 If you're in the insurance business and you're struggling, I want to encourage you to spend the next few minutes with me. I'm going to spend about 9-10 minutes explaining how I made $117,000 as a 20-year-old insurance agent my very first year in the insurance business within an 8-month span. I want to walk through the story. I've got some things I'm remembering lately that I didn't use to remember that I kind of wanted to talk about and implement and let you guys in on things that maybe haven't came out on video before. I was 19, I was an intern and I was making calls out of a phone book for a veteran agent. When I was doing that, I was having a lot of rejection. I was teaching myself to be good on the phone when I really didn't want to be. This veteran agent was paying me so much per book appointment, but I was literally had a phone book which is not even legal and I didn't even know any better. This is a decade ago and the veteran agent was handing me a script. I don't know if I ever said this on video. The script literally read, hello is this Betty? Which is incorrect, right? We've talked about that a lot. This is Cody Askins from Ron's office, I won't mention his last name from Ron's office. How are you doing today? I was just so many. I'm looking back now and I'm like, this is so many stupid pieces to this. And it would be like good or bad or whatever. And then I would say, hey, do you currently have any life insurance? Which is a fantastic introduction to a cold call. You thought about dying recently? Yeah, I'm good there. I don't need to talk. Okay, so you wouldn't like a quote? No, okay, well have you thought about, do you have any money? Have you thought about an annuity? No, I don't have any money. Okay, well have you thought about long term care insurance or disability income? And I was literally just having to go product by product. Well these people don't even know what an annuity is. And the script was so bad. I actually had a little bit of success and it was only because I was very persistent and so I say that to say you can have success with no clue what you're doing if you just be persistent. Well, I did that for a while. Then I'm gonna give a part-time insurance agent, I got my license. But what I haven't told, I don't know if I've ever said this. I've failed my test the first two times that I took it. And I got the first time I ever took it, I remember. It doesn't tell you what, in Missouri don't tell you what score you got when you pass, but it does tell you what score you got when you fail. And the very first time I took it, 69. Okay, I get a 70 in the state of Missouri to pass your insurance test. Okay, I got a 69, I'm like, oh, freak. Okay, so I go back, start reading the book again, go back again, take it, fail, got a 69. And it was because I was trying to learn out of an insurance exam book. And I don't retain information as well reading as I do listening or video. So then somebody tells me about this thing called, I don't remember what it was called, but it was some online teacher's thing for, it had a visual teacher, it was on video. So I started watching videos and taking tests and exams. And I soaked up a ton of content and did the two-hour practice exam and all the little quizzes and everything else. And I went back and somebody told me, hey, as long as you get a 90% or more on all these quizzes, you'll probably pass the test. So I made sure I did that, went back a couple of weeks later, took the test and finally passed. So now I'm a licensed insurance agent and I'm 19 at a time, I believe. And I became a part-time insurance agent for a little bit. Went out, I was working some leads, went out and made a few sales, did okay, and then I was in college at Baptist Bible College, taking 21 credit hours this semester, playing basketball. And I thought, you know what, I really want to turn into a full-time insurance agent. So you had to do so much production to become a full-time agent. So I did this in November and then I had to write so much production in two months. I think it was like 5,500 bucks in AP, or maybe it was 5,500 bucks in commissions, which would have been like 11K in premium. And I did that and I became a full-time agent. And I think my start date was like January 1st of a long time ago, okay? And it was either 2011 or 2012. And I think it was January 1st of 2012 or December 31st of 2011, something like that. And I became a full-time insurance agent. And when I first started as an insurance agent, I didn't really know what I was going to do to be successful. I didn't know what I was going to do. And there's going to be some good key points you need to keep listening to. I didn't know what I was going to do to be successful. But before I started, I said, you know what? I need a goal. I'm a sports guy. I'm an athlete. I'm playing college basketball. I said, you know what? I'm going to write down that I want to earn $100,000 my first year in the insurance business. And I want to win a top trip. And I dated it, signed it, and I hung it up in the wall in my cubicle. And every single day I went out to hit that and make that goal a reality. And what I learned by running the numbers, I had to sit down with about 10 people a week to make my goal a success. So I started out doing some calling, working on a warm market, doing some door knocking. What I quickly learned over the first couple of weeks is I was struggling to get in front of enough people because I had a limited amount of time. And most people would just use that as an excuse. I didn't want to use that as an excuse. I wanted to actually reach my goal. I want to do whatever it took. Some people say they'll do