Agency Owner Ego Check | Insurance Agency Playbook

Welcome to the Agency Playbook, In this episode, we focus on the critical topic of ego and its role as the primary obstacle hindering agents from effectively implementing the five Ps.

Ego, fueled by a "my way or the highway" mentality, significantly hampers growth and performance in agencies. It operates as a protective mechanism, keeping us in our comfort zones, fearful of failure and change, thus impeding progress. Another challenge is avoiding responsibility, particularly prevalent among long-time agents. Staying in our comfort zones and resisting change prevents us from optimizing agency performance. By taking responsibility and delegating tasks, we can free up time for vital activities.

In summary, Embracing failure, responsible delegation, and eliminating the fear of both success and failure are key components of agency success. Stay tuned for insights!

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!

LEARN MORE BY Registering for TUESDAY’s LIVE CALL With The Insurance Dudes!

GET YOUR FREE INTERNET LEAD CHECKLIST TODAY! 👇
https://www.theidudes.com/implants1608704377984#submit-form

For more information and access to valuable resources, visit the Insurance Dudes!
https://www.theidudes.com/implants1608704377984

Like what you heard? Check out our other episodes

The Insurance Dudes Podcast
The #1 Misconception of Growing Your Business And Why Most Don’t
Are You Itching That Niche
No Amount of Success Can Compensate For Failure At Home

