 I want to tell you a quick story about our first speaker. He is an insurance industry legend. He taught me more about this space than anyone else ever has. When I was 16 years old, I was supposed to go to Apple Marketing in Rogersville, Missouri. I was supposed to go to work on a Saturday from 4 to 10. I was 16. I was throwing up. I didn't feel well. It's about 3,330. I go to this man, my dad. And I say, hey, I don't feel like going to work today. Right? Whoever woke up, you're like, dude, I don't feel like going to work today. I don't feel like showing up. I don't feel like being my best self. Me too. And I tell him, hey, I'm throwing up. I don't feel well. I don't think I'm going to go to work today. And he told me, you do whatever you want to do. But you know what I would do. As of April 1st, here in a few weeks, he will have been in the insurance industry for 31 years. The dude shows up. I've learned from not only my father, but also an absolutely incredible mother. And they've both been an amazing positive impact on my life. So please help me welcome. The number one mentor in my life, the number one do to the insurance industry, and my best friend to jump out and kick it off for day two. Please welcome my father, Mr. Brian Askins. Hello, hey, this is Brian Askins with Secure Insurance Group. First of all, Cody, I want to thank you for that introduction. Obviously, you know, a lot of you are listening today because of Cody and just an unbelievable son and I could speak hours and hours on just our relationship and just Cody in general. Today I want to really talk to you about how to build an agency, how to build a successful team. And just to kind of give you some ideas here, I'm going to kind of walk through kind of what I've done over my career. But first of all, I just want to kind of talk to you about, to let you know, and all the things I'm going to tell you today, all of you are going to already know, but you only get one life. Make the absolute best of it. Don't waste any part of your life. We all only get one here on earth to do whatever we want to do in life, but make the absolute best of it. Don't let anyone or anything stand in your way of the dreams that you have. And you know, all I'm trying to do is encourage you to do in this talk today is to bet on yourself. I don't think, I don't think often enough we bet on ourselves. And so I'm just, I'm encouraging you today to bet on yourself. Don't take the easy route again, bet on yourself. There's so many times that we can take the easy route and it's easy and you know, there's no, it's just an easy route. But I'm just asking you today to bet on yourself and always remember, if you don't quit, you can't fail. Simply don't quit. At the end of the day, you'll be glad of what you built because you build something that you'll be proud of and something you can leave as a legacy to your love ones. And so again, today the focus is, you know, if you don't quit, you cannot fail. And I'm just asking you to bet on yourself. So let me tell you a bit about me and what my career has been. I started the insurance business as Cody mentioned, April of 1990. I started with a small little company called Reliable Life and I was with them from 90 to 97. I ran a debit route to where you go around and you collect monthly premium payments from individuals and I collected about 450 homes a month. And in 1991, I was fortunate enough to be the rookie of the year for Reliable Life and I set an all-time sales, a life sales record at that time in 1991. I'm sure it's been broken since, but in 1991 I did hold the all-time life sales record for Reliable Life. And then in April of 1997, I went to work for Mutual of Omaha. I was an agent for them for a couple of years. I'm sorry for a few months, I apologize. And then District Sales Manager for a few years. And then I became a general manager with them in 2010, I'm sorry, in 2000. And then 2010, I became the number one GM at Mutual of Omaha. And what people asked me, how did you take your agency from rank 47th in the company to number one in less than a 10-year period? And it all goes back to I surrounded myself with the right people, had tremendous, tremendous, tremendous people that I surrounded myself with. And so in this business, it's all about the people you surround yourself with. And so that's how we were able to become the number one agency at Mutual of Omaha. It's just the people that I surrounded myself with. And then in 2014, February of 2014, I started Secure Insurance Group. So Secure has been going now for just a little over seven years. And with Secure, it was probably the biggest bet on myself I've ever done. And it's been the one that's paid off the most. And there's so many people, they're just afraid to bet on themselves. And so again, just want to encourage you to do that. So let's start with Secure Insurance Group. Let me tell you a little bit about Secure Insurance Group and what, when I started Secure Insurance Group, I started with four agents. And Cody was one of those four. And we currently have nearly about 750 independent agents across the US now in seven years. And there are many of you listening today that there's no question about many of you listening today. They're much, much, much more talented than I am. You just have it bet on yourself. Your talent is