Andrew Ryan & Jack Hertvik on Dominating the Insurance Game

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It really helps the show grow. From all of us at Believe, have a Merry Christmas, everyone, and a Happy Holiday. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you. We have a conversation with Andrew Ryan and Jack Hurtvick from Hurtvick Insurance.

And these guys just know what they're doing. Got to meet Andrew in person at one of Paradiso's events that he did in Boston. Met Jack for the first time on this call, but knew of him and knew of the reputation of his agency. And was just super interested in everything they're doing. They're just a dynamic agency.

They got joint venture going on with a mortgage company. They're an SIA master agency in addition to all the other stuff they do. And just a lot to learn. Awesome conversation. If you are an insurance industry wonk, you're just going to love this one.

And it's just fun to have these conversations because you never know where they're going to go. And you just get tremendous value. And Jack and Andrew are just great assets to our industry. And I encourage you to connect and follow the things they're doing because you're going to learn a lot. All right.

Before we get to them, I want to give a quick shout out to Podium. Podium is one of the premier communication tools in our industry. And they have lots of different functions and features to their tool. But the feature that I use, the feature I use the most, the feature I talk about the most, is their web chat feature. And what I like about it is it's simple, easy to use.

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Get the demo. Have someone on your team get the demo. Know what the tool does so that if you need it or you feel like it's something that could help you grow your agency now or in the future, you don't have to then start looking, right? You already know what it is. You can start to plan around it, and you can get to work when you need it.

So Podium.com, P-O-D-I-U-M.com. All right, let's get on to Andrew and Jack. What's going on, guys? What's up, Ryan? Not too much.

Another day in the neighborhood here. Have you met Jack before? I don't know if you have. I don't think I have. I don't think so, no.

Well, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, Jack. Thanks for coming on the show. You got it. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andrew texted me, was it last night? You're like, hey, what are you going to talk about? And I was like, I don't know. You tell me.

I just invite people. I don't think it's my responsibility to have to figure out what we're going to talk about. Bradley did the same thing to me. Because I've never even done, this was the first thing that I've ever done like that. And so I was like freaking out.

I was like, dude, you got to tell me what the heck I'm supposed to be talking about. So I can be semi-prepared if you didn't tell me anything. That's the beauty of these things, in my opinion. And that's why I do it. You know, there's a lot of other guys and women in the space that do podcasts.

And their shows are very structured, right? And especially outside of our space, there's a ton of podcasts that are, yeah, see, same five questions. Here's what they are. We go through them, you know, whatever. And, you know, it's like bio, five questions.

And then they, you know, what book changed your life? And I shouldn't do that voice because it makes it sound derogatory. And I only mean it to be slightly derogatory. But I just, that's just not, it's not at all what I'm interested in. Like, you know, I think that's more of the, my podcast is a business model, right?

Like you, you know, I need to have set questions and a flow and people know what to expect. And I think that's how you jack your numbers up and how you're able to consistently produce high volume of content. Like, have you guys ever heard of John Lee Dumas? Yeah. No.

So John Lee Dumas started, what was it? Entrepreneur on Fire podcast. For a while, it was the most listened to podcast in the world. He did an episode a day. He was one of the very first guys to do an episode a day.

And he just interviewed entrepreneurs and that, and he had, it was like, give me your bio. Then here's five questions. Then tell me, you know, some like Freudian question that's supposed to get you to answer in a weird way. That's surprised, you know, like all this like stuff, which, which again, it worked, right? People listen to it like crazy.

They thought he was brilliant. And I've actually interviewed him twice for different podcasts, not this actual, technically this is like the fourth iteration of a podcast that I've had. And, and, and John's a good dude. Don't get me wrong. I just don't think there's anything special about his show outside of the fact that he did the work and he's hardworking guy and he reached out and he made a business out of it, which that part I have a tremendous amount of respect for, but the actual episodes, in my opinion, were boring as shit.

You know, it's like nothing in my life is formulaic. I don't need that, you know, in, in podcasts and people would just be like, Oh, Johnny Dumas got this guy on and it would be some awesome guests, awesome guests, except I don't know. I just felt like the formulaic nature of it. You didn't really get, I was never like shocked by what someone said or like, wow, I wasn't expecting that rabbit hole where if you listen to, um, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, James Altucher, some of these other people who do podcasts, you literally have no idea where they're going. Like you're, you feel like you're on this, you're like walking into the forest and you have no idea where you're going to come out or how you're going to get to the other side.

And, um, that to me just has always been more interesting. So I tend to under prepare. Yeah. There's that whole Howard Stern school of radio. It's just, you know, everybody's excited.

What is he going to say next? Yes. Um, and, and this is terrible radio that everyone is listening to right now, but, um, there is an episode of the James Altucher podcast in which, uh, and I'm going to, man, there's an episode and there's a guy at Sal something doesn't matter. They're talking about, um, um, not Larry David, but, um, the, the, the guy from CNN, uh, who did the show forever, Larry, Larry King, Larry King, talking about Larry King. So this is one of Larry King's very good friends.

And, and this, the, the guest, I think it's Sal Fussman, Sal Fussman, Sal Fussman on James Altucher's podcast. I promise this story has a point. So Sal Fussman is on James Altucher's podcast and he's talking about Larry King and, and, you know, Larry King, all time interviewer. Um, except there's a lot of people that don't like his style and James Altucher at the beginning of the podcast was very anti Larry King's style. And Sal is basically pitching James Altucher on why he thinks Larry King's style is, you know, the best.

And, and, and as much as you can subjectively determine that. And, uh, basically what Larry King said was his style was curiosity. That's all it was. He didn't care what you had done. You really didn't care.

You know, some producer told him, Hey, I should interview Jack Hurt Vic. He's an interesting dude. Right. And Larry would show up with no idea why. And he would just start asking questions.

