Mark McClure Explains How to Use CommercialInsurance.net

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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous conversation with Mark McClure, the founder and CEO of CommercialInsurance.net, a tremendous resource for agencies looking to supplement their lead generation with high-quality kind of live phone call transfer leads. And, you know, again, full disclosure, I'm not an investor, not an advisor, not a sponsor of the show. Just a company that we use a lot. I really like Mark and the way that he approaches his business.

We've had a tremendous experience with CommercialInsurance.net as far as using it to, exactly as I stated, supplement our standard inbound lead referral, you know, all the stuff that we do day-to-day. We use CommercialInsurance.net to supplement that activity and get some live phone call transfers in targeted industries, in targeted states, etc. And we found it to be an incredibly useful tool in creating consistency in our revenue and premium production. So, wanted to get Mark on. I've been trying to get him on for a long time.

You'll hear us kind of chat about that. Just both of our schedules have been so busy. And I just wanted to put this tool in front of you guys. That's why I do the show. I'd like to get high-quality tools, resources in front of you.

And CommercialInsurance.net is definitely one of those tools that I highly recommend. So, hopefully you will enjoy this conversation. Guys, before we get there real quick, just want to kind of go through my standard shout-out as far as I love you guys for listening to this show. It means so much to me. These days, with Rogue Risk, I have been incredibly busy.

There's more things to do day-to-day than I could ever possibly get done. However, this show and sharing these conversations is really important to me. And in that way, I love growing the show. I love building our audience because more people get exposed to these ideas, these concepts. It helps, I think, move our industry forward, these conversations.

I think this show is part of one small piece of the larger movement of moving our industry to just its full potential. Let's put it that way. I think that all the conversations that are happening today are continuing to move our industry to its full potential, which is not just the bedrock of kind of the business and really our day-to-day lives, but ultimately a mechanism for growth, for career development, for satisfaction and purpose in people's lives, creating sustainability and profitability in small businesses and businesses throughout our country, as well as protecting our people's personal assets. I mean, that's what we do. And these conversations help do that.

So my ask to you is that if you enjoy this show, if you enjoy this podcast, whether it's this episode or others, share the show, text it to somebody, share it on Facebook, social media, email your friends, share it in a newsletter if you have one. That's how we grow the show is people subscribe and listen. And if you ever want to give feedback, I'd say right now LinkedIn is the best place. You go to LinkedIn, DM me, whatever. Check the DMs a lot.

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And let's get on to Mark. What's going on, man? How are you? I'm well. I'm well.

It's back in Oklahoma. Nice. Wow. I'm, is it a good change from the, from the ocean and the sun or happy? I love Oklahoma.

It is. It's a great, great state. Nice people. My kids were happy to see their friends. So when they're happy, I'm happy.

I suppose. I like the ocean personally, but you know, they're both good spots. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, it's nice that you can get away like that, you know, and make it kind of a work thing too. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Cool. Well, dude, I'm, I'm excited to connect with you.

I know it's been a long time coming. We had that chat the other day, but I'm just in general, happy to happy to connect. Yeah. Same here. Same here.

Cool. Well, you know, we'll kind of, we'll kind of get into it here. I, so, so, you know, I think I've mentioned you guys a bunch of times on the show. We've been using commercial insurance.net. Off and on since 2020.

Awesome. Only ever off because of staffing issues. Not ever because we weren't happy with the service. Mostly just at different times. If at different times, I've been the only producer and just wasn't able to take the calls.

You know what I mean? And that was a problem I was running into. And then I had at one time a producer too. And for some reason, well, they're not with us anymore. So that's really why there were larger issues there.

But, you know, now, and just, you know, not that I want this to be an advertisement. I don't mean it to be. I just, I have a bunch of things I want to talk to you about, but just to give everyone listening at home, kind of some, some background, you know, how we use the tool today is, is really as a part of the onboarding of new producers to get them up and running, to get them opportunities right away, you know, get them on the phone, see what they can do, prove their metal kind of thing. Like, Hey, you know, we're going to get you some calls. We're going to get you some in front of some business owners.

