 The good thing about our industry is if you want to succeed, you can. If you want to help a lot of people, you can. If you want to make a lot of money, you can. And at the end of the day, I always think like, okay, how do I want to be remembered after this time is over? Was I the dude that was really negative and put stuff on Facebook all the time that was stupid and I ticked off half of our audience and I was always talking about COVID every day and everything else and like, you know what I mean? Like, that's probably the first time I've actually heard me use that word on camera the whole time. Right? Because I don't, I want to be positive, right? I don't even, maybe I should watch the news, but I don't on purpose. I'm noticing a theme with all of our friends that are killers. We all are like the same. It's like, dude, it's up here, man. It's like all up here. I can tell you right now, nobody that I know that's a six-figure producer and up is worried about COVID in the insurance industry. Nobody. Zero. Zero percent. And if they were worried, it was for a short time reinvented themselves and now they're even more successful or just as successful as before. You are listening to the 8% Nation Podcast, created to help you become a top producer in the insurance industry. Enjoy the show. Hey, people. Welcome to 8% Nation Podcast. It's been a couple of weeks, Cody. I've missed you, my friend. Dude, it's been good, man. We are in the office now for what, two weeks? A week and a half? Was last week our first week back? Yes. Good grief. Yes. Well, I wanted to, we get a lot of people that are like, how did you guys do during this sort of crazy pandemic, walk us through it? And we saw some really interesting things. I talked to a lot of clients. I feel like we have a good kind of beat on the industry. I just wanted to kind of talk through some of this stuff. Also our own team and just kind of what we learned. And the key theme in my opinion is those, there are people that adapted well and there's people that crumbled and came up with excuses. That's it. What it comes down to, if you think about it, is if you go one direction or another, because you really didn't just do the same thing and the similar production, nothing changed with you, you most likely either started to do more and adapted like you said, or you did less. And I think a lot of that is, I think it's a lot of someone's mindset. I agree. I was impressed, because 92% of age fell, I was impressed by the amount of agents that actually adapted and that did more and that wanted marketing help and that wanted training help and that wanted to be on videos and watch stuff and soak stuff in. It was a good time to learn. Well, there's a couple stories that I heard that I thought were interesting that I think I'll share if that's okay. So I work with a couple large groups that have multiple teams across the country and I was talking to them, this one particular group, and you know them well, they're awesome. They're great dudes. And I was like, what's going on? How's production? And they're like, well, overall we're down, but some of my teams were way up. And it's like, and he was like, and I'm also like trying to figure out like, what was the difference between my teams that were way up versus the ones that let and just collapsed in the excuses, which I thought was interesting, because- You think it was the leader? The team lead? You know what I mean? Well, I think it was absolutely the leader. I think it was absolutely the individuals that are going to rise to the occasion versus the ones that are just going to use the excuse because man, it is easy to get out of work. Now is the time to make excuses. Yeah. Because really no one's looking over your shoulder and you always have that, well, production's down, but you know the corona, you know, I can't meet people. You know, but at the same time, we know several people. I know you're going to be able to share a story with one of our friends, Nate Offert, that really didn't like do much tell sales at all. Before. But zero. Yeah, yeah. And you just talked to him. I mean, what's his score? Yeah, dude. I mean, he's doing more, he's doing as much sales as he's ever done, maybe more. I mean, he's closed in 30, 40K mortgage protection over the phone with videos. Like, nothing's changed. And he's saying that it's not, he's just getting people on Zoom meetings, you know, and it's not complicated. He's going through his same pitch. Yep. He's got some additional phrasing and verbiage that he uses initially, but it's amazing to hear. But his production was up after he totally reinvented himself. Yeah. What in the world? I almost wondered like, dude, why would you go back into homes? Because and some people are thinking that some people are not, right, which is cool either way. But he's seen crazy growth. But for him, we had the 8% virtual conference a few weeks ago and the theme was if you don't quit, you can't fail. That dude's mindset is like so strong that it doesn't even matter. Like his entire house could have been wiped away from this thing and like had a massive tornado and or something crazy happened. And he would have probably still been up in production. And a smile on his face. Yeah. He's just a good dude. He's got a lock down. His computer could have got broken into. His car could have got trashed. Whatever, right? But he'd have figured it out. Well, it was just interesting. So I