Still Thinking About It? It’s Not Too Late

You’ve built something, thinking about walking away, and are now asking, “Do I have it in me to start again” Shane and Tonya explore why starting over isn’t a step back, it’s a strategic move forward. With experience, clarity, and relationship capital on your side, this might be the smartest time to build your agency, your way. If you're still thinking about it, it’s not too late. 

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.  

Tonya: Welcome to IA Forward, Shane. This week I was talking with one of my oldest friends and he has been in the insurance business since he graduated from college. 

He asked about my job and what I did within the insurance world. And I told him and, and he asked a few other things and I said, look, lemme tell you this. If you wanna start your own independent insurance agency, I'm your girl. His response was 10 years ago. I would've done that in a heartbeat, but I'm just too old to start something now. 

I was shocked that he said this because he's 51 years old and that's not too late to start anything.  

Shane: I agree. It's not too late. I hope not. I'm 50, I'll be 52 [00:01:00] this year. Have you seen the post on social media with the different television stars from the seventies and eighties? It's like the, uh, be author and it what was The Golden Girls and  

Tonya: Yes, that we are the age that the Golden Girls were older. 

Shane: In some cases older, in some cases, like Fred Sanford and Son, which was one of my grand grandpa's favorite, all time favorite. He was a Mash guy and he was a Sanford and son guy. He loved watching them. And so I watched a lot of MASH as a kid and I watched a lot of Sanford and Son as a kid. That's what my grandpa liked to watch, and so that's what we did. 

I was the remote control before there was a remote control. Were you a remote control ever in your life? I was a remote controller. I think Fred Fox, when he was playing Fred Sanford, he was 48 years old. Lamont was in his early twenties, his son. Something's happened. There's, I don't know if it's just improved health. 

I don't know if it's improved. Beauty products, better clothing, better [00:02:00] styles. I don't know what. It is, but 50 something, 60 something sure does look different than it did 40 years ago. That's my view. I agree with you. That is not too old to start anything. We've had lots of successful agents. I. Start in their fifties. 

Tonya: What in the world would make someone that has just turned 50 think they wouldn't be able to start a business or start doing something new?  

Shane: I think it's fear or risk of retirement capital. Putting things at risk. I, I don't feel like I can take that step. The interesting thing is there's so many different ways to do that without putting your personal capital or retirement at risk. 

That's the beauty of. The evolving finance world we live in. The other thing is I think people just get tired or maybe they're not willing to put in the energy. I understand that financial risk can be managed, it can be hedged. That's a reality. The bigger thing for me is [00:03:00] just energy. When you start a business, it takes mental energy, physical energy. 

In some cases, you gotta be willing to do some work that maybe you've gotten to the point in your life in a career 20, 25, 30 years into a career. Maybe you don't work as hard. Maybe that steps on some toes, but maybe you do work as hard, but you don't recognize it because you're so comfortable that it's easier today. 

So that's just an aha moment. Maybe for somebody out there, it's easier to do what I do today because I've. Been doing it for a long time and I've made a lot of mistakes and I know what not to do. Sometimes I know what not to do and I do it anyway. We've talked about that before on this podcast. You let the emotion get in and you're like, don't do that. 

Okay, we did it. I know that it's easier when you've been doing something for a long time. Starting something new is exciting in some cases, but also scary because we don't wanna look like an idiot. We don't wanna fail. So [00:04:00] fear of failure is mixed into that as well. I think all of those little things happen when you hit an age. 

It may not even be 52, maybe it's 42, maybe it's 58. It happens for different people at different stages or different ages  

Tonya: starting over at our age. Makes sense because for the most part, you're an empty nest situation. You have reared your children. They are doing their own thing. If there was any time to start something new, to achieve a goal, to follow a dream, this is it. 

I watched my mom, who was a fantastic stay at home mom until I was able to drive. When I was able to drive, she went back into the workplace. My mom ran our family business in the home while I was growing up. She went back into the workplace full-time when I turned 15 and got a driver's license. After I finished college, my [00:05:00] mom went to law school. 

That was her dream. That's what she had always wanted to do, and I think about it now and how much courage that took and how much faith in herself because back then I just thought, okay, mom went to law school. That's fantastic. And I. Look at it now, and I thought, okay, that took courage, but the timing of it really made sense. 

Shane: There are many iconic founders in the history of the us. Who started their businesses, I, Ray Crock, took McDonald's to the next level franchise, et cetera. I wanna say Ray Crock was in his fifties. That's my memory. I I don't have that in front of me. Feel free to correct me. I know he was in his late forties, but he, I think he was in his fifties. 

