Craig Pretzinger is back with another insightful episode! This time he discusses the concept of achieving agency freedom and emphasizes the need for agency owners to build a successful and self-sustaining agency. He delves into the changing insurance landscape, explaining why the old ways of agency freedom no longer work. Craig also talks about the importance of focusing on growth and investment, not just immediate income, to create long-term equity in the agency, and introduces the “five pillars” that help create a sustainable and successful agency!
Tune in to unlock the secrets of achieving freedom and building a predictable and sustainable agency with the Insurance Dudes!
The Insurance Dudes are on a mission to find the best insurance agentsaround the country to find out how they are creating some of the top agencies. But they do not stop there, they also bring professionals from other industries for insights that can help agents take their agencies to the next level.
The Insurance Dudes focus on your agency’s four pillars: Hiring, Training, Marketing and Motivation! We have to keep the sword sharp if we want our agencies to thrive.
Insurance Dudes are leaders in their home, at their office and in their community. This podcast will keep you on track with like minded high performing agents while keeping entertained!
About Jason and Craig:
Both agents themselves, they both have scaled to around $10 million in premium. After searching for years for a system to create predictability in their agencies, they developed the Telefunnel after their interviews with so many agents and business leaders.
Taking several years, tons of trial and error, and hundreds of thousands of dollars on lead spend, they’ve optimized their agencies and teams to write tons of premium, consistently, and nearly on autopilot!
Well, hello there listeners or viewers, however, you're consuming this playbook. This is Craig Pretzinger. I have been out for about a month. Well, actually, it was a little bit, one day over a month, I think was out a month wasn't too worried about being out a month. And it was, it was some time that needed to be taken. To put it into perspective, my wife left her job. And she actually ended up getting an offer while we were on vacation, but we ended up going to Portugal. And while we were there, and I'm going to highly recommend anybody listening to this, when you get some free time, after you implement some of the stuff we're going to talk about. Go to Portugal is incredible. But moving past that, while I was there I was I did a lot of thinking about the why and the how behind, being able to go away for a month to have a little bit over 10 million in premium, a team and to leave, and really, for the most part, not be involved very much at all. And I'm sure that a lot of folks would would love to be at that point. If you are, then you know how awesome it is to be free from the agency. If you're not there yet. You certainly can. But it's a lot different than it used to be, we're going to look at some of these things. So let's dive in to becoming free from your agency. Freedom, agency freedom in 2023. Let's go see insurance dudes. All right, we are back. And welcome to another playbook. So yeah, amazing trip, amazing trip with my wife, we left the kids at home, made them watch the dog. And that was that was pretty good came back the house is still standing. So so that is a good, that's a big win. Now, we have to figure out how to empty the whole house because we're going to have the floors done while we take the family and go out of go to town next week. So that's pretty exciting. But before that, we're gonna lay down a few different episodes that have to do with agency freedom. So the we're going to talk about a framework that I put together while I was on vacation that I think is really important to that, to put yourself in the position where you have that agency freedom. Now, what did agency freedom used to mean? It used to mean and for many, many years, right to the to the folks who were independence, or were captive and with a with a single carrier. You know, when agents were depending on the carrier, some agents were in a in a booth in a popular box store that is no longer around, they might be around, but I don't think they are. Now then when they're gone. But it was a lot different. What they would do is build up their book with with their neighbor with the be in the neighborhood agent, right? You build up your book to two or 3 million. And this is the herd, right? Most of the folks who build their book up, get to a certain point, take their foot off the gas and kind of ease into retirement, maybe sell it maybe give it to their kids, but certainly not put in the kind of effort that they had on the front end. And while that's great, it isn't what gets you that agency freedom anymore. You can't just sit back idle and, and watch the premium decline without having some kind of new business coming in. Otherwise, the book is gonna die, and you're just not gonna get it. Carriers are cutting back on on the comp tied to your renewals. So you can't play that game anymore. Right? It's a different world, the carriers especially the captive carriers have had to adjust because the landscape has become extremely competitive, right? It's it's been a long time coming. I think the captive carriers thought that they could that they could wait out the discount, the discount 800 numbers, but it hasn't worked out that way. And and now they have to compete head to head. So in competing head to head, they had to change some things up, right, they have to push growth and fuel growth. So that exists. We all know that if we invest in the front end, we're gonna get paid. We're gonna increase that lifetime value of that client and we we've talked about lifetime value a ton. So I think that you're familiar with that. If you haven't listened to us for long. I encourage you to go back. Listen to episodes that we talked about lifetime value. I am I'm going to touch on it a little bit as we get into the framework, but that's gonna be over the course of several episodes. So let's number one, let's let's, let's just focus on the point that a, we cannot do this the same way that we used to, we have to grow, we