What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Shane and Tonya discuss what it means to pivot with purpose, and why embracing change isn’t risky when it’s rooted in strategy. Whether you're an agency owner stuck in the daily grind, a producer ready to lead, or someone clinging to what you've built out of fear of losing it, this conversation will challenge the way you think about growth, reinvention, and leadership. Because sometimes, the smartest move isn’t staying the same. It’s making the right kind of change. 

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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 host, Shane Tatum and Tonya Lied.  

Tonya: Welcome to IA Forward Surprise. To our listeners, Shane has decided to make a change.  

Shane: If you've listened to our podcast for any, any period of time, you know that. 

There's some change that goes on around the Integra Partner network and the Integra organization. A lot of times that change is initiated by me. There's kind of a joke around here that if I go on vacation the week or two after vacation is like the worst time for a few members of my leadership team. 

Long tenured operational staff. It just gives me time to think and be free with where are we going next? This particular. Change is extremely intentional and has been something that's been on my mind several months. Discussed one-on-one, [00:01:00] multiple people, directional things, strategic things, and that change involves you. 

Miss Tonya,  

Tonya: however, the I a Forward podcast is not going anywhere. Yeah.  

Shane: The I a Forward podcast is continuing as is and Tonya and I will continue to co-host. Nothing changing there. The big change is that Tonya is going to take on a different leadership role within our organization. Uh, very strategic in my brain and the way that I've thought this out. 

The Partner Network has been extremely successful. Home based in Texas, very strong footing in Texas and the South Central us. And what started in its infancy a couple of years ago, over the first half of this year, we started moving in this direction of expanding into the Midwest. And it started to become very evident to me that the Midwest and the Southeast needed to be our first regions and. 

[00:02:00] We just happen to have individuals that were geographically in those regions, Tonya being one of them. Insurance is so local as independent agencies. We talk about that a lot and I believe that wholeheartedly that insurance is best done on a very local level if you're going to grow an agency network. 

Expand an agency network. Then I just have this belief that you need to be in the region at a minimum in some cases, and you need to get as local as possible in order to know what's really going on. Kind of the old boots on the ground mindset as we look at expanding into the Midwest region, into the southeast region, that regionalize us, which is how carriers are mostly aligned. 

They're regionalized. Things are different in Georgia than they are in Texas or in Ohio or Indiana than they are in Florida. Knowledge of those regions becomes [00:03:00] extremely important. When I started looking around and going, okay, well how do we do this? I just happened to be extremely fortunate that had someone in Tonya that was not only in the southeast region, but has been on board here at Integra for eight years. 

I've been working with her for eight years, part of our leadership team for almost as many years. She's done several different things. Well within our organization. The most recent has been she's been in charge of our brand marketing efforts, and there's some pivoting we're looking at around that. 

Strategically, this makes a lot of sense. We now have three managing directors at the regional level, southeast region. Midwest region in home base here in the south central region.  

Tonya: So I love the term pivot that has become such a buzzword in corporate speak. The definition from a business context is to completely change the [00:04:00] way in which one does something. 

But the original definition for it became the business buzzword was the central point pin or shaft. On which a mechanism turns or oscillates. And I really love that definition better because when we do a pivot in business, it's not always that we're throwing things away and going a completely different direction. 

I like the idea that there's this central point on which the mechanism turns. But we're staying grounded.  

Shane: That is exactly right in my view from just what the definition of pivot is here, because without the effort over the last three, four years that Tonya has been working on our brand, she's been building foundation and a lot of that foundation even down to the things that people like me forget about and don't think about. 

On the surface, you know, what [00:05:00] are our colors? What's our style guide? How, how do we portray our core values? I created core values, but we didn't necessarily have 'em in a way that was branded up in certain formats. We didn't really have an idea of what to do about social media. We didn't really have an idea about what to do about things as simple as email signatures, business card designs. 

Is laid out has been a created foundation over the last several years. Now, without that, we could not make this pivot. We would be limping along. I don't know how we would've hired an ad agency or a branding firm to do this for us. I'm sure we could've figured it out, but to me, what we've done and the path that led us here. 

Was so much more fulfilling because it truly has been created from scratch. Everything [00:06:00] has been created from scratch. We had a firm develop our logo 13, 14, 15 years ago, something like that. Colors are hard, really technical. There's million shades of brown, different shades of red. Our logo is brown and red. 