thought that this whole season really taught us a lot about our business. I mean, good grief. Before Corona, but first off, you were really hesitant to let everyone go. In the beginning, it was kind of like... Yeah, to actually let people go home. Yes. In the beginning, you were like annoyed. I remember we were kind of like... Always hated the idea of that, man. I don't know why, but I've always been so against it. Hard core. Well, we were like, you know, it's kind of getting maybe a little serious. Like, oh, what? I mean, whatever dude. Well, I'm always the last person. And this is good and bad, right? It's good from a mindset standpoint. It's bad because I can be very stubborn. So like, what used to affect me is like eight years ago when they would come out with a new social media platform. I'd be the last one to get on it. Because I'm like, you know, whatever. Now I'm like, I kind of need to pay attention to at least tech stuff like that or stuff that could impact our business. I need to, you know, adapt early. Yeah. Like the Tai Lopez's of the world with stuff. But when it comes to that, I was very hesitant to have our team work from home because I've been a hundred percent against it from the very beginning. Well, I, you know, it's interesting. So I left March 13th on vacation and I arrived at the slopes in Colorado on Friday night, and then they shut everything down on Sunday. So, and then I was, I had to hurry home because they were talking about potentially closing the borders of Colorado and I was going to get stuck. So I drove through the night. So I, you know, but during that whole transition, it escalated quickly. As Ron Burgundy said, wow, this escalated quickly. Yeah. I mean, it's like, so it was just kind of, it's shocking that, and then eventually it was like, absolutely okay. The right thing to do is to send everyone home and work from home. But what happened to our business when that happened? Yeah. It hit, I don't know. Did it double? I mean, it got freaking crazy, dude. Like we, we, we're moving people home. Most people are letting go of people. Yeah. A lot of people we know, right? It's unfortunate, but it happened. We were adding people and we're like, well, made it to the office, we'll give you your stuff, go home and we'll figure it out. Yeah. You know, and I had my sales team. We had our sales team on zoom all day. Every day they were on webcam. The rest of the staff operations was not, but I was really impressed at how positive our staff was, how well we transitioned. We adapted well. But I mean, the thing is it comes from the leaders down. Like if leaders are worried and freaking out and negative and assuming bad things are going to happen. So they're letting people go ahead of time because they're assuming negative stuff. It's like, if I wasn't on a team member on a team like that, I wouldn't want to be a part of it anymore. No. And I didn't, I personally, I didn't know what the heck was going to happen. I didn't know if it, what was going to happen. I didn't know if this was going to shut things down. But then the more, because really Ramiz and North Star guys, they were the first to start transitioning of all of our friends, everyone working from home. They're the first people I heard from. And they did that early. And I thought, well, maybe that's a little early, but they just got ahead of it and did it. And this is public stuff. So they share this in their social. They had record weeks up and, I mean, all throughout the, these weeks. And so, you know, I also, you know, quick disclaimer, I don't want to like, there's a lot of people that are struggling right now. Sure. I don't want to be like celebrating and, and yeah, we double our business because there's a lot of pain and challenge that's going on. So I don't want to undermine that. And I also, some people, no matter how much grit you have, you're going to, you can't control your situation. Sure. But in the insurance industry, we were relatively unfazed if you don't let it phase you. Totally. Being in the insurance business is, we both felt super fortunate to be in this specific industry during this time because I was wondering, well, will inbound leads slow down? Will sales slow down? Like what will happen? And we got more inquiries than ever. More people needing help than ever with marketing and transitioning to phone sales. And it was, it was unbelievable. And you're right. You know, we want to be mindful that it's not, you know, it's not great that all this has happened. However, you, it is what you make of it. It kind of brought about this entrepreneurial spirit in me where I'm like, I have a new thing to figure out. It was almost like fun in a sense where I didn't really care about the numbers. It was more like a new challenge. And then as the numbers started to continue to grow, I'm like, holy crap. So we hired six people. Yeah. In the last six weeks, we took our staff. Yeah, maybe more. We took our staff up by 30% during this to be able to maintain the demand. But overall, Justin Brock said something that I thought was really interesting that really hammered in why the insurance industry is really not unaffected, but relatively unaffected. He said in Medicare specifically, all these individuals still have the same transactions that they have to make. Yeah. Whether they do it in person or not, they still need Medicare. They still need to shop their Medicare. They still need to potentially talk about this. So those that adapted to be able to meet their customers where they were are the ones that won. But the same amount of transactions happened. So I was already in love with the insurance industry. But during this situation, I was just like, we are so blessed and fortunate to be in the industry that was relatively unfazed. Because anybody that I know, most of them are up except for the big field forces. That's the only one that I'm seeing her down. But they're mostly recovered. They're starting to hit the field again. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that kind of woke me up, I remember about a week into this, I'm like, okay, what am I going to do differently? How am I going to? And everybody else is retreating out. We try to look for opportunities to advance. It would be stupid not to. And I remember thinking, if everybody watched social and events and we put on the 8% virtual, bam. I was doing free phone sales training webinars every week. I was doing night school. I was doing, you know what I mean? Like we almost, from a content perspective and a training perspective and an event perspective and everything else. And I viewed it as the best time to, like you always talk about people who work, people who educate them. I viewed it as the best time to give people's attention online, to grow and scale the brand and to really focus on bringing goodwill by doing five plus free events in a matter of a few weeks. And that, people responded to. You definitely doubled down on your content creation. And I think we got like thousands of YouTube subscribers too. Yeah, we're getting over a thousand a month now. Yeah, I mean, which is incredible. I mean, but that's also just speaks to your heart. Like, if anybody doesn't believe this guy that he wants to see every insurance agent fail and help him get an 8%, you're an idiot. You know what I mean? Because really your actions are there. And so, you know, some of this stuff that you did, you know, let's talk a little bit about, like, you know, when you say you doubled down and you went after that, what was your strategic approach to all that? Like, why did you choose? What was it that clicked? You said it clicked, but what clicked? It's like, now's the time because most people are on their phones or... Well, I was getting... What really clicked for me is I was standing in the shower. Because that's always... You have ideas in the shower. We're talking about this often. I was getting probably easy 20, 25 messages a day of people that were trying to convert to phone cells. That's true. That I've successfully done in the past and I love selling over the phone. And I viewed it as a time for me to use my network to collaborate with people that are doing it and for me to share the knowledge that I have on the subject. And I said, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna put out... I'm gonna do several free events every single week to help people with this topic. I'm gonna give away tons of stuff for free. Yeah, I'll create a membership that if they want more access, you know, I'm doing a live Q&A later today with the members, stuff like that, then I'll do that. But even if they don't join the membership, they've at least got a ton of free content to help them be better and to make money in this current environment when they're not used to doing it. Well, and also too, a lot of our audience is like independent agents sometimes that don't necessarily have a leadership from top down. And really, I feel like it's, you're looked at. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I hear, you know, Cody, your content, I watched your video and I got me, like you are a leader to a lot of these individuals. And I hear that a lot. So that I think is important. And really truly, my heart was, like as soon as I realized that our, not just our business, but the insurance industry was going to coast through this thing, it's just going to be about adapting. Man, I was trying to talk to everybody I could because what I saw too is, a lot of the Medicare space was moving away from seminar marketing into some sort of digital like webinar or whatever. And I wonder how much that's going to, you think it'll tail off or you think we'll go back into seminar as much as we did? Or what do you think? I actually do think that those specific individuals will end up, they'll end up diversifying a little bit and maybe do a little bit of both, but they'll end up going back into, I think they'll end up going back to seminars. However, I think they're exposed to something that's working equally as well, if not better. Well, I heard, It's kind of exciting. I heard a blow to that business model. I heard Golden Corral is filing for bankruptcy. I don't know if that's true or not, but I heard it. That would be a massive blow. It's like all these events are at Golden Corral. They can find the next buffet. That's true. Well, okay. So do you have any other stories of individual agents that you were just impressed with that stand out to you during this time? Like, is there any stories you could share? Yeah, I mean, I remember, what was really, what I really enjoyed was we have this little, I have this little coaching program called Success Society and several people were reaching out. They were even sending audio recordings and then I was doing live, giving them feedback on their audio recordings and listening to agents and just trying to