We're going to get them to you right away. And, and let's see, let's see what you can do. And that that's worked pretty well for us. And so that's, that's kind of what we're doing today. But I'd love maybe just, just to kind of give everyone background.

I'd love to hear a little bit more, just your kind of your origin story, you know, so you're the superhero of, of commercial transfers. There's a lot of good people out there, but thank you. At what point did you get bit by the radioactive spider? How did all this happen? So I started my first company traffic strategies back in 2000 and I just graduated university of Oklahoma and my dad was running a company by the name of flowers direct.

It was just when the flower industry was taken off. And so started studying SEO, became really good at SEO and built a search engine optimization company. But I frankly couldn't sell my way out of a paper bag. So fortunately my dad, I recognized that and ended up introducing me to a guy by the name of Chad Jakeways who became a partner. And this was probably back in 2001.

And we, we grew an SEO company in South Florida, built a lot of the solutions for office Depot, Thompson cigar, a lot of South Florida companies throughout that journey. We recognize that we can make more money becoming an affiliate. And so we discovered affiliate marketing. This is about the time commission junction takes off 2002, 2003 link share corporation. We were also a super affiliate and just started building proprietary websites.

And we got really good at a search marketing, affiliate marketing, frankly, just introducing a customer's to businesses, whether they're in the retail space or the dating space. And by 2004, that's when the mortgage level really started to take off. And so we got into financial services and sort of rode that wave. And by 2007, we were selling about 75,000 leads a month to American express, chase credit cards, a lending tree, countrywide mortgage. And we met a group by the name of rocket.

And at the time they had just acquired link share corporation, I guess, a year prior to that for, I believe 452 million, which was a significant premium over what the commission junction sold just a year prior to that. So we recognize that, wow, this would be the company we want to sell our, our business to traffic strategies. We only had nine people and we were having a lot of fun and fortunately had the opportunity to sell our business in May of 2007, which became the lead generation platform for rocket and our company traffic strategies. Joined those guys in, I guess, May of 2007. And then everybody knows what happened in 2008 mortgage fall out and the whole world, you know, financial world kind of collapsed.

And, but you know, throughout the journey, we developed a skill at generating online leads and introducing them to companies, whether no matter what industry they were in. And so from there, we, during our earn out process, you know, I'm an entrepreneur, I'd never worked for anybody in my life other than maybe picking up range balls when I was in high school at the local golf range municipal. But anyways, I threw up the earn out at about 18 months to think about what I wanted to do next. And a couple of our customers at traffic strategies at the time were e-surance, personal lines, insurance space, as well as insurance.com. And when we were generating leads and traffic for that group, and when we were generating leads and traffic for that group, Chad and I, and also Kim Reed, who's with us again today, when we were generating the personal lines leads, we would stumble upon these commercial insurance leads and we never picked anybody to buy them.

We couldn't figure out why, you know, part of the problem was kind of e-surance was a personal lines insurance company. So that was a challenge, but insurance.com, you know, at least help should have been able to take some of those leads and introduce them to whether they sold the policy or introduce them to, you know, maybe a traveler's hardware CNA of the world. But that was, we were not successful. And so as I finished that journey, I, you know, I had some cash and was in my late twenties, definitely plenty of arrogance. I thought, well, how hard could it be to sell commercial insurance?

You know, we just did this massive deal with Rockerton, one of the biggest internet companies in the world. Maybe I should get a, you know, start a commercial insurance agency because I had a non-compete. I couldn't sell leads anymore for a period of time. So this was probably finished my earn out at the end. End of 2009.

That's after the mortgage crisis fallout and started back over in January of 2010. And since it was a crossroads, I was from Oklahoma and my wife and I had a baby and we wanted to be closer to family. So we relocated back to Oklahoma and hung our shingle. We brought in a partner and he and I started a commercial insurance agency. We got licensed in 50 States 2010 and we were generating all of these leads.

We went to get our first appointment and told the whole Rockerton story, which nobody had heard of in the insurance world at the time. And they weren't really impressed with Rockerton, that experience or small business insurance, frankly, specifically online. So imagine knocking on doors, you know, whether it's Hartford, Travelers, whomever in 2010 said, Hey, we're really good at doing digital marketing. We have all these customers coming in. They want to buy insurance.