Eventually he would figure out what you were interested in, what made you unique. And by the end, it would be this completely engaging, um, conversation. But, uh, he, he had, he said he, he had oftentimes had no idea even who the person was. Like every, the audience would be like, Oh my God, look who Larry King's interviewing. And he'd say, Larry King would like literally have no idea who this person was.

Yeah. Wow. And I just find that to be intriguing. I don't know. Um, this is my, yeah, not to bring it back to insurance, but it's one of the things that I love about what I get to do.

Cause we're an SIA master agency. I don't, I don't know if you know that. I did. Yeah. You know, one of the cool things about that job is we, I walk into five agencies and each of those five agencies is completely different.

You know, they're, they're successful for doing completely different things. And it's that curiosity of, you know, figuring out why it works for you and why it might not work for somebody else. Cause if, if it was as easy as putting it in a box and just saying, Hey, do this, do that, you know, we'd all be successful insurance agencies. So watching them figure it out and kind of having that curiosity of figuring out what works for them is the best part of my job. How did you become an SIA master agency?

It's, it's a really strange story. You know, back in the early two thousands, people would send you those faxes like, you know, Hey, sign up for this. We responded to a fax. It was really, yeah, easily the best investment I've ever done off of a fax machine. So you got fax spammed by SIA responded to the fax spam and it turned into a whole business model for you.

It's, it's been good for me. That is amazing. I, I, so, um, you know, I know the relationship with the parentship is different for every master agency. And I've spoken at a bunch of master agencies and done different things for them. And, um, I'm a fan of, of SIA technically I'm a member of indium, the network, which I'm also a big fan of, but, um, I got no beef for SIA.

And I think, uh, I think very, very highly of Matt Masiello and was very happy, um, that he is, um, um, a larger player in, in, you know, in, in, in what in the future, um, with all, with all the news that came out, I think, I think it's going to be good for the whole channel personally, um, you don't have to comment on that if you don't want to, but, um, to me and my understanding of Matt and what he wants to do, I think it's going to be great for you guys. Oh yeah, no, Matt, I mean, Matt's vision of insurance and what it's going to be in the future, um, I think it's spot on. Um, and, and I'm really excited and couldn't be happier for somebody that's such a great intelligent person and it's going to be, you know, I think one of the fascinating things happening in the industry right now that SIA is going to start, you know, moving in this direction is with technology, you know, it, it used to be a thing where it wasn't as available to smaller agencies. And, you know, over the last couple of years, the tools that are now available to even small agencies to be able to do things with their agency that weren't even plausible, you know, five years ago, uh, it's amazing. And I think you're going to see Matt really kind of move in that direction and helping that move forward.

Yeah. I think a great example of that is so maybe like a decade ago when I was with the Murray group, we, we wanted to do some marketing automation and there were really like two options at the time that were accessible in any regard, which were, which was MailChimp, which couldn't be more basic, right? I mean, you look at MailChimp today, it does all these amazing things. At the time, it was literally just, you put some names in through an uploaded CSV file and send an email. That was all there was.

And then there was Infusionsoft, which essentially you had to have your PhD in rocket science to send an email out. And, uh, and those were like it, and both of them were really difficult to use in different ways and, or limited. And now you have, you know, every agency in our channel could have agency zoom and Tarmaca and, you know, these tools that just, man, they just amplify our ability. It really is an exciting time. Yeah.

When we look in the Andrew, you can comment on some of the agency zoom Tarmaca Arias, you know, combination that we're putting together. It's really powerful, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, I know Ryan, you're working on some of the same stuff we are.

And it's, it's crazy because like Jack's saying, like the technology, I mean, obviously we're slightly bigger than what you are, but the technology is still. No, but it just, it's crazy that the technology that helps a 35 person agency will also benefit a three person agency. Yeah. You know what I mean? And I think it's not, it will definitely help you scale.

I told Ryan this, Jack, I told Ryan this last time, like a couple of times when I talked to him, I was like, man, even though I can never start a scratch agency, like, I don't think I could possibly do it. I'm almost jealous because instead of taking, like, we have what, like how many years old is this agency now? We've been in since 1946. So you're taking 70, 80 years of, which obviously successful history, but you're taking all these things which have been in place for a very long time. And you have to kind of like, try to make technology work in those ways.

Whereas if you're like starting with technology, you can do things completely differently. You know? Yeah. It's almost like what we do with our other thing on the side. You know what I mean?

We just kind of throw stuff at the wall and then adjust as we be. And then. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating from the standpoint.

Like, I mean, you know, Hurtfic Insurance, you know, my grandfather started it. You know, my father, you know, took it over. And, you know, it's a family-run agency. We're in a small town. And it's, you know, it's just like every other agency out there from the standpoint of the fact that, you know, we started as a local agency that worked locally.

You know, we didn't write anybody outside of, you know, probably a 30-mile radius. And, you know, there's still a lot of value in, you know, the relationships that we've built and, you know, the local establishment we've got. But, you know, being able now to use that technology to expand out and kind of have, you know, one foot in the future and, you know, one foot in the past that's really served us well is kind of fascinating. It's like running two different agencies at times, it feels like. I think that's a great way to describe it.

It is, to me, it is wild that, say, Andrew and I can jump on a Zoom and talk about, you know, automation setup and we have three people and you guys have 30 plus and we can share notes, right? I mean, everything's the same and different, but that to me is exciting because now it just broadens the spectrum of viewpoints that you can pull from, right? Like I was always been a baseball player, a big fan of baseball. And my dad at age 15 basically said to me, like, I can't teach you anymore. Like I have taught you everything that I can teach you about baseball and now it's time for you to go learn from other people.

And he said, everyone's going to have an opinion. Take what works for you, throw the rest out and keep moving forward. And before we had these little tight windows that we could do that from, right? Like if you were a middle market agency, you could only talk to middle market. And if you were local, you can only talk to local.

