 All right. Welcome to the Insurance Sales Lab podcast. This is Vlad Ruchenko, your host. And with me, I have two very special guests. I have Jeremy Olsen from the Allstate Agency out in the greater Seattle area, who has built a $40 million book of business over the last two decades. And we also have Kristen Isaacson, who has, did I say that right? Isaacson. Who is the general manager at the agency as well as I guess people in the agency call you the coach because of what you do in the agency as well as for thousands of agents across the country. So what I'd like to do in today's column is get to know you guys better and how you were able to build an agency from scratch to over 23-ish years to be $40 million book of business and how agents can take some of the learning experiences that you've had over the last two decades and implement that in their agency today. So I'll start with you, Kristen. You were, take me back five years ago where you were with the Dale Carnegie organization. I believe you're still with them. What made you want to consider joining the Olsen Agency? Yeah. Well, yeah, because I was a lifelong Dale Carnegie, like thought I was going to be there full time for the rest of my life. And I had been working on the Dale Carnegie side with Jeremy and his team probably prior to that about six months, I had actually been introduced to Allstate and worked with a lot of people within the Allstate community. And Jeremy kind of just took it up to the next level and offered the Dale Carnegie course to any team member that wanted to take it. And so he had many that went through the Dale Carnegie course we had kept in touch. And then after that, he said, you know, I really want this like next level, I would love to have some one-on-one coaching for my team. Do you guys do anything like that? And we really didn't. That wasn't, you know, what we typically would do. But I got approval to create a contract specifically for him because Jeremy has a way of just customizing everything for him. And so we, you do. I mean, it's kind of funny, but he, yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, a lot of times people don't ask for it. So I started coaching about 13 of his team members just once a week for a half an hour. Was it an hour? I don't remember, but he started seeing the results that he was looking for with that and offered me a role here. It was a huge decision for me to move over to the Olson agency, but I really bought into the vision that he had. And really five years ago, I asked myself, would I kick myself? Like, what would happen if I actually took this role? Because I knew it was going to involve some leadership too. And that wasn't something that I was necessarily interested in. I had seen a lot. I talked to leaders every single day and what I did with Dale Carnegie, consulting with them and developing curriculum for their teams and then delivering the curriculum that Dale Carnegie produced. But to actually be a leader was a big decision for me. So I ended up moving over to his team and we've gone on this amazing journey where we've created something, I think, really special in our agency. Yeah, I'd like to dig into that today. So that move happened about two years ago. Is that right? I moved over here probably about five and a half years ago. Five and a half. Okay. Yeah. Okay. With his agency for five and a half years. And then I teach Dale Carnegie, the Dale Carnegie class specifically, usually about three to four times a year. It's an eight week program. So you have to be certified to teach that class. And it's their flagship program. So absolutely love that. I'll probably do that until as long as I possibly can into my life, just because I think it keeps me fresh as a coach for Jeremy's team. And it teaches me so much too. Every time that I teach it, I learn and grow myself. So that's what they call an ablocational trainer. So we have a lot of trainers that work in the outside world. And then they will go in and teach Dale Carnegie's classes. Okay. Is that built on the how to win friends and influence? Exactly. Okay. The curriculum's just developed with the how to win friends and influence people, which is one of the best selling business books of all time. And then another book called How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. And then also the quick and easy guide to effective public speaking. So it's a really good foundational class to help you understand how to communicate more effectively, how to build your confidence, how to diminish stress and worry. And it has some public speaking in there too. Yeah. What's the background on Warren Buffet? I believe he attributes a lot of his early success because he was deadly afraid to speak in front of a group of people. And he knew a lot, but he just didn't want to get out in front of people and groups and share that information. But going through that course transformed that for him. What's the back story on that? Yeah. No. Warren Buffet has been, well, everything Dale Carnegie has done on referral. So I mean, literally people just say I had a great experience and other people do it. I mean, we really do that at RPOA too. But Warren Buffet has been one of Dale Carnegie training's biggest advocates for, I mean, over 50 years for him because he probably took it at least that long ago. It's the only, he doesn't have like his graduate degrees or any other kind of accolades on his wellness office except for his Dale Carnegie certificate. And that certificate and that class, he feels changed his life and changed the direction of how he could put himself out there to people and helped with his success. So he talks about it in his books. He has videos where he talks about it. He's a huge proponent and we love it. And Dale Carnegie training has had, oh gosh, I mean, they've had millions of people, probably over nine, 10 million people go through their training now in their classes, but a lot of really famous people too. So that's phenomenal. So let's get everybody caught up to speed on just the sheer size of the Olson agency. You're at 36 or 37 team members right now. Is that right? Yeah. Okay. Jeremy, tell us how do you segment your team before we get into how you built your agency? So how is that team of 36, 37 team members segmented? Yeah. And when I think that's a big part of our success is how we have our team divided. So I'd say about 10 or 15 years ago, there was a buzzword specialization, a corporation started talking about, you've got to specialize, right? You would, you have to have somebody in sales, somebody in service, they're totally separate jobs. You wouldn't go buy a car and then ask the salesman to change the oil, right? And so we started hearing that my manager kept telling me you have to do this. And to be honest, I fought it. And I still am not a big believer in specialization as we're taught it at the corporate level. To me, so much of our business comes from our everyday service interactions. And so I did not want to take those everyday transactions away from my salespeople. So how we have our team divided now is we have an inside sales team. We have, what do you think, 10, 11 people on that, where they are taking those everyday service calls, the payments, the address changes, adding a car, changing a car. And that's where they make all of their sales is by transitioning those service calls into sales. We then have an outside sales team that we built. I never had purchased leads up until two years ago, never. And with new goals and where we wanted to take the agency, we built this outside arm where we have 10 to 12 people on that as well. They only do leads all day long. They just call out or take live transfers. They wouldn't even know how to do a change on a current policy. So those are the two teams we have. And then for the whole $40 million book, we only have five service people. And a lot of people look at me and say, how could you only have five service people? Because I want my salespeople fielding those calls. To me, specialization would mean I would be taking the people that are selling off of the phones. And I want them talking to people. That's what they do best, is talk to people and transition into sales. So that's the current makeup. And then, of course, we've got Kristen, who's kind of overseeing all the people and how they talk to people and doing coaching. We have an operations manager. And then we have a manager for each of the teams, the inside team and the outside team. But to me, if I was given any advice, whether you're a brand new agent, seasoned agent, whether you're $2 million, $100 million, separate your sales team, they're two totally different personalities, in our opinion. Our inside team would not be good at working leads. And our lead team would not be good at working with current customers. It's just not what they love doing. And so when we separated it, our numbers really skyrocketed. So help me understand. The traditional method of specializing is you have the sales team who works, internet leads, they're the hunters. They're not taking incoming service calls. And that's what you have right now. And you call that the outside sales team. And then on the flip side, the service team usually just handles incoming calls. Someone calls in says, Kristen, I'd like to replace my vehicle. Got it. We got the new event information. Have a great day. And that's the end of the conversation. What you guys have done is you've taken it one step further and said, we don't stop the conversation right there. We dig deeper and we identify opportunities and we cross sell, whether it's life, another home policy or renter's policy, whatever it is that they're missing. So they are customers, service representatives, but they think of themselves as salespeople just as much as customer service. