Resilience, Relationships & Real Conversations

Resilience isn’t just a word, it’s a way of showing up when things get tough. In this episode, Shane and Tonya dive into what resilience really looks like in the independent agency world, why relationships matter more than ever, and how honest conversations can move your business forward. 

IA Forward to can help you take your agency from good to great. Learn more at iaforward.com, and follow IA Forward on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Transcript

Announcer: [00:00:00] This is IA forward your Playbook for Success as an independent insurance agent. Here to help you knock it outta the ballpark are your host, Shane Tatum and Tonya Lied. Welcome to IA  

Tonya: Forward and welcome home from our amazing Integra Partner Network conference that we just got back from in Galveston, Texas at the San Louis Resort. 

Shane: Yeah, it was great. Every time we go down there, it's just a really good time. Agents seem to just relax, get on beach time, island time, and it's a good place to have a conference all the way around.  

Tonya: Absolutely. The conference team this year did an amazing job. Shout out to Holly Howard and her team. 

Fantastic. Any kind of event like that looks like a duck on water. It looks so smooth from the outside and everything's paddling under the water like crazy, but really fantastic job. Our [00:01:00] agents had an amazing time.  

Shane: They did a great job. We did a debrief yesterday and from my perspective, just like you just said, everything was like, best one yet smooth. 

This ice just unbelievable. Like just really good. We graduated to the large ballroom. So we were big enough. Our AV setup was great. I loved everything about it. And the AV guys at the San Lee Louis totally redeemed themselves because we struggled a few years ago when we were there. We let them know that and they wanted to improve. 

So excited about that. There were things going on behind the scenes that I had no idea about, that I learned about yesterday. Just like double booked rooms and vendors. Things like that. The conference was perfect in my view, because the people in charge were taking care of all that stuff. I was just free to visit, talk with our partner agents, listen to their successes, their failures, talk with 'em about what's next for them, be involved in the sessions that I was involved in. 

I felt a little [00:02:00] overexposed this year, every few years. It just so happens that I intend to do a roadmap session every year, open the conference and then. Sometimes I find myself in a few extra sessions that I didn't originally intend to be in, and that's okay. We set the agenda going forward, but it was the content. 

Content's hard. Content's, really hard to stay fresh if you've. Done conferences or been a part of a conference team. You know what I'm talking about. If you're participating in a conference, take it easy on the content creators for those sessions because those things are hard to come up with.  

Tonya: This year's theme was resilience. 

Let's talk about what that meant going in and how it really came to life. While we were there,  

Shane: you and I were talking back fourth quarter. I was working on my word of the year and. We were working on conference themes. I think the way it went down is resilience popped to the top and I was like, man, that's it. 

That's my word of the year. Everybody's [00:03:00] exhausted. Then it hit me that we're gonna be within two weeks of the five year anniversary of Covid lockdown. And the initial craziness of the beginning of Covid March of 2020, and what it meant to me is just what independent agencies the insurance industry has been through over the last five years from covid to this huge amount of money supply coming into the economy. 

Then the inflationary factor that got kicked off the political spectrum of the last five years. Crazy in and of itself. And then just the last two years of the hardest market in several generations, if not history, in terms of the modern day American economy, global economy. I just thought this is the perfect word, and I've seen resilience a lot over the last three to four months. 

I see it coming out a lot. [00:04:00] In different posts in social media, I underlined a one word definition of toughness. Toughness spoke to me just because of athletic background, being gritty, being tough. Just thinking about storied programs like the Yukon Women's Basketball Team recent. National title winners. 

Again, the toughness that it takes to compete at a level, and that's what resilience said to me as I was listening to agents through the last year. We have a lot of partner agents who have weathered this storm mentally and they're still here. We got to the infinite gain thought process within. My session, the fact that we're still here as the channel, obviously the I channel and the flourishing of it, but individual agencies that we've had with us 15 years plus or from startup to that level is amazing 'cause they're still here. 

And they're still doing [00:05:00] great. That was the resilience definition for me.  

Tonya: You brought up agents that have been with us 15 years. We had a session with the Husman brothers who were recent guests on the podcast, but you hosted an entire session talking about the history of their agency. I nicknamed it The Legend of the Phoenix. 

It really struck me the value of looking back to look forward.  