Colonel Sanders, Kentucky Fried Chicken. I know he was older. There are so many businesses. With these celebrity founders. They're not all 20 somethings that had an incredible idea. They're not all Mark Zuckerberg [00:06:00] situations. To me, that's what gets the limelight. When you see the 19, 20-year-old college dropout found a company and become a billionaire within five years, it's defeating. 

If you're in your forties and fifties, like you look at that and you go, okay, I missed my time. I missed my opportunity. You need to keep looking. That's not actually true. There's more that have done great things that have founded incredible companies. There's more actually in their later years. I agree with you on the empty nest, on the, just the time of life. 

It is ideal actually, if you have the energy, if you are willing to put the energy into it, there's a financial opportunity there. You're in a different place at 52 than you're at 22. I would say the average 52-year-old is more financially stable than the average 22-year-old. That's a statistic I'm willing to bet on. 

To your point, it's the best time. It's not that it's too late. [00:07:00] It's actually an incredible time because you get to add all your life experiences. Into the bucket. You get to add your financial capability into the bucket, which is a better place than it has been probably other than it might not work. You might fail. 

That's your risk. I really think this is one of those things that. Is, I don't know, call it off base or call. It just misunderstood.  

Tonya: I was reading an article last week about why ancient ruins are found underground living in Pensacola. This is common because. We are the oldest settlement in the US so people find things here all the time. 

If you're a business owner and your contractor and his team are out there building and they find something, you're done. I had no idea the reason ancient ruins are actually underground. It's because if something would go wrong, if a foe would come in and [00:08:00] decimate or. If there was an illness in a village and people needed to start over, they didn't try to fix things necessarily. 

It was easier to level it. And start again, and then use the rubble to build the new foundation and to make a foundation more stable. And so you have millennia of towns, villages, areas getting built on top of each other. It made me think that's what we have to do in life. If something's not right and we try to fix it. 

And it still doesn't feel good. Sometimes. We just have to knock it down and build on top of it.  

Shane: Yeah, which is interesting when you think about the insurance history, because that's the big tug of war for the last 10 to 15 years, is the tried and true carriers with legacy systems, rebuilding those systems. 

Attempts to rebuild those systems, and then you have the InsureTech that starts with the new platform. It's gonna be [00:09:00] nimble and they're gonna do it better. The legacy systems of those tried and true carriers became huge business to build on top of those platforms. Most of the insurance industry, big names Travelers, Allstate, Liberty, Safeco, Hartford, they still, for the most part, run Legacy systems on the back end. 

Hey, we are an agency network that has been around since the late nineties through a couple of iterations, and we still run our accounting on a legacy platform. The reason we do it is because it's been easier and more cost effective and trustworthy. I. To build on top of that than to scrap it and start over. 

My favorite underground, and I'm not like the Underground Relic or the, I'm not the expert here. Okay. But my favorite is Seattle. Seattle is an interesting, I. There's a whole city under Seattle. They actually have underground tours. I'm sure we have that going on in other places around the country. We [00:10:00] know we have that going on in Europe because Europe is so old. 

And if you've been to any part of Europe, I've only been to Spain and I want to go to more places in Europe, mainly for the history, but. I've been to Madrid and then I've been to a, which would be old Spain. There are so many things you can see that are just underneath like ruins. You couldn't redo it. 

You couldn't take it all out. It's not even good to take it all out, which is probably somewhere we need to go with this conversation. It's not even the best thing. To uproot or unearth the ruins, that's not the thing we should do. It's not even the best foot forward. I recently had the opportunity, I serve on an agency council for easy links, applied systems among agency networks, and it was recently in Chicago and we went to a a Cubs game. 

Wrigley Field would be a bucket list item for me. I grew up like every other eighties kid that watched baseball watching WGN. [00:11:00] Outta Chicago with Harry Carey on the call for the Braves games. They played afternoon games because until 87 or 88, they did not have lights. They played day games. So in the summer, as a latchkey kid. 

At home by myself, maybe babysitting my baby sister at times. I watched Cubs games every day at one o'clock, and then I would emulate the players. I would go outside. We would, this is how my childhood for several years went and it was incredible and I got to see it in person. I don't get amazed very often. 

I was absolutely breathless, speechless. The Cubs were purchased a few years ago and they did a bunch of development remodeling behind the scenes to leave it as is on the outside, like they enhanced it without taking away the Wrigley Vintage feel. I was incredibly impressed. I think there's a story in there about how that applies to the way we should run our businesses, opportunities to run our [00:12:00] businesses. 

