 I can assure you this, if you're in this industry, there is no shortage of money. Oh yeah. There's no shortage of money. There's shortage of training. There's shortage of sometimes effort, but there is no shortage of money. It's out there. You are listening to the 8% Nation Podcast, created to help you become a top producer in the insurance industry. Enjoy the show. Welcome to this week's episode of 8% Nation Podcast. We are here with a monster, monster producer, Todd Turnwald, and unfortunately we're missing our good friend Cody Todd. He's out there training his sales staff to go help with a sort of just a help, do a consulting session, do sales training. So it's just you and I today, buddy. All right, man. Let's do it. Well, hey, so thank you so much for joining us, Todd. I really do appreciate you taking the time. You are a very busy guy with a very fast-growing team. I want to give you a quick plug real quick. So I've known you really ever since I partnered with Cody. And you really have always been very aggressive, very excited, always calling for ideas, always trying to ask Cody and I and what's going on, what's next, and you're always innovating. So from my understanding, you guys are growing month over month by almost 50%. You've recruited almost 30 agents in the last two and a half months. You're an exploding business right now with the United Senior Professionals along with Dash Financial. What I'd love to do is just kind of help me understand, first off, set the stage. Who are you? What are you doing? Why should we have you on our podcast? This is your freedom to kind of bragging yourself a little bit. So who are you, man? Yeah. Well, I'm a former basketball coach. I coached basketball, high school basketball for 20 years. And that's kind of where everything started. So kind of how I transitioned into insurance, this is what I used to do with coaching. I would literally fly all over the country to constantly get like an unfair advantage. So I would meet with different college coaches, pick their brains, and that's what I'm doing now with Cody, Coach Burt, yourself. So I kind of took that passion from coaching basketball to now I brought that into an insurance. Wow. Tell us a little about United Senior Professionals and Dash Financial. So give us as much detail as you can in terms of what you're doing, why you're doing it. Tell us about your business. Yeah, absolutely. So we used to be with a captive group called Lincoln Heritage and we were a 409 financial group and we were basically just recruiting in Ohio and Indiana. That was mainly the only areas that we could recruit in. So then we went independent about a year and a half ago and we're now nationwide. I have agents everywhere from Boston to Orlando to New Mexico, North Carolina, everywhere in between and we're a full independent brokerage now. So mainly we do final expense, we do some annuity, some IULs and we just start recently doing the debt concept, helping people get out of debt, get more of a tax favored retirement. So that's been a big part of our business and then that kind of transitioned over into Dash Financial, which we're kind of blowing up that agency right now. We've got a monster team that we're growing in Orlando that's really taken advantage of that. So basically just fully independent landing and with our primary focus being final expense. That's awesome, man. Well, you're sharing me some numbers earlier about how many agents you've added in the last several months and also your production increase. So, dude, why are things going so well for you? What's going on, enlighten us? Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's a couple of things. I transitioned to basically being out of the field to just training, coaching my agency. And what's really blowing this thing up now, instead of how I was buying leads, you know, for client base, now I'm getting a lot of leads, honestly, through you guys. And it's really growing our agency. For recruiting, you mean? Is that what you mean? For recruiting. Yeah. You guys are doing all my marketing and my gosh, we're probably getting 200, about 150 people to contact a month. It was so much that I had to hire two gals to do nothing but call recruits because I didn't have time. I couldn't keep up. That's awesome. And now landing, we're able to recruit very high quality. We can actually be really picky and make sure that our beliefs align rather than just recruit every person that's got a heartbeat and really looking for a quality agent now. That's great. I think you drew a few numbers. I think from my understanding, you said you've added about 30 contracted agents in the last two and a half months. Is that true? That is. We're above 50 now. And our goal for this year going into this year was to have 50 producing agents. So we hit that goal already, so we're excited about that. I think we'll end up at around 75 to 80 that we're done for this year. So we're super excited about that. You know, now that you're saying that, I remember three months ago having that conversation and shooting for 50, I had kind of forgotten that that was our benchmark. So you already hit it. We didn't even celebrate, man. I should have sent you a bottle of champagne or something. Or I could have went to the Cowboys game with you. I didn't get the invite. There you go. Dude, I have never seen so many people in one place. Oh my gosh, that stadium is incredible. Well, not only are you recruiting a bunch of agents, your production is up big time, right? In the last 30 days, 90 days, you guys are almost 50% increase month over month. Dude, the reason I like you on this podcast right now is because I really feel like there's a lot of people with 15, 12 people on their team that really want to hit that 50 mark. And then all of a sudden now you're seeing the fruits of your labor with the production that's coming with that. So walk me through some of your production increases and why you think you're getting so much production increase overall. