IA Forward
IA Forward is your playbook for success as an insurance agent.
Every week, Shane Tatum, Tonya Lied, and Mike Boesl tackle the real challenges insurance agents face, from growing a profitable book of business and building a stronger team to marketing, leadership, carrier relationships, industry changes, and the decisions that come with owning and running an agency.
No corporate talking points. No textbook advice. Just honest conversations, practical strategies, a few strong opinions, and lessons you can actually use in your agency.
Whether you’re building your first book, growing an established agency, or trying to figure out what’s next, IA Forward is about helping you think bigger, lead better, and build a business you actually want to own.
Learn more at www.integrapartnernetwork.com
IA Forward
Stop Chasing Your Tail
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
There’s a fine line between persistence and wasting your time.
In this episode , we talk about knowing when to keep pursuing a prospect and how chasing one client too much can mean missing five other opportunities right in front of you.
And somewhere along the way, they discuss unique sales techniques, tiny airports, and why hanging up a cell phone will never be as satisfying as slamming down a landline.
Sometimes growth isn’t about chasing harder. It’s about knowing what’s worth chasing in the first place.
Learn more at IntegraPartnerNetwork.com.
Y'all this is right up there with a meeting that we had Friday morning that Mike was not in. And she says, Oh, so and so passed. And then he just kept going. And Holly and Robbie are thinking that one of our employees has just died and he's just kept going.
SPEAKER_00I mean, she passed her license test. I mean, that she passed. And you could have been excited about it, but yet he goes, so and so passed.
SPEAKER_01This is IA Forward, your playbook for success as an insurance agent. Now, to help you not get out of the ballpark, here's your host, Jane Tatum, Mike Basil, and Tanya Lee.
SPEAKER_03Welcome to IA Forward and welcome to uh my favorite week of the year, the first week of college football. Now, I mean, I know we had a week zero, and this is the last year that we will have a week zero according to NCAA schedule changes. So thank you. But we had a cool week zero here in Pensacola. Our Argos of the University of West Florida won their very first Division I football game.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Go Argos.
SPEAKER_03Go Argos.
SPEAKER_00That's nice. That's awesome. We should never have a have a week zero of anything. It's just dumb. I don't understand it. I'm glad there's a schedule change. I have a feeling I'm gonna be negative today, by the way.
SPEAKER_03I can tell.
SPEAKER_00I don't know why.
SPEAKER_03I do have to tell everybody we had our uh home office third quarter family call with everybody within the integra organization, and I was having technical difficulties. So I actually watched the closed captioning in Teams that just to let you guys know does not speak East Texas.
SPEAKER_02Well, let me add to that. I mean, buckle up, kids, because Shane only went 22 minutes this morning, so he's got a lot of words left.
SPEAKER_03So he does. And actually, he went 23 and a half minutes because he started talking at 22 minutes about how he had only talked for 22 minutes, and that did bump it to 23 and a half.
SPEAKER_00No, that was it. The next minute and a half didn't count. Once I killed it at 22, that everything after that moment was like bonus time. No, that's that's the Dana Mall.
SPEAKER_02That's no, that's incorrect. That's factually incorrect. That's like when we you and I have a meeting and I say at like 45 minutes, oh, one more thing before we go. One more thing, it goes to an hour and five minutes. That's not that was that's what it is. It's an hour and five.
SPEAKER_00Well, so that's extended time, but I eliminated, I said that's it, 22 minutes, I'm done. And then then I elaborated on I only went 22 minutes, but I was already done. So, you know, that's different than extended time. It's like soccer, I still can't figure out why they have extended play or penalty time. That would that one got me in the World Cup was just like, what? Why is it going longer? Well, it's it's injury time, not penalty time. Injury time, hydration time, whatever we're doing today. You know, hockey's got that too, right? Hockey have injury or penalty time or something like that. No, but they don't ever add time at the end like that.
SPEAKER_02They don't, okay. That is a soccer specific.
SPEAKER_03Speaking of football, Mike.
SPEAKER_02Oh, is it yeah. For those of you watching, you know, last week I had to take my pledge to LSU. So I thought it'd be fun if we did a little since let you know, I kept it fairly recent, since 2000 LSU Tiger, Buffalo Bill, Wall of Fame. Oh see, so for those of you who don't know, we've got Reed Ferguson, who's been the long snapper since 1983. So that's a pretty long time. Then we've got Josh Reed, who was uh wide receiver during the drought era. If that had been a better team, he would have been he would have shown a lot more, I think. And then at the bottom, you got the two big boys. You've got Trey White and Kyle Williams, the anchors of the Bills defense for a few years before they got good. And then Williams made it one year into the playoffs, which was great, and then Trey was around for a while after that. That's it. That's the that's your uh that's your hall of fame right there.