help during that time. It was cool to see people go from zero phone cells experience to I just got a message of the day that someone's like, I'm struggling. I don't really know anything about phone cells and I need some help from somebody. And I literally got to where I was getting videos from or I'm sorry, messages for people like this one. Right. Hey, thank you. I view you as one of my mentors. Tonight I wrote, I never did phone cells before. Tonight I wrote six applications for $3,429. That's so exciting. All telecells. You have no idea how much you helped me improve. And it's like, that is the point. The whole point. That's the point. Yeah. That's the point. And all along, that's what I love about, you and what you're doing with the industry and helping is your view as a the marketing leader. Like when it comes to marketing, no one views, no one actually views anyone else as the leader other than you. They act like it, but they don't really believe it. And I hear it nonstop, which is amazing. But what I truly love is what we are doing with specifically really adapting and innovating. Like right now, we've got a couple new crazy ideas that we probably can't even release yet that we're getting leads on different areas of the world, I guess you could say, that people haven't even considered yet. Well, I'm discovering these little niches that are underserved. So what's interesting is there's all these little niches that are active on Facebook that really no one's like meeting it. So when you look at the general, like Facebook or general Medicare or whatever, that's fantastic. But there's little niches like under 65 Medicare, right? Nobody's really marketing to that specifically. And it's interesting what we're getting. So if you write under 65 Medicare, for instance, we can walk these people through like a 16 question qualifying quiz and a lead for five, six bucks, dude. Like that's crazy. Like the Byron 10 on that is insane. And those types of funnels exist all over the place. And we've now finally have the tools that you don't need a $700,000 sales force integration like the big call centers have to automate the text and the emails and all that. So a quick plug, me and Justin Brock and Cody by proxy are doing a webinar May 27th talking about a CRM that's free. You have got to go to that webinar. It's free. Even if the CRM that we're talking about is really interesting, but it also captures all your leads and it's incredible. It's free. Just go check it out. Even if you don't use the CRM, I found it as a huge resource for marketing side, but just running your agency, it's huge as well. So that webinar is the May 27th. You got to go register for that. We'll put the link in the description or whatever. But that'll be fun as well. But anyways, between these little tools from beginning to end, there's just so many things that are coming out that are interesting, that are worth exploring. One of the things that I've noticed has shifted a little bit is people are asking about chatbots a lot. You heard that? I started to a little bit. Okay, well, I worked with some people that were really, really deep into the chatbot world. And chatbots are fantastic, sort of. But they're all moving towards these integrations on a landing page. That's some sort of qualifying quiz. So the whole point of a chatbot is to qualify these individuals and then turn it into a lead. Well, you actually don't need a chatbot to do that. You can do like an interactive sort of like quiz questions, which is interesting. So that's working in my opinion better. We're exploring that. There's just some things that are really interesting that we're going down the road on. That we've had time to do because this shut down. Oh, totally. And when you think about, you know, working with thousands of agents and companies and call centers, IMOs and everything else, like, we learn very fast. Well, somebody said it today. You got to, if you're going to work with digital marketing, you have to like have exposure to what other people are doing because you can kind of get down your own path and you can kind of be tunnel visioned on what's going on. Like for instance, we had, we started to see, we have one client that we have a great relationship with that runs their own Facebook ad account and then we run a Facebook ad account and they have us on retainer and half their, or more of their budget goes towards us, but they're still running just sort of as a control group. Well, they were essentially seeing, hey, what are we doing? $11 leads. I can't, I don't know what's going on. And I'm like, okay, well I'll figure it out. And basically we kind of re-tweaked some things, really reinvented the whole thing and got our leads down like $5.50 or something. So then they followed suit. But if their internal team would have never had that sort of collaboration to be able to know what's going on. And so that's been a lot of fun as well, just to kind of see this, because the Facebook landscape has changed a little bit during this Corona thing too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, we've seen several changes. Anyways, so I don't know. Do you have any other stories? Because really I just wanted to kind of like, the core of this is, we're okay, we made it. You know what I mean? I feel like we're back, getting back to normal. I know some of the industries are like still dying. I know people are crying because their personal