiting people to recruit. It was a meat grinder. And what I discovered was, hey, there's a niche here for actually caring about agents, setting them up to be successful and training them to be as best as they could. So I love training, being a personal trainer. Right. It kind of came natural to me, so I went that route. So that was the motivation. And the other side of that is I knew that ultimately the scale on an agency and building it as far as an income potential is just so much more, I think, than just directly selling individual clients. That I knew the upside was it may take longer, but it was far greater if it was successful.

Okay, so you kind of, you saw the opportunity for building an agency, you saw the opportunity for, for YouTube. I mean, like, where did it go from there? Because obviously you were selling in the field, you had kids that were coming, like, how, how did you balance? Because I think a lot of people out there, maybe they, they are like, hey, you know, I should start a YouTube channel or I should start posting content, but they don't really know where to start or how to balance that with also Producing. So like in the very beginning, I know if you go back and look at the earliest videos on, on David's channel, it's like him looking like he's about 22 years old.

In like a, in a bedroom. Just talking about insurance. Like what was it like to just start and then how, how did you balance that with producing at the same time?

So the first thing I want to hit on and taking notes so I can comment, there's a couple of things. This idea of balance, it's. I tell kids that there's a kid down the street who's 19, he does a little bit of work for me. And I probably told you this too when we first started, I said, guys, I gave away my 20s so I could have something great in my 30s, right? Like I didn't party, I didn't do anything. I didn't have a social life, had very little friends. All I did was work my ass off six days a week. I took Sundays off, but I was spending Sunday thinking about getting ready for Monday is really what it was like. My entire 20s and most in some part of my 30s was explicitly dedicated to that. And I really didn't have much to show for that. If you count the personal training years did okay, but I wasn't like fantastically successful. And then final expense took years too. And so the first thing I want to address is how do you balance all this stuff? Well, you work your ass off because it's a business, okay? It's not some sort of, you know, extracurricular activity that you can do in your spare time. This business of recruiting and building an agency is a, is an eight figure plus opportunity. If you look at the exit of what these agencies are going for. And if you think about it in the long term, it needs all of your time and it should dedicate all your time because if you put it in, the output's incredible. Just not just in the wealth and the income, but the lifestyle, the things that you can do, the freedom you have. So I want to address the balancing to anybody who's interested in starting, you give your life up to it. I mean, you might as well accept it because that many times is the difference maker, I think from those people who are half heartedly into it, but not all the way in. And then the second thing is about YouTube. I didn't start YouTube till like a year and a half. I don't even remember. Oh, I remember what caused me to go into YouTube. I remember I was on the insurance forum. So this is before Facebook groups There's. The insurance forum was very active back in 2013, and Doug Massey was on there. Doug Massey, he's on YouTube too. He's still around. We've known each other forever. He put out a video and the first thing I thought was, this is the stupidest idea. Why would this man, who's very good at final expense, give away his most valuable information for no, for nothing in return? No expectations to join or anything? And that was the proverbial devil on my shoulder saying, you know, just talking it down like it's idiotic. But I luckily had the angel on my shoulder saying, well, this is the best idea. Because if you give away everything for free, if you try to help people without any expectation return, it totally turns the expectations of everybody, of what they're going to think on their head. And the thing, the thought they'll eventually have is if it's this good and it's free, well, how good is it when I actually join? Right. Yeah. And. And so I luckily tapped into that and listened to that and, and that was the only reason I have success. That and timing. But it's because I really went all into that. I really gave everything I knew into my channel over the course of years, which developed this brand equity that, you know, it, it, it affords me a luxury in the marketplace when it comes to recruiting that some others don't have because they don't give that.

So almost like the, the Hormozi thing before, like Hormozi even got rich.

Yeah, Hormozi was following my stuff, guys.

Exactly right.

No, but it's, it's old as it's. It's just everything, right? The art, the law of reciprocity, right? It's if you give first people, some, not everybody, but there's a percentage that will give back. And the thing is, in this day and age, and it's still true today, as it was 10 years ago when I started YouTube, there we're in a crisis of trust, right? People don't know who to trust. There's too much information and there's too many people who are slick and trying to one up on you. And if you take that position in your marketing and your content creation is just trying to help people. People may be turned off by it at first, but they'll eventually realize you actually mean it and they'll want to do business with you. Percentage of them. Well, it just takes a long time. It takes longer than you think. But it is the way to approach all content. Really. All. Everything really in business well, let, I.

Kind of want to walk through because obviously like you started posting videos of what, 2013, 2014.

2014. So I think May 2014. And I did my first one.

Okay, so it's nine years later. Right. What, what was the, what was the growth trajectory like? Because obviously, you know, I think we, we've, you've shown us the YouTube growth projection in the past, but how did that translate to the agency? Right, because obviously like now whenever we talk to agents, I'd say most people fall into one of three IMOs, Symmetry, FFL or Duford Insurance Group, at least the ones that we work with.

Sure.