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, they're definitely salespeople. They're on the same exact comp plan as the outside team where the majority of their income comes from commission. So they're definitely salespeople, but they are doing service work and they're just different jobs. For them, they are going to have to understand that there's going to be some monotonous service work involved in everything they do. There's going to be claims that come in. There's going to be upset customers. That comes with it. But you also don't have to dial 300 times a day on leads. So you're gaining that. Whereas the lead people, they've got to make all those dials, but they don't have to deal with any of the service work. So it's just a trade-off. And again, just different personalities. But yeah, to me, that never made sense to have somebody answer the phone and take the payment or take the ad car and have a nice day, the transaction's over. Yes, they might be trained to try to pivot that and turn it, get it over to a salesperson. But why not just have the salesperson handle that and be on the phone right away with them? Yeah. So what service work does the inside sales team not do that the service team takes over? Really? So these five people that I have on the team, and they've all been with me for a number of years, they take the more complicated scenarios. So my inside sales team, again, they're sales people. So I want them talking to customers and selling things. I don't want them spending two hours researching a claim or researching a bill when they've made 12 changes over the past two weeks. I don't want them doing that or writing. We also have one person on our service team that does all of our brokered business. So things like earthquake, flood insurance, classic cars, anything that's going to take time away from my inside sales team to be selling, that's where we give that to the to the five people. And then, of course, the cancellation audit, things like that. But mainly the complex stuff. And we do, we have a on the outside team. We have someone who is now fielding the service just from the new business that's coming in. And then we also have someone that on boards new customers that's from that is from the outside business. And then we have one service person that really is kind of we call her a jack of all trades. She'll do some admin for us. She does inspections and reinspections. And she manages email boxes. She'll help us with making sure that people are setting their tasks correctly in our phone system so that they can use it as a CRM. So things like that. So anything that helps that is a little bit more task oriented will assign like somebody to specialize in that. So that, you know, the agency is running smoothly. Yeah, one of the things, you know, one of the reasons I never had got into leads is because I had heard all the same stories, they, they don't retain well, they're shopping you there. They only want low coverage is and your close rates terrible. And we've really set out on a path to try to change that. And so the first thing is we never settle for we were never not going to write quality business. So we train our outside people all of the same talk pass how to have full conversations. But we also realize that in general people that are are an internet lead. A lot of times they are just I just want the cheapest price and that's where they start our job is to transition them away from that. So we we teach our salespeople that but then we also have a person on the back end like Kristen mentioned to onboard all of the people that were sold as a result of lead. We call her the cleanup artist because she she her job literally is to call we sell about 400 a month off of leads. And so we have her call every single one of those and just introduces herself talks about the importance of having a local agent talks about the importance of good coverage and really just tries to clean everything up. Hey, one thing I noticed was, you know, when you bought this policy, you didn't have this. What are your thoughts on that? And she adds a ton of stuff with just taking a second pass at it, but also tries to get them out of the mindset that, you know, I started as an internet lead and boy, I'm going to do it again in six months and a year. And that's just what you do. We try to talk them out of that and just get them in the mindset because we do believe having a relationship with an agent for for a long time is is important and valuable. So we just try to share with them why. Yeah, that onboarding specialist role is so important, even with a smaller agency, someone needs to onboard every person that joins your agency. And it's best if it's not the person who sold the policy because you have another set of eyes who makes sure that everything is set up correctly. And you mentioned something so passively. Yeah, we do 400 items a month. Like that is unheard of for most agents, like I run at Facebook ads and Instagram ads. And sometimes I say this person or this agency wrote 100 or 200 items a month and people say, Oh, that's not possible. There's no way someone could write 200 items because they're just thinking from what they see in their district or the people around them. But tell us how much your inside sales team writes on an average month and then also your outside sales team. And how does that break down on a per person basis? Like what are the exact expectations from a salesperson working in your organization? What are my outcomes that I'm expected to produce on a monthly basis? Yeah, no, and it's funny because both teams are very, very similar. Both teams sell about 400. We sell about 800. We're really searching to try to get to that thousand item mark. We're getting closer every month, but both write about 400. So they're very, very similar. Our top salesperson, believe it or not, is on the inside team that does all that service work herself, but she's just awesome at transitioning those into sales. So both, both very similar. Both have the same expectations. Our average per person last year was 39 to 40 items per month with our average. We're probably a little above that now. On the top end, we're usually around 80. And then the bottom end was someone that's new, maybe 25 if they're just ramping up, would be the very low end. But our goal is really to have as many people over 50 as possible. We're really shooting for that should be the average. Just the minimum of what they won't leave the month without. So we keep on trying to scale up to that where, I think a lot of agents, if they had someone writing anywhere from 15 to 30, they would be happy. It's just with the resources that we have in our agency, there's no way that, you know, it's pretty easy to write 40, 50 items like that. That's a very average amount at this point. So we'd love to them for them to go up even higher. And we also want, you know, the full conversations and making sure that they're writing the right business. And yeah, we're just very big on having those full conversations. And, you know, again, with internet leads, we had heard all the same stuff, they don't close very well. And we've actually been able to up internet leads that we speak to our close rate is 16%. And we're, we're very proud of that. But that is because we spend it literally we coach every single day on we get the same objections, you know, oh, I was just looking for an online quote of just send it to me in an email. I need to think about it, not interested, need to talk to my spouse. But we work on them every single day nonstop on how to just keep that door open. And, and, you know, just work on our ability to close a lead. So when an internet lead comes in and how many leads does a salesperson get an outside sales person on an average rate? What we have found is 12 to 15 per day is the magic number that will help somebody be successful. So whether that's live transfers, whether those are traditional internet leads, 12 to 15 new or we call them fresh leads every single day. Okay, lead comes in. What's the sales process? How many outreaches are expected for a new lead before we state that lead? Yeah, and we have we have a great, you know, system lead manager that helps us with that. Yeah, I think you know the cadence. I mean, the first day, it's three three calls. So they would call when it first comes in as soon as possible. And then if somebody doesn't answer five minutes later, the system auto dials it. And then five hours later, it dials it again. And then it goes into a cadence of calling. I'm actually forgetting how many times a day, but that's up to like 19 days. So it'll just go through the system. Usually people will catch it within that first 19 days, and have a conversation with them. I mean, the most important thing, and you