And now I feel like we're in this place where with technology and with the fact that it's scaled, you know, to bolt to all areas, you can kind of cherry pick. A middle market can cherry pick an idea from a small three-person local agency and apply it and vice versa. And I think it just makes us all so much better. Yeah. It just helps us scale, right?

I mean, if you have the technology in place, like you got the big thing that you and I have talked about is trying to get like, we have all these processes, right? And nothing's written down. You don't have like, you know, it happens, but you don't know exactly how it happens. Once you get all those processes down and then try to figure out where technology fits in the ease of scaling, like I showed you that kind of that, that library of videos we did for training, you know, just doing little dumb things like that, it barely takes any more time, but doing that once, you know, now, Hey, the next person we bring on, it's going to be super easy to train. You know what I mean?

That's just the stuff we haven't done before. Yeah. You always need to be thinking about what your, how your replacement is going to handle it. Not necessarily because you're going to be gone, but because you might advance or, you know, you might have somebody else that needs to do that job. You know, you have to be thinking that step in the future.

I do think that's important. I, um, so I'm, I'm interested, I'm interested in both your takes, but, uh, Jack, cause I haven't spoken to you too much before. I'll, I'll, I'll let you go after, after I answered this question first. Um, so I had a meeting with a carrier partner this morning and it's a good, very good partner. And, and my, my, uh, he's, he's our local rep, but he kind of, I don't know.

He's very good. He's not your standard local marketing rep from a carrier. Like he, he advocates up chain for me and has helped me get some opportunities that maybe, um, cause he believes in what we're trying to grow. Okay. But so he was, he said something to me.

He was, he was asking me, you know, well, how are you managing growing the business and selling? And I looked at him and I was like, if I never sell another policy ever again in my entire life, I would not be upset. Not even a little bit. It, it, to me, it means nothing that, you know, for me personally to sell them, obviously I want my agency to sell policies, but for me personally, and he was like, holy shit. He's like, I've never, he's like, I haven't heard that maybe ever from anyone.

Like, oh, it's always this very ego driven thing. So I guess my question is maybe, I don't know if you still selling or if you're managing or how that works, but you know what? I guess my opinion has always been if, if I'm not training my rep. Placement that I'm actually not growing as an individual. Like, I feel like you should always be training your replacement.

Is that something, do you believe that? Do you imbide it? Is it, is it like, where does that fall in your structure? How do you guys view that kind of thing? Yeah, I I'm, I'm a huge believer in it.

I think, especially because as an agency owner, you need to know almost a little bit about everything that happens in your agency. And if you don't, it's very difficult to manage. So, you know, and it's funny. I mean, I, I, I don't think I've sold personally a policy in, in a while. I mean, I, I had somebody, a neighbor of mine came up to me the other day and said, Hey, I want you to write my insurance.

And it's, it's almost an uncomfortable conversation where I say, look, I've got people that are awesome at that, you know, and they are going to take care of you. And if you've ever got a problem, call me. But these are the folks that are trained and will do the, by far the best job to get you where you need to be. And, you know, in, by constantly training your replacement, you're kind of empowering everybody underneath you to do what they need to do. That to me feels like a big place when, when I, um, when I'm at a conference or an association event or, or, or whatever, right.

I'm sure you see it maybe in some of your events you do with other agents that I say, Hey, you, you, when I find an agency owner who feels really stuck, not just like I'm struggling with this one particular thing, or, Hey, we just hit a little plateau, but like really stuck. I feel like that tends to be like, if you were to boil down the actual reason it's because they either out of fear of losing connection, which I think is real, um, or not feeling comfortable, they just, they, they refuse to get, to get out of that place. You can't go build JVs and partnerships and look for scaling technology and tools like Donna to better understand what's happening for cross sell opportunities and upsell. Like you can't put that stuff in your agency. If you're also writing the home and auto insurance for your neighbor, like you just, you can't be good at everything.

Like you just have so many brain cycles and that's a really difficult, that's a really difficult thing. I think for a lot of people to do, I believe I'm wired differently as an agency owner. I was, I'm not a second generation. I, you know what I mean? I don't get any pleasure out of writing insurance.

So, so I think that's different, but I think for a lot of people, that's a tough leap to make. Yeah. It's, it's important to know too, you know, what kind of agency you want to build, what kind of aid and how you're going to get there and always be thinking about that next step. Cause if you, if you don't, it's so easy to not get there. Um, I mean, it's easy to say planning helps you get there, but it's amazing how many agencies lose focus of that and you just end up at, you live in the weeds your entire life.

And if you, you know, you're never going to get out of there. If you keep thinking I can do 85 different things in one day, just, you're not Superman. Don't try to be Superman. Yeah. There's only, there's a, there's a hard ceiling, right?

Like if you're not, yeah. And I'll just, I just call it business in general. You know, if you're the person who's at the top, who's still doing all that day-to-day nonsense, there's a very hard ceiling where unless you can clone yourself, you're not going to have a break, you know? So, um, you almost have to be planning ahead, you know? Um, and I think Jack and Scott here, they did like a really good job with that.

Like with everyone here. Like, I think from me, the, the rest of our staff is always kind of like that buying, you know, where you, your police have say in what we're doing and because they have say there's responsibility on their end to enact whatever we, whatever direction we have, you know? So I think, I think that, that empowerment thing that Jack mentioned is very important. And I think, I think that's huge, especially in like a, a small agency is probably even more important because if you have that like embedded in your culture from the beginning, you know, it's just, it's huge. Yeah.

I spend enough time in the weeds on the golf course. I don't need to spend time in the weeds in my business. Um, not today. I shouldn't even say that because I can't even make it to the golf course. Um, Matt Wood and Mike Crowley and I are trying to like, uh, we all kind of live in central Eastern New York and we're trying to get a golf thing together and like what day works for you.