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of it is the agents that we're getting. We train literally every single day that we provide our agents. And we're getting agents that were maybe producing 12, 13,000 and just couldn't get over the hump. And now we're taking them to 20, 30,000 a month. I got a couple agents that are hitting that really consistently every month since they've been with us. So obviously right there, your numbers go up. That's incredible. But what I'm seeing a lot of times in the industry is there's not enough training. Yeah. And it does take time. From the leadership standpoint, it takes a lot of time to train people because the land on the key is you've got to have good content, otherwise you're going to lose their interest. Yeah. Because these guys aren't on my payroll. They're getting on and expecting good content every single day. So we kind of have different headlines for each day. We have a topic of the month that we really hit hard and we really get our agents buckled in on a selling system. So really our big thing is we're constantly trying to get that unfair advantage either through training or our products. And we're now putting ourselves in a position to have a product that we can get on bigger stages. We have a lot of business in Orlando. We had three different sessions. We probably spoke to over 170 people just in one day and talking about more of a concept than a product, a better way of life. And that's leading into different types of sales. And some of those are much bigger now. So we did close to $40,000 in production just off of one event in just a couple days. That's incredible, man. Well, hey, so walk me through, you seem to have stumbled upon something when it comes to training. Would you mind breaking that out a little bit? So if I was to join your team or whatever, what would that training potentially look like for me? I mean, and get as detailed as you can. Absolutely. Well, first off, I flew down to North Carolina and I've got an online university. So as soon as someone gets contracted with us and we just partnered with Lightspeed Bradley, they would get a full university on the products that I offer. So they get that right out of the chute, which helps them a lot. And before they even get up and running, we'll tell them, we'll give them like a curriculum that they watch a certain number of videos and then we do a call with them. So we make sure that they're watching each video and they comprehend it. Then Monday through Thursday, so Mondays we have back-to-basics calls, it's really the fundamentals. Tuesday is more of like a rhythm call, and a lot of times it's more of your motivation. It's working your heart, your spirit. Wednesday, we talk about it's more of a leadership call, so if you're wanting to grow your agency or are currently doing that, that's what Wednesdays are about. And Thursdays are a topic of the month. This month is eliminating confusion, overcoming struggles. So all month we're going to be talking about that on Thursday. On Friday each of our managers will have one-on-one calls. So our whole mission, honestly, I'm getting long-ended here, but we want to bring as much value to that agent as we possibly can. There's more training that they know what to do with. That's great. So how many videos is it in your university? How much hours of content? Yeah, so we have, I believe, 14 different videos, and we're just about to reshoot some of those and add to that. But we want to make it so, well, it's actually more than that because then I have a whole another category of tips and tricks, so there's probably another 12 to 14 there. So I would say a minimum of 20, 25 total videos that an agent can watch. Wow. So, and those are about 12 to 14 minutes? Are they like an hour? No, no, no. Each video anywhere from, could be three minutes to eight to 10 minutes. Got it, got it, got it. So you start with the baseline of the university and then you basically have three calls a week plus one-on-ones on Friday? Four calls a week. Yeah. Four calls a week. So you're basically taking, it sounds like, with all your calls, almost a full work day of training per week. Is that true? Pretty much. And it's not mandatory. It's not mandatory for them, but the better your content can be and the more it's helping these people generate more revenue, the more apps that they're going to get on. And each morning, like I said this morning, we keep getting more and more people on this call every day. That's awesome. You know, because they're having success. Well, would you mind, are you the one that leads these calls? I am, yep. Would you mind giving me and the people maybe like a quick little, okay, so what's one of your better calls that you've had in the past, you know, several weeks and why do you think it was