So like you're, you're growing fast and it's, it's only getting faster. Like it's compounding on itself. What was the trajectory like with the YouTube and then maybe what was the correlation with that to the agency and how did those kind of line up?

Yeah, I mean it was slow at first. Right. But I didn't put out a lot of content. I put out some content, got away from it for about a half a year and it was really slow. I mean if you could visualize the chart of time over views watched, it wasn't until really two or three years in, man, to where it started getting a much noticeably larger amount of views. And part of that is timing. There's been a, I think I got ahead of the final expense, senior market stuff before it really started taking hold in the late teens with the big three letter IMO's coming out, really pushing it. And so I just kind of was riding that wave of bringing more interested people into the business that had no idea it existed and I was already pre positioned, I think. So I think there's a timing element to it, but it didn't happen overnight. And you know, I just kind of figured it out as I went. You know, I had nobody telling me what to do. I just kind of filmed stuff I thought was helpful and got feedback and kept doing it and trying to get better along the way.

Okay. And so like, would you say. Because obviously like we've seen the, the YouTube trajectory that obviously takes time. What was the agency growth trajectory like? Like, was it? Yeah, like when would you say things kind of started to take off with the, with the agency? Because I feel like even in the last two years or so that we've been with you, I feel like it's changed a lot.

For sure. Sure. So I sold. So back to that kind of balancing. I sold full time till 2017. Okay. So I started in 2013 recruiting it didn't. And I was recruiting consistently throughout the time, but not at scale. About 2017, four, four and a half years of doing recruitment. Well, really five. I guess I felt comfortable enough to let off the gas of my personal production and go part time. And then I fully got out of selling completely I think in 2019. But at that point I was like once a month ride alongs with a guy, you know, taking a guy for field training. So. So yeah, for me it was very slow. That's one piece of advice of course to any agency builder is don't give up your personal production. You know, because you're taking on inherent risk, you're co signing the potential for bad debt for people that you really don't know. Right. And you need a volume of agents before you can predictably let off your own personal production so that you can depend on theirs without having to worry about selling. You know, a lot of agents get out too soon and that's a big, that's a big challenge, a big problem. And you don't want to let go too soon of the personal production.

Got it. Okay, so it sounds like you were just like training people one on one in the field, still posting the YouTube videos and then like what, where you know, when you would recruit people, like what did that look like? Was it just people DMing you or they responded to something on YouTube or how did.

So. So a couple of things I never did. Number one, I never, except for one streak of two weeks, I've never put my number out publicly. Now okay, that's arguably a bad idea, but my reason was, is I wanted people to jump through hoops to work with me because something is worth more when it's not easily accessible. That's kind of how I look at it. So I've, I've gone through a bunch of iterations. So when it comes to my recruiting process and I'm happy to tell you how it's done now because it's much different. At first it was hey, you're interested, we do a talk, we like each other, let's work together. Right. It's as simple as that. Without any sort of qualification, the budget goals, long term, etc. I've done one on ones for everybody who is interested in joining. I've done Q and A calls where we've talked to everybody in groups and then ask people to join. And so now what we do is we do a sales assessment, we do an application, a sales assessment and an interview because there's again we get into that as Much as you want to.

There's.

There's big chargeback risks, and it's worse now than ever has been. So you have to be very selective with who you're going with. So it's changed a good bit over the years.

Got it. Okay. And so now, like, with all of the, all of the screening that you're doing, like, how. How many agents would you say you have on board now versus, you know, a couple years, a year ago?

Yeah, we're. We probably have somewhere between 200 and 300 actively writing most of that. That's a month. So that's mostly final expense. There's definitely some Medicare and ACA agents and a few annuity guys mixed in the mix, but it's. That's the minority. It's probably 80% final expense. Life business with most final expense and, and my recruiting volume to add today. I don't know if you wanted me expand on that. It's actually dropped, but it's because I set up these qualifiers to filter out the bad agent, and I say bad agents, just not a good fit agent. It may be good else, but to. To make sure we're really working with the B and A level agents only.

Okay, that makes perfect.

We may. We may expand on that. We may recruit, you know, summer, maybe 20 to 25 agents a month. Right now it's probably closer to 40. That's kind of our running number. 30 to 40. We're working on scaling that up, of course, but. Whereas a year ago it was 80 to 100. You know, that's. And. But that was with very little qualification. So that kind of goes to show you what happens when you put that layer on. Incidentally, my income's gone up. Like, we've doubled our production and, and revenue as an agency because of that, even though we've cut our recruiting down because we care about the quality of the experience for the right type of selection of agents.

That's insane. That I don't. I don't know of too many other, like, IMOs that make you do an interview or like, actually are selective with who they'll take on.

Yeah, it's. It's fun. It's funny, Tim, because.

