There’s a blast from the past, something that you’ve heard a billion times. The guy that we all love, man. I just can’t wait to hear what he’s got to say. In fact, it’s coming up here in just about three, two, one. Ready Go. Pat will always have his teams prepared. Whoa. You heard that voice before. Who is it? Pat will always have his teams prepared. Can you say Magic Johnson, one of the best all time ever, ever, ever, ever. And so what he’s talking about is Pat Riley, Pat, a major league coach will always have his team prepared. So now we’re talking to you as an agency owner/leader. What are you doing? Honestly, what are you doing? Honestly, to get your producers prepared, to go beat the competition, not just play, not just show up, but WIN? He is the most attention to detail guy. Now what he’s saying that Pat Riley’s great at details. He’s a detail guy. He’s the detail of getting producers ready to go do what? To win. He’s Pat Riley, a detailed guy at getting the guys like Magic Johnson prepared to go beat their competition. Now you’re going to love the sound byte coming up. This is how Pat kind of gets into the head of master guys like Magic Johnson. Hope you tune in to hear the rest… Listen below. Or click here to read a transcript.
There’s a blast from the past, something that you’ve heard a billion times. The guy that we all love, man. I just can’t wait to hear what he’s got to say. In fact, it’s coming up here in just about three, two, one. Ready Go. Pat will always have his teams prepared. Whoa. You heard that voice before. Who is it? Pat will always have his teams prepared. Can you say Magic Johnson, one of the best all time ever, ever, ever, ever. And so what he’s talking about is Pat Riley, Pat, a major league coach will always have his team prepared. So now we’re talking to you as an agency owner/leader. What are you doing? Honestly, what are you doing? Honestly, to get your producers prepared, to go beat the competition, not just play, not just show up, but WIN? He is the most attention to detail guy. Now what he’s saying that Pat Riley’s great at details. He’s a detail guy. He’s the detail of getting producers ready to go do what? To win. He’s Pat Riley, a detailed guy at getting the guys like Magic Johnson prepared to go beat their competition. Now you’re going to love the sound byte coming up. This is how Pat kind of gets into the head of master guys like Magic Johnson. Hope you tune in to hear the rest… Listen below. Or click here to read a transcript.
Welcome to the agency growth machine podcast where it's all about transforming potential into profit, and now your host, Randy Schwantz.
Speaker 2:Hey, it's Randy Schwantz. I'm so excited to bring you this podcast today called Agency Growth Machine. There's a blast from the past, something that you've heard a billion times. The guy that we all love, man. I just can't wait to hear what he's got to say. In fact, it's coming up here in just about three, two, one. Ready Go.
Speaker 3:Pat will always have his teams prepared.
Speaker 2:Whoa. You heard that voice before. Who is it?
Speaker 3:Pat will always have his teams prepared.
Speaker 2:Can you say Magic Johnson, one of the best all time ever, ever, ever, ever. And so what he's talking about is Pat Riley, Pat, a major league coach will always have his team prepared. So now we're talking to you as an agency owner/leader. What are you doing? Honestly, what are you doing? Honestly, to get your producers prepared, to go beat the competition, not just play, not just show up, but WIN?
Speaker 3:He is the most attention to detail guy.
Speaker 2:Now what he's saying is that Pat Riley's great at details. He's a detail guy. He's the detail of getting producers ready to go do what? To win. He's Pat Riley, a detailed guy at getting guys like Magic Johnson prepared to go beat their competition. Now you're going to love the sound byte coming up. This is how Pat kind of gets into the head of master guys like Magic Johnson.
