 Welcome to 8% virtual. As people are coming in, we've had over 10,000 agents register for this today. Live free virtual conference. Number one, okay, I wanna thank you as people are coming in, okay. I wanna thank you for being a part of this event. I can tell you, I can promise you, I can guarantee you the next two days are going to be legendary. The next two days are gonna put life back into you and the next two days we're gonna have a lasting effect that is gonna be unbelievable and take a precedence in your life in 2021, okay. The theme for the next two days is if you don't quit, you can't fail. And I really believe that if you do not quit, if you choose that, dude, hey, I'm not throwing in the towel this year, I guarantee you, you will have success in this industry and life will get really good. If you don't quit, you can't fail, all right. We are putting this virtual conference on because we decided that last year our first ever virtual was 8% 2020 virtual in April of last year, right. It was unbelievable event, jam packed with crazy amounts of speakers and it was truly life changing. The response that we got was life changing to us, okay. The positive feedback, the encouragement, people showing up and saying, man, I have eight pages of notes. Some people said, dude, I have 80 pages of notes. It was crazy, it changed my life forever. I can guarantee you we're leveling up and making it even better this year. I personally spent over $100,000 to make sure that this is the best event you've ever been to virtually. Now as good as it's gonna be, 8% 2021 live in Dallas is gonna be even better, okay. So the reason we started this is I wanted to have a lasting impact on agents all around the world. We've had agents register for this in the UK, in the Philippines, in Mexico, Puerto Rico, China, Australia, et cetera, et cetera and tons of agents in Canada as well. I can tell you that this is going to make a massive difference. We had unbelievable speakers and I want for this to change the game in your business. I care about you, I wanna see you succeed, I wanna see you win and we're doing this for free because we wanna help every insurance agent in the world. That's the theme, that's the why, that's the message, that's the mission. Question is, what's your mission, right? What is your mission in your business, in your life? What kind of legacy are you going to leave because I'm telling you, as amazing as this is, we are not stopping it, we aren't anywhere close to where all this will be, okay. So thank you for being a part of this. The number two virtual right now, March 5th and 6th, okay, it's gonna be amazing. Now we've got an unbelievable speaker lineup. I'm talking legendary speakers like Mr. Brian Tracy, who's had an unbelievable, I'm excited to interview him, because he's had an unbelievable, unbelievable impact on my personal life, my favorite sales book that I read as a kid was The Art of Closing the Cell by Brian Tracy. Unbelievable, right? Also, one of the best motivational speakers of all time, he also authored the speech in the Georgia Dome in front of 80,000 people called if you don't quit, you can't fail, right? It was called, which is one of my favorite, it ties in so well to that theme because it's one of my favorite titles I've ever heard, right? And that is that it's not over until I win. And the individual that spoke that message to 80,000 is gonna be alive with 10,000 the next couple of days. And his name is Mr. Les Brown, unbelievable motivational speaker. And I'm telling you, the dude is going to drop it like it's hot, don't miss it, okay, don't miss it. Also, Mr. Tom Hagna, insurance industry legend and influencer talking about life insurance and annuities and changing the game in your business, right? We've got amazing speakers, we've got another two dozen industry influencers. I've hand selected six, seven, and eight figure massive names who are crushing it, flat out killing it in the insurance business and they're gonna be spending two days with you. Okay, now, again, as great as this is gonna be, it's even better when we get in a room together when I shake your hand, when we give each other a hug and when you get impacted, there's something about getting in a room like going to April's Nation 2021 in Dallas at the Statler July 23rd and 24th, go to Aprilnation.com while we're on this to make sure you take advantage of your tickets for this year. Now, I got several announcements before we introduce our first speaker. I got several announcements I'm gonna go through right now. First, we are going to have special deals that you can take advantage of while you're on this virtual event. The link is kodiaskins.com forward slash deals. Kodiaskins.com forward slash deals, the E-A-L-S. I'm gonna release two deals right now. Okay, the first one is a private four week mentorship program with me. Where over four weeks I'm gonna impact and change your life for only $88, okay? That's the C-A deal. Now, the first 8% deal, okay? Cause we're gonna have three C-A deals and three 8% deals. The first C-A, the first 8% deal is VIP BOGO, two VIP tickets where you get a VIP seat to go to the VIP party. You get to be a part of 8% Nation Live in Dallas. Two VIP tickets for the cost of one BOGO to 8% Nation Live 2021, okay? Now, you can go to kodiaskins.com forward slash deals, take advantage of those deals right now also to see what other deals are available for you while you are on this. Those deals are only active and available while you are with me for the next two days. Okay, now also, outside of just the deals that you're going to wanna take advantage of, we're also gonna do some crazy, insane attention-getting something we've never done, but we're gonna try something new called flash sales. So when you hear this siren, that's when you want to make sure that you are ready. You're prepared because these flash sales, okay, here's how it's gonna work, okay? Pay attention, you're gonna wanna hear this. We're only gonna do a few flash sales during the whole conference, okay? And what that means is they're only gonna last for, you're gonna hear that siren. They're only gonna last for three minutes. It's an insane crazy deal that is better than any deal we've ever released and it's not even close. It's ridiculous, it's gonna get your attention and you're gonna wanna take action now, guaranteed. Okay, now, it's also, not only is it only gonna last for three minutes, but it's only gonna be available to a select so many people during those three minutes and it's gone, it vanishes forever, okay? So when you hear that siren, you wanna stop and you wanna take action now. I'm telling you, these flash sales are gonna be fun, they're gonna be unbelievable, they're gonna be insane, they're gonna be crazy. They got my attention and I know they're going to get yours. Also, okay, also, for those that are here and who's on thinking, okay, dude, I want to get and win some random giveaways. I wanna win some free stuff during the next two days, okay, there's some opportunity for four to five people to win some free stuff during this event. We're also gonna be doing, in addition to those four or five people, we're gonna be doing live trivia through the whole event and giving away some free stuff in chat. Now, we're gonna be looking for, here's what we're looking for, here's the qualifications. Okay, write this down, take some notes with me, okay? What we're looking for is we're looking for individuals that have the most watch time. Who's on the whole time? Who got started when the pre-show started an hour early and who stayed on the whole two days? Most watch time. Second, most engaged. Who's the most engaged in what's going on, okay? Third, who's most active in chat? Are you active in chat? Are you responding when the speakers are talking? For example, I'm gonna go ahead and see who's most active in chat right now and I ask you a question, where are you watching this from? I want you to stop and I want you to flood chat with the city and the state or the country of where you are representing during this virtual conference. I'll start, we're here in Springfield, Missouri, live in our studio here at the CA headquarters. Okay, now I want you to throw in where you're from. Okay, amazing. Wow, tons and tons of feedback, okay? I love it. Tons of Florida, tons of Texas, California. We've got some outside the country, unbelievable, okay? Unbelievable, most active in chat. Okay, we'll see if that's you. Okay, also, who invites the most people and sends this out and shares this the most on social and gets the most people into this that aren't currently in it for free, okay? Who invites the most? Who shares this out on social? I want you to tag me on Instagram, okay? At Cody.askins, okay? I want you to tag me on Facebook, send us a picture of what you're doing, how your setup looks, while you're watching on our Facebook at Codyaskins. Okay, now, for those that are joining, here's what I want you to do, okay? I want you to show up early. I want you to stay the whole time. I want you to take notes. And here's the guarantee from me to you. If you do these things, when you do these things, life is going to change. Life is gonna get really good, okay? You have greatness inside of you and these speakers are about to bring it out, okay? So before I get to our first speaker, who's ready? Who's excited? And who's ready to dominate 2021, okay? Welcome to 8% Virtual 2021. I'm excited to spend a couple of days with you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being here. Now, don't forget about Codyaskins.com forward slash deals, the flash sales and the random giveaways. Now, it's time to introduce our first speaker, who is a marketing legend in this space, okay? Marketing legend. He just finished his first book that he's about to be releasing. I've had the privilege of partnering with this individual over the last two years. I've known him for the last several years and I'm telling you, he is the best marketer. Stay with me. He's the best marketer in the insurance industry, period, bar none. And I'll tell you a secret. It's not even close, okay? So get ready for the best market the interest industry's ever seen. And my business partner of secure agent marketing, bring a thunderous virtual applause, get ready, take some notes, soak it in. And if you win, you apply what he's about to teach you. Life's gonna get really good. Please welcome our first virtual speaker, the marketing legend, my good buddy, friend, and business partner, Landon McCarter. Welcome in. Welcome 8% virtual. I'm really, really, really excited to be with you guys to hang out, do a little education. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Landon McCarter. I am Codyaskins business partner. Tim and I own Secure Agent Marketing together. Secure Agent Marketing is a full service digital marketing agency that really specializes in insurance, you know, lead development, marketing, digital marketing, all of the above. I've been honored and blessed to be kind of able to sort of turn what Secure Agent Leads was into Secure Agent Leads, along with Secure Agent Marketing. With between Secure Agent Leads and Secure Agent Marketing, we spend about a million dollars a month of digital marketing spend on Instagram, YouTube, Google, YouTube, these digital products to generate insurance, digital marketing campaigns, along with insurance, digital marketing, lead development, et cetera. So what I'm gonna do today is really break out what I feel like is a key component of what I've learned spending a million dollars a month. And that would be something along the lines of just synergizing all of your marketing efforts to one particular goal. So what I'm gonna do today is I'm really gonna try and teach you guys a little bit on how this thing should look so that you're able to really synergize all of your marketing efforts, whatever you're doing, and then use all of your different marketing efforts to get one specific strategy with one specific goal at the end of this whole deal. And I'm gonna kind of break out these pieces. So without further ado, I'm just gonna get into it. So what I'm gonna talk on first is, you know, one of the biggest mistakes that I see our industry making is creating independent and disjointed marketing strategies that may work, but could be so much better by just connecting them with one overarching strategy, synergizing the pieces. So I'm gonna just jump right into my first example. And that is just, you know, overall, you've got, you know, 95% of marketing budgets are spent on some form and mix of direct mail marketing, seminar marketing, digital lead development, some traditional media, grassroots effort, telemarketed leads, but this is where really most of our budgets are spent in our particular industry. And those are all great places to spend your money, depending on the market, depending on the county, you know, depending on where you're at, there's different little niches and ways there isn't one size fits all with the marketing game. I know some clients that spend, you know, $150,000 a year on traditional TV ads and kill it. I know some people that don't touch TV ads and do everything with direct mail. I know some people that are all in with digital. I know some people that, you know, there's just not one size fits all. But one of the things that I've been blessed with is be able to work with really some of the biggest names in the insurance industry. And because I'm able to work with these individuals, I'm able to understand what they're doing and really connect the dots. What I'm gonna try to do is I'm gonna try to take like what I see across the industry with working with all these really large players in the industry and try and break it down into like a actual strategy that you can implement on your own, okay? So let me show you an example of what I feel is a low hanging fruit way to synergize your an existing marketing project with a digital component to just squeeze out value and save some money, okay? So here's an example. Let's just say that you're doing a direct mail drop. Let's just use Medicare, for instance. There's a particular, you know, area you wanna do a turning 65, let's just say mail drop, for instance, okay? You're gonna put together that mail drop and you're gonna pick together, let's just call it 10,000 pieces. You're gonna drop that in general area with the people that birthdays fall in line with who you wanna target and then you're gonna look for that response. That response is, you know, getting less and less as we continue to go into this traditional media as kind of like lacking compared to what it used to be. Now direct mail drops, you know, you're lucky if you get like a 2% return, like you're lucky if you get a 2% return. A lot of direct mail drops are under 1% return now and starting to get to the point where it's somewhat, you know, unsustainable. Now there's some areas that are just killing it but the problem with direct mail, especially with like turning 65 as an example is is if three other companies just dropped the same list you did with people turning 65 in that area, then you're the third piece of mail that that person got in their mailbox. It's just you're in a noisy space. So one of the things that you can do that to synergize your marketing efforts to get more return investment off the existing spend is something super easy, right? So just put a URL on that direct mail drop that is sent, right? That URL will take them to one of the pages of your website that is built to educate the prospect regarding what the purpose of the direct mail was in the first place. So, you know, we as consumers are being conditioned to educate ourselves before we make purchasing decisions because we have all these educational tools at our fingertips, you will get a percentage of those individuals that are gonna go to that URL to look for further information. If that website page has a video of you talking three, five minutes educating some content that extrapolates the purpose of that direct mail in the first place out a little bit and, you know, a lead form to try and capture a potential first name, last name, email address, phone number, birth date, you know, county that they're in, whatever that is, then you will, you're already paying to reach those 10,000 people that you direct mail. There will be a percentage of those individuals that go to that URL for more information. And if you have a phone number on that site as well, you will get calls and you will get, you know, online leads as for free, basically. So you're already paying to reach the audience. Why not give the people what they want, which is a point of education to then do further education on their actual, like purpose before they take action. Some people will just take action on that direct mail and that's fantastic, but there's gonna be a percentage of individuals that are gonna want more research, okay? So give them that research. That's just, you know, how you synergize with marketing. That's a simple, simple example, right? So, you know, a lot of times what I feel like people do is they end up having, you know, they do a direct mail drop, maybe one or two or five or 10, who knows? So it's kind of what I feel like this year. Then I'm gonna maybe get into some seminars maybe. And I think I'm gonna do five this year, but I could do two, but I could go 10, you know, who knows exactly, but I'm gonna have, you know, I'm gonna do seminars this year, you know, or I'm gonna do some traditional media and get some billboards and all of that, which is all fantastic. These are all good things. Or I need, I know I need to do a blog. So I need a blog or I'm gonna put together like a YouTube content and educate with video. Cause I know that this guy, Cody Askins, he's telling me to do video content, and so what happens is it becomes this overwhelming mess of task lists of things to do. And if you don't really see quick results or quick bumps in all this stuff, you're just gonna go back to your old ways, which is just like working your referrals, doing whatever you did before to get some initial success. But what I'm trying to do is elevate to where you can get a systematic, controllable, scalable marketing system to be able to control lead flow, to then be able to hire and grow your agency based on your controllable lead flow. That's what all the big guys are doing, that those that have figured this out are the ones that are the bigger companies, I can assure you, because that's what they, you know, that's one of the reasons they're big is because they've understood how much it costs to get a lead, how much that lead is gonna get closed on a percentage basis, what's their cost per acquisition, et cetera. So let's keep going. Okay, so here's a few more common mistakes that I see. Okay, so let's just say you're doing seminar marketing. Okay, do you feel like people are sitting in your seminar and webinar and not checking out your website under their table on your phone? You're silly if you think that people aren't, either before they show up to your seminar or while they're sitting in your seminar or after they went to your seminar, if you think they're not Googling you to try and figure out who you are, potentially read some reviews, et cetera, you're fooling yourself. A large percentage of these individuals are going to check you out online. They might check you out online after they make a purchase decision. I'm not saying that this is a required step for people to buy from you, but I'm telling you that we're in the days of educational selling and if people work with the people that educate them and if your website sources the foundational hub of your constant information and you're sitting in the seminar and you're educating them on the seminar and all of a sudden you're like, they're like, oh my gosh, this guy's really like going to great lengths to educate me and he's sitting here at front teaching me like you get so much more buy-in with people because I believe the psychology behind that personally, I've been thinking about this a lot. We're conditioned from the time we were kids to respect the person at the front of the room that's teaching us this thing. Whatever that is, there's this like sense of, you know what, you're teaching me, I want to listen to you, right? And because we are able to, this is just conditioned to us as humans, if we can put ourselves in that position of education, you just get first crack at that business, right? Another example is any traditional media that you buy will have a URL, you know, are you educating them when they check you out? So like if you look at TV or radio ads, well, more TV than anything, my place a lot of TV for clients and what's gonna happen is is you're gonna have a phone number on the TV ad, you're also gonna have a website on that TV ad. When people go to your site, you will see a spike, you know a lot like this spike that I forgot to point out in my previous slide, this, how do I get here? I can't do that. How about this? This, oh, I can't do that either. The little graph on there is the Google Analytics account. Once we do that direct mail drop, you'll see this spike of online conversions after you do your direct mail. It's the same thing with TV, right? So what'll happen is, is you'll put your URL on the TV ad or whatever and then people will be on their phone or laptop or tablet sitting on a couch, like checking you out while they're looking at your commercial, I can assure you that 32nd spot and that one minute spot is gonna get attention and that's gonna create your brand but there's gonna be some follow up. They have to go somewhere, they're gonna go somewhere on a certain percentage of basis to look you up and check you out and see what you got going on, right? So you just need to understand that that's happening. Now, when you're paying to reach all these people, not everybody that's going to your website is ready to buy, okay? Are you capturing IP addresses and remarketing to them on YouTube, Google, Instagram and Facebook or building a warm audience? What that means is, is that all those tools that I just laid out have the ability to capture the device, the cell phone, the mobile device, the tablet, the computer, the desktop, whatever it is that that individual used to go to your website to do research on you, you can capture that IP address and remarket them on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Google, et cetera. So what can happen is you're building what's called a warm audience. So someone is more likely to do business with you. If you're doing TV ads, they went to your site, they checked you out, you got the email address, then you show them a Facebook ad, then they're going to take action on that. That's called building a brand, right? Now, you will be able to get leads that way. But if you're not capturing IP addresses with remarketing or called like remarketing pixels, Google has one, Facebook has one. They're a tool that's built to put on your website to then capture the IP addresses to then choose that as an audience later to remarket to them. You're missing out on opportunity. These are warm audiences that have already been touched by you one time. They're more likely to convert the next time, right? If that makes sense. So another thing that I see people do is are you using Facebook only to develop leads? Are you developing leads with your own brand, creating a warm audience and then creating lookalikes and maximizing that budget? I know a lot of people that buy Facebook leads from lead vendors. So Secure Agent Leads is a Facebook lead vendor. If you have a too small of a budget to really break off a marketing campaign, you can just buy leads. But a better way to do it is to build out a campaign on Facebook that's under your brand. That's using your brand to reach the audience to get the lead out of that audience, especially if you're trying to build an audience in a local area. Because we're paying Facebook for impressions. We're also trying to get leads that are coming out of it. But like, wouldn't it make sense to reach the 10,000 people that it takes to reach to get X amount of leads from that system? Wouldn't it make sense to reach them with your brand instead of the Facebook lead vendors, random brand that they've created and haven't given you any single bit of... Like, if you work with a lead vendor, they're running those campaigns from their Facebook pages and then giving you the leads. Why not run the campaign under your own Facebook page and get your own leads for cheaper, but also the fact that you're building this name recognition in the local market with your particular brand to get the lead is better anyways. And you're gonna get messages that are gonna come from that page because if you're paying to reach thousands of people, if you have a healthy enough budget, you're gonna get more than just the leads that come out of that particular lead campaign. You're gonna get direct messages and all things like that, right? So that will also keep you from getting your ad account disabled a lot of times. So I don't wanna get too far into this because this was kind of a little bit of a rabbit trail and part of a bigger discussion. But in the insurance industry, Facebook is really cracking down on particular audiences being not misled because they're not misled, but the way that Facebook's algorithm is like built is if you have to have positive interactions for every negative interaction that you get on your site. Well, since we're working with an older senior market typically, they don't exactly know how to use Facebook as well. And they're gonna flag ads and think it's misleading and it's just some of the, you guys have seen some of the comments on your Facebook ads just be like trash bins. It just doesn't even make sense what some of these people are saying. But that doesn't matter to Facebook's algorithm. They're going to flag you, right? So if you're running this from your brand and putting positive information into the algorithm as well as using their platform to pull leads out of, you're less likely to get your ad account flag disabled. So, you know, I also see a lot of times people have like independent digital strategies in play with no real synergies. Like as an example, organic social media, you know, they have their social media managers sending posts about the birthdays in the office. Nobody cares about the person's staff member's birthday. Like they may care a minute, but like they're gonna care very little compared to the educational content you can get on how to lower your car insurance premium every single quarter. If you're trying to build out a PNC sort of audience that's looking to you as a thought leader in the space if that makes sense, right? So having like, for instance, like maybe a video campaign or an email campaign or a texting campaign, right? You have all these different things that you're trying to actually do digitally because you think you need to do but they're not connected into one particular strategy. So what I'm gonna do is kind of show you what this should look like so that you're able to exactly see, you know, what I'm talking about, all right? So the first thing you need to do is understand, okay, when are my direct mail drops? When are my seminars? What is my content schedule? Now, this content schedule is important because this is gonna be all the pieces to the puzzle with one particular goal in mind which is to generate leads by educating your particular prospects and establishing your thought leadership in the space, okay? So you're gonna create four pieces of anchor content. You do that by just creating one a week. It's it, right? One a month, that means four videos, okay? So go on YouTube, shoot four videos, shoot on your cell phone, do whatever it takes to get yourself on video. It's not hard to stand up a YouTube channel. Take your best email, I'm sorry, your best video of those four and email it to your database, your customers, et cetera, educate them, right? And then host those videos on your website, host those videos on your YouTube channel, right? And then bite size out the content for social. So once you host that video on your website, it's easy, the easiest thing to do is like write a blog, a worded blog around that so that you have like a blog post and a video on that same page. So that way you're able to have a video and a blog post. So that way you have two really valuable social posts that you can make on Facebook and then two on Instagram. So you can take your video link and share it with a little blurb. You can take your blog post and share it with a little blurb. You can take your, and then do that same thing on Instagram. So that you just created four like social posts with one piece of content. You see what I'm saying? You created one video and wrote one blog and created four pieces of content, right? Once you kind of understand how to get that schedule, you'll start to see how it goes. Cody and I shoot for 60 pieces of content a day, including all of our stories and TikToks and everything that we do, right? We do that because we've seen the power of content marketing and what it means. We rarely, like the value of content marketing for us is paramount. Like we are trying to be the ones that are educating the market, not because we only want to take business from the market. It's no, it's like people work with the people that educate them. If we can truly, we are in a unique position because of our purview of all the different clients that we work with and all across the country. We have the opportunity to bring some value to a lot of agents that are on their own island in Mississippi or whatever. So we are in a unique position to be able to educate the market. By educating the market, people trust us, by trusting us to do business with us, by doing business as we grow and scale. It's that simple, okay? The next thing you wanna do is figure out your goals, right? What's your actual goal of what we're trying to accomplish with our budget? Some goals that are popular are return on ad spend, which is really just a percentage dollar for every dollar you spend on digital. So if I spend $1 on Facebook and get $4 back in premium, that means that I've got a four to one return on ad spend, a ROAS or whatever is the number that it's called. I like that number for a lot of reasons. I can't get into the details because I don't have it on the time now. If you want more information on this, feel free to reach out to us through our website or whatever. But the ROAS is important to understand. Another thing that I find a lot of people do is they have particular lead goals from a volume standpoint. So look, I've got three LOA agents. I've got three in-house agents. I need about 100 leads a week. Let's use digital marketing to then not only generate those leads, but also have a sustainable amount of lead flow that's coming in the doors, right? So a lead goal is a good number. Cost per acquisition is another good number. What's it costing me to earn a customer? The reason I like to check return on ad spend, lead goal and cost per acquisition is because any three of those numbers by themselves don't tell you as much as all three. Meaning return on ad spend, if I get a guaranteed issue product or like a really high premium product, return on ad spend accounts for that. Cost per acquisition doesn't, lead goal doesn't. It costs the same to get a lead, typically for a big premium or a guaranteed issue. The cost per acquisition is equalized as well. Sure, I'd pay 250 bucks all day long for a really high premium product, right? Cost per acquisition, but I wouldn't for a guaranteed issue product, right? So return on ad spend sort of levels all that out. Once you kind of understand the content strategy and how to use like understand why you're trying to create content, why you're trying to educate the prospect to then do business with you, then you just need to understand what portion do I wanna dedicate to our, what portion of our marketing budget do I wanna dedicate to I Need Leads Now versus investing in long-term strategies such as content marketing. So what I recommend doing is really finding a happy medium. If you're a new agent, you really seem to be getting lead flow, right? If you're an established agent, you have more money than time. You wanna start to get better quality leads. You do that by content marketing, by building out a big educational focused website that's built to educate and then convert, right? There's different needs for different folks and different strokes from different phases of business, right? It just depends on where you're at and what your needs are and that's all unique. I've tried to create, I would say 25,000 a year is a really like healthy budget in general to start. That's like a good number. If you can allocate 25,000 a year for marketing, you will learn what you need to do. You'll learn what you need to learn your first, that first year of spending that money. You'll also get a return on investment like whether it's one, two, three or four. If you're doing it the right, you shouldn't be losing money on your 25 grand investment, all right? So here's a general timeline of what I like to kind of walk people through in terms of how to actually execute this just to give you a good idea of understanding of like, you know, of all the clients that we work with. This is like what we try to set the expectation. So I want you to take this expectation as well and try and run with it, right? So you got, I got six months on the board. First month is really understanding, onboarding, getting the assets together, starting to figure out what we have. Do we have a website that we can build on? Let's talk targets, let's talk expectations. Let's talk key performance indicators. Let's define all the monthly work that needs to be taken place. Is it four pieces of content? Is that a healthy content scheduled? Do you want to do eight pieces of content? Why would you want to do eight versus four? All those different types of, you know, sort of discussions are when you have an in month one. You're also going to look at analytics, make sure analytics are set up so we can track everything and then figure out what's already scheduled, right? So we can start to work around what's already scheduled from a webinar standpoint, from a direct mail standpoint, whatever that is from a seminar standpoint, okay? Then on month two, you're going to want to develop assets. This is when we're going to really start to develop a lot of the pieces of the puzzle. The content, the video, the website, you know, the really just, you know, build out the pieces of the puzzle that we're going to use to execute the marketing budget. Now, if you're spending money on month one, you're obviously going to be developing assets month one as well and like paid social, for instance, but like I'm just trying to kind of give you a general timeline. This isn't like at one size fits all, okay? Once we have the assets developed and we understand the budget and we're executing and we're kind of like hitting the ground running, you're really going to want to set benchmarks that you, that we want to hit because we were starting to see the early stages of these numbers. We're starting to see things come in. We're starting to see benchmarks. Okay, we're getting leads. They're $5.50 a lead for a life insurance lead. That's fantastic. We're all celebrating, but I can't contact any of these to save my life. Well, let's increase the cost of lead and increase the buyer intent by adding qualifying questions into our funnel. Those are the types of things where you're starting to like set benchmarks and getting to the month four where you're starting to refine this process, refine what we're doing and get to the point where we are starting to see some wins that are not necessarily like the golden goose, but like are starting to show us promise, et cetera. Now, once you have month five and six, you know, in general, you're looking at like optimizing what the difference between optimizing and refining in my opinion is refining is really still trying to figure out like validity of this market, this program, this, you know, is this going to work for what I'm trying to accomplish? And optimizing is it's working. Let's make this work better and get ready to scale, which is the month six, right? So you really want to get to the point where, wow, we did this campaign. We've refined it. We've optimized it to the point where we know we're getting $14 leads. We're able to get in touch with, like I just did a video today with a, with an OEP like campaign that's a messenger campaign on Facebook for the under 65 health that just got released who's having new open enrollment period now for the next three months. So we have a messenger campaign that's getting like $14 leads. He's getting into like 30% of those are turning into like actual quotable opportunities. And he's like crushing it, right? He's writing tons of business. He's killing it, right? So he's getting ready to triple down on the budget or he is already made the decision to triple down on the budget because he has the capacity to take three times the leads. But when we started the project, we didn't say you need $9,000 a month to hit the lead volume that he wants. Now we started that $100 a day refined, optimized, got to where we needed to go. And then we got to $9,000 because he knows that it was already proven out at three. And the way the digital works is is you can really understand the sort of the scope of what's available by a term that's called impression share. So a lot of this stuff is like relatively like complex. I'm trying to get this stuff condensed in 25 minutes which is not the easiest thing to do. So I'm sorry if I went too fast, but really this is like the core of what I feel like you need to be focused on to hit your ultimate goal which is really this graph tells a lot, okay? So referrals are going to always go up into the right because you're getting more business, you're getting more referrals, et cetera. Leads and paid tools, those are your short-term strategies that are gonna be even. But if you cut that leads budget, your leads go to zero. Long-term marketing and content marketing, what you're investing now today in content to educate, you may get a lead next month from the blog post you wrote this month and you may get one in three months from the blog post you wrote three months ago, but like it's just this engine that's moving it's built to educate. So that's what you're trying to accomplish with this whole marketing budget with especially digital, if that makes sense. So guys, I know that was quick, okay? I just finished my book that's called Find Your Marketer, what I learned spending a million dollars a month on digital marketing. This, it'll be ready for purchase in a couple of weeks where I extrapolate all this out to in great depth. It's like a 25,000 word book, easy enough to read like an afternoon and just get your highlighter out. Also just go to our website for more information if you want, I talk a lot about this or our YouTube channel. You guys can get lost in the content that we've created. I've got good grief, hundreds of videos talking about this stuff. So I really, really, truly want you guys to be successful whether it's working with us or not. These are the principles that you need to have in place in your business, whether you're working with creative marketing or bringing in house or you've got your own guy. If they're not saying things like this, if this isn't the language that's coming out of their mouth and then you haven't found your marketer yet, right? So you don't have synergized strategies. You have one marketing budget kinda but you just got all the pieces. You don't quite know how it fits together. So I really hope that I was able to kind of provide some insight to help you guys be successful in your marketing endeavors as we move forward in this business. I really do appreciate Cody. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to come to the audience and kind of educate as much as I can. Hope you guys found some value in today and we'll see you guys on the next one. All right, who just finished that and you're like, dude, I wanna be a marketing legend too, man. That's how you find your marketer. That's how you also become a marketing legend in your space. You can do some massive things and change your business. So that eventually you say, dude, I don't even recognize it anymore because it's doing so well, okay? Awesome job, Landon. Let's give my virtual round of applause. Amazing job, okay? Also, okay, before we go to our next speaker, I want to encourage you to go to SecureAgeAndMarketing.com to check out all the different services that we offer when it comes to marketing and leads for the insurance space. We dominate everyone else, Gary and Freakin' Teed, okay? Now, I want to spend time with you. Yes, you right now in the Zoom room, I wanna spend time with you in Dallas, live with me at 8%Nation, 20, 21, July 30, 23rd and 24th. Okay, we're gonna put the link in chat. It's 8%Nation.com. I wanna spend time with you. This event, the reason why I love events, okay, is there's a power in events. There's a power of getting in the room, okay? My whole life changed three years ago because I started attending events. And I'm telling you, you have to invest in yourself. You have to show up to go up. If it's meant to be, it's up to me and you gotta go to events. There's a power in events. I wanna challenge you. Events have changed my life. And they're going to change yours, I promise you. Okay, now, time for another new CA deal. Okay, again, kodiaskins.com forward slash deals. Okay, CA as in Kodiaskins LLC, a new deal. We have a new All Access Plan, okay? This is a wild $10,000 of value, okay? For only $9.97. It's an All Access Plan, which comes with the CA sales system. That is my life's work on sales training for individuals and teams called the CA sales system. It's an online video learning university, okay? Comes with CA sales system. The All Access, you get all of it, right? CA sales system, boom. Next, you get a weekly accountability with call with me, where I'm training you and other interest agents every week for a whole year. Boom, you get that as well. And you get to come to one of our boot camps live with me. All Access, all three pieces, 90% off, 10K of value for only $9.97, okay? Go to kodiaskins.com forward slash deals to take advantage of that right now. I wanna help you. I am, I have a gift, okay? Like everybody's got a gift, okay? I've heard Tim's story say this, other people say this, like everybody's got a gift. My gift is taking a complicated sales piece and making it simple, right? One of the things I love doing the most is training sales teams, working with sales people, traveling the country and helping your sales team level up, get motivated, get ideas, challenge them, wake them up and give them content to continue to be better than what they were before. Okay, I can promise you. I get a chance to spend some time with you or your team. I'm gonna leave you in a better spot than when we found each other, okay, guaranteed. Now, I have a question for our team, all right? I wanna see who's been the most active in chat? Who is sharing where their location is, where they're watching from? Okay, who's looking at chat? Who's sitting there thinking, dude, I'm ready. This is amazing. I'm here. I wanna make sure that you stay active because I'm gonna be doing some giveaways in chat and we're watching you whether you believe it or not. We are watching you, okay? Now, time to bring out the second speaker. This specific individual I saw at 10X2 speak on Grant Cardone stage to 10,000, right? Like we got 10,000 virtual. He spoke to 10,000 live in person, legend, okay? Unbelievable. He's been influencing my life a huge help and I'm excited to bring out America's coach, the super coach, Coach Michael Burt, bring him in. Let's go, coach. Excited to hear from you, buddy. Thank you for being here. I spent over a decade of my life as a championship basketball coach, learning the psychology of inter-engineering people to perform at the highest levels, specializing in activating the prey drive, and instinctual ability in each person to find, capture, and kill prey, to go out and see something either optically with the eyes or mentally with the mind and have the fortitude, the persistence, and the intensity to go get it. Now over the last 12 to 13 years, all I've been doing is activating this prey drive in individuals and businesses around the world, building high prey drive cultures where people are producing at the highest possible frequencies. You have a prey drive. You have another gear. You can find that gear and do something you've never done before. I'm Coach Michael Burt, and I'm here to activate your drive. Hey, I'm Coach Michael Burt, the super coach, and I'm so excited to be with you on this virtual summit for 8%. I believe that to get an 8%, you gotta have a high prey drive. You've got to learn to use negative emotions as positive reinforcers. And in this session today, kind of branded around the theme of you can't fail if you don't quit, I'm gonna help you overcome a cycle that people have, right? Which is start with good intention, they fail to follow through, and then they experience guilt. I have been coaching people for 28 years, and I have coached some of the top people in the world. I've coached in the prison system to rehabilitate offenders. I've coached kids for 10 years to build championship programs. I've coached top insurance people that are earning four million a year. I've coached a person who's trying to get one deal, one policy. And I have seen everything you could see. What I have come to learn over the last 28 years of coaching people is that deep within you is a drive. For the purposes of this presentation, we're gonna refer to that as prey drive. And it is a new book that I'm writing. That's my 17th book that'll be out in 2022 called Flip the Switch. How do you activate the prey drive in you and your people? How do you activate the prey drive in you and your team? The reason this is important is because once your prey drive is activated, right? Once you have this internal drive activated, you're not gonna quit. Your quitting is not gonna be an option. You're gonna have some mindsets that I teach every day, which is it's gonna be a fight, but that government we're gonna find a way to win, right? There is no losing, there's only learning. We go to bed tired, we wake up hungry. It all goes to zero at midnight. There comes a time when winter asks what you did all spring and summer, right? This is the mindset of a high prey drive person. So where could that prey drive have gone in your life? Well, it could be dormant. It could be latent. It could be undeveloped. Maybe you've talked about finding another gear, but you've never had a coach to push and challenge you. Maybe you've never even thought about your potential. It shocks me how many Americans have never even been interested in their potential. Never been interested in what they could play at the next level. Maybe not knowing what's on the other side of success to get to. So in today's presentation, I'm gonna walk you through really how to activate this prey drive in you and more importantly, how to use fear, anger, disappointment, jealousy, comparison, rejection. How do you use negative emotions to propel you? Because I would tell you as a coach, these are actually your friend. These are a good thing, not a bad thing. They help you. They seem to hurt you in the short term, but they are really the fuel that you need to perform at a higher level because most people operate in an average or normal capacity going on about life until they have some conflict. And conflict is where real emotion comes from. So I would tell you conflict is actually necessary for your expansion. It is an integral part to you playing at a higher frequency. It is absolutely important for you. And if you do something big, you're going to have conflict. You're gonna have opposition. It's a pretty good indicator. You're not doing anything big if you don't have any opposition, if you don't have any conflict in life. So what is prey drive? Prey drive is an instinct. To see something with the eyes or in the mind and have the persistence and intensity to pursue it. You see, when you quit, you don't have any persistence. You don't have any resilience. You don't have any fight in you. Why don't you have a fight? Maybe what you're going after is not important enough. Maybe it's not big enough. Maybe it's not interesting enough. Maybe it's not appealing enough. Maybe you've got a series of starts and stops in your life. Maybe you start with good intention. You fail to follow through. You experience guilt over and over and over. Prey drive in an animal is the ability to stalk, capture and kill prey. Achita has a 80% closing ratio. It pursues something. It sees it. That's stalking it. It pursues it. It kills it, right? In the sales world, you have a thought. You have an idea. You have a follow-up. You have a referral partner. You have an idea that you can help somebody. Boom, you wake up and like, I can help them. But it takes initiative to initiate, to disarm, to locate a problem, to offer a compelling solution, to go seven touches, to lock into something for a long cycle of time, right? It takes a persistence and an intensity. So I want you to think of prey drive as there's three components to it. There's an activation of it. Many times it's activated by some external factor. Fear activates a prey drive, right? Fear of losing something. Fear of losing status, money, power, fear of going back to who you used to be. Fear of not having anything. That activates something inside of you to do something, to take an action, to generate money, to make a sale, right? Environment activates prey drive. Creating an environment of exchange and energy and expectation creates a high prey drive, right? Exposure to something bigger creates a high prey drive. Like you see something, like you coming to this virtual conference, you're around big-time people performing at big-time levels, right? And it inspires you, it inspires you to want to be a professional. Embarrassment can activate prey drive. Like you know you should be playing at a bigger level. You know there's a bigger game for you. You know there's a deeper potential for you. So I want you to think of prey drive in three components. There's an activation to it, typically by an external factor, right? Embarrassment, environment, exposure, fear of loss, a competition. Is it an activator or a prey drive? It's something that gets you going, that gets you excited, that gets you motivated and you want to take an action. But it's of no value if you start and quit. So you don't have part two and part three. You don't have persistence, which I consider a long obedience in the same direction. And you don't have an intensity. And intensity is ferocity of attack. It's energy. It's movement. It's circulation. It's, I am attacking my prey. Now if you're out there and you're watching this today, I've got a PowerPoint slide that goes with this presentation that I would be happy to send to you. I just want you to text this phone number 678-506-7543. 7543, that's 678-506-7543. And to get it, you need to text this code, all capitals together, get MP, get MP as in monster producer. And I will send you the PowerPoint so you can see what I'm working through here. Now remember it's 678-506-7543, text code get MP as in monster producer, all together. Now, what if I told you and the animal that the reward is not capturing the prey? The reward is actually pursuing the prey. You see in this presentation, I talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you remember in school, we studied Maslow, who had this theory that we had five needs, physiological needs, air, water, food, shelter, sleep. Then we had safety needs. We had to feel like we were safe. Then we had love and belonging needs, friendship, intimacy, family, sense of connection, esteem, respect, self-esteem, status, recognition. Self-actualization is actually the highest form of manifestation. It is where you are self-actualizing your deepest human potential, which is why you should pursue your potential. Work the muscle, go the extra mile. People ask me all the time, why do you push so hard? Is it for the money? No, the money's good. That's a byproduct of value creation, but that's not why I do it. The reason I do it is because I am interested in my potential. I'm interested in taking my talent and bringing my talent to the world. I'm interested in the exchange of distributing my talent to the world and the world distributing back love, affirmation, reputation, back to me. The exchange there, that is what I love doing, which is why I love speaking, which is why I love interacting, which is why I love engaging. Because helping, using your talent to help another person solve their problem is the ultimate exchange. Your past helps them build their future. Your talent solves their problem. That is the exchange that you're looking for. So just remember this, satisfied needs never motivate people, only unsatisfied needs. The enemy of the great life, the extraordinary life is the good life. I got a good house, I got a good job, I got good kids, I got a good wife. It's all good, man, it's all good. So therefore, if you study the motivational theories, we move toward things we want. What happens when we have everything that we want? What happens when we have a good life and a good job and a good everything? What happens when we have what we want? Then we suppress our pre-drive. We become lazy, we become complacent, we quit working the muscle, we quit pursuing the potential. Right now I'm coaching an 81-year-old insurance agent, 77-year-old financial advisor, managing $6 billion, a 74-year-old doctor. What do they have, man? They have an interest in their potential. They're still swinging, they're still in the game. They're still exerting force and energy. They're still pushing. And that's what you gotta do, right? And you can't start and stop and start and quit and start and fail. And you can fail, but you can't quit. You can't fail if you don't quit. You just learn and move. So by 8 a.m. every morning, I wanna activate my pre-drive in the body, in the mind, in the heart, and in the spirit. That includes a spiritual piece. That includes a physical piece. That includes an emotional piece. That includes a mental piece. So for me, it's listen to a sermon. It is physically exercise for the body. It is see my family and kids for the heart. And it is watch something on business. These four things activate my pre-drive at a higher frequency. These four things get me ready to go in and pursue the game. These four things get me going. So when I meet with my team, what do I do for my team? Number one thing is I'm trying to activate their pre-drive. Pre-drive is an instinct to see something in pursuit. Pre-drive is an instinct to take an action. Pre-drive is an instinct to reach out to a strategic partner. Pre-drive is an instinct to move to another frequency. Pre-drive is an instinct to follow up and close the deal. Pre-drive is an instinct to say, hey, this sounds good to you. What would stop you from getting started right now? That is pre-drive. So let's talk about, as it relates to this specific thing, pre-drive and emotions. Because when Cody Askins asked me to do this, I thought about things that paralyze people. Fear, disappointment, anger, rejection, lack of focus, jealousy, comparison, these are crippling emotions. I actually have come in my life to appreciate these feelings, right? Fear is an unpleasant emotion created by belief that something's gonna harm me in the future, right? It's a belief that something is gonna harm me in the future. Where did the belief come from? Something in the past. Fear, if used properly, can be the greatest motivator you've ever had. It can motivate you to take large amounts of action. In March of this year, when the pandemic happened, the coaching business was hit incredibly hard as many businesses were. Our business model was built on me speaking, people seeing me, driving leads into the equation. I was primarily a live person, right? I did some virtual stuff, but not at a crazy level. So when this first happened, man, I was afraid. How are we gonna drive business? How are we gonna hit our sales number? What if we have to lay everybody off? And then I made a decision. The decision was to convert that fear into fuel. I'm gonna multiply my effort. I'm going to push and, right? So I used the activator of competition. Now there's a competitor. Now there's an adversary. Now there's an impediment. Now there's something standing in front of me and my destiny. I'm gonna use that with fear and I'm gonna multiply my actions. When in doubt, take an action. When in doubt, multiply. When in doubt, don't add a thing. When in doubt, multiply. So I did eight free things a day for companies. Showcase events, virtual summits. Anything I could do to push to get in front of people. Anything I could do. And I did it for six straight months. Now remember this, we always reap what we sow more than we sowed it for longer than it was sown. Month one, struggle. Month two, struggle. Month three, decent. Month four, month five. Month six, I had the biggest month in my coaching career. And month six, I had the biggest month in my coaching career followed by the next biggest month in my coaching career. Followed up by a January that was incredible, right? Because there's momentum and there's energy, right? And the way you build momentum, which is just energy headed in direction, man, as you take action. So the fear helped me to play at a freakish level. Even my own team came to me and said, man, you're playing at such a freakish level that we've never seen you play at this level. It would have never happened if I didn't have the fear. The fear helped me play at a freakish level. Disappointment in other people helps you to understand how much volume you have to have. When you're only helping just a few people, a few people disappoint you, man, not your whole day out. When you're helping hundreds of thousands of people and a few people disappoint you, don't even bother you because people are gonna disappoint you. They're gonna tell you something. They're not gonna not follow through. If you're just, if everything's relying on one deal and the one deal falls through, man, you're disappointed. Kind of breaks down your little engine. But if you're working on a thousand deals at a time or 10 deals at a time or 20 deals at a time when you have one deal fall through, forget it, man. See, disappointment is because you're not helping enough people. Then you take anger or rejection, right? There is no such thing as rejection. Some will, some won't, so what? Some will want what you have, some will not want what you have, so what? Who cares? You just gotta keep on moving. You gotta keep on moving. There is no such thing as rejection. All you can control is your stimulus. You cannot control your response to the stimulus. All you can do is make the call, right? So what they don't want is, there's seven billion people on planet Earth, folks. There's no shortage of money. There's no shortage of opportunity. There sure is no shortage of people need insurance because they all need insurance. So when you think about it, I wanna teach you in this segment and really leave you with this concept is that these things can paralyze you. When I'm afraid, I contract. When I'm disappointed, I contract. When I'm in anger, I contract. When I feel rejected, I contract. When I have jealousy or comparison, I contract. No, I wanna tell you that when you feel these, these will pull you and suck you into low value activities. They will distract you away from your target. None of these emotions will help you get your targets, if not used correctly. They will actually slow you down because you'll spend all your time talking about the people that disappointed you, the people that screwed you over, the people that you didn't do, people you didn't close, the people that rejected you. Here's still, here's what you need to think. Thank you, thank you. You know, in the Bible, Jesus commissions the disciples to go from city to city and share the message. And he said, you don't need anything. Okay, you don't need any equipment. And here's the exact words. You are the equipment. You got everything you need. You don't need any fancy this or fancy this or CRM systems or, right, you don't have to stay at the nicest hotels. All you need is you and a message. And you step in there and you give that message and if they don't want it, he says, just shake the dust off your sandals and keep on moving. He doesn't say wine, pout, complain, feel sorry for yourself, blame everybody else. Here's what he says. Go where you feel celebrated, not where you feel tolerated. Here's what he said. Just go, just keep moving. Just keep moving, man. And for you, that is the lesson of pray drive. Pray drive is in you. Pray drive is in you. My son is eight months old, man, he will get involved in anything. His desire is to push, to evolve, to touch, to get involved, to see, to be involved in anything. See, you've lost that desire. You wake up in a static position and you don't pursue. You don't pursue your big goals. You don't pursue your big dreams. You don't perceive strategic partnerships. You have a thought, yesterday I had thoughts. I was like, oh, I need to partner with that dude. Boom, text message. Oh, I need to do what this dude, boom, text message. Boom, next thing you know, things are happening. Yes, I'm in, yes, I'm interested, boom. So what does that do? It creates energy and energy. Money is just energy circulating around the world. It's all it is. It's just paper. The people who have the most circulation make the most money. People who have the least circulation make the least money. Money is energy. So for you, my strategy for you is simple in this 8% concept. You can't fail if you don't quit. You need pre-drive to have the activation, to have the persistence, and to have the freaking intensity. And you take the message to the world and if they don't want it, shake the dust off your sandals and just keep on moving. There is no shortage of anything. Money, opportunity, possibility. There's a shortage of courage. There's a shortage of creativity. And there's a shortage of confidence. And that is what a good coach provides for you. So I'm Coach Michael Burt. I'd love to be your coach. Thank you for having me at 8%. If you wanna get a copy of this, full presentation. Text 678-506-7543. 678-506-7543. The text code is getMP, like monster producer. Get it all together. And we're gonna reach out to you and we would love to help you in some way. I believe everybody needs a coach in life. I believe a good coach can change your whole life. And more than anything, a good coach will teach you how to toughen up and fight through adversity and use adversity to accelerate your process. I'm Coach Michael Burt. Thank you for letting me be with you on 8% Nation Virtual Conference. E-Coffee, E-Coffee, E-Coffee, E-Coffee, E-Coffee. Welcome back, hey amazing job coach. The dude is the number one activator of pre-drive. He always activates my pre-drive. And when he speaks, I stop and listen, okay. Awesome job. Thank you for being a part of this coach. Preach each a buddy. Okay now, I wanna bring out a new ticket for 8% Nation 2021 live in Dallas that we've never done before. This is probably for you by the way, okay. There's a lot of agents. We have 10,000 registered. We also have a YouTube channel with over 30,000 YouTube subscribers. And what we've learned is, because 92% of agents fail, a lot of the agents watching are struggling taking the next step in their life, right. They're struggling to change everything but they're committed to the cause. They're not quitting, they're not throwing in the towel. They wanna win and if that's you, let me hear you in chat right now, okay. I had a company in Costa Rica actually call me, I won a trip and they called me the rising star of the insurance industry, okay. And that got my attention. Like that had a lasting impact on my life, right. And it was just, it was an amazing moment for me. I'm about to give you an amazing moment. Maybe you're watching right now and you're like, dude I also am really committed to winning. I don't have a ton of money yet, keyword yet, but I will. I believe in the power of events and Cody I wanna spend more time with you, okay. Some of you, you can hear me, right. You can hear me tapping on you right now, talking to you directly, you can feel it like I always know when speakers are talking to me man and I'm talking to you, okay. Now, and you may agree that you too, given the right opportunities because you're hungry as Les Brown says. You too are a rising star in the insurance industry. You know it because you're the one, but nobody else knows it. So we now at aprecination.com have a, this year only a rising star ticket for you. The person that's watching this, I do it, I'm a rising star. I'm committed, I wanna win. I'm gonna show up and we only have 92 of these tickets 92 of these tickets called Rising Star for only $92. And by buying this, 92% of agents fail and it costs 92 bucks. You are saying I may be buying a $92 ticket, but I'm never gonna be a part of the 92. I'm showing up to 8% because I'm guaranteeing my spot in the 8%. New Rising Star ticket meant for you, my goal and my dream is to help every insurance agent in the world. And even if you don't have a lot of money and you're unable to buy a fire ticket for five grand or a diamond ticket for a couple grand or a premier ticket for a thousand bucks, it doesn't mean I don't wanna help you. Doesn't mean I'm not thinking about you and it doesn't mean that I don't care about you. Right, a lot of people don't need a handout, they're just gonna hand up. And this is me reaching out and giving you a hand up right now. Let's go to www.apricenation.com to take advantage of the Rising Star ticket because you are a Rising Star and you're gonna get a chance to prove it. And I'm inviting you to attend Apricenation 2021 live in Dallas with Eric Thomas and many other amazing speakers that I haven't even mentioned yet for only $92. So it makes you take advantage of that. Also, okay, before we get to, oh, okay, all right. The flash sale buzzer went off. I didn't even know it was gonna go off. Now that means we gotta do a flash sale. Okay, which means the last three minutes right now. Okay, are you ready? What this means is for the next three minutes, those that take action now and pay attention, do something insane, are gonna get to bring their whole team to Apricenation 2021. Here's the flash sale. Okay, here's the first one. Since the team sounded the buzzer, here's the first one. Okay, I loved this. The first flash sale is 10 VIP tickets, which are currently selling at 400 bucks a piece. $4,000 current value, over a $10,000 retail value. 