so good? Like, do you have a topic you can share? Because I know you invest quite a bit in your own knowledge and I'm sure that's what you use to pass on. So what's some knowledge you can drop on us, buddy? One of my best calls here was probably last week while I was down in Florida and it was on self-talk and that really, it came from Dr. Kevin Elko who spoke at Coach Burt's. But just getting people because so many times as an insurance agent, most of these folks are in their car by themselves all day long. We have a lot of different systems, so we wanted to start putting a system in place for your self-talk. You know, what are you saying to yourself during the day? What's driving you? What's your purpose? So we spent probably a good hour just on self-talk and things that can keep you engaged throughout the day and eliminate distractions. So that was really a good one and I love when people can get off that call and I start getting text messages and phone calls like, man, that call today was great. I got so much out of that. It just keeps building your confidence in for the next call. I love Dr. Elko. He's got awesome, awesome stuff. Same goes with Coach Burt. Another good one was activating your prey drive. That actually led us to one of our best months. So I'm big on learning from different people and then bringing that back to the agents. And that keeps my time fresh. What is it that, why do we as salespeople, why are we so hard on ourselves, dude? What is it about that self-talk that is such a battle for us salespeople? Well, yeah, and I think a lot of it is people want that instant gratification right now. And if they don't get that immediate sale right, I mean, instantly people are questioning themselves, questioning their ability, questioning the leads, questioning the system, their manager, all kinds of stuff. And if they can just put their head down and trust the system and just stay plugged in. What I've really learned, Landon, and part of it was from Cody, part of it was from Coach Burt was you can't pick and choose part of the system. Like I kind of like, I like this part of Cody's system. So I'm going to use it. This part I really don't like. So I'm going to leave that out. You know, you got to go full bore into the entire system. And if you do it, you know, I've learned from him, Coach Burt, these guys are winners. Right? So if they're already winning, why wouldn't I just follow that and bug into a system and go? Yeah. Yeah. Well, what I hope to, what I hope to accomplish with this podcast is I really feel like you have been able to get a team off the ground. I mean, you've always had like good production. You've always been an individual producer, but what you've really done is you've made the transition very recently from on the ground, boots on the ground, a producer to building a team of producers. And I want you to kind of walk me through the wisdom of why did you choose to go that route? First off, let me just ask that question. Why did you choose to say, you know what, I know you still produce, but why did you kind of choose your focus to go from producing to building a team of producers? I think it really comes down to my true hard skill as coaching. Okay. And I didn't, I can't say that I got into this industry to be an insurance agent. You know, I saw people that they had pretty good-sized teams. And what I was able to do then was to take my background in coaching and I have a passion for this industry. And that's very, very difficult to produce at a high level and coach and train agents. See, kind of got to pick and choose. So that's probably my biggest reason why I love training people and in the business that I was in before insurance, we had about 120, 130 employees. So I've always surrounded myself with big teams. Right on, man. Well, okay. So now, you know, because you've gotten off the ground, you went from individual successful producer to building a team, you know, a smaller team, now you're over 50. What wisdom do you have for those people that are right behind you and trying to build a team of their own? Like what wisdom would you say, you know what, make sure you do this or make sure you don't do that? Or, you know, what are some of those nuggets that you have for us? Absolutely. Yeah, because it was not that long ago when we only had, you know, 10, 12 agents and most of the production was my own. Now we've got monster production, at least for us, it's a lot and very little bit is my production, which is always good. But what I would say, the biggest thing is invest. Invest in marketing. Don't try to be that guy that, because I hear this all the time, well, I can just do that on my own, okay? Invest in marketing, invest in coaching, you know, get someone, that's probably one of the biggest things that I would have never guessed a year ago to get on any stage. You know, I was mainly just doing final expense and there's no way on last Saturday, if I put up on marketing that we're going to talk about final expense, would I get 130 people in a venue? Yeah. Right. So, getting coached, Coach Burt has been on me for a year now to keep thinking bigger. You know, he always says, talks about fishing for Blue Marlin instead of all blue gill. Yeah. And that's what we're doing now. We really are. And like I said, our numbers jumped, we're at 94,000 for the month, they're ready for us. That's strong. When our best month