We’re Here to Run A Business with Aaron and Justin Husman

Shane and Tonya sit down with Justin and Aaron Husman of The Phoenix Insurance to discuss the mindset shift from “helping people” to strategically running a successful agency. They discuss building a business with intention, protecting your time, selecting employees and clients, and making decisions that set your agency up for real growth and profitability.

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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. Shane and I are so excited to be welcoming the two guys that we probably talk about on our podcast the most. 

And they are joining us in person, Justin and Aaron Husman, welcome to the show.  

Shane: Thank you. Thank you for having us. The OGs. The, I had no idea we were such an important topic. We don't have a lot to talk about. We scraped the bottom of the barrel and go with you guys every chance we get. Perfect.  

Tonya: Shane, I'd love for you to share the Husman Brothers story with our listeners. 

And then we will let them add the commentary as you go through that.  

Shane: Absolutely. I'll, I'll leave the unsuitable for viewing topics out and just go with the big picture,  

Tonya: fun stuff. That's the stuff that people actually want to hear.  

Shane: Yeah, probably. So [00:01:00] Aaron and Justin go back for me personally and integra to producing days at another agency. 

That's where we were 1st. They started their own agency. I got a phone call one day. Can you get a safe code? Can you get us a market? Can you help us? Can we do this? We've gone out on our own. I don't remember the market conditions. This is like building a house. There's never a perfect time to start an agency. 

You just do it. It's never a perfect time to build a house. You just build it. And of course, I always enjoyed and admired what they did and how they went about their business. And this was what? Oh, nine, 2010,  

Aaron: probably 2010. I called you from a target parking lot and to get out of the office and make the call away from prying ears. 

Shane: The irony of it is we had just started what we called our partner program after 12 years of hit and miss agency. Market access, aggregation, couple of different variations, and we just started this thing. We were calling our partner program and Aaron calls. We're about to [00:02:00] start looking for prospects. A guy coming out of farmers had called a week before and we thought he was going to come on board. 

Here's Justin and Aaron, we got two, you gotta get two before you get three. And of course that was an easy decision for me. I knew they were going to do well and it has been incredible to watch their growth, both ups and downs and ups again. And just being a part of their journey here at Integra. 

Personally, they've become just from. YouTube connoisseurs and the ability to do things differently. It speaks to just who they are and how they go about their business.  

Justin: You left out the part where the old boss called and tried to sabotage us with the other companies. And we had to tip around for a little while. 

That was the  

Shane: Bravo part that I wasn't sure if we should go into. There was some problems with the previous agency owner that. Didn't go well for him. Thank goodness that you guys were able to get out of that. We just left that off. Honesty wins is one of our core values, [00:03:00] but you don't answer questions you're not asked. 

Tonya: Personal is one of our core values. Go there.  

Aaron: We did make it personal. We had things that we wanted to do and a way that we wanted to run a business. We wanted to. Build a business that we could sleep well at night, knowing that it was taking care of something that we felt good about bringing people into. 

We felt like we were really doing good for the people that are working for us. And that's just not something we had and there's no way we were going to have that. So the only way to do it was to get out and do our own thing.  

Tonya: When Justin reached out to me about today's topic, I thought, oh, this is going to be a fantastic one. 

And I can't wait for this. It covers two of the Integra core values, serve others and earn your way. And today's topic.  

Justin: The day's topic is we aren't here to help people. We're here to run a business. That sounds really mean, but it's something that we have discovered is frankly, a problem in our industry. 

We've talked to a lot of potential agents and we asked them, why are you an insurance? And the answer is [00:04:00] because I want to help people. That's not entirely wrong. We absolutely provide an important service and can help, but we often see people who are helping people at their own expense. At the business's expense and really not helping the right people. 

Aaron will come in afterwards. We're helping people who don't really deserve it. A lot of the time.  

Aaron: They're trying to gain the system. There's a lot of people out there who just think insurance is a scam. And so they treat it as such. Yeah. We've talked to a lot of agents over the years who just buy right into it and buy into this mindset that they, someone's calling, they need a policy. 