greater than my talent. I'm very confident of that. And I've just been successful because again, like Cody mentioned earlier, I show up every single day. I don't let anyone outwork me. And I bet on myself. And I surround myself with the right people. And so I'm just asking you about yourself because it's definitely, definitely time. Some of you on this today, you've thought about doing certain things in the interest industry. You've thought about doing this or that. But you're scared and you keep talking yourself out of it because you don't want to bet on yourself. And again, I'm hoping after today, some of you will take that chance and you'll bet on yourself. So let me tell you a little bit about building an agency. This is some things that I've done to help build an agency. And I'm going to tell you what's kind of important. So the most important thing to me, period, is culture. And culture kind of goes back to, I think that the person who is, everyone's looking up to should be the hardest working person in the agency. And whether I was with Reliable Life, was with Mutual Law Hall, and our security insurance group. And that's been my three careers, or three companies I've worked for in 31 years is I truly believe I've been the hardest working person in any of those spots I've been in. And it's something that's important to me. I won't, you know, because I think you gain a lot of respect. I think that you, you know, it's, people see you and all of a sudden they step their game up. And if you surround yourself with a lot of people, talented individuals like I have, and you're the hardest working person in the office, they kind of, in the agency, they kind of see that and they step their game up. But nothing is more important than culture. Culture is absolutely the most important thing that there is. Hire people that fit well in your culture. Again, when you're hiring, it's all about do they fit in your culture. Because they could be, you know, an unbelievable individual, personnel, or as far as a talent and all that in production. But they don't fit well in your culture, they could be more harm than good. So it's all about the culture. If you ever have issues in your agency, handle those issues quickly, don't let those issues to where you, you may have a situation that starts out small. But really, really quick, it turns very large. Because it just continues to faster. Deal with whatever issues there are quickly so they don't, they don't grow. Because small issues are easy to handle. It's all about communication. And but when that, when those issues are just kind of swept under the rug and hoping they go away, they keep getting bigger and bigger each and every day. And then sooner or later, they're very large issues. Don't allow drama or negativity. Again, that can kill the culture. You know, we've all heard about the bad apple and the, and the, and the basket. It can run all the other apples. And it's very, very true. So surround yourself with people who are no drama, no negativity. They're positive, they're talented. They're excited about, about the opportunity that they have. So culture is number one. I could talk hours and hours on culture. Culture is absolutely the first thing I look for in interview. I spend, you know, 20, 25 minutes at least just talking about the culture, what we built and how we're not going to let someone come in and destroy it. I don't care if I'm hiring someone to be a front office receptionist or if I'm hiring someone to be a Medicare specialist. I don't care what, what I'm hiring an individual to do. If they're employee secure, 20, 25 minutes of the first interview is about culture. Because I want to set the stage at that time. The second interview, we talk again about culture. The third interview, we talk about culture. The first day on the job, we talk about culture again. So now let's talk about employee staff. Obviously, in order to grow your business, you can only be so big by yourself. And I don't care how talented you are, I don't care, you know, how organized you are. You can only grow so big by yourself. And so as you continue to, you want to really scale your business up. You want to start instead of adding, you want to start multiplying. That's where tremendous great employees come into the picture at. And so regardless of what you have to pay the employees, you know, if they're great, they're going to more than pay for themselves, probably three, four, five, 10-fold if they're great employees, they'll pay for themselves in a big time way. One of the things about employees I always try to tell people is trust them to do their job, you know, trust your employees to do their job. Encourage them to be creative. You want employees that are creative. You know, the more that you get an employee involved, then the more they're going to be excited about the opportunity. They're going to be excited to come to work. They're going to be excited about everything that they have. And so listen to your employees' ideas. Some of the best ideas that we have come from, you know, our employees. You know, majority of our great ideas have come from our employees. I have an open-door policy. So if they've got an issue, they come to you. And again, that's something where, you know, the issues are handled quickly and it's all about