It's mostly red than brown. When you get into it, somebody's got to decide. This is the standard. You can't really go anywhere until you've decided that standard and created that foundation to launch and pivot out of. To me, that definition that Tonya's talking about is way more important than the business definition because we're not throwing stuff away,  

Tonya: and in case anyone wants to know Integra Red is C 8 1 0 2 E, and Integra Brown is 42 6 1. 

Shane: Yeah. I mean, wow. Okay. And I'm sure all you marketing people are like, yeah, I get it. But I'm telling you, the rest of us do not understand like we don't get it. There's some kind of code to [00:07:00] colors. Red is red, brown is brown, but it's not.  

Tonya: The thing about pivoting is changing direction doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong. 

It means that you're paying attention. And as business owners, we make a decision and we get so stuck in this is the decision that I made. I'm not gonna change it, and probably the decision at the time was the right decision. Having the ability to pivot means that you are a great business owner. It means that you are paying attention. 

Shane: When we started our branding, when I originally came to Tonya with her previous position. It was, we need to make our brand louder. We need to create marketing and branding. And her title was Managing Director of Brand Strategy. That was her fancy title that I came up with. 'cause I felt like a fancy brand person needed a fancy title. 

So we came up with a title [00:08:00] that reflected the challenge, and when we did that, we had our little corner of the world pretty small when we first started. We need to be louder. We need to develop a brand. We need to do some things that I am personally uncomfortable with. We need to do some things that I'm not going to do personality wise, there's just understanding your weakness. 

There's just certain things that I'm not going to do. And then along came, Hey, let's start a podcast. And then we took a year roughly from the original idea that. We're gonna start a podcast or we should start a podcast. And I was like, no, that's not me. Let's not do that. Kept pushing back. A year later, we finally started the IE Forward podcast, a niche corner of the world of podcasting. 

Hey, I would even say pretty successful podcast. Pretty good follower base, pretty good. Download, listener base. It's what we wanted. It's more than I thought it was ever gonna [00:09:00] be Louder. Get outta your comfort zone. That was an original pivot. No way we can make this pivot today into more of an expansion regional. 

We've been talking about business development, agent development, developing partners in new geographic territories, being more knowledgeable within those regions, having people who are invested. Directly in the regions and states that make up those regions. That's an investment on our part that we are making that we can only do because of the foundation that's been laid over the last three to four years. 

Tonya: When our agents are talking about making a major pivot, kind of like this one, there sometimes is a mindset block of, I've already built this, I've already invested the money. I hate to. Discarding it. IE you have built a very successful exclusive agency. You're not happy where you [00:10:00] are. You really wanna do something else. 

But there's that whole sunk cost thinking. How do we shift that? That we are not discarding it? We're just reinvesting our experience.  

Shane: If you are like me and you have the joy of living with my wife, who. Sunk cost means nothing to her if we're not using it. If it's not bringing you joy, then we're throwing it out. 

I use that as an extreme because this is something I have learned within my marriage. Just observing my wife through the years that I have come to love, like absolutely love, there is nothing in her bones that would allow her to hoard anything. There is no clutter anywhere in her life, in our house, anywhere. 

If there's clutter, it's because she hasn't found my clutter in that corner. I've hidden from her. She can't do it. I've learned that sunk cost is [00:11:00] kind of something that I've learned from that mindset. Hey, we spent money on this. Sure, we invested in this, but it's not working. Or maybe it's something that I want to improve on. 

It's working, but it's not working as well as I want it to work. You have to look at it mentally as something you are going to build on, not necessarily something you throw away. If you've been an agency owner or a producer. And whether it's in the exclusive arena, whether it's in the independent booster, in the, in the independent realm, if you've done this and been in this role, you are never throwing away the experiences that you've gained, like the cells, that capability that you've learned, the insurance knowledge that you've learned. 

You've reached a point where choice is what your customers are asking for, and you can't give choice A pivot. There is not throwing things away. [00:12:00] A pivot there is building on everything you have done. It's just that you have to pivot into a choice model. The independent agency system, it's really amazing when agents figure out that it was really them all along their talent. 

Their capability is what made them successful. It wasn't a brand. It wasn't a big brand. It wasn't the advertising of that big brand. It just was the individual and once, once individuals out that it's them and they make that leap from the exclusive system to the independent system, they are absolutely blown away, not just at the success they can have, but. 

