How the Underdog Wins: What Agency Owners Can Learn from Vanderbilt’s Big Upset

What do a historic Vanderbilt football upset and independent insurance agencies have in common? More than you’d think! In this episode, Shane and Tonya discuss rethinking what it means to be a game changer in the insurance world. 

IA Forward to can help you take your agency from good to great. Learn more at iaforward.com, and follow IA Forward on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Transcript

Announcer: [00:00:00] This is IA Forward, your playbook for success as an independent insurance agent. Here to help you knock it out of the ballpark are your hosts, Shane Tatum and Tonya Lied. Welcome to IA  

Tonya: Forward, and it's my favorite time of year. It is college football season and the greatest upset of all time, Vanderbilt v. Bama.  

Shane: That's not supposed to happen in any universe. You're never going to lose To Vandy, let alone at Vandy, Alabama. Number one. Maybe our crazy Aggies could do something like that. Or our Tigers in our off year, but not Alabama. How does that even happen? You know what the voters are going to do? They're literally going to say, Hey, that really didn't happen. 

And they're just going to move past it.  

Tonya: And I love that Lane Kiffin was in the middle of his press conference and couldn't answer questions because he was so distracted by watching the game. To me, [00:01:00] that was the best parts of the day. We were so excited and it was like your baby brother that you love and you protect. 

And you keep him around because he helps keep your GPA up. But it was like, all of a sudden, he did good. And we were so proud of him. It was really interesting because LSU plays Vanderbilt the weekend of our anniversary. And we had talked about going to that game. And I'm like, I don't know if that's what I want to do for my anniversary. 

To see Vanderbilt, if they beat LSU. That could just ruin our entire sixth year of marriage.  

Shane: They're pretty good actually. It's not a fluke.  

Tonya: Yes, it was a real thing.  

Shane: They're pretty good. If you go look at Vandy scores, they've had two overtime games, one double overtime game. They won one. They lost one. They're pretty good. 

The quarterback. Is turning into a folk hero. It's a real deal. Don't discount [00:02:00] Vandy on any game the rest of the season. They're going to be a bowl contender this year. I feel like the Kansas Jayhawks from a year or two ago, this year is a whole another conversation because they're a disappointment, but. 

That's where Vandy is right now, is where the Jayhawks were maybe last year or the year before. It's are they for real? And then you look at them play, and then you look at their scores, and everything's really tight, and it's nah, they're for real. And so, yeah, good for them.  

Tonya: I bring this topic up because at the end of the game, Malachi Moore, At Alabama, lost his cool. 

Number 13, for Bama, he's a very frustrated fifth year senior, throws his mouthpiece, kicks the ball 20 yards down the field as Vandy's lined up in victory formation. And it was a hot mess. And sometimes in our industry, we're there.  

Shane: Yeah, that would never happen under Saban.  

Tonya: [00:03:00] Absolutely, 100%. Or if it did, he wouldn't have stayed on that field and he wouldn't be playing the rest of the season. 

Shane: This is exactly what happens to us. We get frustrated. Something's not going the way it's supposed to go. And really, I'm going to zero in on technology. We want technology to do something that it's not doing. It's something that just makes us lose it. And I've been here. I will go back and take you back to the late nineties, early two thousands, and tell you that I was the guy that sought out what. 

Has generally been referred to as bleeding edge technology. I was Inditech before Inditech was cool. I was fight against the man. And so still to this day, in a way that was who I was. I really think that our agency owners out there have to understand that. There is a what's important decision that needs to happen here. 

There [00:04:00] is a, what do I really need to do or be as an agency owner? And what do I need to pay attention to? And what do I need to ignore? Because there is a lot of noise going on.  

Tonya: There's a lot of noise going on everywhere right now, from politics to technology to Random things going on in your neighborhood. 

Is this the time to add to the noise or is this the time to sit back And be calm.  

Shane: I always think it's time to be calm as a leader as an agency owner when everybody's running around with their hair On fire. It's always time to be even keeled and in calm what I see From the marketplace is I see a lot of ego. 