And if I tell them, no, I'm doing bad. Or if I turn them away in some way that I'm not doing, but being an independent agent. It's a fine line. We answer to a lot of bosses because we don't actually make any products. We've got to get our products from carriers. You know, we've got to place them for clients, but we don't determine the rates and we don't determine what they're going to buy, like tell our team that we aren't really in the decision business. 

That's for [00:05:00] the underwriters to decide whether they're going to take on the business and the client to decide whether they're going to accept those terms. We are the middleman. I don't think anybody has any disillusions about that, but plenty of people that we talk to take that we want to help people to a level where they're trying to become this Superman to their clients. 

And really, we've got to focus on what's going to make the business go round. The hard part is we can't get rid of them. If we take on a bad client, they're going to be our bad client until they decide they're done with us. We talk  

Shane: to agents all the time, especially agents that are starting. from scratch. 

A lot of agents, either producers like you guys coming in, starting your own agency or exclusive agency owners deciding to leave the exclusive channel and start an independent agency. It's the question that nobody really asked themselves because they're thinking revenue. But what do I actually want my client to look like? 

What do I want my book of business to look like? What do I want 5, 8, 10 years down the road? That's the hardest question [00:06:00] agents should ask themselves. And it's the hardest question to actually execute on. Because it's just difficult when you're trying to get revenue on the books. And a lot of times you put revenue on the books that you can't get rid of. 

And you want to get rid of it.  

Justin: We did it too. I will never forget it. One of the early Integra conferences, Desmond asked, how do you not write this bad business when you got to feed your family? We said, just don't find somebody else and it'll be okay. And ultimately that's the challenge. We were trying to help people saying, don't bring that guy in. 

The guy who treats you like you're a. Burger chef is not the guy that you want in your agency. What is your standard? What is the line that you draw? So the best thing you can do as a new agent is to determine who your customer is and not waiver from it. If your customer is anybody who needs insurance, you're going to build a mess. 

Aaron: Shane, you talk about what is your agency going to look like five, 10, 15 years down the road? We've. Realize from interviewing many people [00:07:00] for positions here is that a lot of people really lack that vision of what they could even see out three, five years down the road. Their vision is very fuzzy for someone starting an agency back to Stephen cubbies, seven habits of highly effective people. 

And one of those habits is begin with the end in mind. Five years, hopefully it's not the end, but if you start thinking about what. That looks like then you can back it up and five years down the road, what is that going to look like when you took on anybody and everybody, just so that I can give you our experience of what that looks like a lot of work, a lot of tail chasing because you're not really building relationships with clients. 

You're transactional, you're trying to help people by just being a part of a transaction, even nonprofits have to bring in more money than they spend and how is that going to really help you do that when you're doing it for a 500. Policy. You're generating 50, 60 worth of revenue a year from this policy. 

When the guy is spending a lot of money and building revenue for some other agent across [00:08:00] town at the same time. Why didn't you call that guy? He called  

Justin: you for the harder thing his agent didn't want to do. Our primary niche is exotic cars and collector cars. We spent a long time trying to instruct our agents. 

I have no desire to do his weirdest, most expensive, most dangerous risk. That I got to help this guy mentality would get us a bad, not a bad policy on the books, but not everything we could. We did just as much work for one small, risky policy as we would have to put the whole package on the books and created a relationship. 

Shane: When you hire producers and bring them on, they do their own service work.  

Aaron: They start out. Learning how to do service work, if we bring somebody on who's been in an agency before, then they should have pretty good handle on that. And they should be able to breeze through the training program. But if not, it's a good opportunity to learn how to talk to clients, work with clients and see some of those really challenging clients. 

Because when there's a client who's raising hell about something, you can almost bank on it being a monoline [00:09:00] policy.  

Shane: I asked that question because I know that's out there and that happens, especially in a lot of personal lines, agencies, and there's no skin in the game for some producers outside of being held accountable by a sales manager, agency principals to actually do what they need to do. 