Shane: I. How do you know where you're going if you don't know where you've been? Kind of theme, and they have great story just from their beginnings as producers at another agency ended up in committing tax fraud and going to federal prison. You can't make this stuff up. 

It's just crazy. The history there. What'd you think of the interview style? I know we've done panels before, but what was your opinion of the interview? Oh,  

Tonya: I loved it. I absolutely loved it. In fact, we had another one of our presenters that after the interview with the Homans, he came to me and said, [00:06:00] if I ever get invited back, that's how I wanna do it. 

Shane: I love the interview style. To me, it's so powerful. To be interviewed. The session actually has very little preparation required. You want these agency owners who've had success, who've been through a lot and been through startup growth, reset growth. Again, everybody's bored with lectures, in my opinion. 

And it's like we get to interview style. We get down to the raw kind of authenticity that we crave in our world today, and so I love it.  

Tonya: No, I thought it was absolutely fantastic. If you look at the history of television, the history of radio, of any kind of traditional media, so many news programs have that interview style rather than just having someone get up there and speak. 

I think you're absolutely right there. We had a lot of innovation. Industry Insight sessions. You [00:07:00] interviewed our recent podcast guests, the guys from Strawberry Antler, Chad Jackson and Justin White. There was so much energy during that 45 minutes. It was fantastic and really got to get in depth about what AI is, how it works, and how it can help in your agency. 

Shane: I knew that was going to be an interesting session and any conversation with Justin White and Chad is so contrasting that. Chad's very laid back. Chad's very methodical, and Justin is hardwired. I. All the time in a great way. I really truly mean that the way his brain works should be studied, the way Justin's brain works should be studied. 

There was so much energy and there is so much confusion about ai, specifically AI in our industry. And there's so much sales speak going on because people are trying [00:08:00] to scare their way into the marketplace, is the way I would put it. If you're not playing the AI game, if you're not ahead, if you're not doing these things and your agency, then you're gonna fail. 

People have been saying that about the independent agency channel for. Decades. The independent agency is dead. The agency distribution channel is dead, and it's not dead. It's thriving. It's going to continue to thrive. These guys who are in ai, who are doing it specifically for the insurance industry, specifically for the independent agency channel, as the experts are like, look, you're not gonna get replaced now. 

You might be more profitable. You might grow your business with less friction. You may stop doing some things that you. Have always had to do, and AI may help you do it better, more efficiently, but AI's not gonna replace you. That was the message that resonated when I talked to Chad and Justin when I was on their podcast as a guest. 

A lot of the, we talked about when they were guest [00:09:00] on our podcast, and then again in the interview, it's okay. The ultimate question, everybody goes to Terminator, is AI gonna extinct us? The reality of it is no. It's certainly not going to be the case within the insurance industry, and I think our agents needed to hear that. 

It's like anything else within our business. Learn, adapt, grow, develop, overspend on vapor, on half cocked, built stuff that isn't helpful yet. Don't get scared into buying something. That you're not ready to buy, that your agency is not ready to implement. That's back to the shiny object syndrome. Don't let yourself be sold out of fear. 

That was a big topic I think that hopefully resonated with agents at our conference and hopefully will continue to push that envelope out into the marketplace. Don't be sold on fear.  

Tonya: We had Charles Spect from Millionaire Producer [00:10:00] and he came in and spent the weekend with us, which I loved that, that he stayed for the conference and talked with our agents, and Charles was your contribution and who we should bring in. 

So I really enjoyed his session very much. Great energy.  

Shane: Yeah, he's fantastic. Charles and I have a lot in common. We went to dinner before the conference. He was involved, uh, just around, made himself available, had conversations with our agents. I think there was so many takeaways from that. And his unique approach to quoting is for the week. 

That's one of his things. And I. 100% agree. We do so much for non-clients. Just think about that for a minute. It's okay to quote, but only when you have that person as a client should you be actually quoting something for them. Amateur hour, that's another one that I really liked. Don't be a part of Amateur Hour, and we have this really interesting parallel [00:11:00] background family. 

Industry, not necessarily the generational insurance side, but just where we came from. I really enjoyed his approach to things, the ability to look at the industry and how bad our habits are, but help agents understand that. We have a choice. We don't have to keep doing it that way. We can build our businesses how we choose to build our businesses just because somebody else taught you to do something the way they did it. 

