 Welcome to Q&A live every single Wednesday, two o'clock Central Standard Time. I'm Cody Askins. I'm joined by Mr. Dylan Corbett over here. I want to call you a DJ, you know, just kind of like jazzy Dylan, but he's over there, he's manning the cameras, he's manning the show, and we got Mr. Derek Duker answering the questions live that you've asked either on Facebook or YouTube, maybe Instagram, right? Yeah, sometimes. Yeah, yeah, he's even mic'd up now. Dude, we need to get Dylan mic'd up too. We need to get another mic. Bailey mic'd up, Matt mic'd up, all you guys. I'm wearing the vintage antique secure agent mentor polo today as we do our rebrands, secure agent leads. Cody Askins, if you haven't checked out those websites, please do so. We put some time, some money, some resource. I'm telling you what, those are gonna help a lot. We're excited about those. If you haven't tried our leads, unbelievable. I get positive testimonials all day, every day. Our Cody Askins brand has taken off. Our university has been bought quite a bit already. We're adding some coaching programs and retreats behind the scenes, so stay tuned on everything that we got going on. Today we're gonna answer your questions, so thank you for submitting those. If you're watching, please make sure you subscribe, like and follow everything that we do so that when we do videos, live videos, regular videos, you get notified. Derek, you ready, Duker, you ready for some questions? Oh, I'm ready. Let's do it, bro. What do you think of multi-level insurance companies versus more producer-driven companies? I mean, any, every, okay, there are some companies that do put more emphasis on recruiting than selling. But every insurance company has multiple levels and every insurance company should be focused on production because recruiting people doesn't pay the bills at all unless they do what? Unless they produce. So I'm big on production, on actually moving the meter. I just found out, a little small fact, that our little agency that we threw together did like 3,000 apps in 12 months, which is pretty solid, pretty decent for a little quick startup. But at the end of the day, it's all, I believe every agency should put a lot more focus on growth. Production. And I don't even like the whole recruiting mindset and theme until you've proven that you can lead by example and that you can actually help and train someone. There's a lot of new people that jump into, they think they need to recruit, recruit, recruit. Well, if you're not making any money, if you're not selling anything, then how are you gonna survive and how are you gonna help anyone else survive? So that's a great question. Any phone apps to help run your business more efficiently? Phone apps. He could have prepped me for this one, huh? No, he's, phone apps. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, no. I would say phone apps. Okay, a lot of insurance carriers have a public quote engine. I'm a big fan of AmeriCo. They've got like quotes.americo.com. All these different companies. I think the same thing for Foresters. And there's other companies that have, that have rural neighbors has it too. It's like a quick quote. They all have these public web addresses that you can save to your home screen and immediately get to a quote engine. One thing that's unique and that I do that I think you should be doing is everything's an app, right? Everything's a mobile app, whether you know it or not. If you use an iPhone, I've got different folders to where I'll go to, where I'll go to, like for instance, this is our new Cody Askin's website. This can be an app, right? It's a mobile app. It's a less expensive app. Cause you can go here, I can go to Cody Askin's. I can hit this little box with an arrow in it and I can add, I can click add to home screen. I can title it whatever and then I can immediately hit add and it's immediately a mobile app. And you can see it, it's right there on my page, right by, you know, whatever that is. So, and then it's immediately an app and then I can click on it and it goes straight to the website. So that's one thing I want agents to know is everything can be an app. There's a lot of, there's good ones out there but everything can be an app and everything can become a mobile app. If you'll just, okay, another good one, voice memos. It's a, it's just, it comes on iPhones. I've used voice memos a lot for podcast and audio. Other things would be, you know, iTunes and iBooks for audio books, podcasts. You gotta have a podcast. You need to be listening to insurance podcasts. I'm on the, I don't even mind promoting them. I'm on the insurance guys podcast in next month. I don't know when it'll release but we're recording it next month. There's, there's, there's apps for, for ads, you know, for YouTube and Google and, you know, there's, there's all kinds of stuff but anything can be a mobile app as long as it's a website you can access from your phone. So that's, that's a, that's a really good question. That's kind of a long winded answer. I got my bodybuilding.com app which I'm on my eighth week of working out. So, there you go. What is the best insurance to sell for part-time agents? Oh, it's not PNC. And I say that because there's a lot more service involved. I don't think that's a part-time gig. When you're doing some part-time, you want to be focused on sales and less on service. I would say, I would say, generally life insurance is the best answer. Now I'm not saying that you can't do Medicare and some other, some other avenues but generally life insurance is best because you have family and friends that have life insurance or need life insurance that you can help them get coverage, you can make