know, this too, is just the making sure that you're putting the notes in the system that you're having, even if they bought from somebody else, you can still have that conversation with them. There's a possibility that they didn't have a full conversation with that agent, and you can still review it as a courtesy. And maybe you're a better fit, but we definitely don't take any of those and say they're not good leads. Unless they're really just not qualified to work with our company. But then the follow up, the notes and the tasks setting is just crucial to making sure that we're really managing the investment that Jeremy's putting into the leads. Yeah, no, that's where, you know, I get a lot of calls from agents. Hey, I'm going to start trying leads. And the biggest advice I always give to them is either be in or be out. I just don't think leads are something you can try a little bit. And, you know, we'll try some this week. Oh, they didn't work. We'll come back next month. And I hear that all the time. You know, the company gave me a match. I'll buy a few. To me, either got to be in or out. It's got to be a regular commitment, which is why we specialize like that. But the other another important thing that we've done and we've, you know, we've learned this over a couple years. We never bought leads. Now we buy a ton of them. So we've had a learning curve ourselves. But one thing that we do that I think is super important is we rotate days with our sales. So we have 10 people on the outbound team. Team A is five people. Team B is five people. And they rotate days. One day you are taking live transfers. The following day, you're getting regular traditional internet leads that you're calling out on. And we do that purely for the mental. We found that when people were doing the same thing every day, when they were just working internet leads, oh, I got to, you know, bang the phones for 300 dials today, they were getting burnt out and just not loving it. And that's our job as their leaders is to make them be, we always say happy people sell more. So we look at that. That's our role to make our sales team happy. And we found that mentally by rotating them, boy, it just has made all the difference in the world because somebody has a bad day, make it 300 dials and they strike out. Nobody's answering to know that oh, man, tomorrow I get to come in and my phone's just going to ring. I got live transfers tomorrow just made a huge difference. Wow. And is that auto dialed or do people manually dial each number? Well, we don't have a dialer with my company. We're not allowed to have a dialer. So it's a system that it does dial them automatically, but just one at a time. Okay, makes perfect sense. What does 10 equals three mean? It's a coin, right? Yeah. Yeah, that on that goes back to, you know, that I don't want the service people taking the calls because there there is so much opportunity on our everyday service calls. And that that's a stat that I've kept for my whole career. I've always been a very in the trenches agent. I love talking to customers. And for every 10 calls, I know there are going to be three sales there just by uncovering what their needs are. So we have a very specific process that we follow on every service call. And if done the right way, you should be able to sell three things from it. To be clear, we were talking about the inside sales team now. Inside sales team now the inside sales team for every 10 incoming calls they get, there are three opportunities that should be closed. Yes, another cross old product. Those were my stats for 20 years. I have not been taking as many phone calls lately just busy with the second business as the agency gets bigger. But yeah, and I would say, you know, not every one of my sales team members is there. I would say we're probably closer to one and a half to but if you follow the process every single time and ask the question to transition into a review, there are three opportunities for every every 10 calls without a doubt. I would say there probably are even with outbound leads. I'd love to measure that with the outbound leads. But if you do follow that process and you're good at opening up the conversation from the beginning, you probably do have the same amount of opportunity. When we when I first started working here, everybody kind of used their own process. And what I found when I was talking to team members was that they really wanted to know more about how Jeremy when he was in the trenches selling all the time, you know, by the time I got here, there were six offices. So they really wanted to hear more of his voice and have, you know, something that they could listen to. So I first asked him, would you just, you know, talk to some customers so that we can have recorded calls for the team to listen to. And so we were listening to those and there were team members that would literally listen to his call over and over and over again to try to get like, you know, what he was saying and digest like just comprehending how to talk about insurance better. And then as we kept on going, I said, you know, we need to turn this into a sales process. So I started listening to a lot of his calls and hearing like just from my background at Dale Carnegie teaching sales process and and using a sales process. We started mapping out a process that would work specifically for I mean, really customized for this agency with Jeremy's flavor of the way that he likes to talk to customers and do business. And it was something that we put out there as a script to our team that they could repeat kind of like what you're doing, where you found that like you found a really good rhythm to how to get a first call close and create a process. And so anything that's repeatable is super valuable in any agency because we want to be able to train people with repeatable processes, we want people to be more successful and if things work, why not do them over and over again? And so that one is something that's it was really started as that 10 to three concept specific to the inside book. And then we kind of adapted it but it's really that particular process is really a way of explaining coverage and discounts in just the most simple human way and not making it so confusing because what I heard a lot of times is people would they would be talking about liability for 45 minutes and the customer or the prospect would still not know what it was. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of times we like to talk ourselves in circles and confuse things. So writing it down the way that we did and creating it really makes it just so much more simple on how to explain coverage. Yeah, and for us, you know, that whole process centers around doing a review and we've all heard that, you know, our managers ever since we start our agencies do reviews with customers. We all know that. But what I hear all the time are where people will ask, hey, can you do a review right now? You know, we just made your payment. Would you mind do you have time? When was the last time we reviewed and they they asked them nobody wants to do that. So we just have a very easy, very simple, we call it our transitional phrase. Well, we've, you know, built rapport, we have a great relationship on the phone after the first couple of minutes with the customer. We just casually say after we've made that payment, hey, glad, but you know, while I have you on the phone, one of the things we always love to do is just take a quick look, make sure you have all the right discounts and that you have the right coverage. And that's it. We pause and but we intentionally add discounts at the beginning because nobody's going to say no to that. And, you know, I hear all the time where people will say, Oh, nobody ever has time. They don't want to do a review. You give me a hundred service calls. I will do a hundred reviews with it might be 99. But if you do it that way, they just won't say no, because you're it's not a pressure thing. It's just we always like to just take a quick look, make sure you have the right discounts at the right coverage. Very simple and the pause and they'll say yes. So it's assumed that if I call in and I have two cars, but no home, no renters with with the agency that that's the go to that I'll try to sell. But I'd like to know what's the go to product. If I have my home, my two cars with you, I might even have an umbrella policy. So why don't we I'm talking to the role play at the Olson agency. Why don't we role play for just a quick second. I call in a process to payments. I just updated my card mother one expired. And you do the transition line where you say, I would like to see if we have all the discounts and I say, sure, how long does this take? What do you say? Oh, we I mean, we always make it very simple. But I think that's exactly why it's different what we do. Most people are leading with what what's the go to product. We don't we don't if you have every single line with us, we want to do that for you as well. We truly believe that, you know, when we became insurance agents, we, we decided to protect people with insurance. That's what we want to do. We never lead with what can I sell somebody. So if somebody has everything, no problem, we still want to do a review. And that's where I think people