And they were doing it that way because someone before them taught them to do it that way. And this is a problem for our industry agency ownership. Like, why do we do what we do? Because that's the way we were taught. Why? Why were they taught? That's the way they were taught. Why do they do it that way? 

That's the way they were taught and on, and before we know it. We're five decades into doing something the same way. We've always done it, and that needs to be refreshingly reviewed. Let's rethink this. And Charles does that [00:12:00] from a commercial standpoint. From a benefit standpoint, highly recommend and we'll continue to work with Charles in our organization for the foreseeable future because I think he's got great stuff. 

Tonya: There is a conference presentation that I have done several times over the years called Do As I Do and not as I say. It came out of this idea that we do things because that's the way we were taught to do them and that's how that person taught them. But that may not be what we actually do. But it's what we teach because that's what we were told. 

And I had someone point that out to me one time, they're like, yeah, that's what you teach, but that's not actually what you're doing. And when I looked at it and broke it down, that person was right and have used that. In a conference setting so many times because we teach what we were taught, but that may not be what we're actually doing in our business. 

Shane: What resonates with me about that so much is [00:13:00] I go down the line of policy versus practice. When I served on our local school board, one of the things that I learned from our school attorney. And from my school board training, which I was going into a room full of former superintendents to tell school boards how to manage superintendents, which is basically to leave 'em alone. 

That's the comical side of it. But the reality of school boards around the country is you really have three jobs set the tax rate set policy. And hire and fire the superintendent. That's what school boards do. Now, school boards around the country do way more than they're supposed to and get in the weeds, and that's where things get off the rails. 

My opinion from my experience, but what I learned from the school attorney that I try to pay attention to in our business, and I would always tell agencies to really pay attention to, is you. You set policy, you set procedure. You say, okay, this is how we're gonna do things. Make sure that your practice, what you [00:14:00] actually do matches what you say your policy is that you do. 

Because when I was on school board, we had a practice of doing something, but we had a policy that was different. In many occasions, we just started saying, what do we do? We do X, Y, Z. Okay, what does our policy say? Our policy says we do A, B, C. I'm like, whoa, wait a minute. So what do we like? We like X, Y, Z. 

Okay, then change policy to X, Y, Z and stop. Making A, B, C, the policy, it's okay to change your policy procedure. It's okay to rework your workflow, rework your department structure, rework how you go about obtaining new clients, right? You can be a full-time agent to full-time clients. If that's your policy. 

Make sure it matches your practice. A lot of times in agencies they'll go out and they'll say, I'm going to listen to Shane and I'm going to. Only start working with full-time clients in my agency [00:15:00] and then your people. Continue to sell policies, but you forget to hold your people accountable and train your people to actually do it differently so that you can be an retainer, acquire full-time clients and your people over here still is just selling policies. 

I learned that from school board. What did I learn from school board? You make a lot of people mad. And then how to deal with practice over policy. That's something that when you're talking about this, it's so vital in our business. To make sure we do what we say and we say what we do, and that those two things are not different because those two things will take your people off the rails. 

They will derail you. You'll be a train wreck, and so many agency owners obtain so much knowledge in their head. That they actually never get it written out on paper or in some kind of guide. Their people can't actually read it because believe it or not, they can't read your brain. Even if they've worked with you for 25, 26 years, [00:16:00] even if they're married to you and they've worked with you for 25, 26 years, they still can't read your brain. 

And so if my wife, our accounting manager, can't read my brain, then the person you hired a month ago certainly can't read your brain.  

Tonya: We had a great e and o session with Isaac Peck, and in his intro we actually put in there that he knows how to make e and o entertaining, and he really did a great job. He talked about how small decisions make a huge difference in protecting your agency,  

Shane: Isaac. 

Very knowledgeable, did a great job. We've had a partnership with his firm for a long time. Real life scenarios is the only way to me to get agents' attention with e and o because e and o lectures are hard, e and o lectures, they are. The insurance conference version of watching paint dry. Nobody wants to think it's gonna happen to them. 

It's salespeople, for the most part that [00:17:00] run agencies around the country. Some of them are smart. Some of us are smart, and they get operationally people involved and they get out of the way a little bit, but a lot don't a lot keep their hands in it from a sales approach. Sales. View and e and o is just, it scares us intentionally. 