Speaker 3:Well, Pat is an unbelievable, unbelievable motivator and I gotta tell you this real quick. Okay. He knew that it was about Larry and Michael to me, right? So I would get there. We didn't have to be at the game until 6:00 for a 7:30 game. I would always have to be there at 5:00 because I couldn't stand being at my house. I had to go to the gym because I'm crazy on game day, you know, so I would get there. And, so Pat and assistant coach are the only two people in the room besides myself in the locker room. So he's drawing up the game plan on the wall. I mean, I'm sorry, on the board. So he would say to Bill to get me going, Bill, did you see what Larry Bird did tonight? Wow. He had 40 points, 12 rebounds and seven assists. Now I'm just steaming right? Because he knows I'm sitting right there. So now check it out. He don't stop there because you know, back East with, you know, they're three hours ahead. So their games are over. So then he says, Bill, I want to tell you another thing. I can't believe that Michael Jordan, I tell you, he got 60 tonight. 60 points Bill! So he knew that I was listening but he would never make eye contact with me, but he made sure I knew their stats so that I could go out and have a high triple devil, which you knew I was going to do, because I'm mad at what they did earlier. So that's how he motivated me. Always making sure he kept Larry Bird and Michael Jordan just like, you have to keep your competitors, you know, on your brain. Just like you have to keep your competitors on your brain, just like you have to keep your competitors on your brain.
Speaker 2:Now he said it, I didn't. You have to keep your competitors on your brain. Well, I did say that. In fact, that's what the Wedge is all about. It's about how to get your competition fired. It's about what you do that your competition doesn't do. That's where your prospect is being underserved. It's about how do you drive a Wedge between your prospect and that bad boy incumbent. It's about if you're Magic Johnson, how do you do better than Larry Bird? If you're Magic Johnson, how you do better than Michael Jackson as if you're Jackson, Michael Jackson. He's gone. Michael Jordan and vice versa. You know that Jordan's coach was saying the same thing to him about Magic and Larry and Larry's coach is saying the same to him about Michael and Magic and it's just a way to keep us cranked up. And so look, almost everybody that is successful in selling has this competitive thing down in their gut. And you know, there's gonna be some people throwing marshmallows at you, so you can get you a little sugar high, like give me a marshmallow and give you a marshmallow. Hey look, don't pay attention to the competition. Just go out there and just do the best you can and let things work out. Here's another marshmallow Come on suck on it a little bit. Get your sugar high, let me make you feel good but give you nothing of value. So I sit there and think about, man, I love Magic Johnson. And you know, when he talks about what he talks about, Pat Riley never let his guys walk on the court without being prepared. Pat Riley did what he had to do to motivate and keep in front of his guys; who the competition was and who had to lose for them to win. Pat Riley was a great coach. And you can be one too. I mean that's what we as producers need. That's what we need from our leaders, not some pencil weapon. Get out a spreadsheet. How many dials did you make? Now occasionally, occasionally, that's really important. We don't need somebody to say, well, go find another coverage gap and make a big deal about it to your prospect. I mean occasionally. I mean we need an agency owner that really understands in a big way how to create competitive advantage that we can leverage to go win; go beat the bad guy day in and day out and help us build those skills. And then like Larry, Magic and Michael, you know, put us through routines in the practice house, in the gym, getting us better at the skills because here's the deal: Man, I've done a lot of research on confidence. Confidence is just a feeling, but the feeling is driven by having skills and knowledge. Michael Jordan was known, boy, I wish I could find the article, but Michael used to watch film of whoever was going to be guarding him and he's just watching that film. He had looked for those little glitches in that person's game and he got there in that next game and exploit those little glitches. You'll be dunkin' around them, on his head, you know, bouncing the ball between his legs. I mean all that stuff, because Michael studied the competition. As a leader, when you study the competition, now you know when they're weak. As a leader, if you don't study the competition and you just tell your people, hey, go sell yourself then you are in many ways, making it harder on your sales people,. You're not giving them the tools and challenge them to think. You are living in the old school mentality where back when grandpa or great grandpa was where it all started out, you know was taught, build relationships, go to the country clubs and hang out at the Kiwanis and the whatever else kind of thing they had going on. Bump elbows with people, get a chance to quote, be there when people had a problem. Write little business, right little policies, you know, money is money is money and all that stuff, and look, there's nothing wrong with that for our great grandpa, but then great grandpa handed it down to grandpa and grandpa handed it down to you and now you're handing it down to your producers and I'm just telling you, that's the old game. The real game, if you're a producer, is this. Now let's just listen to this other video, which is really compelling. In fact, let me just queue it up here real fast.
