Quoting Is For The Weak: A Conversation with Charles Specht

Charles Specht, host of the Millionaire Insurance Producer podcast, joins Shane and Tonya to discuss how independent agents can win bigger with commercial insurance through his unique “quoting is for the weak” approach to pre-prospecting, micro-niching and messaging.  

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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 hosts, Shane Tatum and Tonya Lied.  

Tonya: Welcome to IA Forward today. I am so excited to have with us Charles Speck, and he is going to be diving into the blueprint of how you can become a millionaire insurance producer. 

Shane: Hey, Charles, so excited to have you. This is one of those things that's been in the making for, I don't know, several months I ran across your podcast. That's it. We've had dinner, you've come to our conference. There was something about Charles when I heard him speak, and of course I loved his concept. I love. 

What he's gonna talk to us about a little bit more in, in detail on the podcast, but there was something that clicked. I like what he's saying. I like the way he's delivering it. I need to get to know this guy. We had a really good intro call that [00:01:00] I appreciated immensely, and then we had dinner and you got to meet my wife and the, which is obviously the better half of me. 

I wanna be in the Charles spec business. I want to stand more, and obviously this is months in the making. We needed to get you on this podcast, and so welcome. Tell us a little bit more about you and how you got here.  

Charles: Well, Shane and Tanya, thank you so much for letting me be here. I really appreciate that kind words from both of you. 

So thanks. Wow. So I got into the insurance business back in the year 2000. So it's pretty easy to figure out how long I've been in the business and I fault a friend of mine getting me involved in it, so all his fault. But I am still thankful for it in the long run here. So I started being an insurance producer. 

I just didn't know anything about insurance other than the fact that I didn't like to buy it. Nobody likes to shop for it. Nobody likes to buy it and you hope you never have to use it. That's what insurance is, and sold insurance, commercial insurance for about 10 years and enjoyed it Did okay, but I just felt like I was being called to something a little bit different [00:02:00] in the long term. 

So I needed to really focus my time on where I felt that the Lord was leading me and so decided to stop selling insurance. Started doing a little bit more ministry, but I still had to put food on the table for the family. And so what I did then is I started a consulting company to do a couple of things. 

First. One, I still today am hired by insurance buyers. Many times it's like a large construction company to manage their insurance process for 'em. I'll work with their current agent, maybe bring in some other agents. I don't sell insurance. I just manage the process for the insured because I know what I'm looking for. 

And the insurance buyer isn't in the insurance business. They don't know. So these are usually like accounts that are paying a couple hundred thousand dollars of p and c premium and above, and that's what I do for them. But probably the largest part of what I do is I work with insurance agents all around the United States and Canada. 

I help them figure out a process. That works best for them is tailored for them, their strengths and weaknesses, where their agency is located, the geographic territory, the types of agency services that they [00:03:00] have to offer, and the carrier appointments that they're with. And then we develop an entire strategic process. 

I. Based upon what type of business is gonna work best, your messaging, your scripting, your email campaign, what to say when you get to the first appointment. So what I usually like to say is that what I do now is everything from A to Z on trying to figure out what type of business to go after to actually getting the signature on the bind order. 

That's my play box right there. That's where I spend the vast majority of my time. We're talking primarily commercial insurance here.  

Shane: One of the things that resonated was your quoting is for the weak comments that I heard. I've heard you say a couple of times and I am the personal lines, Charles, we'll get you outta there. 

Don't worry. We'll get you right. I know, I get it. We have, so as our agency network has helps so many captive agents become independent agents and we partner with them and we do that. The natural gravitation is they write a lot of personal insurance. Therefore, we write a lot of personal insurance. I can't stand quoting. 

I just, it just [00:04:00] drives me crazy. Another connection point was the quoting is for the week. Can you like expand  

Charles: on that a little bit? So obviously commercial insurance for PNC is night and day compared to personal insurance, but at the same time they're first cousins because what really has to happen is one person typically is gonna make a decision on personal lines and one person's gonna make a decision on commercial lines. 

So we're selling a different product, but the process of the actual sale. How we relate to that prospect and so forth is very similar. My idea in regards to quoting is for the week, it's not that we don't provide quotes, it's that if we simply just go down the process of offering quotes before we've done the real important work, like developing the relationship, uncovering the pain points that the insurance buyer has, figuring out what type of relationship the insured has with their current agent, what do we have to accomplish in order to win the business? 