It's supposed to scare us, and nobody wants to get hyped up at a conference and get excited about how they're gonna transform their agency and listen to the e and o guy. But we have to, it's so important. Isaac did a great job of making. You know, conversations interesting. You tell stories of real life claims without names, of course, and you'd show how easy it is for an agency to find themselves in a really bad spot, and I really appreciate Isaac's ability to do that. 

I do think it would be a fantastic interview and see that as the next iteration of how to make e and o even [00:18:00] more interesting. He could probably do an even better job. If it was more of just a sit down, comfortable interview style.  

Tonya: Speaking of sit down, comfortable interview styles, you and I were both put in a somewhat uncomfortable session with several of our partner agents. 

I. And if you wanna talk authenticity, we had a sit down and ask the CEO. Anything. One of our core values being honesty wins. I had the privilege of moderating this panel, but you never know what's gonna happen when you sit down the CEO of an organization with three partner agents in the audience with 150 partner agents and say. 

Ask away. There's no topic that you can't bring up.  

Shane: It was probably the most uncomfortable 45 minutes of my, certainly my business career. And look, I'm very appreciative. [00:19:00] A lot of the reason it was uncomfortable was we did get a lot of praise. And that's not something that I accept very well. That's just a reality. 

I was never uncomfortable with any of the potential questions because honesty wins, and we talk about that as one of our core values, but also the one that gets talked about the most. If you're not trying to hide something, if you're just, Hey, this is what it is, this is why a lot of times people don't understand decisions. 

Because they don't understand the why behind the decisions. Coaches parents, parents with players, parents, with coaches, especially at the high school level. We see this a lot. My coaching friends out there, they get this. There's a why behind something. I use this analogy, why isn't my kid playing shortstop? 

Why is my kid playing first base? Or why is my kid playing left field? The reality is the coach has to evaluate all of the players. Every day at practice, off [00:20:00] season, all the different things that come into it. They're with them all the time, and we remember Little Suzy or Little Johnny in Little League or in the backyard, and it's just different. 

The perspective and the need of building the team and building the lineup. Every decision we make, we don't make decisions in our business. Haphazardly today, those decisions affect 130, 140 something other independent insurance agencies and their teams and the livelihoods that trickle down. We take that really seriously. 

For me, it's really easy to get up. On a stage in an interview, answer questions just off the cuff, because there's answers if there's not, and this is one of the things that Jared, Antoine, who was the one that organized this, this is what I told Jared. I said, look, ask anything, talk about anything, it's fine, because either one of two things is gonna happen. 

Agents are gonna [00:21:00] understand the decision. Agents are gonna understand why we did what we did, or I'm gonna discover that we have a deficiency in our program somewhere, and then we're gonna have a chance to improve on that deficiency if possible. And then we're gonna be better as an organization if that comes about and we get there. 

And so what happens is leaders, business owners, CEOs, executives. Get so much pride built up that we're important or something like that, that we get this false thing in our brains. Certainly celebrity CEOs have this problem that we're so important and we forget that we're human beings. And we make mistakes. 

Sometimes we make decisions with bad information or information that was incomplete, or we didn't think about how the trickle down effect might happen. And sometimes you need a course correct and you need someone. To hold you accountable. The reality is, in the [00:22:00] big scheme of things, privately held, family owned business, 36 or seven employees, 135 or so, partner agents, like it's a big organization in some regards. 

And it's such a small organization in the big spectrum of companies across the world. If we can get better, I don't even comprehend what happens with Alan Schnitzer, CEO of Travelers, 40,000 employees. That just blows my mind. That's a lot. Luke Bills and CEO, president of Safeco Insurance, personal insurance, et cetera. 

You've got these guys that I'm familiar with, that I've met, that I know. It's amazing what they do with their organizations. It's easy to judge decisions from the cheap seats. It's very difficult to understand unless you've been in those seats, and those seats are lonely. Even my seat is lonely a lot of times, and so to be [00:23:00] held accountable and let that pride go and just be at the level. 

Of authenticity that says, Hey, I'm a human being. I make mistakes. I understand this. Tell me what I'm missing, or let me explain why this decision was made. I think that's unbelievably awesome. I was ecstatic, even though I was very uncomfortable because I thought there was a little bit of a segment in there where there was a little too much praise for me. 