SPEAKER_03And our our new center is Lloyd Cushionberry the third.
SPEAKER_00Cushionberry.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's true. There's some others that I left off, like um Leonard Fournette had uh the brief stint here, amazing tiger, uh really good Jaguar, and then um, you know, the cliff came quickly.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, no.
SPEAKER_00Was Fournette a West Monroe guy too? Yeah, that's what I thought. He was like homeless for a while.
SPEAKER_02I remember that story. Did not know that. Yeah, there were some hard times in that family, so it was nice to see him make it. His brother made it too. Yes, whose name was like incredibly similar.
SPEAKER_03Leonard and Lenard.
SPEAKER_02That's it. Okay, yep. But he was nowhere near as productive. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Okay, so college football should do should we even talk about um what's going on this week with Lane Kippen and I swear it's like the whole finding Nemo thing. Don't touch the boat. Don't, don't, don't touch the boat. Touch the boat. Do y'all know what I'm talking about? Please tell me you know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_00Yes, I know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_03Okay, okay. So that's been this week in LSU football.
SPEAKER_00I'm a Nemo fan. Well, no, it it's it's it's really not an LSU football thing. It's a Lane Kiffin thing.
SPEAKER_04Yes, it is.
SPEAKER_00Everywhere Lane Kiffin goes, he's like uh it's chaos. He's like he is like pig pin, Charlie Brown, pig pen, like the whole dust thing all around him at all times. That's if you could visualize like chaos or drama, it would be all of that stuff that just follows Lane Giffen everywhere he goes.
SPEAKER_03He is a master at PR. He is still the only coach to ever co-host college game day in a game that he was coaching.
SPEAKER_00Was he picking teams too?
SPEAKER_03No, yeah, did he do the picks? Did the whole, but he did the whole show. It wasn't just the guest picker, he did the whole show.
SPEAKER_00Wow, yeah. No, no, he's he's definitely uh look at me, yeah, bring the cameras everywhere we go, kind of guy, for sure.
SPEAKER_03And and Mike can attest when he asked me when all of this happens, that uh my first words to Mike was he's cuckoo for cocoa buffs. But he's a great selection for LSU because of it.
SPEAKER_00So what you're saying is is LSU needed a little extra limelight drama. Is that what you're saying? Oh, sure.
SPEAKER_03And they needed somebody that spoke Southern, that knew Southern, that knew Southern football, that would treat uh LSU fans um the way they're used to being treated and they could identify with. And I think that Lane was a good choice for that. And then you know, bringing back Coach O was masterful as far as uh recruitment. So we'll see what happens.
SPEAKER_02How much are they paying head coaches this year?
SPEAKER_00Yes, eight to ten million, somewhere in that range or more. No, it's way to twelve. No, because it's his salary plus what's his name's salary. Oh, do you mean like all of the how much is LSU spending on coaches and head coaches? Oh, between LSU and AM and ANL uh coaching pay of all the current, all the active and former, I think we could retire the national debt.
SPEAKER_03I mean Kiffin's salary salary, just his is $13 million a year, and that's without all the buyouts, yeah, all the bonus stuff and whatever.
SPEAKER_00So and what's really crazy is that's not their coaching pool salaries, right? That's just him.
SPEAKER_03His salary was like 91 million his contract contract.
SPEAKER_00So but you know but anyway, so insurance.
SPEAKER_03Insurance, let's talk about insurance.
SPEAKER_02Mike, your topic today is well, I mean put it that way, like if it feels like if this episode flops, it's on me.
SPEAKER_00I don't know if I'm into that. It's all on you at this point, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02No, I think what would be interesting to talk about today is when do you give up on a specific client or a specific prospect?
SPEAKER_03Is there a I'm glad you gave us some specificity on that client?
SPEAKER_02I think that's important.
SPEAKER_03When do you think that's give up? Well, you know, use that on a Tuesday.
SPEAKER_00I don't think that you should introduce that topic in your southern pause. Like just don't, you know, I know you're rooting you're an LSU fan this year, but I don't think this is the time.
SPEAKER_02You know, I don't when do that's a that's a tease or a clip hanger hand. I didn't go to radio school, but I listened to a lot of radio.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, y'all, this is right up there with a meeting that we had Friday morning that Mike was not in, and she says, Oh, so and so passed. And then he just kept going. And Holly and Robbie are thinking that one of our employees has just died, and he's just kept going.
SPEAKER_00First of all, it was not that it was not that dramatic. Number two.
SPEAKER_03Yes, it was. It was all of us thought that you had just announced that one of our team members had passed away. And then you passed.