ever was 130,000 and to date we're at 94 and it's what November 12th. Yeah, dude, that's incredible. So, really plugging in and typically what you're going to hear laying in this, well, I don't have the money. Well, I didn't really have the money either to spend X amount of dollars on marketing, X amount of dollars on getting coached by Coach Burt because that's not cheap either. Yeah, no doubt. Right. So, right off the rip, you know, I've got some major expenses there, but what I found out is by having those expenses, it just drove me that much harder to create enough revenue to make sure that portion was taken care of and then just trusting in people, trusting in guys like you, trusting in Coach Burt, you guys know what you're doing. Yeah. And I know if I partner with the right guys, especially in areas that maybe I'm not as good at, that, you know, again, I'm not looking for a long term. Yeah. And that's where people need to, you know, if you're in a position like I was, don't be so short-minded, you know, think long term and who you want to form those relationships with. It's crazy to think because I remember when we first started talking, I remember we had like a $1,500 a month budget in mind and that seemed big to you. I remember that you're kind of like, man, I don't know if I can invest, that's, you know, a lot, well, you know, it's like, you know, that got you, you know, 30 agents in the last, you know, two and a half months and not just the marketing did, but between your passion, the infrastructure that you built behind the leads because generating the leads is one thing, but putting the infrastructure to sell them and close them and cast the vision is a whole another deal. So it's a, you know, a yin and the yang kind of effort. But, you know, that to me is some of my biggest challenge that I have in this industry is trying to get people to understand that insurance and financial planning and all this type of stuff that you're doing with Dash Financial and all that. It's just the vehicle to help people succeed, man. Like the more I think about it, the more I feel like I'm not really, I mean, insurance is our product, but our business is people, man, is connecting with people, sitting with people, caring for people, training people, investing in people, partnering with people. And I mean, that seems so basic, but it's the truth. Like I feel like product knowledge, you know, to me, it's like how much, you know, how much product knowledge can you really, you know, absorb at the end of the day, you really just need to do what you can to get in front of more people, get around better people. Todd, I heard somebody say you're the average of the 10 people you hang out with. Have you ever heard that? Yeah, absolutely. You know, so I believe that, you know, and so what are you doing to invest to get yourself up and to hang out with guys that are challenging, that are sprinting. I've always looked, you know, to my left and my right and tried to find guys to run with. And that's one of the reasons I've partnered with Cody. You know, I, you know, the, that dude is just crazy. The pace that he runs, the vision that he has, the goals that he puts on himself, the accountability he puts on his team. And so, you know, you and I, you were one of the first few conversations I had when I first started working with Cody. And it's just the more I find myself hanging out with guys that are just sprinting and running and just reckless abandon and of just going after it. I find that the, that mindset, I don't know anybody that's doing that. That's failing. Like I really don't know people that I know that are failing are the ones that are like, man, you know, I was going to spend this, but now I have this thing come up and I'm only going to spend this, or I was going to come to 8%, but man, times are tough. I don't think I can, you know, buy that VIP ticket or whatever. But then I talked to guys that invested in the VIP ticket or whatever that was, and they walked away with a relationship that changed the trajectory of their life. You know what I'm saying? Does that make sense? Absolutely. Well, I can, I can assure you this. If you're in this industry, there is no shortage of money. Oh yeah. There's no shortage of money. There's shortage of training. There, there's shortage of, of sometimes effort, but there is no shortage of money. It's out there. And, you know, sometimes you have to take some risk and, you know, sometimes you have to invest a little bit more, you know, to get some extra knowledge. I know Cody provides, we provide training. Cody provides training, but, but I know from my situation and because people ask all the time, well, how much is coach Burton? And when I tell them, like, oh, I don't know if I want to do that. Yeah. But they don't, they don't know what I've made. Oh yeah. No, they forget to ask that part. Yeah. Oh, because it's been a game changer. You know, the same goes with the recruiting, you know, there's all sorts of guys out there. Oh, I can get to recruiting for a cheaper artist. Whatever, you know, I'm getting results. And, you know, by, by, here's the thing. And the same goes with the client lead as it is for a recruiting lead. So many leads get wasted. Right. The people don't work the lead. And I wasn't working, I wasn't working the recruiting lead as much as I could. So that's why I hired not one, but two people to make sure