That's what I'm trying to remove from the insurance process altogether. So I would actually say when I'm thinking about personal insurance even [00:05:00] versus commercial, is that going through the quoting process actually usually hurts the insurance buyer when we get multiple insurance by agents involved. So you've got the incumbent agent who's got the relationship, they're the one also that. 

The underwriter would usually like to receive the submission from. Because normally whenever you send a submission, very often the underwriter will say, do you currently control this class of business or this account? They wanna know what's the opportunity for them, right? And so when we start to think about what's happening behind the scenes, how does the insurance buyer pick an agent? 

What are they looking for? What insurance agent is the best? Should I use agent A to represent travelers, or should I use agent B to represent travelers? Which one would be the best? The. Insurance buyer has no way to figure it out. They don't know. It's a challenge for me 'cause I have to do some legwork to be able to figure it out. 

But then is that agent the best agent, maybe even at that agency to represent travelers? Does that agency have a good reputation with that particular underwriter? Because I would say usually three or four carriers are gonna compete for the business. Outta those three or four carriers. Now I gotta be [00:06:00] able to figure out who's gonna be the best agent to represent them, and then offer the best negotiating process and the best services to the insured post bind. 

And so it's a bit of a process, but that's where I spend my time when I'm working with insurance agents.  

Shane: One of my career lifetime insurance goals is to develop a personal lines comparable to what you've. Been successfully doing for so many years now on commercial lines, and I would say, whereas the market, you know, in personal lines, doesn't get blocked like it does in commercial lines, and that hurts the buyer and so forth. 

The, you actually, we hurt the insured, as you would say, and that's true. Very true. I. The client doesn't get what they really need. On the personal line side, what happens on the insurance? On the personal line side, it's not a blocked market. Markets aren't gonna get blocked. But for you personal lines, agents out there, you've felt it like why the safe to quote or the traveler's quote from the agent down the street is different than my quote. 

Why? Because the insured is now [00:07:00] confused. Like why? They don't understand that there are coverage options that. One agent has left off. There are endorsements that one agent thinks is more important than the other, or that the client doesn't understand, and this is exacerbated. This gets even amplified there when they're like, I have a Geico quote quote, or a progressive direct quote, which might even be a completely different filing altogether than their rate filing with their agent distribution channel. 

This is a lifetime challenge that I'm gonna. Take on is to take your quoting is for the week. And I've told you this before and I keep saying it 'cause I want to be held accountable. I want to take that into the personal lines arena and figure out a path to help agents understand that quoting is also for the week when it comes to personal lines, even though the marketing dollars that are spent on get a quote. 

Get a free quote. We're definitely climbing Everest here and working against the grain. [00:08:00]  

Charles: The whole entire wave that insurance has been marketed, frankly and sold. I just feel does not really fit the mold of what any side of this equation wants. Doesn't help the insured. That's not what the underwriters want. 

That's not what the agents want. I don't really know who exactly benefits from this whole process, but the ones who who need to benefit don't. There's a sense in which I think, at least on commercial insurance. The one that it does tend to benefit is the incumbent agent, but what it tends to do then is it tends to make the incumbent agent often a little bit lazy and less likely to negotiate. 

So when we think about quoting us for the week, very often we just have to get the insurance buyer to realize that there's a way to do this that will help them. They just have to. Take the reins and not simply allow the other agent who's been sitting on the account for the last three years to go to the marketplace and not do any hard work, not negotiate, not put together the superior submission that's gonna give them the best opportunity, for the most rate, decrease and so [00:09:00] forth. 

So the idea of quoting us for the week, it's that we're trying to step up our game. We're not just a quoting factory like Geico. Farmers has to throw together quotes. That's what they do. State Farm has to throw together quotes, so does Geico, but as an independent insurance agent, that's not what we do. We don't actually offer quotes. 

Underwriters offer quotes. Carriers offer quotes. What insurance agents do is provide service, and we negotiate. That's what we do. We provide service and we negotiate. And so when we get that mantra into our mind of. Quoting is for the week. It allows us to think bigger on really what we wanna accomplish and help the insured to see there is a better way to do this. 

You don't have to do it like it's been done in the past. Let's potentially walk down a different path here and get a better result.  