money and then, you know, your hands off from there if you want it to be. So. How can I improve my renewal commissions? How can I improve my renewal commissions without getting into carriers and comp, I mean, some carriers pay more for renewals. Like that's just a thing. Without getting into carriers and comp and all that, write more business and then you'll have more renewals. So there you go. When someone asks you what you do for a living, what do you say? Okay, so Charlie Chino will be proud of my answer because you guys probably heard, you guys got to hear his speech, you guys came to our office. Okay, you need a better answer. The short answer is you need a better answer than I sell insurance, right? So Charlie Chino would say I empower seniors and assist them with their final planning needs in three easy steps guaranteed. Like that's kind of like a Charlie Chino answer and it works, it's good. He's great at that kind of stuff, at branding yourself and kind of having word tracks. In general, you do more than just sell insurance. You help people plan for the unexpected and you do it in a big way and you do it in a great way. What has been your go-to insurance company for someone who is totally healthy? That one comes off of it. The insurance company for someone who's totally healthy. A lot of people would use fully underwritten. A lot of people would use the least expensive, final expense option. I don't have it like a, I mean, I've got carriers that we use or that I know big companies use that are great. I try to not talk about me as much with this kind of stuff and I try not to show favoritism. So if someone's healthy, find the best option for him. I mean, that's the best thing. That's one thing my father does better than anybody. He sells them what's best for them. He doesn't care about commission, carrier. He just does what's best for people. What are your thoughts on captive agencies versus being independent? Captive agencies, you guys got some good questions today. You guys are all about this today. Captive versus independent. I mean, I'm on the independent side, but I started out captive and I did well. I made a lot of money and now I'm independent. And we've grown this from an independent background and a captive background. And so I don't think that you could put me in any situation on planet earth insurance-wise and I would fail. I'm gonna give you a generic positive answer to this just cause I like to, I gave you an answer, but I like to stay away from some of that talk. We have a lot of agents and agencies that follow us that are that, both, right? So the long, the short answer is you could drop me in any office, in any situation, at any commission level. There are a couple guarantees and promises that I can make to you. I don't care what situation I'm in, what comp level I'm in, in the country. I don't care if you drop me in the middle of Asia and I gotta learn Chinese, it doesn't matter. I would make six figures and I could easily succeed long term. Any atmosphere, any situation. But that's not always the case. The other situations that are tougher, which is why 92% of insurance agents fail. I think it's probably higher if they were just life insurance agents, but that's a good question. We've got a question, I don't know if you're gonna wanna answer it, it's what are your top three life companies for 2019? I don't know if we're able to say that. Okay, if we're talking about final expense. If we're talking about final expense, three of my favorite carriers are AmeriCo, Royal Neighbors and AIG. Just because healthy, middle of the road, guaranteed issue, right? Now there's a lot of good ones. I've always used force, there's a ton in the past. There's other companies too that have done well. We had a lot of great carriers at our conference. So you can see why some of that's tougher for me to answer just because of the relationships we have with a lot of those carriers. But in general, those are the three carriers I use the most, so. And then Douglas on Facebook just asked when someone- Douglas Humphrey, I guarantee it, what's up brother? Douglas Webb actually. All right, Webb, either way. Douglas Humphrey just emailed me last night, sorry Webb. I know both the names. When selling FE and MPI, if there's savings to be had on the client's home in auto, do you think that helps or hurts your process when referring it out to your referral partner? If it's a true referral partner and you trust them, then it helps. If it's a, oh, they may steal my business, try to sell life insurance too, then no. If it's someone that's a referral partner that you trust, you can refer them business, they won't steal your business, they won't get in the way of the fact that you're trying to save money to earn business, and they won't get in the way and you trust them, it can't hurt, right? I don't like me making a sale contingent on whether someone else can save someone money though. Like I want to control the controllables, and that's not controllable that I can control, so if I can sell them, Douglas, I wanna do it, whether they can save up money or not. They can, it helps, it helps the client, so. Justin2800 on YouTube wants to know when you're gonna play a one-on-one on the basketball. Justin2800, I wonder if it's Justin Brock. I don't know, I'm curious, I'm curious, who Justin2800 is, but yes, and I promise you, you will lose, right? Dude, you may not score, bro, you may not score. There's a, okay, one thing that was always true. I don't care whether I played D2 schools. I was always the fastest dude on the court, every game, so, but you can probably out-shoot me, Justin, I guarantee it. I like that. I like the fun questions, man, you guys gotta