Speaker 4:One of the questions I've been getting asked a lot lately, is how much money do I need to retire on? Now, it's a really good question because you need to know that now so you can start planning for the future. Now, I'm really surprised that most people haven't got any idea of what this figure should be.
Speaker 2:That's a pretty bold and outrageous statement. Most people don't have any clue what that figure should be. Wow! Well, when you think about that, people don't have a clue what that figure should be. Then how the heck are they going to prepare for it? And if they're not preparing for that, then what is it that is motivating them and giving them cause they want to go do something and then see, when you can get the motive, then you come back to the skills building. Confidence is just a feeling driven by skills and knowledge. When you know how much money you need to save, you know who the competition is, you're reminded of that and now you have the skills to go beat those guys. Then the game becomes fun! But too many agency owners don't make it fun it. See that is the real game. The guy's still playing in the"Hey, let me get you a quote and see if I can save you some money. You know, let me look at your policy, see if I can improve your coverage". I mean that's the old game dude. It ain't working no more for people who want to make a lot of money and take care of their family. So you know, taking care of my family was my number one priority. Once I understood that I personally had to save$65,000 a year after tax dollars, then it was Game On. I knew exactly what it had to do. I didn't have to guess about it. I need to save$65,000 a year for 20 years in a row to have the minimum amount of money I needed to be able to take care of my family. And that means pay for cars, universities and weddings, and then fund the retirement for me and my beautiful wife Lori. So let's quickly get into how much do you need to save? We're going to let our Australian or New Zealand buddy kind of jump in on that. Here it comes...
Speaker 4:I love simple formulas and one of the ones I use all the time is what I call the rule of 20. Now let me explain what I mean by that. Let's say you need$50,000 a year to retire off. Okay? All you need to do is multiply 50,000 by 20, which will give you a million dollars. And that is in effect what you'll need to retire as a lump sum in your super.
Speaker 2:So he just gave you a number. You needed 50. You know, if you're going to retire on$50,000 a year, then you got to have 20 times that, I've heard of 22 times that. So pick whatever number you want to, but who can retire on$50,000 a year? I mean, who can do that? My Gosh Man. I mean, yeah, my house is paid for. My Kids' college is paid for. Everything's paid for. I don't need any money. Yes, you still need money. You still need a lot of money if you're going to be honest about it. Particularly if you want to travel and have any fun and doing things. If you want to live in your trailer house,$50,000 a year probably get you by fine. But man it's going to be like a monk lifestyle. So when I sit there and think about tying all this stuff together, I mean I want producers to know how much you need in that pot, how much you want to be living on and it, look, who cares if you never retire, you want the choice to retire because you want the choice. You want the financial freedom to go do something else that maybe doesn't cost money. Maybe you want to go build homes for Homes for Habitat and you want to go do things like that. I mean, I don't know what you want to do, but, even if you're part of a country club, a country club costs you$10,000 a year at a minimum, but if you eat over there every once in a while and you play a little golf and you, you get the point; it takes money. So when you have money, what you have is financial freedom, and now we're going back to where this thing all started off. Magic Johnson said, Pat Riley always has you ready, and then he came back later and said: Pat is a great motivator. And so then he came back and said: Pat always reminds you. You got it. You know, Magic said you got to know who your competition is. Keep that at the edge of your mind. So when you, when you pull this stuff together, well, where does your motivation come from? Motivation by definition is a simple word, from the word motive. What's your motive? What's your reason? What's your purpose? Why do you want to do what you do when you get clear on that and, and maybe you want to maybe you just love selling insurance. That's cool. Maybe if you're like me, you came from a household. I mean the most money my dad ever made was$23,000 a year, so we got by. We got by. You'll get by. In fact everybody gets by until they die, but some people just get by a whole lot better and I wanted to have thought about it. How would I get by a whole lot better? I wanted to be able to actually buy a new car. I actually wanted to buy a house. I actually wanted to go on vacation, I wanted to go to Europe, you