Tonya: Charles. Tell us how to walk down that path. Tell us about what you do and why it's better than what we've done historically.  

Charles: Sure. Okay. So I try to break down the training that I do in a few different modules, if I can put it that way. 

There's at least [00:10:00] five different things that I focus on, and then there's a bunch of sub points underneath, but we break down the entire process on prospecting, what you're gonna say during the first appointment. Pre-proposal and proposal and those are like the major areas, what we do before we prospect, that's pre prospect. 

Then what do we do when we're actually prospecting? Now we've set appointment, we're gonna meet with the insured. What do we do during that first appointment? And then I call it no man's land In between. We've talked to the insured to, we eventually give them a proposal. What are we gonna do in that No man's land pre-proposal. 

That's where positioning takes place. And I would say about 40% of insurance agents lose the business. In no man's land because they didn't build relationship. So then we position ourselves to the actual proposal. How do we present? When do we present? What does it look like? Have we put together the right type of process so that the insurer can see that this is what they need to have? 

So when we think about that process, prospecting first appointment proposal, I would say most insurance agents, when they get hired, they focus on step two and step five, and they don't focus on [00:11:00] one. Three and four. So they just grab a telephone and then they start calling people and they're like, do we even have the markets to write this account? 

Because most agents out there, they'll prospect and then they'll meet with somebody and then they gather everything and they come back and they're like, all right, now we gotta figure out a place that's gonna write this. And I just think, wow, that's amateur hour. That is really like a huge waste of everybody's time. 

Why are we doing that? So let's get some pre-prospecting done and figure out where are we gonna get. The best ROI After all of the prospecting efforts we do, why are we gonna go call on this class of business? Do we have the number one and potentially number two insurance carriers with the best product and potentially the most competitive pricing? 

I would say if we can do that, our hit ratio goes up dramatically. The nice thing about us is that we have potentially some very solid insurance carriers, and those carriers, them themselves are very micro niche. They will only write certain things and there's a lot that they won't write. And so when we figure out not only what will they write, but what are they very competitive at writing, if I can [00:12:00] focus on my key carriers at where they're most competitive in their top three, and I just go after that client kind of business, I would suspect everybody's hit ratio's gonna go up. 

More than probably 60 to 70%. Whereas the average commercial insurance agent is usually hovering somewhere between a 20 and 35% hit ratio on quote to bind. It's because the process is wrong from the very beginning. They skip pre-prospecting. They just start calling. They don't even have a good script. They don't know what they're gonna say. 

They're just hoping that somebody meets with them. They get to the first appointment, and then I imagine this, they have no strategy for how they're gonna run this appointment. They have no strategy for what they're gonna say. They have no strategy for what they're trying to accomplish. They don't even know what they're trying to accomplish other than maybe, hopefully at the end of this meeting I can photocopy a few deck pages and then go back and figure this out. 

So there's no plan for the first appointment there. As I mentioned earlier, there's no plan for pre-proposal that that time gap, no man's land. And then when it comes to the proposal. Very often, there's not a lot of thought process behind [00:13:00] it. They might just put together a little bit of proposal that's done inside, or they really just go over the actual quote from the insurance carrier directly. 

But I can tell you this, there is very rarely any negotiation that's going on if an insurance agent can simply do one thing and get this across. To their prospect that you will negotiate like a beast on behalf of that insurance buyer, that you're gonna go to those underwriters and you're really gonna push for some better coverages. 

Maybe a change in the endorsement, an exclusion to be removed. We're gonna want an 11% decrease on the auto, and we're gonna need a 4% decrease on the general liability. If we can get the insurance buyer to see that, we're not just going to accept quotes and then say, here they are, but we're gonna accept quotes and then go back and renegotiate. 

That one thing. I really believe that one thing will increase your hit ratio probably by about 30 to 40% across the board, but it's the pre-prospecting at the very beginning that I would say it'd be interesting if you guys did some research even into your own network of agencies. But I would say when I [00:14:00] look at some of the stats out there, that around. 

35% of a new insurance agents that are hired will last up to three years, only about 35%. I've worked with a top 100 agents agency where I was a chief sales officer and they were averaging 21%, so they had 21 1 out of five. Sticks around. Why? It's because there's no plan. There's no process. So if we can create a pre-prospecting strategy for our producers, even maybe before they are actually hired, and then we can simply insert them into a process that we already know, they're gonna have very good success, their ratio is gonna go up dramatically. 