10 VIP tickets to bring your team because when you bring your team, everything's gonna change, all right? And we only got three minutes for a thousand bucks. Okay, so make sure that you take advantage of this specific flash sale right now. You got three minutes to buy 10 VIP tickets for only $1,000, that's insane. And we're gonna limit it to the first three team leads that go grab them. So put in chat right now, did I want it? I'm in, I'm committed. I know the urgency is insane, and I only got three minutes. This is the crazy deal I've ever seen. It's meant for you to take advantage of it right now. Okay, because of this flash sale, right? So now it's time to bring up the next speaker. And again, this flash sale is going for three minutes. You must hit the link and go grab it. 10 tickets, only $1,000, 10 VIPs. I mean, it's all 10 of you are going to the party for only $1,000, that's insane. Okay, never been done before flash sale, limited three minutes. So stop what you're doing and take action now. Okay, the people that are committed and they're paying attention and they wanna win, they will take advantage. This is a crazy freaking flash sale meant for you to take advantage of right now. Okay, next speaker is unbelievable at selling life insurance, gathering referrals. He's a good buddy of mine. He puts out amazing content, right? He's got activity trackers, everything else. He loves converting age leads from hundreds of dollars into tens of thousands of dollars. The dude does an amazing job. I'm not only excited to call him an amazing sales trainer in the insurance business, but I'm also excited to call him a mentor and a friend. And I've enjoyed getting to know the next speaker as I bring him to the virtual stage. Please help me welcome Mr. Pete Fournier. What is up, 8% Nation? It's Pete Fournier coming at you, president of sales for an innovative financial group and owner of Fournier Enterprises, a training, coaching and consulting company for agents and agencies across the country. Just wanna give a huge shout out right off the bat to Cody and Landon for putting this on. Unbelievable job with the advertising, with getting some monster producers and monster motivational speakers to be on this virtual conference. I'm humbled that you asked me to be on here with this lineup. It's exceptional. I can't wait to watch each and every keynote. Now, the moral or the theme of this conference is you can't fail if you never quit. And it's really interesting to think about this concept for a little while because our job as insurance producers, hopefully every single one of you on this call is producing something, right? You're either a life producer, a nudity producer, you're a senior markets expert, an advanced market expert, maybe you're selling Medicare, maybe you're selling auto home commercial like the campers or somebody like that, right? You're doing PNC, life health, whatever. You're selling something with the word insurance in front of it. And if you are, it is specifically your job to fail each and every day. The reason for that is you can't close at 100%. It's literally impossible. Most people won't close in the high 90s or even high 80s percents. I'm pretty sure that the national average is that insurance agents sell 20% or less of their sits, 20% or less. If you have 20 sits a week, you might sell four. Maybe, if you're lucky, if you're average, right? So your job is to fail 80% of the time. Now, with that statistic, how does it make you not wanna quit? How does it make you not wanna go get a nine to five and say, screw it, I just wanna base salary and some good benefits? How does it make you not wanna pick up the phone every day and make two to 300 dials? How does it make you not wanna get into your car tomorrow morning and drive around and knock on doors in the freezing cold? And I'm pretty sure it's freezing cold almost everywhere right now. How does it make you not want to quit this industry with a statistic like that? I think the only job that you can be successful at failing that much is probably playing baseball. If you close two or three out of sales, it's like batting a 200 or a 300 batting average. If you're a 300 batting average, you're going to the Hall of Fame, okay? Right? And if you're a 30% or more closer, you're going to the Hall of Fame of Insurance based on statistics, maybe not based on your personal goals, but based on statistics. The reason that you shouldn't quit based on those statistics is knowing your numbers, okay? I've been doing this personally for about 10 years now. Came up on my 10 year anniversary in the business in December. That's where all this gray hair comes from, right? The insurance business. And I failed on a micro level. I failed on a macro level, whether it be not closing well for my first couple of years. I was a very poor recruiter. I was good at selling the dream. I was very bad at vetting agents and that caused some serious roll up debt liability to hit me that caused me to want to quit pretty much every day for almost 18 months back in 2012 and 2013, but I didn't. Why? Granted, I'm from North Jersey originally. I kind of have thick skin, but that's not really the reason that I didn't quit. I didn't quit or I didn't get pushed out of the business and neither should you when I had almost $50,000 in roll up debt hit me from a bunch of life producers that were doing some malicious stuff. I didn't quit because I knew my numbers. I knew I was confident in myself knowing that every dial I made was worth like six bucks. I want to say at the time, every referral I got in a house was worth like $150. Every sit that I had was worth like 800 bucks, right? Doing the math and making those small failures that are mandatory, that you're doing on a daily and weekly basis and turn that into profit in your head. You have to fail. You have to. That's part of your job, but you can't quit from it. You can't. And the only way you're gonna alleviate yourself from quitting, from getting burnt out, from becoming one of the 92% that Cody always mentions, right, 92% of agents fail. That's why we have the 8% nation. That's why you're here. To alleviate becoming one of the 92% is knowing your numbers, knowing your business, okay? If you know that you can go out and consistently only close 20 to 30%, but make a couple hundred thousand dollars in doing so, you're going to laugh at your micro level failures that you're going through on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis. You just will. You have to look at the end result and you have to be running towards future you, okay? I look back on the first, let's say, two or three years that I was in the business. It was hard. I was working 80, sometimes 90 hours a week sometimes because I wasn't that good when I first started. I didn't perfect my craft. I was getting depressed. I was getting upset. I was getting frustrated. I was like, why aren't these people buying what I want to be selling them? I didn't come out the gate having success, right? So I wanted to quit. I really did. But I didn't do it because I knew other people were having success in this industry. So I interviewed some of the best and most of them told me the same thing. They knew their numbers. They knew if they sat with 10 people that they would close four of them, let's say, for $3,000 in premium and they would make 1500 bucks if they were at a 50% contract, right? They knew the breakdown. So I want you, if you don't know your numbers right now and I mean all of you, like I can randomly pick one of you on this virtual conference, call you after this is over and be like, hey man or hey guy or hey girl, whoever I call, how many sits, how many sales, how many referrals given, how much AOP, right? How many dials did you make to get those sales? And how much was each one of that segment worth to your business? That's the only way you're going to get past wanting to quit on a daily basis. Compete against yourself, okay? It's much easier to pick up the phone and whether you're cold calling, you're calling age leads, you're calling on warm market, you're calling on referrals, you're calling on brand new fresh Facebook leads or brand new fresh direct mail leads. It's way easier to pick up the phone and dial. If you know every time you dial the phone, it doesn't matter if they pick up or not, it's paying you $6. Every time you get into your car and you get out in the cold and you're freezing and you're knocking on the door, each door knock is worth $45. Do the math. If you haven't done it already, sit down after this, after these monster keynotes and monster speakers, go through their presentations. After this whole event is over, if you take nothing away from this talk right now, it's I want you to sit down and actually write up your numbers. Break down your year, your quarter, your month, your week and your day. How many dials does it take to get $5,000 worth of business? Or even better yet, how many dials does it take to get $5,000 worth of commission? Because I don't really care what you submit, right? It's based on what you bring in, what you put into your pocket. It's not based on what you turn into the carrier. It's not even based on issue paid half the time, right? Because all kinds of stuff can happen. It's based on what you take home. So do the math, run the numbers. That's the easiest way that you're gonna create a positive atmosphere for yourself, your business and if you're building a team for your agents. That's one of the first things that whether I'm coaching and training an agent outside of Innovative or within, they need to know their numbers and they need to send them to me on a weekly basis. I wanna see how many leads did you buy, okay? How many dials did you make? How many sets did you have? Because not everybody's gonna sit from your sets, right? How many sets did you have? How many sets did you have from your sets? And how many sales did you make, okay? How much ALP annual life premium? How much annuity business? How much, you know, make it customized to your business, obviously. I'm just talking about life right now. But how much ALP did you write? How many referrals did you get? How many Medicare apps did you write, right? Breaking down the numbers to make sure they're formulating activity and then reverse engineering that to see how much each one of those activities is worth, okay? Your baseball player, that's getting up. I'm not a huge baseball fan. I like the Yankees, but I know there's 162 games I believe in the season, okay? And maybe they get at bat one or two times a game, baseball experts, okay? Out of 10 at bats, they're maybe gonna hit the ball two, three times if they're monsters, right? You think that person's, that batter is ticked off because they missed the ball or they strike out 70% or 80% of the time when someone's paying them $25 million a year to do so, $100 million a year to do so. Take that, reflect on that and adhere that to your business. Think about it, okay? You're never gonna quit if you know that I'm going to fail 70% of the time and make half a million dollars a year doing so. Are you gonna be ticked off? Probably not, unless you have crazy high NATO offer, Cody asking, Brian asking goals, okay? Unless you have Tyler Reese goals, whatever, and you wanna shoot for tens of hundreds of millions of dollars. I don't think you're gonna be mad as a producer. If you fail 70% of the time and the carriers are paying you half a million dollars to do so, okay? So that's my one, that's really my key takeaway to this business after 10 years and it sounds so trivial, it sounds so basic, sounds so remedial. Some people want like the magic answer to how do I close all these people? The magic answer for how do I have a positive attitude? Do I have to get jacked up and listen to music every morning or suck down a Red Bull or some ginger juice like Ryan Loady, right? You got me hooked on that thing with Brock and Hannan. But what do you have to do to stay motivated, to keep yourself from quitting? My sole argument for that would be knowing the breakdown of your numbers to a T. And if you wanna send them to me personally, you're more than welcome to. Email's pdptefornier.com, P-E-T-E-F-O-U-R-N-I-U-R. If you wanna send me your numbers and I can help you break them down, you're more than welcome to. 10,000 people are on here, kinda scared that I just gave my email address out, but you'll be fine, I'll be fine. But please, break them down. If you need help doing this, I've provided a free ROI tracker to everybody on this call. We set up a link on pdpfornier.com. I didn't even tell Cody I was doing this. I don't wanna sell you guys anything. It's a free download. Go to Pete, P-E-T-E, Fornier, F is in Frank, O-U-R, N is in Nancy, I-E-R. Pete at pdpfornier.com, go to free resources. It's a tab. And you can download my personal ROI tracker. And you're gonna write down every single day, every single week, how many leads did you buy? How much did they cost? How many sets did you make? How many sits did you have? Or presentations, if you're doing telesales. How many sales did you make? How much premium did you write? And again, customize this to your business. Could be Medicare apps, could be MedSub, could be DVH, could be auto insurance, whatever it is, break that down. How many referrals did you get? How many sales from referrals did you get? And then you want to calculate your power number at the end of the tracker. And you wanna go for a 10 plus power number. If you download the tracker, you'll know what I mean. But I put it together for you. So that way you don't walk away from this quick talk right now because I can only do so much in 15 to 20 minutes. But I don't want you to walk away from this and let it seep out of your head and you not to do it. Download it, put it in front of you on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. And track your numbers. And I promise you guys, you will still consistently fail on a daily basis. That's never gonna stop, okay? We're in the insurance business. Again, like I said in the beginning, it is your job to fail. But if you know your number breakdowns, you will never, ever quit, ever. I appreciate the time today, guys. Thank you so much for attending. You've paid yourself dividends just for being on this event. Again, I appreciate you, Cody and Landon, for having me. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing each and every one of you at the live 8% nation in July. We'll see you soon. Take care. Hey, awesome job, Pete. Man, that dude speaks with such confidence and eloquence. And you can see how he would be so successful at not only helping agents, but helping clients, man. The dude does an awesome job selling life insurance. Amazing job, Pete. Thank you, sir. We'll see you at 8% in 2021 live in Dallas. Okay, also, I want to mention another new CA deal. Who's watching? Let me know in chat. And you're saying, dude, I struggle. The number one thing I struggle with is overcoming objections. If that's you, put me in chat right now. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me too, right? This is the biggest thing I hear. If you think about agents, and I talked to our sales team and I said, hey, what's the top two things agents struggle with? And they said, objections and closing. I'm gonna spend an entire day with you and take this away, all right? I'm doing a private event here in a couple of weeks. For only $47, an entire day with me, and we're gonna obliterate objections forever for only 47 bucks. Come on now. Like, I'm making it so irresistible, like this event. I mean, it's so irresistible, you had to show up, right? I'm making this offer, so irresistible. You gotta show up. It's $47. I wanna help you become a master of objections. Objections is the best, the number one thing that I'm the absolute best at in the insurance industry from a sales perspective and also from a sales training perspective. We are gonna take away objections forever. Let's go to Kodiaskas.com forward slash deals. Register for the objections mastery class for only 47 bucks. It's in two weeks, okay? And we will see you there. Also, I wanna mention, the team wanted me to mention, when I was listening to Pete, okay, the team told me to mention this. Okay, 8% the Statler Hotel in Dallas. We sold out early last year. Actually, pretty freaking early. I wanna make sure that you know ahead of time, all right? You want to reserve a room. Don't wait, don't procrastinate, just do it now, okay? So we're gonna put the link in chat. It's also at aprecination.com for you to actually go to the Statler Hilton Statler Hotel link and actually book your hotel for aprecination. Now, the event is a 23rd and 24th. You're gonna wanna come in at minimum on that Thursday, the 22nd, and stay unless you're close by till Sunday the 25th. We'll go from about nine to five on, we'll have like a welcome of social event on Thursday night. We'll have like a nine to five event on Friday. Then we'll have a VIP party that night, probably not till seven, eight o'clock. Then on Saturday, we'll do breakout sessions in the morning and we'll fill up from about 8 a.m. till about 5 p.m. And that'll be Saturday. And then Sunday, we may or may not have something special for fire ticket holders, okay? So stay tuned on that little side surprise note, okay? So make sure that you get your hotel, go to aprecination.com to grab it. You wanna be at the host hotel, you wanna be hanging out, you wanna be staying across the hall from me, not in the same room, but across the hall, okay? Maybe down the hall, maybe on another floor or whatever, okay? Go get, you wanna hang out with speakers, telling you the side conversations, the hotel conversation, the elevator conversations, the people you meet, the relationships, it's so key. Most people ignore the relationship piece of this, okay? So go to aprecination.com and grab your hotel right now. I'm excited to see you there. Also, I'm excited to introduce the next speaker, this dude that's about to speak, okay? He once wrote $505,000, a final expense premium in one single year. Now, I'm excited what he's about to speak on and I'm excited to hear him again. The dude knows his stuff. I'm excited to have him a part of the stage. I'm excited to share a stage with him once again. Please welcome to the virtual stage, my good buddy. Welcome back, sir. This dude Matt, maybe. Hey, everybody, Matt Moongia here. I wanted to first start out by thanking Cody for having me share my stories of myself and others that I know and other professional athletes and what they've gone through to get to the places in life and in their careers where they're at now. And I think that's the theme here. You're gonna hear a lot of good speakers, a lot of speakers that I know that I've talked to and I think they're gonna come with some very good stories. So I will start off with mine and let me start off with who I am first. Again, those that may not know me, I'm Matt Moongia. I own the insurance squad. I own 360 Insurance Group. And I've been in the business for 15 years now. My goal and my job, if you will, these days is to help facilitate all the agents that we have. We have bunches of agents in almost the entire country that are specialized in the Medicare, final expense and ACA now. And so my job is to make sure that they have the very best training, the very best support systems and leads and the whole nine yards to make sure they're the best that they can possibly be. So that is my job and that's who I am now, but that's not the way it always was. Let me tell you, I came from very humble beginnings to start off my career. And so let's start there. So I started off at New York Life about 15 years ago and I didn't really know anything about insurance. It's not something I wanted to do. Just like most other people, I got an insurance because I couldn't find anything else. Quite frankly, I went to several interviews after I got my business degree thinking that, okay, once I get my business degree, everybody's gonna want me and I'm gonna get a job real easy. Well, that wasn't the case. I went to several interviews, got rejected left and right. Finally, New York Life said they would take me in. Well, it's 100% commission. And 55% contract levels and everything has to go through a blood and urine process. And by the way, no leads, you create your own leads. So needless to say, for those that have been in the business and know when you have policies that you get paid on quickly or that you have good commissions and you have a bunch of carriers to choose from and you're not captive and you have a good mentor and all these other things that most agents out there have, that's hard enough to survive in your first year as it is. Well, New York Life, you're captive, one company 55% levels and blah, blah, blah. It's much more difficult. So, but at the same time, I'm glad I went through it because going through it and surviving that and not quitting, which is the theme of what we're talking about in these videos, allowed me to get to where I'm at now. So I have no regrets on that front. I'm glad I survived that and went through that and never quit because that prepared me to survive anything that is thrown my way in the insurance business. There is nothing at this point after going through that, nothing can derail me, right? And so I'm gonna talk a little bit about my experience as just how broke I was so that people can understand that sometimes there's a long path ahead of you and sometimes you might be in the absolute bottom of the barrel of dumps right now. I mean, the lowest of the low. I mean, I hear and get these calls sometimes. I know how some of these agents out there are barely making, but I encourage you, do not give up. This isn't one of the most rewarding jobs, but you have to do your part and you have to get through these trying times. But just to tell you how broke I was, we had a small house when this is when I first started New York life, a small little tiny house and the air condition broke in the middle of July or August. Doesn't matter, it's 100 degree weather. And so we couldn't afford to fix that air condition. So we went to a little Walmart, got a little $70 or $80 window unit and placed that in the master bedroom only. So we didn't dare go in the rest of the house unless we were running the refrigerator for water or something, but we lived in our master bedroom and that little window unit kept that little master bedroom cool. We'd have to put a little towel underneath, as my wife was my girlfriend at the time, towel underneath the door crack so that the cool air wouldn't escape from our little master bedroom. And, you know, because to get the air condition fixed it's gonna be a thousand plus dollars. And it might as well have been like I said, a million dollars, it doesn't matter, we couldn't afford that. So that's how we lived. One day, a few days later, I was cranking that thing up because it was still somewhat hot and it froze up on us. And I'm sitting there chipping away at the ice that had accumulated on that little window unit. And my wife comes home and, you know, I'm down in my boxers because it's hot in there and I'm chipping away at the ice. Like that is how bad it was. That is the place in my life where we were. And in that same house, there was something that lived in the attic as well. To this day, we don't know what it was. We don't know if it was a squirrel, a possum, an alligator, a kid, we don't know. We couldn't afford pest control to come and see exactly what it was. So, but I just wanted to preface everybody with just how bad it was. To the point also where my father would come visit me. And instead of getting excited because I hadn't seen him in a while and I wanna see him, I'll get excited as bad as it sounds that I'll get excited because I knew that I didn't have to pay that weekend for food and gas and whatever else that he would offer during that weekend visit, you know, he would always fill my tanks up and he would leave a couple hundred dollars before he left. And, you know, I was in my 20s at this time and that's how bad it was for me. I mean, dead broke. But I got through it, you know, and at New York Life, I found my way. And I found that insurance was a passion, you know, and I got the hang of things. I had a good mentor, Ben T, Ben Treadaway that got me through some of these trying times. I made a couple of sales here or there just to make ends meet and got some rhythm. But I think that I'm glad I went through those experiences. You may be listening in right now and be like, that's me right now. Like that's exactly what I'm going through. And I say all what I said to say this is like, no matter how bad things may be for you right now, if you have the will, the heart, the desire, the passion, the fight in you, you will come out on the other side of it. And you can never see all the glory that's just on the other side of that hill and that mountain, if you quit, anybody can quit. I could have easily gone to take a job somewhere and worked with a family member probably since I couldn't get my own job in interviews, but I had family members around that they could have gotten me a job, right? I could have found something, but thank goodness, I never quit, I didn't stop. And I think of all of the professional athletes. So I love sports growing up. I ended up playing division one sports and got a scholarship and all that. So sports was always my passion. I was never good enough to go pros, but that's something I always look at. And so think about this for a second. We have Tom Brady who just won the Super Bowl. Arguably the best quarterback of all time, I think he's the best without any argument, seven Super Bowls, right? He's 43 years old and he just beat Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes on his way to the seventh Super Bowl. All of these are for future Hall of Fame quarterbacks. But when you think about Tom Brady and what he had to go through, he wasn't the best quarterback out there when he got drafted. He got drafted in the sixth round, which means he was a bottom of the barrel NFL quarterback. He was drafted, I think at number 200 in his draft. I think seven quarterbacks were drafted before him, I believe, or somewhere around there. So it goes to show you that in his world, he was at the bottom of the barrel in his world and he had to work his way up. And I guarantee you he did all the right things along the way and throughout his career as time went on to give him the best chance to get where he's at now. So there's probably no apologies given because he had to do it. Michael Jordan is another one. Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team and got sitting down to the JV. And I was watching a documentary that he used that to help push him. When somebody says, you're not good enough to be here or you're not gonna make it, whatever it takes for you to energize yourself and get you back up off the floor and keep fighting again, use that. I think Michael Jordan was a master at that. The documentary, he would make things up in his head that people didn't even really say anything but he would play it in his head as if they did say something and he would use that to urge and spur him on to do great things. Kurt Warner is another professional athlete I think about. He was stocking shelves in a grocery store at one point, got called up to play at the Arena League and I think he played at the Arena League, did well with the Arena League for about a year, got called up to the pros, was a third string quarterback for the Rams and a couple of the quarterbacks got hurt. He got a shot at starting quarterback position, made the most of it, right? Did all the right things to put himself in that position and I think a year or two later I ended up winning a Super Bowl. So I mean, think about that. You go from stocking a shelf at a grocery, working at a grocery store to a Super Bowl champion a few years later, you know there's steps along the way, right? And it took several years to get there. So again, I encourage all that may be listening in, they're down in the dumps right now, they're at the lowest level they could possibly be keep fighting, you know? Keep after it because just on the other side of the mountain don't quit right before you dig six feet and the goal was six and a half feet underground and you stop six feet under and you never realize what was just a few inches lower had you just kept going after it. And I think that's what's helped me a lot is, and I think sports helped me with that, just having that mindset of never giving up and always fighting. So hopefully that helps somebody, but that's my experience, but I also work with several agents that I've had similar experiences. So Ruben Trejo always comes to my mind because he also went through hell and back. I mean, he had been in this business for I think nine years and was always struggling, barely surviving, never thriving and making just making an eating out of living. And he would tell stories to this day of being at a grocery store and calling his wife because he couldn't afford milk or eggs. He would call to make sure that it was okay for him to buy that for his family, milk, eggs, bread. Some of the basic necessities that we all take for granted, he was having a call and see if it's okay. Can they get that? And now, here he is, has won several insurance trips around the world. We've traveled to Hawaii together, all over Europe together. And he always calls me with so much appreciation and thanking me that I've done so much for him. And what I always try to remind him is, Ruben, hey, I appreciate the appreciation, but you did this, you know, you fought. You're the one that went to go doorknock those leads. You're the one that went to go call on those leads. You're the one that studied those scripts to make sure you were on point and went out there and got all these things done. So, you know, he fought for it. Now, there's only so much I can do, but he was one of the few that fought for it. We have other stories. Ethan, one of our top Medicare agents, I think he sold over 600 policies last year. I mean, he was telling me of his story. He had been in the business for four years before he got here and things were rough, rough and tough for him. And he was barely surviving. He was about to throw in the towel and he got on this lead order and he started talking to some of the other agents in this group. I know Adam has really helped him out. Adam Howard, who sold over 800 in 10 months and you know, some of the other trainers here like Louise has really helped him. And now he is thriving. I mean, to do 600 Medicare Advantage policies in one year, you're looking at well over 100,000 in lifetime renewals. And so now it's, there's no looking back. He got through the hard times and now he's gonna be able to enjoy the fruits of all his labor at this point. There's no looking back because those things pile up on year after year on top of each other. So, you know, I say all that to again, encourage somebody out there that's feeling the financial stress and pressure of this job that no matter what, the people that are in your agency, the agency owners at your FMO and IMO, they're all probably in similar positions as you are right now, but they never quit. They kept fighting and that's why they are where they are. Okay? So agents, you get hit with a chargeback. When you get hit with a chargeback, how badly does that affect you? Do you let that tear you down? I think that's another key point in some of these professionals, whether it's a professional athlete or a professional insurance agent is chargebacks are part of the game. They will happen. How you mentally get over that hurdle is up to you. And the better agents don't even mind because they're writing so much business anyway, they don't feel the chargebacks. The ones who feel the chargebacks are the ones that are maybe just start now or the ones that are not selling enough or the ones that are on only a few leads, those are the ones that are it's affecting. So again, don't let things like chargebacks or agency owners, you're gonna have a hard time, you're gonna pour into people and you're gonna take them to new levels and new heights that these people have never been and they may leave you. Part of the business, not the fun part of the business but part of the business. And you wish them well and you part ways but you don't let that affect you down the road from now. Short-term memory, some of the best professional athletes have short-term memory. So think of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, all of these athletes, they can go out there and miss six or seven or eight shots in a row but they're still gonna take that next shot, probably with confidence too. And that's the difference between them and somebody who's in the minor leagues still playing in the G league, right? So it's short-term memory. Forget about what's happened and move forward, move past that. Don't let what just happened affect you in the future or near future. Babe Ruth is another good example. Babe Ruth is known for his home runs but people don't realize that Babe Ruth had the most strikeouts of anybody as well. So again, short-term memory. Babe Ruth, that means he'd probably go out and strike out twice in a row and the third time at bat, forgot about the first two times and ends up hitting the home run the third time whereas the guy that's still struggling in the minor leagues or never made it to the minor leagues couldn't do that, right? They didn't have the mental mindset and fortitude to turn that off or forget about those first two abats where they struck out. I just read right now LeBron James is one of the best of all time, arguably the best, although I like Michael Jordan, but he has the most turnovers of anybody ever. Second place, Carl Malone, another Hall of Famer. So these are guys that have gone through failures with some categories and at some point in their life but yet they're Hall of Famers in other things. And so you have to, it's okay to go through the peaks and valleys this business will throw at you but learn from the best of the best. Learn from these professional athletes and these other insurance agency and agency owners that have gone through all that. They've been through all those trying times and they're still after it. So I think this message today was to encourage people that may be on the fence, throwing in the towel, don't think their life's gonna get any better. They're not gonna get to where they wanna be. Keep fighting, keep after it. Don't stop because that gold could be just on the other side of that mountain or just a few inches deeper if you keep digging. So again, thanks everybody for listening in. Thank you, Cody, for having me and we'll talk soon. Hey, awesome job, Matt. Welcome back, K. Awesome job, Matt. Thank you so much. Unbelievable job. Chat is lighting up. You did an amazing job. Thank you so much, buddy. Appreciate you being a part of this, K. Look forward to seeing you in Dallas, all right? Now, another 8% deal, kodiaskas.com forward slash deals for Premier tickets, for Premier tickets. That means VIP, that means Premier ticket. VIP party and Premier lunch. Four people, all right? Normally, right, it's a $5,000 to $6,000 total value. Current pricing right now for you as an appreciation deal for Premier tickets. Literally one of the craziest and best deals you're gonna see for only $9.97. So go to kodiaskas.com forward slash deals to take advantage of that, all right? Now, I'm excited for our, yes. Yes. Did that scare you too? That scared me, okay? Are you ready for the next flash sale, all right? They're just gonna, I guess they're just gonna just pop in the side of them and I'm in the middle of talking and just totally throw me off my game, all right? You got three minutes, you know the deal, okay? Three minutes, you gotta hit the link. It's only for so many people and it means it's gonna be a ridiculous and sane deal. And they're actually showing me what it is, which means this is going to be nuts. Next flash sale, right now you got three minutes to take advantage, the clock is ticking, tick, talk, not tick, talk, but tick, tick a talk, all right? Tick, talk, tick, talk. One VIP ticket for only a hundred bucks and we're only doing it for 10 people. One VIP ticket, $100 and we're only doing it for 10 people. Go to take advantage of that right now. Random flash sale, hit the link in chat, go take advantage of it, one VIP ticket, $100, it's insane, it's only lasts in three minutes and you want to grab it right away. That's one of the, probably, I mean, I don't know if we're gonna top that, we'll see, okay? Maybe we won't, but that's an insane deal. One VIP ticket for only $100, which is so crazy, all right? Do me a favor, okay, as the clock is ticking, okay? I want you to tag me on social at Kodi.askins on Instagram, at Kodi.askins on Facebook, I'm gonna even throw something out. Team, I want to find the person that posts about us the most and give them a hundred bucks, okay? I want to choose one person that tags us and promotes us and just freaking gets after it and crazy. I want to give them a hundred dollars, okay? Straight from me, from my Venmo, okay, or Cash App or whatever. Also, I want, okay, for the individual that has the best video or picture, maybe it's a testimonial while they're watching, okay? Get you out of your comfort zone, shoot some video, or maybe it's just, maybe it's the best picture we see. We're gonna give that person another hundred dollars as well, okay, so whoever posts the most and then who posts the best, $100 each, okay? So it makes you take advantage of that, all right? I'm excited, the clock's still ticking, okay? We're getting close to that three minutes. One VIP ticket, $100, it's ridiculous. Never gonna happen again. Only flash sale, poof, it's about to be gone. Go take advantage of it. Now, I'm excited to welcome our next speaker, okay? I've been getting to know her for a long time. She's unbelievable at like local grassroots marketing. They call her the Medicare Wonder Woman and she's about to fly in, day-percent virtual, okay? And help you, I think Wonder Woman does it, I don't know, okay? All I know is I'm a big fan of Rebecca Davis. She's unbelievable. We're good friends. We spend a lot of time together and I'm telling you, you want to listen to this lady. Her local office is crushing it and she's dominating her space. So please welcome to the virtual stage. Blow it up in chat for Mr. Rebecca Davis. I'm Rebecca Davis. Some of you know me as the Medicare Wonder Woman because I take the wonder out of Medicare. I also own Cannonball Insurance Solutions. I'm originally from California and I grew up on a ranch but I moved to Texas about 21 years ago and I got into the insurance business about eight and a half years ago. I kind of fell into it. I was pregnant with my son and when I had him, I was looking for a different career at the time I was managing retail stores. And I found insurance actually stumbled in the state farm and after four years there, decided to branch out on my own and Cannonball Insurance Solutions was created. So what a lot of you guys don't know about me, I actually was born and raised on a cutting horse ranch. If you don't know what a cutting horse is, Google it. My dad was a trainer, a professional trainer and we grew up with the hard ranch life where everything came first, the horses, the cattle, the animals. You get up in the morning, you'd bust ice if you needed to, you feed, long before your day ever got started personally. And that taught me a lot about how to work, just work ethic and what it means to work and what comes first. I eventually started showing competitively myself. I was far from a natural at it. I fell off more times than I can count. I even have professional photos of me falling off in major events. But then I would always get back on, no matter how many times I fall off. And over time I learned how to do it very well. I actually became in the Hall of Fame by the time I was 16 in a national championship. I was on the fast track to a very lucrative career on the back of a horse. I even demonstrated our sport to the Olympic community. Not too long after that we moved to Texas because in our business, that's where all the major competitions were having anyways and we would come back here three or four times a year showing. So it just made sense for our family to move to Texas. But we weren't here six months and I flipped my car and over and seven times. I got ejected out the back wind shield and landed it in a bob wire fence and a fire ant hill. And when I tried to get up, I realized I couldn't. I was in trouble. Next thing I know as being life-lighted to the hospital in Fort Worth in was on the emergency floor for 18 hours. The doctors really didn't know what to do with me. I'd actually broken my neck and my back in seven places. My scapula had glass sticking out of areas that glass should not be in. In the whole time I kept coming to and waking up and fighting with the doctors because I was supposed to be on a plane to Vegas in the next couple of days for another competition. And the doctors in their most sincere but straightforward voice told me, yeah, that's not gonna happen. Well, I got sent home a week later in neck braces and back braces and there I was. Just