A lot of agencies go wrong there with not holding those producers accountable. And those agents accountable to following the standards of the agency that the risk takers, the owners who put in the sweat equity, the real dollars, who has my, one of my finance professors in college said the beanie weenies for a little while, instead of being able to have a decent meal, you guys did all that watching you as you grew up through building and owning an agency, Justin calls it harsh. 

Or whatever. And Aaron comes in with a softer tone. I get it. But if you back up and think about the context of entrepreneurship and starting an agency from zero and the [00:10:00] work risk and effort that takes, this is where I want agency owners. Are those aspiring to be agency owners to hear you loud and clear? 

You have absolutely the right to determine your standards, to decide which client you want to work with and which clients you do not want to work with. That's simple, brilliant, but so hard for salespeople to get through their brain.  

Justin: Once they go through the service side, we see that they're not all fums and they can do the work. 

They end up with me because I'm the sales manager, trainer, et cetera. And one of the first things I tell them is that you have the right to say no. Most of them are shocked by that because the other agency was produce at any cost. And that right to say no is really important to what we do. In fact, I encourage it. 

If someone is not acting the right way,  

Aaron: there's a professional way to say no. And then there's the unprofessional way we still have a reputation. We're not here to come down hard on consumers who [00:11:00] don't understand what we're trying to build in our business. So that's not what this is about. Ultimately, our thought has always been, if it's not something that we want to write, and that client is going to take a lot of energy and effort from our staff. 

If that's going to drain a staff member's morale, because they've got to deal with that client on their billing issue, then we should let them go free and find another agent. And frankly helps us, uh, keep our competition down while we build ourselves up because important to build a culture, it takes a lot of work, energy and thought that I put into it. 

We make a lot of investments into our team to make sure that it's more than just a coal mine that they go into every day and shovel coal. Cause that is what it feels like an insurance, the inbox of service requests, never stop the pipeline of quotes that need to be done. Never stops. You can shovel and feel like you did a great days where the work can come in tomorrow and it's all full again, but it could be really draining. 

Adding those extra clients, even just a couple of them a month really puts a strain on the staff [00:12:00] that you have to think about what are you trying to build? What do you want your team to really look like? One of the challenges that Justin and I have faced from the very beginning is our impatience. We want to be at the top of the mountain today. 

That's not how life works. I mean, you just got to take steps and we got to get there and we're not perfect. We took on clients that we shouldn't have in the very beginning. We did all these things and  

Justin: that's why we're here,  

Aaron: but it's because of our impatience and we thought, okay, we've got to do this one. 

It's going to get us to the top of the mountain, but it never does. No one policy is going to get you there. It's the slow and steady, consistent approach to building the business that you want to build that fits your vision.  

Justin: Being in a niche. One of our challenges is that people see our advertising for Exotica Classic and they then pigeonhole us. 

We don't do just Exotica Classic. We're advisors. We do the whole package or nothing. Even though I advertise that we're the best at this thing, we're really just good agents. That's how I meet you. And when we tell our, our new advisors, Hey, I have no [00:13:00] interest in just doing his Lamborghini. Their minds are blown because that's not how we do it. 

And we learned our very hard lesson from doing that in the beginning.  

Tonya: How do you say no?  

Justin: A couple of different ways. I don't think we're a good fit for you. The market's super tight right now. You probably stay where you're at. It's super expensive, man. We're double what you're paying now. And those are easy ways to do it. 

Our mission. As an agency is to change the way people think about insurance. If we can't do that on the front end and you can't think that it's better to have your most dangerous, craziest risk with the same people you have everything else with, then we've not done a good job and we'd rather send you away. 

When I'm  

Aaron: gathering information and they wanna do just this one thing and I ask 'em where their other business is and they tell me it's with whoever it's with, I want, I'm gonna ask, why didn't you call them about this? And I want to get them talking about what's going on with their agent. Why would you not just call that guy and talk to him about it? 

What's wrong with your agent? They can provide this when it comes to personal lines, PNC [00:14:00] insurance, nobody's doing anything magical. Every captive carrier offers the same products and can cover the same things that any of the independent brands can cover. There's nobody doing anything special out there. 

