The Story Of Advanced Agent Marketing

In February of 2022, we were sitting in Tim's house in North Carolina, searching for the answers of what to do next. We had just found out that our Medicare contracts were going to be held for the next 12 months, which completely crushed our dreams of being a Medicare tech startup. With plastic wrapping covering holes on our floor from a flooding incident that happened in the house and no heat the entire winter so that we could save money to invest in our business, things felt hopeless. Flash forward 12 months and we've been able to help thousands, thousands of agents change the courses of their businesses by generating their own leads. We were even able to give away $10,000 in cash at our in person event. In this video we're going to share with you the story of advanced agent marketing. How we went from living in a house without heat, doordashing and waiting tables for money to changing the way that insurance is sold. But first you're going to need some background.

Alright, so we have some notes here on the laptop. Basically we're just going to kind of go back and forth, kind of do this like a little bit podcast style, just so you guys can kind of understand our background and where we come. But I'm gonna let Julian start off with telling his background of how he actually got into the insurance business and a little bit on his upbringing and all that.

One thing that I always really enjoyed was talking to people because I was homeschooled and so I was kind of like isolated as a kid. My mom wouldn't let me play video games. I didn't have a phone or anything so I had to call somebody who's gonna be my cousin and I would call him up on the home phone on the landline back when that was in and I would like play on a computer like a little pirate game. Like this was my whole social life as a kid. When I actually got to talk to someone, it was super refreshing. I was homeschooled up until 8th grade when I trans and then I realized that I like absolutely hated school. And it wasn't because like I hated learning. So I love learning but like I just didn't like the public school environment. It's very restrictive. Tell you that businesses are not gonna happen. Like you can't have wild ideas. And I've always been someone who's like always on some other level of ideas that people think is just like completely out there. Yeah, I think you're kind of the same way, 100%. But I like didn't really have a plan going out of school. My Whole thing was like, I knew I wanted to get into real estate and I wanted to be a businessman and do all this stuff and passive income and you know, whatever, basically the insurance industry. But I didn't know it existed. It was crazy. I thought to myself, I was like, okay, so I got no cash, I got no network, no connections, what can I do? So I was like, shit, I'm gonna go to the military, get connections, get some cash, and then four years later I can either come out or I can invest in doing rental properties while I'm in there. And that's a noble job. Whatever, that'd be pretty cool. Trying to do that for three years while simultaneously working in gym sales and waiting tables. So yeah, yeah, that's how we met. Before I did gym sales, I was in real estate. I had a six month post military attempt at real estate that went super poorly. Had a bunch of random people tell me I was too young. I had baby, like way baby face. And now it's like, like I literally had a coworker that called me baby face when I was waiting table. It was rough. Got into waiting tables, gym sales, loved gym sales. Saw that I had a real passion for that industry. I really just like getting people to do something that was beneficial for them. So that's kind of been like a staple of what it is. Whatever I'm doing, I have to believe in the product. I can never sell cars. I don't view that as beneficial. Like it's, yeah, it's transportation, but like, do they need it? Probably not. So I've always wanted to do something like fitness based or like health based, finance based, like with insurance. And while I was waiting tables, I actually got picked up by a guy. Yeah, I think you remember this.

Yeah, picked up.

Yeah, I mean, you know how it is with these ML guys. Like this dude came swinging through at my job and he's like, he's like, hey man, you know, leaning in like, hey man, you look like a hard worker man. What are your dreams? I remember he said, exactly. Rub me the so the wrong way. He was like, do you want to be a waiter forever or do you like want to build a, like a future? So he said something like that and I was just like, I hated the way that he presented it, but I was like, I'll answer his question. Because he'd been nice the whole night. So it didn't come off as like extra rude or anything. And like from there ended up at a webinar, saw the comp plans that I'm in, you know, and then I told you and everyone else about it. I think that what sparked this whole journey.