When everybody zigs, you want to zag, right? Like, I really believe in the velvet rope principle, which is, you know, you go to the club, you got the velvet road up, right? And it appears to be much more of a exclusive thing. And the velvet rope principle applied to my agency is you don't get to immediately talk to me. You don't Immediately get to join. You have to prove that you're worth dealing with. You have to apply, you have to do a sales assessment, you have to interview. And then if you don't go through our process onboarding, we fire you. And we let go of agents on a weekly basis who come on and they show like they're good, but they don't actually go through the process of rehearsing the script, going through the motions. And it sounds like a lot of work because it is because we hold our people at a higher level of standards because we get good results for them. And if you don't fire people and get rid of them, then what you do is you change the whole culture of the agency.

For.

Right.

So, so, yeah, so for, for people.

That are out there that are like, hey, you know, I want to have an eight figure agency. I just, you know, don't want to post on YouTube or whatever it is. Right. What would, what would be your biggest keys of advice for someone that wanted to start? Like if you were to, if you were to do it all over again, what would you tell somebody starting?

Yeah, yeah. So the biggest thing I've had to unravel in my mind is, is that this may come as a shock to some of my long term viewers. So bear with me as I explain it that the MLM process is inherently bad. And what I've realized as I've gone through my years, especially recently, it's not that recruiting people to recruit is bad. You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What's bad is when a new guy that doesn't know shit recruits another guy and then is supposed to be responsible for training that agent to be successful, you're doing a disservice to that person you're recruiting. If you don't know anything and there's not an existing quality control platform in place to make their experience as top level as it can be. And so what we've done differently at the DIGG Agency is we control the quality of the experience for each of our agents. We now allow our agents to recruit because we want them to gain an override. But what we do is we apply our filtering process, our training process and that quality control process to every single recruit that comes in. So we can, we can ensure that that agent is going to be the right match and that they're going to get all the resources necessary to be successful again. I see this as the big problem with all the three letter IMOs out there is they, it's, it's it's fine to empower people, to recruit people to recruit, to build a business. The problem is, what do you do with them when you got them? And so much of what happens after the fact for most of these agencies suck. And so our attempt is to try to solve for that and to give that experience better. A much better experience at agent, Meaning that they'll go out there and actually have some success. So that's been a big change for me. If I could have done it all over again, Tim, I would have absolutely embraced that. Created a better quality control experience earlier. Been okay with saying, you can recruit, but let us do the work while you enjoy the fruits of getting out there to do the recruitment.

Got it. So you're basically having people bring people on, rewarding them for bringing people on, and then you guys are handling the training so that they're not stuck under, like, some crappy downline that doesn't know what they're doing.

Yeah, yeah. So. So the typical agency, and this is what I don't like about the typical IMO structure, is that there's that one sub agency, right? Can be totally different than another one could be totally focused on training and support. And that's what you hear when they're promoted. But then the other one sucks. And they came from Amway or they came from herbalife, and they do this whole MLM thing. And you get this just totally different experience. And so me, my take was like, well, why don't we just eliminate that, Hire people, put really good trainers in place that have street cred to take control of that process, and then do a filtering mechanism to make sure the agents were taking on. Aren't dead weight or going to rip you off or, you know, making sure that they're a good fit. And the results have been fantastic. That's what we've implemented at the beginning of the year. It's different, but, boy, is. It's just, again, so many agents get out of this business that that would not have if they had something like what we do, which is a much more streamlined process to make sure that they're getting success.

Okay. So you bring someone on and then you match them with a trainer. My question is, how do you. How. How do you pay trainers if they're not technically on their downline, Right? Because, like, if you bring someone in, I know, for example, you have some of the trainers. Tim Hildebrand is one. Why would Tim Hildebrand train agents if he's not making an override?

Well, so he gets. He gets a production Bonus, Right. So. So I pay base plus a production bonus on their, on their assigned downlines. And we say assign downlines or downline to me, but we pay a quarterly bonus based off of issue paid business for that prior quarter. So they're incentivized to train these people, make sure they're successful and then do well. Right. So. So yeah, there's. It's not the same as running a business, right. But it's this nice little deal where if you are recruiting enough and you're keeping them on and they're successful, it's. It's an easily a six figure income opportunity. And it's. Yeah, it's. So it's. We, what we've done is we've divvied up the roles of, you know, what does an agency owner do? Right, well, they recruit, they train, you know, they support. Now we've kind of taken the recruitment part out. I'm responsible for that or the company's responsible for that. And then the training part is what we've built into our business model as being, you know, what an employee would do.

Okay. So the trainers are basically like employees. Do they still sell or.

No, I mean, they did in the beginning. In the beginning, we started in part time because, you know, it's like, is this going to work? I don't know. Let's try it and see what happens. Right. And as we started to build up and get more interest and they didn't have time to sell their full time. All three of them now are full time now.

Okay, so like a new agent comes into to dig, which I just thought about. You're technically a three litter imo, so you might, we might have to change the sound.

All right. Yeah, the other three.

Right. The other ones not dig, obviously. So someone comes in to dig. Right. How are you placing them with a trainer?