SPEAKER_00I mean, she passed her license test. I mean that she passed.
SPEAKER_03And you could have been excited about it, but yet he goes, so and so passed.
SPEAKER_02Oh gosh. Oh, well, I think you've known Shane long enough to know that pretty much was excited.
SPEAKER_00I'm still I'm still stuck on when do you give up?
SPEAKER_03When do you give up?
SPEAKER_00Okay. Yeah. I think it's really important that you you continue there with the you know, on a prospect or a client, you know, like when do you give up talking to them? And I I think you mean like, or do you mean like like they're just you're not getting anywhere? Like well, it depends if it's a prospect.
SPEAKER_03When they pass, that's what you give like.
SPEAKER_00When they pass is the answer. That's definitely when you want to give up.
SPEAKER_03So oh my gosh, especially if you're trying to sell life insurance.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that would be the only one claim in life insurance.
SPEAKER_03So Mike, what is it that just brought this particular topic to mind? Y'all hacking it today, apparently.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we got the giggles today. I think it's going well.
SPEAKER_00I think it's going well.
SPEAKER_02I don't know. It's just um the the idea of diminishing returns within an agency was on my mind. And that is a spot where that can occur. You can can you can chase your tail for quite a while on specific things because maybe it's your personality, you can't let something go. And you can waste a lot of time just going around in circles on that same thing. Where, you know, if you stepped back, you would say, okay, you know, I'm this company is better off closing the doors. No, no, no. That company is better off if we just leave this off to the side, maybe revisit it later, but let's leave this for now and get to the five or six or seven other things that I maybe have not been putting as much energy into as I should have because I've been going nuts about this one prospect or this one client.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I this is really good, actually. Like I know we've had some fun, but it this is this is one of those things that really can uh derail, especially newer agencies, like agencies that are still trying to get, I mean, it it really applies to everyone, you know, uh, you know, multi-generation agencies, etc. But it it is newer agencies can get really easily derailed and miss a ton of opportunities because they're they're chasing that one thing or they're chasing that one client, uh, that one prospect. Um I think this is really easy to do, actually, in the insurance business. And we especially moving from, say, uh the captive side over to the independent side, for whatever reason, like there always seems to be this mental block. You've been a really good salesperson and you've been able to do business, but you maybe you only have the one offering, right? You're you're a captive agent. And so it's either you know, you kind of get into that sort of this is what I got, yes or no, and then you move to the next the next prospect. In the independent world, we should do more of that, but what we tend to do is here's my best shot. I think, oh, that's not good enough. Let me go see if I can find another thing that might be good enough. And then you spend hours or days on that instead of hey, here's what I got. Um, and and I think that's really easy to do.
SPEAKER_02I think part of like I had mentioned, I think part of it is your demeanor or just the way you think, you know, like you you want to just keep pursuing and getting after that one specific thing because you feel like that's a win if you go get that. But the problem with that is aside from the time, is are you making concessions in the policies as well in order to get that? Are you making change like okay? We just you know, you're like you got the hood open and you just start pulling stuff out. Don't need this, don't need this, don't need like that's not the right way to write business. So I think that's another spot you have to be super careful about, you know, what what you're doing to try to sell something that maybe you should just leave.
SPEAKER_03I had two incredible mentors when I first started selling radio, and I got to share an office with both of these ladies, and their names were Pat and Marty. And Pat was Sophia Loren incarnate, like everything about her, she looked like Sophia Loren, she sounded like her, she smoked, you know, continuously. Actually, they both did, but anyway, um Pat was a scarcity salesperson, like she was always gonna be there, she took great care of clients, but she was that she was that salesperson that like if she tried to sell, you know, if she was in the the process of um uh selling, and you know, she would put the pen down in front of the person to sign the contract, and they would say, Well, I don't know about this. She would literally pick up the pen and take it away. And you could see people like, well, well, you know, it's gonna be like, well, obviously, I I don't have what you're looking for, and she would take the pen away, and then people would be like, give me the pen I want to sign, right? And then uh she was oh, she was so good at it, she was so good at it. It was it was incredible. And then I had Marty, and Marty was the quintessential chihuahua. Like, people would say yes to get her to shut up. I mean, she refused to take no for an answer. And I mean, like, I saw people do it over and over and over again. And in fact, when my mother had um her first heart attack, that they would not let us back to see mom. And at the point that they let us back, my mother was like, Marty has been in here for three and a half hours, like talking, you know, like why are why is no one else coming? And she had talked her way all the way back to my mama's room because she didn't take note for an answer. And I saw these two extremely successful women do things in a totally different way. So I this may be one of those personality things of when do you give up, right?