Yeah, 100% so way I got to insurance and like this is going super back. So when I was younger I was like decent at school because I was always kind of like in the accelerated classes. But I just thought it was like a waste of time. I was always super lazy with assignments. I learned that I could wing things when I was in like fifth grade. And that was like the entire world opened up to me. I would just like bullshit every assignment that I did. I never did homework, like none of it. I was still like decent at school. Get like A's and B's. And then got into high school, I was like committed to going to college. I wanted to be a lawyer, if you can imagine that. And then all of a sudden I like realized like, this doesn't make any sense at all. I started watching like e commerce videos on YouTube. Like I'm sure a lot of people have seen like the drop shipping, all that kind of stuff. Got into that. I saw people that were maybe a few years older than me, like seeing a ton of success with that. And I was, alright, well, let me have a.

Try this.

So started doing that a bit. Failed like a million times. Like at least like 20 times I failed trying to do that. So I'd like multip. Multiple, multiple, multiple failures. My sophomore year, I got my first job. I was waiting tables at a Greek restaurant. And that was kind of where I got like my first taste of money. It's up until then, like I was the kid that whenever I got a dollar, like it left my pocket. Like I literally would borrow money from my sister at the, like when the.

Ice cream truck came by, like fractional reserve banking.

Absolutely. Like she would save her money like from her birthday or whatever. And I would just be like, yo, let me get five on hand ever. And in my junior year of high school, I was still waiting tables, you know, saving money. I was like into the whole investing kind of getting into all that. And I had this idea because there was going to be a massive snowstorm coming to our hometown in Greensboro. And I was like, dude, like we're not going to be open at the restaurant. And I was trying to put as much money away as I could. So I was like, I need to supplement some income. So I get one of my best friends at the time and we decide we're going to basically plan out this whole driveway shoveling business over the next few days to supplement our money. Because we were working at the same restaurant. So we put together this whole thing. We start posting on next door, and we end up having like a freaking, like massive business, like, spring up overnight. Like, I think we did like 5k in Rev in like 4 days. And this was at a point like I was a high schooler. That was the most money I'd ever seen. Wake up to the crack, ass of dawn with a shovel, gut and shovel. The whole day my back would be sore, get up, do it the next day. And I was just like, addicting.

Was it, Was it hustle or were you like charging high ticket? Like, were these high ticket driveways? Are you going in like 40 bucks? Like just cranking it out, you and your boy?

No, no, not 40 bucks. It was 13 inches of snow, which, like, in the south is a lot. So everyone was panicking and we were.

Like the guys to go to.

I had like four teams of people through different yards like that. It was like my first real business. This is like December of that year. I had this idea that I was going to save $30,000 in one year as a 17 year old. And I was like, I'm gonna do this shit. So I had this whole spreadsheet. I would track every expense, every time I made money. And basically I was like the cheapest bastard there was. Like, I wouldn't even buy a soda because, like, everything was going towards this 30k goal.

So I did that.

And while I was doing that from the snow shoveling, I had this idea to get into lawn care. So I was like, I have all these people and they're like, hey, if you start doing lawn care in the time will hit you up because you did a good job. I'm like, shit, I might need to do that. So start doing like posting jobs on nextdoor, get like leaf removal jobs, all that kind of stuff. And I built up this business. And by the, by springtime, I was making more money doing landscaping than I was waiting tables. And I knew that because I tracked every dollar in the spreadsheet. And so I was like, all right, at this point, I'm just gonna go full in on lawn care. So this is going like end of my junior year of high school, coming into senior year, whole summer doing lawn care. I'm in Italy with my family on a vacation and I'm like thinking about how I can incorporate spraying for weeds into my business. And I had like, had my friends running my business at home. I was making like 2k a week. 17 years old, mowing lawns and all that stuff. So coming to my senior year. So why would I go to high school? Because my goal at that time I was going to be the biggest lawn care business in Greensboro, North Carolina. Like that was my plan.

And so could you imagine?