There's something here around not living in our past, but embracing the experiences of our past, what we've learned, and being able to say, we're gonna go forward and win and be successful, but we can't just rip it all out. That's an area that. We've been going through as an organization for about a year as we've had new promotions and positions and people coming into different things. 

It's like, why do we do that? Why don't you check it out and decide whether we need to review this? So there would be things that have been done and we should do it differently, and then we start to do it differently. And then, oh my gosh, actually what we were doing was better. And it's actually been validating. 

Some things have been improved with new processes. Some things have been validated that our process is really good and we need to leave it alone. I think that's been a great exercise for our organization to learn. These are the people that have been here [00:13:00] 5, 6, 7 years versus 20 years. These are the people that are brand new in the last year. 

They're trying to get their head around some things and they're trying to learn, and it's like, why do we do that? And then you go through the process and you go, oh. That makes a lot of sense why we do that.  

Tonya: One of the things that you have in your forties and fifties that you didn't have in your twenties and thirties is relationship capital. 

Starting a business in life. When you have that relationship capital just makes sense.  

Shane: Sometimes it's who you know, not what you know, and there's a lot of truth to that in the insurance industry and. To tooth, the horn of the agency network. Moss, the country, again, recently met with some of our peers, leadership from different networks across the country. 

There's a huge leveraging opportunity for an agency that's starting today. Somebody wants to start an agency. You get to leverage the who, you know. Inside that network and the [00:14:00] network has the hoo advantage that you may or may not have at the level that you need it. And I know that from a carrier access standpoint, from a which system should I choose standpoint. 

That part of the starting the independent agency today can be leveraged through the organizations You're a part of the relationship, leveraging opportunity of potential clients, potential referral sources. Not only is there relationship capital, but within that relationship capital is a huge amount of trust capital that you've built up over the years. 

Assuming you have done well in your career, if you're in your forties and fifties looking to start a new business. Being able to do that in your forties and fifties and being able to financially do it, et cetera, that means you've been successful. And if you've been successful, that means that you've done right by people. 

There's very few successful people who have cheated. People [00:15:00] who can continue to go. Recently had a guy. Get charged, arrested in East Texas. Basically, he'd been scamming people out of money, investments for years, various types of businesses that he was promoting that he was going to do, and there was lots of smoke and lots of red flags around this guy. 

The crazy part is that most people knew it, but people kept giving him money. He was arrested and charged with wire fraud and all kinds of different federal crimes, and he's probably not gonna get outta jail. In his lifetime to the tune of a little over $9 million. We're not talking about a couple hundred thousand, I think it was a little over 9 million. 

And it's people from Texas, Louisiana, California, Nevada, all around. And Ike, he was slick Willie. He got in with some things he was doing with even some celebrities like Pete Rose and things like that, just memorabilia type business. I'm so far removed from it. I don't [00:16:00] even know how far it reaches, but I know it reaches a long ways because you can just read the articles and realize it's far fetching. 

I hate it for those that are affected. I hate it for those people that are gonna lose money in this deal. That's not the guy that's gonna be successful. That has built up trust capital and. Those individuals that are shady, move jobs a lot, hop around, burn a bridge here, burn a bridge there. There's no trust capital. 

There's very little relationship capital, if any, that is a very minute percentage of the people we're talking about 99%, 98% of the people in this 40, 50 age range that. Would start a new business. To Tonya's point, you have relationship capital, built a career somehow, some way in some industry that has led you to where you are. 

And that is a lot like skim over the things that make us very capable in our fifties. That is a [00:17:00] very important point because your potential clients, your potential referral partners are probably looking for. Someone like you that they could put their trust in. And so I think that's another big reason to make that leap. 

Tonya: Let's talk about the phrase that we hear so much, and that is, I would love to do it, but it's just too late for me. To me, that's a total myth. Where does this idea. Of it's too late. Come from, you're comparing yourself to others and comparison is the thief of joy. Just because you're seeing people in their late twenties, early thirties starting agencies and they may be the ones yelling at you on social media. 

You are comparing yourself to somebody else. There are so many things that you have that they don't have. There are so many things that. You have period. And Shane, you keep bringing up. Do you have the energy? [00:18:00] And that's an excuse that doesn't necessarily fly with me because you are getting up every day. 

You are working with your clients, you are. Answering those phone calls, you are making things happen, and time is gonna pass one way or the other. If you don't have the energy to do this, there's something else going on. I really think that's an excuse. It may be that you would rather spend your energy. 

Doing something else with your grandkids or traveling the country, but I don't think it's that you don't have enough energy.  

Shane: I do believe that gets blurred into comfortable. It's too late for me. You're comfortable. When I say energy, I mean you don't have the drive that you once had. That's not my problem. 