go wrong. They say, hey, by the way, I see we just have your car with us. Who does your home insurance? Can we give you a home quote? We never do a great discount for a home quote. They go straight into that. What we do is we review their auto first and then notice that they don't have their home with us. And so yeah, it does help quite a bit. Yeah, everything I was going to tell him is when you're doing that, you know, transitioning into a review, no matter what, sometimes brevity, you know, like you're just, you're kind of gauging, like, you know, how much time they have. And if they have every product with us, you're finding out how knowledgeable they are and what they have, you're looking in the system to see how many conversations. It's also a great opportunity to transition into there are ideal customer. Why would we not ask for more people just like them? So there was always an opportunity because every time, even if every time I said, Vlad, oh my gosh, looks like you've been with us for 20 years, we have great conversations with you. It's been wonderful talking to you today. Do you have any other questions? You say, no, this has been great too. You know, if I could talk to someone like you every single day, Vlad, you are like my ideal customer and all states ideal customer too. Do you know anybody else like you that would be interested in working with me? And you can just, yeah. That's the genius in that approach. You first prop me up. I feel good about myself. I think I'm an amazing person all of a sudden. And then you ask for a referral. And we very, it's, you know, it's a whole process stuff to just do a quick role planner, but it literally starts with the second you answer the phone, we teach our people to scan their portfolio. And we always point out one thing positive to them about their insurance. So it might be, you know, they call, they want to make a payment. Hey, before I even take your payment, one thing I noticed you've been with us since 1998. Oh my gosh, thank you. So they're instantly, and that's why we bat 99, 100% on these reviews because we've told them something great, which we want to, we want our customers feeling great when they're talking to us. So by then they're, they're almost like our friends. And so when we say, Hey, by the way, while I have you on the phone, one of the things we always love to do, just take a quick, we also say quick so that people like your reaction was, how long is this going to take? So we insert that word quick. They instantly think, Oh, yeah, I've got a few minutes, but then we also have a comeback if they say, you know, I don't really have time or how long is this going to take? I know I can't do it. We then are looking, we've already looked and scanned for something we could do, whether that's adding a paperless discount. For example, if we saw somebody that said, Nope, I'm too busy. Can't do it. I would say to you, Oh, no problem at all. We would agree with you. No problem. Totally understand the reason why I asked is because right off the bat, I noticed a discount where if you just went paperless on your policy, it would literally save you a hundred bucks a year. So I say that to you even though you told me, No, you're probably going to want to stay for more and 90% of the time people will say, Okay, let's go ahead and do it. Yeah. So what you're doing is you're not making it a transactional call, but you're finding one piece of information that you can essentially compliment them on or point out that you appreciate about them. And then once you do that in the beginning part of the call, even if someone says, Look, I'm too busy. I don't have time for that. You just mentioned some very basic discount that might not be applied. A lot of carriers have these devices that you can install on a vehicle or an app that you load in your vehicle. It might have been mentioned at the time of the sales conversation, but if it's brought up again at this time of the conversation, now you're coming across as someone who is actually trying to save me money, even though I'm already with you, which is not common in the insurance industry. So how do I get paid upon a salesperson in your agency? I don't know how much you're comfortable with sharing, but what's the general base and what are the different tiers that you have? How much money can I make working in your agency? Yeah. So I'm always very transparent. My base, I'm a big believer in a low base, but very high commission, because I want my people to earn their money and they want to as well, but I also want them to make great living. So first of all, every single person on my team is on the exact same comp plan. The base on my team is $2,000 a month, and then the commission is tiered based on how much you sell. So the more you sell, the higher your commission rate will be, we go clear up to 22%. Okay. So what are the difference here? Breaks? Oh, we go zero to 35 policies, 35 to 59 and 60 plus. Okay. And that's on purpose because we don't want anybody, they're working towards that 35 mark, just as like the rock minimum to start earning a good paycheck or a better paycheck, and then it tears up from there. But we started that first we had 15, then we went to 20, then we went to 25. Like we literally just kept on stepping it up. And it's been really good because it used to be that the baseline, like the top person on our team was at 42 policies a month. And now that's just like an average, like if someone sells that, you're just like they're never on the top. So it's kind of cool to get to that point where you can see how we've just changed the bar over the years, but that stuff doesn't happen overnight. And how big is the jump from 34 items to 35 items in a month? Well, and that also depends on if you have a life kept appointment as well. We have two different tiers there, but the lowest commission you would earn is 7%. And it jumps to 14 if you get to 35. So it doubles. So that's why nobody on the team gets glad. He's like, Well, I had a call with Kevin Moneric from ideal traits. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because no Kevin speaks really highly of you too. And we had a conversation about the compensation plan. And we discussed something very similar. It's virtually identical with the exception of I track households, you guys do items, but you can break it up however you want. But you have a small base. And then your first tier is at that breaking point where for you, it's 35 items for me, it's 10 households, which is about 30 items where if you don't do at least 35 items, you don't get paid all that much. But once you cross that 35 mark, now you start making some good money. So it forces people to want to get to that 35 at the very minimum. And if you're already there, if you're doing 35 to 40 and autopilot, now you're thinking, how can I get to that 60? So you're essentially forcing your team members to want to sell more just by the compensation plan that you built for them. Fascinating. Now, how do you incentivize your team members and motivate them to get to that next level outside of having this great compensation plan in place? Yeah, I mean, the comp is probably the biggest part of it. They're all shooting to get to the next tier, but we are constantly trying to motivate them. First of all, we have daily team meetings on Zoom, just like this, where we're talking to them, we're teaching them, we're showing them where they are at, are at every single day where their numbers are. We have promos at pretty much every single month, different promos where we're focusing on different things like talk time, number of quotes or, you know, things that aren't only sales numbers, but the activities that we know it will take to get there. The other thing too is that, I mean, I get asked this all the time, like, how do you set your team goals? Yeah, I mean, it's like, we used to say, you know, okay, you know, you're in this category, so your goal is 40, you're in this category, so your goal is 50, and here you're 60, you know, like we would actually give people goals, and then we changed it to everybody's 40. That that's just should be everybody's baseline. And then we just like, we stopped doing that because the comp plan does it for us. And, and so we just have a team goal that we're looking towards like a collective goal for the whole team. We're looking for, for that. And our promos are kind of designed around the team goal, and then they can, they actually just start gauging their individual goals. And their managers are pushing them to, to, they know each person and, you know, we know what they're capable of. And they'll, they'll push the ones that we know we could push a little bit further and are just like in their comfort zone, like I was just talking to one of our team members in Spokane a couple of weeks ago. And I mean, he's smooth. He's so good at talking. But since he started working here, he's, you know, he didn't make, he worked in insurance before and, and literally his income has doubled working with the Olsen agency. And I think that it's been amazing for him. His lifestyle has totally changed. Now he has a girlfriend. And he's kind of just like starting to, I could tell he started Yeah, his pedal off the gas just a little bit. Like he just seemed like, you know, he's