I mean, I probably could have done it, but like, would have been an entirely different business with less freedom. And so I realized at a certain point, because over that summer I was hiring my friends going into my senior year where all of my friends, all my employees went back to school and I had to actually, actually hire like real landscaping employees. And the problem was everybody kind of sucked. Like they wouldn't show up, they would like drink on the job. And I'm just like 18 year old kid trying to manage grown ass adults. And this is like my future. And I'm like, I don't know if.

This is the move.

So easing back into E Commerce, start trying that. And then at a certain point I decided like, I'm quitting this whole lawn care thing. I'm going full into E commerce and I'm just going to make it work. And so I just like closed the whole business down basically over the course of like a month and a half because it just stressed me out. Like no one would show up. I'd have to go and do it all myself. And it just was.

It was awful.

So went full blown into E Commerce and all of a sudden started seeing some success. I had a store that made me like six figures. And this was right as Covid was happening. And I put all of the money that I was making into stocks. Like, right is like the dip of COVID So I rode that whole wave back up. Ended up, you know, making a pretty decent amount of money at 18. Bought a house and a car. And then at a certain point I kind of just like slowed down a little bit just because like when you start making a lot of money without having to put in a lot of effort, it kind of makes you like numb to it. So took my foot off the gas. I had a girlfriend, I was still working, but like not as hard as I was before. So the results started to slow. E Commerce store wasn't working anymore. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna find something to do. So I start doing door knocking for solar. And this was like my first taste into sales other than selling lawn care and stuff like that. Around the same time, Julian got recruited to insurance. So I was doing solar door to door. And then I see Julian gets recruited into insurance. I'm like, let's do it. So I'd jump on in with you. That takes us to this next part of the story where we first got started at the imo. Mm. So when you first started, you brought on me and then your roommate at the time.

Yep. And then after that, I was like, yo, we need to get people coming in. Then you picked up your roommates at the time?

I think one of my roommates. And then I moved the other guy in and brought both of them.

Yeah. So they both came on, and it was kind of like this insurance frat. Yeah, it was like a frat. That's kind of what it. That's kind of what it was.

None of us went to college, so it was literally just like our version of the frat. Yeah.

It was like four dudes take on insurance. And, like, the guy that we. That we were working with was, like, around our age. He'd actually been in there. Frat. So it was literally just like, constant work hard, play hard. Pretty much. I think I Working in insurance, like, probably, what, a month and a half or so before you guys got in?

A few ride alongs with you. But, yeah, you started, like, a month.

And a half before, and I was just, like, pounding doors.

Yep.

Realistically, like, I had a. I was writing a fair amount of business, but, like, it was hustle. I was working so much because I had to make up for the lack of, like, I didn't have skill. Like, I had skills from previous gym sales. Yeah, but it was gym sales. Yeah. It wasn't insurance sales. There were questions that I didn't know to answer. And so every pitch was, like, different. I was just, like, throwing anything I could out there. If they're telling me no, like, I'm just not leaving, like, not taking over, like. Yeah, no, I think we're just gonna think about it. I'd be like, gotcha. Okay. So you sent this in about, you know, three months ago. Right. Like, I'm just throwing anything out there just to, like, keep the conversation going. And it worked. Wrote a ton of business when I first started, but it was like, six days a week. Every freaking day, I'd start door knocking. 8:39. And I'd go until dark. How much of the business stuck in the first month? Ugh, none of it. I got one policy that issued because I didn't know underwriting existed. That was pretty rough. And then this was when me and Tim went to Halifax after the first month. So the first month, I, like, had no bread. Yeah. No money. Yeah. And then I literally made, like, 300 bucks after writing, like, 25, 30k somewhere in there. I was, like, on the top of the leaderboard, like, number three, number five, week after week. I was, like, speaking on the conference calls and stuff. Like, I'm like, dude, like, what the heck? Like, oh, I'm gonna get paid at the beginning of next month. And, like, it never came. And it figured out. I figured out that I didn't know what underwriting was because, like, the guide sold Medicare. That trained me. So I didn't ever see him ever do underwriting. And I didn't know that that meant, like, I was just like, oh. He just asked, you know, family problems. Like, cool. I'm just gonna put it here, you know, yes or no.