know, I wanted new golf clubs. I mean, that doesn't mean I'm greedy and it sure doesn't mean I'm needy, it's just what I wanted and that's the motive. What do you want? But I also wanted to be able to, when I got to that age, be it 60 or 62 or 65 or whatever, I wanted to have freedom to go do whatever I wanted to do. Now here's something else that's interesting and you shouldn't be short sighted about this. Man I listened to, if you don't listen to Dave Asprey with Bulletproof Radio, he's the guy that does Bulletproof coffee. I mean, you know, he, his goal is to live to be a hundred and eighty and Lord only knows why. I mean that's a long, long time. Right now I think the longest anybody's ever lived is 122 years. But what's interesting because he has that mission now, he's doing all sorts of things to take care of his body and reduce that aging process. Well, I mean, think about it, whether you are poisoning your body by drinking a half gallon Scotch every night or whatever your thing is, you know, eating big old, you know, six pounds steaks and whatever... It doesn't matter, but he's on the other side of that. He's thinking about how do I take care of my life, how am I around longer and whether you want to be around longer or not, you probably will, because technology is keeping people around where you know, people used to die when I was a kid, I mean a lot of these farmers because they had their hands in pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers and all this sort of stuff every day and they worked really hard and they put in long hours and they, you know, they had steak and potatoes every night. Then, you know, they died of cardiac arrest and died of cancer. They died of stuff like that, those guys had died back then you know 65, 70. 70 was old today. Man. I see 70 year old guys skiing down the black slopes. I see 70 year old dudes out here at my country club swinging a golf club and hitting it 200, 220 yards out there having a great time doing it. Seventy years old, man, they're going dancing and having fun doing things. Seventy years old is like a kid compared to what it used to be, and so a lot of you are going to live to be 80, 85, 90. In fact, the stat I saw that if you've got a significant other, there's a greater than 50 percent chance, one of you will live to be at least 92 now. I don't want to get gross here, but I will just talk. try to weave. I want to weave the carpet. I want to weave the rug. I've got a mother-in-law down to Tampa who's 84 and is now in assisted living and in many ways just not doing well. In fact, in most ways not doing well, you know, dementia, you can't really have a conversation, can't control her movements of her body. Uh, you understand what I'm saying? I don't wanna get gross here, but it takes money to take care of people like that probably in the range of$4,500, five grand a month. That takes money, right? So, it's not about greedy money. It's about freedom money, and that's what I don't want to keep thinking about. Okay, so this is kind of rambling. I get that I'm kind of rambling, but I'm trying to weave this rug. I'm trying to get you to see that when you get, in fact, here's my mantra. Let me just give you my mantra. My mantra is this, that motivated, confident, organized producers with a plan will always way outperform people who lack motivation, lack confidence, are disorganized and have a weak plan. So what's the role of leadership? To me, it's simple: Help tweak everything we can to keep you motivated because it's in your own best interest and look, if you don't have a leader doing it, then you got to go tweak yourself, your motivation, by getting clear, by writing in diaries, by doing your financial plan, by knowing how much you need to save, what you know, how much you need to save. Then you sit there and build, your book of business that throw off, that kind of discretionary money. I mean that's, the business I'm in, is to help you figure that out and get there. Number one: Motivated. Number two: Confidence. Confident people always outperform people who lack confidence. Confident people knock on bigger doors. Confident people ask tougher questions, confident people ask their clients for introductions so they can get introduced into the things they want. Confident people just do things that people who lack confidence don't do and won't do. Keyword there is'won't' do. They're afraid. So then how do you build confidence? Well, you build confidence like a Lego set one little block at a time. Confidence, again, write this down, is a feeling driven by skills and knowledge. When you know what to do and how to do it, you feel confident unless you're a sociopath. So when you know what to do and you know how to do it, not just, I kind of know what I should be doing. I'm saying you know how to do it. If it's standing over a golf ball and you got a driver in your hand, you've got the muscle memory to swing the club, hit the ball send it out there. And you feel confident you can hit it out there if