The Invisible Ceiling Costing You Your Best Producers

Your busiest producer might be your most lost. He's on the phone all day, calendar packed, servicing renewals and putting out fires... and he hasn't set a new first appointment in nine weeks. From the outside he looks like your best. On paper he's drifting straight off course, and nobody can see it. 

In this episode, Randy Schwantz breaks down the Flight Plan system: a specific number for every producer, the activity math behind it, and a six-week flight review built around the one question that surfaces the ceilings your people have been hiding for years. One agency ran this and grew 18 percent, then strung together three straight years of double-digit organic growth without hiring a single new producer. If you're flying your team by feel and a year-end revenue report, you're catching the drift four hours too late. Listen now and learn to fly with instruments. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hey, an agency owner called me about two years ago. He had a producer, seven years with the agency, built a book of around five hundred and fifty thousand in revenue, and he told [00:00:10] me he just handed in his resignation. So I asked him, "What happened?" He said, "I don't know. I mean, he seemed fine. He hit his numbers this year.

He wasn't [00:00:20] unhappy." And I just asked, "Well, did you talk to him before he left?" He said, "I tried. He was gracious, but there was one thing he said that I just can't shake. He said, 'I [00:00:30] never felt like I knew where I was going.'" I said, "Well, what do you think he meant by that?" And then he went quiet. And then he said, "I think I know exactly what he [00:00:40] meant, and I think there are three more people on my team who might feel the same way right now."

And I said, "Okay, well, that's where we start."

Welcome to the Agency [00:00:50] Growth Machine podcast, where it's all about transforming potential into profit. And now your host, Randy [00:01:00] Schwantz.

Hey, welcome to the Agency Growth Machine. I'm Randy Schwantz, author of The Wedge, founder of The Wedge Group, and creator of Bignition. It's the only sales operating system [00:01:10] built specifically for commercial insurance agencies. And today, we're talking about planning.

Not the kind that lives in a binder and never gets looked at again, [00:01:20] the kind that actually drives growth quarter by quarter, producer by producer. So let's go. Let me start with a picture. [00:01:30] Nick Saban won six national championships at Alabama, and if you ever heard him talk about it, he almost never talked about winning.

He talked [00:01:40] about the process, the next play, the next rep, the standard for one drill on a Tuesday in March.

Reporters hated it. [00:01:50] They wanted the vision, the trophy, the big speech. Saban gave them footwork. 'Cause here's what he understood. [00:02:00] You don't win a championship by wanting one. Everybody wants one. You win it by knowing exactly what has to happen on Tuesday, so Saturday [00:02:10] takes care of itself. Now look at most agency plans.

Most agencies have some version of a business plan, or at least they do it once a year. [00:02:20] Usually around October, November, numbers get put on a spreadsheet, goals get written, everybody nods, and then January comes, and everyone goes back to [00:02:30] doing what they were already doing. And look, I'm not making fun of anyone.

I've been in those meetings. I've even run those meetings. The problem isn't the plan. The [00:02:40] problem is that the plan doesn't connect the behavior. If your plan says grow organic revenue by fifteen percent and that's it, you don't have a [00:02:50] plan, you have a wish. And there's nothing in that plan that tells a producer what to do on Monday morning.

A real plan works backwards from the [00:03:00] goal, like Saban working back from Saturday. You want fifteen percent growth on a ten million dollar book, that's a million and a half [00:03:10] dollars in new revenue. That means at an average account size of, say, twenty thousand, you need about seventy-five new accounts. That means at a thirty percent close [00:03:20] rate, you need to get in front of two hundred and fifty prospects this year.

That means about twenty new first appointments a month across your producing team. [00:03:30] Now you have something. Twenty new first appointments per month. That's not a wish. That's a behavior. Something you can [00:03:40] track, manage, and coach. And that's the difference between a wish and a plan. One lives on a wall, the other one shows up on a calendar [00:03:50] Now, here's where most agencies stop.

They do the agency level math, they set an agency goal, and then they kinda [00:04:00] hope their producers figure it out how to make it happen. Now think about what a pilot does before he ever leaves the ground. He files a flight plan. Where am I [00:04:10] starting? Where am I going? How much fuel does it take? What's my altitude gonna be?

What are my waypoints along the way? [00:04:20] And what do I do if the wind pushes me off course? He doesn't take off and just aim in the general direction and hope. [00:04:30] Nobody would get on that plane. But that's exactly how most agencies fly their producers. The general direction, good luck, see you at the end of the year.

The [00:04:40] agencies that grow consistently, they file a flight plan for every producer. And here's where you are, here's where you want to be, [00:04:50] here's what that requires, new appointments, new accounts, and protected renewals. Here's the activity that gets you there. And here's when [00:05:00] we check in to make sure you're still on course.

I know an agency in Phoenix. They had fifteen producers. Owner's name was Hank. He put individual flight plans [00:05:10] in place about three years ago. Before the flight plans, he'd have his annual planning meeting, set the number, hand everyone a slice of it, and then he'd spend the whole year with a [00:05:20] vague feeling about whether they were on track.

No real checkpoints, no course corrections. Just a gut feel and a quarterly revenue report that showed up too [00:05:30] late to do anything about it. He told me about one producer he would have sworn was having a great year. The guy was really busy, always on the phone, [00:05:40] calendar was packed, looked like a winner. And then he actually looked at his flight plan.