that those leads, they were called, they're emailed, they're text voicemail. I were working every lead to get to these people. And thank God, thank God we are for some of them because, because of that effort and because we hired those people to do that. There's some of our biggest producers. No doubt, man. No doubt. Well, you know, I, you mentioned earlier, I went to a Cowboys game this weekend with Cody and Brian and all those guys. And I kind of had this epiphany. This is just going back to what we were talking about. There's no shortage of money or opportunity. I don't know if this was just, if I can translate this into actual knowledge and wisdom, or if this was just in my head and it only made sense to me, but we were going through, there's a hundred thousand people in the stadium. There was not a single open seat in this, in Jerry Jones land. I mean, I've never seen so many people in my life. And whenever you see a hundred thousand people in a stadium watching a game, my mind was just moving. And one of the things that clicked with me, and I don't know why my brain is like this, but I remember walking through the metal detector and it basically said, all, you know, take your cell phone out and put it in the bucket. And that's all we really care about. No bags, but take your cell phone out. And 100% of the people of these hundred thousand people that are in the stadium had a cell phone. I remember thinking, man, it must be good to be in the cell phone business because, you know, everybody has a cell phone. You rewind the clock. I remember when I was in high school and nobody had cell phones. And I was, you know, it was like the little Nokia flip phones were playing on the phone river. I'm like, man, what a booming business. And then I immediately said, and every one of these people have some form of insurance. And I get to sell it and I get to market it. You know what I mean? And I started to think about it's impossible for me to go manufacture iPhones and droids. But in fact, the insurance that a family carries for their home is more, you know, more expensive than the cost of their phone and the, you know, the monthly maintenance on their phone. But anyways, that's just, it was just that little thing that clicked with me. I'm like, good grief, the opportunity we have in the insurance industry, every home, every person has insurance on their car, their home, their boat, their life, their financial planning, their kids, their health. And it's like, what an opportunity we live in today. You know what I mean? And I just, I don't know why it clicked with me. Does that make sense to you? A hundred percent. And I'll take this a step further since you brought that up. But let's say that we were going back to that Cowboys game on, that was a Sunday night game, right? Yeah, Sunday night. Sunday night game. So let's say you and I are there and and at half time, all right, stay with me here. At half time, we're going to set up three tables. And I'm going to give you two of them. All right. So your one table is going to say life insurance. Another table is going to say annuities. All right. Then I'm going to have a table and there's what, a hundred and a hundred and ten thousand people. Yeah, something like that. Yep. I'm going to have a table that says that I'm going to help you get out of debt in nine years or less, including your mortgage without spending any additional money. How many people do you think you're going to get at those two tables compared to me? Well, you know the answer. Yeah. So this is what this whole thing's about, you know, unfair advantage. And how are we going to drive more people to you? Yeah. And then couple that land and with at seminars teaching them a better way to live. So I always use that analogy that you just use with football field. I use that everywhere I go. I'll give you two tables. I'll take one and I can guarantee you that I'm going to have more people at my table than than the other two combined. I mean, right on. I agree. Yeah. Right there. That's that's why our numbers are going up. I agree. Well, that's that's interesting, man. So I mean, is there any other just wisdom or knowledge or, you know, this is your chance to we have a lot of people that are, you know, deciding to get in the industry or are newly into the industry to look to our brand for sort of some leadership. What wisdom would you have for that group? I always try and ask that question. Try and get, you know, you've been in the industry long enough to give wisdom to somebody else. What would you say to that person? Yeah. OK, so a couple things, to be honest, don't try to do it all yourself. Make sure that you partner with good people, you know, people that have they're they're not money friends, right? They're not they're not a friend. They're not helping you just because they get an override on you. Yeah, right, partner. And that's what honestly, that's what attracted me to Cody the most. It didn't matter whether he was making a dime on me or not. He was always picking up his phone. He was always willing to help. And it wasn't. I never got that. Well, it's going to cost you five hundred dollars to talk to me. Yeah, yeah. But OK, so then what that do and I'm getting off topic here, but that just made me want to partner with him even more. Yeah, right. So as a young agent, or even if you're not young, I mean, I'm 41 going to be 42 this week. So