taken more vacation and his numbers kind of started going back, but it didn't really matter because he's made, you know, so much more money. And I just asked him, I'm like, what do you want? Like, what are your goals? Because your goals of when you started here, like for yourself are totally different now. They have to be like, are you planning on getting married? Is this the one like, what is it? He's like, oh, yeah. And I want to get a house and all this stuff. And I said, so stop thinking of yourself like back then. What's, you know, the new you right now, and do you want to make a six figure income? Because if you do, it's within your reach, but I can tell you what you're doing to not get there. And he's at the top now this month. Yeah, you know, regular communication. I mean, we both chat to our sales team probably 10 times a day where we're sending them, you know, their talk time, their quotes, or we talk to them all day long. We don't just good meeting guys. We'll see you tomorrow. Yeah. So I'd like to know more about that. I can imagine that it's been nearly impossible to run a successful agency or organization of that size for an extended period of time without having some sort of accountability system in place for daily, weekly, monthly, and maybe not even accountability to get them to produce more, but at least check in with them to see how are you doing? Why is it that when you first started, you were crushing it? But then now that you've met your goals that you had before you started working here, now that you've met these goals, things have just fallen off for you. Like what systems do you guys have in place to identify those opportunities to have conversations with your team members? Yeah. So we, first of all, have our own team website that keeps track of every metric you can imagine. So we use that a lot. We have a great person on the team that built that for us. But then every single day we track, we call it pyramid, many people use it where we're first looking at the top of the pyramid is how many items a day they sell. We want people to sell at least two a day. That's our number. We feel that we provide you with enough opportunity to be able to sell too. So it starts there. If you do that, you're good. Come 530 comes around, we're closed. You're good. Awesome. Have a great day. If you didn't do two items, we then look down at number of quotes because that's going to lead to the number of sales. So our number is we like eight quotes per day and serious quotes where they're actually running reports and driving records and serious quotes, not just, you know, sending one in the mail. So our number there is eight. You do that. Even if you didn't get the two items, two items that day, you're good. That's okay because we know tomorrow you will based on those quotes. Now, if you didn't do the quotes, we then drop down to talk time. And a lot of agents, I know use a number of dials. We change to talk time. It's probably been what three years ago, we changed to talk time. Our number is three hours a day. And I'll tell you, when we first started doing that, it was difficult. People were probably averaging, what would you say an hour and a half back then? It was difficult for them to get three, for sure. And I think a lot of them were hiding behind email too. Like they would say, Oh, you know, I've got so many emails. I've got all this customer service I have to do. There's always an excuse, but it's really just a muscle. It's just like working out. Like at first, you're just not as strong. And it's mentally strong, because you don't think you can do it. You think it's a lot. But I always say three hours equals about five hours of work. If you're thinking like dialing out, maybe sometimes having to take notes. If you've had a conversation with someone, it does depend. That's why we don't do number of dials, because you can make a hundred dials in 45 minutes if hardly anyone answers. And they're not good prospects. So that just doesn't have any weight. But the three hours, you can see how much work that is. And I mean, yesterday, there were two people over five at the end of the day. But I mean, almost the whole team was tracking for over three. So it does, that has changed. But we did have a lot of promos to kind of, it's almost like we had to prove to them that it had a result. Like the talk time had a result. And in fact, I was just talking to someone today and he was saying, you know, I'm always up there on the talk time. What I want to know is how to close my sales more because I know how to talk like, and they know how to coach themselves on these things too. So it's kind of cool. So if I am hitting my talk time, I'm doing the eight quotes a day. I'm first one in, last one out. I'm doing the work. So work ethic is not the issue. And I'm not hitting my numbers. I'm doing not two items a day or 10 a week. I'm doing half of that five a week, 24 the month. When do you know when to let someone go? What is that, what does that coaching conversation look like to get me up to speed? And do you ever let me go? Like if my effort is there, and the reason I ask is because a lot of agents that I talk to, and I'm sure you're- This is like the number one question. Yeah. I like my team members. She's a great person, comes in, puts in the hours, great positive energy, but she just cannot close the sales. She has great conversations. People love her, but she cannot close sales even though she's great on the phone. What does that look like? Yeah, you still have to have someone in the right seat. I mean, and we've had people like that, and a couple of them, we had different seats for them. They actually moved into more of a customer service role, and they'll be with us for life. I mean, we didn't want to lose them, but they couldn't have stayed in the sales role. For one thing, when they're in a role like that, they're not fulfilled if they're trying so hard and they're not getting the results that they're looking for. And chances are, if they do have that good work ethic, they're just not emotionally geared towards sales. So I would say work with them as far as like making sure that they're using the full sales process and all those things. If they are doing everything and they're still not getting results and you don't have another seat, sometimes you have to part ways. Honestly though, we don't have a lot of people that we have to let go for that reason. We don't let go of a lot of people. Sometimes when they're someone that just, you know, you really like their personality and they're great, but you know they're not right for the sales role, they'll self-select out after you've had enough conversations with them. The ones that you have to let go are the ones that really don't live up to your core values because that creates like kind of a disease within the team. So we're looking at that and then making sure they're in the right seat. If they're not in the right seat and you don't have another seat for them, you are going to have to make some tough decisions. And that's the hardest thing I think for business owners is letting go of ones that they really like, but they're just never going to perform. And so their agency will not get to the next level. Well that's where you've got to have, you know, the right comp plan, the right expectations in place. You know, for years when I just had a very static comp plan, everybody made the same percentage. I would get very upset with the low producers because they were costing me a lot more per sale by doing this tiered system and having the very low base. It's helped reduce a lot of my stress as the owner. If somebody wants to write less than 35, I'm okay with it because they're going to make a whole lot less than their cost per sale is going to be the same as somebody who else who's moved into the higher tier. So just break that method down for us, please, because I don't think everybody would understand exactly what you said. How does the mouth break out? If I'm selling 30 items a month, how does that cost you as the agency owner the same as the other producer who's doing, say, 50 a month? Yeah, I mean, it's simple. They just earn half the commission, right? Instead of, for me, that second tier is 14%. I'm going to pay him seven if they're below 35. So my cost, yes, there is the base and the health insurance, but it's a lot better than it was five years ago before I had the tiered comp system. And I was paying both 15%. I would be very upset without producer writing 25 because they were costing me a lot of money by lowering the tier if you don't write enough. And we do another thing on the outside team. If you don't write at least 35 items, you don't get new leads the following month. Interesting. Okay. And so call on the recycled ones. They still have their pipelines. They can work. They still do get the live transfers on those days. But on the days they get internet leads, they get no new fresh leads. And we implemented that in January. We had one person not hit it. And what do you think happened the next month? She hit it. Genius. Yeah, because she knew, boy, this is cutting off my support. And people are planning ahead. There's two that didn't hit it last month. And they knew exactly why before they didn't hit it. Like one just had some personal issues. But