You guys have policies for them. We're going to sell these policies online without talking to the customer. That just was, I mean, it would have been maybe easier to bang our head against the concrete curb, but nonetheless, we, we started selling some policies through some wholesalers and we were last, we went ahead and got licensed in 50 States. And, you know, the first couple of years were rough. We put in about maybe 700, a little over 750 grand in the first year and generated 64,000 in top line revenue.

So that was not quite the college try the next year. We put in another 800 grand and generated 200,000 in revenue. So two years, we're just completely get taken out of the woodshed and starting to understand how hard it is to build a commercial insurance agency staff with insurance agents. Generating leads, you know, is in our DNA. So that came naturally, but we, you know, first couple of years were pretty tough.

And throughout the journey, there was a guy by the name of Brian Lippel over a traveler to introduce us to Mark Schmetlein, who was running travelers at the time. And they flew, I was just about ready to quit. And so they, they flew and do something different. They flew nine executives out to Norman, Oklahoma. And we didn't even have a conference room.

There were just like four insurance agents in an office on campus corner. And we told our story and, you know, Mark and Brian just, they gave us the confidence just to keep going. Don't give up. You're on to something. This is 2012.

So by 13, we were cashflow positive. And by 2015, we had returned all of our investment and built a small commercial insurance agency. Didn't need to build our book over the next few years, probably sold way too many contractors and learned some lessons on how important renewals are in cross-selling. And again, we were really good at generating leads, not so good at service. So customers were coming in the front door and going out the back door just as fast.

By 2018, I had a few partners who love the insurance business. I had spent eight years building this agency with 50 salespeople, service people. It just wasn't to the size of a company that I had dreamt that it might be and wanted to get back into the leads business. So I had the opportunity to divest all of the insurance assets and sold the insurance book along with all of the insurance producers and service team members and even some accounting members over to a middle market brokerage who needed a small business insurance unit and retained all of the digital assets. So I started back over and I guess this is the fall of 2018 with about maybe $190,000 a month in revenue, so a couple million dollars annually from just selling the leads that we were not selling insurance with.

So we were essentially cherry picking the leads when we had the insurance agency and then selling all of the overflow, the bounce houses, excess and surplus policies that either we didn't have expertise or maybe would not. Renew started back over 2018. We had about 15 people on the digital marketing side and reached out to my buddy, Chad Jake ways. He had had a number of startups and was back at Rockington and built out their search marketing team and convinced him to get the band back together. So Chad and I joined back up in January 2019.

And like I said, we were doing just under a couple hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue. First year we finished at 5 million in revenue selling leads. We built out a real time bidding platform for the lead exchange. We had about 5,000 leads a month that we started with and ended that year again at about 5 million in revenue and we were cash flow positive. Next year we did 10 million and of course, you know, COVID hit in March of 2020 so that was a bit of a challenge and then last year it just took off for us again and finished the year at 24 million revenue and are on track to do about 43 million this year.

Our business today bread and butter is introducing small businesses to insurance agents, brokers, carriers throughout the country. I think probably what makes us unique is, you know, lead generations in our DNA, but also running a commercial insurance agency for eight years and understanding that all leads are not good leads for everybody, especially if you don't have a market, even if the lead is free. That experience I think gives us a competitive advantage in space and understanding how important it is to make sure just from a customer experience standpoint, you're introducing customers to somebody that can help them, but secondly, you know, our customer is also the agent or broker that's purchasing or carrier that's purchasing the call. And we want to make sure that they have a market for this risk, if not we allow them to return it and you know we try to place them elsewhere that's essentially what our businesses today we also offer inbound outbound telemarketing services which a lot of insurance companies use for capacity challenges, as you know, whether you have a smaller insurance agency with a couple agents or even these, you know, large carriers that have a couple of hundred agents, you know, staffing licensed insurance agents.

To work the amount of traffic that we can generate. It's a challenge. It's a challenge. We even struggled with it, you know, when we were running our agency and so through that we built these capacity solutions that allow us to be on the front lines of many insurance carriers. So the customer will call in, we might answer the phone on behalf of the carrier.