Yeah, it's, it's. So we assign it by how they want to sell. So with us you can sell over the phone or you can sell in person. Also, you can take free leads if you sell in person or you can buy your own. So we have a free lead program. We'll provide the leads to them. And we're working for something less comp. Exactly, yeah. And we're upfront with it. We'll move them to the higher comp. Buy your own leads after a period of time if they want to, depending on if the agents built to be that way. And that's a different conversation we can have for sure. And then for telesales, we're about to implement a free lead program that proved challenging. Our first iteration of that didn't really work well back in October. November, December when we went with it. But we're going to do it again. We've got a much more robust system I think for training and leads now that I think we can make it work. So it. So yeah, they're assigned based off of what their interests are and the agent, of course. So the trainer is, is a specialist in that niche. Face to face or telesels. Right. So they get a relevant trainer with relevant experience that can relate to them.

Got it. Okay. So they basically get a trainer and then they still have an upline or.

Yeah, I'm the upline, you know, so. So technically in the hierarchy, the dig agency is the upline. The trainer though is responsible for the management, the coaching, most levels of support. Right?

Yeah. You know, so basically anyone new that comes on is direct to you and then the trainer manages them and then if somebody recruits someone, then they can be below them.

Yeah, yeah. And what's cool is the trainer gets paid off of that recruit. So they're assigned to that trainer. Right. So they get their bonus on that downlines recruits production. So everybody wins in this equation.

I've never heard of another agency like that. That's insane.

Very sophisticated. I like it.

Yeah, I'm thinking about that.

Guys, the pro. The problem is if you're new out there, like nobody does this because I don't know why, because many of the people come from the MLM backgrounds and it's not that revolutionary. I mean all we're doing is just answering the biggest reason why agents fail, which is bad agency selection, bad training and bad experience. So we're just trying to control for that, that experience. So it's better to. In my opinion, it's better to centralize that so you can have a consistent output as opposed to letting the downlines, the uplines decide how it is. It's like McDonald's. You want to have a consistent experience at every McDonald's. The same process here. Right. So. So that you can make sure that the end user is actually getting the results that they want.

So you just have like a. It's a very wide. Because is everyone directed to you to direct to day, basically.

Correct.

Is that, I guess the, I guess the only like concern with that would be what roll up debt if something were to happen or people were.

You want, you want to talk about that? How we control for that now?

Yeah, I'm curious. I mean, I don't know if like how many people are actually like, maybe, maybe I'm going you know, a bit over like the average person's head with the agency talk.

But like this is, this is like I'm in on this. I don't care if we get no views. Let's talk about it.

Yeah, for real.

So, so here's how we control for roll up debt. So I, I lost 125000 in roll up debt last year. It was my biggest loss year yet because I was doing this like you got a post, come on in stuff, right? It wasn't that blatant, but it was enough of that. And we didn't control for who we selected and we didn't ensure that they were who they were. And so this is what happens, right? So year to date and, and the biggest. And if you're new to agency building or thinking about it, you're. Everybody gets 500,000, 1500 roll ups, that happens, okay? That's why you should continue to sell. What really takes you out of the business are the people who should be put into federal, you know what jail and are are basically doing 50 to $100,000 fraudulent roll up debt, okay. They're literally thieving people's information, fraudulently doing applications and like getting $50,000 in advance debt and then disappearing. Okay? That's what takes you out of this business. It's not the little stuff. Okay, so how do you control for that? Because you want to control for any roll up debt, but especially the fraud roll up debt because that's the big stuff to take, takes you out. So the number one is you want to do an identity check. So this is less of the problems that we see. But fraud really picked up with COVID So I use a service called Burbix and what it does is it uses the user's iPhone or smartphone and it does what's called a liveness check. And it, and then it compares it to their ID to make sure that the ID that they have matches facially what's on the ID in real life. Right? So why is that a matter? Because there is, I've heard carriers tell me people have stolen identities of insurance agents, gotten appointed and then did all this, right? So this step, and it's really cheap, it's like 100 bucks a month. This prevents that from happening, right? The second thing I do is I, I call it Scared Straight. Now you guys are probably too Young to remember MTV, but there was a show back in the 90s where all these like deviant kids would go into A local federal pen, right? And these gang bangers that ran for like life would basically tell them like if you don't shape up, you're going to be in here and be my, you know what, right? You know, and they'd walk them around and you know, just like this is what's going to happen to you, right? So I call this the Scarum straight process. That's what I related to. So here's how. So in the onboarding process.

We show them how we have gone after agents and how our partner companies have gone after agents who have defrauded us. The first thing we show them is, is an agent who did $350,000 in roll up how he went to jail for eight years in department of Illinois. We've got, we've got the documents, they're redacted to protect identities, but you can clearly see it's a summary judgment. The guy's on the hook for 350 grand and he's, he goes to the, the, he goes to jail for eight years at, in, at the state level. Okay. And then we show another agent we got their license revoked. We discuss how we're going to go after several that have ripped me off and how we're pursuing civil and criminal lawsuits against them. And so the whole, whole theory is this. And then there's another part I'll get to, to audit your books. But the whole theory is this, if you are a thief, if you're gonna steal, you want to make sure you steal and not get caught, okay? Nobody really steals or does criminal activity with the hopes they're going to end up in jail, right? Nobody wants that, okay? Even the worst, the worst. So if I'm a thief and I'm looking in my cul de sac right now and there's a house that all the lights are off, nobody's home, there's no evidence of cameras going to rob that house instead of the next door house that has the, you know, growling pit bull and the lights all on and the, you know, the come take them over my dead body gun, you know, flags or whatever, right?

