Follow the Directions (Or Skip Them): Balancing Tradition With Innovation

Shane and Tonya dive into the eternal struggle between following directions and blazing your own trail. From puffer jackets to agency best practices, they explore how independent agents can balance tradition with innovation to drive success. 

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. 

Tonya: Welcome to IA Forward. Today, I want to talk about something that as business owners, we don't always do well, and that is following the directions because we know better.

Shane: I never follow the directions. Do you follow the directions? 

Tonya: I usually do, yeah. I take like the extra 5 to 10 seconds and read the directions. 

Shane: I don't know a lot of guys that follow directions. 

Tonya: You argue with the GPS, don't you?

Shane: It's not even the GPS. It, yes. Enough of that, but I got some new lighting for my camera stuff here and sometimes it looks like I've got like a darkness across my eyes and face and it doesn't do well if you are trying to do marketing in social media and you're trying to implement video.

And so, I [00:01:00] got these new lights because the ring light that you got me many moons ago now, it's become aged. But on top of that, it just wasn't good for my setting. Like I couldn't put it where I wanted to put it. So now I have these lights that just rest on the top of my monitor. Like they're on right now.

I don't know if you see any difference at all right now. 

Tonya: No, I can see a difference. Okay. 

Shane: There were instructions. But I just plugged one end into the other and I didn't read anything. Now I got a hot mess of wires going on that, and I've got some pieces in the box that I haven't thrown away yet because there's four or five pieces that I haven't really found a purpose for.

Tonya: I did it, but there are some pieces left over. That's the whole story of going to the mechanic shop. 

Shane: I always have pieces left over. There's nowhere for them to go. And. Who wants to take five minutes to read the directions? I don't have five minutes. 

Tonya: I brought this topic up because I mentioned on a previous episode that while [00:02:00] I was in Huntington, I finally succumbed to the peer pressure and bought the puffer vest.

I was wearing it the other night and spilled something on it, brought it home. And before I put it in the dryer, I thought, I wonder if I need to hang it up or need to actually put it in the dryer. So, I grabbed the puffer out, I looked at the washing instructions, and it says, Machine wash cold separately, gentle cycle, yes, good, there.

Do not use fabric softener, no problem, we're there. And then it says this, tumble dry low, inside out with three clean tennis balls. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't keep three clean tennis balls in my laundry room. That's just not a thing. And Daniel was on a video call. He's the one in our household that plays tennis.

I have no idea where the tennis balls are, much less three clean tennis balls. And I just This is the dumbest thing ever. I said, fine, [00:03:00] I'm just going to hang my coat up. And this was an unfortunate decision because my puffer coat is no longer puffy and it basically totally messed up my brand new little puffer jacket because apparently it's important to actually dry it inside out with three clean tennis balls.

Shane: I don't know why you don't have clean tennis hanging around. I really think that everyone probably should have. Unused, clean tennis balls. Three of 

Tonya: them in their laundry room. 

Shane: What textile manufacturer, engineering, East Texas, redneck kind of thing is that? 

Tonya: Why three? Why not two? Why not four? 

Shane: Why tennis balls?

Seriously. I know why. I get it. It's to keep it puffy, obviously. But why make something that requires your customer to have something totally unrelated needed? To that thing to keep it clean and in its standard condition, like what that's a design flaw to [00:04:00] me has to be. That's just crazy. 

Tonya: We had a friend who is a physician at a local hospital that was actually spending the night that evening.

He does two. 24 hour shifts, and then with the 12 hours in between, and he lives like two hours away. And so his double shift like that, he always spends the night. And my second thought was, I can't even imagine how much noise it would make to have three tennis balls. In the dryer with my coat, even if I knew where tennis balls were, like, am I going to do this and wake up this position?

It's just not going to happen. But it really messed my coat up because I didn't follow the directions, even when the directions seemed stupid. 