What, you know, we're all so busy doing all these different things that it's like finding a day. And then, uh, it's, you know, when, when do you, when do you get away from your business? But, um, okay. So I want to kind of transition to when, when did you guys, so you, you've mentioned three tools that agents may or may not know about. Um, uh, they certainly should know about two of them, Donna, uh, by, by Arias analytics.

Um, that's Donna for agents, Google Donna for agents, Donna for agents or Tarmica, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com. Not that either one are not sponsors of this show. So people should know about those two tools, but, um, you also met agency zoom. I'm sure you have other tools. When did you, was, uh, when was it a conscious decision?

What was the impetus? Like for you to go, I mean, those are some of the more most forward leaning pieces of technology in our entire industry. And we can talk about what they do and how they implement it if we want, but, but just in general, like those are kind of the cutting edge tech in our space. When did you, as an agency decide that moving into tools like this was, was to the benefit of the agency? Like there, was there, was there a decision?

Hey, we're going to move this way. Or were you always tech focused? Like, how did that come about that you found yourself using these tools? Yeah. So it was really out of necessity.

So we, we started a joint venture with, um, with a real estate group. Um, and we found ourselves in a position where suddenly we were getting, you know, hundreds upon hundreds of leads every week. Um, and being able to process them all in the way that we wanted to, um, really led to, uh, us looking into agency zoom. Um, and that's kind of where it started and agency zoom, um, really with the ones that, you know, kind of connected us, uh, I would say it was our first system outside of our management system and our radar, um, that we really got in depth with, um, would you agree, Andrew, that that was kind of the one that really, we utilize fully to its potential. Yeah.

To, to rewind back, like we had two years before that we had been on Salesforce, but Salesforce, like, like, I didn't know what we were doing. You know, we didn't know when you need somebody who knows what they're doing in Salesforce or has something already built out in there to make that work. So we basically wasted a year of paying for Salesforce and did very little with it. Then we switched to HubSpot. Um, I actually really would have liked HubSpot.

Um, still a big fan of them, but we still had a little issues with like, how does that insurance terminology? You know what I mean? So with the salespeople, it was just, it was just hard to get them to like, get really into using it. The good thing about agency is that, and part of it's almost that like there's a lot of stuff I can't do, but what it can do is like very insurance based. You know what I mean?

You can tell it's definitely created by people with insurance backgrounds, you know what I asked about. So getting that build out, Jack's right. We, we kind of had this process and we, Jack and Scott, I wasn't even involved at that point with this, but like they had to like, this process laid out. But then I think on the, the numbers were even like bigger than they had presumed beforehand. So like, all right, like this makes no sense.

How are we planning on doing this? So agency Zoom staff, we've been big. Um, I, I think I mentioned to you before, like we, and then we walked out too. We had, uh, Scott's on Griffin was working for us and he had just graduated during COVID. So he had, uh, he has a data analytics background.

So he was able to do lots of stuff, even outside of the system to kind of connect different pieces of technology, you know, whether we're connecting to our real estate partners or whatever else, you know, to kind of make that full of data very smooth and taking that manual, like seeing this data in completely out of the picture. And I think it's stupid because I think it should be a lot easier than it is. Like it's almost dumb that we had to build something like that, but doing that and then everything else we've gotten into, obviously, um, I mean, Tarmica on the commercial rating side is fabulous. I know you're using it now, um, personal lines with what we have going to be game-changing once it's live. So very excited about that.

And then actually Grange is the one, Grange Insurance is the one that hooked us up with Donnie. Um, so definitely shout out to them because they, they, um, Jack's very close to them. So, um, I think we're one of their biggest partners. So they reached out to Jack and just said, Hey, we got this thing. And that was funny because I already knew Ron from Tarmica.

You know what I mean? So I was like, oh, I know Ron. It was like the weirdest little thing. So I didn't even know who he worked for at the time. So we went through all of that with them.

We actually literally just got our login information. yesterday. Oh, nice. Have you jumped in and poked around a little bit? Yeah. We, we've been poking around.

Um, I'm really Jack and I, we're trying to figure out whether we, cause we don't want another interface for our CSRs to go into, you know? So part of us really wants to postpone until we can get this integration with agency zoom like seamless. You know what I mean? Because I do know what you mean. I mean, I know you've talked to like Chris Paradis about how he uses it, but it's so funny how one tool can be used two completely different ways.

You know what I mean? Like he uses it to, to basically educate his people are doing reviews on every single policy. Right. He kind of has like all this information with everybody. Um, we are trying to use it to pick who we want to have conversations with.

Does that make sense? It does. It does. We don't, you kind of have this broken into like two separate sections, right? You have the people who love us, want to buy from us or the people who want to leave us.

Then we need to figure out why they want to leave us and if they're worth saving or not. You know what I mean? So those are the two, the two pockets we're going to aim for. And I think down really helps us kind of dial in, figure out how to best aim our efforts. Yeah.

I see it and how I've been using it so far as more of a management tool. I don't know that I'll have my people, you know, I have, um, uh, Sarah on my team who currently is an account manager, but she may eventually morph into more of like an operations position and I'll probably have a limited more leadership or managerial logins and use it as a management tool rather than a tool that I have our, our day-to-day operators using, uh, is the way that I've kind of viewed it so far. I mean, obviously that's, that's always, that's always open to change and Don is making a lot of improvements. And, um, I'm on, I'm on the, you know, I mean, I don't think it's, uh, uh, I, I, I'm not disclosing anything here, but I'm on an advisory board for, for Donna. And I spend a lot of time giving them feedback and they're, they have so many, um, and, you know, I don't want to say improvements, but upgrades and, and, and, uh, feature enhancements and stuff like that, that are coming that are just, to me, I see it as a place that I love the, the idea of it being integrated directly with agency zoom from an operator perspective, because now we can do the trigger fires and all that kind of stuff, which to me is like, that's the next level when someone's sentiment.