Yeah.

And they all got referred because I was writing am. So it was pretty miserable.

Yeah. So we go out to go to Halifax county, which is like, you know, closer to the coast of North Carolina. We stay in an Econo Lodge, which, if you've never been to a Decano.

Lodge, don't do it. Look it up. Wouldn't even look it up. It's like a motel, baby. Basically.

But it was the nicest motel that we could find in this town. That was, like, cheap, like 90 bucks a night. So we stayed here for, like, a week. We were, like, third in the company in production. We speak on the conference call, and we're just, like, hustling. I would call and set appointments while you were driving. Like, there was no second that was wasted. We would sit in the parking lot, and this is what. This is the craziest part is we would get a bunch of paper leads and then organize them. We would sort through every day. Sort through by the name. We throw them onto the route.

200 of them.

200 leads to set the route and get each lead in order so that when we got to the door, we could easily just reach in the folder and grab it.

Part of us driving, like, the three and a half hours or whatever it was to that county that was far as we got a hotel. We were building the route while we were driving there.

Yeah.

To make sure that we'd never wasted a moment. Yeah. And so in this. In this time, I came up with this rule because I realized, like, how it was kind of working out for whether or not we could fall behind on an appointment. Do you remember? It was sit or set up. The 45 minute rule. So we made this 45 minute rule where if you had 45 minutes or less until your next appointment, you set the appointment. If you had 45, like, a little over 45 minutes or any amount of time past 45, run the appointment, sit with them.

Then was you always had to stop at dark, otherwise you get shot.

Yeah, you did. You did have to stop.

There was like a. Almost like a risk and reward as far as, like, at a certain point in time, if it's like. Let's say it's like 7:30 about to set in the summer sunsets at like 8, should you run the appointment or should you set it for tomorrow? Because you can set more appointments, but if the appointments are done.

It was a way. I think we dialed in some good processes. They're like, figuring out the door knocking process and everything.

Yep.

I don't know if I had come up with it before that. I just remember, like, we were hustling so hard. This is one of the reasons that I get so frustrated when, like, sometimes agents have no guidance around this. Like, nobody tells them, like, hey, you need to make X amount of calls, you need X amount of dials, you need to make X amount of door knocks or ask for referrals, like nobody told us we were just doing. Because we didn't know, like, what the other option was. Because the other option in our minds is just failure. And so if you're an agent, I think having, like, any doubt about what to do, like, just dive in. That's. That's my advice.

Because it works 100%. So we go our separate ways. We start producing individually, start working, writing a bunch of business. Things are going well. We're going from coast, mountains, coast to mountains, everywhere in between, Kind of burning ourselves out. The crazy thing is, though, so we would work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. We'd have Sunday off. We'd just play basketball or whatever. Like, all as a, you know, insurance brat or whatever. Monday we would come into the office, have meetings. We'd find out where we're gonna work, pull leads, and then the rest of the day was calling leads to set appointments for the rest of the week. So the only day we really had.

Off was Sunday sometimes. Because then there was other times where I would go out with, like, one of the newer agents that wasn't writing as much business. That was just for us to scrum up some business to get them a paycheck.

Yeah.

And then, like, continue to get more training out. And it was a hustle. Six and seven days a week.

Yeah, it was for months, but we were selling a lot. But, like, after the chargebacks and the gas and everything, we just weren't, like, we weren't really profiting that much money?

No, the gas was the biggest thing too, because prices were going up. This is right when, like, there was, like, a gas shortage. I think they cut a pipeline or some craziness happened. Driving two and a half hours one way and then door knocking the whole day. Gets expensive quick.

There was one, like, trip to the coast that we made. It really sticks out to my mind. And this was our.

My.

My roommates and best friends. First week he went out was knocking. He ended up having a zero week. Like, no sales that week because, like, everyone was younger. Anyway, so he goes out the first door that he knocks, a guy puts a gun to his forehead and says, get off of my property.