Criminal and go after the low hanging fruit. And so what you have to do, guys, I say all this because you have to set up these boundaries so that the people who think they're going to rip you off and get away with it will maybe, just maybe it's better just to go to one of those three letter IMOs that doesn't do any of this crap, okay? That doesn't do any of this stuff and steal from them instead of this guy who's like, saying all this crap and he sounds a little off the deep end, you know, And. And that scares away those handful of guys that'll ruin your entire business. But it'll also keep the good guys. It won't scare the good guys off because they're like, I'm not going to do this stuff. So that's what you do on the front end as you're onboarding them. Scare them straight. What you do on the back end is you need to hire a VA to call on your entire book of business for the. Not the entire, Excuse me. But for your new agents to call a quarter of their book of business and just say, hey, congratulations, I see you signed up with ABC Life Insurance Company. Thank you so much for the business. We're just calling the. Thank you. Have a great day. And when you do that, two things happen. One, you dial the number and it doesn't work. The frauds just put in fake numbers. Okay? Or they dial and it works. And the people are like, hell, I don't remember taking this out. What are you talking about? I've had insurance for years. I never did this. And they're like, what do you mean? Tell me what you mean. Well, it looks like on this date. No, I had no idea this. And so you can stop this onslaught of debt that can accumulate. So you need to hire somebody who will make the phone calls, and you really need to screen the new people and you need to again, tell the new people that this is going to happen. Because again, the real people who should be afraid of that are the people who are going to rip off. Because it's like, oh, they're auditing the books and they're. They file civil and criminal lawsuits and they've shown evidence that they put people in jail. I don't want to deal with this guy. And to this day, knock on wood, I don't have fraud. I've not had one enormous chargeback issue like I did last year.

So.

And it's nine months into this, which is. Thank God. So, again, if you're new to this business, you might think what I've talked about is over the top. And I've gone into a ton of detail. Well, tell me how to find people and how to recruit. I get it. But you need to, because you're an insurance agent, think like an insurance agent for your business. This is an insurance policy you need to take out on your business from the first day to protect against bad things happening to you. Because all it Takes and it hurt it for years. Is one bad agent destroying your business, putting you on vector, losing your advances. You can never get new appointments. If you're with a care or an agency that sucks and you want to move, you can't do it until you pay the vector off. Like you want to avoid that. And you can easily avoid it if you think through it.

I've been hogging questions. What questions you got?

No, I just, I'm just glad we came to dig.

I'm gonna call it like the dig.

Sales team or something.

Just digst that way it's not a three letter one, but digest the digest. This is good stuff. I really like this. I told, I told David the other day, I was like dude, you gotta, you gotta spit the wisdom at me and Tim man, because there's big things coming in the future and.

Yeah, there's nobody really taking these types of measures in the business. I think it's, I think.

So I talked to, so I'll tell you this real quick. I talked to a guy who's with another three letter imo. We all know who they are. He, he ate $150,000 debt last year. Same, same crap.

I think I sent that guy to you.

You did, and thank you by the way. And you know, their IMO said, oh, we've got lawyers and we've got this and that. You just stay put while we go ahead and fight this for you. They never did anything, you know, so, so it's, it's a shame because. And I never heard anybody doing anything like this until, you know, I got, you know, screwed up, just started putting things into place and so I just can't stress enough if, no matter what, if you're with any IMO out there, you, it's your responsibility to protect that. Because nobody, these people, these uplines, they don't care about you. They're not going to pay the debt off. If you're out there recruiting, you got to cover your own backside, okay? And a lot of them are at the top of the pyramid and they've got row after row of downlines and they're not, they don't care. Somebody's going to absorb it. So they're not motivated. You have to protect your own.

So that's insane. So I feel like we've gotten a better picture of your agency. Right? Like people, come on. I, I guess the, the, the, the thing that I'm kind of unclear about, right? So let's say an agent, if an agent comes from you, your YouTube, they go direct under you, right? If that person wants to build, they can get a downline.

And then can the downline get a downline? Like can it build out like this or you're just trying to go like this?

It could, it could. I'm not big on the, you know, recruit to recruit to recruit at my present mindset about it is hey, if you're doing well, tell somebody. You know, most people hate their jobs. A lot of people love the idea of working from home or working on their own terms and actually selling a product they can feel proud of, you know, like that's what we have to offer in the insurance space. Tell people about it, you know and you know, all you have to do is just tell people about it. You don't have to worry about recruiting them or you may be talking to about the opportunity but beyond that, the training, the support, the vetting, like that's our job, right. And there's in the way we set it up now there's enough spread based off of the new agents commission, what I pay my people, my trainers, you know, that everybody can win and it's still a good opportunity for everybody. In, in the downline.