And, and, and for those that don't understand the quick breakdown is of Donna is, uh, agency book analytics, and there's so much more to it, but they're defining characteristic. I think as a utility is its ability to give you real time feedback, um, on the sentiment, the actual, uh, uh, disposition of someone towards your agency based on email convos, text convos, phone convos, and then policy, uh, policy administration. So it's taking how many claims, how many call-ins for different things. And then, um, you know, they're, they're very close. It's in beta right now, but they're very close to being able to say, okay, based on the, the words used in emails to you, how often they're emailing, how often they're texting, the words used in text, what is their sentiment?

And, and then, you know, I think about it, like, like you guys, you know, you have all this high volume. There's no way for you to gut how people feel about your agency. When you have that many people coming in, there's just no way. I mean, it's impossible for you to gut that. So what if, you know, client 59 in that week, uh, you know, comes in and all of a sudden their, their, their sentiment for the first two months is an 80.

And all of a sudden it drops to a 60, right? You'd have no idea. You can't catch that in net promoter score. So that happens. Now, all of a sudden, Jack gets an email that says, Hey, home auto umbrella client dropped 20 plus points sentiment.

Something's wrong. And now you as Jack, the leader or, or Andrew, you know, whoever is, this can come in and go, what? Something happened on this account. What's going on? And now you can actually find and solve a problem in real time.

I, to me, I mean, one, this is the second largest expense in my agency. I, I pay for it. So no one can accuse me of, you know, I'm getting this for free or whatever. And I just, I invested in it early because I look at, I want to be a high volume shop like you, but in small commercial. And I look at it and I say, there's no other tool that gives me the ability to do that down the line.

It just, it's a game changer from a customer experience standpoint. What's up guys. Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show in an exchange for that. I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment.

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I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode. Yeah. We just, it was funny when we kind of first started doing this.

We said, hey, look, I just want to be able to go to each one of my CSRs and say, hey, look, these are the five people this week that are most likely to leave the agency. And these are the five people this week that are most likely to buy something for you. Because before we were just choosing 10 random names out of a hat. We'd be like, all right, let's call these people this week and see what happens. So it really gives us some direction and empowers them to do what they need to do.

Yeah. This is the kind of tech, though, that gets me so excited about what we're doing. And again, it's not about technology. It's about what you can deliver to your customers. And what I think is this stuff, especially something like Donna, coupled with something like an agency Zoom or another CRM.

I don't want to knock just plenty. Better agencies are great CRM. I don't want to knock them. Nick and all those guys are friends and I wish them nothing but the best as well. So I don't want to just make this about agency Zoom.

But I look at that and I'm like, this is bringing us closer to delivering on the real value proposition that every independent agency actually has, right? Like we do a good job of it. But man, this is taking us even closer to that. You know, now your person, you can actually get to the point where you know that for a middle-aged man, a 45-year-old guy, Sally in your office is the most, will have the most productive conversations versus Tammy or Johnny or Timmy, right? Like you just know.

And then for younger millennials or right now, I mean, younger is now zennials or whatever you call them, right? Maybe Tim's the best person to reach out to that person. And, you know, eventually we'll get to that point where you can actually be that targeted in who reaches out, when they reach out, what they're asking about. I mean, man, it just blows my mind what we're going to be able to do in the not-too-distant future. And it's funny because a lot of other industries, this is old news almost, you know what I mean?

And like, it's, we were just joking about the stuff that we get excited about in insurance is like crap that like other industries have been doing forever, you know? So, and like nothing against like, I mean, looking at Tarmacare, for example, right? Like how long has someone been trying to build a commercial lines reader, right? Like, seriously, like I remember even the first time I pulled Jack about it, he just kind of shook his head and it's like, yeah, I heard this story before. I was pretty sure the government was shutting all these things down.

Like why else wouldn't it have happened by now? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So like, but just, I think we're finally at that point where like, I mean, things are still kind of happening slower than we like, um, like, especially on the management system side, you know, um, but I think we're finally getting to that point where like people like you and I, we're not, we're, we're not a tech company.

We don't even pretend to be tech companies, but we can cobble something together, which does what we need to do, you know? And the fact that we're there, I think we'll just kind of snowball and everything will just happen very fast from this point onwards. I think that slowness though is really important because, you know, so many agencies, I mean, gosh, you know, when you walk into your average agency, you know, they're not using any of this stuff now and they're almost afraid to use a lot of this stuff. And you're, you're never going to win those agencies over by saying, all right, well, yeah, you got to implement these six systems and change everything about the way you do it. You need to be able to go in and say, Hey, look, we're going to set up a, you know, a timeline, you know, and we're slowly going to build it.

You know, I know I've heard you on the podcast say, Hey, look, there's systems I want to use and I'm love, I'm a big fan of, but I'm just not there yet. You know, you got to take it step by step. And I think that's where so many agencies go wrong in technology. They try to do everything all at once. And then they wonder why they're confused and it's not working.

Yeah, I recently did. Um, I had the pleasure and the honor of speaking live at the Kentucky leadership conference, like a few weeks ago, it was one, it was freaking amazing to be back in person talking to a live audience. It was just, it was so much fun. And it was like, I had my, my, um, my, whatever my energy bucket was like refilled, right? Just having random conversations with people that would ask questions.

It was awesome. But I was talking to, um, uh, Tara, their executive director, and we were talking about this tech stuff. And she said, you know, I brought up Tarmico was one of the tools I brought up Don. I brought a couple of other things that I use. And she goes, geez, some of these tools I've never even heard of.

And she said, you know, and it wasn't, I don't mean that as, as a knock in any way. Right. She's like half our membership. If I go and walk into their office, they're still using like hard files and it's, you know, these are dusty old offices and they do, you know, they make a money. They have clients and she's like, how do you go in and tell that person that they're doing something wrong?