He was busy servicing [00:05:50] renewals, fires. He hadn't set a new first appointment in nine weeks. From the outside, he looked like Hank's best producer. On the flight plan, he was [00:06:00] drifting straight off course, and nobody could see it. After the flight plans, everything changed. Every producer had a specific number, [00:06:10] specific activity targets, a checkpoint every six weeks, and when somebody drifted, he caught it in six weeks, not at year-end.[00:06:20] 

And the earlier you catch the drift, the smaller the correction. A pilot who's two degrees off and catches it in ten minutes barely touches the [00:06:30] controls Two degrees off for four hours, and you land in the wrong state. His agency grew eighteen percent that year. [00:06:40] He had three straight years of double-digit organic growth.

Not because he found better producers, but because he started flying with instruments [00:06:50] instead of by feel. So stay with me, because Hank did one thing in those six-week checkpoints that almost no manager does. It wasn't a [00:07:00] performance review, and it wasn't a pep talk. It was one specific question, and the first time he asked it, a producer told him something he'd been hiding for three years.[00:07:10] 

Hank called his checkpoints flight reviews, and they were not about the scoreboard. Think about how Belichick ran a film room. He didn't [00:07:20] stand up on Monday morning and yell the final score to his players. They knew the score. They had just lived it. He turned on the film, and he coached [00:07:30] the process, the footwork, that read, that half second of hesitation on third down.

Because you can't coach a scoreboard. [00:07:40] The scoreboard's already happened. You can only coach the behavior that produces the next one. And most management conversations are scoreboard conversations. [00:07:50] And here's where you are versus goal. Here's where you need. Now go. That's reading the score out loud. It changes nothing.[00:08:00] 

Hank ran film. He'd sit down with a producer and say, "Walk me through your prospecting for the last six weeks. Not your results, your activity. How many first [00:08:10] appointments did you set? How'd you get them? What's still in motion?" And then he'd ask the most important question of the whole thing. "What's one [00:08:20] thing that's not working that you'd like to fix?"

And that question right there, that's the whole deal. Because most producers will never raise a hand in a [00:08:30] group and say, "I'm struggling." Not on a status report, not in front of their peers. But across the table from a leader who's clearly in their corner [00:08:40] trying to help them win, they'll tell you the truth.

And one of his producers told him he was terrified of calling on accounts over fifty thousand in revenue. [00:08:50] He'd been quietly avoiding that whole tier of the market for three years, and nobody knew because his activity in the small stuff looked fine. He had a ceiling [00:09:00] nobody could see, including him. So they went to work on it.

Hank role-played the call with him, walked him through a pre-call strategy, got him [00:09:10] in front of a few of those accounts with a plan in his hand instead of a knot in his stomach. And within six months, he closed two of his first accounts over fifty K. [00:09:20] That account does not exist without the flight review.

Because without that one conversation, that ceiling stays invisible forever, and [00:09:30] invisible ceilings don't get higher on their own. Now, back to the producer who resigned. Here's what he meant when he said he never knew where he was [00:09:40] going. He'd had goals. He'd hit them. But nobody ever sat down and said, "Here's your personal flight plan.

Here's where you're [00:09:50] headed. Here's how we get you there. Here's how we check in." He was flying without instruments, doing fine and quietly lost, [00:10:00] and three of his colleagues felt the same way. The owner heard it the moment he said it, and so he built the flight plan system the very next month. He called me a year [00:10:10] later, and he hadn't lost a, a single one of them.

So here's what I want you to walk away with. Your agency needs three things. A [00:10:20] specific agency level goal with the math behind it, an individual flight plan for every producer, and a checkpoint [00:10:30] conversation every six weeks about activity and process, not just the scoreboard. You don't have to build it all overnight.

Pick, [00:10:40] pick a producer this week and sit down. Build the flight plan together. Walk the math. Get their buy-in. Schedule the first checkpoint, [00:10:50] and then do the next producer, and then the next one. The agencies that grow don't just set goals. They file flight plans, real [00:11:00] ones, producer by producer, quarter by quarter, and then they fly them.

And that's the flight plan. Now go file one. [00:11:10] Look, subscribe.

Share this with somebody on your team. But before you go, I wanna leave you with something. You know, commercial insurance selling has gone through three big eras, and right now you [00:11:20] and your agents, you're living in one of them. Selling 1.0 is kind of how your granddaddy did it, three-by-five card, Yellow Pages.

The whole strategy was quote it and then hope you [00:11:30] win it. No real differentiation. Generally, whoever had the lowest price on renewal day probably got the account. And then selling 2.0 came along, [00:11:40] and that's when technology got big. Salesforce, HubSpot, beautiful dashboards. And you know what it actually produced?

A pipeline report your manager could pull on [00:11:50] Friday, but the training lived in a binder, the technology lived on a browser, and they never even talked to each other. And what happened? Well, the incumbent would get [00:12:00] last look and probably keep the business. Then selling 3.0 came around, and here's what that looks like.

You set your revenue goal, the system works backwards. How many [00:12:10] appointments do you need? How many accounts do you need to close it? What size? It tells you all that. Your appointment setting is scripted, tracked, tied to a specific target list, not random. [00:12:20] Every sales call starts with a pre-built strategy to drive a wedge between your prospect and whoever they're with right now.

And when you close the account, a documented service timeline [00:12:30] goes in place so you keep what you win. Every step, every producer measured. Now, that's not a binder and a dashboard that don't talk to each [00:12:40] other. That's one system running the whole game. That's Bignition. Hope you come find us at bignition.io or [00:12:50] thewedge.net.

And if you like this, leave a review. I'm Randy Schwantz, and I'll see you next week