Transcript

Craig Pretzinger: 0:04

Hello, and welcome to another agency playbook. Last time, we talked about the five P's, I introduced the five P's, it's going to be the framework that you install in your agency to support the high powered offense that you need to create income and equity with your agency, the five P's. And I said, we're going to start with the first P, which is purpose. But I was being a little bit quick by saying that we're gonna start with the first P, because we're not. Today we're going to talk about ego, we're going to talk about ego and why it is the limiting factor from agents, installing the five P's and making it happen. It's what got in the way with me is what gets in the way with a lot of folks because it could be that it's my way, or the highway mentality that can really, really hamper growth and performance. So let's go and do it. All right, welcome back to the insurance dudes. I'm Craig Pretzinger. This is another agency playbook. We're going to talk about ego. And in this case, the ego gets in the way of installing the five P's. What are the things that I found myself saying? Or that I've heard other agents say, that have prevented them from successfully installing the five P's? What are the things that prevent them from making that? That foundation that your agency needs in order to then support the the high powered offense that every agent needs in order to create increased income and establish a path to equity so that eventually, you can exit? So what is the number one thing? Well, the ego, right, the ego is the eye. It's the self, it's our minds, way of protecting us, we, and I'm going to do that with the air quotes. It protects us, right? It actually, I'd argue, hampers growth, keeps us comfortable, keeps us playing in the safe zone, so that we actually won't ever advance. Einstein actually, if you've heard of Einstein, he said, he actually came up with an equation that I think is pretty cool. When it when with regards to ego, he says ego equals one over knowledge, right? So it's the inverse of knowledge. So the greater the ego, the less than knowledge, the more than knowledge, the less the ego. So pretty, pretty interesting, right? So you may, it makes me think of the term the armchair quarterback or backseat driver, right? The person who is doesn't have all the information or isn't doing the activity can often be the one who's going to give the most insight and the most input. And again, it's a protection mechanism. It's, it's, Hey, I need to make myself look good. Because I don't quite necessarily know all the stuff. And so I want to not look stupid, so I'm going to try to and what happens is actually it's it can be more damaging, right? Another thing is that that ego is, it's protecting you, right? It's the fear. If we experience fear, it's, it's the ego coming in and trying to protect us from what can potentially be painful, right? If we go out there, and we put ourselves out, it can be painful, the same way when we started doing the podcast. I mean, there were a million things that were going through our minds when we were doing this and still are right, I've been away for a month coming back, putting down episodes, recording myself, start getting my head start thinking, Oh, is anybody actually listening? Is this actually helpful? Am I good at this, you know, all of the things that come in, and it's important to, to focus on on your own why and what you're trying to accomplish. So that it, it can squash that ego and get you to advance. So let's look at a few of the things that that will do. So what about fear of failure? Fear of failure, look at stupid, right? We hate to fail. It's it's sort of hammered into us from the time that we're little that failure is bad. And successes is great. But everybody's probably heard the saying the path to success is littered with the bodies of all of the failures. So it's something like that. I may have goofed that up, but that's okay. It's okay to fail, because now I'm going to look it up and get it right. But There you go example right there. If I, if I was, if this was an ego driven thing that I would go back and tell our editor to take that part out, I'm not going to, because it's okay, I can throw up a fail, I'll get, I'll work through it. So fear of failure, if I was worried if I was so worried that I would fail when I'm doing the podcast, or when I bought 100 leads a day, or when I bought two, if I was so afraid of failing, then that would prevent me from doing the action that is actually going to lead to the results, my outcome and doing the podcast is to help other agents. Because if I help other agents, they're going to be successful, they're gonna go help other agents world is going to become a better place. And that's great, right? That's what I, I ultimately want to do is give back so that other people can be successful, and not necessarily go through all the pain that we went through, there's still gonna be pain, right, there's still gonna be ego, no matter what I say, folks are going to maybe take some of it and run, but they're going to try to do a little bit of their own thing. And that's fine, I did the same thing. But the best way to get to results is duplicate what others are doing that is working. So that can eliminate some of that fear of failure if we actually do duplicate, right? We don't have to invent it ourselves. But let's look at what what's something that you could say, around the the this fear of failure concept, one of the things I say is what if I invest in this thing, if I invest in training my team, this time, invest money, and they still can't handle the responsibilities that that we put in place or they're not able to, to execute and get results after I spend this time training them, it would be a disaster, right? I wasted all my time doing this when I could have been doing that, that FOMO can't let that drive decisions cannot make fear based decisions. Because we're never going to get anywhere, we're going to be stuck in this place of comfort in this place of I don't want to move past that, and will never be successful. So gotta throw that off to the side, it's really important in order to, to, to, to move past these fears is to be able to take a step back and really observe become the observer, right, your ego isn't going to observe your true self is going to observe. So if you can, if you can separate from the automation, this autopilot that you're that you do from the things you say, and actually try to look at it, almost like you're remote control on yourself. And, and observe the thoughts that are coming in, observe the, the way that we're handling these these opportunities as they come up. It can really change how you how you perceive the thing, and then how you execute. Because had I said, for example, when I started building out the telephone, if I had said you know this is too hard, I don't even understand what cost per sale means I don't understand these things. I don't understand a