This was his first knock ever by himself.

He calls and tells me the story, and then he's like, all right, bro, I gotta go. I gotta hit the next door. What I remember crazy, like, that just happens, like, every day. Like, I would get a call like that from one of our friends. I'm like, man, every single day, hit the next door.

Yeah, you gotta hit the next door, man. Dude, I've ran from pit bulls, Doberman had knives pulled on me, been held, had a gun on a table, faced at me one time, had another lady meet me outside with a gun. One of our other friends had, like, a couple. A guy like, you know, show him, like, a gun, like, brandish a gun, like, multiple times. The craziest part was I got hit by two 18 wheelers in the same week. First, I got hit and run by the first 18 wheeler. He dropped a telephone pole on a bridge. On either side was water, so the only choice was to hit the telephone pole. I ended up stranded with no phone service. Me and his roommate at the time and closest place, an hour and 20 minutes away with no, like, traffic coming on. There wasn't even hitchhiking here. And then two days later, I get T boned by another 18 wheeler. After getting that fixed, ended up missing, like, two days of appointments and then got a rental to get back at it next week until the car was fixed. Oh, my gosh.

So here's where things get interesting. So at this point, the reason we had actually gotten into the business is because we wanted to sell Medicare. That was a big. A big piece of why we wanted to be there. So this point, right, is August. To be able to sell by oep, which is in October. We needed to be certified by September so we could get all of the appointments with the carriers, right? We were frustrated with our upline for not, you know, being as urgent with us Getting certified as. As we were.

So there was a scheduled Monday time where we were going to do that every Monday. And it wasn't even like we needed help doing it. We just needed the directions and what to do.

Yeah.

And they wouldn't help us.

Yeah.

For like nine weeks. Eleven weeks. Something crazy.

It was insane. So at this point, I hadn't even been paid in weeks because of chargebacks. You know, still running, like, a little bit. We were still making sales, but, like, the chargebacks were so crazy and the expenses were so high. We were making, like, literally no money. And I hadn't been paid in, like, three months from my check because the chargebacks would swallow up the new business. I wrote.

Oh, my.

Like, I literally. I even wrote an annuity. I wrote an annuity and didn't get paid on it, bro. Because of the charge.

I remember this too. It was so crazy, the amount of charge back you get when you give out gift cards to seniors on a fixed income. And, like, by this time, the only.

Reason they send in the mailbo, of course.

And like, by this time, I had more luck with chargebacks than. But like, before, it was the same thing for me as it was for. For Tim in this period. It was like the same time frame of, like, learning curve where you're just getting beaten to crap, like European of chargeback.

I mean, we were still, like, we had written a lot of business. We had, like 200k in our first six months. Like, between the two of us.

Well, we were writing about, like, on average, like, 25 to 30k a month each. So we were going crazy. And this was before we even hit Medicare, right?

Yeah.

The fact that we weren't making money with this was, like, nuts.

Yeah. It was insane.

And our compensation was at 50.

And so this point, I came to you with the idea that we should start generating our own lead because, like, the quality of what we were working was just so low. I wanted to work in a closer area. Like, we were driving three or four hours to where we would go work to work.

Gift card leads. And most of them are recycled.

Yeah, most of them recycled.

So it was like.

It was insane.

Five and six years old. Like, this stuff is crazy.

So we're like, all right, let's start generating our own leads. Like, I had done Facebook in the past with my background in E commerce and all that, and I was like, I think I can figure this out. And, like, we're at a lower comp to get free leads. We were going to generate the leads on our own pay for them and then still be the low comp and then roll, help the company roll us out. We talk to our upline and tell them the idea. And then all of a sudden, Julian, you got a call the next day, right?