So it really comes back to that relationship. I want to know about that. Help them understand that this is risky. Proposition that we're talking about. We're talking about the riskiest thing here. And in order to do this, I'm going to have to be your insurance advisor for everything. Why would you want to call two different people about your insurance? 

Why would you want to try and remember who you need to call to get your ID card for billing? Why not just have one phone number? Would that make your life easier?  

Shane: Consumers forget that they're interviewing us too. We create this false assumption about actually what we're doing in our industry on the advertising side. 

And some of it is intentional. Some of the carriers that are doing it on a disruption basis and trying to disrupt things. Sometimes it's best to just say, no, sorry. Can't do this. Sorry. Not a good fit for it. I always love to go down this path of [00:15:00] agencies. In different geographic areas, metro, suburban, rural, small town, Main Street, in our partner network, you guys are in the Dallas Fort Worth area, the Metroplex, as we call it in Texas, you guys are in a totally different place than, say, our rural agency that we were born out of, our partner network was born out of, a town of 2, 000 people, Main Street, I can tell somebody no at 11 o'clock and then pop into the grocery store to buy milk and eggs at 5 30 and get my butt chewed out because you didn't want to do business with me. 

The context here is maybe it's obviously both are right. There's situational. Scenarios where I would probably have to go down the Aaron path a little more softer, but there's other situations where there's only so many minutes in the day and you got to know right now, this is not a customer for me. 

Pretty quick up front. It's okay to pass  

Aaron: something I picked up on shark tank. I'm here to bring [00:16:00] value to the people I work with. And I just don't think I can bring you the kind of value that you need to get out of your insurance. So I'm afraid I'm not a good fit for you. And there's probably another agent out there who is. 

That's a nice, kind, gentle way to relay that.  

Tonya: The topic you guys presented is we aren't here to help. We're here to run a business. We've covered the we're here to run a business part. But this whole idea of we aren't here to help. That feels a little bit ouch to us as independent agency owners. How do you get over the hump of wanting to help everyone place where you guys have landed? 

Justin: You have to determine really one who's worth the help. That's what the other discussion was about. Who's going to let you do your job, who's going to respect you as a professional, who's going to follow your advice. People will call us, it's not just exotic cars, ridiculous commercial risks and things like that. 

And they call us and an agent will get it. A lot of the agency things that happen during the day are straight up a grind. You're [00:17:00] talking to people, you're doing quotes, you're deciding what you're going to do. And here's this new shiny thing that either tugs at your heartstrings because I can't find anybody to do it for me, or you just want to get out of the normal grind that you're into. 

So you'll run down this rabbit hole in order to, and I'm air quoting here, help them. But really what you're doing is you're hurting yourself. If you do a good job and stick to your standards, you'll absolutely help people. If you're a good insurance agent, but really what we do is help, but not at any cost. 

And that's really what it's about. That's the hardest thing to teach new agents. I understand that we can do something for them. It's not always appropriate.  

Aaron: The topic sounds harsh because you have to make sure you get the right definition of. Help in your head a lot of our clients would say we have helped them quite a bit. 

We absolutely help so much How is it helping you if I just deal with this transaction for today? I would be helping you a lot more if you had a good insurance [00:18:00] advisor on your side I've got a client right now who's got a traveler's policy that they they have a terrible water leak underneath their house, and the first round of the claim was adjusted. 

They came back and said, all right, you get 29, 000. That's what you're getting paid. And that wasn't. Drop in the bucket for what they're going to have to spend to repair their house. I got on the phone with the adjuster, talk through the policy and was able to identify other coverages that should be considered. 

I did the work that an attorney would have done for them. I found the pockets of money within the policy and got the ball rolling so that these were. Part of the claim. We've tapped into foundation water damage coverage. We've tapped into service line coverage, and now he's up to nearly 80, 000 for this claim. 

Doesn't sound great for a loss ratio. So it's not helping our our agencies numbers at the bottom line, but that's not what I'm concerned about. I am here to help this client, and that's how we're going to fight for our clients. So am I helping a client just [00:19:00] because I me. Made sure he was able to get an ID card. 