The freedom within that success. That is a major pivot scenario. You are not throwing things away. You're building on the foundation that you've created the [00:13:00] last 3, 5, 10, 20 years, whatever it's been.  

Tonya: You didn't build the wrong thing, you just outgrew it.  

Shane: Absolutely. Or maybe it's just that the consumer mindset has changed the idea of I'm gonna go buy from this brand. 

And I'm gonna do that for my entire life. That is very rare anymore. That maybe happened in the sixties, seventies, eighties, maybe, maybe up until the last 10 or 15 years. But now, while there's still brand relevance and the big advertising is still happening, I get it. But if you look at who's really growing, a lot of those organizations are growing because of their independent agency channel and their distribution. 

There. Even the direct riders are jumping into the independent agency channel, and so there is this movement. Recognize that I'm biased. I'm always going to be an independent agency channel guy. I do not hold back from that and I, [00:14:00] I, I am fine being called biased there. Absolutely. I am biased. Fine. That's no problem for me. 

I just believe in the system so much because. If you told me there's only one type of vehicle that I could have, one brand, one model, that's it. That's all I can have. Well then that doesn't make me very happy. I want choice. It's the American way to have choice. Go down a cereal aisle and look at how many different types we have in a grocery store in America. 

We are a choice consumer. Country being able to go to an independent agency as a consumer or a business owner, and know that I can have this long-term relationship with that agent and get the choice as my needs ebb and flow through life. Then I can build a lifelong relationship there that's attractive to me as a consumer. 

[00:15:00] So naturally, that's where I go from a career standpoint as an independent agency advocate,  

Tonya: there's a phrase that my mom always uses when speaking with people about their children. Moving into next phases of life, whether they're getting married, going off to college, or starting a career that maybe a parent doesn't agree with. 

My mom uses this phrase, you gave them roots. Now give them wings. I know that sounds really silly and it's, it's very cliche, but that's true. And. You don't have to abandon your roots just because you've decided to make a change. You're aiming higher. Of course, there is fear when it comes to starting over or doing something different. 

As a business owner, you can get overwhelmed and afraid to make that change because you're stuck in your routine, even though the routine may not be one that you enjoy. It's still yours and it's okay to evolve. It really is.  

Shane: We tried expansion [00:16:00] 12 ish years ago. We didn't do it well. We didn't know what we were doing. 

We didn't have a real strategy. We just had ideas that were hard to execute. Version 2.0 of expansion we're more targeted, more specific, and I'm following a good to great statement from the book. Good to Great. First, who then what? And that's something that is very important here. Development, okay? If you're going to expand into a region of seven or eight states, or in the Midwest, it's 10 or 12 states. 

And if you're gonna do that, finding that right person that understands our, your business model that is fully invested, who has shown that they're fully invested, all those things, where are you gonna find that person? How are you gonna develop that person? This is probably the biggest thing once you've reached the comfort of having someone in a role. 

[00:17:00] So go back to Tonya, like It's okay to pivot. We're giving you permission to pivot. It's okay to be uncomfortable. This has been a very uncomfortable thing for me. I'm sure it was a little uncomfortable for her in the beginning. I hope that it continues to work to be more comfortable for her. But for me, it's the uncomfortableness of, well, what am I going to do about the things that Tonya does? 

Because there are a lot of things that when you have someone in a role, especially in a very critical role, you know when you've got someone who's done certain things, they've sort of made it go away, they made something that was maybe a problem for you, disappear. Like you didn't have to think about that stuff anymore. 

Like you didn't have to think about somebody needs business cards. Like what is the design and what do we do and how do we get those? You don't think about little things built into people's roles as [00:18:00] those roles have been in place for a while, it becomes very uncomfortable and I think it's good that we just share this and, and you can progress with us. 

Success or fail. This is a success or fail moment. The decision I'm attempting to make, I don't think that it's just replaced Tonya with another Tonya. They couldn't replace Johnny Damon in the movie Moneyball, the Oakland A's. If you need to go watch it, go watch it. It's a great movie.  

Tonya: Just go watch it because it's Tuesday and it's fantastic. 

Shane: The Oakland Athletics were a small market team. They were having to figure out how to replace these superstar free agents and they didn't have any money. It's not that we don't have any money. That's not what I'm saying. So it's a little bit different, but the analogy to me is the same. Hey Tonya, I would like you to make a pivot, go a different direction and take over the expansion, growth and management of our Southeast region. 