Shane: This had to have been designed by a man. For me, this is a big lesson because I'm the guy that needs the most attention to this. I am just absolutely horrendous at reading directions.

I [00:05:00] even scan at best directions. If I'm going to read anything, it's a scan of the directions. And I'm going to get to tennis balls and go, what? Whatever. Like, I'm not doing that. The tennis ball. That I know I have was for agility workouts for my former coaching days, and it is not clean, and I'm not going to Academy or Dix or wherever and buying new tennis balls for one process to be clean.

There's a lot of this in our life, isn't there? There's a lot of things like this. 

Tonya: But the reason I brought it up, I started thinking about our independent agency owners and a lot of them are coming out of the captive system. They were, they owned all state agencies. They were at Liberty Mutual. They were farmers agents.

And when they start their independent agency, it is, Oh my gosh, I am going to do this my way and I'm not going to listen to anybody else. It's [00:06:00] okay. There is a balance. And yes, it is exciting to not have to follow somebody else's rules, because you know what you're doing. You don't need to follow those rules.

However, sometimes some outside instruction really is a good idea when you're making that transition, or even once you've been in the business 15 or 20 years. 

Shane: Whether you're transitioning from the captive system, whether you're transitioning from producer role to agency ownership, those two scenarios, you have been under rules, somebody else's rules, and a lot of the frustration there comes from just not being able to do it your way.

You see things or you interpret things. We went through this conversation just in the last couple of weeks about a few things internally, operationally. We were looking at, and I was involved with our partner operations, a leader, Holly Howard, and my wife, who's our accounting manager, and [00:07:00] we were walking through some old stuff and like, why do we do this?

There's actually really good reasons why we actually did what we did. And that's this kind of transition dilemma is you learned. under someone or you were trained by someone who had a lot of success, but you saw things that you felt were dumb and you needed to do differently. And your mindset is, I can improve on this process.

That in and of itself is called innovation and innovation is great and I encourage innovation. That's why we talk about things in terms of best practices versus rules. Best practices are kind of directions for multiple people that have had success like the data set is like many people went before you did something, whatever that is, successfully.

And therefore, this idea became a best practice. And I love that idea. Like, that [00:08:00] in and of itself doesn't mean that you're deciding to ignore directions. Like, what you're deciding to ignore is a form of directions that all these people did really well, but you're smarter than them. They're all dumb and you're smart.

And maybe there is a percentage chance. That's true. You may be the Elon Musk of the independent insurance agency system, and that's great. You can lead us to the promised land. For the other 99 percent of us, we should probably pay attention to best practices, A, directions. 

Tonya: When I ask this question, I am not picking on 20 somethings. Did you know everything in your 20s? 

Shane: I knew everything. I was smarter than everybody. Smartest guy in the room. I just got through 30 minutes ago giving an opening orientation session to a new group of agents that joined our network right before I come in here to talk with you. And I'm going over that.

I'm telling them about who [00:09:00] I was in my 20s. All the errors of my ways. And here we are, this is a great example. I tell people all the time, the things that I did wrong, like that's a form of directions to me is I I'm saying what I did wrong and I'm embracing the fact that I failed so that hopefully others will not repeat that mistake.

And we have a business centered around that. We have a podcast that has somewhat centered around that. It's important that I pay attention. To some of the innovation coming out of the 20s and 30 somethings right now, like I'm not snarky to a generation. I believe lifelong learning is super, super important as a business owner, and I have a lot of things I can continue to learn as we age and we get into maybe the last quarter of our business life.

The biggest mistake we can do for those that are in my age, that are in their 50s, certainly for those that are in their 60s, is to stop [00:10:00] listening to directions, like, to think that you have all the knowledge you ever need, and you have no knowledge to gain, AI is showing us that's not true. There's really innovative ideas coming out of the generations before me and you.

There's really exciting things happening. I love that our agency network is multi generational. I just had a conversation again, a few minutes ago with. second generation coming into mom and dad's agency and the excitement that he has and just asking for some guidance around how do they transition? How do they work together?