We try to make sure that they have a market before we call or in the hands of the insurance agent. If they don't have a market, then we will match them with one of our other 200, a little over 200 agents or brokers that can help them. And, you know, it's beneficial for everybody, right? It's a better customer experience. Why send them to a carrier that doesn't even have a market for them?

They may be told, we don't have a market. You're not big enough. You have too many claims. Nobody wants to hear this. So we try to match in with somebody that can help them.

It's also a bad agent experience to, you know, as you know, spend even 10 minutes explaining why you can't help somebody. It's a waste of everybody's time and it's just negative energy. And so we remove that person. And then, of course, it generates incremental income for the carrier and frees them up to spend more time with the customers that they actually have a market for. Yeah, you know, that's that's lead triage is such a important part of the equation.

And what's funny is, you know, we we don't generate anything near the volume that you do. But on our own, you know, we do a decent amount. And, you know, lead triage is the hardest part of it. You get these, you know, you can you can be as targeted and keyword optimized and SEM optimized. You know, as much as you want, you're going to get stuff that doesn't fit what you're looking for.

You just simply can't help. And every minute that you spend on the phone or even dealing with an account that you just know you can't help. And as much as you want to be good to people and you don't want to just blow them off because that's, you know, negativity that you don't need in the world for a bunch of reasons. It crushes it crushes not just not just the your bottom line, obviously, which it does. It also crushes the morale of your people like, you know, when you're when you're sending leads to somebody and they get excited and they see a lead come in and they call that person and they find out it's dynamite manufacturer.

You know, on the coast. And, you know, they're in a stick built building that that also gets as forest fires next door. It's like, you know, that just crushes their soul, you know, and then that starts to happen over and over and over again. And now all of a sudden they feel defeated. They don't want to pick up the phone.

They don't want to make these calls. And that's how you burn out a sales force or a service forces is that kind of stuff. So, you know, I really like your point around kind of making sure that only the leads that you want to write or can write get to you because that that is a huge part of the equation. You can have 500 leads, but if you got to sift through them to get to the hundred that you can actually write that those 400 leads are going to kill you. They're going to they're going to destroy your business.

Yeah, that's why we lost so much money in the beginning. Yeah, we were able to make it through it. But, you know, we had some, you know, really good friends to just, you know, kind of give us the, you know, pat on the back to keep going. But yeah, it's, it's challenging. It's expensive and it is negative energy.

Yeah, I know we, we currently, you know, I'm for sure not your biggest seller, but we, we sell, we sell, we've started to bake in process in our system where we're pushing leads back to you guys. And, and, and then you can push them out to wherever, you know, the, to the markets and the agents and the carriers that actually can write, you know, certain lines that we just either, like you said, don't have the in-house expertise for, or don't have the markets for, or just for whatever reason have decided it's not a place that we want to be like trucking, you know, trucking is a good example. I think there's a huge, there's always a huge opportunity in trucking. We get a lot of truckers, you know, cause they see the stuff that we do around commercial auto. So they'll reach out and, you know, we just don't have the in-house expertise to be a trucking firm.

So, you know, you guys have exposure there for sure. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So you guys provide us with a good, a good outlet to say, Hey, unfortunately we're not a good fit, but we're going to send you over here, call this phone number, you know, go to this website, whatever.

And, and they'll get you all squared. And then people are happy, right? I mean, that's all they, they're just looking for a solution. You know, I think, I think a lot of agents get hung up on the idea, like, because I can't help you, you're going to be mad at me. And it's like, no, these people called you because they're looking for a solution.

And if you're willing to say to them, I'm not the solution, but I'm going to send you to, to the person that is, that makes them way more happier than you trying to fumble around and fart around and figure out some program. And it's taken 10 weeks to get them insurance because you're not really an expert in it. That's the worst case scenario, not the, Hey, I'm just gonna, Hey, I really appreciate the call. Would love to do business with you, but can't, I'm going to send you over here. That's, that's a way better process.

That's good to hear. Thank you. Yeah. 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.