Right. I mean, they're, their constituency where they live, the type of people they want to write now doing, is that the future? Absolutely not. Right. I mean, we know that that's not the future, but, but I think the point is, um, I think that by having a plan, regardless of its speed, if it's a three-year plan, a three-month plan, whatever it is, having that plan and slowly implementing this stuff gives you such a competitive advantage that, you know, you, in one snapshot, you'll never be able to really fully understand it.

But if you look back, you'd be like, oh my gosh, look how much further away we are. Look how much further away we are from our competition. And I think it's noticeable. I mean, dude, I do video proposals using neoteric agent, uh, Grant Batma's thing. And I get these emails back.

Oh my God. I've never seen anything like this before. This is, this is amazing. All it is, is me for three minutes talking about someone's policy in a video. And like, you would think this was like revolutionary technology to people.

And it just speaks to like, you know, the opportunity because of in general, where we are as an industry. Yeah. And while it is slow and for the agents that aren't slowly implementing, it's going to change for them overnight. You know, they're going to wake up one morning and realize that they're in a completely different industry than what their competition is. Yeah.

And, and, and truthfully, you know, you look at like next insurance and what they're trying to do. You look at Coterie, you look at a tune, you look at, uh, next just bought AP Indigo. You have a cover hound Milo, you know, the, I mean, these are the people that I compare, you know, that I compare rogue to, I mean, we're not there yet. You know, they're not, they're not, they don't have me in their list yet, but, but they will someday. Um, and, and, and I, and I don't know that, I don't know that many agents are awake to the, and maybe the people that listen to this show probably are.

So I might be preaching to the choir just because if you're willing to listen to me pontificate for as often as people do, then they're obviously aware to some extent, but these guys are opportunities aren't even going to get to the local level pretty soon. That's what's starting to happen is deals like your JV, right? Where every deal doesn't even hit the retail market. It's, it's just a partnership that goes to you and you guys are servicing it and doing a great job, but those opportunities aren't even hitting the market. They're going right to you.

And that is happening. That is the move. That's the move in our space is that it's not that your guy down the street who's using you today leaves you for next. That's probably not going to happen. What's going to happen is the next guy, he doesn't even get to you because next or Milo or rogue or someone else picks that person off because they used this tool or, you know, they signed up for this service or they got this license and, and these deals, they're just not, there's going to be less and less people who make it to the retail, the true retail market, both on personal commercial life.

It's going to happen across the board. And being able to have the tech that allows you to create those partnerships, um, like you did with agency zoom and all that kind of stuff that, that to me is, uh, it's something that needs to be considered, uh, moving into the future. Yeah. We always joke about how, when we would walk into like a mortgage person's office or a realtor office, you know, they'd look at us like, Oh crap, here's another insurance agent. You know, you're the third guy that's walked in here this week.

Um, and you know, fighting that ground war like that, picking it off realtor by realtor, um, is a difficult game. I mean, I think every agent out there has great relationships like that, that have really helped them grow their agency. Um, and they're good things to have, but man, those can be difficult to strip away, but when you can get to the top and like you said, kind of choke that pipeline a little bit, it's a heck of an advantage. Um, so, you know, when you guys are taking on, uh, I want to go back to the, uh, SAA master agency thing, and you don't have to give me any intimate details. I'm just interested in general philosophy.

Um, when you look out over your agents and the things that they're struggling with and some of the places that you might see easy wins. So you walk into one of your member agencies and you're like, Hey, here's, here's an easy win for you. Here's something like, what's like one or two things that you see that, um, that, that, that maybe, you know, it's people listening at home could be, could be potential easy wins for, for, for something. I, you know, I mean, this is kind of a general question, so you can take it wherever you want. It can be any part of the agency, but just, just some maybe easy wins that you've maybe started to advise or, or that you see, um, just in the place that you sit.

Yeah. So a few, I mean, technology is the first one, but I think we've kind of hit on that. So, you know, right now, I think that the biggest thing is everybody's complaining about people and everybody's kind of saying, man, I can't find anybody. Um, and you know, we're going through it right now. We've got a whole staff of people that have come back from COVID, um, and are working in our office today.

And I guarantee you, there's a few of them out there that are like, man, I miss working at home. Um, there is an entire marketplace of CSRs out there, um, that are being told they have to come back to the office that aren't happy about it. And we're seeing some agents having a lot of success now hiring an agent, you know, CSR out in, you know, Missouri. Um, whereas before your talent pool was kind of within 20 minutes of your office. Yeah.

And now what COVID has taught us is we can expand that. And the people that I know that are successfully hiring people are doing it that way. And they're finding those people because they're good. They're qualified. And they, all they want to do is work from home.

And if you're okay with that, man, I think you can find some really talented people right now. I think that's one of the easier wins that's out there. I love that. I mean, Hey, my producer that I hired lives in Illinois, right? He's in a different time zone and it has had negligence.

I wish I had better processes. I think that's the key is if you're going to, I think you can, um, you can, uh, uh, hide, uh, poor onboarding and processes. If someone's in the office, cause you just be like, you know, Hey Jimmy, you don't do this. But, um, but so we've, that's exposed in rogue. Some of the lack of documented processes you have in which Andrew we were talking about, and I'm actually starting to build out that like Google sheets thing that you showed me, which I, you know, it was a simple solution to, to a problem, which I actually really like.

Um, but man, I agree with you. He's, I feel like I hit a home run with him. He's in a different time zone and it has had zero effect on, on our business. Yeah. There's no need to be, you know, keeping everybody, you know, so close to you, you know, it's difficult, different to manage, you know, that there's a, there's a different relationship that you have to have there, but it's certainly plausible.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I completely agree with you. That's a great point. Anything else, anything else you see hiring tech, any, anything, any other places?