How do they do things? And I have that experience, some great things, some not so great things, some things that we could have done differently. That's a form of directions. I love That we have that in our network because I'm learning still I'm the figurehead. I'm supposed to be leading the network in this organization that's got 35 [00:11:00] employees and 100 and something partners.

And there's a lot of people when I lay my head down at night that depend on a decision I make. And yet. I have so much to learn from so many of them. And the minute that I say I don't have anything else to learn, I'm throwing directions away as soon as I open up the box, and I'm probably going to ruin my puffy jacket because I needed tennis balls.

Tonya: Several weeks ago at my father's funeral services, and then at the, the gathering after, I was absolutely overwhelmed with the mentors that I have had in my life over the years that came in and were there, you included. And as we were standing around having conversations and it was almost as overwhelming to me, the level of gratitude that I had for the people that were there that had poured into me.

And like I said, in my twenties, I knew everything. [00:12:00] And so, looking back over those hours of things that people had said to me, and advice they had given me, and questions that they had asked, I cannot believe how blessed that I have been to have such extraordinary people that looked beyond Tanya Knows Everything to look Sister, you really don't and let's work through this and take the time every once in a while to think about that and the incredible people that have poured into you and maybe the lesson didn't make sense when you were 26.

It may make sense now that you're 46 and if we don't take the time to reflect back on those things, then we're missing so much. 

Shane: We need that pause time to reflect. I have this big fear that the people that respect me today and know me as Shane in his 40s and 50s, that they will somehow converge with people that [00:13:00] knew Shane in his 20s and wreck everything that I've worked so hard to build and correct.

And I want to apologize To those people from my 20s that I don't know that haven't come with me through this journey. But at the same time like I don't want those people from my 20s to interact with those people from my 40s and 50s. That makes me a nervous wreck because we mature and we get better and we learn and 

Tonya: Shane, I do not have time to buy tennis balls. I do not want to buy tennis balls. And it is really stupid that I need those in my laundry room. 

Shane: A high school classmate, and he's been very successful in the IT world. He lives in Wyoming, Montana now. Has a really cool blog, has become very fit in the sense that he, he, fitness and, and physical health and mental health are a big part of his life.

He put a poll out on LinkedIn and basically the biggest vote getter for why people don't work out, why people do not pay attention to their [00:14:00] diet, why they don't pay attention to their physical health, ultimately their mental health, is time. I don't have time. You have time. This is where I interject the stop doing list, alright, to come full circle here.

This is also where I interject get up earlier. The 5 a. m. club, people who get up 5, 5 30 in the morning, that sounds ludicrous to those of you that love sleep, and I love sleep, but what's really interesting is Julie and I, as empty nesters, and now that we're older, when we sleep in, that usually means 7, 7 30, that doesn't mean like 10, when we get up at 7 like we're sluggish, when we wake up at 5 Sure, we're hitting a wall at 9 o'clock at night instead of 11 at night.

But the energy and the things that are done between 5 a. m. and 30 a. m. are a huge part of whether I'm winning that day or not. Just a [00:15:00] hundred percent of the time. There's just a reality to it. You have time. And that excuse is that, is just what it is. Even though I've been where you are, I've been in the busy rat race, and I've been with the kids activities, I've been getting the kids to school, all of those things, guess what?

Life is always gonna be busy. Like, it's always gonna be the case. Your agency's always going to pull you in your business, your customers, all of these things, you got to find those boundaries, get up earlier. These are those best practices. These are some of those directions that we can follow to improve our businesses because.

You can't really do better at your business if you don't do better on your personal self. If you don't make yourself better, you can't make your business better. 

Tonya: I was on a panel at an event in Washington, D. C. two years ago, and there were two questions that were asked of me. That had very [00:16:00] different answers from anybody else, and one of them was what intimidates you.