That one agency, they were spending a million dollars a year in non-validated. Salary and training costs, sending all these different people to producer school and hiring them and just everything. A million bucks a year to only keep one out of five. Wow. Crazy. When we can just create a pre-prospecting strategy to give them a plugin process that's gonna guarantee their success. 

Shane: Wow. So there's [00:15:00] five podcasts in everything that Charles just said, by the way. So I wanna know about two things. If you can just help us here. Just, I'm thinking about our audience. I'm thinking about just, some are new to the commercial space, some want to get into the commercial space. Maybe they built a really successful personalized agency. 

Small, they want to be successful, right? So maybe dig deeper, dive a little deeper into. Micro niche. And then what is producer validation? What are you talking about?  

Charles: Okay, so inside pre-prospecting, there's a lot of things that can be done. Number one on my agenda is the micro niche. The riches are in the micro niches. 

That's what I like to say. The riches are in the micro niches. Micro nicheing basically means. I don't go after everything. I go after a very narrow focus. Okay. And like you can micro niche down more and more. I don't do clothing stores, I just do construction. But then inside construction, I don't do just general contractors. 

I do subcontractors, but then I micro niche it down even more. I only do [00:16:00] plumbing subcontractors, and then I might even like micro niche it down a little bit more. I don't do residential plumbers. I only do commercial plumbers. So we begin to micro niche down. The idea here is that you wanna become the biggest fish. 

In the pond that you choose, that's what you wanna be. And when we micro niche down, it allows our branding to be much more dialed into what our prospect wants to hear. And so I can then brand myself on social media as a plumbing expert, and then I can know which carriers are really competitive in plumbing, and then I can start doing some research on their policies and figure out. 

Which of these carriers is offering what coverages versus the other ones and which one has better coverage, or which one doesn't, which one's really competitive and so forth. So I can start to really narrow it down and why we focus on the micro niches, a number of different reasons, but we want to make sure that we've got the right markets that are gonna write that. 

We wanna make sure that we can brand, we wanna make sure also that we can have enough of those prospects in our geographic [00:17:00] territory that we plan to go after. But the micro niching makes sense. And from a branding perspective, yes. But I wanna think of it just for like, how much time do you have? So the typical producer isn't going to prospect for eight hours a day, even brand new producers. 

It's just too hard. They might not even prospect for three hours a day. Some producers with a decent book don't even do a couple hours a week. So depending upon how much time you're going to prospect, you can only call on so many accounts. Why not call on the ones where you're much more likely to say something that's gonna be very attractive to them so that they wanna move forward. 

And so the micro niching helps us with our messaging to make it so much more clear so that the insurance buyer can see we are the. Best option available on which agent to represent them. We are the obvious choice of which agent. That's what we're trying to get across to the insurance buyer. So if I'm talking to a plumbing subcontractor and I've got a brochure that's focused on plumbing and my timeline of services is the 12 month plumbing timeline of [00:18:00] services, they're gonna see that I am likely the one to represent them to the marketplace. 

'cause I can say these 17 insurance carriers will write plumbing subcontractors here in the state, but only these. Four are really competitive depending upon whether or not you do track development or not. So I can like start to break it down so that the insurance buyer will see and get confidence. 

Charles knows what he's talking about. Charles is the one that would make sense for, to represent me to the marketplace, and that's what we're pushing for. I don't need to get 50 clients in a year. If I can just get 15 clients in a year that are, say, $10,000 of total commission, then I'll have $150,000 of commission in the first year. 

I only need to get a certain number of accounts to move forward with me. And so micro Nitching helps in every aspect. In fact, micro nitched insurance producers, they write more accounts, larger accounts, so they make more revenue per account, and they get more signed broker record letters than a general's producer ever will. 

Period. So micro niching, literally, I would [00:19:00] probably say about 95% of all my clients who hire me because they don't even know where to start. Pre-prospecting is the start. What should I call on and why? If you're at an agency that's already got some things going and working, maybe that's a decent place to start, but usually I say. 

I've got a number of exercises we worked through, but some of the main processes that I want you to itemize, each of the insurance carriers that you really want to feed, that you wanna write business with, and then you're gonna go and meet, or you're gonna have conversations with the sales reps and or underwriters at each of these insurance carriers. 