Yeah. I presented this idea to the regional sales director at the time. Or no, he was the regional sales vice president. Yeah, he was like, hire higher up. Yeah. And I was like, yo, like, we need to all get on a call and do this. And then I get a call, like, he was super receptive. And then like, the next day I get a call. Like, I get woken up and I'm like, finding out, like, there's drama on. They're saying, like, there's drama on your team and all this stuff. And I'm like, what is happening right now? It was so confusing, cuz, like, it was a complete 180. I'd never seen this side of them. And they were freaking out about Facebook ads.

Yeah.

I didn't even know what they meant by drama. Thought something happened. Yeah.

And so they were just like, terrified by the fact of us running Facebook ads. And we have a call with me, Julian, our uplines, Upline. Our uplines, uplines, upline. Who is the RSVP and the CEO of the company, all on a call. Like, they start to call off with boys. I just want to tell you guys this is a good call, not a bad call. We're just like, thinking to ourselves, like, why would this be a bad call? We're coming to you with an idea to help us get more leads and.

Just to let you, like, guys know, they said when they met us on numerous occasions, like, you guys are crazy producers. You guys are freaking studs. If you have any ideas, bring them to us. We're always receptive. Like, this was built on other people's ideas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, That's.

That was the way that everything was framed. So we were super excited about it, came to them, and then just total, completely shut it down. So anyway, we have this call, we get off the call, and we're just like, we call each other right afterwards. And like, how did you think that call went? I don't even know where to start. Like, it made no sense.

It made no sense.

So anyway, after this call, we're just kind of like reflecting on it, talking about what happened, shooting basketball, you know, kind of piecing the puzzle pieces together. And we're joking about, like, what would happen if we started our own marketing agency with Facebook ads and put direct mail out of business. So just. Just a joke. Like, ah, let's get real. That would never happen. And funny flash forward today, but. So at this point we're kind of, you know, a bit frustrated with them. And we decided to. That we're leaving, go start our own Medicare agency.

This was an interesting situation because once we told everyone that we were leaving, we told our upline, like, yo, we're out. Yeah, Basically we're like, hey, so we're all leaving. Like, group walkout. Basically, we're going on strike. He's like, oh, okay, gotcha. What is your plan? And then starts like telling us a bunch of things that aren't even accurate in the industry. And quite literally calls the CEO, calls his upline, which is our upline. Upline. Upline, the RSVP and like, turns us into a whole kit and caboodle. Eight hours in a conference room, they buy us lunch. They. They're like telling us the whole time that, like, what we're doing doesn't exist. It won't work. They're threatening to take our renewals away and then they're saying we're gonna go.

To jail for trying to generate leads.

They were pitching us on the dream of getting ownership in the company and stuff.

And, like, throwing away $40 million.

It didn't really make any sense. Like, it just kind of was all really scattered and disorganized and like, it was. It was weird. One of the guys was like, crying. Yeah, I've been in like a few mlms. And that is the. That was the weirdest situation I've ever been in. This only happens in these types of environments, I think. Like, I don't think this happens in corporate America.

But after we leave, we have a few days. Turns out it snows again. We just left. We weren't able to sell insurance for a while. We knew this. At this time, we were wrestling between what to do because there was like a broker side a of this same agency. And then also, like their career model with the free leads.

Well, keep in mind, we don't know that what they're saying is dishonest at the time.

Yeah, we don't know anything. We don't.

We're so green, they won't tell us anything either.

And so we're just like, trying to investigate and find out more things so we can figure out where we want to build our agency, which was gonna be the Medicare agency, like, who we wanna do that under. We're researching, looking at a few different companies and we, you know, anyway, it snows at this point. So we decided to Go. And, you know, I revert back to my roots. We do a snow shovel traveling business. There was a lot more ice this time. So, like, we still made money, but it wasn't as good as the first time I did it. Afterwards, we had a bunch of meetings set up with people from different agencies. So one of them was David Duford. One of them was going to be in Alabama. And so we decided to set off on this road trip, and we drive down to Chattanooga. We meet with David.

Well, we met some sketchy dude that was living in Israel or something, and he was living in Jerusalem. Like, it was all. They were all super sketchy. And so we ended up, if we're gonna do this, we're gonna meet people in person. Like, this is way too sketchy. Yeah, that's how we met David. And then the other guy, we have.