And there's really not a whole lot that intimidates me just because I've always really felt like I could do anything. But I thought about it later, and I thought about that question over the last year and a half. And you know what my answer really is? That's anything to do with accounting. And the fact that has stuck with me.

Since this July event, a year and a half ago, I decided to take an accounting class because if this is something that intimidates me, if it's something inside of me, it bugs me that, I don't know, I can take a class on that. I can learn more about it, and that's what I'm doing. I'm taking an accounting class because if that's the one thing that really intimidates me, I can fix that.

So if there's something that is bugging you, something you don't know about, whether it's AI or marketing having to do with our industry or whatever it [00:17:00] is, 

Shane: One of the things that intimidated me was speaking into a microphone on a podcast. That was something that originally, before we started doing this, and there was practice and there was just talking to yourself.

How did I deal with that? I put my AirPods in and I went on a run or walk and I talked into voice notes and I listened to myself. That's how I worked on that. Because I felt, if I don't like the way I sound, then I can listen to what I sound like, And try to correct some of that. Try to enunciate. I can do better things.

And that was some things that you shared with me as well. Talking into a camera, video, which is something that I need to do more of, that we've talked about doing more of, that I can do, But it's the new kind of microphone intimidation is because it's weird. It's really weird to speak into a camera where there's no audience.

Like I got no problem talking to a thousand people in the audience. No problem. But speaking into a [00:18:00] camera and not maybe this loss of control in a way. I don't know what it is, but that's intimidating. My other one that I don't know how to solve because I'm not going to go take the lessons. The big thing that intimidates me.

Our fighter pilots, not just flying airplanes, that's intimidating, but like these Apache helicopter pilots, these F 16 pilots, these, I don't even know them all, like the Blackhawk, I know a Blackhawk pilot, he's great. Man, when I, every time I see him and I shake his hand, it's, don't be stupid, don't say something stupid, don't be an idiot, that's what goes through my brain, because that is so impressive.

Because you've got this machine made up of all these instruments, and now technology is unbelievable. There's a person, there's a man or a woman that is in charge of guiding that thing. And, I mean, that in and of itself is super intimidating to me, and I'm not gonna [00:19:00] fix that. Because I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna be able to go take that class.

That's the mountain I'm never really going to be able to climb. 

Tonya: That is so interesting to me because talking to those guys was a random Tuesday at my house growing up. So that is like the least intimidating thing or people for me to talk to are those pilots. And I've even been blessed with the opportunity to coach a Blue Angel pilot and work with him on personal development and speaking.

They're people too. They really are, but I totally get what you're saying. 

Shane: Oh yeah, I know. They're people. I get it. But they are people that do some crazy stuff. Navy SEALs. 

Tonya: Army Rangers. Yeah, so much respect. 

Shane: I am on a lifelong journey to be a more disciplined person. It's gonna be a forever thing for me because I'm not the most super disciplined person, which is not good for a CEO, by the way.

And they are just people, but they do some incredible things. And it's interesting that numbers and accounting. [00:20:00] See, it's the same thing because I'm a numbers guy, finance, I am married to an accountant. So that's like the same thing, like you're used to talking to pilots. I'm used to talking numbers. So it's really interesting that those are the two things that are intimidating to us.

Tonya: The other question that I was asked on that panel was what is your biggest regret? And there are very few things in my life that I truly regret because Could I have done something different? Yes. Should I have done something different? Absolutely. Am I very grateful that social media and phone cameras and all of the things when I was younger, that was not a thing.

Are there things that I would do differently? Of course. But every decision that I've made in my life has brought me to this moment. It has given me the knowledge. It has put me in this chair. It has given me. The opportunity to share all [00:21:00] of the stupid things that I've done in my life to help other people grow and be successful. So, are there really things that I truly regret? Not so much. 

Shane: I'm not a big regret guy because even though I wish I would have done different things, the things that we regret. Are things that have shaped us and people say, don't live your life with regrets or whatever. No, there's a saying in sports, leave it all on the field, no regrets, the decisions, good and bad we make shape us.