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Peace. Let's get back to the episode. So, you know, I, I guess, you know, I'm, I'm interested a lot in, um, not, not necessarily the secret sauce cause I, cause I know it exists, but you know, the idea of generating inbound leads in insurance. I mean, obviously you dealt with it full frontal when you were trying to go out to the carriers. I think today the disposition is a little different, still, still not what it is in other industries, but a little different, you know, for a long time, you know, we've been dealing with this concept that like any consumer that would go out to the internet and search for an insurance agent that way is a bad lead.

And I would love for you to talk through that, the evolution of that and maybe put to bed that concept just based on your experience. You know, that is, that is certainly a challenge that we had early on when we were trying to seek our original appointments, when we were an insurance agency, I'll tell you the sizes of the businesses that we saw in those days. I think many people refer to them as micro because they were really small. Uh, we're starting to see, you know, larger, they're still small businesses, but they're businesses that have been in business for significantly many more years than they were in the beginning. It seemed like we had a lot of startups in the beginning.

We still have some today, but the quality of the leads that we're seeing come across today, even somewhere in the middle market range are, it's just significantly better. Which tells me that it's very similar to the shop that my father, my father built with flowers, direct me, flowers.com. And, you know, that was back in the late nineties. And, you know, selling flowers online was, was, you were a pioneer if you were doing that in the late nineties. And, you know, it took about six, seven, eight years for the public to be aware that you can go online, you can search for flowers, you can credit card in.

And I think we are just still like in the very beginning stages, very similar concept to how flowers were in the late nineties. Like customers are just now figuring out that they can go online and, you know, at least search for quotes and, and try to start to find a agency carrier broker that can, you know, that can help them. And as they become more and more comfortable, I think that we will see commercial insurance online explode, uh, into more of a, you know, the hockey stick that, uh, I was hoping we would see in 2012. But it's just taking a lot longer and it's because it's a difficult product. I mean, you know, I think the, what keeps me up to mind is, you know, is dreaming about selling these policies online without speaking with the customer someday and managing loss ratios and making sure that, uh, you know, they, they, they classify themselves correctly.

Like we're, for me, we're still pretty far off on being able to do that in mass. Yeah, there are certain classes you could probably do it with, but to be able to scale that at a, you know, at a much larger range, it's, you know, it's just going to take some more time. Yeah, I think getting people to buy online initially, I agree we're, we're far off from mass adoption, but it's, you can definitely grow a business rapidly getting them to buy. The problem is retaining. If you don't, if, if, if you do not have the service model, you know, so what, what I've seen a lot of our competitors do in that, that are digital commercial brokers are, they get, you know, they get a channel partner or two.

They buy a shit ton of leads. They run a shit ton of ads. Um, they get the leads in the door and they can write them right. Yeah. Whether it's a human or, or, or, um, direct binds, they're writing business and putting business on books.

I mean, just look at new front and renegade and some of these others, what they've done. Yeah. Yeah. Problem is they can't break 40% retention. Yeah.

And, and, and, and it's because, you know, for my opinion, um, the CFOs take over and they make the decision to outsource. I mean, I know I'm pretty sure at least one of those two, and I'm just in case I'm wrong, I'm not going to name which one I think it is, but at least one of them just outsourced their entire service department to India. Sure. Now that sounds like a great idea from a financial perspective and nothing against the people of India or people of Indian descent. But when you're in a different time zone in a different country with a different, uh, accent, um, in a, in a non native speaking English person who is trying to service your policy.

And it is obvious that they are not the agency that you originally worked with. You don't get retention. And that is the part that kills people. So it's, can you scale this business using American cert? I think the sales process can be hot, much more automated, really light human touches or direct binds initially certain, especially for certain markets and certain size accounts.

I don't know that you can completely that you can do that on the service side yet. I just think. I don't think we're there either. Yeah. And we may never be the customer.

You know, we, we saw the retention for standard lines business in the 80% range, which I understand is lower than you see with a really good firm like a Gallagher or most likely a hub or some of these large brokerages. Um, we, you know, the, that, that was for the standard lines customers, the non standard customers were the ones who were the groups specifically if they're brand new, that you saw retention rates just be significantly less. Yeah. So, you know, I think being able to focus on the right classes that, you know, are going to, you know, most likely renew, uh, whether it's you're building in my years in business or payroll or number of employees, uh, is, is a much smarter way to attack this concept and trying to be a generalist, which is what I tried to do at my agency. So, you know, we built up a nice, we built up a nice book.