it's in selling, you know who the competition is you know who the buyer is, you know your strengths, you know how to ask questions, get the buyer to see the incumbent is not doing their job. You know how to drive that wedge. You know how then to work them through the vision box and get your buyer clear on what they want, how they want it, so that now you can create a proposal that plays back exactly what they want, which is everything the incumbent is not doing. And if you do it really well, you can go ahead and just go pick up a BOR right now. That's confidence and that's what we all want, right? Well look, there's nobody that can't develop it. If you've got enough discipline on your own or you're in the right kind of sales culture, you put those two things together, your own discipline and the right kind of sales culture that's driving these processes, running great sales meetings doing the kind of goal setting that's more like financial planning that we already talked about. You know, helping build out a proactive service platform where you know your differences, and look, there's a bunch of people out there right now saying, hey man, you ought to you ought to change your label from an insurance agent to call yourself a risk partner or risk manager or risk advisor. You know something like that and then go create good looking 4-color PDFs. It tell them about your capabilities, loss control, claims management, exposure analysis. You know, cost of risk. You know you're a total cost of risk, all this stuff. I mean, and I love it, but the problem is the problem is, that all of your major competitors, all of them, USI, HUB, Gallagher, Acrisure, Assured Partners, Willis, AON, Marsh, they're all out there talking about their capabilities. See, if you're not careful, you'll sound just like them, rather than being able to say it in a way, and that's why I'm not a big fan of cape... You got to have the capabilities, but if you don't break it down to what I call a proactive service platform where I'm taking all the things we do in loss control, breaking down each piece of it, and labeling that so that now I can communicate simple things, not capabilities and go win. So now we go back to confidence. Confidence is a feeling driven by skill and knowledge. If I have the knowledge, boom, boom, boom, about myself, about the competition, I've got the skill to be able to deliver it, ask questions, get the buyer to see the incumbent is not doing their job, work the buyer through what they want. Create the vision box, work the buyer through what's it going to be like to tell the other guy it's over. Work the buyer through how they want to give me a BOR, then I feel confident I can grow and then so if you're motivated, confident, kind of one piece of it could be missing is you're not very well organized and look, man, all those off the shelf CRM tools, Salesforce.com, Microsoft dynamics. I mean, if I could talk out of school and I won't, but I'm dealing with large firms now that have buried themselves in overhead where they've spent money with consultants, money with Salesforce consultants and Microsoft consultants in the range of millions of dollars, million dollar plus; one from a million point four, others millions. And the problem is, they got what they asked for, but they didn't get what they want and they sure didn't get what producers want; it's too complicated. It's too hard. And in fact instead of being something that helps you sell more, it becomes a demotivational barrier to selling more in most cases. So those off the shelf CRM tools are really more executive reporting tools so they can go roll it up to the venture capital firm or roll it up to the analyst on Wall Street and say, look, here's what's in our pipeline is what we're doing. But it's not meant to help salespeople sell more. And I think I built something that is; it's called The iWin Agency Growth System... It's a technology within that. So you know, if you're not a client, man, you ought to check us out. I'm just telling you, you ought to check us out. I hope that you will. So organized means, I know who all my prospects are. I know who my buyers are. I mean I've got, you know, all that basic stuff. Email addresses, addresses, phone numbers, but part of it means that I also know who my competition is, I'm keeping track of everything that they do. I've got notes on them, about the agencies and agents I see their proposals and within just a few clicks, man, I can sit there and develop a strategy to go beat those guys. I've got my whole wedge database already all mapped out. Once I get a client, I just drag and drop and create my written service plan. It's just all integrated and it's just easy. If I'm a sales manager, two clicks, I'm running a sales meeting, not a spreadsheet. Liar's Club meeting. No Man, that's the old game. Hey, what's in your pipeline: I'm working on Xylophonics Insurance, uh, restaurant. Okay. Well, what do you think your chances are, oh, about 50/50. Okay. Do you need any help? No, I