communication. They're, again, communication is the key to any relationship. I don't care if it's a work relationship, a marriage relationship. I don't care what type of relationship, a friendship. I don't care what it is. Communication is the key to a long-lasting, productive relationship, regardless. Don't micromanage. I don't think you'd be on this call on today's event. Would say, you know, raise your hand, I love being micromanaged. I just love it. You know, nobody wants to be micromanaged. You know, no one wants, I don't want to be micromanaged. I can't imagine that you'd want to be micromanaged. And just, you know, your employees don't want to be micromanaged. Set the expectations, give them the tools and resources to be successful and let them do their job. Now you want to monitor and measure from, you know, make sure that, you know, they're the right person, they're getting the job accomplished. You know, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying to micromanagement, that drives people insane, it drives them away. And so that's why there's so much turnover and employee status and so forth is people just don't want to work for a micromanager. But make sure they're on the right seat on the bus. And the right seat on the bus, you know, you may have an individual that is, and I can tell you several examples. I've got a lady right now, I'll just give you one real quick. I've got a lady right now that to where she was a Medicare, I'm sorry, she was a life specialist for me. She was my personal assistant for life insurance. And she was doing a good job, not a great job, but I could tell she just wasn't enjoying it. And some of the things I was having to do and so anyway, so we had a role come available in the Medicare as a Medicare specialist. And we have moved her to that role and we've added some extra responsibilities on top of that. And now this lady is thriving. She is, she's head of our PR for, you know, she calls all her clients for their birthdays and all kinds of things of that nature and I'll kind of walk through some of those in a few minutes. But she is just absolutely thriving, one of the best employees we have now. And we just, we got her on the right seat on the bus. Make it fun, you know, like one of the things that she does, she's kind of our PR person for within our agency. She is, you know, she has birthdays. So every time that, you know, once a month, she does a birthday cake for all of our employees whose birthdays that month. She does team building events. We do those every quarter. And so our next one is St. Patrick's Day. But great employees pay huge dividends and I could talk all day long about great employees because that's the key to the success of great employees. Let's talk just for a split second here about customer service. And again, this goes without saying and I know I've been on this, every on this call, you know, I'm sure you do a tremendous, tremendous job of customer service and I'm sure your staff does a tremendous job. But the biggest thing is, is to teach your staff to go above and beyond for every client. Not just meet the needs of the clients, but go above and beyond. You know, let the client know they're the most important person in the world on that phone call, listen to the clients. What seems small to us is it can be huge to our clients. And so treat every time that the client has a need, a request, whatever it is, if it's possible to make it, to do that, do that. And I promise you those individuals will send lots of referrals to your office, to your agency, and they will absolutely love doing business with you and they'll tell others about it. People tell others whether it's good or bad about the experiences that they have. And so obviously we want those things to be positive. So let's talk about client retention. And so the client retention is just all about setting yourself apart. Stay in front of mind with your clients. Client retention is about the education process. So when you meet with a client and you'll obviously teach all of your reps to do the same thing, is be an educator. Don't be a salesperson, be an educator. You educate individuals and let them make an informed decision, because obviously the best way to make a tremendous, a great decision is to be well informed. And so be an educator and your retention will just be 95% and above if you're an educator. But set yourself apart. And so some things that we do to help set ourselves apart with our clients is we do quarterly newsletter to every client. And so it's kind of funny, we just did one and on this last one, we had a caramel pie recipe in there and we've had several clients call and talk about how they made the caramel pie was delicious and they get some of them give us ideas to even add this to the ingredients, et cetera. So the caramel pie, we had to where, hey, find the logo, the secure logo. And if whoever found it called in and we put them in a drawing and we drew out, I think it was 10, 20 file or gift cards. And so, and we had dozens and dozens of dozens of clients calling in. Hey, I found the secure logo, et cetera. So it got the clients kind of involved. We do a lot of Medicare business, obviously. A lot of life annuities, other business, but Medicare is probably our number one. But thank you cards, birthday cards. So we do, every time a person buys