We had maybe 15, 16,000 customers active, but, um, we didn't do a good job keeping them because we were way too many contractors and really addicted to clean new business on the books and not focusing on that service aspect that you're talking about. So, you know, over time, I would expect that the quality of the customer continues to improve. Do you ever get to a level that you might see offline? No, but can you scale offline, uh, at the same rate with, you know, the same economic? Probably not.

Well, no, that's, that's, that's the big lie that I think is still being perpetuated today. Is, um, I, I give all due respect to everyone that built standard, local, super regional, even, even up to national agencies in the eighties and nineties and early two thousands based on, you know, what I'd call very tried and true best practice traditional methods. I, I, they did it the way they had to do it. They did it well and it worked and I, and I give them all due respect. You cannot build that agency today.

And you, you, I, I look at agencies that are starting up the, the, I'm going to join the golfing thing and I'm going to join a networking group and I'm going to ask for referrals and I'm just going to cold call my local market. It doesn't work. Yeah. You know, now if your local market is the entire Northeast, maybe, maybe, but then now you're, now you're starting to expand into what would be considered a digital agency anyways. So like, I think, I think that yes, you know, if you have an established book and you're getting referrals from agents, can you incrementally grow with traditional method?

Yes, it's not dead, but if you want to scale your business, you want to grow and you don't want it to take 25 or 30 years to get to the point where you actually have a team and back end support and all this kind of stuff. You have to go digital or digital has to be a large part of what you're doing and, and then all these realities that we're discussing come into play. It's a, it's not, I feel like I used to get this all the time. Cause you know, I've been talking about this stuff, you know, especially content marketing, less, less ads and stuff, more, more content. And that's how we, you know, we have a very high close ratio, um, on our inbound stuff because of all the video work that I do.

So people watch a lot of videos and whatever, but, um, um, you know, they used to say, well, you know, I, you know, that that's, you're trying to take it, you're trying to do it the easy way. You just don't want to do the work. You just don't want to do the hard work. And it's like, this is not, this is just different obstacles. This isn't easy.

There's nothing easy about what we're doing. You know, there's nothing easy about what you explained and all the trials that you went through and you're one of the best lead generators in our, in our industry. So it's like, you know, there's nothing easy about it. It's just different. It's just a different set of obstacles.

And I don't like that mentality, or at least I think that's a very narrow mentality to, to think that way. Yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah. So, you know, as far as like, um, so, so as far as in general, the, the lead generation space, um, digital space in general, digital consumers, like what kind of stuff do you see coming down the pipes?

Are there any general trend changes that you see? Um, are there any like major shifts in, in how people are buying, how they're shopping, anything like that, that you see that, that you're, you're willing to share? I know, I know some of this is kind of your sauce and I don't, I don't want you to not ask me to share anything like that. I think, um, every year that, you know, it goes by, you start to see more and more customers gravitating online. I should know these percentages in the back of my head, but I don't, it's, but it is certainly growing.

And I think we're at the very beginning, the quality of the customers I mentioned earlier is, is starting to improve as well. We're seeing that in the retention and loss ratios with some of the carriers we work, work with that report their data back to us. So we can make sure we're feeding them the right, uh, the right calls as far as, you know, what the future looks like. You know, my hope is eventually we get to a point where we can ask the customer, do they want to talk to an agent? I think that's not going away, um, at least not, uh, during my working career, uh, or do they want to purchase online?

If they want to purchase online, most likely to protect that customer experience, we'll take them down that route for those that, uh, have that ability. And, you know, others, we might, you know, obviously steer through the, uh, call exchange. That's a network that, uh, that we've built today. But I think that's what the future looks like. And, you know, that's what we're working towards.

It just keeping it, you know, not, it's not rocket science. Just focusing on the customer experience and making sure that, that, you know, you're making that small business happy because you're introducing them to somebody that can sell them a policy in the way in which, in which they wish to purchase it. Yeah, I agree with you. You know, I, I, I will say that a large portion of the inbound leads that we get, or I shouldn't say large, a, a significant portion, a significant enough portion to mention of the inbound leads that we get are actually customers who bought D2C that realized that they now needed help. And that happens a lot.