basically stuck in a giant brace for months on end. Couldn't do anything. Actually could not ride. Ended up not being able to ride for three years. And my career as a professional horse showman had ended instantly. And that put me in a very dark, frustrated, angry space. And for several years after that, I bounced around from different types of jobs, a lot of retail, did a lot of managing retail stores. And I just wasn't in good head space. And then I found out I was pregnant and it was no longer about me. I know how to make decisions for what would be best for my child. And at the time I was managing retail stores and I had my son while I was doing that. And in the moment of having him, I realized I no longer wanted to work nights, weekends, holidays and that kind of schedule being dictated by somebody else. So I started scrolling through the help wanted job ads and I found a job for insurance. State farm insurance in fact. And it was nine to five, Monday through Friday, weekends off, holidays off, pay time off. I'm like, hey, that's perfect. And I gotta sell something you legally have to have. So how hard can that be? Little did I know it was a little harder than we all thought. So I started for State Farm and I was there for about four years. And then through that, I got lots of great learning experience but I realized I wasn't going anywhere with this. It was just the same thing every day. And coming from a self-employed business background that my family had established, I decided it was time to go back into that field. And so I decided at that time to become an independent insurance agent and open my own insurance office. And that's how Cannonball Insurance came to be. And hence the name Cannonball because my son's name is Cannon with a K. So after the idea of Cannonball Insurance Solutions was formed, now the big question, now what? So at the time my husband was deployed. He was actually on a naval flat top ship out in the Gulf or the Pacific. I don't even know, I wasn't allowed to know if any of you are military family, you understand. But while he was deployed, I decided to make the sleep of faith. And I first started at my dining room table where I know many of you currently are or have been. And I had my computer set up and I was working from home. And it didn't take me too long to figure out working from home was not a good fit for this person. I would get so distracted, I'd look out the window and be like, oh gosh, you're grasping in super mode or the pool looks so inviting. I think I'll just go lay around it for the rest of the day where the dishes need to be done or the laundry needs to be done. So that wasn't working for me. I could not focus at the task at hand. I always seemed to manage to be doing most of my work after nine o'clock at night when there was nothing else to do. And that's not good work life. So I decided to find a small office space. And when I mean small, I mean small. Because I had the fear of renting a space and spending that money before I really had a business going. But I knew if I didn't get off my dining room table I was never going to have a business. So I bit the bullet and I found this Shoebox office right on our town square. It was probably 10 by 10. It was tiny, barely enough room for a desk and a couple of chairs. But it did have a window to the street so I could hang a sign. And there my business started officially. And it worked. It did exactly what it needed to do. It was low rents, low maintenance. It gave a place for customers to come. And more importantly, it gave a place that I went to every day. And while I was there, all I had to focus on was my business. And just within six months I was already hiring an admin. I had too much on my plate. And again, do I wanna spend the money and hire an admin? But I bit the bullet and I did. Got somebody that was part-time. She was also a single mom. So it worked out great for her because I could use her part-time while her kids were at school. And she did this simple task for me. She helped me with my thank you cards and got birthday cards out. Just took stuff off my plate which allowed me more time to focus on the business and on the clients and the sales. And with her help in our Shoebox office I was able in about a year's time once again, able to grow again. And then I rented my first retail location. It was about 800 square feet, I believe. It was just enough for myself, her and another agent. Well, since I had the space, you know, you gotta do what you gotta do, right? You know how this business is. So I decided to get an LOA to work out of the office to help me with the sales. Again, I had no idea how I was gonna pay this person. We were still so new and I was so scared. I was just thinking I'm gonna hire this person and I'm gonna go bankrupt. I was scared to death. I even got a little creative in financing because we were still new and didn't even have a renewal base yet. And I went and refinanced my car and got a little extra cash just to put it in the kitty just so I know it would be covered. And I laugh at that now because it was the best decision I ever made, even though it was a very fearful one because now I'm hawking something to start my business but I did it anyways. And I invested in my business to make it grow. And from there, we spent two years in that retail office, the three of us, and we boomed. We just boomed. Looking back on it, I feel so blessed. I was able to pay off that loan in six months. And then in two years, we were busting at the scenes. We were tripping over each other in that office. And my mom was a real estate agent at the time. And we found a building just to block up the street from my current location. It was about 4,000 square feet. It's a brick and mortar. It's not attached to anything. It's a standalone building, a block from the H-E-B across the street from one of the popular Mexican restaurants in our town between a pawn shop and a dry cleaners. And two doors down was an urgent care. It was a gold mine. It was a mess. This building was a mess. It was split into two different buildings. One was a tobacco shop, a vape shop. It was disgusting. And the other one had, I don't know how many different tax firms in it from one time or another, but it was awful. When we started remodeling this thing, we had four layers of flooring, y'all. Four, it was a mess. But we got it cleaned up and moved in. My mom passed right before we actually closed on the building. When that happened, it created a lot of fear and anxiety if I should even continue with the purchase of the building. See, my mom was one of my biggest motivators. And without her, I felt a hole and didn't know if I could continue to move forward. So I sat down with my dad and my brother and we had a conversation if we could continue with the purchase of the building. And it came out as 100%, yes. Keep moving forward. Keep growing. So I did. It took us about six months to remodel it and then we moved in. And I then had space for more agents. So I hired another LOA. Again, still wondering, but this time my residuals are up because I've now been in the business a little while. So it wasn't near as fearful, but it's still always a fear because you never know are you hiring the right person? Are they going to do a good enough job? Are they going to do it like you do it? There's still always those fears and making the wrong decisions or even failing. But I'm a big believer in as long as you keep moving forward, good things will happen. Funny thing about fear and failing. You know, we're all afraid of failing, but is that really what we're afraid of? Because you can fail all the time. You can fail a test. You can fail your driver's license when you're 16, but you can retake it or you can try again. I don't believe we're actually afraid of failing. I think we're afraid of what comes behind the failing. You know, once you're an adult and you have a family, your family depends on you. And when you fail in what you're doing for a living in your business, you feel like you're failing your family. You're disappointing them. Maybe you're not putting food on the table. Maybe you can't make your house payment. And I think at the end of the day, that's really what we're afraid of. It's not the act of failing in itself. It's what the failing means in the long run to us. In, you know, that's when you got to have people behind you. And I'm going to use a quote that I heard at 8% Nation last year from Justin Forsett. It hit hard to me. He said, build your huddle. And I think that is so important. And what that means is to build people around you that will support you and will pick you up when you have bad days. We'll put you in your place when you need to be put in your place. People you can really lean on. Whether that's family, co-workers, other agent friends. I for one had to go into my huddle just to make this video. I am not a professional video. If you guys have ever seen my Facebook or my TikToks, they're awful. I have an iPhone that's like from the centuries. It's a dinosaur. I know nothing about this. So I went into my huddle and they're lo and behold, I had an agent friend that loved doing this. And she was more than willing to help me. Which that is part of what makes this business so great. We have people all around us that are good at other things than just insurance. So build your huddle wisely so you can lean on people when you need them. And they will help you get through the fear of the failure and come out ahead. So build your huddle. But when you do, don't be afraid to ask for help, y'all. It doesn't matter if it's family, friends, agents. When you need help, ask for it. Because Lord knows in this business, we get stuck, it's hard. We need help, whether it's emotional support, whether it's help within the office, we just need that help. So don't be afraid to ask for help, especially from your huddle. You built them for a reason because it's a group effort and everybody knows it. And don't forget to return the favor. So if somebody in your huddle reaches that to you, always say yes, it leads to great things. So what I'm trying to say, y'all, is whatever you do, keep moving forward. Whether it's an inch or a mile, all forward movement leads to success. That doesn't mean we won't go backwards or go side to side for a while. Just don't stop. When you stop that leads to quitting, which leads to failure. And when you quit, that's the only way you will fail. So as long as you don't quit, you won't fail. Awesome job, Rebecca Davis, Medicare Wonder Woman. Now you can see why amazing job, Rebecca. Thank you so much. Love spending time with you. You're crushing it. Awesome job, you just did as well, okay? And you're getting a lot more comfortable on video. Awesome freaking job. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, now, what's next is I want to spend time with you and your team. Are you an agency owner? Do you have downlines? Do you have a team? Is your, do you have an office? Is your team struggling? Are you, is your team on the struggle bus? Are they having trouble closing deals, overcoming objections, follow up, building a value, building rapport, creating certainty, closing, getting in and building engagement and trial closing and follow, like all these other pieces, right? Does your team struggle with this? The phone, I'm gonna take it away, okay? So make sure you go to the deals page, codeyaskers.com, four slash deals, okay? These are exclusive deals for C88%, only during this event, okay? The next two days, you can't purchase the team training, but I want you to go to that page, if you have interest in talking to me about potentially training your team, whether it be just one time or for a whole year, right? I just want you to go to the deals page. You can't purchase it, there's an interest form, okay? And okay, I'll ask that, okay? There's gonna be an interest form on that page so that you can let us know, you can raise your hand, I'm interested in you helping my team, okay? I can promise you, I'm gonna over deliver and change their life and you're gonna make more money because of it, guaranteed, okay? It's one of the things I love doing, I do it every single week, multiple times a week for a ton of companies, right? Now, my team's telling me to ask, okay, which is a good point and I'm curious, let me know in chat what is your favorite part so far of this event, all these amazing speakers so far, right? And we still got several more just today, okay? What's been your favorite part of today's event? Let me know in chat right now. There's gotta be big takeaways, right? Like I believe it's on the learner to take an idea, a takeaway and to really get something out of showing up for an event. Most people think it's the speaker's job to change my life. It's your job to listen intently and to take notes, to take big ideas, big takeaways and to actually take something and learn something and apply something for what you hear over these next two days, okay? So I'm curious, what is the major takeaway so far? There probably is one, okay? So let me know what that is in chat. Social media's blowing up. I'm getting tagged like crazy, all right? I wanna get tagged in 10,000 posts before this is over, okay? So thank you for that, okay? Don't forget, make sure you're taking advantage of those other flash sales are gone. We may have more in the future. The siren's not going off to scare me at the moment so I guess it ain't happening now. Either way, you can still go to the deals page and kodiaskins.com for all these deals, take advantage of all the private deals just for these two events. Thank you for being here. It's my focus to help you become the best version of you that you can be. And I want us to do everything in our power to help you be more successful in the insurance business. So you're showing up, you're listening, you're taking notes, you're getting takeaways and I'm gonna keep bringing the heat along with the next speaker, okay? Good buddy of mine. We first met back at 8% 2018. He came to the very first event and was on a panel. Then him and Justin came to a retreat with myself in Chandler, Arizona. He actually lives there back in, I think it was June of 2019, okay? I'm remembering pretty well. And this dude I've been getting to know for the last several years, okay? About the last three years. Good dude, love the guy. He cares about the insurance industry and has a lot of knowledge to bring, okay? Thanks for being a part of this, buddy. Love spending time with you. Thank you for coming and is he ready, okay? Please welcome. Bring to the virtual stage. Come on now. My good buddy, you light it up and chat with Mr. Eric Pia. Sometimes the opposition that we're gonna face in our sales career will come from those who are closest to us. Now they don't mean ill by doing so. In fact, it's the opposite. It's just easier sometimes to tell us to travel the more predictable path versus setting our own. This was my reality. But just because somebody doesn't understand the direction that you wanna go doesn't mean that your direction is the wrong way. You see, we're a different breed. In fact, this whole conference is built around the idea that only 8% of the insurance agents who get into the industry will still be here making it a career beyond three years. That means only 8% chose not to quit. You can't fail if you don't quit. You see, my grandparents on both sides of the family immigrated here when my parents were young. My dad was 10, my mom was 17, and both of them came here for the same reason to find more opportunity than what they could in Mexico or El Salvador. But by the time I came along, my parents had relocated to Arizona, which by the way, I love it here. Don't think I'm gonna leave. And as we were growing up, we really didn't have much money, barely scraping by. And when you have friends growing up, whose parents have means and the ability to provide the finer things in life, you'll normally fall into one of two categories. You're either gonna look at the other kids and say, man, I wish I had what they had. Or you're gonna look at them and say, one day, I will have what they have. See, I fell into the ladder. I just didn't know how I was gonna get there, but I knew I would one day. Growing up, I didn't have a lot of good influences in terms of trying to find the right career paths and trying to tell me which direction I should go. And I sure didn't have any influences when it came to getting into the sales careers. But I did have a couple of people who did help frame my mind in a way where I knew that if I chose the right career and I had the right work ethic, I could be a person of means. The first was my grandma. My grandmother and my mom's side started a store, a Mexican grocery store in Northern California, which ended up growing to six stores in a short amount of time. It was an amazing accomplishment from an immigrant from El Salvador. My other influence was my uncle. My uncle made a great life for him and his family. He joined at a young age, a big company called Intel, and worked his way up the ranks until he became management. And from there, he ended up being able to provide a lifestyle for his family. That again, I looked at it and said, one day I'm gonna be able to do the same thing. Now myself, I started working when I was about 15 years old. And through the different jobs that I had, let's call them that, I ended up getting a lot of valuable work skills. But none of them met my internal desires for what I wanted as a career. Well, what do you ask those are? Well, first I wanted to make sure that whatever career path I chose, I was actually going to help people, truly help people, make a difference. The second thing that I was looking for is I wanted a place where I could earn what I was worth. I didn't wanna have to walk and work in the political arena and try to climb the political ladder in order to get pay raise after pay raise after pay raise. I wanted to be in a position where if I put in more work and more effort, the return would also increase. That's exactly what I was looking for. The last thing is I wanted to make sure whatever career path I chose, that it was recession proof. I wanted to know that even if the chips are down for the country, no matter where we're going up and down because we all know that recessions are cyclical and so I just wanted to be in a position where in the bottom of a market or the top, I could still hustle work and make a living in whatever state the country was in. And so sales just seemed like the best fit. Now what I was gonna sell, that's a whole different story that I had to figure out along the way. So in the beginning of my sales career though, I did have a really tough go at it. And of course, along the way came the, I told you so's from the people closest to me. There was also the managers who say, you know what Eric, sales is just not your thing. You're just not cut out for this. I think you should stick to the nine to five jobs, right? Those are really deflating words for somebody who has ambition. And you know what, many times I actually did just that. And when I looked for that nine to five job and even though I was miserable, I did just that. But then one day, an awesome opportunity came my way from one of my best friends. He's actually my best friend outside of the insurance industry, but he happened to be specifically focused in the sales industry for a niche called Medicare. And so when he presented this opportunity, I decided I wanted to give it a try. So I would continue to work full-time as a finance manager, and then at night, I would go run appointments for Medicare. And guess what, I was good. I was actually really good. So much so that my part-time income going to these appointments after work ended up eclipsing my full-time income. That's when I decided, yeah, I think I should probably make the jump and go jump into full-time Medicare. But something crazy happened along the way. As I decided to go full-time, and as I did go full-time in my sales career, I had this fear come over me. And on speaking about this, because I think a lot of people could actually resonate with what I'm about to say, a lot of you probably can empathize because you've been where I've been. And that's why I wanted to make sure that I spoke about this part of my story. You see, I had this overwhelming fear just come over me that honestly, for months and months, paralyzed me and hindered my progress in sales. And I kept it a secret. I didn't talk to my wife about it. I didn't talk to my friends about it. But obviously my performance was suffering. It was a really tough go. And the good news is I was able to turn it around, but I attribute that turn around to three things. First, I always had a mother who supported me, believed in me from the time I was a little child to the time I was grown up. She was just behind me 100%. She was one of those moms who, even if I said I wanted to be a professional basketball player, even though I'm only five foot six, she would still 100% back me up and say, go for it. You got this, do it. The second person is my wife. I've been with my wife since I was 15 years old. She's always been there for me, supporting me, encouraging me, seeing things that my mother saw in me that I personally struggled to see myself. She was always there for me when the chips were down. The third person is that best friend that I told you about earlier. His name is Teg Ray Moot. He was a guy who also saw potential in what I could do, believed in me so much that even when I was in that street where I was just not doing well in sales, he sat me down as a good friend would and he just asked me straight out, do you wanna be in this industry? Do you wanna be in sales? And in my heart of hearts, yes, I absolutely did because I could remember all the people that had been helping that I really enjoyed helping. In fact, this career was checking off all my boxes of what I wanted to do for a living, but for some reason I was just paralyzed by fear. What fears was I paralyzed by? I was fearful of sounding stupid. I was fearful of making the company look bad. I was fearful of having people telling me to F off, to cuss me out, to tell me to pound sand, to kick rocks. I was fearful that I would just look like an idiot, that I would be asked a question that I had no answer to causing the people I'm talking to to think, oh my God, why did this company hire this moron? I would telegraph conversations spending 20 to 30 minutes before each call because I wanted to make sure I was as prepared as possible. You know what ended up happening? I would call the person and 99% of the time they just don't even answer. So here I am spending 20 to 30 minutes trying to get ready for a phone call that was never gonna end up happening. That was the paralysis of analysis. So this best friend I'm telling you about, he sat me down and after he asked me that question and I said, yes, I wanna be in this industry, he's asking me, well, why aren't you doing what needs to be done? And after explaining all my fears to him, he looked at me and he said, okay, what you need to do is you need to go into beast mode. You need to flip that switch where you give yourself permission to just go all out and just stop caring. Don't try to telegraph the conversations. Don't try to come up with the rebuttals to all the objections that you perceive will happen when 99% of the time don't even answer the phone. Just be reactive. So that day I went and I bought myself a little putting circle and I got myself about five golf balls and a little putter, set them up in my office and every time I would make a call, I would consciously wipe my mind of any thoughts and I would just focus on putting and as soon as somebody answered, I would just purely be reactive. Go into my intro and then just react. It changed my life. It honestly changed my whole sales career. And moving forward, I became that beast. I was afraid of nothing and I wanted to go after everything. So I'll attribute a lot of that to that friend that I told you about Tigre move. So now with that being said, let's do this. I wanna help you create a plan to get you from point A to point B so that once you decide to flip that switch, if you haven't already, you're gonna have a path that you can start going down to lead you to the success you're looking for. First, you're gonna need a mentor. Mentors are extremely important because they can help you avoid a lot of the pitfalls that people fall into when they try to go at it themselves. They can help give you direction. They can give you a path, a way that you should be going in order to have the highest likelihood of achieving success. People like Cody Askins, they've made an entire career out of finding this niche of helping people in the insurance industry get on the right path to success or help elevate where they're already at. The best thing is people like Cody Askins actually walk the walk because they themselves invest in coaches to help them go bigger, go harder, go faster. And you know what? At the end of the day, it's extremely important. I myself invest thousands every year in self-development so that I can make sure that I'm staying on task and that I'm going after the goals that I achieve. It's incredibly important to find a mentor. The second thing you're gonna want is a sales system. No, I don't just mean one tool, I mean a sales system. The Senior Sales University that I created is designed to specifically help an insurance agent to get going in the right direction, to train them, to provide the tools for them and that way they have the highest probability of success if they work it. So what should a good sales system have? Let's break it down. A good sales system should have an online training platform that's gonna teach you the products you need to know, that's gonna teach you how to sell, teach you how to market, teach you about lead generation, teach you all the components needed in order for you to operate your business and then on top of that a good sales system should provide you the tools you need. That can be from top of the line CRMs to quoting tools to anything else needed in order to make your business as efficient as possible so that you can focus on doing what you do best, selling. If your sales system could also have hours and hours of recorded phone calls that you could listen to so you can put all the pieces of the puzzle together, that's another big bonus. Your system should have presentations available, phone scripts that'll help you get and know exactly what to say, when to say, when you're talking to clients or possible clients on the phone and it should also have built out automations that are gonna help you with lead nurturing and client retention. And if this system can have accountability and coaching calls on top of that, well, that's just the icing on the cake. But most importantly, your sales system, whichever one you choose, should be able to produce results. You should be able to see past members who also applied and use the sales system telling you that they were able to produce results because they actively worked the system. We really pride ourselves as senior sales university because we feel that we're one of the best at doing what we do. And the best part in my opinion is that we're a friend to all insurance agents and FMOs alike. As a sales system and consulting agency, when we help insurance agents level up, we're also helping their uplines as well. Last, you need to give yourself time to succeed. I know it's hard. Trust me, I know it's hard. But you're not gonna reach your goals overnight. I can tell you that from experience. But I never met a person in our industry who after a few years looks back and says, man, I regret sticking it out. This wasn't worth it. Never. And in fact, it's the opposite. Everyone is always so thankful that they were encouraged through the good times and the bad times to stick it out because in the end, it is absolutely worth it. This industry is so amazing. There are so many perks to it. And at the end of the day, as Cody Askins always says, this industry has made more millionaires than any other industry outside of real estate. But I know the problem is we live in a society that is full of instant gratification. That does cause a lot of issues internally for us as producers who want it now. Amazon Prime, Netflix giving us a bunch of series where we can just sit down and binge watch 10 episodes in one sitting, movies on demand, the list goes on, right? We're living in a society where more and more things are at our fingertips because of the internet, a whole library of knowledge where we don't even have to memorize things, we can just Google it. But wealth creation, building a business, that all takes time. Regardless of how fast the other stuff is moving, the part that is important, the part that's long lasting will still take time, energy, effort, discipline, dedication, but be encouraged because the small wins are there. And as you continue on with small win after small win, after small win, you'll one day look back and it'll be quicker than you think. And you're gonna see just how big you've built something. You're gonna be amazed at what was possible because today you decided you were gonna change. Now remember that all things that are worth doing are gonna take time and hard work. That's just the God-honest truth. But let me leave you with a couple of quick pieces of advice. We live in an era of social media. Hardly any of you who are watching this are not on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. I don't know that YouTube's considered so much social media, but still at the end of the day, the majority of us are in some form or fashion utilizing social media. Whether it be for our business or whether it be for pleasure or both, we are on social media. And the hard part is that by being on social media, you are likely going to see a lot of other people posting about their successes. And what that does to most people is it causes us to do something that we should not do. We compare ourselves. We compare ourselves to those top producers. We compare ourselves to those agencies. We compare ourselves to others and feel down. Like we're not doing enough. Like we haven't made the right choices. Like we're not where we should be in life. And all it does is sow seeds of negativity in your mind that hinder your ability to move forward. I know I've been there. One of the best things that you can do for yourself is that if you find yourself, if you're being truly honest and you find yourself in a position where you're comparing yourself to others and you're being held back as a result, remove the distraction. I said it, remove the distraction. What you need to do is you need to focus on your system. If you did the previous with finding a mentor and getting a sales system, you need to focus on the path you've set and you just need to work that diligently day in and day out without the distraction of comparing yourself to others or seeing what others are doing. Now, if you find yourself in a position where you have friends that can help encourage you and vice versa, you encourage them, by all means, stick with them because that community is so important in helping you go to the next level without feeling like you're alone. At the Senior Sales University, I feel that's something we've created in our private group is that we have a sense of community where we're helping each other to not only implement the system but encourage each other in our wins and our successes. But be sure to do one thing and that's to only compete with yourself. What your mindset should be is that you just wanna make sure that you're always gonna do better today than you did yesterday. You should be the only person that can put you out of business. The key here is that you need to work your system because it only works if you work it. I'm gonna say that again, it only works if you work it. My friends, I'm gonna be honest that even though I've been in the Medicare niche for quite a while, about 15 years now, there's many times where I wanted to quit, many times. But I persisted, I kept on going because at the end of the day, I wanted to make the naysayers eat crow. I wanted to make my family proud of me. But most of all, I wanted to prove to myself that no matter where I came from, what I've been through, the struggles I've had to overcome, I can achieve my goals when I allow myself permission to succeed. You're the only one who can hold yourself back. It's like my good friend Cody Askins always says, think big, baby, think big. So I'm gonna leave you with this. If you've been struggling in your sales career, if you've been struggling to get started, if you've been struggling to make ends meet, struggling to stay motivated, struggling to find others who believe in you, remember it doesn't matter where you came from or what others have told you, find a mentor, find a good sales system and then stay disciplined and consistent. Activity and consistency are king in this game. There's no way you're gonna reach your goal without it. I'm here as living proof that you can reach your goals and do some amazing things in life as long as you give yourself permission to succeed. You can't fail if you don't quit. Awesome job, Eric, Kay. Welcome back. How we feeling? How we doing? Awesome job, Mr. Eric Fierro. Amazing, amazing, amazing. The dude cares, man, you can tell. He's got some passion, he's got some heart. The dude cares about helping you, okay? Love it, man. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Appreciate you being a part of this. All right, now another 8% nation ticket deal right now. You can actually, for whatever reason, maybe you're like, dude, I can't make the actual in-person event in Dallas. I hate it, but I can't do it, man, I want to. It's till 23rd, 24th. If you can't make it to the live one, you can still jump on the live stream of the in-person event, okay? And right now, the next two days, it's about to go up, by the way. You can get the live stream for only $47. On the deals page is 8% deal. Kodiaskas.com forward slash deal. Live stream of the in-person event, which means you also get the recording, by the way, right? So even if you're gonna be there, you still get the live stream you can give to somebody else and you can get the recording for later and watch it forever, forever. Okay, a little happy Gilmore thing. We're at 47 bucks, all right? 