If anything, that's the opposite of my problem. I have my hands sometimes in too many things, the drive too much. I do think you're right on the comparison [00:19:00] thing, being a defeating view that I. Can zap your energy, zap your drive, maybe make you question yourself. I had a childhood dream that morphed into a new dream, and I would say at 51 that when I think about those dreams, one of them definitely I can't do anymore. 

The other one, I got a pretty good uphill battle here financially because of what's going on in the marketplace. The first childhood dream was to play major league baseball. Nobody told me. That people were gonna be giants. These athletes were gonna be incredible physical specimens that shortstops were mostly going to be six, two to six foot four. 

When I was growing up, shortstops were where they were smaller. A Ozzy Smith incredible Hall of Fame Shortstop was like five foot nine, five foot eight. Peewee Reese, way back in way before my time. There was all these players that were always shortstops that were always. They were smaller. They were [00:20:00] five eight to five 10, and so it was like, okay, I can do this. 

And then Altuve, Jose Altuve becomes the rarity, Dustin for the Red Sox back several years ago. Now those guys become the, wow, you did it and you did it at five foot six, five foot seven, and not a big guy. And once that dream moved past, it's not gonna happen. For me, the secondary dream, which was very similar, was, okay, I'm gonna own. 

I'm gonna become an owner in a major league baseball team. I didn't, nobody told me that this was a billionaire's club. I'm going to be successful in business and then I'm gonna buy a team. The market values of these teams, the timing is wrong. Some of these teams like the Rangers and. Some of these clubs in the smaller markets were purchased in the nineties when I was thinking about this for 180 million, 200 million, things like that. 

And now these clubs are worth multiple billions of dollars. And so I've got to start playing [00:21:00] within the arena of a few more commas if I'm gonna buy a team. I see that dream. Moving away. I think that's what happens. I think people set these dreams and set these ideas. They see the young guys, I don't wanna call it get lucky, because that's not fair to them, but timing is right. 

The idea is right. They hit it and they sell their company for multiple billions of dollars at 35, and then they get to spend the rest of their life investing that wealth and. We look across the spectrum at that group of people. There's a couple of young guys, I think in their early forties now, maybe late thirties, that are Texas tech grads that were hit it big with a couple of situations in the oil and gas industry and sold their company for. 

Seven or $8 billion. And what's making them hit the spotlight? Ironically, wasn't the sell of their company at 30 something years old. It was the fact that now they've turned that [00:22:00] around. And as Texas Tech alumni, they've teamed with Pat Mahomes, I. And they've, they've got Patrick Mahomes and Adidas, and they've teamed that up with throwing money into the Texas tech athletic programs and buying wins. 

They spent a million and a half on a pitcher in softball. I love softball 'cause I have daughters and the child that plays in the Big 12. My daughter had the opportunity to face this pitcher this year and she's really good. She gave up a Stanford education to come to Texas Tech, Lubbock, Texas. The kind of money she's making is money she can't make. 

After another three or four years, there is no major league softball type equivalency at the same level. So she takes, she's gonna do this. I think it's great, like they're spending their energy. I don't love the portal and I don't love NIL, but what they're doing is they're not losing their drive. [00:23:00] They just keep going. 

And they've been fortunate and they've done that. Some of us. Look around and the person we're talking about here, or the situation we're talking about here at 50 something years old, and they look around and they see that scenario and they're like, I'm too late. And the reality of it is, you are not too late. 

They didn't spend 50 years, three generations building their company. If that's your goal, I don't think you're ever too late. Maybe if there's a health issue, maybe there is an age where you're too late, but it's definitely not your fifties. Probably not even your sixties.  

Tonya: I had a mentor several years ago. 

Tell me that. If you're still thinking about it, it's not too late for you,  

Shane: that's good,  

Tonya: but this is where you are. If you're still thinking about it, we wanna talk to you. Shameless self-promotion here. Integra partner network.com. We have had extraordinary success. With partners who this is their second, [00:24:00] third, and even fourth career pivot. 

Shane: I just don't think it's too late. You have a lot to offer as someone pivoting out of a second or third career or a first career. You've learned a lot and you don't give yourself enough credit for what you've learned and what you're capable of.  

Tonya: I'm gonna leave us today with this quote from Satchel Paige, who was the oldest MLB rookie ever debuting at 42 years old. 

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?  

Shane: Attitude's a choice. Make a great one.  

Announcer: I. Bye y'all. 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 market. 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, it's ready to empower you and your [00:25:00] agency To find sustained growth, find your way to Integra. 

Visit integra of partner network.com today. That's integra partner network.com.