then the other one, he was putting all of his eggs in one basket and really banking on some big sales. And I think that he kind of, he took his pedal off the gas as far as activity. But this month, I talked to him and he said, I know exactly what I did last month to not get there. So I'm not going to do, you know, like it helps them really strategize and look at this as kind of like a mini business inside of business instead of, oh, he'll pay me anyways. And you know, like it just, it changes everything. It's a total game changer. Yeah. And the brilliance and how you guys have structured your agency in my eyes is that you've allowed systems to do the managing for you. Like when you talk to a lot of agents, they're thinking about how can I as the agency owner get my team member to produce more? What can I tell them? How can I motivate them? When in your agency, what you've done is you've built a company that really forces them to do at least 35 items a month. And guess what? If they don't, then they don't get leads the following month. And if they don't get leads the following month and they have goes on for a couple of months, then they're just going to self eliminate. You don't need any performance management conversations. The systems just do it for them. Yeah. And we really do spend a lot of time like trying to nurture and grow them. It's just, you just know, like when you have done all of that, because we are really good at the coaching piece and we do have the training piece. I mean, I hope we do, because other agents are using it and they seem to like it. But when all of that just doesn't map out for someone, then it's a very peaceful conversation. It's not one that you're even stressed about having with someone where I think a lot of agents are scared to talk to their team members because it's something that they're, I don't know, they think their team members are going to be surprised or they're scared of losing someone even though they're not contributing. And for us, it's just lifted. We went through this training with, we were talking about, we had a business coach a few years ago and this was the concept, let the system, you know, work in the business. And it is, it makes it so that you're not making emotional decisions anymore. We at that time didn't believe that we wouldn't be emotional because we thought we love our team. They're like family to us. But the thing is, is that the things we were being emotional about weren't the right things to be emotional about. And so the systems takes that out and now we can put our emotion into the positive things in the business. Yeah. Yeah, I just, I don't remember the last person we ever sat down and said, we got a part ways. I can, I cannot remember the last person that we had to do that way. We've had people that we've sat down and said, do you have the capacity to do this? And they've said, I don't know. And then we just say, just, you know, why don't you go home and think about it and you let us know, you know what the expectation is. And some have risen to the challenge and other ones have come back and said, you know, I've got all these personal things going on and I can't do that to you guys. I won't be able to sell what you need me to sell or, you know, like really be consistent about coming in on time. And they're like saying they're sorry to us for letting us down or even wasting our time. And, and it's just, it's an amicable, like, you know, departure. They just opt out, which is okay. But that doesn't even happen. That hasn't happened in a really long time. COVID has actually been really friendly to our business. We've hired some amazing people during COVID and had this at the very beginning, anybody that was kind of on the edge of not being the right fit, ended up self selecting out. And then our team bonded and got closer together because of just the world pandemic. And then we ended up hiring some amazing team members too. And we lost one of those last year. And that's it. Yeah. In our next call, I'd like to, if you guys are open to having a conversation about exactly that, I think we can spend a full hour on that. How you have 20 interviews a week, I know you've discussed that with me in the past. What questions you guys go through, what the onboarding process looks like. But I want to briefly touch on the defensive part of the business because the only way you run a successful agency long term is if your clients stay with you. So you can write 800 items a month, a thousand items a month. But if people aren't staying with you, then there's really no way to stay profitable long term as an agency. So I know the inside sales team takes care of that in a huge way with having these reviews constantly. And it keeps people with your agency. But have you had any programs or systems put in your agency to retain your clients? Do you send out a postcard once a quarter? Do you have a newsletter that you put your team, your clients? What does that look like in your agency? No, I mean, my, and we've been very proud to, despite the, you know, all the internet business we're putting on now, we have maintained our retention at over 90%. For me, my style, I'm not a big systems process structure guy. I want my people to be doing reviews with 100% of inbound calls. We take 250, 300 inbound calls a day. We do that. That's 1200 to 1500 a week. That's 6000 a month. We'll cover them all. That's been my style is to reach them while we have them on the phone. We also have things in place like we just implemented in the last six months, a cancel out of because sometimes when you get a book this size, you're not seeing like, or getting in touch with the customer as often as you need to. And then their policy might cancel because, you know, they didn't see their email, they didn't get their mail, they might have tried to leave things to the last minute and procrastinated. And so just putting that in place has decreased our cancels by over 100 a month. Like it's just down to a ridiculous level now. So yeah, we now have with our cancel audit, we have two people that are dedicated to that just with, you know, with the size of the book. And they, we now have that up to five touches that they will get before their policy cancel. So if they're late on a bill, they get three emails on very specific days that we outlined for them that are individualized, tell them their exact amount, their exact dates, then they get a call and then they get a second call. So up to five touches that has been huge. And that is something that we implemented about six months ago. I think if agents get nothing else except for that from this call, that's, that's super keen because you can have, you can pour a lot of water in a bucket, but if you have poles on the bottom, it's seeping through, you're not going to retain any water. Same thing in your agency. People are leaving as quickly as they're joining, then you can't grow. I think the other thing too is when people call and say, I think I need to cancel my poll, we just had a guy here today, like, we get as excited about like somebody saving a customer as somebody gaining a customer. And he took her from saying, I think I need to cancel my policy to her staying and scheduling an appointment with our financial services person. So it's that I think like training them to really talk to people that are canceling and having effective talk pass for that. And, and really talking about these things on a regular basis is invaluable because, and I think that that's the difference between like an inside person and outside person. The inside sales team, like they love saving customers. They love that. Like that's actually like a really meaty call for them. Like not everybody does that. We had someone on our team. This was crazy. The person called had the other company that they were going to cancel their our policy here and move over to the other company. They had the other company on the line calling for them and she saved it. And the customer came over here and brought their home here. But that is, that's all culture. I mean, all of this stuff we're talking about is culture, which we can certainly talk about on another call, but top to bottom, my people truly bleed the agency. They care about it so much because we care about them so much. It truly is, is the culture that leads to all that stuff. They're, you know, they don't make anything when they save a customer. They want to because they're bought in. We don't sell this as a job where you come in for eight hours and you're just, you're just slinging insurance items. We are here to protect people and to, to care about what coverages they have. And that bleeds over to our outside team, inside team, every call they're thinking about how can I improve this person's situation and the agencies. And so when they truly believe in that, it just, it takes care of everything. It really does. It really is. Like, I don't know. Like we have these calls like today, we had a team call and we always debrief the role play that we do on Tuesday. We debrief it with the team. And I had one of our team members, I had him debrief it with the team today. I just said, Miles, you're really good. Get the team talking. And it's so fun sometimes to sit back because usually I facilitate those calls, but to sit back and listen