Do you feel like there's a cap to how far you can scale with the current model or not really, like with how people direct to you.

You know, the cap is really going to be marketing medium related, you know, like I really think for me now, don't, no, but no, if you're doing YouTube, don't let this discourage you from starting or continuing it. I feel like in a sense I've capped out for years on the YouTube stuff. Like if you look at my stats, it's weird. Like I have had the same. I get 75 to 80,000 views a month and have for the last three or four years. I steadily get 500 to 600 new subscribers. Like I've been in this weird lull. Like it's not bad but like my recruitment volume is represent. It's not like I'm not getting more out of YouTube than I already do. And so I think where scale is going to be limited and this has been kind of my realization is my next move with scale is moving on developing some sort of outbound system. So, so my big task for the next year is we're testing, we're testing email right now. Email marketing. There it is. 100 million. Exactly.

You read it?

No, but I've watched enough of his content that I've basically stolen his ideas on.

He's got a whole thing on outbound in There. I would definitely. We'll send you one. We have like 13 of them and.

I don't want to. I'll take it. Thank you. But no, it's so, so we're building. That's fine. We're building, you know, outbound processes on, you know, just cold DM outreach.

We'Re gonna do, we're doing email. We'll eventually trial outbound cold calling. I think really anything's up for grabs because again, the thing is, is that for, for us to get to the next level of recruitment which, which we, we have a great system. We, our system is fantastic when it comes to the operational side. What we lack. And I'm just telling you where our weakness is, that the one thing that if, if we can 10x is if we can get that recruitment volume in. I mean it's, it's balls of the wall. Right. So that's my task for the next. And has been for the last six months, it will be indefinitely is finding that next system to really start to scale up, process. And so, you know, we know what works out cold outbound. I mean ffl, build their agency on cold outbound and Instagram, you know, that works really well.

Agencies have built it on cold calling. I don't think that's, I think that's still viable if you have the right offer. Right. So. So that's where we're at right now is that testing phase. And as I start figuring stuff out with that, I'll, I'll start talking about that. But that, that's something I think everybody should take advantage of because that's more controllable, it's more scalable. YouTube can cut your content at any point. You know, I mean you can't always depend on social media. It's great to have it, but what if it's gone? You know what happens, you know, so get canceled.

Very true. You say get canceled or get canceled.

You could get canceled. Yeah, you know.

Say the wrong thing.

Yeah, this is true. Very true. To demonetized.

Yeah, yeah, it's all gone.

An incident.

Well, cool.

Julian, you got any more questions?

I don't think I have any more questions. I have some behind the scenes questions, but other than that, nothing. I think we've, we've, we've given.

I had some stuff in.

Yeah, 100 and then I don't know. Let me see if we got anyone, anyone that has questions that's watching like drop them, drop them below. It's Q and A. So any questions you guys have, we're down asking. But yeah, David, go for it.

So a couple of things that I just wholly recommend.

Regardless of what you do, if you're doing any kind of content and you should, to drive traffic to your website, make sure that you're collecting their email. Okay? Like the thing I didn't do for the first five years that I wish I did was collect contact information. Okay. You're gonna have people if you do this long enough that say, hey, I've watched you or I've seen your stuff for years now I'm ready. Okay, so you want to get their information, so just give them something for free. Don't be, you know, give them a free script, you know, give them a free guide. I don't know, whatever. Don't be over complicated. But have some kind of pop up. Opt in monster is really good. That's what I use in my website. Have it pop up. Yeah, they're annoying, but it really works. So that's all that matters. And collect their information and do that religiously the rest of your business. Okay, so like that's, that's a big one. I just wanted to throw that out there because you know, some people, they'll put all this content out and they don't collect anything from anybody. It's just like.

Yeah, no, I, I think that's huge. I mean just in the last year or so that we've been doing things, we have like 10,000 contacts.

That's awesome. Wow. Really?

6,000 emails? Yeah, 6,000 emails or something.

That just pisses me off because when I started I'm like, I think I got like 5,000 in my first year. In like 17 when I started doing, I was like, why did I wake up? You know, so good, good. That's money. That's. You're stacking money with that list and.

So give it up.

This is true.

Same with the insurance leads, man. The more leads you have, the more, the more contact. It's just data, man. Like data wins.

Oh, and email them to. You all know how much I email. I mean, I think I sent out five emails to my list today. And every, I don't get, I don't get much hate mail. I really don't. But I send out no less than 15 emails to my, my weekly, you know, opt in list. And as long as you're giving something and it's valuable, like people will, people will click on it and, and, and they can opt out at any time, but they choose not to.

So they definitely won't forget you if you email them and you have to.

I Mean like my wife's email box. Like my email's always empty. Like I keep it under 2015. I'm on top of my wife. Like I remember looking at her, her iPhone one day, I'm like, you've got 7,000 unread emails.

I think 35,000.