Yeah. You know, I mean, so within SIA, you know, we were, we're really pushing a lot more of the commercial aspect of that. And it goes back to exactly what we were talking about on the personal side, where that market is changing so rapidly that, you know, making sure that you've got, you know, your foot at least, you know, solidly in the commercial lines market is really important. So that's one thing that we're doing a lot of right now is going in and teaching about just that niche marketing. All right.

Look, we're going to choose two classes of business and we're going to go after them. And we're going to learn as much as we can about them. And we're going to become that person for the state of Ohio that does that. You know, maybe even for other states as you kind of branch out, but that's kind of the big one right now is going in really niche marketing in that commercial lines to be, you know, to build that with the business. How many states are you guys in?

Ash, 30. 30. Have you, how have you managed that? Have you, do you have someone who's specifically like a compliance person? You know, that's a big, a big question that I get.

Cause we, we technically are licensed. I shouldn't even say technically we are, we are licensed in 16 states and then through our relationship with India, and we're basically able to write in all 50 states. And I get people who ask like, how do you, what if you sign the wrong document here, there? And it hasn't really been a struggle. I mean, we have a basic list of, you know, the documents that need to be signed in a state.

It hasn't been that much of a struggle. Have you found that? Oh yeah, no, it's, it's a, it's painful. I mean, it's one of those things where like, I always thought that, you know, if, if somebody could pass a law that allows us to get just like a national insurance license. Oh yeah.

The licensing part is brutal. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. That person.

Yeah. I would vote for that person to be president tomorrow. So that, I mean, but so we, we've got an office manager that handles all that. Yeah. And you know, it's, it's, it's almost impossible to not have somebody that specializes in it.

And I know there's a lot of companies out there that do it. I'll give a big shout out to who we use. I mean, it's, it's an expense because you're, you're essentially paying someone to do this, but ILSA, I L S A I N C I think is their website. But if you, ILSA insurance licensing something, SA, you know, I can't remember exactly what it is, but man, we, I send them an email and I say, Illinois, and a week later, we're licensed in Illinois. And, and that has been a godsend.

I mean, obviously I'm hoping that they don't mess anything up. They don't seem to, they've been doing it for a while. They seem to do a great job. So that's why I'm recommending them, but, um, but, but the other side of it is it's not in-house and you are, you know, you're paying an expense for it. It's not like you're just going to, you know, NIPR and getting the license.

I mean, someone is doing the work and there's a cost to it, but, um, that's who we're using for it. Yeah. And I won't mention names, but I, I know an agency that went through a fee with the state because the, you know, he got his non-residence license and he was there, but he also had to go to the secretary of state and register his name there. And, you know, how would you know that? You know, it's like, I, you know, that's not something that I would know, but you got a, you got a $500 fine because you didn't do it.

I'll tell you that that is, again, I'm again, why it sounds like this. I'm Ilsa is not a sponsor of the show. I just use them just so everyone is aware. But, um, but they, they taught me that I was on the phone with them and they're like, Hey, do you want to do the secretary of state file with secretary of state and have us send any tax documents? And I said, I was like, well, is that, you know, I, I'd never heard of that before.

Uh, you know, I said, that sounds weird. Is that really necessary? And they're like, well, it's not necessary, but you could get a fine. And, you know, I basically just said, you know, whatever, whatever it takes, I want to, I don't ever want to get anything in the mail that says I owe anyone money if, if I can avoid it. And if an extra, whatever, a couple hundred bucks helps me avoid it, I'm going to do it.

So that, that was something that I was there. There's also fingerprinting in a couple of States that, you know, it was difficult. And, uh, a lot of States have like these ancillary documents that you may think you're licensed, but if you don't send the documents in, in a certain amount of time, then it's, it voids the license. And so you're sending your license to carriers saying you're licensed in a state, but really you're technically not, um, sorry, Vermont, but we've, we have since fixed that problem. So if anyone from Vermont is listening, we're good now.

Um, so it's, it's, it is why I agree with the licensing part, the, the, um, I guess when I said it wasn't difficult, I meant the, uh, the writing and managing of insurance policies in those States hasn't been as difficult as I thought it would be, but yeah, the licensing is brutal. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, there's always that, you know, concern about, you know, Hey, geez, you know, is there something in that state that I don't know a ton about? And, and we've always been a little bit, you know, hesitant about doing that one-off, you know, sometimes for policies.

Yeah. But, you know, I, I think on the, on the whole, I don't think it's that big of a risk. And, you know, if you've got business more often than not, you're going to try to find a way to write it. Yeah, I agree. So, you know, I want to be respectful of your guys' time and this has been a tremendous conversation.

I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm. Thank you for taking the time with me. This has been great. You know, I'll leave you in and I'm interested in both of your perspectives and you're not allowed to say ditto, but just the next, the next three to five years, I'm going to give you just a little bit of context. I see this as a defining period for the next 10 to 20 years in our business.

I think we're in a transition moment. I think we're in a true transition moment from, um, analog to, to digital. And actually I just had a conversation with Nigel Walsh, the head of Google insurance, which will be coming out. It'll have come out actually before this conversation, but, um, so goal is going to last up to that guy, but we're, we're much smarter than that guy. No.

Well, so he, he basically, what he said was, um, there are two things happening. There's digitizing, which is a traditional agency becoming digital. And then there's digitalizing, which is basically the same word, but with an AL before the ING. And, um, that is native digital businesses. And he said, what's happening is traditional are digitizing and more and more digital agencies are coming into existence and gaining share.

So, so we're in this like tumultuous period. And that's why I think the next three to five years are defining. You're going to define where you fall in the next 20 in this period. So obviously to me, it seems like you guys are on the right path, but you know, do you see yourself positioning, you know, are you thinking about that? And is there any future move that, that we haven't talked about that you see coming that you can talk about that will set you selves up?