I see a lot of Individuals trying to promote their strategy, their idea, their product, if they've built a product, uh, a tool as the end all be [00:05:00] all save all theme. And there's some good stuff and there's some not so good stuff. I don't want to go as far as calling it snake oil salesman type stuff, but there is this reality that exist within our industry and and let me take a couple of steps back to my late 90s 2000s and a little bit of the story here of of how I relate within the insurance industry There's this independent agency sub channel of just product development Distribution and it's huge. 

Okay, there are two gigantic platforms Vertafore They're both private equity owned. They're multi-billion dollar organizations. I went to AppliedNet a few weeks ago. Their users group conference had 4, 500. People there took over the entire Gaylord Opryland Hotel. It's just a big conference. And it was surprisingly big to me, bigger than I even [00:06:00] understood. 

These two vendors, they control a substantial amount of the market when it comes to the independent agency channels. What we have to understand is independent agency owners. Is that 80 something percent of independent agencies out there have less than probably six users, six employees, this 20 percent or even 15 percent make up a substantial part of the market in terms of if you're a technology company, users, user bases, or money spent on technology, there's a lot of us on the small end. 

Which is where we play as an agency network. We work with mostly smaller independent agencies. And we play on that end, even though collectively we're a larger, once you add everybody together, if probably somewhere around 400 users. In that way, we would fall over here into one of those bigger platforms. 

But since we are made up [00:07:00] of smaller agencies, we fall under the Another platform that we decided to go all in on in 2013, which is EZLynx. Up until 2021, before Applied bought EZLynx, we were part of this sort of indie scene. We're not going with those big boys. We're over here doing our own thing. The founder of EZLynx was like, I'm taking People from them. 

I'm winning. I'm not going to sell and the number just got too big and I don't blame him for that one bit multi generational wealth was created. It happens. One of the things that I felt like we did the decision that was made is from about 1998 until we decided to go all in. On a single platform is we bounced around what today you would call a bunch of the Inditech tools. 

They're newer. Some of them are good. Some of them are not. Some of them are underdeveloped. Some of them are just trying to [00:08:00] get their footing. And look, it's capitalism. It's free market. I love it. My statement today, though, is You have a business to run as an agency owner and you have a decision to make. 

Do you need to have half a dozen bleeding edge tools that you're constantly having to repair? Or do you need to be in a, it works to 80 percent of my satisfaction. You need to go all in on a single platform. Now, this is not an EZLynx commercial. This is not a Hawksoft commercial. That's another independent software platform that's holding on that has not sold to one of the big two. 

That's still out there. So this isn't commercials for that. This is just talking to our agency owners about what's important. Is it important to use a cool looking tool or is it important that stuff doesn't break and you take care of your customers? Is it [00:09:00] important that it just works? And that's where we were in 2012 2013. 

We were patching it together. We were fighting the breakage. And then we decided, wait a minute, you know what we can't grow an agency network and have our partner members constantly in a sea of change. That's not going to work. It's not going to work when somebody is trying to start at zero. Leave the captive system, start an agency. 

They've got to have technology that does basic stuff. The download needs to work, the rating, the integration, everything needs to work. And here's the problem. What I see is agency owners getting into this realm of, I'm going to obsolete download. I'm going to make it better. We're going to do web services, and we're not going to have stored data, and we're, you know what? 

This industry is not going to move that fast. And what people keep forgetting is carrier [00:10:00] technology in the scheme of this thing. People keep coming back and saying, we're going to obsolete policy download. No, you're not. Not until the carriers decide That they want to obsolete download, policy download, not until this huge, gigantic ship that makes the Titanic look like a dinghy. 

Then, until this happens, then you're not going to change the issue. You're not going to change the way data is shared or stored or whatever. And so I see what happens is these agency owners that get excited about really flashy new technology, and they jump on this bandwagon, which has now been termed Inditech, and they decide that we're going to get into this. 

Okay, great. But are you? Focused on your agency or are you focused on Inditech? What is your focus? And I see a lot of agents getting scattered.  