And you're gonna find out what really are they competitive with and who do they think is the other competing carriers out there? Because we're going to excel, spreadsheet this thing to figure out all the types of industries that they want to write and be really competitive at. So if I do this process with, let's say, 7, 8, 10 insurance agents. 

Carriers, I can put it onto an Excel spreadsheet and then I can find out which ones are actually wanting to write it so I can color code it. I just put like a green next to each one where they say we wanna write plumbing [00:20:00] subcontractors that are doing residential and so that I can find the area. And then there's a little bit of like psychology attached to this. 

I actually don't think it makes a lot of sense to go after a class of business that every single one of your insurance carriers want. Normally, that just tells me that the pricing's gonna be lower because everybody wants it, and then it's gonna be really hard to find any carrier that's very different. 

I like to find the middle spot where you've maybe got like 10 carriers who said, yeah, maybe think about it, but there's two or three that said, yep, this is what we want. That's what I like to find. Two or three carriers that really wanna write this business, and then you have access to those two or three carriers. 

That's where the money's at, because now there literally is no reason for that insured to use a different agent to represent those two or three carriers than you. You're micro niched. You know the differences. You have relationships, you have the access points. Now it just becomes a matter of selling yourself. 

To be the one to represent them, rather than just throwing mud against the wall to see what sticks. I would say [00:21:00] that normally it's anywhere from about two weeks to two months for an insurance agent to figure it all out. Sometimes they get it right off the bat. Usually I say be ready to pivot two or three times, but once you have it figured out, it works beautifully. 

I've got some clients that just do campgrounds. He moved from personal lines agent only to doing campgrounds. He is got. I dunno, something like 70 in the last year and a half campgrounds, others that do RV dealerships, one that just does condos, just all different kinds of like weird stuff that work really well. 

Shane: Does that generally end up in a situation where they're spanning multiple states or even into a region when they're doing that? Or, or do you find that it's more about. Staying in your state, staying in your backyard, so to speak?  

Charles: This is a great question and usually this is one of the harder parts to figure out. 

This is one of the negatives that can creep up when we start figuring out micro niche, because you can micro niche too small. Like I can keep going down, like I want only residential subcontractors. I want only ones who are doing business by the beach. Like I [00:22:00] can narrow it down too much where there's not enough. 

And so there comes a point where either you have to add in a second micro niche, which I say that's a valid option. Two one's best two's. Okay, three's bad, or we expand the geographic territory because part of figuring out the micro niche is you also have to figure out what size premium is acceptable to you and drive that back into revenue. 

I know carriers like they want premium, but I can't spend premium. If I spend premium, I'm gonna go to jail. So the premium doesn't matter as much to me as the revenue that I'm bringing in on the account, which again, is why like I'm looking at carriers, are they paying me 13% or they pay me 9%? So I'm gonna try to figure out which carriers I'm gonna be partnering with. 

In the long term here, but if I like go, say I only want accounts that are like $250,000 a premium, like really big accounts, there's only gonna be a few fish in that pond. And so then you'll be forced to expand your territory in order to find more accounts. But if you can find that sweet spot of things that like you're willing to write, you can build a good foundation here. 

You can do it typically in just your state and then [00:23:00] expand from there. I have clients in Arizona that they don't write any business in Arizona. They write business only in Texas or South Carolina. I have one client, he lives in Illinois. He only writes business in Colorado, so you do not have to be where you're at. 

In fact, those accounts, those guys that are in Arizona who write stuff elsewhere, they're all typically writing about $250,000 of commission on greater, and they never see their clients. It's all just done via email and virtual.  

Shane: That's amazing. Just to think about. We're five years roughly past COVID, and what it's done is just incredibly. 

Change the dynamic of the customer, right? What the customer's willing to do, what they care about, what they don't care about, and so that's a great point. I think that's where agents get confused around micro niching. Then you're in your own micro niche. You've got to develop this. You've got to create a strategy and a plan. 

So I love that.  

Charles: I look at it like you're building the cart while you're trying to buy the horse. Like you're not putting the cart before the horse. You're trying to figure out which horse to buy while, what kind of car cart should I build. It's hard to put together all the pieces, [00:24:00] but when you put it together, it really is a beautiful thing. 