I wrote him a policies. And he saved him a hundred bucks. Yeah. And it's not exciting enough for me to help someone save a hundred dollars on a policy. It's exciting for me to make sure that someone is going to be out there going, you know what my insurance advisor helped me, he worked hard for me when I needed him the most. 

That's a huge savings. You're not going to save 50, 000 a year on your insurance, but I say that guy have 50, 000 on what he was gonna have to spend on his house. That's the kind of help that I'm here for. Every  

Justin: agent should be here for front saving him 50 bucks thinking like a consumer and looking at premium versus protection. 

That's not help. And that's the hard thing to explain to them. I wouldn't be helping you if I did that.  

Aaron: I know you got a lot of independent agents, maybe a lot of captive agents that are listening to this podcast, and I hope that everybody's listening and realizes that if we were all in this together, if we were all on the same page that we have the power to help consumers change their mindset, we got the power to help [00:20:00] consumers start thinking Maybe an insurance carrier is not there for me a hundred percent, but my insurance advisor sure is. 

And that means that we can tap into that market share that the captives have, or maybe that the, uh, direct writers have, because we can be there to help our clients. And I would think that your family and your friends who never get to see you because you are so busy hustling to write that one policy here and there just to generate a little bit more revenue. 

Justin: Having yourself on Sunday night.  

Shane: You can't help the people that you truly need to help when you allow the wrong clients to attack your capacity. I would substitute client, the wrong producer. The wrong employee, the wrong whatever, when we allow those individuals that shouldn't be in the circle, that shouldn't be in our book of business, in our client base, when we allow them to come in and stay [00:21:00] there and the best way is to y'all's point, be a gatekeeper and not allow them to come in the first place. 

But if we allow them to stay. And just eat our time, we are preventing the opportunity to do what Aaron's talking about. We've prevented ourselves, our staff from being able to truly help, to truly serve. It's happened to us on the agent side, allowing an agent here or there that slips in, that comes in, that we take a chance on. 

It turns out that. Particular person runs our staff crazy. That takes away from supporting you guys, our top agencies, even our agents that are just starting out, that, that are going to be where you guys are in 10 years, if we allow the wrong people in. Then we're going to take capacity. It's a really crazy aha moment when it finally hits you in your business, what it is that you're supposed to [00:22:00] be doing every day and what your client is supposed to look like, and it can be different from agent to agent. 

And that's the aha for me that I constantly have to be reminded of. A mentor of mine said probably five, six years ago, your biggest challenge over the next decade. Is protecting your time. If you don't protect your time, then you're going to find yourself in a bad spot. So simple to say, but oh my gosh, so difficult to manage. 

Justin: We've had the same challenges with people that work for us too. We want to help them. And really Aaron and I, despite my crusty exterior care quite a bit about people and we see the best in everyone. And frankly, we've spent a lot of time trying to help people who just don't fit within the agency either. 

To your point, absolutely.  

Tonya: Aaron, what's the best piece of advice that someone's ever given you?  

Aaron: I don't know. I always keep coming back to this and it's silly because I used probably in third grade. Some kid was probably talking about my mom or saying bad things about me. And I [00:23:00] had this friend, Roy, and he could see I was upset about it. 

And he said, do you believe that? No, absolutely not. Because then why do you care what they say about it? It's always stuck with me. And it's the thing I can come back to. I'm sure I've gotten tons of great other advice throughout the years, but for some reason that always comes back to me because I do care about what people think, but it can be crippling at times. 

And you've got to center on yourself. Ultimately, you're the one who you're going to have to live with for your entire life. Certainly very close to family. Justin and I work together. We're together, but you got to really think about what's important. Who is important to you and whose opinion really matters, especially in this business where you can easily turn from hero to villain just at a renewal increase or at a claims situation. 

So you really got to stay centered on who you are and make sure that all your actions flow with that.  

Shane: We're going to do another podcast whenever, uh, the renewal for the 80, 000 claim comes up and see how that conversation goes.  

Justin: [00:24:00] Justin, what's the best piece of advice you can give? Be true to yourself. 

