How To Pick The Right IMO (Don't Get Screwed)

Picking an IMO is one of the first and most important decisions that you will make as an insurance agent. Depending on who you put your contracts with, you can either supercharge your insurance career or set yourself back financially for years. In this video, I'm going to break down the seven things that you need to consider when picking an IMO so that you can avoid making a costly mistake like myself and so many others have in the past. Starting with number one, which is arguably the most important, is is common. I want you to imagine that you're given $100,000 to start a pizza restaurant. Lo and behold, you know absolutely nothing about the pizza business. So your first move is to partner with someone who's run a successful pizza restaurant. You're deciding between two guys, John and Tony. John is only asking for 10% of the business, but he wants to be a silent partner. He offers to connect you with his vendors for the ingredients and answer this semi occasional phone call, but that's about it. Tony on the other hand, is asking 30%. However, not only has Tony started and ran his own successful pizza restaurant, he has 20 successful franchises and a proven framework and model to help you go from a pizza know nothing to a pizza kingpin. So which deal would you take? I'd work with Tony 100% of the time. Unfortunately, there are IMO's who give John level support but want 50% of your business. So the money is in finding the perfect balance. When you partner with an agency or imo, you need to think of them like a business partner. Whenever you write business, you are paying them a percentage of your commission in order to train you, give you resources and steer you in the right direction. You are literally paying them a percentage of your profits. Make sure that they earn their override. Now comp isn't everything, right? Like the John and the Tony example, you should be willing to trade some comp for more support and more resources. But on the other hand, I work with agents all the time whose numbers are great, have a low cost per lead, they have a high closing percentage, they don't even get a lot of chargebacks, but they're barely scraping by. And the reason why is they're trying to make it work. On 50 point comp. They could literally double their profits just by switching to an IMO at 100 point comp or something comparable. Now personally I would never take anything less than 70 point comp. And in order to justify 70% you better have some damn good training and resources. Now one thing to note is the newer you are to the business, the more you should be willing to trade comp for training and support. Eventually you can kind of flip it. But in the beginning, you definitely, definitely, definitely need the support and the resources. And that brings us to number two, which is the training the IMO offers for newer agents. This is the most important thing that you can possibly get to ensure your success in this business. You cannot afford to receive anything less than absolutely stellar training. It doesn't matter if you already know how to sell. You definitely need somebody to help you navigate through the freaking corn maze of underwriting and all the other things that come along with selling insurance. Wait, how am I supposed to know who offers good training where everybody claims they have the best training? Well, there's a couple ways. If a company's model is more focused on recruiting than actually selling insurance, chances are their training is subpar. Why? Because think about it. The philosophy of that company is why would I invest a ton of time and resources in one agent over another if more than likely they're going to fail? And I can just recruit, recruit, recruit and bring more bodies into the business and then eventually find somebody that succeeds on their own so they're not as focused on training and the individual success of each agent. Now another way is to simply just look at reviews. Side note, every IMO is going to have terrible reviews from the people that get in the business. Don't actually try to put any effort in, just whiners and complainers. But if you consistently see a pattern on the reviews, you can go to like glass store dot com. There's a ton of, you know, sites to review, different IMOs and places people have worked. But if you consistently see a pattern of people saying my IMO left me high and dry, my upline doesn't answer the phone, there's no training, no support, no nothing. That's probably something that's set top down and it's probably an issue with the imo. Number three is their model. And no, I'm not talking about Victoria's Secret. I'm talking about the way they run their business. Is their model centered around telesales or Facebook to face? If you're an agent who wants to have that location, freedom and the time freedom and all that probably should not work with a company who is married to selling face to face. That would make no sense. Also there's another sneaky one that a lot of people forget to ask that is related to the model. Who are you paid by? Does it come directly from the carrier or does it come from the imo, the terms are, when it comes from the carrier, it's called direct pay. When it comes from the imo, it's called loa. And you know, typically for insurance, that means like line of authority, like life, health, Medicare, whatever. And in this example, it means a license only agent, which means you're actually contracted through the imo, who's contracted directly the carrier. And all of your commissions go straight to your IMO and then are paid to you from the imo, so you actually get a paycheck from your imo, not from each individual carrier. So let me kind of break down what that actually looks like because it's kind of like, you know, pie in the sky if you're just imagining that on direct pay, let's say I go and write a policy for carrier A and then I write up another policy for carrier B. The policy for carrier A charges back. So now I owe carrier A money. Policy for carrier B did not charge back, so I get paid from carrier B and I have to come up and pay carrier A. Now on an LOA model, where you get paid directly from your imo, if I write a policy with carrier A and a policy with carrier B charge back from carrier A, policy with carrier B stays solid and says in the books, but I owe money to carrier A, all of a sudden the commission from carrier B is coming over to pay the charge back to carrier A. So now on my paycheck, I did nothing. This is something that I