So I, I think about here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's interesting.

You know what I mean? We get a lot of business from next, you know, Hey, I bought a next policy and I, you know, I can't get ahold of anybody. Right. Or, you know, whatever. And nothing against next.

Cause we actually write some next, you know, as an agent, but it's just that, you know, you click a couple buttons, you buy an insurance policy, and then all of a sudden you start to go, Oh, you know, is this actually what I need? How does this work? How does this work? How do I get a CY? There's all these things.

Yeah. I do. I'm with you in that. I, I, I am interested in and hope to someday be able to facilitate the customers who can, who can purchase policies direct and have it done in a way that, that they're purchasing the right thing that they feel confident in it. I think that always needs to be backed up with a phone call or a place that someone could call a human.

Right. I have this philosophy that if, if you, if you don't feel like, you know, if you don't feel like if something goes wrong, there's somebody you can punch in the face. You're not comfortable being, you're not comfortable working with that business. Right. It doesn't matter where they are.

Yeah. But if you're like, if you're thinking to yourself, you know, if something really goes wrong, I got nobody that I can like fight, you know, I think that, you know, people just, they struggle with that. Better you than me. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's, it's a, it's a really interesting, it's a really interesting problem, but I, I think that there, there has to be a way, there has to be a way to, to, to educate people throughout that purchase process. And there's some companies that are doing some interesting things. Um, what I, what I, you know, and, and again, maybe I'm interested in your feedback on this, but what, what it looks like to me a lot of times is people have good ideas, but those ideas, every new, every new question, every piece of explainer content or explainer video that you, that you insert into the form process. It reduces overall conversion rate, right?

Because it's super easy. If it's four questions to buy a policy, you're going to get, you know, max number of people, but if it's eight questions, but those eight questions get them a better policy, your conversion rate is going to be lower. And it feels like what happens is a lot of people come out with these good ideas with these processes that work people to where they need to be. And then they look at their conversion rate numbers and the conversion optimization starts to eat into those questions. And now all of a sudden you're back down to four questions again in this very like remedial process, but maybe the book's not as profitable.

Um, it's, it's a really interesting dilemma. Yeah, I I've been dealing with that since we started our original business plan was to be more of a lending tree of commercial insurance. And, you know, we figured out pretty quickly that even though we could generate the traffic and we could get the customer started down the funnel of the, you know, questions, the underwriting questions, we never could get them to press the buy button. I mean, yes, a few of them checked out and bought the policy, uh, others checked out and bought the policy misclassified. And yeah, we, which forced us down the, the route of, uh, building out the contact center because that's how the customers today are wanting to buy.

And so, uh, we're not in the contact center business because we'd love contact centers. I mean, we don't like our center, but you know, it's the end of the day, that's, that's where the buyers are. And I would expect it to be like that for, you know, for the near future. So, um, you know, eventually somebody is going to be able to figure out how to underwrite these policies online correctly. And, uh, but it's, it's not, it's not a, it's not, it's, it's going to take both strategies to make that one.

Yeah, I completely agree. I, I think the point that you made to, um, we've seen, uh, just in the last two years, but I've seen throughout my career in general, the size of businesses that are going online is increasing as well. You know, a lot of people will say, ah, well, you just got all those consultants and main street, small businesses. Like, yeah, I mean, we get a lot of those and sure we get a lot of contractors and stuff too, but you know, we wrote. We wrote like a $40,000 manufacturer the other day.

That's awesome. Um, we wrote, it wasn't from you guys. No, but, uh, we, we did, we get, we do have a nice one that my guy is working right now. Um, uh, uh, it's, ah, shoot. What is it?

It's a manufacturer actually in California. And I'm going to butcher what it is. It doesn't matter. One of my guys is working it, but he just gave me the feedback. But, um, you know, I mean, and then we had, we had the other week, we had a $15,000 premium account. $25,000, you know?