I think it might be 40.

I believe it. So, so you're so as a marketer, like it's, it's not the frequency or emails, it's the fact that they just don't ever get read, you know and so you have to increase the frequency to increase your chances of being read. So, so for example, when you want to recruit people you should be reminding them weekly, hey, we're take, we're recruiting. Come on down, come on down. You know, keep it up. So yeah.

That'S, that's true.

Dominique has 50,000 unread emails. I might have you beat.

How can you live with yourself? Those emails have to be read and managed and, and gotten rid of. But you know, at some point it's just like let it go, you know? Yeah.

At some point you give up. I think it's in the thousands mark. I try to keep mine at zero. I give up. Yeah, it just pile up quick.

You're, you're getting enough emails from David Duford you can't, you can't open.

About 20, 000 of those at Dominic are probably not.

Yeah, seriously, that's hilarious.

100. Well, yeah. Anyone, anyone in the comments got a question? I know you know David's a super busy guy growing this agency so we appreciate him. Jumping on.

Yeah. Enjoyed it.

Yeah. If anyone has any questions, drop them in. We'll. Let me see, give a guys seconds to see.

I don't know like if you guys like this content, I mean feel free to give us a, like it lets us know to keep making stuff like this. If you don't like it then, then don't click the like button. Just get off the channel and we'll know to, to, to never make this again. But if, if you guys think this is valuable, please shoot us a. Like my buddy introduced me to David and his content is great. I'm stuck in one of those multi level companies and I'm ready to get out of it. Cesar, I think we've actually spoken before. I'm not sure if you, I'm not sure if, I'm not sure if I'm putting the right name to the face but if I am, get the hell out of there. Respectfully. And yeah, I mean I've been I've been working with David for. I don't know, David, how long we've been working together?

Year and a half months, too. Yeah.

Yeah, A little over a year. And I wrote over 4,200 today. I think it was on. On these assurance leads that we do. And the best thing I ever did was leave my three letter imo, so.

And go to another one.

Yeah, and go to another three letter imo.

Dig.

Let's see. When you recommend starting to recruit.

That's a great question.

Yeah, I think, I think that's fine. You know, just. Just understand that the skill set to be a successful recruiter and mentor is different from a salesperson. You know, some sales people are just naturally good and they don't understand why they're good. So you're going to have to take this role of being an educator almost and, and being patient with people, you know, and, and understanding that, you know, people like you, Dominique, are. Are hard to find, you know, like.

I'm just a damn good trainer, too.

Animal.

He's actually taught me quite a few things in our zoom room. We do one every day.

Yeah, I. I do it. Give it a shot, man. I mean, you know, start a YouTube channel. Talk about your, you know, talk about your sales calls. Go over some of the information you're doing. Talk about. Objection. You know, like, create a little, like, niche and people. You, you know, and I, I can tell you this, being out. One of my weaknesses as a channel, I think, is that I don't sell anymore. I don't have to, you know, but so I don't have, like, relevant content right now of me closing, like, some of the other guys, like you guys have and some of the other guys out there. And, like, that's an edge that you guys have that I don't, you know, putting that content out there is, like, really good. People want to see that stuff. So. So, yeah, go for me.

I think that's a fire question.

Fire.

Fire.

All right, other questions we have here or. We only got two likes. So I guess this is probably the last live we're ever gonna do. I don't know. I'm gonna update this, but yeah, if you guys drop us a. Like, if you want us to do.

More stuff like this, if.

Seven likes. Okay, gotcha. So half of the people want to see this. If you don't want to see this comment. I've never wanted to watch this. I just accidentally ended up here.

Cesar says.

Wow. Okay, I'm done. Thanks for the push. Yeah, man.

Of course.

We're here to help, man.

Caesar, just real quick. Hey.

You know, you, you assume your carriers will be stuck at your imo. You know, I'm sure this is a familiar story or guys, right? Yeah. There are plenty of others you can get as rare if I, I've almost never seen an agent who couldn't move and just pick up other companies and then somewhere after 612 months, you can move those carriers over. But people do business with you, not the carriers. And yeah, it's a pain if you got to like relearn everything, but you're the magic behind your business, not the carriers. And, and you only have this much time in this business, guys. And, and if you're, if you're in a bad situation, you know, don't endure it. You know, you probably have the personality type that, yeah, I'm, I'm hard worker. I'll just put my head down to work. Well, in this instance, it's, it's, there's the psychology is playing against you. You got to position yourself so you can perform well and have longevity. Because at the end of the day, this business about, is just about surviving. If you can survive this business for the first couple of years, you'll be just fine. But if you can't because you're in a bad setup or you're getting poorly paid or not getting training, I mean, the clock's ticking. You don't let it. You don't have to.

It's very true.

I love it.

David, where, where can people find you if they want to reach out and learn more about joining your agency?