SPEAKER_02You went down that you lost me. I gotta be honest. As soon as soon as you went to Marty and Pat, and then you said they were both women, and then I went straight to Saturday Night Live, and I was out there for pretty much the entire thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I have a question that I really think we need to we need to solve the answer to. Like, I love the pen and the pen strategy. Like, how do we how where do how do we do that in an electronic signature world? Like, I want to figure this out now. That's where I've been my brain's been buzzing since you've been talking about that because I'm like, man, in you know, personal lines, you know, maybe with commercial, but even in our commercial world, yeah, we don't collect signatures anymore because hey, you're gonna get an email with uh uh you're gonna need to sign electronic signature.
SPEAKER_03And she always said you had to do that with a nice pen. Like you couldn't just go in there with like one of these. You had to do it with a very nice high-end pen.
SPEAKER_02I like it. I like it a lot. Yeah, you can't you can't go in there with a 1983 Smurfs pencil. That's not gonna work.
SPEAKER_00Definitely can't go with one of those javelin waltons. They'll fire you before you can leave, you know, to do that.
SPEAKER_02It's gonna have to be something like the electronics signature box pops up on their computer while they're talking. You're yeah, something. No, nope, pull it back.
SPEAKER_03Do you take the tablet back from them?
unknownI don't know.
SPEAKER_00I don't know. Maybe so.
SPEAKER_02I think that's just something that's gone. Yeah, yeah. There's jobs that are feel like they're heading out with AI. That that's just something that's gone.
SPEAKER_03We gotta figure out how to never get to slam your phone down anymore. Now you have to like, and it's just not as satisfying.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I don't know. We gotta, you know, figure out how to replace those things that are the coolness factor, right? We gotta figure out how to replace those things in a digital world.
SPEAKER_03But yeah, I definitely think. Maybe it's a personality thing. And I know of clients that never ever signed on the line for me. But they still sent me other clients. So I would go and see them because while I never had a product they really wanted, they would always refer other people back to me. So if it's somebody that's doing that, I don't think you ever give up.
SPEAKER_02I think there's always, I think this comes back to parameters that you set for yourself before you get into the situation. You know, your management system maybe can help you with this. Uh you have a prospect in there, and maybe you send out communication X amount of times a year to the people that are in the prospect pool within there, or maybe you have a follow-up that comes up after X amount of time. And if these are all things you set up beforehand that you felt were the appropriate intervals, stick to that and don't start deviating to chase rabbits.
SPEAKER_00Uh there, you know, I would add qualifying your prospect, right? If we're talking about prospects here for a second, but not everyone needs to become your client. And I I think as a salesperson, sometimes as salespeople, we tend to assume that everyone is a great prospect to become our client. And that just isn't true, right? I mean, you know, depending on what you're selling, I mean, you know, obviously Amazon's proving anybody, Walmart, you know, etc. But that's not the insurance industry. You it's very difficult to be a generalist. Um, it's very difficult to gain a lot of traction as an you know, generalist of everything, personal lines, commercial lines, you know, standard preferred, uh, non-standard, excess and surplus. I mean, you just you have so many different avenues of how you can grow and build your agency. If you don't create some guardrails for yourself, you can end up chasing just about everything. And you will run yourself ragged. If you don't do it on the sales side, you're going to do it on the servicing side down the road.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So you to elaborate on that, really what you're saying is let's say you decide you want to do commercial business, you shouldn't really have 20 commercial clients that are in 14 different industries. That's that's that's gonna become problematic.
SPEAKER_00Well, you're you're the jack of all trades, master of none, right? Got to get our cliche, our standard cliche in there for today. Um that's right. I mean, you can do it, but the chances of you retaining that business forever and ever become a little more difficult. However, if you have 14 clients in two industries, you got you've you've started something right, right? Now now you've got some expertise, you've built a foundation, and you can expand on that. Um, what what happens a lot of times, certain agencies, depending on where you're located, you may have to go further. You may have to go wider geographically if you're in a smaller area, rural area, versus say a suburban or metro area. Um, I'm gonna use like, you know, uh HVACs, uh HVAC industry, uh, or the plumbing industry, you know, if you're in a rural area, there may not be enough for you to just write HVACs, right? Uh, but you may can write trade contractors that may be more of an expansion there within a rural area. Uh I we, you know, we focus on trades, we focus on trades. Um that's one way to think about it. The other way is you go broader geographically and you stay focused on some of those trades.
SPEAKER_03Okay, looking at our retail agency, Shane, um, is that really Nistrat? I mean, I know that we write a lot of churches, we write a lot of school districts. There are specific things that we write, but I mean, I would think being in uh uh the rural area and the size of our our business, um, do we not have a pretty expansive commercial focus?