That's the part that I didn't love about that session. The part I loved about that session is how we got to talk about real things going on in our organization, in the industry, carrier relations, things that are so vital to the success of our agencies. I. And get down to, okay, this is the why behind all these things. 

So I thought that was a fantastic session. In the end,  

Tonya: I loved that our partner agents were so comfortable asking the questions. This could have been one of those situations where we [00:24:00] open it up for questions and it's crickets because people were afraid to offend corporate or the home office, or I can't ask this out of. 

Fear of repercussions the way things are in a lot of companies our size and larger. But I loved the honest questions and feedback that we got from our agents. There was no fear. It was, Hey, this is what we wanna know, and. We gave the answers,  

Shane: pride gets in the way of being able to get to that point for a lot of CEOs, for a lot of executives, not just CEOs. 

Let's pick on regional VPs. C-Suite of any level. Middle managers have maybe the bigger problems here because you really gotta put yourself in their seat. They've got bosses above them. They've got subordinates below them in org structure. And the ones that are not really confident and comfortable in their space are the ones that generally have the most pride problems, and that [00:25:00] creates fear within their group of people. 

That would be the ones that need to ask the questions, and that's when you get the crickets. I hope that our leadership team, I hope we never get to that point, whether we stay our size, whether we grow. 10 times larger, 12 x, 10 x, whatever. I hope we never reach that point. If we do, we need a gut check. We need somebody to hold us accountable. 

I think we have the agent partners that will hold us accountable. I think we've created that confidence and that comfort within our organization, within our partner network, for agents to be able to pick up the phone professionally, I would say certainly professionally, not out of line. Not inappropriate. 

Somebody runs at you with something. The first thing you gotta do is diffuse that. Then we can have a conversation. Our agents don't do that for the most part. They come to us with thoughtful questions like, why did this happen? Why did we do this? What was the reasoning behind [00:26:00] this decision? Why did this carrier do what they did? 

What are the things you can't put in an email? What are the things that you can't. Say, I don't mind answering those questions unless it violates a non-disclosure agreement, then I can't. But everything else is open. It should be discussed. Communication. That's what we're talking about. Really when you get down to it, is good communication because wars get started on bad communication. 

Countries implode on bad communication. Families have total destruction. Stop talking to each other because of bad communication or no communication. And I think that's the thing that I took away from that session is we need to continue to be the best communicators, the most authentic communicators, and. 

Not hide behind some label title perpetually, forever and ever. Like as long as we're in this doing what we do, that's a big deal. And that [00:27:00] was my biggest takeaway is communicate.  

Tonya: Our last session while we were there was with Jeff Brior. Of the independent insurance agents of Dallas, and I always love Jeff. 

He's so much fun, and I think he brought us the biggest stack of PowerPoint slides that I have ever seen. For a 45 minute presentation. It was something like 85 or 86  

Shane: slots. It was eight 80 something for sure.  

Tonya: I was just thinking, oh my gosh, we're never gonna get through all this. And he actually said that. 

He's like, I know I'm not gonna get through this. And I'm like, that's good to know. But I always love the energy that Jeff brings to a session. Great information. He really knows how to get agents pumped up and excited even when he's delivering news. That's not. The best. He knows how to present somewhat negative information in a really positive, energetic way that makes [00:28:00] you look forward to the future. 

Shane: Jeff, former company guy, claim side, distribution side, now executive director of a very large association here in Texas. What's really crazy about independent agents of Dallas, independent agents of Houston, those metro areas are extremely large metro areas, and as a metro focused association, local association, they're larger than most state associations around the country. 

You see this in. California. You see this in Florida, you see this in Texas. Obviously the state association in Texas is larger, but it's not. Nothing like independent agents of Dallas is a pretty good size organization in and of itself. Jeff brings us industry news. He's done this for a couple of years in a row, gives us this state of the industry. 

Dallas Fort Worth is struggling from a cat exposure standpoint because we have both wind and hail, so convection storms. Those are things that's different than say our coastal. I. Aries, and I always love hearing [00:29:00] Jeff because he's the king of the internet meme. He loves memes and he's going to put memes in his presentation, and it does make insurance fun even when he's talking about insurance stuff. 