a policy from us, we send them an email and it's a thank you email, but it's asking us, asking them to also leave us a review on Google. And so that has been tremendous for us. And then the birthday reminders, we send out birthday cards, but also we have a lady in our office that calls every client on their birthday and unless their birthdays are Saturdays and Sundays, if that's the case, they call them on Friday. She calls every client on their birthday and just wishes them a happy birthday. And so little things like that. We have a client appreciation breakfast once a year, right before AEP. And so in that, there's no sales pitch. Just simply thanking them for their business. And there's no other agents doing things like that or not many. And towards last event, we had around 500 clients at this event, it cost us a lot of money, but we had, we fed them breakfast at door prizes, giveaways, bingo, trivia, but there was no sales pitches. At the end of the meeting, we just talked about how AEP is upcoming and we, you know, office will review everybody's plans and make sure they're on the right plans. And we had 10 staff members out front into where people got in line and set appointments up for their annual reviews. So there's so many different things you can do. So just kind of think outside the box and, you know, an individual thinks outside the box and is always thinking of creative new ways to do things is obviously that person is worth their weight and go. Let's talk just a second about recruiting. So obviously recruiting is very, very, very important. And so in recruiting, there's several things we can do on recruit or that we do currently on recruiting. We get a license list from various Department of Interances. And most of the time, those Department of Interances will send you that license list for no charge. And those are people who are newly getting licensed or they just added a new, you know, some type of new license to their already existing licenses, a new line of authority. But for most of them, it's brand new individuals. And so those individuals, some of those are going to be tremendous, tremendous, tremendous agents one day. And so they just need, they need to be put in the right situation. And so, you know, you can contact those individuals. You can contact those individuals by mail, by phone, by email, you know, et cetera. So obviously Google recruiting ads, Facebook recruiting ads, your current agents, you know, what other proxies do they have with other FMOs or IMOs? A lot of our agents, you know, they have contracts with other FMOs. And so we contact those to see, you know, hey, can we beat the comp levels? Can, you know, whether the support help, can we give you to help in that arena? So current agents, don't ever forget about your current agents because those are the individuals already doing the business for you. Referrals from existing agents. When you start getting referrals from existing agents, and that's where we've gotten a large, large, large majority of our current agents is referrals from existing agents. That's where you know you're doing something right. Now we can always continue to improve and we try to improve every day, but that's when you know you can do something right is when your existing agents refer you, refer you. And also recruiting webinars. We did a recruiting webinar two weeks ago. We had a hundred and I think it was like 118, 119 register event, 40 something attended event. And so great events to where opportunities for you to get a chance to kind of tell your story to multiple people. So recruiting webinars, all kinds of opportunities there. So let's talk about the opportunities that you might recruit to. We recruit to two different ones and this might give you some ideas. And most of you are probably already doing this, but I'll just kind of give you some ideas just in case. One of the opportunities is we recruited a lot of, we started an LOA program, which is a licensed only agent program. And that has really flourished and we're going to continue to expand that, the licensed only agent program. That's a program that we help, they can help us service our existing clients there in AP because obviously the larger and larger you get it becomes more difficult. We offer those individuals incentive trips and contest, but for those individuals, here's kind of what we do for those individuals and here's how kind of we structure this. We pay for their marketing support. You know, we give them all the training support, we pay for all their marketing, we pay for all their office space. So there's no monies out of their pockets. We also can, you know, some of them we've paid a salary to kind of depends we have a couple of different options, but those individuals, their commissions are paid to secure and those and secure then pays those individuals. So secure is basically splitting commissions with them. The street commissions are secure, obviously keeps the overrides, but we're splitting street commissions. But these individuals, they need marketing training. They need lots of training, lots of marketing. And we help, you know, they get plugged into our Medicare seminars, live seminars or Medicare virtual seminars. And we pay for all the expenses for them. And in these individuals, we just had an agent, one of our LOA agents in