to them talk. And it always is such a huge source of pride for me because when I first got here, nobody wanted to talk in those team meetings. First of all, nobody wanted a team coach for sure. And they certainly did not want to role play and talk about insurance to the level that we do now, but they literally are all like exchanging ideas. And people are saying, Oh my gosh, that was such an aha for me. I love that. And they're, they're sharing on such a different level because of the culture. And then they'll go into their calls with all of this stuff in mind because they're so engaged. But we're literally, it's an unending conversation. It never ends. Either we're insurance nerds and like we're just so weird, but we find it interesting and fascinating every single day. It's like, it's a good conversation to have on how to protect people and talk to people about their protection. And so like with the role plays, I've had a lot of people say, gosh, are you going to run out of content? You never do. No. Yeah. I would say, tell me if you disagree, but most agents would agree that they really care about the clients that they service. So if you ask them about their culture and what makes them different from other agencies, they'll say, we go the extra mile for our clients and different agencies do it at different levels. But I want to know, besides that, you're not in the one top 1% in your company. You're in the top 1% of the 1% in terms of production. What makes agents who play at that level, your agency and other agencies similar to that compared to the other, let's say the bottom half of the agents who are trying to write more business, but are just stagnant. What makes those two types of agencies different? What are you doing in your agency that other agencies are not? I mean, I personally think it just all, it starts with the owner believing in growth. I've had some very difficult years with things the company or the industry has thrown at us. It certainly hasn't been easy every single year, but I know one thing I will never not grow. It's not even in my mindset to not grow. I've had last two years where I took home zero, not a dime. A lot of people can't believe that. I'm very transparent about it, but I was given such high goals in 2019. I had to decide, do I stay in or, man, I've built at that point a $30 million book. I could just coast and cut half my team and make a lot more money. I don't do that. I don't not grow. I think that's the biggest thing I see when agencies are struggling. They almost find a way not to grow or a reason they can't grow. There's always a reason to grow. After 21 years at that point for me to have to really take a step back so I could stay in the game, it just was never an option to me. First of all, I would not ever let my team down like that because that's really why I'm here is for my team. I enjoy seeing them grow and be successful. They know that I would never not grow. I think they all carry that same mindset. They would never not produce. Yeah, growth mode. I also think, that's him. He's got the ideas. He knows how to grow. He drives, drives, drives business, but then the other part is he surrounds himself with people that don't do what he does that he thinks is a gap in the business. He'll bring in a person that was a corporate trainer and that can teach systems and processes and do under the operations in the business that really helps with that. He'll bring in someone that has coaching background and can teach soft skills. He starts to round out his leadership team and the people that he brings in, not with skills that he has, but with different skills so that people get a deeper meaning to what they do and different levels of resources that they can have. The other thing is, is that if there is a gap in the business, he's not going to fill it with, I think I see a lot of agency owners just try to do it all. If we have a gap, we'll create onboarding specialist for the outside team called the cleanup artist. If we see that the service is getting overwhelming for the outbound team, we'll designate it one person for that. We're always looking at what the holes in the business are and we're filling it with things that will make it so we can do something different. I think a lot of agency owners, they're doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different. You probably see this because you're in the training space too, but you can give agency owners all the advice in the world and they've got to do it. It truly breaks my heart when I sit down with an agency owner and I say, I spend a few hours with them going through their numbers and here's what you do. I promise you this will work and that involves hiring and adding two bodies or whatever it is. I call them back a month later. Yeah, I sent an email to the recruiter, but it's like if you're always in growth have a person hired tomorrow. You have to move at a fast pace. Like you just mentioned, we do 20 interviews every single week, 52 weeks a year. We don't even need anybody right now. We need zero, but we will never not grow, so I will always be prepared. This job is super hard, for sure. We're seeing a lot of changes, but man, it is so enjoyable. Every agency owner out there, it's like their business that they can decide what they want to do with. There is so much success to be had in our industry still. It starts with good people though, good people and doing whatever it takes to grow. I present to some new age and owners all the time. I'll speak to little groups and there's always somebody that raises their hand and say, Jeremy, the meeting's over. Give me one last best tip. What's your best tip? Everybody thinks I'm going to give them the name of a vendor or maybe a really good talk about the close deals. I always say the same thing. No. After this meeting, get in your car and drive to the nearest bank and take out a line of credit and invest in your business. As a new agency owner, that is the best thing you can do. I do it to this day. Every single day I'm investing in different things. We have our own coach because we don't know it all, despite almost 25 years. Always investing and being willing to write a check to get better. That's what this job is. Yeah, we have so much. Like everybody looks at us and they're like, oh my gosh, their agency is producing so much and we are. We're in a great place. There's so much more we can do. I'm so excited to get to even the next stage because we've worked really hard to get here, but it's not near finished. I think that a lot of people think, okay, I'm done. If you have that mindset, then you will be done and everything will start going down the other direction. It's never done and there's always opportunity to grow. What is the next stage? Is it 50 million? Is it 100 million? What is that next stage? We have our long-term goal. Yeah, 50 in five, which is 50 million, 50 producers in five years. This is important to also know. If you have a 10% lap skin and you're at 40 million, we lose 4 million a year, which is more than what people write over a decade. You have to significantly outright that in order to make up for that. I think this will answer your blueprint of what you're going to do. If I'm an agent, three producers, two, three producers, I'm stuck at that two and a half, $3 million mark. I've been there for a few years. I'm buying internet leads. I want to hire people, but no one wants to work in my agency for whatever reason. No one's applying. I know there's not that secret sauce that you just said that you would recommend, but walk me through that blueprints that you're going to go through to go from 40 to 50 that I could implement in my agency to go from 2 to 3 million to 10 million in the next five years. What is it that I have to do outside of just taking line of credit and growing the agency? How do I do that? Yeah, I mean, make sure you have the right people in the right seats. First, we've all heard that. Every book will talk about it, but I see a lot of people not in the right seats. Separate your sales team would be one that I would... What's he got here? I don't know. He's got a little trick up his sleeve. I see something. But I love that agency size. That's one of my favorite agency sizes to talk to is when you're 2, 3 million, your opportunity to grow that thing is so much better than mine. Losing 4 million a year out the back door, that's a tough thing. You don't have that. Your growth can be solved by just hiring an extra one or two people. A lot of people look at when they're deciding, do I hire that person? They're literally saying, okay, this person is costing me 50,000 a year. If I don't make 50,001 dollars, year one, I'm not going to do it. That's just not the right way to think about it as an owner. We will have the income coming in forever. We want to grow our asset. We want to be successful in the company's eyes. We want to achieve awards. There's so much more than just what comes back day one. That's our job as the owner is to invest so that our business grows. Yeah. Throughout the last hour of this call, growth has been, I think, the main thing, growth through people. These are... I don't know if you can see them okay. The growth principles that... Is it backwards or can you see it? In this order, I believe agents