Spoken step-by-step blueprint by Timothy Schucker for building an insurance agency from scratch. Recommendations: sell personally for six months while filming content to build credibility and audience; recruit from audience or from abundant lead pools; scale onboarding by recording Q&A videos into a training library; prioritize acquiring leads before recruiting and trim low performers to shape culture; set initial agent splits around 75% (possible to 100%) and reinvest margins into InsurTech/CRM; recruit influencers, launch an insurance carrier, and acquire policy-quote marketplaces to internalize lead flow; finish by scaling aggressively and offering a linked mini-course on Facebook ads.
Questions this video answers
Six months.
Start people out at 75% (commissions may ramp up to 100%).
Approximately six minutes (speaker notes: budgeted nine minutes but took six).
Chapters
Here is how I build a $100 million, IMO in 10 minutes. This is the exact blueprint that I would follow to go from nothing to a massive agency in just a few years. So, obviously, to build a massive insurance agency, we're going to need agents, right? But the question is, when do you start recruiting? So, in my model, what I would recommend doing is just selling insurance for six months. Now, the reason why is this is going to give you enough time to gain the experience that you would need to have to get respect from the agents as you bring them on, but not too much time to where you're just wasting time selling insurance. But the thing is, while you're running for those six months, what you need to be doing is filming content. Like literally just you knocking doors, literally just you doing telesale, hitting the phones, whatever, right? And as you're learning things, you're putting that into video form. Now, what this is going to do is as you're doing the work, as you're gaining your stripes selling insurance, you're also building up an audience who likes your mission and likes what you're doing. Then you should have a decent audience from posting to YouTube or Instagram. I wouldn't really go towards TikTok, but you definitely could. But after six months of doing that, you should be able to get your first recruit off of your own audience. All right, so now we've just hired our first recruit from our own audience. We're going to have to train them, right? No, we're not going to train them one on one. What we're going to do is every time they have a question, we're going to record it and put it into video format. And the reason we're doing that is because as I bring more and more agents on, I don't want to have to have 15 phone calls with 15 insurance agents. I'd rather make one video that can be shown to thousands. So every time there's a question, I make a video, and then I create a library of videos. So every time they ask a question, I can just pull from my library of videos answering all the questions that people have had before. And eventually I can completely remove myself from that process of training agents. All right, so how are we going to deal with the issue of leads? Now, in my opinion, this is something that 99% of IMOs and agencies do wrong. Here's what I recommend doing. So first, I want you to imagine that you're a caveman, right? Let's say you're getting kind of lonely and you decide to go domesticate some wolves. So let's say you go out and find a pack of wolves, you take them back to your little cave or whatever. Only problem is now they have nothing to eat except for you. So now you're a dead caveman. Or here's what you could do. Let's say you go out and kill a mammoth and you bring all the meat back to your cave. Then you go out and find the wolves or agents and bring them back home, and now they're all your best friends and you have a pack of wolves following you. This is exactly the same way that you should do leads. Your agents are your hungry wolves who will eat you alive if you don't feed them. And the food is obviously leads. Agents need leads in order to make money and do their business. Otherwise they'll find somebody else. So what you should do instead of recruiting agents and then trying to find leads for them is get a bunch of leads and then recruit the agents to work the leads. So my next step would be to find an abundant lead source. This could be generating my own leads on Facebook, organic leads, like having a separate channel that only talks about insurance or Medicare or something like that. My next play is actually going to be for the culture. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut off the bottom performers. At least in the very beginning, I only want to have the highest performers in my agency because anybody else will be talking down to the business, they'll be saying, hey, this can't be done. Creating doubt and new recruits. And I only want to have top performers. So very beginning, I can build a strong foundation to build my agency off of. I'm still posting to my YouTube channel. I'm still posting and giving away free value. And I'm attracting people towards me. Instead of chasing them, you know, taking people to dinners and trying to find recruits, I'm bringing people towards me. So at this point, we have a few agents who are making multiple six figures in commissions every single year. And now what I'm going to start to do is I'm going to tell all of my successful agents to start posting to YouTube and posting to social media. So now, not only am I attracting agents to my imo, but all of these people under me are starting to attract agents to my imo. And so let's say somebody doesn't really relate to me, but they relate to John. John's posting his own YouTube videos. They'll get sucked into our entire web from John. Or maybe a single mom needs a female producer to bring her into the business instead of me or John, right? So I have all these agents posting to YouTube and growing our social media presence. So one thing you have to give FFL a tremendous amount of credit for is they've been able to attract influencers, think Bradley or Andy Elliott into the insurance business. However, since we're still small, we're gonna have to create them. So we're gonna have all of our agents start to post to YouTube. Think what Patrick bet David did with php and this guy called 7fig who now makes his own YouTube videos. Before we get any further, we're going to have to address the burning question that I guarantee is on your mind. How do I do commissions, how do I do agent splits and all that kind of thing? So my philosophy with this, I don't think that you should try to give people the highest comp. I think it's a race to the bar. Just like you're trying to compete with Walmart to have the lowest prices. It's just like you're cutting your margin by doing that. So what I would rather focus on is having a healthy margin where I make a ton of money every time my agents write business, but also I'm providing enough value to justify that and it's a win win for both of us. Let's just say I start people out at 75% of my company and let's say maybe commissions go up to 100%. So I have this massive margin on all of my agents and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take that money and fund it into buying InsurTech. Right? This could be like investing in a better CRM software that would help them with cross selling or upselling. So I'm investing this money back in to make my agents life easier and make me and my company more money. So once we've rolled out InsurTech, we've made all these things easier. I'm going to start to go after the bigger fish, right? I'm going to start to do an FFL play and I'm going to bring big influencers into my agency and have them build teams. So I'm going to get guys like Alex Hormozi, Jared Miller, Minor Grant Cardone, Jordan Belfort. I'm going to bring them into my agency and have them create their own teams so that it makes the insurance business seem more sexy, particularly my agency, because I have these people that everyone's talking about coming and, you know, putting their stamp of approval on it and it's also going to bring a lot more attention to our company. All right? So at this point, we are freaking killing it. We have a ton of agents who are writing a ton of business, we have a massive presence on social media, and we have an infinite line of recruits. Our next step here is actually going to be something that Symmetry Financial did. In my opinion, it was a chess grandmaster move is they rolled out their own insurance carrier. So basically what this does is it brings a lot of the money back in house so they can invest it back into stuff that makes it easier for their agents. So that's going to be our next step, is to roll out an insurance carrier. So at this point, I have multiple thousands of agents selling our product and selling other carriers products. Our next step here is going to be reinvesting a bunch of that money into buying insure quote website. This is think policygenius or websites similar to that so that I can even further cement myself to having an overabundance of leads for all of my agents to work. And at that point, step number 11 is just scale the shit out of it. We finished that video a little bit early. I know you guys budgeted nine minutes, but we actually only took six. So here's what I got for you in the link below. In the description, we have a free mini course that teaches you how to set up all of your Facebook ads. Everything that you need to know. All you need to do is click that link down below, just put in your name, email and phone number, and you'll have access to a mini course that shows you everything you need. We even have a case study with one of our students where we kind of show like exactly what we did in their ad account and break down the entire process. So if you still have 3 minutes, click that link down below and I think you guys will really enjoy it. Peace.