fitness business is getting shut down unfortunately. I hate to hear that kind of stuff. You know what? I view it as like, and this, you can't do this in every state, but I view it as a time to like, my hairdresser came to my house. My fitness instructor, personal trainer, wherever you want to call him, came to my house. My massage therapist came to my house. The cleaning lady still came to the house, right? We even had, we even were like, having them come over and like, wash cars, like we were looking for opportunity during this time to help others that needed it while helping ourselves. So I think it's kind of a duty and responsibility everybody can do. I agree. If I'm paying for stuff and I'm doing stuff, I don't really have to stop doing it. I've heard several of our sales reps are supporting their brother, sister, because they were servers. Yes. You know what I'm saying? But how blessed are we to be able to provide that opportunity? That's like, to me, what it's about. Well, that was one of the coolest stories. One of the sales reps came to us and said, hey, he's a newer sales rep. He said, hey, I'm before I would have been worried about spending 40 bucks for Mother's Day and I went and dropped 400 bucks on some jewelry and I didn't even blink twice. He's like, it's because I work here now and I'm like, that's really freaking cool. It's awesome, man. But that's what we're here for. That's what it's about. We're here as a team to kind of go there together. But in this situation, there's people that need our help. In the insurance industry, we should be lending a hand to other industries because they're struggling, not like us. You know what? This time has taught us to adapt, get more creative, hyper focus more and to even think about how to scale everything we're doing. We're thinking about we're running out of office space and parking and we need more people. We literally have no parking spots left. No. We're doing letters. We have a whole team meeting at 8.30 start every day. Someone gets here at 8.29, 8.30. They're going to be late because there ain't no parking. It's almost like forcing you to be early just to find a parking spot. That's funny. That's funny. It's good and bad. Well, the way that I look at it is we are like, okay, I'm just going to say something bold. If you're an insurance agent right now and you're telling your wife that the reason your production is down is because of COVID, that's an excuse. Change your mindset. Mindset, activity, skill level, all of that. Get around a better leader. Find a better mentor to listen to. Find a better team to be a part of because we really have no excuses in the insurance industry. For some reason there's teams that are down and some reason there's teams that are up. Well, let's try and identify what's going on and get yourself on a team that's up. And also too, man, I heard Jared Mangum, one of our friends say, if you're starting to like, the people that are him and Haing about potentially getting back to work and is it too soon and all that, I need guys that I can sprint with. You know what I'm saying? If you're trying to convince me to stay home longer, you know what I'm saying? We got to run. Our team knows better than stuff like that. I'm not saying don't be safe with your... If you're sick, you need to stay at your home. Sure, totally. You know what I mean? But like, let's run. There ain't no time. Life's short. For sure. I mean, one specific client that we're doing marketing for and I'm consulting and training his sales team, they have tripled their field production by moving 100% to phone. Maybe some initials. AR. Okay. So did... Interesting, tripled. Tripled production. One of the weeks was tripled. Maybe even quadrupled. And they've doubled in size consistently. I haven't heard that feedback. Marketing and training and... Yeah. Dude. Unbelievable. That's so fun. And that makes me smile because that's why we do it. And they were 100% filled. Like, they were like, do not silver the phone. Now, they're like, oh crap, we need some help. Well, is there any other stories you want to share before we wind this thing up? Like, anything? I just... I mean, the good thing about our industry is if you want to succeed, you can. If you want to help a lot of people, you can. If you want to make a lot of money, you can. And at the end of the day, I always think like, okay, how do I want to be remembered after this time is over? Was I the dude that was really negative and put stuff on Facebook all the time that was stupid and I ticked off half of our audience and I was always talking about COVID every day and everything else. And like, you know what I mean? That's probably the first time I've actually heard me use that word on camera the whole time, right? Because I don't... I want to be positive, right? Maybe I should watch the news, but I don't on purpose. I'm noticing a theme with all of our friends that are killers. We all are like the same. It's not really... Dude, it's up here, man. It's like all up here. I can tell you right now, nobody that I know that's a six-figure producer and up is worried about COVID in the insurance industry. Nobody. Zero percent. And if not, and if they were worried, it was for a short time reinvented themselves and now they're even more successful or just as successful as before. Totally. The amazing thing about the industry is there's a lot of different ways to succeed in it. If your way was