I would like you to consider taking that role and then it's like, okay, well then [00:19:00] what are we gonna do? About our marketing and branding role. This brilliant idea that everybody either gets to say, wow, he was amazing, or laugh at me 'cause there is no middle ground here. It's either gonna be great or it's gonna be terrible. 

So Tonya is Johnny Damon. In this analogy, we are going to replace Tonya in the aggregate because she gets on base. That's just a reference from the movie. The reality is that's not a pivot to say, Hey Tonya, go over here and do this. And then we're just gonna figure out how to find another Tonya, develop another Tonya, et cetera. 

So we're gonna do it a little differently. There's actually going to be a couple of people in an outside firm that we are going to replace Tonya with in the aggregate. It won't be a one for one thing. It's like a three for one thing. And so I've thought about that and we've looked at this in different ways within our organization. 

Where it doesn't have to follow the status [00:20:00] quo. Sometimes you need to try something a little bit different, a little bit out of the box. I go back to that movie Moneyball, because it was instrumental in this thought process. You get hung up on comfort. The Scouts in that movie, the scouting director. All the scouts were literally trying to replace Johnny Damon with another Johnny Damon, and they couldn't do it. 

They couldn't afford to do it in their case. In our case, we think that we're pretty good at relationships and building relationships. The development of those relationships is really about people. I think our people are great. We're really good at building and and growing relationships. Now that we've created a foundation of brand and marketing that we can maintain, build off of, et cetera. 

I think our best people need to be put in a place where they can build relationships with the future growth of our partner network. It works [00:21:00] well for our culture, for who we are, and it really works well for our partners because the winner here. In all of this is back to our partner network itself. It's to our partners. 

The long-term goal is that as we grow, it doesn't feel like we're getting bigger. The blob of growth is not good. I do not love big for the sake of big, and so we've always had this boutique feel when it comes to the agency network world As we've grown, the bigger challenge is how to feel small. As you grow another book reference, Seth Godin. 

Small is the new big. That's another example here. Replicating our Texas success, our South Central success. It requires relationships and it requires people to be invested in people where they are.  

Tonya: Sometimes people have been in a spot for so long, especially as the owner of a [00:22:00] business that you forget to dream. 

You get so involved in managing the day-to-day. In doing the mundane things, you forget to shift or evolve or future cast, and you stop trusting your own instincts because you're doing every task. Job as the owners of a business is to lead the vision, and it's not to lead the task. So this is one of those places that, yes, Shane has made a change, but it's very exciting because he is future casting, he's vision casting, he's seeing where we wanna go next. 

We want to grow our partner network just like we've grown out of our local agency. So this is one of those places that sometimes you have to step back to step forward and not be afraid to look at it from a chief possibility Officer perspective. And just go for it. Make the [00:23:00] change. See what happens next. 

If you just happen to be in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, or Tennessee, I would love to chat with you about whether or not the Integra Partner network is the place that you can make that step forward and, and start thinking big.  

Shane: We're not afraid of shameless plugs around here, as you can see. 

That is absolutely right and it's okay to think through this. It's okay to pray through this. I spent a ton of time and prayer and and thought on this. It's still not guaranteed. I feel like it's the right direction. Everything says it's the right direction because things aren't guaranteed. It's hard for us to take that step and break something in our minds we're breaking something, but you may not be breaking anything at all. 

You may actually be. Creating an opportunity that saves your business. You know what we don't know around the corner in any [00:24:00] business life is there's this idea that safe is actually riskier than the next iteration of your business. The growth of your business, sometimes growing your business is safer than trying to keep your business at the same level an insurance agency. 

It is a sales organization with service needs. It's a service business, but primarily we're sales. If you stop, grow, if you stop selling new business, natural retention will eventually shrink you. So you get that old adage, if you're not growing, you're dying. There is no middle ground in an insurance agency. 

There is no stay. The same, the only way you can stay the same. You have to grow enough to offset your retention. And if you're retaining 90%, that means you're losing 10% a year. So you gotta grow 10% just to stay at zero. [00:25:00] And that's why that's so important. And I had conversations with different agents, you know, probably going back 20 plus years ago, just around this idea of it's actually more risky to not grow. 