think I got it wired up. I mean a typical spreadsheet Liar's Club meeting. I mean, you've been through them. You've heard other people say dumb things like that. You've heard agency owners ask questions like that and it really doesn't do any good. What we need to do is help producers just like Pat Riley helped Magic define and defend how they're better than the competition and figure out how to go beat them. And then of course the last thing here, so I'm just going to say it again. Motivated, organized producers, motivated, confident, organized producers with a great plan will always trump those who lack motivation, who lack confidence, who are disorganized and have a weak plan. So now the plan man, when you don't have a plan and know exactly what you want to get accomplished in a sense, how many dials you have to make to set the appointments you need to build to work a qualified prospect and close that deal. So whether it's dials or red hot introductions so that you can get your activity so well defined of how much activity of what kind of account, based on what kind of submission rate, what kind of close rate so that you can go accomplish that which you want to accomplish. If you're a producer, you'd have to be an idiot not to want that so well mapped out that then you can program your brain to go do it. When you think about it like this, your brain is nothing more than a computer and when you start to scribble that stuff out and then go from scribbling to make it real, that's the software that programs your brain. When your brain knows what you need to get done, you'll go do it. When your brain doesn't know what needs to be done, then you're confused. You're confused, you confuse your brain. And then it kind of just like, you know, bogs down and it's like walking through molasses in the middle of winter up in Toronto, Canada. It just bogs you down. So man, I hope we said something useful to you today and I just want to go back and summarize. First of all, motivated, confident, organized producers with the plan will always outperform people who lack motivation, lack confidence or disorganized and have a weak plan. So now Magic said that Pat was, he always got his guys prepared. That's a part of the plan. He said Pat was a great leader. He knew how to motivate. We got to keep people motivated. That's where the fun is, man. And then we got to build confidence and the way we build confidence is, you know, if it's basketball, you're out on the court and you're going after each other hard. It's one on one. It's all that sort of stuff. It's running drills, it's getting in shape. In selling, man, we got to do the same thing. And so if we don't have a playbook, how are we going to train skills to go pull off those plays? So that's a correlation. That's many of the agencies I run into when I say,"what's your playbook"? They'll say they have one, but then when they start to describe it, it really breaks down, but when you have a playbook and you got the plays to find, now you can train in those skills to get great at knocking on the doors and open up prospect doors to work with your clients to work, red hot introduction to get introduced in. Then you go on this, before you go into a sales call your agency managers help you figure out how to go beat your competition. What are those differences that you can use on that sales call to get the buyer to see that they're getting underserved by the incumbent and now you're on that sales call working through the wedge, taking and driving that wedge between the prospect and the incumbent, rehearsing them through what's it going to be like to tell the other guy it's over, walking out with your BOR and that all drives confidence. Now it's all about efficiently, doing more of it with bigger accounts and that's the secret to you making the kind of money you want to make. And then lastly is now a well defined plan. You put all that stuff together and man I'll tell you what, as a producer, you can easily become a multi millionaire, a multi millionaire, and it's better than almost any other business out there on the planet. If you don't, like as a producer, you own the agency. How many other jobs, sales jobs. Can you be a multi millionaire? Now, I'm sure some exist, but there's just not a lot. Here you can. And that's what we're committed to helping you become: Multi millionaires. We're committed to helping agency owners build big, fast growing, fun living, great place to work agencies. So there you go. Hey Man, this is Randy Schwantz. I'm with the Wedge Group and I'm the developer of the iWin Agency Growth System. Right now we have just under 100 agencies throughout North America working the system and driving their way up to double digit growth. It's a fun place to be. It's a way. It's a system. It's a combination of training, technology and coaching. Unlike anything else out there on the planet today. And I hope you'll look into it. So until next time, thanks for listening. This has been a lot of fun today. I'll see you later.