whatever it takes. I believe in actually doing whatever it takes. And so I came up with an idea because I was having success making cold calls because I'd already done it for a veteran agent, but I made a better script. And because I just learned everything that he was doing that was wrong. And so I scheduled a call night. It was like my first week in January of that year. And I brought over college kids to the office because I was in college. I think three college kids. And I gave them all a script, a cubicle, a phone, and a data list, a cold call data list that was scrubbed. And I said, OK, here's what we're going to do. You're going to read this script. You're going to book appointments. I'm going to walk around and help you. I'm going to make calls as well. I'll buy pizza for everybody. I'm going to give you cash if you book. First appointment you book, you get $10. Second appointment you book, you get another $10. Third appointment you get $20. And every one after the third you still get $20. And then the top person for the night gets an extra $20. So those three students were calling with me. And remember the first call night like it was yesterday? We started out a little slow, picked up. About halfway through we got some pizza. And we finished the night. I remember I always had this appointment sheet where they could write their appointments on it. And I could go put them in my calendar and everything else. And at the end of the night I would go take all the sheets and put them in my calendar for the week. And the script wasn't fantastic. I mean, I believe it was, hey, Betty, hey, this is Cody. Something about, hey, we've got a new product. We've got a new program out to help you with your final expenses. There's no health qualifying. You're going to love it. And Cody needs to come drop off the information. So you can do that on Tuesday or Thursday. Very simple, very straightforward. And not even as good now if I'd have known as good as it could have been. And I did that. And we, at the end of the night, had, I believe, one person set five, one person set three, and one person set two, something like that. And I think I had set a few as well. I think we set like 14 appointments the first call night. And again, I don't know exact, but it was close. It was like 14 points. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I've figured this thing out. I was like, I was like so excited. I gave everybody cash and paid them. And top person got extra 20 bucks. Person got five appointments, got 10, 10, 20, 20, 20. That's 80 plus 20, 100 bucks for like two hours. And they wanted to come back, obviously. And I went and put them all in my calendar. I went and ran the appointments over the next three days and four days, whatever it was. And we would always call on Monday nights for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, even Fridays if we needed to. And I remember that about eight of those appointments stood me up. I sat with six and I sold two or three. And I thought, oh my, this is good. Now the no show rate sucked because I was cold calling. And we weren't adding lockdown closes and confirming and addresses and directions and everything else. But I figured something out to maximize my time. I can remember I'm in college as student athlete, practices, games, tournaments, playing basketball full time and taking 21 credit hours this semester. So I started doing that. And then when I didn't have appointments on like a Friday or Saturday, I would go cold doorknock. I remember one Friday I left school, got out to Willow Springs at like between noon and one and by an hour and a half drive after class. And I doorknocked till almost 10 o'clock at night. It was like a hundred and myself and a couple other agents and it was like 175 doors. And we wrote six policies, cold doorknocking. And so I made it in my mission to set 15 appointments, sit with 10 and sell five every single week through cold calling and cold doorknocking and doing whatever it takes. And after doing that and just being consistent. And I remember my first year and there was a World Series contest, a sales contest. If you were in the top seven, I believe, rookies in the people that were in the first three years in the company, you got to go to the World Series. And so you had to do at least, typically I'd do at least 30K in commissions over like three months. Well, I did like 30, 35, 38, 40K in commissions like 80, 90K in premium. And I got to, I won the trip. And kept doing what I was doing at the end of eight months. And I'd only had, I've been to the World Series. I had at the end of eight months made over 100K and I didn't even work the last few months of the year. I went back to playing basketball in college and I finished the year with some residuals and renewals and everything else coming in later. 117,361 dollars and 13 cents. My first year as a new insurance agent. So I say all that to let you know that I believe that if I can succeed, that I truly believe that anyone else can too. And so I want to challenge you to do whatever it takes to succeed. You can make 100K, you just need to map it out and go do it, okay? So that was an explanation, a brief explanation, not a long one of my first year as insurance agent and how I made it six figures and how you can too. Hey, if you like this video and you want three simple steps that I teach to overcome any objection you ever get, then click on that video which right there, go watch it. Let me know what you think in the comments below and I'll see you there. New insurance agents struggle with objections, but you don't have to. So I'm gonna give you three simple steps really quick.