And I usually try to tell insurance agents on the commercial side specifically, like how many clients. Do you think you can handle before you hit your peak? Like you can't service anymore? Too much renewal. You can't, you have no more time to prospect. Everybody has a ceiling. If you go after really small accounts that have no, no service, maybe you can write more. 

But if you go after big accounts that have lots of service, you'll have to write fewer. So based upon that, like how many clients would be the right number for each person is different. But usually when I ask that question, I get anywhere from 25 to about 125. And I usually say, if you can find 50, if I get 50 accounts, 50 clients that have $10,000 of commission, that's everything. 

General liability, auto work, comp, property, d and o, cyber excess, like all these policies, just $10,000 commission, that's a $500,000 of commission. I will get that 50 so much faster if I'm micro niched than if I'm a generalist. Who, nobody sees me as [00:25:00] special. I will be Mr. Irrelevant to almost every single insurance buyer that I talk to, but if I micro niche, I will get to my 50 so much quicker. 

And then usually I say, I wanna think about it. I wanna get to my first $250,000 of commission. Once you get to your $250,000, then you can reevaluate. Do I wanna go bigger? Now, do I want to add into a secondary micro niche? Because you can get bored as well. Like you can decide you wanna build out something different. 

If you're an agency owner and you've got three different producers, you might build out different micro niches, two micro niches for each of your producers, and so you're not getting overlap. And then each producer's going after different things. And so you're creating strength in your agency. And by the way, if you're putting this with the right carriers, you're gonna get a whole lot of profit sharing. 

From the right carrier when you're doing the right type of micro niches. So it's gonna work really well. The only people that I would say put up some resistance are the ones who, I say employee health benefits, producers. They put up the resistance 'cause they literally can write anything. They're not subject to market [00:26:00] access, but it's people that. 

I'm PNC who think, are you saying that if somebody refers me into something that I shouldn't write it? And my answer is no. Why would I say that? If you get referred into it, write it. I'm never gonna say no to good business, but just because it's being referred to me doesn't mean I wanna write it. So I have to decide yes or no. 

Do I wanna move forward to this? But if the right class of business or right piece of business falls into my lap, that's not in my micro niche, I'm gonna write that thing. What I'm saying is that. You only have so many hours out of a week to prospect, we might as well come up with a very good plan to get you more clients in that small amount of time that you have to prospect. 

Let's be wiser about the process. Quoting is for the week, think bigger. Let's create a process. Pre-prospecting. The micro niche then comes your messaging and your scripting, and then comes the 12 month timeline of services. If we do those three things, it's gonna make prospecting so much more easier. You are gonna set more appointments and win more business. 

Tonya: Charles spec quote that is on my desk right [00:27:00] now, and it says We have to think bigger. No bigger than that.  

Charles: That's what I try to think all the time because we have a tendency to shrink back into what we feel we're comfortable with and think about it. Any insurance agency owner listening to this right now? 

You have been doing what you're doing and you have been doing it for a while because you are so used to it and you have not pushed the envelope. You have been running in the same path and you've been going after the same types of accounts and you've been writing the same size of accounts. Why? Because that's what we've been used to. 

It really requires Tanya that we push. To go bigger. It's very difficult, but it is literally 100% mindset to go after an account. Maybe that's three times the size of what you're used to, requires that you come out of your comfort zone. And normally we tend to start thinking, oh, why would they wanna do business with me? 

Maybe they would probably doing business with a bigger agency and all of that. But one of the things that I learned from working with insurance buyers when they hire me is that none of them [00:28:00] are thinking that way. It's very rare that anybody picks a very large alphabet house. Because they just think that bigger is better. 

I think a lot of insurance buyers are not of that mindset. They don't think bigger is better.  

Tonya: What's the best piece of advice that you've ever been given?  

Charles: I think the best piece of advice that I've ever been given was when I was forced to go bigger by the agency that hired me. So when I first became an insurance salesperson, I worked for. 

A good agency. They're a good agency. They have a very good reputation. They are a top 100 agency in the United States of America. They're a bigger agency, but they're not an alphabet house. When I went to the second agency, which was an alphabet house, okay, by the way, I would probably never want to go and work for an alphabet house again. 