have to grow, because we're not growing, we're dying, and we just may as well get out of it, we have to focus on investing. For that growth, that's the only way to make it happen. You can't just hope that people are going to come in, and you're gonna get enough business that way, with retention going down for many, many people, because quite frankly, the the, the audience or the the people that are buying insurance, these days are really focused on the deal. Of course, we're going to move them off of that and get them into the point of understanding that they need the right coverages. But when they're looking there, their first thing is they were trying to find the deal, right, and you hear it from your producers, they're going to tell you, Oh, yeah, they were focused on price. Of course, that's how everybody comes to us. Right. That's what they've been taught. So they've been taught by the 800 numbers by by Flo by the get go suggesting that they need to be trained to save money, right? And do it quick in 15 minutes. So really important that we that we do that, right? There's been there's a pendulum swinging. From that. It was the agent who, who who held the keys to the kingdom for a long time. The Internet came along. It swung. And now it's it's overcorrecting the other way. Agents aren't gonna go away, at least not anytime soon. People want to talk to people, not everybody, but a lot of people do. Millennials ask a lot of questions. I know that there's a lot of listeners who are millennials. So you can appreciate that the folks who are millennials, sure, they're going to enter your funnel via the internet, but they're ultimately going to want to ask them questions, and they're going to want to talk to you human to get the business done. So really important to focus on that. And the other. The other thing that's happened in the in this world is this consolidation of smaller agencies. So smaller agents are getting out, the ones who thought they could sit back and collect premium, off into as they go off into the sunset, are now having to sell, and they're selling at a lower melt multiple than the agencies were going for before. So they're they're really taking a hit. Right. And it's sad. And it's unfortunate, but there is a way out. And it is it is to invest in growth. Now let's look at that. Let's unpackage that for a second. On top, right, because it's switched. Because this thing has has changed, we now have to focus on not just the income, right? For a very long time, agents would focus on income, I need to maximize my income, I need to maximize my revenue. And that's great, because that's your immediate money, right? That's your cash flow. That's what's going to pay for the reinvestment into your program that is creates the offense that gets you the quotes, that then gets to your people that then they close and you write more business. But that doesn't create the but just focusing on income alone isn't enough. And that's the old model, right? Creating the relationships and having people said, waiting for people to call in not being as proactive and aggressive to bring in the new business not necessarily investing in leads or investing in something that's going to going to drive more quotes the agency. That's just focusing on that was the old way was focused on the income. How much can I make this month? We hear it all the time, people will will sign up with tele dudes come in and aren't always ready to wait. Right? Ready. They they're looking at, okay, we got this many quotes this month, how much did we make off of those quotes? That's the income only model. And that doesn't work. We have to focus on the equity that we build in our book, right? We get equity from all the leads that we buy, and all the people that we've talked to all the emails that we have all the people that we can follow up with. That is equity in, in our basically our cost of goods sold. And then our equity in the book is the is the the overall premium that we get from growing, right. So not only does our income increase when we're when we're focused on growing the book, our income increases but also our exit increases. That's our equity on the exit, right. Everybody should be building a business with the intent of creating equity, so that someday you can sell it or some Day, you could bring somebody else in, run it. Lots of different opportunities there, when we have crease, increase the value of our book. And like I said before, because the multiples may be going down, we have to increase that premium, right? We can, we can change it, we can still get the same, the same payoff at the end when we sell our agency, but we're gonna have to have more premium. So how do we do that? Right, we have to get more quotes. But it's not just that. If it was, if it was that easy, then then all you need to do is pay for a bunch of leads and, and get the right system in place and have the great offense. But that is only a short term fix. Again, it's just income. We don't want to be narrow minded and only focus on the one thing, we need to be looking at income and equity. So how do we do that? We need to focus on the five Ps. Let me take a sip. So what are the five Ps, I'm gonna get into the five Ps, but I'm not gonna get into into them right now. What I'm going to do is stop here, because we've been going a little bit, I want you to unpack the things I've talked about. Really think about that. And let's circle back. On the next episode, I'm going to, I'm going to introduce the five P's. And we're going to talk about why they're so important to supporting both income and equity for your agency and creating this long term, predictable, sustainable, offensive strategy and all around successful agency. So thank you for listening. If you have any questions, please shoot us a message on Facebook or or wherever else. And of course, we do appreciate if you give us a review. That's how we get more people to listen. And ultimately, we want to help other agents grow. And they can do it by listening. And the more reviews that folks put, the more people will listen. So if this has been helpful for you, we appreciate it. Throw comments on the YouTubes what have you thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.