Tonya: Let's explore why [00:11:00] this is happening. Because the one thing that I've learned in my seven years in this industry is that independent agents by nature tend to be the rebels. 

They tend to be rebellious. And even though they are usually. Perceived as this very conservative group of people internally, they're always wanting to make changes and they're wanting to keep their independence. And they don't really want help because they're so focused on doing things their way.  

Shane: It's the source of where we were born out of mostly. 

I find that independent agents come from two different places. A large percentage of the independent agency channel comes from captive channel. They come from leaving that channel. Or, they come from multi generational independent agencies. Either [00:12:00] place that the origination is from leads to this kind of same convergence point where if you're like me, multi generational independent agent, then you're independent at the core. 

Like your nature is independent and nobody's going to tell you, nobody is going to tell you how to run your business, what you can do, what you can't do. The, like, base American theme. It's like the independent agency and America are like one thing. You're not going to tell me what to do. I'm free to do what I want to do. 

All of this. 100 percent and that's me. I'm an independent agent by core because I was raised in the channel. I don't know any different. And then you have the other side, the guys that came out of the captive channel and are now independent, and they experienced being told what they could do, what they couldn't do, all these things, they had to write more life insurance or else, they lived all that, and then when [00:13:00] they got the freedom of the independent agency channel, Now they're very conscious about something that tells them they have to do it a certain way. 

Those two things blur into probably 95 percent of the channel. You don't have a lot of people start independent agencies that spent life elsewhere. Unless it's a startup type of thing or something really interesting. Like I know a couple of agents that started and sold businesses. Software companies, ironically, what we're talking about today, and they were like insurance looks like an old industry that I could disrupt and they come up with a little wrinkle and they start an insurance agency because they're going to disrupt the industry outside of that really small percentage. 

Everybody comes from the captive agency background, or they come from the multigenerational. Existing independent agency thing. That foundation is what makes us rebellious. It leads us to this rebellious place. We're [00:14:00] attracted to something that doesn't feel like we're going the way of everyone else. Like it gives us a unique place or it gives us a place to say, well, we're doing it differently. 

It's this reality that we're drawn. To something exciting. It's new. It's flashy. And I call it the shiny object syndrome. I don't know that an agent can listen to this podcast and go, Man, Shane's right. I'm that guy. I need to settle down here. I don't know that you can figure this out without going through it. 

I just don't. You can tell your kid all day long, don't ride that skateboard down that set of stairs, but sometimes they just gotta figure out that skateboard doesn't go down the stairs like they think it should, and they gotta do it on their own, and you gotta hope, you gotta hope as a parent that it's a broken arm and not something worse. 

It's just that place that we find ourselves, and sometimes you've gotta do [00:15:00] it, and then you gotta figure out that, okay, wait a minute, this isn't helping my agency. This is actually hurting my agency and maybe, just maybe stable technology is the thing I need to be thinking about.  

Tonya: I don't think that's something that you can learn from a podcast. 

I really don't. That's just one of those things that is part of it. And some people learn faster than others. And there are things in life that I learned pretty quickly and things in life that I'm still learning.  

Shane: First and foremost, one of the lessons I learned was listen to your people. There's a difference between people not wanting to change and understanding that people's jobs need stability. 

I read who moved my cheese way too much between 1998 and 2008. And I forced my people to really get a mindset around being okay with change. And they did. They did get okay with change. They [00:16:00] followed the change. They went through it with me. There was some moments within a 10 year period that if I would have been a little more clued in to being the CEO or the owner or, Just the leader that there were little moments that I should have clued into that said wait a minute I am just doing this because I enjoy new technology And this isn't moving the needle on our business and it's actually causing the people who I am charging with Executing and implementing the grand vision that all agency owners put on the table for their people, it would have been easier for the individuals that I was charging with this to do if I would have let them stabilize for a little while, we changed management systems three times. 