A story about that, the video called Watch this Before we work with David Dufour. I'm sure pop it up on the screen somewhere where we tell that whole story. But we. Anyway, so we were in Alabama, and we decided, like, you know what. What if we just drove across the country? Because at this point, we both wanted to move and leave where we were. And so we're like, what if we just drove across country, see different cities, and. And decide where we want to live? Like, on a whim, close. Packed for three days, and then I.

Think it was two days.

For two days.

Yeah. I don't even think we had. I don't even think I had three days. I had, like, a pair of pants.

And shorts, and we just start driving out west. So we go Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, all the way out west to Arizona, up to Utah and back. And at this point, this is where we decided that we wanted to live in Arizona. We were between a bunch of different cities, so we're gonna live in Arizona. We come back to North Carolina just, like, ready to go. Like, we are energized, inspired. We know where we want to be. It's just time to, like, pour into our work and go. So we decided we want to go with David. We decide that's where we're going to put our contracts. And so we request for a release.

After being told we would get one.

After being told we would get one, after being told we get one, and we're like, all right, let's. Let's do this thing. We press the release, and then all of a sudden, we get to knock.

Yeah, it was pretty. It was a pretty crazy moment because we've been told that we would get them released. And at that time, it was pretty insane because there was no clear answer as to why, since they previously told us they would. And so when we asked them, like, what was up, it was a different story every time. I mean, it got down to the point where after leaving the company, I had multiple people from other teams try to recruit me to their team, call me up. I had multiple other people ask me, like, what happened and why I was trying to recruit people after leaving and things. And, like, they were just basically telling, like, everyone that I used to talk to, like, at work. Yeah, all these random things about me and Tim. He was ringleader Tim, and I was the pack mule. I was a slave force that was going to drive the business forward. Yeah, it was pretty crazy.

So we find out they're holding our contracts, some for six months, some for a year. Like, the main contract that you need to sell Medicare, we weren't going to have until 2023. And so we're like, all right, what do we do? So we'd already started posting on YouTube and building, like, a very, like, small following for this Medicare agency. We're gonna do, like, organic leads and stuff. That was all gone. That was crushed. So we decide, all right, let's, you know, revert back to. Back to the roots. And we just saw. We decided to start trying E Commerce again. So we had a couple different, you know, stints and stores. We did all of that. Totally flopped. Failed. Nothing came of it. And I remember I was, like, cleaning my house one day, watching some videos on YouTube, and I remembered the conversation we had had a few months before, before about the marketing agency. I'm like, what if we started generating leads for ourselves because we were gonna have the life insurance contracts in a few weeks.

Going back to selling life.

Going back to selling life. But what if we decided to generate them for other people in the meantime? And then once we get our contracts back, we can just use our own leads and sell. So we go down that rabbit hole, meet with David, and basically he agrees to let us go on his channel and talk about what we're gonna do if we can get a success story. So our first step was to find someone who would let us generate leads for them.

And we had no contract, so we couldn't even do it ourselves.

Yeah, no contracts, couldn't do ourselves. And so we meet with a couple different agents. We decide that we're gonna do it for this one lady. We start, and it just completely flops. It's like $40 a lead. We tried to do this like complex landing page where we sent them through all these videos to make them like the highest intent leads. And she got, got like two leads and they were $40 a pop. And one of them was another life insurance agent filling it out just to.

See what it was.

So we're like, we go back to the drawing board, tweak a few things, make a few tests run.

Keep in mind this was her money.

This was her money. So we literally had, we told her like, oh, we're going to kill it, we know what we're doing. And we thought we did, we didn't. And so we pay her all of her money back for her ads. So at this point we were running her ads for free already.

We were paying to run her, now.

We'Re paying to run her ads. So we make some tweaks and then all of a sudden it just freaking kills it. We were getting leads for under $2. This is where the 77 cent leads came in. And she's just getting like so many leads she can't even work them all like 40 leads a day.