SPEAKER_00Or yeah, we're we teeter more along the generalist lines, right? And um it's not that we love it, it's just that um we we're dealing with a couple of generations worth of uh worth of clientele in small areas, uh, and we have made the decision to go more general versus and and and stay smaller geographically versus go uh more narrow in specific classes of business because we would have to go wider on a geographic basis.
SPEAKER_02Doesn't that rural placement make that a lot more feasible? So, I mean, if you're in Houston or New York City, you don't want to do that, I don't think. No. If you want to pick something and go at that hard, plus it makes advertising and marketing much easier, right? I mean, if you're you said plumbers, you're going in on plumbers, you can find a periodical on plumbing and you can advertise in that and you can stay pretty narrow, and there's gonna be a huge, huge amount of of prospects in that pool, right?
SPEAKER_03So is this something that you decide up front? Hey, we want to be the master at school districts, and so this is what we're gonna do. Um, I can remember with my mom's law office, she was like, if if you were on logger, you went and saw my mama, you had legal trouble. Like, but my mother did not set out to be the expert with loggers. It was like she was a generalist, and then she started like she had a logger that she worked with, and then he like passed her information on, and yeah, so that became her specialty, but she surely did not set out to do that.
SPEAKER_00I I think depending on your area, most what I would say non-metro, so rural, are gonna start out as generalist, just like your mom did in in her law practice. We did too. You know, we started out very general. We we, you know, then we wrote a school district. And then then, hey, this is kind of good. Then we wrote a second and a third, and the next thing you know, you know, we've got a dozen school districts around East Texas. And I think we have at one point we are the most I think we had was 17 or 18 school districts. I think we're back down around 13 right now, but they're they've gotten larger, the premiums have gotten larger, and we've stayed with them. Um I don't think anyone in small town America, agency-based, starts out as a specialist. I think most start out as a generalist and then find some niches along the way, right? And uh that's what happened to us. Yes, we've got some church, we've got some church business, we've got some school district business, um, we've got some HVAC business. Um, you know, there are uh the farm and ranch has become a big part of what we're doing because of our area, but it wasn't always that way. Uh I if I'm if I'm in a metro, more of a greater metro area, Houston, Dallas, you can you can target one or two classes of business and generate a million dollars in revenue and become the expert in that field, right? It's just more realistic when you get into that. Um, in the rural areas, it's just more difficult, right? And and that's just part of the game. And nobody really starts out as a specialist, they work their way into being a specialist.
SPEAKER_02Now, sometimes, you know, we like to work here at Integra, we like to work with people who are changing careers. Sometimes you can leverage that. You know, maybe you were a salesman at a bobcat dealership and you decided you want to go into insurance. Well, that's a natural fit for you to maybe start down that particular path and go down that road and see how far you can go with that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. The you know, great example for us. Um, the the individual that started our school district program and wrote our first school district, she retired in 2018. And um, my brother-in-law and and I were having a conversation. He was in copier sales, printers, copiers. Uh, we were having a conversation about a year before uh her retirement. And in that conversation, we both realized that his customer base in the printer copier business was almost identical to our school district customer base. Um, so there was such a natural fit for him to come in and take over our school business because they already knew him. They already had familiarness to him. All the clientele was virtually the same. And so that made his transition from printers and copiers and equipment sales to insurance sales a much easier process because all the clients were the same clients.
SPEAKER_03I know that within the insurance world, there are some commercials, commercial groups, um, commercial classes that uh like we don't touch at Integra. Like we don't do that, we don't play that. So how do you resell? Like if I decide that I am going to do um uh home-based child care. And I say this because next door to me is a home-based child care business that's been in business for 30 years, right? So um, and I know that that one time I we had a we had an integrity.
SPEAKER_02Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You have a day care a home-based daycare center next door to you. Yes, like the backyard is full of toys, and those little rascals are just running around out there.
SPEAKER_03Actually, we never hear them. Like, yeah, she's on like second and third generation kids, and like we never see them, we never hear them. It is not a challenge. We don't own.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That does raise some I know these people, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean, we see them when they drop them off and we see them when they pick them up, but like during the day, it's never uh yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because I know if I were looking for a home and I saw the next door neighbor was Roses, uh, you know, preschool, I'd be like, um we're gonna pass.
SPEAKER_03There's not a sign.
SPEAKER_00Is that one?
SPEAKER_03And we didn't really know that.
SPEAKER_00There's no signs for daddy didn't care.
SPEAKER_03There's like there's not toys outside. There's not, I mean, it's a very with what I knew about them was I met the the husband who was the general sales manager for wear, which is the uh ABC television affiliate here. And so we got along great and we talk shop, and I never thought to ask. Do y'all have a home daycare business?