8% live stream, $47. Okay, now, I'm excited to bring up the next speaker, okay? Does an unbelievable job of selling term life insurance. Life insurance in general, right? They've got a final expense division that's killing it over the phone, all right? The dude knows what he's talking about it. When he comes, when it comes to selling life insurance, okay, he's been a part of the very first 8%, and I'm excited and that he's a part of it and I'm excited to bring to the virtual stage. Come on now, here we go. Hey. I'm about to bring up, Jeff, we got a flash sale, okay? My team said it was gonna be random, all right? I wouldn't know. I'm like, well, now I'm like, well, it's not like when I'm about to walk off and do it, but hey, either way, it's here. And we got three minutes together, okay? Three minutes of flash sale. It's just random, right? I told them, I don't even know, I don't wanna know when, you guys just do it, okay? Make sure I'm like speaking when we do it so I can address it. Here we are, okay? Next flash sale, right? Diamond tickets are, depending on the time of year, anywhere from a thousand to $2,000 a piece. Right now, for the next three minutes, we're gonna give five people the opportunity to get two diamond tickets, right? You're sitting literally like second row, you get access to everything, you get access to the private speaker social on Thursday night, the party, the lunches, the closer seats, like it's just behind fire, unbelievable seat, two diamond tickets for the only $897, okay? So hit the link, inch cap right now to take advantage of this flash sale. Again, five people, three minutes, and then poof, it's gone forever, okay? Now, I love the flash sales, okay? The sirens about to scare me to death here and that thing, I don't know about you. It just comes in like it's hot, right? Limited time offer, these flash sales, I told you only a few per day, okay? I don't know if I got any more today, but I know that this is insane. The purpose of flash sales is to get your attention, to get you to the event and to make you realize that these are the most insane offers you will ever see, but if you don't take advantage during the actual flash sale, never can get it at this pricing ever again guaranteed. Like we're not selling it after for any of these flash sales. You can call in tomorrow and be like, dude, I want the flash sale from yesterday. Can't do it, it's gone, okay? Now, now that the timer's ticka-tackin' for three minutes, all right? I'm gonna bring in the next speaker. As I was saying, the next speaker, okay? Good buddy of mine, right? I just, I'm actually, I'm about to go speak at his live conference, the digital life insurance agent mastermind in Austin. Amazing at selling life insurance. Good dude, and he is, he cares about the industry and is going to bring value to help you close more deals, right? When he speaks, he always brings value. I can guarantee you, whatever he's about to speak on, it's going to be good. Okay, so please welcome to the virtual stage. My good buddy, Mr. Jeffroot. Hey, what's up, 8% Nation. Jeffroot here. I am managing partner over at Digital BGA. We're 100% TELASAIL's life insurance agency. I'm also author of the Digital Life Insurance Agent, which is the number one best-selling life insurance TELASAIL's book on Amazon. You're probably thinking, who is this dude and why should I listen to him right now, right? I've personally written over 3000 life insurance policies from 2007 till about 2016. In 2016, I stopped my personal production and started at Digital BGA, which is focused on TELASAIL's and will actually be recognized this year as one of the fastest growing private companies in the nation, according to Inc. 5000 at least, when that comes out in August of this year. So with all of that said, I was thinking about what sort of value that I could provide and that would have the most impact for agents. I mean, real actionable value that could really affect your bottom line that you can take action on immediately. You know, I kept coming back to, you know, what I credit for my success in the insurance industry and that's understanding cash flows and profits, okay? And how to maximize them in the insurance business. So I'm gonna share five actionable moves to increase cash flow and profits in your insurance business. So I'm in life insurance, right? So all of my examples will be in that segment of insurance business. I understand 8% nation as agents from all types of insurance verticals. So if you're not life insurance, these moves can absolutely help you. It's just, it'll just be missing some concrete examples that I'm just gonna give in the life insurance space, okay? So, you know, for 10 years, I sold term life insurance over the phone and had to learn how to cash flow. You know, a business where over half of my sales were fully underwritten and didn't pay out for, you know, around six weeks on average. You know, I saw over 90% of agents come into this business and leave the business quickly. You know, truly talented agents that couldn't put it together as an independent agent. All right, it wasn't due to not having the right leads or carriers to sell. It was simply the strategy in running their business to focus on cash flow and profits. It's stuff we're not really taught when we get into the business, right? We get all this training for sales, you know, where to buy leads and all that, but as far as cash flowing in business and optimizing for profits, okay? You know, I learned that, you know, ROI matters. That's everybody preaches, but cash flow matters even more. I've also learned that commission's deposit in your account matter. That's what all the trainers will say. You look at the commission's deposit in your account, but profits matter more. It doesn't matter if you're spending too much, right? So I picked up this, you know, most of my knowledge from reading books and hiring business coaches, all right? I believe in mentors. I've always had one and I always will, right? Somebody who knows more than me. And I'm just gonna pass on everything that I've learned as far as cash flowing and, you know, building more profits into your business, okay? So, you know, I use these strategies consistently at Digital VG as well. And it carried from the personal production I did in 2006 to, or 2007 to 2016, all right? So here's the five actionable moves to increase your cash flow and profits in your life insurance business, all right? Number one, upsells, downsells and cross-sell every single time on every presentation, all right? Number two, work your unconverted leads. Number three, beat down that P&L. Number four, enhance cash flow. And number five, word of mouth, okay? Referrals. Now I'm gonna go into the how of all those five, right? And you know, you're probably thinking like, okay, yeah, work your unconverted leads. You know, word of mouth referrals, like everybody talks about that. I've got some pretty interesting strategies that have really worked. It's a spin on all of it that I'm gonna share with you today, all right? So let's start with number one. Upsell, downsell, cross-sell on every presentation, right? Your sales process should be the same every single time. Every time there should be an upsell pitch somewhere in the process and a downsell pitch when somebody isn't interested. It has to be in every presentation you do. I can't stress that enough. It needs to be consistent and you'll see your profits and cash flow increase. So let me give you an example of each of these. So an example of an upsell pitch that can help life insurance agents is always going for the maximum close, right? The maximum close. It doesn't matter what they want. Tell them what they can get. For example, on final expense, let's say you're getting into the close, you did some health qualifications and whatnot and you're going off into presenting the rates, all right? Say, oh man, Doris, great news. One of the nation's most respected final expense life insurance companies is ready to make you a conditional offer. I requested the amount we discussed of $10,000. Well, they accepted that request and also offered an additional coverage amount of up to $35,000. I mean, that is offering the max, right? And we go into a little bit more in our script but it's offering the max no matter what. Even if you uncover, Doris needs $10,000 of coverage. It doesn't matter. You're still gonna offer that. You can always come back down with a proper price drop back down to the $10,000 and even lower, all right? You can do the same thing on term life insurance by using the maximum multiple of their income, right? Each carrier will do a multiple like 10X your annual income, right? If somebody can qualify for a million and a half of coverage and they're only applying for $750,000 of coverage, let them know they can qualify for up to a million and a half and even put the application in that and they can make that decision when that policy comes back approved, right? Same thing with disability insurance. Give them the max, the max offer, right? So a lot of people like to sell on price. You need to sell based on the emotional connection to the coverage amount and what they're buying and with the max close, you're hitting on that, okay? So incorporate a max close into your scripting and your annual premium per sale will increase. It has for us agency-wide since we've done that, right? Which means profits will increase, okay? On the flip side of that, there's down sales, okay? So down sales. If you quote someone and they aren't interested, the default is to keep coming down on coverage or coming down on price, right? And by that point, you're making it about price. You can never make it about price. Life insurance is not about price. There has to be an emotional attachment to the death benefit and what it will do for you and your family, okay? For term, you can lower the term length. That's the first option. I think everybody defaults to that anyway. You can also take the death benefit over a period of time instead of a lump sum that can lower the premium by up to 20% with some carriers. Protective life comes to mind that does that. We do that all the time with them, okay? Another option that many agents don't even think about that can work for final expense and for term is blending an all cause death benefit with an accidental writer or an accidental policy. So if the prospect wanted, called a million dollars of coverage but couldn't afford it, sell them $750,000 of an all cause death benefit with a $250,000 accidental policy or writer just depending on what the carrier offers, okay? You know, then come back in a year or two and replace that $250,000 accidental with an all cause coverage plan, all right? You're still hitting that coverage amount for them. You don't need to come down and you're gonna sell more policies that way. It works with final expense too. If someone can't afford $10,000, try selling a $5,000 policy with an accidental writer and that doubles the death benefit, right? If it happened, if God forbid something happened in an accident. So, you know, a lot of carriers do that. American amicable, prosperity, mutual vomaha, foresters, you know, just off the cuff, right? And then of course you have cross sells, okay? Every single client should be offered other products. So you have their trusted attention, right? You just sold them something. This is the best opportunity to see if you can land another sale. Calling a new lead is not gonna be the best opportunity for you. Cross selling something else to that person you just sold is the best opportunity. You can have it that single, you know, moment in time, okay? You have their trust. You have their attention. And, you know, see if their spouse is around. They wanna quote on their spouse, their child, their grandchild, whoever, you know, or a different product line altogether. Sell them something else. Sell to someone else or sell them something else, okay? Every client you sell should have an automatic cross selling strategy that you implement. It should be like the back of your hand, right? While on the call or even with follow up calls after 30 days, so do it right then after you make a sale or do it on a follow up call. But automate it, right? It's gotta be a process that you have so you see consistent results and can improve your profits in cash flow. That's the goal here, right? So automate some of it with automated emails and mailers even built into your process. I know agents that use a service called thanks.io. It's a website. And they automate postcards going out throughout the year. So a thank you postcard is immediately sent with their family photo with no offer. Just a pure thank you, you know? Here's my family and asking the client to think of them if they have any friends or family that need life insurance coverage. Just think of me, they're not asking for it, right? And so they have this connection and they'll, you know, we have agents that get phone calls that say, hey, I saw your family, you have a beautiful family and you know, I had no idea that you love fishing is maybe the picture was of them fishing or something, you know? And then, you know, automate a postcard later with the, did you know I also do this? Medicare, disability, whatever it is, right? It's all automated and only takes the initial input of their name and address after making a sale if you set it up correctly in thanks.io, okay? I'm just giving you an example of ways that you can automate a cross-sell process. It should absolutely be in your scripting now, okay? Remember, you already paid for this, you know, for the opportunity to acquire this client. Anything you sell on top of this is pure profit and cash flow, all right? Take the time to build these upsells in your sales process, these downsells and these cross-sells into your business and your cash flows and profits will see an immediate effect. Happened when I was a personal producer and it happens again, you know, as we built an agency with digital BGA, it works, okay? So number two is working your unconverted leads. I mean, that's a, like, duh, right? Of course, work your unconverted leads but not a lot of agents do it, right? Here's the thing about unconverted leads. Only a small percentage are ready to buy right away no matter who it is because you got the right message to the right person at the right time. Remember that. That's key in really building out the mindset of calling unconverted leads. If you've been taking leads consistently, you're sitting on a massive, massive, massive database of just pure opportunity, okay? Or a significant number could become clients the next 12 months if you can get the right message to them at the right time. Again, that's the mindset of this, okay? So here's two key actionable concepts to work your unconverted leads. Number one, send a simple email or text, okay? To your leads that you've never spoken with. And here's what it should say. Just plain and simple. Are you still interested in life insurance? Question mark, let me know. Jeff, that's it. Don't write a paragraph of what you do, all the companies you represent that you can get them the lowest prices on the market. You represent all these carriers, whatever that is. A short and simple message like this will get you more responses. If I've tested it, it works, all right? Just that simple thing. Seriously, send it. Email or text, just mass send it to your uncontacted leads that you're able to contact. Remember TCPA stuff, if it was an online lead, you only have 90 days to contact them. If you've never contacted them before, I just wanna preface that. So make sure they're within that timeframe. All right, and then the next thing. Number two, as far as the second actionable concept to work your unconverted leads, you know? You know all those not interested leads that you talk to? Call them again, right? Yes, the leads that you had a conversation with that said they weren't interested, those leads. The ones who you wrote off, the ones who said no and you went onto your next lead. Those ones, there's gold in those, all right? Once you recognize the fact that insurance sales is about getting the right message to the right person at the right time, you'll start seeing more opportunity in your unconverted leads, okay? You won't be like, oh, that person was a jerk, you know? Or that person was rude, or I don't want it, you know? Whatever the excuse is in your head, right? For the most, I mean, if this was somebody who filled out a form online or requested any sort of interest, it was just the wrong time, all right? It just simply means not interested means they're not buying right now. Just get that into your head, get that mindset, and you'll have no problem calling those not interested leads as people who told you no before. I mean, some people will tell you no right away. It's really just a smoke screen, right? I'm like, oh no, I never filled that out. That's a smoke screen, they did fill it out, and most agents will never call that lead again. You just caught them at the wrong time, most likely, all right? So you already paid to acquire those unconverted leads, okay? So go profit from them. This will cost you no extra money and just add to your cash flow and profits. Build out a process to call on those not interested leads, even if it's once a month, you know? Pick a day, the 15th of every month, or the third Wednesday, or whatever it is, and go through all your not interested leads and just call down the list, right? I mean, even just once a month, you're going to find sales in there. You're going to find people that are interested and you didn't have to pay for those leads. All profits going to help your cash flows, all right? This was one of the core things that I did as an independent agent that really helped with my cash flow in the very, very beginning of my career. I remember calling not interested leads from other agents. You know, I'd go after them and I'd ask them, like, hey, all the people you quoted that were interested, can I take a shot at it? And people would send me some leads, some files, forward me some emails, and I would make some sales. It might not have been right there, but I'd keep following up with them and make sales, okay? There's money in those and it's ignored. To me, how I describe it, it's a hidden profit center in your business, you're not working. Okay, enough on that. So the third thing, all right, is to beat down the P&L. All right, so let me preface this first. To increase cash flow and process, I beat down my profit and loss statement. Every couple months or so, right? And I get the most juice out of the first time I did it. I'm gonna go into that in just a second. I just wanna preface this. First things first, don't commingle your personal accounts with your business accounts, okay? If you have a business account where all your commissions are getting deposited and all your marketing, lead costs, all that stuff, the cost of doing business gets drafted from that account or business credit card, great, just don't commingle. Everybody should keep that separated, okay? Next, make sure you have a profit and loss statement, all right? It may sound like overkill for a business, for insurance business that only has commissions and marketing and lead expenses, but for the most part, it puts you in the headspace as a business owner to look at these profit and loss statements and compare them to previous periods. You're gonna see trends, you're gonna notice some things. It's almost gonna gamify it for you to see how much profit you can pull. If you can see those up green arrows and profits and revenue and those down red arrows, you know? Anyway, so I use zero.com, X-E-R-O.com for accounting software and connect my business bank accounts and credit cards so all transactions are automatically sent over, right? So it's just a matter of reconciling the categories, right? And I even pay somebody to do it. I do it automatically. I have somebody who just goes in there every month and reconciles everything for me, but it's simple. I'm gonna start with that, okay? So from looking at that profit and loss statement and comparing your previous four months, you'll notice trends in profitability and cash flows, right? And then when you see that profit and loss, you beat that thing down every month. I mean, beat it down. So what does that mean? It's one of my favorite things to do, right? I mean, I wouldn't say it's one of the things where I find a lot of profit, all right? So here's some examples. Find all the subscriptions, right? Or consistent vendors you use and contact them, all right? Tell them you're thinking about leaving and email will do it. Just ask them what they can do for you. You're thinking about leaving, what can you do for me? This exercise can earn a lot of profit doing this in one afternoon, okay? If you don't have a P&L, just go to your last bank statement and look at all the charges. So if you have a lead company or any vendors charging you an extra 3.5% merchant fee because you used a credit card, right? Challenge that. 2.9% is the going rate. But even that can be negotiated if you just simply ask. I've done it before. I've got that completely removed. It's a stupid fee that a lot of lead vendors will charge and they don't have to charge. It's just, you know, it's their way of increasing profits. But if you're a trusted client of theirs, they will do it for you. If you just started with them, there's most likely everybody's gonna blow you off and not care, right? But it's worth and ask, okay? A second thing is just to cancel any subscriptions that don't make you money. I know for myself, I always forget about subscriptions, especially domain names, right? On GoDaddy. I don't know if any of you have this problem as I do. I'm a habitual domain name buyer who thinks of an idea and says, I'm gonna buy the domain name and then I forget about it until 12 months later it renews and I pay, you know, the $12 or whatnot. I call GoDaddy my boulevard of broken dreams. It's kind of a funny thing between my friends. But I mean, do you really need to pay $10 a month for that screencast software or $10 a month for that calendar scheduling software? Or could you get by with the free versions of those just and just display their branding on it, right? That stuff adds up and when you get deeper in business, subscriptions add up, okay? If you don't have a P&L, like I said, you can do this on your bank statements and whatnot, but go through those, find those subscriptions, find those payments that you're making every single month and talk to them. Can you do better, all right? So number four is cash flow, enhancing cash flow. All right, so cash flow is the number one killer of insurance agent careers. So how do you enhance cash flow in your business? The first step is to drop your accounts receivable times. I know it's a very MBA school talk, right? So what does this mean for insurance agents? Get paid quicker, all right? Take the maximum advance on your commissions, okay? Don't write carriers who don't advance. Just don't write them, all right? Don't take commissions as earned or opt for the smaller advances because you want those months, you know, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 and 12, you know, in the future. Get as many dollars as you can in right now, get those advances, all right? There are some carriers out there who might even advance if you do a lot of business with them, the entire commission, okay? So, you know, write carriers that pay on issue for simplified issue carriers. A lot of issues will pay on, a lot of companies will pay on draft and you might have to wait 30 days if somebody doesn't want it to draft for 30 days or, you know, or on a social security drafting or billing date, okay? So, excuse me, so stop, also stop tying up capital in underwriting, write more simplified issue products. That was a huge, huge lever I lifted in my business when I started, when I got over the fear of, you know, selling something that's more expensive, you know, for the same amount of coverage and a fully underwritten carrier, you know, that would get approved either immediately or within a couple of days over, you know, something that might be 33% less expensive but might take six weeks, right? Just get that stuff in force. And by doing so, you're not tying up capital, that's in underwriting, right? That money is gonna come in the next week if you were able to sell that person a simplified issue policy. One thing that I always did is I always gave people the option, right? You could buy a fully underwritten policy or a simplified issue policy. Fully underwritten, they're gonna come to your house, you know, I'm gonna make it seem like it's a huge inconvenience, they're gonna poke you with the needle, you have to pee in a cup, you have to hand it over to them, you know, and then you're gonna have to wait six weeks and you might get approved or we can just take care of this now, it's about 33% more and you write them a simplified issue product, okay? Of course that's for term coverage, all right? So, you know, there's two things to enhance in cash flow. So the number one is what I just said, you know, drop your accounts receivable times, all right? Get paid quicker. Obviously the second one is to lift your accounts payable days, right? So for insurance agents, here's what that means, okay? Accounts payable is your expenses, what you're paying out, right? So most of you, that's leads, right? So if you're working with a lead vendor for a while, ask for net seven terms. Instead of paying right now for, you know, for call it a 50 lead order, you know, make the order now, net seven means then pay for it seven days later. That's what net seven terms is, all right? Or extending the terms, if you already have net seven terms to maybe 10 days or 14 days, whatever that is, you know, you can only do this if you have a good working relationship with your marketer or lead vendor, but you know, if there's that trust built, they will absolutely do that. And they get it, they're a business owner, they know what those net terms mean to them, right? So that's one way. The second way to lift your accounts payables, the accounts payable days is to put all marketing and lead costs on a credit card and pay it monthly. In fact, all costs on credit card and pay it monthly. This buys you 30 days of cash flow without finance charges and you'll get rewards points on top of that, right? So a lot of agents think, you know, you know, Jeff, that's, you know, that's nothing that I don't know. Of course, get a credit card, right? And put it on there. But it's the concept behind it, okay? A lot of agents think this is pushing off the inevitable payment, you know, and creating a liability. If you think this way, your issue is confidence in yourself and building a business. You lack that confidence, okay? If you're turning a positive ROI on marketing and leads, this is a no-brainer to do. The moment I implemented this as a, the moment I implemented this as a producer, my bank account was flushed with cash to reinvest in my business. And I did that. I reinvested and turned that cash into way more cash, okay? Now, if you take that newly found cash flow as income, yeah, that defeats the purpose. That's not why you're doing this. You're trying to turn more, you know, freed up cash into more cash. So, you know, I'm telling you that by enhancing cash flow with all of these strategies, your mindset changes as well. You can deploy funds into growth and you do just that, all right? So, you know, that's how I built my agency as a solo producer. Simply getting more money quicker and pushing out expenses as far out as I could without paying interest, right? That allowed me to reinvest in more marketing. It allowed me to hire my first agents probably sooner than I should have been able to, right? It allowed me to build out better infrastructure with software that was better than what I currently had, better dialers and whatnot, okay? So, and the same thing at digital BGA, you know, everyone is, you know, is always impressed, you know, with, you know, how we've grown this so quickly over four years and everybody assumes that we have an investment partner, right? Or that we don't know the business. No, we bootstrap this thing, right? This entire business has been bootstrapped. I'm still 50, 50 partners with my partner and we're able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars early on in our business on building our own technology which has set us apart from, you know, from a lot of our competitors. And that's by, and we're able to do that by being savvy with cash flow, all right? Using these exact same principles because when you do this at scale with, you know, with more agents, more money, you know, you can free up a lot more cash flow to be able to make these bigger moves. And that's what it's all about. You have to be able to take risks in this business to get big rewards. In order to take big risks, you have to have the cash flow, okay? And so enhancing cash flow, again, to recap, drop your accounts receivable times, increase your account's payable days, okay? That's gonna free up cash and allow you to grow, all right? And the very last thing, the fifth, you know, way to increase cash flow on profits is just to boost your word of mouth, you know? There's, you know, let me ask you this. Do you have a referral program you talk about on every presentation that results in a sale? Most agents I ask that question to say no. I would say 98% of agents that I ask that question to. And I ask it a lot when agents are contacting me that are struggling in the business. If you don't have a word of mouth, a referral program, you should. Internally, in our agency, we call it an ROI maximizer because that's what it really is, okay? I find that many agents don't ask for referrals at all because of the default excuse that they just don't feel comfortable, okay? What if you were able to offer something in return though, okay? I'm not talking about a Starbucks gift card, right? For each referral. Remember, there needs to be an emotional attachment, especially in life insurance. That emotional attachment to the death benefit is what sells policies, right? It's not, there's no emotional attachment, you know, to a digress here. We sell life insurance and a lot of final expense insurance by offering a free accidental death and dismemberment policy for every referral. It's scripted into the process after you make a sale. It's this fun way that we script into the process that they can get $1,000 for every referral and up to $5,000 of accidental death and dismemberment insurance, AD&D. And it's part of our script and it works like a charm. And agents are just getting referrals. And, you know, it's, it really is a maximizer of return on investment. So you can probably think of something to offer up. Let me give you another example. So I know a lot of you don't have access to a referral program like this. So here's what another agent does. That's really, really smart. So I know an agent that finds out their favorite restaurant or hobby or something as part of the rapport building process, right? And he will offer a gift card to that specific something at the end. If it's golf and you live in Austin, Texas, he's gonna research, you know, well on the call, a golf store or even a course or something and offer up a gift certificate to that specific thing. He makes his clients feel heard and like, and by sending, you know, and it creates that relationship with them as well. And they almost feel, he says they almost feel like they have to give him something now, but he gets a lot of referrals. And just by adding that simple thing and making notes, you know, while building rapport during the presentation, you know, he incentivizes his referrals. By offering something up like that, okay? So you can probably think of different ways. I've heard of people, you know, I think there's some ways to give out, you know, vacations and whatnot, but, you know, the agent or somebody pays a fee and they're able to give out some voucher for something. There's a bunch of stuff out there, you know? But if you can incentivize, like just come up with a good incentivization offer for your referrals, it's a game changer. It absolutely is a game changer. And incorporate it into your sales process every single time. Every single presentation you make, every sale, that needs to be said, okay? So I mean, those are five core things that will find hidden profits in your business and improve your cash flow, okay? I kind of, I can talk about this stuff all day long. I hope this was actionable. I hope this was helpful. I hope this will find hidden profits. I hope that this will help your cash flow. But if anybody has any questions whatsoever about anything discussed here, feel free to email me Jeff at digitaldga.com. And I'd be happy to answer, all right? Appreciate everybody for listening and best of luck. Awesome job, Jeff, okay? Well done, buddy. Thank you so much for being a part of this, all right? Unbelievable job. You can tell why the dude is so successful, man. He always brings the heat, right? Question for you, okay? Let me know in chat right now. What was your favorite part of Jeff's presentation, right? What was a big takeaway? It was a big major takeaway that you're gonna implement right away, okay? Let me know in chat right now, all right now. Another, remind you of a CA deal that's available right now at kodiaskins.com forward slash deals, kodiaskins.com forward slash deals. Four week private mentorship program with me that is almost sold out for only $88, $14,191 of total value for only $88 bucks. Go to kodiaskins.com forward slash deals to take advantage of the four week private mentorship program with me. Okay, now, we've been through several speakers and they keep bringing the heat, they keep, they just get warmed up. They just wanna keep one up in each other, man. Like it's awesome to see, okay? I am enthused and excited for what's about to come in your life in 2021 based on the fact that you're here right now attending this event. So thank you for being here with the thousands of others that are currently watching. All right, now, another question, okay? Another question, who should we bring to Dallas? Give me a speaker name, let me know in chat. I wanna know, right? Should we go get like flipping Peyton Manning, Will Smith, The Rock, Tom Brady, Dylan's back here saying, dude, Patrick Mahomes, right? Who should we bring, okay? Who should we bring to speak? Last year, we had Wolf Wall Street, Jordan Belford, okay? First year of Aprisnation, we had Cardone, Ray Lewis. Second year, we had Michael Irvin. Third year, we had Jordan Belford. We even had two surprise speakers last year. I may just totally surprise you again. The surprises last year, Inky Johnson. Dude, was that a surprise or was that a surprise? Okay, this is what you can expect Aprisnation live in Dallas, okay? Inky Johnson, right? Also, Justin Forsett, okay? I think I need to get some tea or I'm gonna lose my voice at some point, okay? If you guys can help me out, okay? Or you on the screen, bring me a tea to Springfield, okay? Inky Johnson and Justin Forsett as surprise speakers, okay, did an unbelievable job. The question is, we got Eric Thomas, okay? We're still gonna have a couple surprises. Who would you like to see? Maybe it's a surprise, maybe not as a surprise, all right? I'll give you a little hint. We've talked to some really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really big names lately. And I'm excited for what's about to come next. It's only going to go up from here. So let me know who you would like to see in chat, okay? Who you would like to see in chat. So thank you for being here, okay? Appreciate you being here. I'm excited to continue to spend time with you. I love doing this. I love bringing the action straight to you live in your home virtually so that you have no choice but to go up, okay? If it's meant to be, it's up to me. If you don't quit, you can't fail, all right? These speakers are embodying that. You're hearing a common theme all day. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Dude, they thought about quitting. Now they're speaking. If you don't quit, maybe you will be speaking one day too, okay? Let's bring in our next speaker, all right? Let's bring our next speaker, who is the president of sales, good buddy of mine, okay, with senior life services, okay? This guy is a phenomenal, phenomenal speaker. I saw him speak at one of their events. I'm telling you, the dude can absolutely lay it down. Phenomenal speaker, one of the, I would say one of the best kept secrets in the insurance industry on his speaking level. We did a high-level mentorship program recently. We were talking on Zoom together and I asked him, like, dude, how did you become such a good speaker, man? And maybe, I don't know if he's gonna share it, but he shared it with me, okay? And he does an awesome, awesome job. Please welcome and bring to the virtual stage. My good buddy, again, thank you so much for doing this because I know you could be doing anything. And I'm excited that you're pouring in and helping people choose not to throw in the white towel and quit. Please bring him out right now. Here we go. Mr. Henry Stewart. You have to make a decision and it's a decision that only you can make for yourself. But how long does that desire hold on to you? How long does that desire motivate you? How long does it move you? How long does it push you down that path to and through adversity? If you want to be successful, it's going to take a lot of work. Do you have a fuzzy connection to your dreams? Everything's gotta go exactly right. It's gotta be the exact perfect angle in order for that vision to come into focus. And if you have any movement at all, that dream just goes away. You can't have a fuzzy connection to your dreams. It's got to be crystal clear. Henry Stewart and I am the president of sales and marketing for SLS. It is my pleasure to be here with you. Shout out and thanks to Cody Askins. When I first met that guy, I knew he was something special. And I thought to myself, I want to do something with him. I didn't know what the something was going to be. I didn't know when the something was going to be, but turns out it's here and it's now. And we've had a chance to work together a little bit over the past couple of years. And it's just been so impressive to see the 8% nation continuing to grow and the bigger it gets. It's just touching more and more lives and more and more people and just changing the game entirely. So I've had a chance to meet some of the beautiful folks on his team. Haven't met everybody yet. This coronavirus has slowed us down just a bit. I'm sure I would have shared way more of the high fives under normal circumstances, but I haven't had a chance to meet Landon and some other folks on the crew and looking forward to meeting Lauren, probably the first and foremost, have a feeling if she's like my wife, she might be the real secret sauce there in the Askins house, but we'll see what happens. Cody's pretty tough, because I think it's just two really strong people making it happen out there. But boy, we're in a tough industry. Are we not insurance, financial services, whatever you want to call it. And it's tough because there's so many posers in this business, right? Everybody's always pretending that they're making so much money and we never know what's real. You know, there's so much glitz and glamour and people are good at pretending, especially nowadays with the internet, anybody can look rich, you know, pull up somebody's Facebook like that. I think they're doing pretty well, but the math doesn't lie. Less than one out of 10 folks are actually making even $100,000 a year or more. I don't mean $100,000 a year households. Talking about one man, one woman, bringing in $100,000 or more all by themselves. Less than one out of 10. What does that mean? It means that in general, nine out of 10 of the people that are telling you to make it money are not. And $100,000 a year isn't even all that much anymore in this economy. If you start looking at who's making the quarter of a million dollars a year, now you're into the half percent. You start to find out who are the real millionaires. You're in the tenths and tenths and hundreds of percent of people that are actually making this cash. So what does that mean to us? Every time you turn around, isn't that why we got into business? Somebody said, oh, you're gonna make so much money. Could have been an upline. Could have been who knows who. And we're all trying to find where are these folks that are successful in the insurance industry? Less than one out of 10 are making real money. That means nine out of 10 are not. You know what else that means? It means those nine out of 10 that are not making money. It's not just insurance agents. It's nine out of 10 folks in the United States of America do not bring home more than $100,000 a year. That means nine out of 10 of your friends probably think you're crazy. They think you're crazy. You are in a commission only business and it's so crazy when we have jobs, we look at self-employed folks and say, man, I wish I was one of them. And then you become self-employed. If you're not careful, you'll find yourself looking back over the fence wishing you had a job. Don't you dare. Don't you dare go get a job. Don't you dare quit. Don't you dare get amnesia. If you're a Bible reader, you might recall the Israelites were in slavery to the Egyptians. And then they were free. And then they're walking on their way to the promised land. They face a little bit of adversity. And what do they say? Oh boy, I wish we'd go back to Egypt. The food was delicious. You're so worried about what you had to eat. You forgot you were getting beat and see sometimes that happens to us in job world, doesn't it? You forgot. You forgot how terrible jobs are. Remember your boss, you couldn't stand them. You're always underpaid, overworked. But what is it that we're yearning for? Oh, security, consistent income. I need to get a job. Sometimes the voice telling you that is in your own head. Sometimes it's in your own ear. Sometimes it's your significant other or someone closest to you saying, give up. Don't you dare listen. Don't you dare quit. You're not going to fail. It's not going to happen. You're not going to allow it to happen. If you were a quitter, you wouldn't be here. You're here for nourishment. You're here for encouragement. You're here to get this thing turned around or to keep this good thing going, one or the other. And if you're here hanging out with Cody and his crew, you're in the right place at the right time. But you cannot quit. You know what? You can never quit. And you got to be careful because the idea of quitting when things get tough is ever present. You can't stop it from infiltrating your mind. You can't. If you're sitting there watching some program and somebody's having adversity, you're having a bad day, you're struggling, something bad happens, the idea of quitting, it can creep up in your mind. What you have to control though is how long do you dwell on? Do you think about quitting for months, weeks, days, minutes, seconds, or milliseconds? When any idea of negativity or quitting crops into your brain, you got to stamp it out. You have to treat it almost like a virus. If a virus gets into your body, the body reacts immediately. This doesn't belong here. Get it out. And you've got to do that same thing with negative thinking. Any of us, me, you, anybody listening to me right now, we've got the power to never, ever fail at anything we do. It's real simple. You can't fail if you refuse to quit. I learned that lesson a long time ago. I grew up in a really bad, bad neighborhood on the east side of Buffalo. It was bad. When I was younger, it got worse. And I went back to visit and it's so bad. I tried to show my family my house and I didn't even come to a complete stop. I was driving down the street. I said, look quickly to the left. That's where daddy used to live. We're getting out of here. That's how bad the neighborhood has become right now. Growing up in that tough neighborhood, there was unavoidable stuff. There's an article in the Buffalo News and it's about me and growing up in this crazy neighborhood that I was in. And by the way, I was not in the worst neighborhood in the city by any means. There were some that was even worse than where I was at. But it was close enough. I won't say that I was in danger of bullets coming through my window, but I could hear the shots. I was within walking distance of the hood and the hood encroached. And eventually the older I got by the time I got to high school, it was a pretty bad situation. Pretty bad situation. Gangs had become very serious in my neighborhood and I knew that was bad news. Most of the folks I went to high school with at this point are either destitute, unfortunately in jail or dead. And so that's where Mr. Stewart came up. So unfortunately fighting was a part of my young manhood. And I'm proud to say that my fight record is his 50 at O. I've never lost a fight. And you might say, Mr. Stewart, you must have been pretty tough. Well, kind of. See, when I won, I won. And when I lost, that was just round one. See, this is gonna be continued next time I see you. And once they realized, I had crazy kid on Gerald Street, he'll just fight you every day if you get into it with him. Guess what happened? Freedom. Freedom, they said, find somebody else to mess with. And that was one of my first exposures to this idea of, you know what, if you just refuse to quit, you can't fail at anything that you do. And I got that lesson honest and it was taught to be by my father and my mother, two very tough minded people. My mom, whoo, she was tough. I had seven brothers and sisters and she was tough, tough, good love mom that I had and still provide some of that tough good love even to this day. My dad, he was another rock in the family. No matter what was going on around us, there were standards that we had and there were expectations that they had of us and we were expected to live up to those expectations. And one of them was, you better be tough minded. I used to watch my dad back in the day. He was one of the first African-American insurance agents to service our community, which was a challenge at that time. Buffalo, if anybody knows, it's like the Pittsburgh or Cleveland, were industrial cities that lost their identity because those jobs left. Those jobs were going overseas and other places. So here you went from a stable community, graduate high school, didn't even have to go to college, walk up the street to the plant, get a job, work there 30 years, retire, get a goal, watch, live off your pension for the rest of your life. That rug got snatched out of many, many homes and most of the homes of the people that I knew. So here, my father, he was in the insurance industry and started out fairly well. My first exposure to the insurance industry, I said, Hey, I don't know exactly what this insurance thing is. I was a little guy, but I said, I think I want to do it. Him and dad talked about insurance and he bought a Cadillac. And back then it was a Cadillac sedan, the bill, it was a four door, it was probably as long as two cars nowadays. It was silver. Now he didn't have the top of the line back then. I don't know if you can still get vinyl seats in a Cadillac. Back then you can buy no seats or leather seats. So he had vinyl, but it was top of the line vinyl. It was a silver on red sedan Deville. Ooh, it was bad. It was the envy of the neighborhood. There's just one problem. Very early in life, I learned a word that many of you know today called charge back. I learned about a charge back because that beautiful sedan Deville, it disappeared from the driveway one day. I ran to get my dad said, damn, we got wrong. Cars too good for the neighborhood. We made a mistake. We need to get out of here. He said, no son, not quite. It wasn't quite a robbery. It's, it is another word that starts with an R. It's called repossession. It's like Mr. Robinson's neighborhood. You know what today's word is boys and girls repossession. And this charge back thing. I said, you know what? I don't like the sound of that. You mean I make money and then somebody can take the money and I, and at that moment I said, I don't know what I'm gonna be when I grow up, but it's not going to be an insurance agent. Isn't it funny how life turns? So I watched my dad, he's in the insurance industry. That doesn't work out. I watched him change direction. So H Stewart, general contracting was born. Why? Can't fail, if you don't quit. The insurance industry didn't work out. We had a bunch of charts back. Had a bunch of issues. Let's try construction. My dad always was very handy. He was good at selling. He was able to get a bunch of jobs. Again, family back on the rise. We used to know when my dad was doing good based on meals. It's funny. You know, we, plus we always got great pizza and great wings and there were so many kids that my dad, if we were having tough times, first of all, we didn't get pizza at all. I think it was super tough. Now, if it was medium tough, then we would get a sandwich. He'd give us a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and we'd have some salad. And then the pizza, he just topped us off. So he had one pizza, cut it up in little small squares. And, you know, the slice, when you get one slice of pizza, that just feels like a small, but you get four squares of pizza. Boy, it feels like you had a meal. And funny enough, I still eat pizza in squares to this day. But anyway, we would know how things were going based on the meals that we ate or didn't eat. And so we were in a pizza season. You know, now if you got pizza with no, no appetizers, no salads, okay, well, Danny, he's gonna let us fill up one pizza. That could be a two, three pizza night. So it was in one of these two or three pizza seasons that we're thinking, okay, the insurance thing didn't work out, but this construction thing. I thought that was my path. I'm gonna do this. I'm a young guy paying attention. Okay, construction gets you three pizzas a night. I'm doing that. Sure enough though. That ran into challenges. The part of town that we were in was heavily connected to some unsavory characters. That's how I will describe them. And so they wanted you to use your minority status in order to acquire some contracts. But if you did that, you'd have to pay this person and pay that person in order to stay in business. My dad refused to do that. Couple of jobs ended up getting burned down. Couple of nasty notes got left in the mailbox. My dad said, that's the end of H Stuart general contracting. So he gave up, right? Nope. Had to reinvent himself. Again, the birth of Enviro Star Associates. My mother's name was Star. And there was Enviro Star Association and Star Industries. This is a business that my parents started together and we were selling cleaning systems. Cleaning systems. Matter of fact, I'm gonna go ahead and give a shout out. It was Rainbow Cleaning Systems. I'm gonna go ahead and give them some free advertising with other people looking at it. But I gotta do it out of loyalty to my old Rainbow Cleaning System days. And that was a competitor. There were a bunch of other backers out there that people sold door to door. And my family opened up a business where we did that. As a matter of fact, I sold my first cleaning system at the age of 11. And I actually used to sell going from door to door. Maybe sales actually had a very, very good business. I grew my business to the point that by the time I was in high school, I was making more as a teenager than many other folks were making as supervisors at GM and Ford and some of these other plants that folks were working at. So once again, it's three pizza season all over again. All right, we're having success as a family. I'm learning the art of sales, but it's challenges. So you cannot get away from challenges in life. If you're thinking that successful people, oh, you know what, they just leave these charned lives. Nothing bad ever happens to them, not true. Bad stuff happens to successful people all the time. In fact, bad stuff often happens to successful people at a higher clip than unsuccessful people because successful people are risk takers or entrepreneurs are always trying stuff. So they're experimenting, they're the pioneers, they're taking the arrows. Stuff happens then it doesn't happen to everybody else. So here we are working this business and that opened up its own set of challenges. Why? I told you we were in an economically depressed area. And so we were selling our cleaning systems as they were being sold on payment plans. And when times got tough, what do you think one of the first bills was that people stopped paying? It was that $1,000 cleaning system that we had sold them. How do you repossess a vacuum cleaner? Very, very carefully. So what happens is that here we found a need now to spread out. So we started going into other communities, but the other communities that we were going out into weren't quite ready to accept. Oh, Mr. Stewart and his dad. So we had some very interesting times. I encountered racism at a very early age and I watched my dad encounter it as well. Heard him, saw him, called things, dealt ridiculously, especially as we were out there walking from door to door. I learned to speak to law enforcement at a very early age. You have the utmost respect for law enforcement. It's a job I would not want to have. It's a job that family members of mine do have. I don't wanna live in the world without law enforcement. Well, boy, some folks don't deserve a badge. And it seems like I would run into those folks more frequently than I wanted to. I lost my sister in 1993 and that really took an emotional toll on our family. It sucked the joy out of our family to some extent. We were a very, very close family. My mother got to the point that she really couldn't move. She couldn't move emotionally. She couldn't move physically because arthritis had taken a hold. We said, we need to change a scenery. We gotta get out of here. We moved to the south. All our problems are solved now, right? You know, the first time I saw a subdivision that had people that looked like me, a whole subdivision was in Atlanta, where I'm from right now. And that might not seem like much. But that was an eye opener for me because where I grew up, you know, you kind of got bottled in like certain folks live in these blocks and certain folks live in these blocks and you better not get caught on the wrong side of the tracks. After certain times of nights. So that was socially liberating for me to see that there's more. And that's one of the things that you have to do to keep yourself motivated, keep your mind open. Don't ever let your mind get close to the possibilities of what you can become but also to accept the mantle of work that's responsible to achieve that goal. You see, you've got to be serious about what you want to do. You have to be focused. You have to be determined and you have to decide no matter what it takes, I'm not going to stop. My father taught me his final lesson about refusing to quit in 1998. I watched my dad suffer 17 different medical events between 1998 and 2002. He had heart attack, stroke. He would lose the left side, lose the use of the left side of his body, have to go through physical therapy, regain that, then lose the use of the right side, lose his speech, regain his speech and just have to retrain himself to talk over and over again. He fought until he was completely immobilized. And even then, he would still struggle to move and communicate. I remember distinctly, September 11, 2001, when the chaos was attacking this country. My dad was in a nursing home and he couldn't speak. He would have to speak in grunts and he could just move just barely. If you say, dad, move this way. If you say yes, move this way. If you say no. And I remember as things were happening, they were saying that there was a plane that was headed to the CDC grabbing my family and I went and just didn't even sign my dad out, he grabbed him and we're just driving, trying to get towards the interior of the country. I didn't know what was gonna happen but I figured whatever bad was happening, it's gonna be taking place on the coasts. So we're just flying, trying to get to, trying to get the safety. And I'm looking at my dad and he's not able to communicate with me but he was looking with approval. He's like, hey, I know what's going down. You're doing the same thing that I would do. And a few short months later in January of 2002, my father passed fighting to the end. Why do I share that story with you? I share that story with you because that's my foundation. That's my foundation. Seeing my parents fight. Seeing my parents willing to explore these different business opportunities in order to get the money, to get us out of what was a bad situation, get us out of a dangerous neighborhood, get us out of a drug riddled community and try to give us something better. I can't betray that. And you've got to find something that you're not willing to betray as well. You hear about the why that makes you try and the why that makes you cry. Sometimes you're the why that you're willing to die for. Something so unacceptable to you that you simply won't allow it to happen. Think about this for a second. If I were to say to you, can you imagine a scenario where you lose your home? I hope you can. I hope you can't even imagine that. But suppose you strained your imagination and you said, yeah, if I lost my house due to losing my job, I could see that. Where would you go? Oh, well, I'd probably go to my mom's house or have to downsize a little bit. Can you see a scenario where things are so bad that you couldn't even stay with your parents or a friend, couldn't even afford to pay to sleep on a couch or sleep in the basement? Boy, that's pretty extreme. I can't imagine something like that. But again, if I strained the power of my imagination, I suppose I could see some scenario where even that could be a challenge. Can you see a scenario that you're living in a box under an overpass on the freeway of your town? Now, I don't say this to cast dispersions on anyone. I realize people have challenges with mental illness. So this is not meant to attack the homeless in any way. Follow me on this analogy though. Can you see a scenario where things are so bad you're living in a box under an overpass in the freeway nearest to your neighborhood? You might say, I can't imagine it getting that bad. I would do something to prevent that. Why is the bar so low? Why do you say, ooh, I can't imagine it being that bad. Whatever you would do to prevent that scenario, you just have to raise the bar. If you say, I can't imagine myself ever living in a home less than $300,000 a year. If that's where you set the bar, guess what? You'll never live in a home less than $300,000. If you say, I can't ever imagine myself having less than three cars living in a neighborhood less than $500,000. Wherever you set that bar, wherever you, if you, what I refuse to go lower than this, whatever number you set for yourself, that's what's going to happen. But the problem is some of us set our bar so low. We're afraid to raise that bar so we lower our dreams to the bar instead of raising our bar to the dream. And that's a form of quitting too. So you're quitting on the dream. Don't quit at anything. Don't quit at anything. If you build and indoctrinate that into your life, I don't quit. You've insulated yourself from failure. Things that can make you fail is things that you allow to infiltrate your mind and fester. I was a big comic book reader when I was growing up. And so a bunch of movies had been made and that's the technology has gotten better. The movies have gotten better. And there was a movie that had Superman and he was interrupting a crime and someone shot a gun at Superman. And they showed the bullet coming towards Superman in slow motion and it hit him in his eyeball and just collapsed and fell. I said, boy, that's a tough rascal now. He has bulletproof eyes. But you see, that's what we need to have, isn't it? You've got to have a bulletproof mind, even bulletproof eyes and ears. You can't let nonsense permeate your thinking and wreak havoc in your brain. You've got to block it at the gate. You've got to block it at the gate. You have to have a sense of purpose in this industry that you understand every negative experience, every no is bringing you closer to a yes and you have to believe that. You have to know your numbers, whatever they are. It takes X amount of dials. It takes X amount of doorknocks. It takes whatever it takes to achieve the result based on your personal sales metrics and you can't quit until you get those numbers and you have to associate those numbers to the things that you want, whether it's a house car, private school for the kids, donation to your favorite charity, wardrobe, vacations, retirement, whatever it is that you are reaching for, whatever it is that you refuse to betray, you have to know how much activity it takes to achieve that and then you cannot quit. You cannot quit monthly, weekly, daily or hourly until you achieve the goals that you set up for yourself. What are the results of it? I've been in the insurance industry now for about 15 years with that don't quit mindset. And I can't even tell you all the times that I've been down. I can't even tell you all the times that negative things have happened. The lead company has gone out of business and that was my primary lead source. A product has changed and now it changed my market. A commission plan has changed. A marketing plan has changed. Somebody changed the deal on me. Someone lied to me. Some training program that was in place no longer in place, but you can't focus on those little speed bumps on the way to success. You have to make up your mind no matter what. I'm willing to do the things that others want to have the things that others don't. I'm very fortunate right now to be in the position that I'm in. I think about my first house and I was so proud of my first house and I fixed it up. I drove by my first home actually not long ago. And it was in decent shape. I was good to see that someone seemed to love it as much as I did back in the day. But I couldn't help as I drove home and I'm thinking, wow, I'm driving in a car that costs three times as much as my first home. And I don't say that to brag. It was a matter of perspective for me. I was like, wow, I feel rewarded. I pulled into my garage and my garage is about the same size as that very first home. And my home's about 10 times as large as that very first house. And if I told many of my friends 15 years ago that this is what my life would be like 15 years from now, guess what many of them would have said? I don't have to guess because I told them. And guess what they told me? Probably some of the same stuff they're telling you. Get your head out of the clouds. That's unrealistic. How do you plan to do that? Who do you know that's ever made that much money? How are you ever gonna make that much money? And I had to make a decision not to listen. And I'm here to encourage you to do the same. Don't you listen to that nonsense. And it's not even coming from a negative place many times. The people that are trying to hold you back, they think they're helping you. They really do. They think that they are holding you back from harm's way. Let me protect you from getting your heart broken. Don't believe, don't dream. Don't want anything, baby. Just stay here with us. Get a big screen TV and let that be the definition of your success. They love you, but don't let them love you to death. Don't let your family or friends love you to the death of your dreams. There's so much you can accomplish in this world. I am proud of what I'm able to do for my family. But do you think I stopped dreaming? No. There's people that have so much more than me and it's not about the possessions. It's the power to help once you possess. Does that make sense? See, it's not money that is the root of all evil. It's the love of money. It's what are you willing to do? What are you willing to sacrifice? Who are you willing to hurt in the pursuit of money? But if you are pursuing money in a good way for a good purpose, there's nothing wrong with dreaming big. You don't get extra points for being poor. Some people think they get extra good points for being poor. Look at me, I'm poor, I'm a better person. No, you can be a terrible person, broke. You can be a great person to be rich. We've got to decide who we want to be internally. We've got to decide what dreams we want to do, what we want to have, what goals we want to achieve. But then you've got to be willing to work to have it and you have to have realistic expectations. If making money was easy, if being successful was easy, everybody would do it. It's like gaining weight. It's easy to gain weight. And we're all one donut away from being in trouble. That's the easy part. The hard one is maintaining the financial fitness. It's easy to be broke. It's easy to complain. It's all I'm never going to have. This person's got more people. If having success was easy, everybody would do it. You wouldn't have nine out of 10 people that make less than $100,000 a year. But you've got to understand, you've got to keep it real. If most of the people are not making it and you're trying to join that rare group of folks that are, choose your circle carefully. There's a good chance that many of the people that you are around today, you need to visit them with caution. It's difficult to completely cut negative people out of your life because sometimes the negative people are related to you. And so there are times that you have to join hands with them because you love them and it's the right thing to do. But you may not want to have them as your closest associates and best friends. Why? Because if you surround yourself with a mediocre environment, if you surround yourself with people that do quit when the going gets tough, if you're not careful, you'll join them. I'm going to beat them, you're not going to beat them. You're going to join them. You've got to protect your mind. That's why I'm so glad that you can hear my voice right now. Not to hear my two cents. It just means if you're here, you're hearing people more successful than me. You're hearing people more skilled than me. You're being exposed to more concepts than even the things that I'm bringing to you right now. And man, is that a blessing for you and your family. I want you to absorb every minute because there's a common theme that you're going to hear. I promise you, among the folks that are talking here today, tonight, this afternoon, whenever you're watching this program, and that is this. You can do whatever you want to do in this business. You can do whatever you want to do in life. You can have a successful family. You can have a successful marriage. You can have a successful business, but you cannot quit. You cannot quit. You cannot allow yourself to quit under any circumstances. No matter how tough it gets, in fact, the tougher it gets, the happier you should get because the tougher it gets, the more people are quitting. Remember that. Whatever you're doing, the tougher it gets, the more narrow and cramped it starts to become, the less people you start to see around you, that means the more people that have quit, that means you're close. And eventually you get to the top of the mountain and there's going to be a couple of folks there. I plan to be there. Cody's going to be there. Many of the speakers that you see today, we're going to be up there waiting for you. And more than that, we climb down the mountain. We put folks on our backs. We pull folks up. We do everything we can to try to get you to the top of the mountain, but we can't do it for you. We can definitely do it with you. And we didn't do it by ourselves. There were people that held our hands going up the mountain as well. And we're just paying back that favor. But nothing that you hear today will matter if you quit on yourself. Do not quit. You can't fail if you refuse to quit. Find something that you refuse to betray, set a standard, set it high, never come below it. Put the effort in to achieve that standard and you will find yourself in the winner's circle. Have a great day, everybody. I hope I get a chance to speak to you again and I'll talk to Cody. Maybe he'll let me come back. Have a good one. Awesome job, Henry. Now you can see why he chose that dude to speak. He embodies 8%. How about these letters, by the way? I mean, how freaking cool is this setup? I wish you were here. We need to expand the studio, Dylan. Cassidy, we need to have them expand the studio and get a live studio audience in the future. Expand it out another 12 feet and put like 24 chairs back there so you can be actually a live studio on Steering 8% Virtual last year. If we did that, who would show up? I don't know if we'll charge. I don't know if it'll be free. I don't know if we'll pay you to come. Who freaking knows? But let me know in chat who would come to Springfield, Missouri and want to be a part of this live so you can see all the action behind the action. It's 100 grand a piece, who's still in? Just kidding, all right? But maybe, just maybe, we'll do something insane like that in the future because you, guess what? You, guess what? You, guess what? You, never know. And you never know with me, man. You never know, okay? Now, next 8% deal, Bogo VIP, two VIP tickets for the price of one, Kodiaskins.com forward slash deals. That's the 8% deal. Kodiaskins.com forward slash deals, okay? Make sure you hit it, hit up the link. See all the deals. Take advantage of something because they're insane. They're not gonna last long. They're just like the flash sales which isn't scared me at the moment yet, okay? Those are for the whole time, the whole two days, those deals. Kodiaskins.com forward slash deals, flash sales. Three minutes, poof, and it's gone, okay? Now, I want to remind you to keep sharing on social. Thank you for blowing up my inbox. I love it, okay? Keep sharing on social, keep bringing the heat, okay? Go live, dude, just freaking share this thing out like crazy, okay? Start sharing the live stream, like go do whatever it takes, all right? Go do whatever it takes. Thank you for being here, okay? I am going to keep showing up in your life. Please let me, because I want to help, okay? I want to help. Now, reminder, I may even throw another little deal, okay? For those that share this out to the most Facebook groups, the most insurance agent Facebook groups, okay? I may give you a hundred dollars right now, okay? A hundred dollars right now. Also, for those that jump on and tag, okay? First one opportunity for a hundred bucks with sharing to the most interest agent Facebook groups. Boom, go do it now. Come on now, okay? Also, for those that actually go into the comments and tag the most insurance agents into the video. We'll also have a chance to win a hundred dollars cash. I'm gonna just keep bringing it strong like I'm giving you a free conference. I'm giving away stuff. I'm giving out rising star $92 tickets. I'm live streaming for 47 bucks, like I am making it so irresistible that you're like, dude, I gotta help, I gotta show up. I gotta do it because he just keeps showing up for my life, man. That's what I'm gonna keep doing, okay? I'm excited to bring out the next speaker. Makes you tag me on social. I'm excited to bring out the next speaker. He's selling over a million dollars a month, virtually. Million dollars in annuities per month, virtually. His team is selling a million dollars a week in annuities, virtually. That's insane, that's insane, that's insane. In the membrane. This dude's a good dude, man. He was speaker at the very first April, 2018. I love this guy. He always brings amazing content. We recently did a full day annuity training together, I jumped in for like 30, 60 minutes, but he just freaking brought it like it's hot for a whole day. You want to add annuities to your business. You want to cross sell. You want to add a piece or this or that and just freaking blow it up. Add a hundred grand to your income this year. This is the dude to do it, okay? Please welcome to the virtual stage. My good buddy, blow up and chat. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. Mr. Ryan Palamini. Hey everybody, Ryan Palamini here from Level Up Advisors Academy. I first and foremost want to say what an honor it is to be a part of this 8% Nation virtual conference that Cody Askins has put on. You talk about a visionary, right? These kind of people come along once in a lifetime. You see a Cody Askins who is absolutely revolutionizing the industry for the good. I've never seen anything like it and I could not be more proud to be a part of it. And really to get to know Cody over the last couple of years has been an incredible journey. Watching him go from the inaugural 8% Nation to battling the pandemic and still overcoming those objectives. But here's the thing is he's here and he's doing this and he's helping a lot of people. And so I'm fortunate to be able to give back just for a few minutes here. And the title and the topic of this conference is you cannot fail if you don't quit. And man, I could tell you over the last 12 years I think I've wanted to quit every single day a lot of times. Like some of you, I have been so down in this business and I remember when I first got started I'm going on almost 12 years and I can't believe how fast that went by. But I remember starting off when I was 21 years old and I had no idea what I was doing. Probably like some of you, you got your insurance license, you're like, all right, what's next? That's where I was. I was 21 years old, I had no money, struggling just to pay for a lead, struggling just to buy a lead, hoping to God that that lead worked. It was the one thing like this lead has to work or I'm going to die. And when it didn't, man, I remember how disappointing that was. And I remember feeling like, what am I going to do next? Like where's my next lead going to come from? Where's my next check going to come from? And I remember early on in my career, seeing the eviction notice on my door. I don't know if you ever felt that, but man, that is such a hard thing to balance when you're trying to stay positive and you're trying to build the business and make some money, but things just aren't happening. And I remember wanting to quit all the time during my first four or five years in business. It wasn't easy. I know some people come out of the gate smoking and make $100,000 in like a month. I'm like, congratulations, that wasn't me. And so maybe it's not you either. And but I remember the first couple of years just trying to figure this business out. And I know some of you have seen me now and I do a lot of stuff on the IULs and I teach master classes and don't mean wrong. I've had the privilege of teaching and coaching over 4,000 agents and advisors in the financial business and it's been my honor. But I'm gonna tell you this, there's a lot of commonalities that I wanna talk about today. And when you're in that trenches, right? When you're in the trenches and you wanna quit, what are some of the things that will keep you going? And so here's what I wanna say. Over the last 12 years of working with 4,000 plus people, the commonalities become very clear on the mega producers, right? So maybe you wanna become a mega producer. Maybe you wanna be the next Cody Askin and the CEO of your company. And I promise you this, it is possible. It is possible. The last five years of my career have been the best five years and I'm explaining to you some changes that I've made and that anybody can make. There's nothing, you see a lot of these big producers, I promise you there's nothing special about them. This is like rocket science to me a lot of the time. I can't figure it out most of the time, but I do know how to do something and it's how to simplify the process. And so what I wanna touch upon today is going from the salesman mentality to becoming the CEO of your company. Because I promise you this, for the first five years of my business, when I was out there selling mortgage protection and final expense and it's kinda scraping by and thinking that I was doing good, which I had some great times and I learned a lot, but I was thinking as a salesman. And so there's a mind shift change that has to happen in order for you to get to the next level. Cause some of you maybe going through this transition period or you may be struggling a little bit going, I've been doing this for so long and I don't feel like I'm at the level where I should be or where I want to be. Trust me, I was there, I've been there. It is not a fun place to be. And so in 2015, I made some changes in my business. And this is where if you take a note, I want you to write these things down because there's subtle differences that can change the trajectory of your entire business. But you alone have to make them. And here's the thing, if you're gonna quit, you're gonna fail. But in order to not quit when times get hard, if you start thinking like a CEO, here's the first thing you have to start making considerations for. Number one is, where are you going? You see, when I was down and out, like a lot of you have been, I mean I have gotten beat up so badly in the last 12 years of my career, knocking on doors, getting doors slammed in my face, getting kicked out of people's homes just because I was trying to make a sale and it wasn't happening like, man I know the frustration. But I'll tell you this, in those times, in the hardest times of my career, the thing that got me through it was having clarity and vision of where I was going. So for those of you guys maybe just getting started or maybe you're in that position where you're going, I'm capped out. Like I don't see a way to get to the next level. I wanna start challenging you to start thinking like the CEO of your company because for a long time, again, I was a salesman. I was out there just trying to make a sale, trying to make a sale and make a living. And it was like the hamster wheel over and over again. But I started going, listen, I want more than this. I'm not gonna do this forever. I can't do this forever. I'm burnt out. I don't wanna do this anymore. I'm not having any fun. That was the moment in 2015 where I sat at my kitchen table and told my wife that. And I was like, I can't do this anymore. I am so burnt out. I'm so tired of spinning my wheels and living the same year over and over and over again. What do I mean by that? You make the same amount of sales, same amount of money over and over and over. See, that's not growth. That's living the same year over and over and over. So if you're gonna have growth, you have to next know where you're going and sometimes it's taking risks and really putting yourself out there to learn something different in this industry to get to the next level. And so Vision is one of the most important things in your business. I promise you this, any CEO that you will go a new interview, the reason that they have built such a great company is because they know where they're going. And they are experts at painting the vision to their entire team, to their staff of where they are going. It's a way to keep people motivated. And in those days when you're down and out, your vision is what's gonna keep you going. You know, I love when Helen Keller talked about that. She said, you know what's worse than being blind? Having sight with no vision. You know, I heard that in 2015. You know, it's one of those things where you know when things are bad and you hear something like that, it was for a purpose. And I started thinking about, I don't have a vision of where I'm going. I am just out here trying to make a living, trying to feed my family like everybody else, but I don't know what the end goal is here. I don't know what the end game is. Do you? And so that's something that I had to think about. And so as I started going, there's more to this than where I am. I started getting very clear on where I wanted to go. I had a purpose for my business. I had a mission statement finally created for my business of where I was gonna be. You know, a vision of where I am now, but where I'm gonna be in 10 years from now. You see, I know that when we're trying to make this one sale work, all you think about is that one thing because if it doesn't, you don't know how you're gonna pay your bills. Oh God, I remember being there. It's so difficult. But in those moments when it doesn't work out, if you know where you're going in the next five years, this one thing today is a lot smaller than you think it is. Because if you miss this one, there's gonna be the next one. But if you don't know where you're going, and you don't have that vision, this is gonna be the end day for you. This is it. You're gonna quit after this person tells you no because you can't take it anymore. And I remember being there. And so in 2015, I had to make some serious changes to my business. And you think about that, that was only six years ago. I was broke six years ago. Some of you, you see me now and if you see me on interviews with Cody, you know, the incomes and all the things that I've done, which have been great. But that was five years ago. I couldn't pay my rent. So my point is that it can happen quickly, but you have to make the changes. So here's what we're gonna do. This is what changed for me. I started learning how to run my business in phases because here's why I figured out a CEO is not stuck on this one thing because he or she knows where they're going in 10 years, five years from now. So that vision allows you to go, okay, this is where we are phase one today. But what does phase two of my business look like? You see, phase one for me, and maybe this is where you are, phase one for me was figuring this business out, figuring out the life insurance side of it, right? Figuring out what a term, whole life, mastering my presentation, and then getting to the next level of, man, these annuities, these IUL things make no sense to me. So I realized in that moment, that was phase two for me. It was mastering phase one, making some money, learning how the game works to get to the next phase of my business. I'll tell you this, if you're gonna win the game, you have to have knowledge others don't. What I mean by that is this, as you develop in your career and in this business, the reason that people produce at an incredible level is they just know more. That's what it really comes down to, because I probably, five years ago, I didn't understand taxes, I had no idea what estate planning was, wealth management, I'm not doing that. Annuities, I can't even spell the word annuity. Here I am five, six years later, doing over a million dollars a month in annuity premium. I didn't know what that was five years ago, but I realized that if I'm gonna win this game, if I'm gonna get to the elite level, the first thing I have to do is know more than everybody else. I became a student of the game. So part of every phase that you're in in your business, you have got to become a student of the game in that particular phase. Again, point, you may be phenomenal at the life insurance side, but you suck like I did at the annuity side and the IUL side. So phase two is while you're out selling the life insurance, mortgage protection, whatever it is, Medicare to pay the bills at nighttime, you need to be studying the other part of the next phase of your business. And that's all I've done. So every time I knew where I was going, because again, vision, clarity, whenever we have vision and we know we're going, you know what the next phase is. You're just not there yet. So when you're getting to the next phase, you just got to study what the next one is and become a master at it before you even jump into it. Now don't get, I know people sit there and study and never do it, that's different. You have to be studying to be prepared for when the coach calls your number, right? And I want you to think about this. We're talking about winning the game. Every game is won or lost before it's even played. So for those of you sports players, I give you an analogy here because this is how you start changing your mindset to become better. So think about this. You can either go into this business thinking, I hope it works. You know, this is it for me. Maybe you're older and you're like, this is my last hurrah, right? But your mindset is gonna dictate the level that you get to in business. It's the same thing in sports, right? If I'm a soccer player, which I am, and I'm a defender and I know that I am gonna have to guard the best striker or forward in the league, I've got two choices. I can go into that game going, this guy is the best or she is the best and I'm gonna struggle all day. I can't believe I have to mark this person today. Or I can go into it going, this is gonna be the hardest game of his entire season. Because I'm gonna do the best that I can. I'm gonna dominate that person. I'm not gonna let them do anything. I've got their number today. You see, when you start to think about that, think about the attitude, right? Think about the posture that you go into with something like that. That's how you have to treat your business. That's how you have to treat the next phase of your business going, I'm gonna dominate this game. So when I started transitioning into the annuity role, I didn't know how to spell the word annuity five years ago, but when I got into that side of the world, I started going, I'm gonna kill this thing. There will be nobody in this space that outproduces me because I'm gonna become a student of the game. I'm gonna learn everything that I possibly can about this side of the world so that when I do compete, not only am I competing, but I'm winning the game. So your job as a CEO of your company is to win the game for your family, for your staff, for your agents, and just for you personally, for your internal self-belief in yourself, because I promise you this, as you become better, your self-belief becomes better. You see, I didn't believe in myself five years ago. Maybe you're in the same situation where you are just down and out and you're like, I can't do this anymore. I didn't have any self-belief. My God, I had no self-esteem. I was burnt out and dead, but as you become better, as you become more skilled, your belief level goes through the roof. And I'll tell you this, running a business in phases gives you the incredible clarity that you need and as you become more clear as to what the next level is for you, self-confidence becomes very easy. When you know more than others, self-confidence becomes very easy. You look at some of the stuff that I've been able to do and again, you see me on the interviews and I hear it all the time, I could never do what you do. I could never do a million dollars a month in annuities. Five years ago, I didn't even know, again, I didn't know what an annuity was. A million a month, forget about it. I'm lucky just to do 100,000 a year. I'd be fired up about that. But as I started developing the belief in myself and developing the knowledge of what it took to become that level, here's the next thing you gotta do as you run these business in phases. To get to that level, sometimes you gotta get around the heat. No, all the time, you need to get around the heat. And so think about that for a minute. Who is someone around you that you can learn from and grow from? We call it the mentor, right? Maybe there's a mentor, somebody that you wanna be mentored by to get to that level. So let me tell you a little bit about how my story transitioned from the life insurance world to the annuity side. In 2015, when I was dead and I was dead broke, I had no self-confidence in myself anymore. I hated this business, I wanted to quit. My wife said, you're not gonna do this. You are better than this. You are gonna pick yourself up and you're gonna go figure it out. Thank God I had that support system because I'd be out of the business today. But what I started doing was looking at the industry and going, okay, who are the players? Who are the players in the industry? And what I dedicated an entire year to doing was getting around the heat as often as I possibly could. Learning nuggets here and there from everybody that I could possibly learn from. And so even to the point, so when you get in motion, like when you're building a business and you start getting in motion, the universe starts moving things around for you to put things in your lane that help you get to the next level faster. Now, you can either take it or you can leave it. If you take it, you're gonna do a lot better. But if you're not clear of where you're going and all of a sudden you get this break and you don't use it because you don't see it, that's a problem. But when you're in motion and you're clear of where you're going, things become easier. So watch this. 2015, I started thinking about how do I become a phenomenal annuity producer? How do I get into the world of wealth management where I can meet with high net worth clients that would actually listen to me? I was 30 years old at the time. Listen to a, I was 28 years old. Think who's gonna listen to a 28 year old about wealth management? I'm broke. I don't have 500 bucks for my bank account. But I didn't care about that because I knew where I wanted to go. And I knew that this was phase two of my business. So I moved, my wife and I, we lived in West Palm Beach, Florida. Not many people know the story. We lived in West Palm Beach, Florida. And we moved all the way, all the way, four hours to Tampa, Florida. Why? Because I met a gentleman that was doing $20 million a year from his office. And I'm like, $20 million a year at annuity volume. I can't even imagine doing a million at that point. 20 million, I need to be around there. So we literally shut down our office. I moved out of the apartment that I was in and we moved all the way over to Tampa, Florida. And for a year and a half, I spent every day in my mentor's office. I literally moved into the building where he was. I actually took an office in his office, a little corner desk, right? It wasn't making any money, it wasn't salary. I didn't care about that and neither should you. Sometimes when you get an opportunity, you gotta take it and run with it. And it doesn't matter what you need to do to make it happen, you do it. So for a year and a half, I went to every one of his seminars. I was the one that was checking people in the room. I made sure that the chairs were set up properly. I made sure that the presentation board was ready to go, that the clicker had, whatever I had to do just to be a fly on the wall to learn a little bit, right? These are the sacrifices you have to make sometimes. And I had the ability to do this. So again, but that happened because I was in motion. So during that year and a half, I became a student of the game. So as you run your business to the next phase, whether it's the annuity or recruiting or building a team, what does that phase entail? No matter where you are, it's about becoming a student of the game. So for a year and a half, I became a student. And in 2016, I had my number called. I had the opportunity of a lifetime to be able to go and help open up a marketplace in the federal space. I do a lot of work at federal employees. I had an opportunity to go to Connecticut, where I live in Florida, but to go all the way to Connecticut and open up a marketplace that changed my entire business. From 2016 to here we are now, we have become one of the largest federal agencies in the entire United States. But it was that one decision. Hey, how about the decision of living in Florida and traveling back and forth to Connecticut when you have no money? That's a whole nother story because sometimes again, when you know where you're going, it doesn't matter. You do things. I remember when I was in Connecticut, not having any money, and my aunt lives in Connecticut, let me borrow her car with no AC. And this was July in New England. So here I am, bobbing around New England and Connecticut, trying to meet with clients in a 1992 Toyota Corolla with no AC, sweating so much that every time I got to the office, I would have to change my clothes before the clients came in. Those are the kind of things that you just do. You just do because you know it's the right thing because you know where you're going and it does nothing that's gonna stop you from getting there. So I wanna just remind everybody how talented everybody is. Listen, I don't care what your background is, where you've come from, you are talented. It is your job to nurture that talent. It is your job to pull that out of you when nobody else will because you are the CEO of your business. Nobody else is. You made a decision to get into the financial world, to create your own schedule, to create your own financial opportunity, to become financially free, and to build a business, a legacy for your family. But only you can do that. It's up to you to take the necessary steps to get to that level. You know, one of my favorite movies is a Bronx Tale. Maybe you've heard this quote where he's talking to his son, he goes, you know son, the saddest thing in life is wasted talent. And it's decisions every day that you make that change your life. And so I want you to start thinking about that. Where are you today? Are you wasting your talent? There's so much waste of talent out there. 8% nation is about the 8% that make it to the top. It's about the 8% that did not quit. The 8% that found the talent and pulled it up out of them. You have it in you. The question is, is are you ready to take it to the next level? By being here, I believe that you're ready because you made the decision to be a part of this event. And I know you're gonna continue to keep investing in yourself and your business. I can't wait to watch it. I know Cody Askins is your biggest cheerleader and he has put this on to help everybody in the financial industry grow to the next level. I'm here to help, he's here to help. We'll see you at the top. Awesome job, Ryan. Okay, who loved that? And you're like, dude, I'm gonna start adding annuities to my product portfolio. I'm at least gonna ask. I'm at least gonna ask the easy questions that he just laid out. Yes, yes, maybe yes. Absolutely yes. Okay, great, good. Good, good, good. Okay, now, before- I love the siren, man. I love when it's time to release the flash sale. Everything I don't have to jump for like three minutes nonstop. Okay, but here's what I can tell you. Three minutes and it's about to be poof. It's about to be gone. Here's what the flash sale is. Okay, this one's for the first 10 people, which means it must be a lower price point. And it's something you're gonna want to take an answer right now. Three minutes and it's gone. It's a flash sale, random, instant, insane. Boom. It's ticking and talking. So you may want to know what it is. Okay, hit the link. Two premier tickets, two premier tickets, right? But you're currently $1,200 for only $297. You get access to the premier seat. You get access to the party and you get access to the premier lunch. Two premier tickets, only $297. Hit the link. Take advantage of the flash sale while it's going on, okay? Hit the link right now. It'll be going for three minutes and then poof just like that instant. As instant and crazy as it comes, it's gone. Okay, so do not miss out on the random flash sale. As we start, we kind of have some fun with this thing. Okay, so welcome, thank you. Make sure that you take advantage of this flash sale. Okay, now, here's a quick question for you. All right, those that are watching, I want to know again where you're watching from, all right? We've had thousands of other agents come on that weren't on one to ask that first time. And I want to know now, the team's telling me, a lot of people are on that may not have been on the first 28 seconds. Where are you watching from? Okay, because I know, we're formulating this information by the way. Like I'm going to be traveling in 2021 and 2022 and I'm coming all over the country to do events. Let's see which area gets the most representation of the over 10,000 agents that registered because that'll tell me where I need to go to spend time with you to take this whole thing to a whole nother level because I want to spend time with you. I want to invest in you and I want you to continue to level up. All right, here in a little bit, I'm going to finish with a challenge as we finish out the day. Okay, so next speaker, the dude runs a final expense call center, runs it very, very well and does an amazing job doing it. I call him JVE. Dude, you freaking dudes, freaking swole, man. Justin Bomb Eigen is how you pronounce his name. Please help me welcome, okay? Bring him on up, amazing sales trainer. We did an event together in Miami at the Miami Mastermind. He came and spoke for a few minutes, him and Grant Docherty. I'm sorry, not Grant, James Whitley. Okay, I love all of them. Rory, everybody, okay? Justin came and spoke at the Miami Mastermind with James and the scripting man, the objection handling, the closing, the way he was framing his virtual sales process was really good and you're going to want to hear this. It's gonna help you win even more. So please welcome, flash sales still going. Please welcome, it's almost done though. Hit the link, baby, hit the link. Please welcome to the virtual stage. My good buddy, come on in, JVE, Justin Bomb Eigen. Justin Bomb Eigen and I am coming to you here from sunny South Florida. I got my buddy Yoda here. He's got the SLS, no excuses, only results count had on. Well, this is our SLS nation logo. Got my lightsaber because Luke Skywalker never gives up. Got my 2020 Rory award, most valuable builder, growth-wise for SLS has ever had. A little bobblehead there. If you don't have me on social media yet, please add me. Okay, my Instagram is J, or at J underscore, vomigen, okay, you'll see my last name up there. My YouTube channel is justinsurance, one word, LLC. You'll be able to access all my content on there. I look forward to reaching out and talking to some of you. I really, really hope that you come at me to any questions that you have about insurance knowledge, insurance sales, skill sets, anything like that. Today, what I'm gonna talk about is how if you don't quit, you can never fail, okay? Because failing along the way doesn't make you a failure, right, like people have a little tiny failure and then they quit after it. But the people who are successful in this industry, they just never quit is what happened. So the theme really is if you don't quit, then you can't fail. So I think Napoleon Hill said it in one of the best ways in 1937 that opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune or temporary defeat. So you gotta note the temporary part of that. All right, and this quote rings true for me today, just as it did for all the businessmen of the early 20th century. And during my, I can't even compare myself to them, but during my life and career as an agent, I've run into so many situations which at the time seemed catastrophic, both personal and professional, but they ended up being catapults to my success. Biggest example that I can think of in my life, drug addiction, fresh out of college. I was hooked on heroin for about four or five years. Ended up actually being the best thing that could have happened to me. Because I wouldn't have the courage to persist and push through the business world today had I not gone through that. I mean, I was battling imminent, almost death every single day. You don't just lose your career in that business, in that world, you lose your life. So I mean, I went to a great, great upbringing, great college in upstate New York, full ride for chemistry, transferred to Northeastern University in Boston, in the middle of my college career, essentially. It was my backup school, honestly, but I couldn't stand living in upstate New York. So I went to Northeastern Finnish College and I got into some of the wrong things. I mean, drinking and smoking weed, led to Oxycontin, which led to heroin really quickly. I tried so long to get clean. I just kept quitting on myself. And I thought that no one could have a better idea from my life than me, right? Like I didn't have any idea in the high of power. I got in trouble. I was confused. I was accused of some pretty serious drug-related things which led me having to go away for a little while. But that passed over. And after having been forced into an institutionalized detox at a local jail for five months, I voluntarily checked myself into a 10 month rehab facility and I could have quit there and got back to the old lifestyle. It's not fun getting clean, but I'm telling you that getting through that sparked a fire that will never be put out. And I wouldn't have the dream life that I'm working on if I didn't go through that, all right? Actually, honestly, I went to that place with about 30 guys. 10 of them are dead. 10 of them are still using and about 10 of them are living productive lives. So the statistic wasn't in my favor. And I also could have quit at my first job selling cars at a halfway house. Then when I was there, keep in mind when I checked into the rehab facility, all I had was a bag of clothes to my name that didn't fit. I mean, I lived off Salvation Army donations, pantry donations, the kindness of my war well-to-do peers at the rehab. Selling cars isn't easy. Training consisted of, hey, you see that person? Go sell my car. I mean, if you've been in the car business, you know what I'm talking about. And I almost quit at that too, but I didn't. After three weeks of no pay, I had a monster Saturday. I made $1,200 in a day. And from that moment on, I was so obsessed in winning in sales. And I was top salesman every month until one of my good friends Kevin Valdez came along. Easily the best salesman I've ever met in my life. Privileged to work with this guy, a girl named Tysha, who's working with us now at SLS, a guy, Rob, Rachel. They all gave me a chance of success that led to where I am today. But I didn't quit. I mean, I refused to give up. And it led me to do whatever I needed to do to succeed. I decided to leave the car business and get into the insurance industry to chase a higher paycheck in the residual income, which is why most people join insurance. I was making 150,000 a year selling cars. I got that in like a third, jumping into insurance my first year. I had no clue what I was doing. Like, no training aside from product knowledge. And then my first year starting a call center every week was like bankruptcy knocking at the door. I mean, I maxed out credit cards with $50,000 in debt. I was barely making that much. Tens of thousands of dollars in downline chargebacks paid my agents more than I made for the first year. But I didn't give up. I refused to give up. I had a plan and I wasn't gonna lose, man. Then despite facing going belly up in business for almost a whole year before joining SLS, I pushed myself forward and drove harder towards survival every single day. At no point did I feel like I couldn't accomplish what I set out to accomplish. And it's true that if you don't quit, you can't fail. Now persistence of someone on a given course is a good indicator of this type of stuff that person's made of. It's almost like a spiritual thing. People with high levels of persistence and perseverance contain something that you can feel when you're around them. Like, you just know it's like a fire, man. It's like, whoa, this person's like, this person's got it, man. And you can just see it in their eyes and all their actions. I mean, the people who are successful in this business didn't have it any easier than anyone else. They just took the risk that other people weren't willing to take. And their remaining survivors in the War of Attrition that we call the insurance industry, which actually eliminates 92% of agents in their first year. It's a pretty courageous thing to go up against from a statistical standpoint, right? And trust me, the only way to have courage is if you're actually scared. I mean, you can't be courageous without some level of fear. So if you're scared at one point or another during your career as an agent, don't feel alone. Like, everyone's felt the discouragement and discomfort that come when you're selling insurance. It's part of the game, man. But remember, you simply can't grow if you're comfortable. John Maxwell says, personal growth in immediate gratification are incompatible with each other. And that's true. Looking back at my career as an agent, the few years I've been doing this, the time when I was most uncomfortable were the times I grew the most. It tested me, the times when I got comfortable and rested in my laurels were the time we had our statistic dropped. In fact, if you don't get a little scared about this business, you got something wrong up here that may need some addressing before you continue going, because everybody feels it, right? But I'll joke and aside, like one piece of advice I can give new agents, this is set up a path of success that can help you give a weapon to battle the unknowns in this industry, being unknown to how much money you'll make next week, which your clients will cancel and you'll get a charge back on. What environmental and political factors, like all this stuff we've dealt with last year that may prevent you from being able to work next week, right, things like that. I'm gonna have everyone do an exercise with me here today, so don't worry, it doesn't require much movement. Besides, I grab a pen and a piece of paper or pulling up a Google Doc, so please do that right now. Grab a pen and a piece of paper or a spreadsheet or something. All right, cool, so I want everyone here to write down a maximum of five things you wanna accomplish in the next 30 days, okay? They have to be an actual value, an actual number, they have to be quantitative, they have to be realistic, and you gotta say, hey, this is something I can actually do in the next 30 days. So, for example, a qualitative income goal would be make more money in the next 30 days. An actual quantity goal would be, I'm gonna make $10,000 in the next 30 days, so write one goal that has to do with your finances as income that you wanna accomplish in the next 30 days, okay? Write another one that has to do with personal development, like physical fitness or something like that, and then write another goal that could be relationship-based for either a significant other or a friend or family member or a group of people that's important to you. For instance, like if you wanna spend more time with your spouse or at church or something like that, write how many times in the next 30 days you're gonna go and specifically spend time with that person or those groups of people, okay? So, maximum of five goals here. You don't wanna focus on too many things at once, right? Like most billionaires are focused on like one thing at a time from that ones I've listened to. So, you wanna focus on the main keystone goals in your life that are gonna let everything else fall into place. So, now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you a format to schedule your weeks so that you can make sure you do everything possible to achieve your goals, and I do this every week, okay? Remember, if you don't achieve your goals the first time around, man, you mis-underestimated or you underestimated the amount of energy, time, and effort you would take to accomplish them. Simple as that. You gotta hit it harder next time. So, in this sense, failing the first time around may not make you a failure, just don't give up. So, write down the steps here to planning a successful week and use these tools after this conference to plan. Take two hours on a Saturday or Sunday or whenever, if you're face-to-face whenever you're setting your appointments. Because having a battle plan is gonna set you up to have the best chances of winning the war, which is this industry, man. So, first you wanna write your commitments, like appointments, anytime you have to be somewhere for someone. This may be different from your face-to-face appointments if you're a face-to-face agent. These are things like sports games for your kids, doctor's appointments, things like that, where you have like a commitment, right? Meetings, next set, excellence time. This is with your family, time for reading, sales training, gym, exercise, stuff like that. You gotta put this here. I mean, this is your personal development time and long-term growth time that if you don't schedule in before everything else may not get scheduled at all. Right, so next on your calendar you're gonna wanna put your green time in. This is your money-making time. So, if you're in tele-sales, you wanna block off the times you're gonna call, stuff like that. I'm not expecting people to write their schedule here. Just write these things here, okay? So, if you're a face-to-face agent and you wanna incorporate your green time into when you call to set appointments for the week sales, or a specific time you'll be door-knocking, all right? And then after the green time, we have red time. So, this is anything that you use to maximize your green time, like organizational stuff, calling charge backs, follow-ups, referrals, extra training, stuff like that. And then next, you schedule some recreation time. So, this could be some personal alone time for the week just to decompress, okay? So, you have your appointments, then you have your excellence time, then you have your green time, your red time, and then your recreational time. And I think you'll be surprised about how much time you actually have in your schedule once you're done doing this. So, once you have a plan of attack to help ensure your success, you have to have these goals to keep you motivated through the ups and downs. So, I