the month of February produced 39 applications. And they all produced over 20, but one kind of went above and beyond. He did 39 this past month as an LOA. And these are individuals that, you know, that he met either at a Medicare seminar. We do lots of lead drops for those individuals, Medicare lead drops, you know, et cetera. So one other thing too, is obviously there's independent agents and those are individuals that they're looking for carriers, products, commissions, support, training, marketing, prospecting, all those type things. And those individuals, you know, they're typically most of the time paying for the majority of their own or if not all of their own marketing and prospecting. But obviously those individuals are receiving extremely, extremely high comp levels. And we'll talk a few more, we'll talk a bit about that here in a few minutes. So those individuals are individuals that, you know, they're looking for a partnership. They want to be a part of something. And so they, you know, don't want to be just left on an island all the time and, you know, recruit them and then never, never speak to them again. So let's talk about training for a second. And again, this is where you just teach your agents to go above and beyond. And that's how you get referrals, is to go above and beyond. People refer people that they know they trust, people that's brought extreme value to them. And that's, and do things other agents are willing to do. And I'll just kind of give you a couple of ideas here today. Couple of ideas is, you know, like when a person needs to be enrolled in Social Security or Medicare, we do the enrolling. We will enroll them in Social Security, we'll enroll them in Medicare. We don't want to send them to the Social Security office or make them, you know, call in and, you know, because we can do that, we can assist them and do that in just a few minutes. It's very, very, very quick and easy. Same thing with Medicare. If they need to be enrolled in Medicare, you know, we take care of it for them if they need, if they've already got part A, but then you part B, we get them the applications, we do the, you know, online aromats, you know, et cetera. So lots of things that we can do for these individuals to help them if they qualify for, you know, Medicaid or extra help, you know, we help them with that. We help sign them up for that because we don't want them, we don't want to send them down just to the Medicaid office. We, you know, we want them, we want to be a resource to them. So anytime they need anything whatsoever, they contact us. And so once we've helped them in individuals on those type things, you know, obviously they become referral machines for us because how you need social security, this is what, you know, Brian can help you with that or whoever the agent is can help you with that. Train your agents on all new carriers, products. You have the best products on the market, but if you don't know about it, they can't sell it. So, you know, we have, obviously we sell a lot of, we sell it every product that a person can dream of naming and we also have the most competitive cares in the industry and I'm sure, you know, most of y'all have the same situation. You have the most competitive cares in the industry and the most competitive products where you never get beat on price. You know, we're never getting beat on price period or underwriting at all. If it's a way to place that case, you know, we're gonna have a carrier product to do that. But make sure your agents are aware of all the practice services you offer. I was on the phone with an agent this morning and this individual has pretty much done just Medicare. Got a little bit into final expense, but doesn't offer the hospital identity plans when he sells Medicare. Advantage plans doesn't offer the heart attack stroke plans, doesn't offer dental vision hearing plans, doesn't offer, you know, that's just a little bit in the final expense, but not much, been very limited. And so just kind of walking through some things of telling them all the other opportunities that are out there and how much it would drastically increase his income. And this agent was obviously extremely excited when he got the phone and that's what it's all about is getting his, you know, letting people know what you do because if you let people know what you do, then it'll snowball for you. Let's talk about carriers just for a split second here. Make sure your agents have the most competitive carriers, which we kind of mentioned that already, you know, to where again, you'll never get beat on price underwriting, you know, et cetera. The more competitive you are, the more allows you to cross sell. And so that's why that I want the most competitive carriers. You know, a lot of times people have a certain budget, maybe $100 a month, maybe $200 a month, maybe, you know, whatever per month and a budget. And so the more competitive you are, the more proxies you're able to get in that house and fill the needs that that particular client has. So let's talk about products just for a second. And again, we talked about this just briefly, but cross selling is so important and 40%, we have a 40% cross selling rate for hospital identity plans when we sell Medicare vanish plans. And it adds an additional $300 or so commissions, which for