Help happens if you do a good job bending over backwards. I, I, I do care quite a bit about people. I want to do good for people, but if you give someone an inch, they'll take a mile. So don't give them an inch. And really that's what it is. Be true to. Who you are, what you do, and don't waver from that. And that's really hard to do. 

I've not always been able to do that, but that would be the advice I would give.  

Shane: I'm going to go into Justin translation mode for a moment because people don't know Justin. And I would say that if somebody called, one of our, one of our agents in our network calls Justin up. Because he said it many times at our conference in a session or whatever and says, Hey, I want to bounce something off of you. 

He's going to stop and talk to them if he can't stop at that moment, he's going to set something up. I firmly believe that what you hear about this is really about learned experiences. The level of discipline it takes to be successful as an independent agency owner is absolutely tremendous. We talk [00:25:00] about it internally here, operating the partner network. 

We reference Aaron and Justin, like stay disciplined. What works? That's probably  

Justin: the best quote.  

Shane: Aaron, stop, stop yelling at the wind. These are really good things that are great takeaways for anyone that's running an agency, that's really running a business. These are really good business owner attributes. 

And we do get caught up into what people think. And we do get caught up into trying to maybe over serve or over help people that aren't really deserving. They're not helping themselves. They're takers. They're just, they're takers that exist. There are customer leeches that just take and will drain you and create turnover for your people. 

Aaron: That's the most challenging part of this business. There's no way. Out once you've got one in your house, you cannot get it out. My wife is forever blown [00:26:00] away. My wife is a financial advisor and she's got the ability to move people out of her book. I don't have that. So when I'm complaining about some client causing us a lot of hassle and it's just not worth it, she's like, well, I just. 

Get rid of them. I'm like, I can't until they decide that they're going to go away. I cannot get them out of your house. So can you imagine that you let a guest into your house and then you could not make them leave unless they decided to leave, nobody would do that, but people will do it in their insurance agency all the time, other businesses is not quite the same, but if you're running an insurance agency and once you decide that you're going to take on that headache, there is no Advil. 

That you can take, you have no control, and there is nothing more maddening in a business than to not have control over it. A lot of business owners are going to be control freaks. So we want to control things and you just have no control over it.  

Shane: That's enlightening and nobody's thinking about it. No one is thinking about that question when they're trying to make a sale because we are [00:27:00] salespeople. 

And I know that all successful independent agency owners. Our salespeople, that's why we're successful. We started that way, but at some point we've got to make a shift. We've got to transition from just being this salesperson, hopefully sooner than later, and get into this mode of business ownership. 

Justin: Exactly. Absolutely. That's the challenge because you either got to eat or you feel like that person is going to really leave you a bad review. In our experience, bad reviews don't really happen all that often. We've really got to screw up to get that. Or if we get a bad review, it's because we didn't do business with him mad. 

Or we didn't do business with him and it turned him away and it made him mad. So those people that are out there not wanting to turn someone away, don't worry about it. There's a million people around. That'll be all right.  

Aaron: We ask him for a social as we do. When we gather information and he didn't like that because he didn't have to give it to other people. 

And we said, maybe other people don't want to do their job, but we want to do our job. So we need this in order to do our job. And he said, forget you. And [00:28:00] he hung up and left a bad review for us. Another person had called in and she wanted to just do a renter's policy with us. We wanted to do auto insurance for her and you know, she didn't really want to talk about that. 

So I said, sorry, we're not going to be a great fit for it. She put a bad review online and. I hate when I get bad reviews, but ultimately I would hate having those clients a lot worse in the grand scheme of things. I've got 290 star reviews and two bad ones. So really not the world.  

Shane: A five star review rating is too impossible. 

Anyway, they just helped you be more authentic. Two bad reviews gave you authenticity.  

Aaron: I want to touch on something you said, Shane, you talked about. Running a business here. I want to take it back to when we first started, we had worked for another agency for six years and we knew how to write insurance. 