keep these rolling. Oh, we got another one for you, this is the last question. Last question of the day. Oh, one more, one more on YouTube, okay, okay. Before we get to the crazy, the entertaining one that you guys are surprising me with. Andrew Jones. Oh, I see him. For field agents, do you notice any higher close ratio between telemarketer and direct mail leads? Yeah, you're gonna have a higher close rate with direct mail, you just will. I think that the two, if I had to choose two different, if I'm like being unbiased, I have to choose the two highest quality sources of leads right now for agents, it's outside of direct mail that's also extremely comparable and really solid is the leads that we generate. Outside of that, I wouldn't mess with anything else and there's a lot of top producers that buy direct mail and our leads or just our leads and they don't mess with telemarketing and that's it. I've used them, I can get in front of people, but normally it's people that are in bad health, definitely don't have a job, extremely low income and sitting by the phone waiting to talk to everyone that calls them. So, you do the math. Good question, though. Jared on Facebook asks, best referral slash center of influence for a life only agent. Best center of referral? Yeah, yeah, that's right. It's like a few referral ideas, maybe, or... I would say, okay, I caught most of the question, just in general, referral partners are always a great idea, a home and auto agent that doesn't sell life. A mortgage lender that doesn't sell mortgage protection life insurance or doesn't want to. A real estate agent that realizes they need term life insurance to cover the mortgage on their home. If you're in the PNC space, car dealers, right? There's a few other ideas which is like networking groups, B&I, mob, masterminds of business or you can start your own networking group like my father has and it's worked out extremely well. There's ways to chamber. It's being top of mind and in front of people and having relationships. The biggest thing with referrals and the reason all those things don't work for agents is they don't refer business first. People, agents are weird, man, like in general, human beings think that we should receive stuff before we give stuff and I'm telling you, you will not succeed at the whole referral game unless you have a give first mentality. Any other questions on Facebook or YouTube though? Orlando Coleman wants to know, is it better to sell a single insurance like life or multiple types of insurance? I know a lot of agents that will sell like life and Medicare. It needs to kind of go together, I think. I don't think you should do. I mean, there's a lot of like state farm and shelter and also agents that do, they do PNC and life in health. So they, it's more of like a full service. I know that to get, to make a lot of money short term, you don't wanna try to sell everything. Now you can make a lot of money long term and build up a solid book of business like PNC World long term. But if I wanna start making six figures and make really good money immediately short term, then riches are in the niches and I'm gonna focus on one line of business and have a target client in mind that I wanna go sell. That's the fastest way to like repeat the process and just freaking run and take off. Got one more off of YouTube. We're getting a lot here at the end. Come on, YouTube, you guys are freaking killing it, man. If you haven't subscribed, you gotta do that. Also, we hit 5,000 subscribers and I'm telling you, I guess we can only thank you because you're the ones that have subscribed, so. Well, thank you. Scott wants to know what's your advice for staying motivated while prospecting and any thoughts on delegating that task? For staying, for delegating and staying focused on... While prospecting. While prospecting. Yeah, I mean, there's agents that'll have assistance, that'll help them with calls or help them with turning in apps or pending business or emails or service. Early on, you should do all that yourself. But eventually, if your goal is to go make five grand in the field this week and those tasks will get in the way of you making five grand in the field this week, then delegate. Without our entire team, we've got like 18 team members now, without all of our team members, this would not be where it is. You guys would not even be watching because it would have been me in my basement doing a video that sucked with no editing that you guys wouldn't have wanted to watch. I mean, so without a team and delegation, you cannot, I don't think you can explode. I just don't. Sean Glover wants to know, can you be independently contracted with too many companies? Sean, I'm gonna surprise people with this answer. Yes. I started out getting contact with like 60 companies. Way too much. Find three, and there's people that may disagree. I don't care. Find three to five carriers that you can put in the less the better, less is more. The less carriers you can have, the better. But find three, maybe upwards of five to put all your business with and be super focused because it allows you to be an expert with that carrier, have a chance to win bonuses, extra comp, trips, and it allows you to run in that lane and get really good at that. So I would say like you need to be the expert and know everything about this instead of trying to go. It's like going deep instead of wide, right? So that's a really, really, really good question. I don't know if I've ever actually answered that question on video. I don't even know. So that's good. Mary wants to know. Mary. She says she wants to partner with leads and start her own agency and learn. Will a partner help in our appointment