But I did learn a couple of things that just totally revolutionized my way of thinking, and it has to do with what I refer to as a minimum revenue threshold. They forced me. To not go after small stuff because they said, we will not pay you if the commission is under this level. And so the number that they told me [00:29:00] was $5,000 of commission. 

Anything. If the account generates less than $5,000 of commission, don't write that. But they actually said, but if you're writing stuff that's $10,000 of commission, you probably won't be here in the long term. When I was 24, about a year and a half into the business, they said, we just want you to go bigger because at my first agency I was averaging around $3,500 of commission. 

Per account my second year after I was forced to do that. My account average went from 3,500 up to $26,000 of commission per account. I wrote half the number of accounts, but my revenue per account went from 3,500 up to $26,000, so $3,500 of commission up to 26,000. I wrote half the number of accounts, but you can do the math. 

It was a whole lot more revenue, and I had half the number of accounts that I had to work on. And service and renew, and my team was happier. So that whole mindset of going bigger was by far and away the best piece of advice anyone ever gave me. And I would love to say that I just decided on it, but actually I was forced to go bigger. 

And I'm so [00:30:00] glad I did because I would have been fine. I would've thought, okay, I'm just, this my second year, this new agency, I'll just go after the same stuff. And if I went to a different smaller agency, they would've been fine with that. But I also know that I. I would end up probably like with a book of business that I didn't appreciate, that I didn't like, too much service. 

It's not big enough. I'm not making enough money because I probably have, I'd say 20% of my clients hire me because they have too many accounts and it's a small book of business and they're not happy. Insurance agency owners let that happen. That's their fault. They allow their in a salespeople to do that. 

So small book of business. And so the idea of going bigger makes sense for a single producer. It sure does make a whole lot of sense for an agency owner.  

Shane: My East Texas math says. To connect the dots. When your average went to 26,000 per account, you only had to have 40 clients to be a million dollar producer. 

That, that's an interesting thing that I don't think that most producers think about and they think, here's this small account here. This is easy. They go in the front [00:31:00] door. Thinking about how easy it is to write this account versus, oh, there's no way I'll get a shot at that. How do you change the mindset of bigger? 

Yeah. How do you get them to think that way?  

Charles: I love when one of my clients finally gets into a big account, even if they never write it, because what happens with salespeople is we start tally up the commission in our own mind right off the bat, right? And we start thinking, absolutely, oh, if I get this, it'll be this amount. 

What that does is then it starts making all the other stuff you're working on. Almost load some to you. And so I love when a client just even works on it. If they get it, like it just takes 'em through the roof, like they don't wanna work on small stuff anymore. They go back and they check out their old prospect list and they start fresh and it just works out really well. 

What I think an insurance agency owner ought to do is put together the prospect list for the producer and don't think that your producer's gonna be able to figure it out. I think that if we do that, if we take control of that on the internal, everything's gonna take care of itself. Why would we allow our career and our agency to be in the hands of somebody who just [00:32:00] got in the business? 

That doesn't make any sense to me. So let's really create a strategic process so that we can ensure they're going to stay in this business and have success. So I actually feel it needs to be handled internally. We have to be careful about this. 'cause I can say, I want you to go after a hundred thousand dollars commission accounts. 

There's a point in which like you can start thinking too big, right? And this is the challenge is there's going to be a sweet spot. The sweet spot is somewhere between what you've been comfortable with versus what the bigger agencies are just better at than you are, because the bigger agencies can tend to be very much better at certain practice, group class of business, and we can't compete from a servicing standpoint. 

Now that doesn't mean there's not low hanging fruit there. But I would say there is a tremendous amount of low hanging fruit inside that gap between the, your typical competing agent and the large one, because most, what I would call small-minded insurance producers are gonna stay where they're at. 

They're not going to prospect on bigger accounts because they are incorrectly thinking, I'm not good enough for that account. That [00:33:00] account's too big for me, so because it's bigger, it's gonna remove most of your competition. Then with all the bigger alphabet houses, they're thinking, I can't even go after that kind of business because they don't even gonna pay me, and it's not on their prospect list in the first place. 

And so what I tend to find is two things. One, I tend to find accounts in that sweet spot are with a small agency that's receiving no service whatsoever. It's just the wrong agent. I don't know how they got it, but they got it. That's cherry picking 1 0 1. You should be able to win that account very often if you're micro niche. 