That's not fun. Whether we're talking regulation, whether we're talking rate increases, trends, whether we're talking economic exposure to the insurance industry. Jeff's been a good friend for years, certainly a good friend to Integra, and we're very grateful that he continues to come back and share what he sees as salespeople and insurance agency owners. 

We're focused on clients, we're focused on distributions sales. We're focused on helping our clients in times of needs, but we're salespeople. I think it's funny sometimes that. We try to forget that we're salespeople at our core. We don't always know what's going on in other parts of the industry or the channel. 

It's good for us to be reminded and have that third party that's not a carrier person, that was a [00:30:00] carrier person, that's not an agency person to give us that neutrality that. Perspective that makes us go, ah, okay, so that makes sense. That's why that's going on. That's what Jeff does. And hiring me as a speaker. 

If you're looking for somebody to come speak on industry, Jeff's great hiring. Make sure you understand the time you're giving him and. Make sure he doesn't create 150 slide presentation for you. Instead of making keep it to 80 or below. Just mess him with him. He does a great job.  

Tonya: My favorite part of our conference is always the relationship building, the things that happen off stage. 

Those are the moments that really matter.  

Shane: It's always networking that wins. Some agents end up in perpetual networking breaks at our conference. You know who you are. That's okay because there's a lot going on in those networking breaks. I'm guilty of that at some other conferences where I will attend a few sessions and then end up in the perpetual [00:31:00] networking break because you're in the middle of a conversation, the session's starting. 

You really don't wanna leave the conversation. It's more vital to be in that conversation than to be in the session. It happens and it's part of what makes in-person conferences great. Certainly in the post covid world, we do so much over teams Video, zoom video. We do so much virtual meeting that we just crave that face-to-face personal interaction, and that's what. 

Validates the need for an in-person conference to me for our organization. It's why we attend some conferences. We're getting back in the conference swing. I went on a conference hiatus, so to speak, up until about 2018 from about 2010 to 2018, and it was because I got burnout, went so much in my early career for about 10 or 12 years. 

I just got exhausted. Time of life happened. Age of children activities, I just couldn't go. It's okay [00:32:00] if you're sitting out there listening to this and you're like, I don't know when I would, I can't leave for two days if I'm gonna take a vacation. I can't take a conference break vacation, and. I get it. 

Don't feel like you're failing. If that's the case, because I was that guy too and I had to go on a break, but don't forget about 'em. They're vital. I think learning from others, networking with others, getting to see people, carrier reps, face to face, our trade show is fantastic. It's just a great time to be in person. 

Tonya: The networking you get at a conference is so different. Then the networking you get within social media groups, and I hear people now saying, I don't need to go to conferences because I'm in this group, I'm in that group. I get everything I need. It's totally different.  

Shane: I don't really know what to say to that. 

I. It's scary that someone would have that opinion. Like social media is not networking, it's not [00:33:00] socializing. It's just not. I think if that's your perspective, then you need to step outta your comfort zone a little bit. Get outta the basement, so to speak. Let's go. We can't have that perspective. We were meant to be relational. 

We were created for relationship, and that's vital. If you think you're getting that on social media. You're not, you have a whole nother level of things that you would get from face-to-face, person to person interaction. So try it. Get outta your comfort zone. Go to your state association. Do something that connects you with others and. 

You will be better for it.  

Tonya: So many great takeaways from a wonderful few days in Galveston. If you wanna know more about the Integra Partner Network and our conference, reach out to us, integra partner network.com. You can find us on all social medias and we would love to talk to you and love to have you come play with us. 

Shane: [00:34:00] Talk to you in person would be fun, and we'll talk to you on the phone or on a video where we can see your face. And we would love that. We love to hear your voice.  

Tonya: I'm gonna leave us today with this quote from Misty Copeland. I failed and I've been hurt, but I keep going. And that's what resilience is all about. 

The  

Shane: attitude, the choice. Make a great  

Tonya: one. Bye y'all.  

Announcer: At the Integra Partner Network, we understand that carrier access is the key to your agency's success. That's why Integra offers direct access to top rated personal and commercial carriers. Ensuring your agency thrives in today's challenging markets. 

And with our comprehensive resources, profit sharing and bonus opportunities, technology and peer support, all while you retain a hundred percent of your book with no penalties to exit, Integra is ready to empower you and your agency to find sustained. Growth. Find your way to Integra. Visit integra partner network.com today. 

That's integra partner network.com.