She can't even breathe.

Yeah, she can't even breathe. And so she ends up selling a few policies, ends up with a 14x return on her ass.

Spend 14.92 to be exact. I remember because it was like the first time that we hit like a ballpark.

Grandfather calculated the numbers, we were like, holy.

We realized we hit a gold mine.

So we decided, all right, so let's share this and teach people how to do it. And so our initial idea was with the current course that we, that we had, we were going to do a 30k in 30 days challenge where basically people paid us a thousand bucks and we would teach them how to go from nothing on self generated leads to 30k in 30 days. But there was a caveat to it and that was if they hit 30k in 30 days, we would give them all their money back and send them on a vacation and give them a trophy. And then we realized that was a terrible idea. So we killed that. And then we just stuck with the course. Part of it that I knew was so bad, we started DMing a bunch of people on Facebook. We would post stuff in David Duford's insurance forums. We make YouTube video response responses to that and started going to the YouTube channel.

LinkedIn DM. LinkedIn DMS.

At this point, like nobody was interested in like what we were offering.

We had no reputation.

We just had this one case study where we got this lady a 14 extra. Yeah, we Decided to lower the price of everything and we just started offering it as a course. And then after our first video with Dewford went live, like we kind of like popped up onto the map and just things just took off from there. At this point we were still planning on like selling ourselves, but there was such a demand from what we were doing that we literally just had to focus all, all of everything on the legion side.

Well, we were even like. And leading up to this, we were like starting to sell on them because people were talking about like self gen leads and whether or not they work. So we were like, well dude, I mean we know these work. Why don't we just go run them? And we got the video up and everything. So like we were literally in the process of selling it and then things start to like really pop off. Yeah, it was insane. Yeah, it went crazy.

A few months later, we create the Facebook group Insurance Agent Freedom. It was so small when we started, like 20 people. You guys were in the group when we first started. You remember this? But like way like came from literally like 20 people. And so we started, you know, just continuing to offer value, continuing to grow the program, added a Facebook group. We went live in the Facebook group, did all kind of stuff.

I remember our first live. I do remember our first live.

That was, that was something else.

It was so bad.

After a few months of just doing that, you know, continued to give away a ton of value, things just started taking off. We had more and more agents like just killing it with generating their own leads, case study after case study, agent after agent, just like killing it. And so we started scaling everything up, started running ads to the Facebook group and just continuing to do what we did best. Started offering like a done with you, done for you type program where we basically set up ads for people and just the case studies came in even heavier at that point. I mean that's pretty much what's happened over the past few months. We've just continued doing what we're doing, doubling down and helping more agents generate their leads and change their business.

And pretty much like from today forward, our goal is to make as many millionaires in this industry as possible and really help as many agents achieve insurance agent freedom where they're not outrunning the chargebacks constantly or hearing stupid things like I thought it was free. I didn't know this was about insurance. I didn't think I was going to talk to anyone or having to waste basically realistically a year of their life just sitting in homes talking to people for them. To charge back after they get their gift card. I drove 45 minutes out to the opposite way to just to give her her gift card, and she charged back the next day. Yeah, like, this stuff was ridiculous. And it's been a super crazy, crazy ride. It's been a crazy ride, but, like, being able to help people get on track that don't know any better the same way that we did is. Is so awesome. I talked to a guy yesterday who was on 30 point compensation. Yeah. He just was like, oh, yeah. Knowing it's out there, it's hard to see it, but it really is.

Yeah. That's the story for everyone who's been wondering, like, that's where we came from. That's how the business got started. And ultimately where we go from here, just make as many millions as possible and keep, you know, helping people generate leads and eventually, you know, make some bigger plays and go from there. Thank you guys so much for watching. This is a little bit longer than, like, the normal videos that we do, but we kind of wanted to just give you guys, like, the entire story, Just dump everything on the table so you guys know, you know how it got started, where we came from and where we go from here. Thank you guys so much for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.