SPEAKER_02Wait, if they're never outside, what are they doing with these kids all day?
SPEAKER_03I don't know the answer to that question. I've never asked them.
SPEAKER_00We need a appearance. I think wood shop. I think they're in the back. They're they're they're whittling. Yeah, they're whittling. They're they're uh, I mean, we are in the south still, right? Florida's still in the south. So can't handle your stuff. Yeah, so yeah, we've got some. I I think I think they're you know, I'm not thinking like sweatshop stuff here, but I'm thinking like I'm thinking like they're putting them to work, right? They got they got them doing some crafts, they got them doing some wood shop. I think that's what I think. That's that's where I'm operating.
SPEAKER_02They got those little baby sewing machines out of there. Absolutely. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00All right, that was our full derailment. What was your question?
SPEAKER_03I know that we had a partner agent about eight years ago that decided that she wanted this to be her focus on her commercial. And we went in and did all of these, you know, social media campaigns and she did some other things. And then once she had spent the money to do all this, she realized my superiors don't necessarily have an appetite for this.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03So how do you research to figure out like these are the things that I want to do without them being the obvious thing that everybody wants?
SPEAKER_00So we we see this a lot with agents um starting up uh and and we see this with salespeople in our retail operation. And they start at the wrong place, right? So one of the places you want to start is what do your carriers offer? Like what markets do you have and what classes of business do they like? And look, I'm not opposed to you being all in the in the excess and surplus market. If you have a class that you want to go after or multiple classes, and you're gonna become really, really good at excess and surplus type business, and that class is gonna fit into that. I'm okay with that. The flip side of that is look at your standard preferred markets. Who do you have? What do they do? Um, there are a lot of classes of business that they want to write, and then see if you've got some kind of crossover, right? See if you've got crossover of interest, knowledge, um, maybe background to your point. Uh, someone coming out of a previous career uh in equipment sales. I'm thinking about like tractor, um, bulldozers, etc. There's dealerships, there's all kinds of different places that you can kind of look go down that path. Um, but the first thing you want to do is check your carriers. And and that's not typically where agents start. They start with how much premium does that class of business, that's a you know, what what kind of premium do they generate? Because everybody's after that, first and foremost. That's not the most important thing, in my view. It what's important is is there enough opportunity within those classes of business that you're looking at that reconcile with your carriers that you can then become the expert on, and all of those stars align. Now you're ready to go.
SPEAKER_02Well, here's the deal: like, if you do an AI search, what are the top five commercial lines that generate the most revenue? Whatever's on that list is going to come up. And here's the thing everybody else is doing that same search. Sure. So if you're going into those, you have to have the understanding that everyone else is trying to do that exact same group as well.
SPEAKER_00You know, my my my secret sauce that's not really secret sauce, I just don't think anybody thinks about it. And and to Mike's point, you know, you're gonna you're gonna run up against large national brokers. For the for the rest of us in the small uh to mid-sized agency world, I love the $15,000, $20,000, up to $50,000 account. Like I understand writing three and four thousand dollar bops all day long is very difficult. And you really need to be personalized and small commercial if you're gonna do that. Um it's hard to be a commercial expert on three to four thousand dollar bops, but there is a lot of business between 15 and 20,000 up to 50,000, and you're never going to run up against large national brokers. You're never going to. They don't write that business. Um, you might run up against a neighboring town agency. You might run up against a larger multi-generational agency and one of their producers, but it is an area you can go toe-to-toe with agency networks like Integra. You have access to markets, um, the same markets that that agency cross-town is going to have, and you're going to be able to go toe-to-toe there. You're not going to run up against MarshMack, um uh USI, uh Hub. You're just not, right? Though they're not playing in that space. And so I love that approach for finding your niche around those still still gonna be considered small business uh when you look at the big spectrum of of the insurance marketplace.
SPEAKER_03Hey, you guys, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back in about 30 seconds.
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SPEAKER_02So let me ask this. Shane, do you see any correlation or is there anything measurable or quantifiable about going out and finding commercial business that has high employee counts because there's more opportunity to write the personal lines business of employees within?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I think there's some of that. Um a lot of I don't think there's anything wrong with that, right? Um, I think that you probably need to be pretty good at work comp. Um, maybe understand the the work comp world a little bit. Uh, if you're gonna try to do that, um, I think that's a great place to get into to basically uh look at the employee and and try to offer personal lines to the employees. Um maybe, and I know we try not to blend this, but I think this is okay. Uh, maybe if you're comfortable getting into the benefit side of things, so the group health and the workers' comp tend to kind of blur together uh at times, and you get a big opportunity to um to talk to the employees at that moment. So you could create some synergies there. I think the only thing you have to be a little bit careful about is a lot of high employee count businesses are gonna generate maybe larger premiums, and there's nothing wrong if you've got the market and the expertise to go after that. Uh, but you have an you have somebody that's got 40 or 50 employees, probably spending pretty good penny on insurance, right? So you can depend on what type of business, what class of business you're getting into. Um, we see that with some of the larger trade contractors in our area, uh, where they might have, you know, 40 technicians, um, but that that organization is generating $250,000 to $350,000 a year worth of premium. So they're generating a lot of interest from out-of-market agencies.