Sure, David. Duor.com if you check when you go to that site, there's a menu at the top. The FAQ link will tell you more about our agency, who we're looking for as agents. Also the testimonials were. We're very diligent about having a preponderance of proof. We have over 295 star reviews and dozens upon dozens of case studies to just validate that we know what we're doing. We can help you. We do a live Q A call every single day. If you'd like to ask us questions about join, no obligation join, of course. And then if you like what you see, you can see how to apply and go from there.

I think right as you said that we got like five questions. You have?

Yeah, they hit us all the questions. Hey, where's Dave? They're like keyboard.

Yeah, yeah, let's go through rapid because my, my wife and I are gonna go walk here in A minute but I still hear yeah.

You want to answer this one real quick?

Yeah. Deanne. Nice to meet you. I'm Julia and I am working these assurance leads here that we develop at advanced agent marketing so I write business on those. We're going to be building a massive enterprise here as like an agency in the future. So we're just doing the zoo assurance leads and I did yeah I did over 4200 today I did a term policy and two final expenses. The last one I couldn't get approved because I don't have the carrier yet but working on it so we'll have another one coming through for 1131 I'm.

100% sure so 4200 plus 131 yeah but that.

That doesn't count. I haven't written that one yet. That is coming though. It will come. I'm the only one who can get her approved so we're good but yeah zoo Sharon all the way is I'm an I'm with an IMO and thinking about getting out. Is there a procedure to get out of an imo Just jump. That's it.

Just like that meme with the road warrior you know just walk away.

Just walk away.

You know just that you don't have to get I wouldn't give your two week resignation again. Some people think well I want to do the right thing and let them know if you do that they're going to cut your advances they'll get rid of you and then you'll be out of the business for weeks and sometimes that'll end an agent's career. The best thing to do is just do it on on the download be quiet about it. Pick up different carrier contracts with your agency and slowly transition over to the other one because just like fail out.

Low key I think that's kind of the bet like yeah he didn't make it is the best thing it can say about you. They will stab you in the back if they get the opportunity.

Yeah you have to watch your back guys. It's just. It sucks but that's how it is in this business. There's no way around it.

Can you join career program with the David this one's for you. Can you criminal lead burner I don't know if you want to talk to this cat but.

Sounds like he likes the phone. Sure. Yeah so we our career programs for free is free leads for face to face that's how our system works right now we're again probably in the next quarter gonna have Free leads for telesales. But absolutely, if you wanted to start that way and then transition to the phone, that's 100. Fine.

Okay, awesome. And then I see Dave, Sebastian, Diaz. We're just rapid firing these basically. I'll summarize that real quick for you. Do you see any regulations coming to the ACA market for.

Consumers?

Yeah, of course it's, it's, you know, no pun intended with the hat. But it's the wild wild west right now with aca there's no think about how that compares to Medicare. Sebastian, with Medicare you can't cold call. You got the 48 hour cooldown, right. Like there's all this, this like limiting business, limiting stuff in the way. Whereas aca, there's nothing. And you've got probably the biggest problem with ACA right now is that you can go in and do an agent of record change like it within minutes and it's, it's, it's at some point it's all gonna stop. And as far as the no call lead stuff, you know, I've promoted that stuff in the past. I still think it works. It's not for everybody. It takes a lot of time. The persistency is not going to be as good as if you personally sold them. But it's really a system I think if you're going to do, you've got to go all into and you've got to spend a lot of money and time and accept the fact that the persistency is not going to be as good. But the way to look at it is, you know, strike while the iron's hot, create a book of business and then if it gets cut off where you can't do that anymore, well, you still have that book of business and then you can still service those people. Work, referral, sell other products, products, etc.

That's awesome.

You want to touch on this real quick and then I think that's.

Yeah, I'll wrap this up.

Yeah.

Deanne, I wrote carriers, I wrote Mutual of Omaha and two Aetna Ascendo. Now these leads are not David leads, they're, they're our leads through Zoo Assurance. It's like our branded lead program that we have. This is actually why I got back into producing because I mean why wouldn't I? I can have days like that working Zoo Assurance leads. So yeah, so if you guys want to learn more about how you can, you know how, how I did the, wrote the $4,200 in a day and how you can get leads that are also, you know, having commerce real conversations about life insurance, not asking for something that's free or about, you know, whether or not they can win a yacht this winter. Then you can clear.

I think there's a link down below.

That you can actually click to get more information. So www.advanced advancedagentmarketing.com and you guys can get more information on that. And if you want to hop on a call to see if you qualify to work with our, our trusted brand and, and get these leads, then we'd love to meet you and get to know you a little bit. We actually do interviews as well for these because our faces are on this. It's our brand. We put a lot of money into this. So you can click that link down below if you want to learn more. But other than that, David, you're the man. Thanks for hopping in here. Don't hang up because we do have to save this. And then everyone, thanks for hopping on. Really appreciate it. It for those of you that didn't like it, we're never going to make one of these again. For those of you that did, we're going to be here next Tuesday at 4:30 Pacific Standard Time. And let's go write some business guys. Let's go protect some families and see if we can't get our own cowboy hats. You guys have a good one. We'll see you there. Peace.

Bye.