And so these aren't like $250,000 middle market accounts, but they're media accounts with real risk and a couple of policies. And these are business owners that have been around for a while. And basically what happens is, you know, again, this goes back to America right there, you know, and that's, you know, we have this no customer. I am currently making the mistake that you described. You know, we are, we have, we have what we call a no customer left behind policy, which means that outside of nine classes of business that we just simply do not have a market for.

Um, and that would include like mining and all the things that go along with that. Um, uh, transportation was one of them. We don't do home healthcare stuff. We don't do human transportation. We don't do, there's a couple others that I'm going to butcher.

It doesn't matter. Right. So we have nine kind of larger classes that we just, we just don't want to deal with today. Um, we'll write anything else that comes through or try to, as long as the person we look more for, we try to disqualify people who are not serious about purchasing. Now that's what we look for less than what type of business they are.

So if they're, if they're kicking the tires or they're, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a business in 2024 and I'm getting some numbers or whatever. Sorry, we can't help you, but if you're like, look, like I opened up this, you know, I don't know, mobile food truck business and I need insurance. And Hey, to get into this, to get into this farmer's market, I got to have a CY and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's the next step. And for you as an entrepreneur, that's what I hated about this business.

When I first got into it is everybody told me not to be a generalist. And I, it just, you, you really want to help these entrepreneurs, whether it's the mobile food truck person or, you know, even a handyman or, um, so, you know, I think, I think what I, what I found is the fact that I went very wide, very quickly has caused me immense amounts of stress and caused all kinds of things to break. Cause it's a very big problem to solve versus just one niche that you can build towards. But at the same time, it has allowed us to consistently put revenue on the books. Uh, it has given us experience scope scale that I think not a lot of people have.

Um, and as we start to work the thing, the problems out, you know, we're still, we're at 86% retention. Um, you know, we're still retaining business and you know, it's, it's been, it's been a very interesting process. It's, you know, I'm positive that as we grow and grow with more pace, that, that, that number is going to come down a little bit for a while. Um, but these are, these just feel like solvable problems to me. Um, and, and I, I'm yet to, I know that there's going to be some tough decisions and that no customer left behind isn't always going to be a hundred percent, no customer left behind.

But I feel like it's an aspirational goal worth trying to go after only because everyone tells me it's not possible. So for that reason alone, maybe with your transaction with SIAA, it possibly is, you know, maybe you're not the one writing. It might not be progress, but it could be, you know, another agency that has that mining specialty in that, you know, in that large. Um, so, so that's, that's a really, you've kind of hit it. Right.

Is what, what SIAA gave us was the breath and the experience and the scope to now start to build out pockets of expertise that we can, we can start to write that stuff. So I, I just, I think that generalist question is so into, I think everyone who says you can't be a generalist is right, which is why I want to figure out how to do it. Because if we can, then I was right there with you. Yeah, we were semi successful. I mean, we were barely profitable, but yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a mountain of a task, but you know, whoever figures that out is, is, I mean, there's a lot of money at the end of that rainbow.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Mark, dude, I, I appreciate you coming on.

I appreciate you spending some time with us. I wanted to get you just your company in front of our audience. I wanted to talk a little bit about leads and stuff just because we've been so successful with, and I love sharing tools that we're successful with on the podcast here. So if someone's listening to this and they're going, geez, you know, I've seen their name, but you know, where do they go? Where do they get signed up?

Where do they find out if a CI.net is a good fit for them? Where, where, where should people go? I would just have them go to commercial insurance.net and they can call into the contact center and we'll put them in touch with one of our team members who can, you know, identify what their appetite is and, you know, see if they're a fit for, for our organization. And then, you know, we usually can get a customer up and running within a few hours. So just go to, you know, commercial insurance.net and place a call, or there's also a web form that you can fill out to, if you're interested in purchasing leads and we can take it from there.

We, we really focus on trying to sell the best leads in the business. And, you know, our dreams are to become the largest aggregator of commercial insurance, new business opportunities. And, you know, so we need, we need all the customers we can. So thank you for the, the time today and for, you know, for, for sharing our company with your audience and your experience. I'm glad.

Thank you so much. All right, man. I appreciate it. And, and wish you guys nothing but the best. Yes, sir.

You too. Good night. Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible. It's not.

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