We felt like we had done a lot to keep the agency going because our boss was barely there. We literally paid electric bills. Ran the commission reports and came up with the total [00:29:00] amounts of commission that everybody needs to be paid. So did payroll in a sense. And we thought one, we needed to get away for various reasons, but we thought we knew everything. 

And so we left, we started our business and then we got going and realized, yes, we know how to write insurance, but we actually didn't know how to run a business. Neither one of us had ever run a business before. And our dad was not an entrepreneur. He was a W2 employee throughout his life. He, we didn't have any entrepreneurial experience. 

We had to figure it all out from scratch. It's something to think about as you're starting your own agency, be real with yourself about how much. You really know about running a business. We probably did not read enough books about structuring a business, uh, in the beginning to be able to prepare ourselves. 

But those are some things to think about. You're busy when you're starting this business, trying to be an insurance agent, but you've got to remember what the mission is. Is this what you're going to be? Just you in the office, writing insurance for the rest of your life, or is it going to be a business with. 

Procedures and standards can pass [00:30:00] on or sell. It's easy to jump into starting an insurance agency just because you know how to write insurance. But if you really want to build a business, you got to start thinking about that from the very beginning.  

Tonya: What books would the two of you suggest that our listeners invest their time in? 

Aaron: First and foremost, I'd say atomic habits. If anybody's listening that has not read Atomic Habits, read it and you will realize some things that you got to change and what it takes to really build good habits. Another one that we like to read around the office and we've had a lot of people read is Extreme Ownership. 

It's written by a couple of Navy SEALs and I liked it. It was a great read. Some of our staff don't love the military aspect of it, but pretty interesting. Jocko Willink has a series of books, starting with Extreme Ownership, that had been really helpful and crystallizing. The vision for what management and what team looks like. 

For me,  

Justin: I would  

Aaron: say good to gray  

Justin: is a business book. If you have employees, I would look at the Cy Wakeman books, no ego for [00:31:00] managers and the rules based workplace. I don't remember the name of it. One of the challenges we've had with employees in general is that whole reality based rules of work. Of the workplace by Cy Wakeman. 

Yeah. To paraphrase league of their own, there's no crying in insurance. And really we've had to had that discussion many times with people that, Hey, this is a business and we have to be reasonable human beings to work.  

Tonya: Justin, what are you reading right now?  

Justin: Right now I'm reading a book called the anarchy. 

It is about the rise of the British East India company. One of the most predatory and destructive businesses in the history of the world. Fascinating. So a business that changed the entire fate of countries before that, I actually read a book about Catherine, the great. I like to read nonfiction books about leadership and business, but from a much larger scale,  

Tonya: Aaron, what about you? 

Aaron: I'm reading teams unleashed how to release the power and human potential of work teams.  

Tonya: Okay. So what are you reading?  

Shane: I'm [00:32:00] reading two books, The Obstacle is the Way, and then a book called All In by a pastor out of Washington, D. C.  

Justin: I would throw another business book in there, whether you're a solo entrepreneur or you have a bunch of people. 

Start with Why is a really good book. If people don't know why they're working with you, then you're not on the same page. And that's part of the challenge is that, how do you explain to them why you really want?  

Aaron: We were not as good at digging into these books early on when we started our agency. And that was something that Justin and I changed after a couple of years. 

We started really digging in and in the team involved in getting your team to start reading books has proven to be a bit of a challenge because there's always the answer back of, I don't like reading personally when I'm reading a paper book. I read very slow and frankly, I probably get distracted anyways. 

It takes me a while to recall all of that. And so I just encourage anybody who's not reading or thinks I'm not really, I don't love reading and [00:33:00] I don't really have time to do that. Audible books on audible books have been just a lifesaver for me. I've been able to read more books and people say, I can't listen to a book in the car cause I'll be distracted by other things, but I can tell you. 

Give it a try because reading zero books and any, then no books at all, you retain nothing. But if you listen to an audible book, you're going to retain some of that and listen to it a couple of times and you're going to retain a lot of that  

Justin: and i'll say this to the people that have their cell phone on all hours of the day And night for their clients turn it off and read something with that time instead. 