didn't really realize until I got into the business. And I had weeks and weeks and months of not receiving a paycheck for any of the business I was writing. It makes it a lot easier to manage your finances and cash flow of the business when you're getting paid directly from the carrier and you actually get paychecks, even if you owe some money back to the carrier. All right, and the next one we're going to talk about is, are you captive or are you independent? Now, a captive insurance company basically means that you can only sell one carrier's product. Make barn, think nationwide, Northwestern Mutual, all those companies, you are directly contracted with that one company and you cannot have any other contracts. This makes it a lot tougher to be competitive in the marketplace because you can't always find the best rate or the best product for somebody because you can only sell one company's product, which ultimately oftentimes leads to higher chargebacks, lower issue rates and all kinds of things like that. All right, the next one we're going to talk about is Culture. Now, have you ever gone to one of those recruiting meetings where some guys got a nice, you know, flashy diamond watch? Maybe he's showing his Rolex slapping cash on the table. He's showing you a video of him hopping inside of his tj, which means private jet. That is typically going to be a more MLM style culture. Now for some of you guys that's exactly what you want, that's totally fine. But for others of you, that is just not going to work at all. So I'm not saying MLMs are bad or, you know, MLMs are good or whatever. It really depends on the person and what you're looking for. But if you're not looking for an mlm, you should definitely do your due diligence to make sure that it's not that kind of of culture. If they're talking about recruiting as like the main focus of your business, probably an mlm. Another thing to think about is how do they talk about the clients, like who you're selling? Right. If they view them as just a number or a way to get a commission, it might be more of like a toxic culture, not really somewhere you want to be. Whereas if they're genuinely talking about wanting to help people and finding the best product for the client and not just what pays the highest commission, probably going to be a better culture. Another thing that I didn't really think about, but really should have Red flag is how your upline talks about other agents. They talk about the other agents that came in and like, oh, they're lazy, they're this, they're that and they're talking about other people behind their back. They're definitely going to talk about you behind their back. And ultimately there's not really any loyalty or sense of professionalism there. Now these are all crucial questions to ask before getting into bed with your business partner, right? Who's your imo? Another thing to look at with culture is in their culture, do they typically release people or do they hold on to contract? Now, if you ever decide to leave the IMO you're at and want to move your contract somewhere else, if you don't owe the company money, like you don't owe them any money for chargebacks, they should release you. If they don't release people, which you can see if you go and look at reviews, you know, hey, they didn't release me this and that. Once you start to see a pattern, it's probably a culture that doesn't release. But if they don't release, that's usually a Major, major, major red flag. Because why are you trying to force somebody to stay at your company if they don't want to be there? All right, next thing we're going to talk about is resources. These are basically the tools in your toolbox. When you're selling insurance. Think about underwriting guides or underwriting cheat sheets. I know a lot of people use insurance toolkits, so maybe you don't really need that from your imo. But, you know, this is things like scripts or maybe like an underwriting hotline that you can call to get in touch with other producers who might be able to help you out. You know, different things that you can leave behind for retention. Like maybe a business card template or like a life insurance guide for your clients. Like, what kind of resources are they giving you to help you with your business? If I go and sign up with Chick Fil A to become a franchisor, they're giving me all these business systems that I can implement for a percentage of my profits that you should think about your IMO the same way. What are they giving you in exchange for the override that they are taking on every dollar that you make? So really, really consider and look at all the resources that your company is actually going to be giving and compare those with other companies, because a lot of people will try to flash things that, like, are ultimately just commodities that everybody has. So what makes them unique and different from the other, other companies? All right, the last thing to look at is reviews. This should be pretty simple. A bad reputation is hard to escape, but a good reputation can be easy to fake. Maybe they'll have you talk to other agents that are at their company that are just, like, giving you a glowing recommendation of the imo. But that's their job. So make sure to do your own due diligence. Do your research. Look at Glassdoor. Look at these, you know, employer review sites and try to see if there's a pattern of negative reviews of things that would be a concern to you. Like, if it's the culture, lack of training, lack of support, not releasing contracts. Really, really do your due diligence and take a deep dive on those things before you pick an IMO to work with. The last thing that I will leave you guys with is if they're going to have you sign a contract, read the contract. I mean, shoot, you can literally copy and paste upload the contract into chat GPT because chat GPT is past the bar. And ask chat GPT different things about the contract to make sure that you find fully understand it, but if there is a contract for you to sign, do not sign it until you have read it and understand it. That is a personal mistake that myself and Julia made and I don't want any of you to make it. So that is going to wrap up our video on how to pick the right IMO for you. If you guys found value from this, be sure to leave a like on the video. Drop a comment down below letting me know what you would like to see next. And hit that subscribe button for more videos like this. This. Thank you guys so much for watching. I will see you all in the next one. Peace.