an agent adds thousands and thousands of dollars every year just by asking about, hey, would you like to cover some copays on your hospital, your hospital copays, you know, your emergency room copays, your ambulance copays, your outpatient observation copays, cancer writers, you know, et cetera. So lots of opportunities there. One of the things that, the most difficult thing to do is to get in front of people. And so while we're in front of people, we might as well take advantage of it. Make sure that they know all the product and services that we do. Easiest person to sell something to is someone you've already, it's already bought from you. So one thing I try to teach our agents is when you're in front of a client, make sure the client knows all the product and services you offer. You may be there to sell Medicare, but have you a little sheet that shows all the product and services you offer? And so as you say, Mrs. Jones, today we took care of your Medicare. But let me show you the other product and services we offer. Mrs. Jones, do you have any life insurance? And let her talk for a second. She'll tell you, yay or nay, and there's a good chance you might improve your situation on whatever life insurance she currently has. Mrs. Jones, we do a lot of annuities which, you know, save money accounts. Do you have any money in CDs or money market in the market or annuities or whatever it may be? Any 401ks. And they'll kind of tell you. So just kind of walk through all the different product and services you offer and you'll be completely surprised to where the client will say, you know, you have bought a life insurance last week or, you know, I've had life insurance for years and when I've got term it's about to run out. All kinds of scenarios. So one thing I'll say on that and we'll move to the next topic here is on the cross-selling, you may go in there and sell a Medicare Advantage or a medical supplement or one product. And then, you know, each year you may go back to review it. I can promise you this, those individuals are buying those other product and services from other agents because those other agents are making them aware that they had those product and services. So don't kid yourself that they're not buying product and services from one else because they are. But because all you're doing is maximize your earning potential while you're in there, you're filling needs for the client, increases persistency, the more, you know, Limbers always told us for years and years which is a true stat. The more policy you have in your house the less likely they are to move their business. And so now we've talked about several things here. Now let's talk about commissions. And this is one thing that's kind of important and as you're recruiting. Now some people may disagree with a little bit about what I'm gonna say but, and there's different ways to go about this. So I'm not saying I'm right, I'm wrong, but this is my true opinion and my true belief on commissions. I wanna pay extremely high commissions. I want SIG, I wanna make sure that Secure Insurance Group puts all their agents at extremely high levels. And the reason being is because I do not wanna have that commission conversation again in the future. I do not want an agent to come to me and say, Brian you put me at 100% with this final expense carrier and this person just offered me 110 or 120 or 130. I don't wanna have those conversations. That's why we put, because if I put you at, say that I put you at 100 and someone else offers you 120 and then you came back to me and I said, well I can match that 120. Where's the credibility there? Where's the, because that agent's gonna, if I were the person I'd be thinking, why didn't we do that first? If you could do that, why didn't we do it first? Why do I have to threaten to leave you before that happens? And so I just don't like having the commission conversation. I want that full trust with every agent. Another reason is, is others are always trying to recruit your agents and obviously we're all recruiting. All the FMO's across the US are always recruiting and so if you pay them high commissions and you do all the things, we've talked about the support, the marketing prospecting support, et cetera. Your chance of you losing an agent are very, very slim. And commissions are extremely important again. And the reason being is because it allows them to hire more staff. So if you have an agent that's very successful, the more money they make, the more money they got to spend on their, on them. You may have an agent that, once they got to 500 Medicare clients needs an assistant. Well, if they're making tremendous amount of commissions, then all of a sudden they have the money there to do so. So it helps them hire support staff. It allows them to pay their quality staff even better. Because if you don't want to pay minimum wage for it then you probably not get the quality you're looking for. So obviously the more money you have at your disposal, the higher the quality of individuals you're gonna be able to bring to your team. Hey, if you enjoyed this, I got another one you're gonna love. It's right there, click on it, see ya. I was, we were talking earlier about how like there's more to what we do than just the money. You know, like there's riches in other ways. And that's not a,