affected, you can find another way. Yes. And I just want to encourage you guys that if you are down in the insurance industry right now and you're feeling like there's a... You're not in this alone. We're here. Connect with some content. Reach out to your team, but you don't need to be down. Now should be a time to be celebrating because a lot of people that are going to make excuses, they're going to get out of the industry. Totally. There's more market share for us. You know what I'm saying? Yep. That's what 8% nations... Exactly. Do you have any teasers for 8%? Now that we're at the end, I do because maybe if you stayed at the end, you know what, I should have said that earlier. What have you got? Dude, it's looking like the same dates. Okay. There's a really good chance. If you were there last year, the scenery may look the same this year. There's a little hint. There's a little hint. There's several reasons why that's going to probably be the case. We'll know a little more affirmative in the next couple of days, but it's looking really positive. I'll just give you a hint. Another hint. I'll put out a Facebook post giving our attendees and our audience options what we should do because if nobody shows up, there's no point. There's no point, so I need to make them part of the process. They are 8% nation, and if you go to my Facebook post, you will see that about 70%, maybe 80%, chose one option specifically. All right. Well, I'm excited no matter what. You said so the dates are potentially the same. Yeah, so we're still looking at July 24th, this year. Cool. And we may have to make a couple adjustments from an event standpoint. We may have to limit ticket sales a little bit. We've already sold way more tickets than we previously had in the past, so we may have to cut off ticket sales much sooner so you don't have one and you actually want to go. You may want to consider getting one pretty quick. I may even be removing a couple ticket levels that are actually sold out based on the venue cap. They're actually oversold, so I may have to actually bump some people up for free. There's some weird stuff we got to do based on some specifics, but either way, I promise you, it will be the best experience I've ever had. Also too, I'll give you the people some independent insight. Whenever everybody was freaking out about their events, you and Lauren were like so chill and calm. Yeah. It was like a non-issue. Like, everyone else was kind of like nervous for you. Everybody kept asking me, I'm like, is it fine? It's fine. What do you mean? Well, and if they saw the Facebook post, you would have thought I'd have really been freaked out that the people that own the Palms, they own four different properties in Vegas. Three of them are staying open and are opening immediately. The one that's not is the Palms. They're actually closing. I think there's other reasons why they're closing the Palms that they're just not going to say. Gotcha. Because if the other properties are opening and they're open immediately, then everything's fine. Well, that'll make any sense. Well, the Palms is closing until at least November, if not the rest of the year. That's where 2020 was, so, but it'll be somewhere and it'll still be amazing. The thing is, people are going to still attend. The people that want to learn and improve and get better, I'm actually doing a webinar in a few weeks on how everything here has 13xed over the last two years. That's a big number. It all started because I went to an event and I got serious and we started getting attention. We started throwing events. We started bringing some freaking studs in-house and to join the team, et cetera. I'm here to tell you that events have been the one thing that have leveled me up more than anything else. Also, you're just getting around people that are equally yoked and you can sprint and look to your side and see guys that are also sprinting. You brought your sales, your key sales guys that hit the goals to 10x. They both said, obviously, it changed my life. It is true. Well, look at them now. Also, kind of interesting, I don't know that it's necessarily a coincidence. I went to 10x for February 21st through the 23rd. This all happened in early March. It's right now while we're recording this. It's been about two and a half months. Everything we've done has doubled. Oh, yeah. For sure. Are there other reasons why yes, but is being involved in stuff like that and wanting to learn definitely a part of that? I believe that because my focus in creativity has been an all-time high. I'm more aggressive and people thought I was crazy before. These last two and a half months, dude, I think we can 10x everything we have. Well, we got to. Yeah. So it's just a matter of time when. That's it. Well, dude, I mean, this is powerful. Anything else you want to share before we wrap it up? No, dude, I love it. I love it. I love it. And I want them to succeed better never and if they believe it, they can. Thank you guys for joining us on this episode of 8% Nation Podcast. We will talk again soon with a special guest. Hey, if you love this podcast, which obviously you, Dick, is going to land it and I, hey, we got a video right here for you. It's how to hire and recruit insurance agents with the wolf. All right, click on there and we'll see you over there. You got to realize that the typical interview questions out there are like, they're all well-known and most people.