It's way better spent I promise spend the eight hours you're available on saturday trying to improve how you do things expanding your mind with Any number of things works, whether it's historical or it's business based, it's all going to help you.  

Aaron: Business books are too dry. Try books by Patrick Lencioni. 

He's got great fables that he tells and it helps to keep you engaged and really understand, really you want to know what happens next in the story. So it's less about just reading dry business material.  

Shane: [00:34:00] Sometimes I get accused of being a little bit anti education, I'm not. I am very much education, but I am more for business owners about Self education by reading, I see much more success with business owners, agency owners that read as those that say things like you're talking about, I don't have time. 

You do have time, you're just not prioritizing where you're going to spend your time. All these authors, all these books you guys are throwing out there are golden relevant for independent agency owners. Maybe not the British East India Company one,  

Justin: but  

Shane: there's so much to learn, especially if you're going to  

Justin: try to take over the world. 

Isn't that what happens when you start a business? At one point, the British East India Company, 4, 000 employees a year died in the line of work. That's the kind of loyalty I'm looking for in the agency.  

Shane: Can you imagine what their workers comp mod multiplier is on that? At that  

Justin: point, the only insurance was on the ships. Nothing else mattered. Human life was cheaper than cargo. Yeah. Just hire a new one. That's crazy.  

Tonya: Guys, I would love to give you just a moment for some shameless self promotion. 

Aaron: Justin, go for it.  

Justin: We are busy doing things. One of ours is our YouTube channel, the Husman Bros. We work with influencers for advertising within our niche. A couple of years ago, we decided that we should be influencers too. So we have a YouTube channel where we work on cars, talk about cars, do car stuff, tour garages, and that's our fun one. 

We have another YouTube channel where we try to educate consumers and show that we are experts. Ish, and that's the Phoenix insurance channel. Both of those available on YouTube, Hussman bros, H U S M A N and then Phoenix like the city. So those are the two channels you want to look for. One is for fun. 

One is for business.  

Shane: If [00:36:00] someone wanted to start a YouTube channel. Before  

Aaron: you start, come up with a plan. What is your focus going to be? Because your channel can't be about everything. But what is it going to be? What is the value that you're going to bring? Why would people tune in to your channel? What kind of value are you going to bring to them? 

And then once you have determined that, just start doing it. I went to school for radio television. I did a lot of editing. DJ on the radio, anchor on the campus news channel. I did reporting and made packages for the newscast. You want that to be perfect because your professor is going to be grading that. 

Today, where media is, does not have to be perfect. And that's the beauty of it all, is people actually prefer the authenticity of it, especially as we're starting to get into this AI age, where you can create a lot of videos that don't have. Humans in them. If you go on Twitter, you'll see any number of people touting, everybody should have a faceless YouTube channel that generates 10, [00:37:00] 000 a month. 

And that sounds great, but where's the differentiator. You can be the differentiator. What value do you have to bring? Don't try to be perfect. Just get it done and get it done consistently. It will get better and better every time that you do it.  

Justin: If you watch our original videos, they're not very good, even though our chemistry is pretty good. 

But the content was pretty bad. As we've gone on, we've gotten much better  

Shane: at this. We found the same thing with podcasting. If you go back and listen to the first dozen, maybe two dozen, you can like, Oh wow, that was not great. Now we're 250 plus episodes in and the quality is pretty good. We've even had some non edited or very low edited. 

Versions come out where we just talked. It's really crazy. What happens when you stick with something, this episode  

Justin: is going to be a dip in quality, but I seriously doubt that  

Tonya: guys. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to let you leave us with your favorite quotes.  

Justin: I'll start, it's from a television show called BoJack Horseman, and it's when, uh, BoJack starts [00:38:00] jogging and he's laying on the ground dying and a guy runs by and he says, every day it gets a little bit easier, but you got to do it every day. 

That's the hard part.  

Aaron: Mine is from Atomic Habits by James Clear. Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.  

Shane: Appreciate you guys joining us today. Very thankful for our partnership. It's been an absolute blast to watch you guys grow and learn and just get better and better about what you do.  

Announcer: Bye y'all. 

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