I'm I'm not I think I'm young. I'm not compared to all these young guys, but so many of the young guys, I see they're just trying to do everything themselves. OK, and they have a ton of knowledge, but I think they could explode even quick. They would expedite their process if they get a little additional coaching. And they partner with it with the right people. That's really that's really what it comes down to. That's good. And what's one of the litmus tests that you use to determine if you're partnering with the right person? Besides what you just said, I mean, if they're not always trying to get a dollar on you, is that your main thing that you use or is anything else that you try and like uses a guy because there's a lot of leeches out there, man. I want to see, you know, when I'm when I'm partnering with somebody, I want to see what kind of value that that they're bringing me and that they show a genuine interest in what I'm doing. You know, and if they're trying to help me in ways where it's not a constant fee, you know, that's kind of a turn on to me, like, hey, this guy is willing to help. And the first thing out of their mouth isn't, well, I'll help you. Or, hey, sign up for my 299 a month class. Yeah, you know, they're willing to help first. And then, hey, if you want more, you know, I can help you get to the next level. Here's what it here's what else I can do. Yeah. And then ultimately, the beliefs got aligned, you know, my my my beliefs aligned with Cody, because a lot of it stemmed from his basketball background. Same with me. Coach Bert was a basketball coach himself. We had a lot of a similar past. And, you know, that's kind of what people that I can connect with people that I can have fun with outside of talking business all the time. Right on, man. Well, Todd, I really appreciate your friendship and your time. You know, there's there's a few guys that because I just partnered with Cody about six and a half months ago or so. And I remember you were one of the first guys that I talked to when I first, you know, one of my first sort of introductions to the insurance industry was some conversations with you early on. And I remember being like, oh, these students are cool dude, he's like legit and not all like because there's some guys that I've just learned to just stay away away from in this industry that are all about the opposite of what you just laid out as a good dude. And so I appreciate your friendship and your time. I appreciate, you know, anything that, you know, we do together is a ton of fun. I'm looking forward to what that looks like. And I'm sure one of these days we're going to bet the same, you know, venue, you're going to come to 8% in 2020. I hope so. You got to get your butt there, man. I know. Right. Get a sweet man. We got I know I seen those. Those look awesome. Oh, dude, it's going to be you saw we got Jordan Belford too, right? Yeah, I did see that. Oh, man. The wolf. So yeah, man, it's going to be good. Well, hey, thanks for thanks for joining me. Is there anything else you want to discuss before we, you know, log off? No, I mean, not really. I appreciate you having having me on and everything that you guys are doing for us. You know, I try to post that as much as I can in Facebook is is making sure that people know I give credit where credit to do. And I by no means, you know, people could be watching this show like, Oh, he's only doing that much. He's not that big a deal. And that's all cool. But I do know what kind of growth. I know what kind of seeds we're planning throughout this country. And in the thing that I really like is is guys like you, guys like Cody, guys like Coach Burt are helping me get to a level that I never thought I could get to or not there yet. But we keep get we keep moving that needle. Yeah. So I know from a number standpoint, I'm probably not the number one guy. But how you guys you guys make me feel like I'm your number one guy. You know what I'm saying? That's kind of the big deal. That's why those partnerships. So that's a shout out to you and the coach for I would put a plug in for both you guys any day. And obviously you guys didn't tell me to talk about this was completely unscripted, which was kind of cool. But no, if anybody's out there, and they need help or or, you know, they're in that situation that I was that they're looking to get to the next level and growth. Reach out to me. I'm going to do the same thing that Cody and those guys have done for me. You know, they don't have their their handout all the time, like, hey, make sure that you're paying me first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything that I can do to pay it forward, I definitely want to do. And that's pretty much it, man. Cool. Yeah, Todd, thanks for joining us again. All right, guys, this was this week's 8% Nation podcast. Don't forget next July, Jordan Belfort. We have the Palms casino for two days. Get your butts there. It's going to be ridiculous. I cannot wait for this event. We already have almost more tickets sold now than what we did for sure last year at this time for this last event, and it's going to be so big. We're shooting for 2000 agents. So get your butt there. Just the networking alone, much less the speakers, much less the event. It's in Vegas. It's easy to get to. So we want you there. We hope to see you there and have a great week, guys. Happy production. Thanks.