Sounds like a question for you, Andrew. I think what's funny. So like a hundred percent agree with you, but I think at the same time, and it's going to sound weird coming from one, at the same time, you got to remember that like our current client base, like we have an office that's like an hour west of us. And it's funny because those people compared to like people here do business completely different, like completely different. The type of marketing you got to do to them is different.

Like everything is different out there. So I think there's definitely a future that we'll talk about in a second, but I think currently you can't forget, you can't just go digital and forget everybody else. You know what I mean? Because I think I, 90% of clients out there still do business the whole way that's what they're used to. You know what I mean?

So even if you're rolling in new things, you can't just like pull a plug one day and plug it into a tech outlet and expect all your clients to just want to do business like that. You know what I mean? So I think there does need to be some thoughts put into that. And even when we roll out stuff internally, right? Like, so a lot of what we're talking about with agency Zoom, like I don't even, we're just beginning to kind of use that to manage current clients.

You know what I mean? Like we didn't even have a book uploaded because we don't, we've been doing business with like some of these people for 20 years. You know what I mean? We don't want to completely change our type of communication with these people without making sure that it's flawless. You know, like I'm, don't get me wrong.

We're going to make mistakes, but like, I'm trying to eliminate those mistakes and have the mistakes be with like my 1% of new business clients and not like my entire book, you know? But as far as the future, I mean, I think there's so much crazy stuff. Like I'm super interested, like someone's going to figure out a way to, to leverage a lot of what's going on with like, you know, like the Bitcoin, like, you know what I mean? I know I listened to like Sessor on this thing the other day, but I think it's like, and I don't know that that's the answer, but someone's going to figure out some way to kind of tokenize all these transactions and it's going to be really interesting. When that happens, I think that'll trigger a lot of, of the, a giant symbol effect, like all the way down the chain.

So I think that's something you got to be ready for. Um, and just, just kind of like evolving with your clients, you know, like, I don't think any of us sitting here can say like, Hey, this is how we're going to do business in five years, because I guarantee you if all three of us were sitting together five years ago and look where we are now, like none of us would be like probably talking about anything that we're doing right now. But I just think you've got to be nimble, right? You know, you've got to, there's a couple of things that Jack and I always joke about that. Like, we don't want to be the first thing to try.

Like we're never going to be the first person to try a brand new phone system. And we're never going to be the first person to try a management system, to be honest with you, because those are two things that we just need to kind of make phone calls and just store our policy information. Right. Yeah. The dummies like me try it and then see what breaks.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. Well, we're not going to be first adopters for those things, but lots of these like ancillary technologies that are able to connect. I think the big thing with the next step is that like, you notice that all these companies that we've talked about, literally every single one of them, even better agency.

I think like they're able to integrate with these other third parties. I think there's a pipe dream for a long time about having one management system, which does everything you need, you know? And I think that's like a bunch of nonsense. The problem is that like, even if you build that, you're not going to be the best at anything. You know what I mean?

Like, you're not going to be the best CRM. You're not going to be the SANS, you know, you're not going to have the best technology in the back end with analytics. Like, you're just not going to have all of that. So in order for you to take that step, either, like, I think eventually Jack and I, like, we had Griffin on staff. So like, we almost had like a tech person in the office, but I almost think that's something between that tech person and that marketing person in the office, those are like the two biggest additions which we've made, I think, you know, and that's, that's really kind of playing in your head because like, we don't really have 40 hours of tech stuff for somebody to do in the office, you know what I mean?

But the hope is that we're going to have them, you know, and the hope is that we might get a couple of them, you know, that might be an extremely important position. So just trying to position yourself in a way to like, whatever comes out, you got to be ready to adopt and try to figure out how to work, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome.

Yeah. I mean, it's a big, you know, I guess I could say concern moving forward is what that's going to look like. And we think about it all the time. You know, when, when you talk about digitalizing agencies, I think that there's an aspect of a skill set there that most agents just don't have. And, you know, I always say this when I listen to podcasts like yours, there'll be people on there and they'll talk about, oh, we built this platform and, you know, it does this or it does that.

I'm like, man, I, I can't do that. That's not who I am. That's not what my staff is capable of doing. If I'm going to build an agency like that, I got to, you know, fire all these people and bring in a bunch of programmers. You know, it's like, it's almost like a different world.

So, you know, I think right now we're taking that digitizing route because I think that it's something that we can do and it's something that we can do well. And I, you know, and I, I am a big believer in, you know, the idea of, you know, community. You know, when, when I first started in the industry, I mean, I never thought I'd end up in insurance. And I, and I got good advice from a friend of mine that said, you know, Hey, look, you know, good people that are going to change the world are going to work in every industry. You know, you're going to, you're going to have to do it wherever you're at.

You can do good things. And, you know, so from a community standpoint, we're really big in the community and we want to make sure that we're a big part of that. And that's part of the joy in it for me. And I, so I think that there's always going to be that aspect of, you know, being an agency that can deliver a product that feels very digitized to my customer, that feels the same as if they went directly with the Hartford, but is also a member of their community and, you know, or, or a member of a community where they look and say, Hey, look, man, that guy's doing some really good stuff for his community. Those are the type of people I want to work with.

And so that's what I think it is. I think you need to build it digitized, but it needs to still be a brand. It's still got to be somebody that people want to work with. I think that's the perfect way to end this. I couldn't agree with you more.

I think you're right on it, man. Well, Hey guys, this has been tremendous. I appreciate you sharing time. I mean, this is, this is, there's a lot of dollars per hour being, being blown right here. I mean, the brain trust of, of, uh, her Vic insurance here on the podcast.

No, I, I, and all jokes aside, I, I, I do appreciate it. I love you sharing your expertise. I think it's tremendous. And, um, I think that, you know, it's these kinds of conversations, I think help just incrementally, you know, give people little ideas, little nuanced concepts, little turns of phrases that help open their eyes to what's available to them if they want that. And, um, I just appreciate it.

So thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Great talking to you. Thank you. Cheers.

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