SPEAKER_03You know, and I've also heard some commercial producers uh that are the antithesis of that. It is very much I don't want personal lines messing up my commercial lines. If you know there is a personal lines challenge over a A $10,000 claim on a vehicle and it ruins the relationship with a huge commercial client. Um, you know, I I get that. I I get that idea. And so I think there's a dichotomy when it comes to this idea of okay, I'm I'm gonna get their commercial, then I'm gonna write their personal to. And then there's the I absolutely do not want their personal because I don't want it to mess up their commercial.
SPEAKER_00I I agree. That's that's always been this thing out there. Um, it creates some silos in larger agencies and and and opens up opportunities for small agencies, actually. I would also say check with your carriers um to Mike's question on the number of employees, because you might be a personalized agent that um could go in with a carrier or two. Um there used to be, I I I am not current on this, so um not sure, but I I'm pretty sure a few carriers are still doing this. Um, they're doing uh payroll deduction um on personal lines insurance through certain certain size companies. If the company isn't uh opposed to it, uh they can generally you can set up and do some enrollment stuff around that. And there's a few carriers that used to have programs for that, that agents that were gonna focus on it, they could you could get in and you could uh you could get set up to be involved in um working through businesses to offer personal insurance to their employees.
SPEAKER_03So you have 3840-ish employees, Shane. Obviously, we're an insurance agency. This is not uh you're not the target demographic for this, but if but as a business owner, say you had the number of employees you have in some other field, is that something that you would consider doing?
SPEAKER_00No, I hate it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that's what I thought.
SPEAKER_00Um, it's a payroll nightmare. However, um, however, so you know, I will say this. Um there are some companies that don't mind it, right? Um, I personally hate it um because I go home with the payroll accounting manager uh every day, and I I know it's not her favorite thing. And so um not to throw her under the bus at all, that's not what I mean. Right. I'm just saying you you kind of have to have payroll service or a little bit larger, even of a uh environment because a lot of that voluntary, that's what it would be called is voluntary services, just becomes another payroll thing that has to be that has to be set up. And so um it it you know it it can tend to take you away from your focus as you're as a business, but some people love it as a benefit. Like if they're really struggling to keep people, it might be a great benefit for them to consider.
SPEAKER_03I'm trying to figure out how that's a benefit.
SPEAKER_00Um you know it payroll deduction, they never see it. Maybe they helps with their budget. That that's general, that's generally the sales pitch.
SPEAKER_03Gotcha.
SPEAKER_00Man, we've been all over the place on this question, haven't we?
SPEAKER_02We basically today's topic was no topic.
SPEAKER_03I mean, you know, we've got somewhere around 12 minutes left. We want to go into how much money progressive is spending putting their logos on college bootball deals.
SPEAKER_00I have not seen that yet.
SPEAKER_03So oh yeah. I mean, it's what 13 or so? Yeah, 13 universities, it's gotta be Georgia, Oregon, USC, Boise, Colorado State, Iowa, Kansas State.
SPEAKER_00They did become the number one auto insurance company in in America, and I think you know, they're trying to stay there, right? They're planning to stay there. And now State Farm's mad, so they're coming after them, and everybody's gearing up to grow because everybody wants to, you know, chase them. So now that they're there, they got to stay there. So marketing teams like, let's spend some money.
SPEAKER_03I mean, I was shocked that at Georgia um somehow progressive knocked Delta out.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00If you got enough money, you can knock anybody out. It sounds like I don't know how many airlines have a bunch of extra money laying around right now. Yeah, maybe so.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but Atlanta, Atlanta is so Georgia, uh Atlanta and Georgia are so Coca-Cola and and Delta, it's just hard to even imagine that Delta gave that up.
SPEAKER_04So yeah.
SPEAKER_03Although Delta Airlines did start in beautiful scenic Monroe, Louisiana. And Monroe, Louisiana was the second place that Coca-Cola was ever put in a bottle in where the family that uh started Coca-Cola lived and still does.
SPEAKER_02Do we know if that is the smallest airport in the United States?
SPEAKER_03Monroe?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03Oh gosh, no.
SPEAKER_02It's not, or we don't know.