Oh, wow. We chased the [00:17:00] shiny object at my push at my leadership. We chased the shiny object. One of those management systems went bankrupt, and this is the infamous story of me being the 25, 27, whatever year old president elect of their users group. They went bankrupt while I was president elect of their users group. 

I did not understand what I didn't understand at all. But it was the shiny object of the day. It was the thing that was going to allow us to be different. All the while, I've got competitors over here who aren't doing this and it's the tortoise and the hare. We think we're outrunning everyone and then when we look up we are so distracted and all over the place that everyone's actually outrunning us and it was a really important lesson and in 2002. 

We stabilized. We went to a single platform. We were on that platform until 2013, when we decided that we needed to move one of those giant behemoths, Vertifor, this one being [00:18:00] Vertifor, bought our independent indie management system platform that had been around for a couple of decades. And we continued to stay on that platform for a while. 

We're still on that platform for accounting from 2002 to 2020 4, 22 years we've been on this platform from an accounting standpoint, because it just works. During that 2002 to 2013 reign, we stabilized and we grew and we created our partnering program, and we just observed how much better our people were doing, how much better our business was doing. 

Through the stabilization. Now, it was not the prettiest, coolest looking thing on the market between 2002 and 2013, but it worked from 98 to 2002, four years. We changed three times, and then for a 10 year stretched, we settled in. We went [00:19:00] into a calm kind of environment and our people excelled and our business excelled. 

Sometimes we have to take a step back and go, okay, what works and is calm is better than the way it looks. And the idea is being presented by the salespeople because salespeople do that. They present ideas. Hey, look what this can do in a demo. And you get sucked in, and it doesn't do what you really needed it to do in the end. 

And what did it do for your agency? And those are the words of caution, I would say, around just, does it actually do what I need it to do, or does it do something that doesn't matter? And is it going to cause disruption because look, a lot of technology does cool stuff, but it doesn't matter because it doesn't do what I need it to do. 

It doesn't do the basic stuff. Agency owners. We have to be careful with that kind of mindset.  

Tonya: There's a quote has been attributed to many people over the years, but was [00:20:00] actually said by a Pulitzer Prize winning historian named. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and it was Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History, and I can remember somebody gave me a pink t shirt when I was in my 20s that had this on it, and I remember thinking, That I was really torn about this gift and that I want to be the disruptor. 

Did I want to make quote unquote history? Did I want to be unpleasant and push the envelope? Or did I want to be the person that sat down and worked hard and did what she was supposed to do? And I see this with business owners, with agency owners all the time. Do they want to be the person that makes the splash? 

That sends the email that tells people how great they are? That makes the post on social media that they got a check this month [00:21:00] for 70 something thousand dollars? Or do they want to be the person that takes all of that energy? And puts that into the focus of making their agency successful.  

Shane: It's really easy to let the ego get in the way. 

And it's really easy to do what a mentor of mine calls, be careful about trying to create, accidentally creating shame co. You don't want to necessarily do that if you're trying to build a business. It's not necessarily the best thing. And what we see is we see these celebrity CEOs. So we see the Elon Musk of the world and we see all that celebrity and we think, okay, that's our goal. 

That's great if that's your goal. But. You probably need to create something that's going to scale much faster, bigger, and gigantic than an independent agency. There's an AI company, ChatGPT. So the owner of ChatGPT is going to move from a non profit to a for profit company. They've already raised gazillions of dollars in this, in [00:22:00] this effort. 

Microsoft's pouring in tons of money. Sam Altman is a celebrity CEO that's increasing in celebrity because he's gonna, he's going to be worth a lot of money. There's a lot of energy being put into me as the brand, me as the superstar. And the question is, what's happening to your agency? What's really happening to your business? 

I sometimes question these individuals. I almost feel like they're not really happy with the insurance business. They're not really happy with the independent agency system, which is why they want to change it. And innovation is not what I'm talking about here. Innovation's important. I'm all about innovation. 

What I'm not about, because I've been lied to so many times by salespeople at software companies, I'm not about innovation that's not really there. I don't really care much to be told, which has happened many times. That the system will do X and the system at the end of the day will not do X, which is a lot of bleeding edge [00:23:00] technology. 