have my longer-term goals, but those shorter-term ones allow me to be very efficient with my time and cross-off wins every day. Because I've noticed for myself that happiness comes from overcoming obstacles towards the accomplishment of my goals, reflecting on past accomplishments and the new constructive endeavors. So, these are things that actually make me feel good and improve my emotional state. So, setting up goals for yourself along with a plan of attack to reach those goals will allow you to have constant confidence boosters every day that you can check off your list to get done. All right, you gotta have these little wins along the way to keep you going. You'll start to flourish, I'm telling you, in all areas of life if you do this and stick to it. But there's always a human factor, which is something that, we don't really have a tool to measure yet. But so, you gotta make sure you don't give up on yourself. Don't freaking quit, man, I'm telling you. All this plan doesn't mean anything. A lot of people get ready to get ready. Just get ready and do it, right? So, I recommend logging all of your successes as well so that you have never referenced to look back to in a separate notebook to be like, whoa, I did that, I did that, I did that, right? And look, if you fall short of your goals, you have two choices. Increase your action or lower your standards. You gotta do one of those two, or you're gonna be miserable. As far as increasing action goes, you may have to invest more action into training to make your actual work time more profitable, right? The ton of training courses online. Cody Askins has a great training program. There are a lot of others. I will learn from Grant Cardone personally. That's most of the stuff I know on sales. And I've invested a ton of money at first on credit cards, right, I didn't have it, into myself. Because having skin in the game financially keeps you dedicated, keeps you focused, and most of the good training programs cost money. I custom-built the training platform for our agents, for anyone who works with me. I mean, it's not for sale, but it combines my sales experience with my insurance knowledge, my insurance experience from everyone I've learned from. I mean, I spend at least an hour or two a day studying and working on personal development. That's a game changer. That's really gonna help you not quit. This keeps me focused and persistent, because I'm always acquiring new methods and data that I can use to handle the problems I face on a daily basis. I mean, you can never lose out on an investment into yourself. And action must also go on your work day, like just get to work, dude, right? Into the actual income-producing activities, right? If you're in tele-sales, make sure you're either dialing or talking to someone during the green time you're scheduled in. If you're in the field, make sure you're on an appointment, setting appointment, calling an appointment, or driving through an appointment, or door knocking. If you're an agency manager or a team builder, then build your freaking team, right? Figure out what actions you have to take to get there, right, and what behaviors are necessary to achieve those actions. And I promise you, quitting is not one of them, all right? So I'm gonna go over a little bit of a sales tactic today that can help increase your closing, all right? This is gonna help with answering rebuttals, okay? This is how you answer the first rebuttal. I'm gonna do a little bit of a brief of a sales, little sales class here. Sneak peek into what's in the training course I have. So whenever anybody buys something, there's three things that they're sure about. There's a certain level of how sure they are. It's either they're sure about you, right? They're sure about the company and the product, okay? So they have to be pretty confident in those three things. Now, insurance, it's not like people wake up one day and they're like, oh yeah, wait, there's this thing, life insurance, that like I can pay every month when I die and my family will get the money? No, they know about it. So what are the other two facts? And if they're talking to you, they're at least sold on the idea of a product. So there's something that that product will solve. I don't care what anybody says. They're on the phone with you, or in an appointment, there's probably something. Now there are some time wasters, but say 80% to 90% of people that are talking to you have a problem that this can solve, all right? So what happens when you go for the close? You guys can relate to this. Anybody here who's done more than two presentations for insurance, when someone gives you an objection and then you answer it directly, they go from one objection to the next objection to the next objection to the next objection. So they start to hop from objection to objection. What you really wanna figure out there and what you really wanna flush out is the real objection. That way you don't quit on the sale, right? At the end of every sale, if you don't quit, you can't fail thing. That goes into a sale too. The first person, at the end of every call or appointment, someone is sold. Either you're sold on the idea that they don't need insurance or they have to talk to this person or that person, or they're sold on the idea that they need insurance. So they either sell you or you sell them. So you ever notice that when you go to close and someone says, I gotta talk to this person? And then you agree and then you answer it directly? You ever notice how they jump to the next one a lot of times, right? So they'll go from, I gotta talk to my kids to, well, I don't make quick decisions. I don't do business like this. I don't give people my personal information. You guys have heard all that. I gotta think about it. So when you answer those directly right away, you're not really finding out what the actual objection is because I've found that it's a, first one's usually a smoke screen for something else. The first thing they tell you. So what you wanna do is validate first whether they even like the product, all right? So you wanna ask them if they like the product at all? But hey, aside from everything else, assuming that it didn't cost any money, do you actually like the idea of a program like this for your kid or whoever? Now if they agree, awesome, exactly. Go to build up the product a little bit more. Cover some other features and benefits into a little bit more depth. Show how that it can actually match their needs and what their family run into when they pass based on everything that was gathered in the presentation. Okay, and then you wanna evaluate if what their level of certainty is on you. So you wanna ask them, hey, now on a scale of one to 10, no, no, no, sorry, wrong point there. You wanna ask them, now listen, if I happen to be the person you have to talk to here or if I was like a trusted advisor or someone that you always ask for help, you'd probably be saying, hey, where do I sign up? And then we'll figure out the details, not I gotta think about it or I gotta do this or that. Am I right? Now if they say no here, I kinda come back at it, I'm like, come on, you gotta be kidding me. Like if you could have, assuming everything worked out and I was a trusted friend and I'm like, hey, do this or if I'm your son, like, hey, dude, do this because it's gonna help me, you wouldn't be saying, where do I sign up? Now most of the time they say yes. They say, yeah, you're right. Just say exactly, like, you know, and I get that, you don't know me, I don't have a track record with you. So just reintroduce yourself. No, but hey, I'm just to reintroduce myself, my name's Justin, I'm with Senior Life Services and I'm one of the top agents here, right? I have one of the biggest teams at Senior Life Services, the biggest divisions and I pride myself on the ability to be there for my team and my clients and everyone else in my life. And my success has been a result of that. My success has been a result of not giving up on my clients and not giving up on people on my team, right? So you, and then you go into building up the company that you're selling or the agency that you work with, right, and as far as the company goes, right, cover their success, their history, their ratings, stuff like that. And then what you do when you ask for this sale a second time, drop the amount of insurance that you're recommending for them to go with. So just drop the coverage amount, all right? So that's a little tip there that can help you close more deals. If you need more information about that, you can just reach out to me on Instagram or YouTube, that's fine. I mean, Facebook, send me a message, Justin Balmigan, it's cool. If you don't quit, then you can't fail, guys. I'm telling you, everyone in this business, I know who's successful. They just didn't give up, man. They just kept going. And I don't, and once you get to taste a little bit of the success, it's like, oh my gosh, I want more, I want more, I want more. So where would Yoda be? If, well, he died, I can't use that as an example, but if I had so many times, I could have quit during my career as an agent. I could have quit when I started with New York Life and then the state of Florida told me that I couldn't get my series six because of my history in Massachusetts, having the stuff I ran into and went by a drug problem. I could have quit right there. No, I'm gonna sell final expense, right? I could have quit when I bought leads and when I spent a couple thousand dollars on leads on a credit card and I realized, whoa, South Florida, everybody lives in a gated community. I can't even get into these places to doorknock, right? I could have quit when I started a call center in my second bedroom and was just trying to get off my feet. I could have quit when I actually moved into a call center, when I rented an office with no clue what the heck I was doing, just a passion to win, man. That was it in persistence and energy and desire and I had a great team, Brian Whitley, he's been with me since the beginning. James Whitley, awesome guy, I absolutely love James. Grant, Rory, Henry, Brian, Vicky, my girlfriend, Vicky, she's awesome, they all help push me to not quit and we help each other. You gotta get around a good team too, guys. Get people in your team who don't quit. You get a quitter in your life, freaking kick them out, man. You don't want that cancer around you, that toxicity. You wanna have a team of winners. Start surrounding yourself with people who win. You'll notice that they don't quit and you'll notice that you'll start to have these wins too. You want people that are gonna motivate you, that are gonna not only drive you, but kinda help pull you up if you need it a little bit. So don't quit. If you don't quit, you can't fail. We all have times in our life when we could quit but some of us do and some of us don't. Unfortunately, some people that are watching this right now you will quit and there's a much smaller percentage of people that won't quit and will be successful. So it's up to you to decide which of those statistics you're gonna be. Don't make excuses, right? No one has control over your success except you. You're the only one who has control over your future. Right, so take that today. Apply the goal setting, scheduling, closing techniques, technique that I taught you today. See if that can help you stay focused, stay persistent, stay driven and just stay grateful for all the things that you've been blessed with in your life. Thank you everybody and thank you so much, Cody. I would like everybody to add me on Instagram at atj underscore v-o-m-e-i-g-e-n that's j underscore vomigen. My YouTube channel is justinsurance-l-l-c. You can find me on YouTube there. Geez, I mean I want everybody to do well here. So ask me any questions, reach out to me. I'd be more than happy to help you. Thank you guys. JVE, awesome job, man. I don't use that lightsaber and Yoda, whatever else you got going on. Don't use that on me, man, all right? Like I could take a lot of these speakers. I don't know if I could take that dude. That's a big dude, man. Awesome job, okay. Thank you for being a part of this. Appreciate your bro, really, really do. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you. Now, okay, so I'm following off my standing pad because I'm doing a lot of standing today and tomorrow, okay, is the next deal. Again, for those that didn't hear before, okay, or you haven't taken advantage of it yet, all access with me for a whole year, I'm moving in with you to help you level up in 2021. All right, the All Access Plan, which is a CA deal, codeyaskins.com, port slash deals, All Access for only $9.97, 10 grand of value for $9.97, access to my CA cell system, okay, access to my CA cell system, access to a weekly training accountability call for a whole year, okay, which is Success Society, and One Boot Camp is also included, the attendance of One Boot Camp, all, all access, all included for only $9.97, hit codeyaskins.com, port slash deals, spend some time with me, let me help you think on a whole another level, let me motivate you, let me challenge you to be the best version of you the rest of this year, hit the link, grab it, I promise you will not regret grabbing the All Access, okay. Now, before I bring out the next speaker, I got a question for you, what's been your favorite part of the day? Okay, so I'm about to bring out the last speaker of the day, okay, what's been your, and then I'm gonna wrap up, and I promise you're gonna want to stay for that, what's been your favorite part of the day? Let me know in chat, what's been your favorite part of today so far? Okay, how's the speakers done? How have I done? How's our team done? How have you done? How's my energy level? I got Starbucks cups galore over here, right, just piling it down today, okay. I'm excited to introduce the next speaker, okay. His story is probably like nobody's ever heard. He and I have become buddies over the last couple of years, right, I went to Tulsa and trained his whole team for a whole day, right, had a ton of fun. He's also been in our studio, sat right here, and has gotten over 20,000 views on our interview, probably 30,000 by now, maybe 40,000 by now. He just freaking keeps flying off, okay. If you haven't seen it, check it out, okay. Homeless to $100,000 a month. What? And he sat right here and we interviewed together, okay, and it's blown up on YouTube, okay, so please help me welcome. My good buddy's doing an amazing job and continues to help the industry. The dude cares a ton, and I'm excited to see the knowledge, right. This was the one, everybody keeps saying, dude, bring Marlon on from the, they're like, dude, where can I hear more Marlon? His story's amazing, I keep hearing it. So we just dropped another YouTube video here lately, okay. Please help me welcome to the stage. Bring him up, dude's unbelievable speaker, okay. One of the best unknown speakers in the insurance industry. Dude, you're gonna do amazing. I believe in you and thank you for being a part of this. Also, thank you for being a part of this as well. Okay, please help me welcome. Let's welcome and chat. You've seen him, you've heard of him. Please welcome to the virtual stage. My good buddy, Mr. Marlon Popkin. The other night I was watching a Netflix movie with my wife, Heather, and my youngest son, Josiah. And we were watching a show called Animals on the Loose, You versus the Wild. And it was this interactive movie with Bear Grylls, and it's about these wild animals that escaped from a wildlife sanctuary in Africa. You get to interact or make choices that tell Bear Grylls which way to go or which animal to pursue, right. And even which bugs to eat. I think at one point he was eating a leech and he was doing something crazy. But you get to kind of help Bear Grylls and you get to tell him and make decisions that'll help him consequently bring the animals back to their protective habitat. But if he chose wrong, that means he had to start over. And the cool thing about this, I was watching this with my youngest son Josiah and I got to watch him learn and grow and make different decisions. The look on his face when he finished the movie and he'd helped get all the animals back, it was priceless. I'll never forget that. And I love that. Here's why I love that. Because I believe this with everything in me. I believe that every person, every person listening right now, I believe that every person deserves a second chance. See, most of my life, I didn't believe that I deserved a second chance. I don't know if, has anyone ever felt that except for me? Like I didn't feel like I was worthy of another chance in life. As a young kid, one of my first memories in life when I was growing up was in second and third grade. And I was in school like most boys and we were very mischievous my friends and we were always looking for trouble. And one day we found it. We were walking around the playground and we were away from the playground equipment and we were walking and there it was, on the ground there was a cigarette that was smoked and I guess it was still smoldering. So I guess someone flipped it over the fence and drove by. Well, one of the kids picked it up and stared at it. Being the attention seeker that I am, I went and grabbed it and started acting like I was smoking it and telling jokes and I didn't see the teacher walk up behind me. And she grabbed me, my heart dropped and to her it looked like I was smoking the cigarette. So I don't blame her for what she did. But for the record, I never smoked anything. A few minutes later, I was sitting in the principal's office and listening to my teacher call my dad to come and get me. I was suspended and I missed the next few days of school but I sat there in fear of waiting for my dad to come pick me up because I knew this was not good. See, my dad wasn't like most dads, he was different. See, my dad was an abusive alcoholic and he wasn't like most dads. And so on the ride home, he didn't say one word. He got home and he told me, go up to his room and I went up to his room and I sat there waiting and I'll never forget him walking in and taking off his military belt. I don't know if you've ever seen the military belt before. They got these huge buckles. And I remember seeing that thing flying through the air at me. Boom! And he kept swinging and swinging and swinging and he wouldn't stop. It started getting harder and harder. And earlier that year, I started taking Taekwondo and I don't know when it happened or when I clicked but something inside of me said that's enough. I went to protective mode and I saw that belt buckle coming at me one last time and I dodged it and I spun around and I kicked my dad in the chest. My mom says that she ran into the room because she stopped hearing me cry. And she said he was punching me as hard as he could with his fists. That was the first time. I felt less than. I felt like trash. I felt unlovable. Why would he do that? Why would he beat me like that? Why would anybody do that to someone that they loved? From that point on, I just didn't feel like I deserved greatness. Can you imagine being six, seven years old? Something inside of me died that day. I remember thinking I'm never gonna be sick and I remember thinking I'm never gonna be successful. I'm never gonna be great. I'm never gonna win in life. If my dad would treat me that way, the only thing that I could do was dream. I always started to dream a lot. And I thought one day one of my dreams would come true. I didn't share my dreams with my friends. I didn't share my dreams with my mom. I didn't share my dreams with my wife when I got married. I never told people what I wanted to do because I didn't think I deserved it. Has anybody ever felt like that before? Is it just me? Over the next 30 years, I had failure after failure after failure, bad decision after bad decision after bad decision. I didn't think I had a second chance. I thought when that happened to me, that was my life. That's what I was supposed to be, even relationships. I never had very successful relationships when I met my wife, my beautiful bride. Even when I married her, I thought, she can't even really love me. She doesn't really know me enough to love me. Deep down, I was still that little boy laying there, cleaning to life, clinging to consciousness, feeling unloved and unsupport. I didn't feel good. I ruined everything in my life, guys, for 30 years. No good relationships, no good jobs. At a certain point, my wife had to make a decision that probably one of the toughest decisions any woman has to make that I wasn't fit to be a father, I wasn't fit to be a husband when we decided that I had to leave. So in 2014, guys, I left my home and I was homeless. I didn't have anywhere to go and I would stay on friends' couches until I ran up my welcome or I would try to stay at the YMCA but I was so embarrassed. I was eating out of trash cans. It was the lowest point in my life and I believe in second chances because I'll never forget sitting on my buddy Brian Hinton's couch and stayed at a bunch of friends' different houses and my buddy Brian was gracious enough to let me sit with sleep at his house and I was on the porch one night because him and his wife were inside fighting because I was eating a lot of food. I wasn't paying bills, I was laying around and they were fighting about if I could stay there anymore. And I was on the front porch thinking of a reason to live and my phone rings and I pick it up and it was Nate Offord and I hadn't talked to Nate in a year or two and he starts talking about this insurance company and I'd sold insurance for 15 years and never made more than $30,000. $30,000 was a good year. Like when I made $30,000 we were taking friends to Sizzlin like I was tipping people an extra dollar. Like $30,000 was a lot of money to a homeless guy, right? But I never made more than that and Nate Offords called me about insurance and for some reason I started listening. But not only did I start listening, something was awoken in me, I started dreaming. Right there on that porch. What if this is my second shot? What if I get to turn my life around? Of all the crap that I messed up, all the things that I've done, what if I can go from here and I can do better? I always thought that if I really got a second chance, I wouldn't need a third. Have you ever wanted a second chance in life? Have you ever wanted to redo? What if 8% nation is your Nate Offord call? What if this is your second chance? I got started at Symmetry Financial Group and one of my first conference calls, one of the owners, Casey Watkins is on a conference call, he's talking about being different. And the thing that I love about second chances is number one, if you get a second chance at life, you gotta do it different. And so he's talking about George Costanza off of Seinfeld and George Costanza is one of my favorite characters, but George has this really crazy life and so one day he decides to do everything different and it was unbelievable. His results were crazy because he lived his life different than he lived it in the past. That's it. What if I do something, everything that I do, what if it's opposite of everything that I've ever done? What if I think opposite of every thought I've ever thought? What if I do opposite of everything I've ever done? See, my life wasn't working. It didn't matter what I did. I was homeless, I had nothing. So when I started there, you know what I started? I decided that you know what, if you're gonna do it again, number one is you gotta do it different. I wonder about people watching in right now. What if you had an opportunity to do it different? What if you had the chance to start over or to flip the book and start a new chapter in your life? That's what I got. That was my wake up call. The second thing that I understood was if you get a second shot at life, you have to understand that there is no, there can never be a plan B. When I got that call, when I started with that insurance company, that was it. I knew this would be the last job I would ever have. I was never gonna have to, there was no plan B. There was no, well, I've got my resume and send it out. This is it. This is it. We were watching that Bear Girls show that animals gone wild or not animals gone wild, animals on the loose. And there was this challenge where Bear Girls was towards the end. He has this difficult task. And the decision you have to make for Bear is he has to go across this gorge. And it's about a thousand feet in the air. And the only thing separating the both sides was this rope. And the option was either you can scoot across on this rope and maybe you have the opportunity to fall to your death or you can climb down the ravine, walk all the way across the valley and then climb back up. We'll be in Josiah said, let's take it. Let's go. We're adventurous. Let's go get it. And so we chose for Bear Girls to scoot across the rope. But guys, I wasn't doing it. I was just watching it. I was terrified. Like my hands were sweaty and I was nervous and I was watching him. But it was pretty, it was pretty cool because what he did was he laid down kind of military style and he put the feet around the rope and he starts scooting and he's getting tired and he would rest. And then he would start scooting some more and he'd get tired. He'd hold on and he'd rest. It seemed like hours, but he made it. He was scooting and he'd rest, he's scooting and he'd rest and he made it. And he said something so profound when he got to the other side. I wrote it down. I want to share it with you. He said, you'd be surprised. How much strength you have when you have no plan B? Number two, you'd be surprised how much strength you have if there is no plan B. Number two is if you get a second chance at life, there can be no plan B. There can't be any other options. You gotta burn the bridges. You gotta burn the ships. You've gotta go all in. You can see most of my life, guys, I've never gone all in. I did anything. Not in my marriage, not on myself, not with my kids, not in a job. I've never gone all in. This was my shot. This was it. Number two is if you get a second chance, you gotta go all in. You got to. Number three, if you get a second chance at life, you can't quit. Quitting is not an option. Quitting is not, you don't, you can, if you get a second chance at life, this is what I'm doing. Like Will Smith said, if you want to beat me, I will die before I get off this treadmill. I knew that when I started this job, this was the last time I was gonna, there was no plan B. Do you have a plan B? Maybe plan A isn't working because plan A knows that there's a plan B. What if you did that like with your marriage? Like you get married and you're telling your wife, you know, I love you. But if things don't work out, babe, I've got another girlfriend in my path and things don't work out between us. You know, what if you say that in your marriage vows? What's your marriage last, right? There can be no plan B. Number three is this, don't quit. When I went to my first conference at Symmetry Financial Group, I was a few weeks out of being homeless. I still wasn't living at home. I was literally sleeping in my car in my driveway because I made the decision that I'm gonna be the man that I all, I committed to my wife. I'm gonna be the man that I committed to my kids and I wouldn't go anywhere else. I was gonna win them back. I messed up everything else in my life. So one day I had to go to this conference. I didn't have money to go, I was homeless. So when my wife went to work and my kids went to school, I went home and I broke in. I stole some money from my wife. I knew where the stash was and I even got my kids piggy banks. They were saving up to go to Disney World. And I knew that I was gonna change their lives. So I stole that money and I went to that conference and when I was at that conference, I'll never forget. I was listening to Brian Pope. He's another one of the founders of Symmetry Financial Group. Now this is the wealthiest guy in the room. Millions and millions and millions of dollars. And he's talking and I'm sitting there writing and I'm looking around. And he says this, he says, you can make it here if you just don't quit. And I wrote down, just don't quit. And I looked around, nobody else was writing. It's the wealthiest guy in the room. He said, you can make it here if you just don't quit. I started writing it over and over and over. Just don't quit. Just don't quit. Just don't quit, tears. We're falling out of my eyes onto the paper. Just don't quit. Just don't quit. Just don't quit. I remember thinking I can make it if I just don't quit. I can make it. I wonder how many jobs that I still be at. I'm glad I'm not there, but I wonder if I didn't quit, if I didn't give up, if I believed in myself, if I let other people believe in me. So guys, if you get a second chance at life, number one, you gotta do it different. You gotta do it different than you're doing it. Can't do the same thing. You gotta wake up different. You gotta get dressed different. I took different ways to work. You gotta do it different. Number two is there is no plan B. I got nothing. This is it. All my eggs are in one basket. This is it. There is no plan B. This is the plan. We gotta make it work. Number three is you can make it if you just don't quit. You can make it if you just don't quit. Every now and then I'll lay down at night and then I save my marriage and golly, I get to tell my kids, I love them every night. Sometimes when I'm laying in bed before I go to sleep that I envision myself walking up to that second grader and telling them, man, I see myself looking at that decimated kid that that kid that had no hope. I see myself telling them, man, everything's gonna be okay. Just keep your head up. You're gonna be great one day. I envisioned myself telling that kid, millions of people will be moved by you. You're gonna change the world because of your story. You're gonna change the world. I look at that kid, I tell him how proud I am of him for not quitting, for not giving up. What if you can go win? So you can tell your old self, thank you. What if you get a second chance? One of my favorite superheroes is Batman. And he's got this quote. It's my favorite quote. It says, everything is impossible until somebody does it. Everything is impossible until somebody does it. Everything is impossible until somebody does it. I get to go back and tell that kid, man, if you just don't quit, we're gonna do the impossible. And we're gonna change the world. Let me ask you this. I'll leave you guys with this. You got one life to live. If you get a second chance, what are you gonna do with it? You got one life. What are you gonna do with it? Don't quit. Thank you guys so much, Cody. Thank you so much for letting me be out here. I'm honored and blessed to be a part of this. You guys have a great day, 8% nation, baby. Let's go talk to you guys later. See you at the top. Good was he, Marlon. Dude, unbelievable. I'm so jacked up ready to run through a wall, man. Phenomenal finish to an amazing day today. I want, here's what I'm gonna do. Here's what I'm gonna do. Unbelievable day. Tons of incredible speakers. Unbelievable. I'm curious, who was your favorite, man? Who was your favorite? It's all right. Tell us who your favorite was, okay? I mean, we had, gosh, we had so many good ones, right? We had Rebecca, we had Eric, we have Landon, we have coach, we have, you know, we have Marlon, we have Jeff, we have like so many on Henry, JVE, like so many unbelievable amazing speakers. I wanna know who was your favorite speaker and what was your biggest takeaway from today? Okay, favorite speaker, biggest takeaway from today. Okay, also the, don't forget, about April's Nation 2021 in Dallas, live at AprilStation.com, take advantage, okay? Now, we've got myself, Landon MacArthur, Galen Hendricks, my father, Brian Askins, and also Eric Thomas, released for April's Nation 2021 live in Dallas, okay? We're gonna keep bringing the heat and piling it on. You do not wanna miss this. I'm telling you, I got some crazy stuff planned that will make this, this will make this go down as the best insurance event ever done. Okay, we got some mega surprises. It's gonna freak some of you out, the stuff that's gonna happen in Dallas this year, okay? So go to the deals page, don't forget about the deals page, because again, I don't know what deals will be available tomorrow. I don't know what flash sales will be available tomorrow, so make sure that you take advantage of what's available right now. Kodiaskas.com, forge slash deals, check it out, hit that up, look through that tonight, okay, pick one of those, two of those, three of those, four of those, and jump on those tonight, okay? Appreciate that. Tomorrow's speakers, we got a bunch of amazing speakers still to come. Okay, we still haven't even released Tom Hagna. I mean, as good as today was, we still haven't released Tom Hagna, Brian Tracy, and Les Brown. Tom Hagna speaks on his own. Brian Tracy, I interview. And Les Brown, I also interview, okay? You do not wanna miss those speeches tomorrow. Unbelievable day two coming on Saturday, tomorrow, and unbelievable Friday, did we not? Did we not? Appreciate you being here, okay? Thank you so much for being a part of day one, 8% virtual, the second ever 8% virtual. 10,000 day one is just about in the box. Okay, what was your favorite part of today? Appreciate you being here. Also, reminder, pre-show starts at 9 a.m., central, standard time tomorrow. So get in, remember, we're giving away money for social and prizes and most watch time and most engaged and live chat, right? We're not only doing flash sales and the deals, like we are making sure that this has a profound impact on your life. I remember personally driving up to Northern Missouri as a kid, because I had a manager that said, can you go train two insurance agents that are struggling? They're struggling to make sales and they need your help. I'm like 20, maybe 21 at the time, right? I'm brand new to the industry, what would you have done? I drive up four or five hours, spend a whole day with them. I'm like, I can just take them cold door knocking, that's all I knew at the time, right? Cold door knocking is a life insurance. That's how I did it. So then I went and did that, okay? And we wrote five life insurance policies in one day. Boom, left all the business with them, apps, commissions, everything else, and went home. I remember crying on the way home thinking, dude, I have found what I wanna do for the rest of my life. I found my calling. I found what I was meant to do. Like some of you have found that and it's a good feeling. I was meant to help you succeed. I was meant to put special events in place just like this, to make sure that your life changes forever because of the things that we do to help you. So today was a gift for me, my wife Lauren, and all of our team. And hopefully you stayed focused and you received that gift today. I appreciate you being here, okay? Make sure that you keep your notes, you show for the whole day tomorrow. We get unbelievable speakers. It's gonna be crazy. It's gonna be a jam-packed day two, a ton of seven and eight figure earners just fading you with the strategies, the tips, the success hacks if you will of what they've learned for them to be mega, mega, highly, highly, highly successful in how you can be too. So make sure that you are back for tomorrow. I look forward to challenging you, motivating you and giving you ideas to change your life forever. If you don't quit, you cannot fail. Quitting is a choice. Quitting is a mindset, quitting is a decision. I'm asking you now, please choose to never quit. Throw it in chat with me, put me if you choose to never quit ever right now. Quitting is a choice, just like effort, just like skill, just like knowledge. It's all a choice. If it's meant to be, it's up to me. That means it's up to you. I'm ready for day two. I'm excited to come back tomorrow with you. Have a great night. Appreciate you being here day one. If you don't quit, you can't fail. See you tomorrow for day two. Appreciate you guys.