Because of the type of business we're in. And that's really hard to get our head around. Well, yeah, there's a lot of lifestyle opportunity in this business, in the in independent agency system, but that doesn't mean that you sell, sell, sell, and grow, and then you just stop. That's it. You're done. There's no business really like that unless you sold a patent and you're getting royalties, maybe something like that. 

But from a business standpoint. This business is a great business, but there's just no such thing even in a lifestyle created business where you just stop. If you stop, you're going to shrink and eventually wither away. And so you do have to keep going. You just may not have to keep going at the same [00:26:00] pace. 

So let's be clear on that. In our case, there's so many reasons why expanding geographic regions is important, spread of risk, catastrophe management. Many conversations with our carrier partners. We think we've got a pretty good program. We are told we've got a pretty good program by carrier partners, by agents, by agents that went somewhere else and wish they wouldn't have. 

We get lots of different feedback, so we think we've got this really cool program and it's working for us and so many agents, so why not share that with more people in more areas, especially if it. Checks a lot of boxes around diversification of risk, catastrophe management, et cetera,  

Tonya: and most of all, helping other people grow. 

Most of all, we love taking what we know and what works and best practices [00:27:00] helping agency owners grow, or helping super producers grow. It's a phenomenal thing to be on our side of the business. To step back and look at what the Integra partner network has been over the last 20 years, and we are so excited for this regional expansion, I am not throwing away 30 years of brand and marketing knowledge. 

I am elevating how I'm using it into our business development world. If you decide to start an independent agency or there's something in the back of your mind thinking, I can do this, just know that you're not throwing anything away. You are starting to reframe something in your mind that you can grow into. 

It's that. Idea that there's a decision you've been delaying that could really [00:28:00] help you move forward?  

Shane: Tonya's, exactly right. Some of you just need a nudge. Some of you have been wanting to go independent for years. What I hear the most from our partners that came from an exclusive background, either at the agency ownership level or at the producer level, is that I wish I would've done this sooner. 

I've never had. A partner in our agency network say, wow, I should have waited. That's never happened. It's always been, I wish I would've done this sooner. Now. It was hard for a year or two. That's the transparent honesty, but it was worth it. Most of the time when those conversations are had, and when we hear that, it's because it was someone who had been. 

In the exclusive channel for 15, 20 years, they had reached a a level of just, I don't wanna call it coasting, but close to coasting. And now they sold their [00:29:00] agency and they started an independent agency. It's a start over in that sense, rebuilding the book, but it's not a throwaway in start over to Tonya's point. 

That's just not the reality of it. You're bringing with you all that experience and we've been fortunate at Integra. Me as a second generation agency owner, we've been fortunate to survive start overs like we've started over multiple times. We're in version 2.0 of our agency network. Our original agency network was 1998 and we started over in 2010. 

We were capable financially because of the agency. We were very fortunate. We've actually done what we're preaching. We've actually started over. We've got iterations around inside our organization. A lot of times we're like, remember when we did this? Remember when we did that? And [00:30:00] that's where a lot of exclusive agency owners and producers are today trying to figure out is it a good time? 

It's always a good time. The answer's always going to be yes. It's like, well, I'm gonna wait on interest rates to build my house or buy my house. Well, by the time you wait on interest rates, the valuation of that house is gonna increase. There's all these arguments that you can go, there's no such thing as the perfect time. 

It's just the time. I'm saying that from a standpoint of having made the leap in different ways, multiple times and starting over, it's kind of scary. I'm kind of doing that again here where. We're taking a couple of major things due to this. This desire to grow, expand, and diversify some risk and do some management. 

We need to do this, but it's a little scary. It's different people like Tonya, who I'm challenging to take on a different role, [00:31:00] but there's going to be this end game where we're gonna look back and go, wow, I wish we would've done that sooner. I think it's gonna be just like most of the agents that we work with. 

I wish I would've made that leap sooner.  

Tonya: Shameless self-promotion. If you are interested in Integra Partner Network, check us out@integrapartnernetwork.com or send us a message on our socials. We would love to talk to you about why starting over really isn't that scary. So let's chat.  

Shane: Look for us in your state, and we can't wait to talk with you. 

Tonya: I'm gonna leave us today with this quote from Serena Williams. It's never too late to start over. If you weren't happy with yesterday, try something different today. Don't stay stuck. Do better  

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

Tonya: 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 market. And [00:32:00] 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 agency To find sustained growth, find your way to Integra. 

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