SPEAKER_03No, Hattiesburg is much smaller. In Hattiesburg, they like you pull up, they let you off the airplane, you walk down the little stairs, and then they pull the plane around, and they're literally handing you your luggage off the back of the plane. Monroe has a cattle chute, and they have like an actual luggage carousel. I mean, they're much smaller.
SPEAKER_02They weren't much more than that until the show Duck Dynasty came about, and they almost doubled the size of their airport after that, from one terminal or two terminals to four, or whatever.
SPEAKER_03I don't remember it was one to two or two to four, but I mean go from two to four, but only but when it was two, only one of the gates was used. They only used gate two. So I grew up in that airport. Like my my oldest memories are having breakfast at that airport.
SPEAKER_00So yeah. Well, I'm gonna see your small airport and raise you uh and wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
SPEAKER_02Before you go into that, you had breakfast there. Like, what was it? A stand outside? No, was it a little bit?
SPEAKER_03They always had a restaurant, and like they had the the the three tables that were reserved for pilots, and then they had the other tables. But yeah, like uh and and if I went, like, let me just tell you, Miss Ethel would fuss if I did not finish my food. Like she would stand over me and make me eat because I didn't like grits, and she'd always bring me grits, and I learned to like grits.
SPEAKER_00So Kotzebue, Alaska has uh Where Kotzebue, Kotzebue, Alaska. It's uh not very far from Russia, uh on the on the western coast of Alaska. Um so uh Alaska Airlines flies in there from Anchorage, and it flies a uh basically a converted 737 with about 10 or 12 seats that is mostly cargo in the back. And when you get so it is fully capable of handling a large jet, okay, so long runway. When you get off the plane, the the driver of the steps, so the little little buggy that drives the steps up to the plane. So I I think she's still there because my brother just got back from a hunting trip. It's big hunter, hunter place. Um the lady drives those stairs up to let you off, right? As you're coming down the stairs, she goes and gets in another cart and unloads your bags. You walk inside the terminal, and there is a baggage claim to your right, and there's a gate to your left, right, where you get on the plane and then where you go get your bags. She gets the bags and she drives them around and rolls up a door and throws them through this garage door, and you get your bag. A week later, when you come back to get on the plane, she's there at the gate, right? And there's one other person in the entire airport, and they do security. They're TSA, and she works for Alaska Airlines, and she's like, And then she hops and flies you where you want to go. Yeah, she does everything except fly the plane. Like I've I've never seen anything like it, it's absolutely incredible. So just keeps flipping it, take this hat off, put this hat on. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I don't know if Alaska Airlines has a non-stop flight between New Orleans and Seattle, and they are the only airline that has like any direct flight to Seattle from around the greater vehicle area.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a good I love Alaska Airlines. I think they do a great job. Um, I don't know if anybody, we haven't gotten a movie uh reference in here today, so probably need to do that. Um the proposal, the proposal, okay, Tanya's. When they go to Sitka. They go to Sitka, Alaska.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00Okay. And then there's the guy. He's both the he works everywhere, but he's also the stripper.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_00The guy, you know what I'm talking about? Yes. So that there's a female version of him in Katsabu, Alaska. That's that's the point. Is Ryan Reynolds in that? Ryan Reynolds, yeah.
SPEAKER_03I just want to point out that I finally got a Shay Tatum movie reference. That wasn't a okay, it's not a sports movie.
SPEAKER_00No, I got it. I get those.
SPEAKER_03I got a non-sports movie, Shane movie reference.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I like a good rom com rom com. Not bad. Mike, have you seen this? I have seen it.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_00I forget his name. Uh I know his it's like Luis or something like that. Anyway, it's a good one. It's a good movie.
SPEAKER_03Is there anything else we need to cover today?
SPEAKER_00I think this is the point that we started. There is a ton of opportunity for agents out there. And when you're chasing your tail and you are chasing a client to get back to our first question of the day that Mike raised, um I think focus and and and then discipline around what it is that you do, and then doing it over and over and over again, and not being afraid to let that one thing go, not being afraid to let that prospect that's all of a sudden ghost in you go. Um, I I just I just think there's so much business. I think that's what we've proved. Like, there's so many ways to be successful in the insurance agency business that you don't have to do, you don't have to have that one client. Sometimes you just gotta walk away and move on, right? And I think that was Mike's point. Yeah, this could have been a seven-minute podcast. We added a little filler in there along the way.
SPEAKER_03Well, there we go. Well, I'm gonna leave us today with a quote from uh the hopefully will be great at one day, Link Gibbon. You have to be willing to change what you're doing, even when what you're doing has worked before.
SPEAKER_00Attitudes of choice make a great one.
SPEAKER_03Bye, y'all.
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