should think about growing their agency and tell me if you guys disagree. Number one is hiring eight players, great team members that you don't have to push to produce at a high level. They're just, they have that in their DNA and not just having eight players, but a lot of eight players and continue to add and always, always, always be hiring. That's number one above everything else. Number two is having a sales process, whether it's a talk path or a way that you communicate with people and also train them on an ongoing basis. So that's the second thing to handle. A third thing is marketing. So you have to have a lead source where you're... You've got to get the phone ring somehow. And then last but not least is accountability. So once you have people in place, the sales process, marketing, you have to hold them accountable. And in my eyes, if you have the right people, but you have no accountability process, you have crappy leads. Say you're giving them aged leads, people who are not even shopping for insurance and you don't even teach them a sales process, the right people will find a way to figure things out. But if you have the right people and you train them, it doesn't matter what kind of leads you give them, it doesn't matter if you hold them accountable, they'll still find a way to get things done. But if you have the right people, the right sales process and you give them good leads, then they're going to crush it. But once you have the accountability piece in place, and I know that you say you're not, you guys aren't, you don't have systems, I would... Well, I don't, I'm not the systems guy. I heard you, I saw you look at me like, well, I have people in my agency that I hired because I'm not a tech system guy. So we do have, and we do have accountability in place with the pyramid. They have to report it every single day. We have like the inbound and outbound managers are looking at people's numbers, we're showing people their team numbers every single day, we're making sure that they're setting their tasks and we have someone like watching over that. So if they're not, we have, you know, Cameron will go through and make sure that everybody, one of the things that we want people to do is write good business. There's a report that comes out at the end of the month for every policy that's written in our agency and how it was written. And he sends it to every team member if there's any corrections that need to be made or if he said, if he sees something that doesn't look, you know, I wouldn't say ethical, but just not good judgment on how they wrote the policy, we're holding them accountable to that. So it's, it's just not in kind of like a micro manatee kind of way. It's the way, it is the way, like the way that we just, we all converse and talk and we know that that's like the standard. There's a lot of accountability things that we could get even better at that we're continuing to improve. I think accountability is one of the hardest things for agencies. Like our, our comp plan is part of an accountability piece too, but it's, it's one of the hardest things for agents to really map out because sometimes they can go so far on the extreme that, you know, people leave because they feel like, you know, they're just being nagged all the time and that they're not being treated like adults. It could be that they go so far on the other side where they don't know how to have a conversation in the moment when they're seeing something happen where they can make an adjustment for someone. It may be that they don't know how to create like a good review process every six months or however often you want to do it where you actually sit down and, you know, show them what you think their progress is. So accountability is pretty huge piece of it, but it's probably the piece that's most missed a lot of times. I should probably reward this or rephrase it and put in performance management because that's where my mind goes when I think accountability, not compliance or some that part of accountability. I'm thinking more of like following up with your team numbers and having sales come have conversations with them about their performance. But yeah, in terms of order, do you agree with this order? Would you do it any other way? What are your thoughts on that? I mean, I think the biggest investment you can make is in your people, in the business. So, and the thing is, is that it's so funny when people don't want to invest in their people with any kind of training. I think just I come from the training world and when I taught for Dale Carnegie, it was $2,000 a person to go through an eight week class. And it still is. So I'll teach a class of 30 people and each person paid $2,000 to be there. A lot of times their business does, but there are so many affordable options out there that are literally like you literally can make up for it like with one sale. And when people say I'm watching my budget, no, I can't afford $99 a month because I'm watching my budget, I'm just thinking you won't invest just that little bit to give your team lift. It doesn't have to be with us. It doesn't have to be with you. Like it, it just has to be that they have something in place. And if they're, if they're deciding to pull back on that, not investing in their people in any way, that's where I think that they, the business fails the most. Because you could have say that you have great leads, but you haven't trained your people, like you said, like there's no way that they would even know how to make the most out of those leads. And you'd be so frustrated, the work environment and the culture is bad. So your investment of time and energy is probably the biggest investment you make in your people. And then the second biggest investment is the, maybe the training, I don't think training, you don't have to spend a lot on training to make it be something that's really great in your business. So it's really a small investment for what it does, but people who don't do it, the ones who don't do it, I've noticed they'll say, my team doesn't want to do that. So that's a leadership problem. They'll say, I don't have any team members. And so when I do have team members, I'll start chances are they might need to know even how they would train their team members and do it now. They'll say stuff like I'm too busy and I've got so much business that I don't have time to train my team members. And that's, that's a problem too, because they're going to be left with, at some point, that's going to peter out. So I would say invest your time and a little bit of your money and you've got a great thing going if it has anything to do with good people. That's great advice. It doesn't have to cost much. This book costs 15 bucks on Amazon. Yeah, secrets of closing a seven. We're actually going to this book as a team right now. Everybody got a copy. It's broken up into six parts. And we had our first meeting this morning on this book and another one in two weeks. So everybody reads the book or listens to the audio version at home outside of work and they take notes and then during our bi-weekly meeting, they share their three biggest takeaways and just a conversation around that just stimulates so many ideas on what people can, what we can do to grow and have better sales conversations. So I can't thank you guys enough for hopping in this call today. How can agents get in touch with you guys and work closer with the two of you guys? Want to take that one? Well, we do have a, obviously a training company. You can see it behind us. It's just role play at the Olson Agency. We do role plays every single week and we get kind of deep into these topics of just everyday insurance scenarios that people would have and including things like active listening and powerful questions and powerful phrases that we can use. We really will role play just about anything as long as it's legal. And you can reach us at www.insuranceroleplay.com. That's it. And then if you want to reach out to Jeremy or I individually, our emails are just our name, Kristen, and it's with an I-N. So K-R-I-S-T-I-N at insuranceroleplay.com. And then Jeremy's is Jeremy at insuranceroleplay.com. You can find us on Facebook too. I'll include that information here as well. Thanks so much. We'll talk again soon. Yeah, awesome talking to you. Thanks, Vlad. Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you for watching this video. If you are an insurance agent who wants to write 100, 200, 300 policies per month, then I'd like to show you how this script can help you do exactly that. This script is what I personally used to write over 150 policies month after month after month. And many insurance agents have implemented this sales script in their agency and now are also writing over 100 policies per month. If you want to see a live demonstration on how this script works in action, then go ahead and register for my free sales training webinar. I'll include a link right below this video. Register for that free webinar and you'll be able to see exactly how the script works and you'll be able to start implementing it in your agency right away. There's no theory in that sales training webinar. I'll actually show you the script and how it works. Go ahead and register for that webinar and I'll see you there. Take care.