And I believe that's important. I don't really think about it that way. I agree with you that there are things that I wish I would have done differently, but they're not necessarily things that I want to go back and do differently because. I learned such a great lesson from it and now I'm a better person because of it or my children are better people because of it.

I want to go back real quick to the fighter pilot or the accountant, CPA. They have to follow directions. I was thinking while you were saying that about the regrets and it hit me. The checklist a pilot goes [00:22:00] through just to start the engine. The checks and balances of accounting, generally acceptable accounting principles, GAP, like those are rules, those are directions, those are really important, or the IRS doesn't like you very much.

There are things that those disciplines, fighter pilots or pilots and accountants are two examples here that we've said intimidate us. They don't need parts left over. If the fighter pilot has some extra parts or jet engine mechanic has a few extra parts left over like I do when I put something together, that's a problem.

That's a problem that we're going to have to deal with. You can't be out of balance as an accountant. You can't just plug the number forever. You got to balance. You got to follow the directions. That's interesting that we picked those two things, that those are the two things that are intimidating to each of us.

Because those are super critical [00:23:00] direction following occupations. 

Tonya: Taking the fighter pilot conversation to the next level, yes, those checklists are imperative. And those checklists carry over. To every single part of their life, and I am grateful for growing up in a checklist household because that's shaped a lot of who I am, and I can't imagine living life without them.

The flip side of that is, yes, they have those checklists, but they also have the personality to push the limits when they need to. And, to me, that's what makes them great, is there's a balance between the two. Yes, the checklists are there, but they also know how to push the limits. And that's what we, as independent agency owners, have the opportunity to do.

Shane: We have this system that continues to get better and better. One of the things that I was reminded on just in the last couple of days, in a LinkedIn [00:24:00] post, is From another agent was this use of checklist. We've used checklist for years. Some of our folks internally are checklist zealots. They are like, oh my gosh, we didn't do a checklist.

I'll go get a checklist done for this client. Checklist are super, super important in the insurance. Industry, especially in the agent broker space, people understanding coverage checklist as a sales tool, a checklist for the customer to be able to go. What are the important things in this contract I'm purchasing?

You think about it? We sell contracts. That's what we sell. We sell promises. And those contracts are created by attorneys, those contracts are defended by attorneys, those contracts are litigated, sued by attorneys. It's a contract. And most of us in the insurance industry are not attorneys, but we spend our days around contracts.

Following directions becomes [00:25:00] extremely critical for us to be successful. And it's also part of our own loss control. In our own Arizona missions environment. And so I was reminded of this just the other day and an agent using checklist and the new year, this is a good time to stop and look and make sure that the named insured on your policy is correct.

We blow that off, but that's a big deal. One of the first things you learn in insurance is who isn't insured. And who isn't insured is not just whoever you want. There's very specific contractual definitions about that. To geek out for a second, following directions and why it's important to follow directions.

That's not what this is. This is because we're in the contract business. We sell a contract. Most of our customers on the commercial side, we're selling a contract to fulfill a contract. If you really want to get weird for a second, that's a big deal. Most people on the commercial side are buying insurance.

Yes, to protect their business, but 80 percent of the [00:26:00] reason they're buying insurance is because they sign a contract with somebody that requires them to buy insurance. There's so much of this that goes into why We need to be following directions. 

Tonya: I'm going to leave us today with this quote from NBA coach, Phil Jackson. Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength. 

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. That's why Integra offers direct access to top rated personal and commercial carriers, ensuring your agency thrives in today's challenging markets.

And with our comprehensive resources, profit sharing and bonus opportunities, technology and peer support, all while you retain 100 percent of your book with no penalties to exit. Integra is ready to empower you and your agency to find sustained growth. Find your way to Integra. Visit IntegraPartnerNetwork.com today. That's IntegraPartnerNetwork. [00:27:00] com.