I'm not fond of running my business on software that doesn't work. That's one of the reasons that these two gigantic organizations have stabilized across the industry and why they are what they are. It's why EZLynx. Was so good for so long and is still good because now more investment is getting poured into it by Applied. 

Applied sees that EZLynx is the largest platform now as far as number of agencies. So what's really comical to me. We went all in, in 2013, we go in 2013. And what's really funny is easy links was the bleeding edge. Okay. In a way it really wasn't because it was stabilized and I knew the founders and I knew the developers and it was a good risk for us to take. 

It was going to work where it needed to work. There were some pieces they were adding that. Was bleeding edge, but the core product was stable. What's really [00:24:00] funny now is that at 8, 000 agencies later, EZLynx has become the stable platform and is now being these tools and these vendors are now trying to unseat EZLynx and they're bringing instability. 

To the market. So that's what's happened over the last decade. The Hawksoft of the world, Hawksoft, a very stable system. There's a system out there called agency systems. They're Newton product, very stable system. There's lots of stable platforms that have been around for a very long time. And what I see agents doing is I see agents. 

Picking stuff so that they can be on the commercial like they can be the spokesperson and I'm like, what are you doing? Is that really making your agency better or is it just stroking your ego? That's the part that we need to be careful as agency owners because we have people to pay we have businesses to run We have valuation Carrie Wallace [00:25:00] is a valuation expert out there, her firm agency focused. 

I need to get her to advertise because I keep plugging her over the years. Ask her, hey, what makes my firm successful? What makes the value of my business good? I can promise you, constantly flipping and changing and Chasing the latest shiny object and your people being disrupted is not making your agency more valuable. 

I had a recent conversation with an individual about this a few weeks ago. Sometimes you just got to do the work and some people spend all of their energy trying to figure out how to not do the work. How can I build an automation to make this better? Okay, great, but do the work first, put it on paper first, then build the automation. 

Okay. We have agency owners running their people ragged, trying to build on it, they don't even know if it works on paper. Like, if it doesn't work on paper, it doesn't work in technology. It's the age old truth. If you can't map [00:26:00] it out, if you can't write it out, The same thing goes for speaking. If you're trying to pitch an idea to someone and you can't write that out first in an email, in a document, you're not ready to pitch it. 

Because you haven't fleshed out the whole content of your idea yet. If you sit down and you write it out, you will discover if you have holes in your idea. The same thing goes with technology and automation and everything else. Hey, I know you want it to get from point A to point B. I know that. But there is point A dot 1 dot 2 dot 3 dot 4 dot 5 dot 6 before you get to B. 

Okay. And if you can't write that out and follow it, then you're not ready to, Go get the technology to do it and that's just the reality of it. Unfortunately from 98 to 2002. That's what I did I said, hey, we need to do this And then we I made my people go do it and it sucked and it [00:27:00] broke and it drove them crazy Some of them even quit They quit because they were tired of being chased around with their processes like by some crazy dude. 

And so that's what happened and that's where we went and that's what our story has been. I watch agency owners chasing this stuff and I'm like, man, grow your business, put, do the work and roll your sleeves up. And there's a huge light at the end of that tunnel that'll come and you'll be even better and you'll be able to go even faster. 

Tonya: I'm going to leave us today with this quote from Lou Holtz. Without self-discipline, success is impossible. Period.  

Shane: Attitude's a choice. Make a great one.  

Tonya: Bye, y'all.  

Announcer: At the Integra Partner Network, we understand that carrier access is the key to your agency's success. This. That's why Integra offers direct access to top rated personal and commercial carriers. 

Ensuring your agency thrives in today's challenging markets. [00:28:00] And with our comprehensive resources, profit sharing and bonus opportunities, technology and peer support, all while you retain a hundred percent of your book with no penalties to exit Integra, it's ready to empower you and your agency To find sustained growth, find your way to Integra. 

Visit integra partner network.com today. That's Integra Partner Network.dot com.