setters still an option? A partner for like leads and appointment setting is always a good option because you can't do it all, right? If you need someone, I mean you can build an agency but when you're building an agency you don't have to worry about generating leads, tracking appointment setters, recruiting, contracting, paperwork, managing personalities, training. Like there's, if you're an agency owner you could wear 50 hats if you wanted to. It's best if you can find partners. And I'm not saying partners in the sense that they own part of your business. I'm saying partners in the sense that they provide a service for your agency, that you trust them. They do it at a discounted rate because you're an agency and they do it in a good way and again you trust them. They're not gonna take your agents like all that. Like that's important. And so as an agency owner it's very nice to have partners that you trust to allow you to focus on growth and production and happiness and training of your people. So, hope that helps. All right, I think that's all their questions. Here's our surprise question. You can't get these vintage polos anywhere anymore. The SecureAgent Mentor brand is being split up for those watching don't know it into SecureAgent Leads and a Kodiaskins brand. If you have a bit of those new websites, Kodiaskins.com especially, please go check that out. That's gonna be a fun site. A new university with 145 plus training videos, business retreats coming soon and four different coaching programs that we're actually building out right now. We've been building out those for a couple of months. We're gonna be jam packed, a lot of stuff. Oh, last minute question by Larry Woods. What's the best advice to give new agents starting in the business? Larry, Larry Woods. This is my favorite question of all. It really is like, hey, what's advice for a new agent? My advice is have a niche. If you're gonna sell final expense, sell final expense. If you're gonna sell Medicare, sell Medicare. You're gonna sell life insurance. Just regular life insurance, sell life insurance. If you're gonna sell PNC, sell PNC, whatever it is. If you're gonna sell group health, sell group health. They're gonna sell annuity, sell annuity. Make it really simple. I sell this product and I'm the best at it. I know everything about it, right? That's tip number one. Tip number two is be focused on getting in front of so many people every single week. That's my only two tips. Have a niche and go sit down with a minimum of eight people every single week, no matter what. I always say 10, for some reason, 10 is hard for people. So if eight is the answer, then go sit. If it's something you'll do consistently, that's the only reason Larry, that agents fail. 92% of general insurance agents fail. And the only reason is because they don't consistently see enough people. The only thing that matters, I don't care if you can spell the word insurance, if you barely passed your license exam, or if you're a captive agent making low cost, it doesn't matter, right? The only thing that matters that determines whether you succeed or fail in this business is if you get in front of people consistently. If you sit with people, guess what? You make sales. If you don't sit with people every week, you fail. That's it. That wasn't the good, that wasn't the entertaining question. You guys wanna hang on for this one. Buckle up, buckle up your seat belts, sit up straight. What do we got? You ready for this one? I'm ready for this one, I think. The spread for the Rams versus Cowboys game is Rams by seven. How much money should we put on the over? Oh, on the Rams minus seven, Cowboys plus seven, or the over under of points? No, the over for the Rams. The Cowboys won't get beat by, if I had to take it and take points, I'd probably take Dallas. It's a playoffs, I'd take Dallas plus seven. If I'm a gambling man, and I'm wondering what it was a few days ago or a week ago, I wonder if it shifted, because that'll tell you where people are voting, right? Or placing their bets. Again, this is a insurance show. Please don't take our advice and put any money on it. We didn't have anything to do with gambling ever, but my Cowboys are gonna step it up, telling you, my Cowboys are gonna pull this game off. And if they don't, remember to post in the comments of this video, if they maybe don't, or if they do, when they do, come congratulate me. And you know what, if they win, I'll be at the NFC Championship game in Dallas. I can promise you that. How about that? A little road trip for the whole team? A little road trip for the whole team. Just the marketing team. Sorry sales guys that are watching. No, come on, you don't wanna do that. A little closer drive maybe. That's a good question. You guys are amazing. Any other final comments or questions as we roll out of here? Doesn't look like it. We've been going a good 25 minutes. You guys have, we've had a lot of fun. I love live Q&A. You guys get to jump in and ask questions. Duker gets to ask them. Bailey gets to make fun of them. And Dylan, because Matt's not here. And Dylan gets to just edit it and run the show. So awesome job to them for producing today. Thank you so much for watching. Thanks for commenting. Thanks for your questions. Please keep submitting those, because we'll answer those every single Wednesday at two o'clock Central Center time. I want some fun questions though. I want you to think about unique questions, tough questions, hard questions. Stuff that's gonna make me stutter and think and not know what to say. Freak me out. You go between now and next Wednesday at two o'clock to do that. Thanks for watching. We'll see you Friday, great percent club.