The second one is that it might be with a bigger agency, but because the agency is increasing their premium size, they have put that into a service center that also is cherry picking. So to find that sweet spot where we push ourselves past the point of. Comfort, but then we're also careful not to go too big because frankly, you can just go too big where it doesn't make sense. 

You're not gonna be able to win enough accounts in that. So you find that one spot and then you stay in that lane and that lane is success. It literally is success.  

Tonya: Charles, if our listeners want to learn more about [00:34:00] working with you, where can I find you?  

Charles: Two places for sure. I'm on LinkedIn, so go to LinkedIn and just Charles spec. 

That's where I'm at. That's where I spend most of my time. From a business perspective, I will get back to you like almost immediately if you ever connect with me there or go to my website@permissiongroup.com, permission group.com, and maybe just one last place. I do have a podcast at Shane mentioned earlier called Millionaire Insurance Producer. 

I do actually put out what I hope is just a lot of good free content, and so millionaire Insurance producer. Is the podcast. Why a million? What is it about a million that landed you there? Mike, we're niching. When I first got into it, I was trying to think, how can I create branding that's going to at least generate curiosity. 

I could have said, oh, the a hundred thousand dollars insurance producer, but that doesn't do it for anybody right now, most insurance agents, like agents in Montana, they're not trying to create a million dollar book of business necessarily. Because you can have a very good lifestyle in Montana for maybe $300,000 commissioned, but in 300,000 in LA, you can barely pay the rent.[00:35:00]  

So it's a different mindset, but the idea is that less than 5% of insurance producers out there have a million dollar book of business. And so it's something that's just not attained by most people, and it's a number maybe to shoot for. It's also a number that most people have never thought that they could get to. 

They have no plan because they keep running. They write a bunch of small accounts and they level out at 300 grand. They don't know what to do. So if we can create a process that's going to get you to a million and not to say 250,000, then you're gonna be much happier in life. And so that's really why I focused on the millionaire aspect as well as the broker of record letter aspect. 

Tonya: Charles, Shane and I are both voracious readers. What would you suggest that we read right now?  

Charles: So if you haven't read StoryBrand or Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller, gotta go read that. That really changed a lot of my own messaging about kind of the hero's journey, but he kind of uses the idea of like movies and so forth. 

We're not the hero as the insurance agent. Our insurance buyer's the hero. So we're not Luke Skywalker. We're [00:36:00] Yoda. We have to help Luke Skywalker get what Luke wants to use the force and win. So we are helping the insurance buyer to get what they want. So that whole idea of creating a story, brand of helping your prospect see the journey that they're gonna get, the final result they want, that book has been instrumental in my messaging. 

The book that changed my mindset on a lot of things, or certainly at least solidified a lot of things, is the one thing. My one thing, when I look back at it, I focused my branding on the broker of record letter because I knew that it would repel a lot of people, but it would also attract the exact ones that I want. 

I. And so like that idea of the one thing, this is what I do. I'm focused on the broker of record letter quoting is for the week. But then I also do that in regards to my prospecting. Where can I spend the bulk of my time to get the best result? If I can only spend it in one main area, like where do I get the best? 

ROI. So that book, the one thing really helped clarify a lot of things in my own thinking.  

Tonya: Charles, thank you so much for joining us today and reminding all of us that if you're not owning your niche, [00:37:00] you're renting your results.  

Charles: Love that. That's very good stuff.  

Tonya: So I want you to leave us today with your favorite quote. 

Charles: So think Bigger is. The thing, I think that has changed my, my focus in business on not just maybe a, a job but a career where I could see like this could go, if I could just think bigger and get outta my own way, think bigger, no bigger than that, I think is really that quote, think bigger. No bigger than that. 

'cause usually we're not thinking bigger. But the other one comes from the Bible, from the Old Testament, from the Book of Proverbs, a book of wisdom. And this I feel is very helpful when you start thinking about who should you have around you. And it's that there's wisdom in the multitude of many counselors. 

And so if I can gather wisdom from different people and their perspectives, like if I can hear how Tanya would do it, I can hear how Shane would do it. I can hear how some others have done it, and then I put it together and create what works best for me. I just feel that is very wise after all said and done. 

Shane: Awesome stuff. Thanks for being with us, Charles. Attitudes of choice. Make a great one  

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