dialer, I don't understand how to hire telemarketers do the right way, I didn't understand that I had to have those, those dials on all of the different components could very easily have said, Ah, you know what, it's too complicated. I don't think I'll be successful doing this, and eject and never would have had the 4 million that added to the agency overall premium that now created a much higher value of equity in this agency, right? It's creating a situation where now I have more freedom in that I could I can continue to invest using the systems that we have in place. Or I could sell it right, I'm creating more opportunity for myself and my family. And everybody that I know around me. All right. So that's one thing. How about avoidance of responsibility? This is gonna come a lot with potentially somebody who's been in the business a long time. But I guess it could happen with somebody who's new also, right, avoidance of responsibility. We've been doing it this way for years. If we start changing thing now and it goes wrong, I'll get blamed for it right? Again, I'm going to look bad, or if we start changing it, if we change things now, and we don't get results. And it gets worse than that would be even more detrimental. Well, if we don't change things when they're not when they're not fully optimized, or they're not getting us the results that we need to max everything to increase our income to increase the equity in our agency. Well, what are we doing? Right? So it's easy to stay in that comfort zone and it's easy to avoid the responsibility of taking on those additional things. It's much easier to stay busy, right? A lot of folks will say well, I still work my butt off. I'm still at the agency 12 hours a day, I'm still doing all these things. Well, if we're if if we're If we're grading ourselves on the amount of, quote unquote work that we do, I don't know that we're actually helping our agency that we're creating better results. If we grade ourselves on doing the right number of activities that are going to lead to the results, then we're doing better, right, we're getting warmer, we're getting getting more towards avoiding this ego area and working towards the growth. All right, what's another one? The fear, the fear, procrastination? You know what? I'm going to put it off? I can't. I cannot tell you the number of agents over the years, when we started doing coaching, than when we started the telephone call. And all of the different things that we've that we've first tested and optimized in our own agencies that we then have had other agents ask us if they can use? Well, sure. It would have been very easy, or I'm sorry, what what we've heard over and over and over again, many times is oh, well, I'm not ready for that yet. It's a big commitment. I'm going to do that when I have more time. I've said it, you probably said it. Everybody said it right. I'm going to do that when I have more time. And when is that going to be? Ask yourself, when is there actually going to be more time available? Never. Right, there's never more time. In fact, there's only less time. Every day that goes by there's less time, every day that we don't create automation that we don't create systems in place and processes to to free up chunks of time so that we can then focus on the right activities, is hampering our performance. But it's an easy out to justify it by saying you know what, I just am too busy right now, I can't do that. I'm too busy to focus on the five P's, I'll do that later, when I have more time. Well, the five P's is what actually creates the organization that then facilitates the freedom. So we're never gonna get to freedom. If we don't create the process. If we don't put the five P's in place that then leverage that. What else lack of confidence, lack of confidence, maybe itself, lack of confidence in the team. I'd like to delegate more stuff. We have we have some we have a fantastic member in our, in our elite group. And she she came to us, or we told her, You know what you need to take you got to take a day off. You got to you gotta Why don't you take Friday's off? Just do it and see what happens. And the objection, of course, was the delegation, right? Or lack of confidence in the team, or maybe in her own ability to let go. But we pushed we pushed we pushed. And I think she was real grateful that she started to take Friday's off. I think she's now the last elite meeting I asked. And she said that she well, it's not quite the way that she she wanted. And that's the way that it works, right, we're going to drift back to doing it the old way, until we really fortify those habits and make ourselves do it. There's always a reason why we could go in, there's always stuff that can be done. There is never a time when there isn't a million things on the plate, we just have to focus on the right number of those million things. And again, it's going back to putting the right system overall system in place. And we do that by put it using the five P's right let's let's not reinvent the wheel, let's use the things that have proven in organizational theory to work. So, lack of confidence what something is, I'd love to delegate more tasks, but I'm not sure they can handle it. No, maybe they can't handle it. Maybe they can't. But the only way that they ever will be able to handle it is by having them try, right. They may fail. That's okay. We're not building airplanes. We're not doing brain surgery here. Nobody's gonna die. Let's let them do it. Let's give them the confidence by us having the confidence in them. What about fear of success? This one is nuts. Now the human mind is a very, very interesting thing, isn't it? Fear of success is a big thing that prevents us from moving forward. I remember prior to buying the first building, I was renting. And I thought ah if I bought a building, that'd be awesome because I could get somebody I could get a tenant. I can use an SBA loan, I can do all these things that are gonna really put myself in a great position. But then I started thinking Ah, but then I'm gonna have to be a landlord then I'm gonna have to do this. It's like yes, these are challenges, aren't they? But these Good challenges. When I bought the second building, the same set of stuff went through my mind, I can't believe I can hardly do X, Y, and Z, and have this building, what if I buy another building? How am I going to do that? So we did buy another building, it was uncomfortable, but then all of the things that were uncomfortable about that, that were new, aren't even things that I think about anymore. Now I just have a building for each agency. And we're able to, actually, instead of just paying rent throwing it away, we're creating equity in that little side business, right, which is the business of being a landlord. And that then is creating another opportunity. So the fear of success could have prevented me from buying the building or the second building, right? The the fear of that success is an easy way out. What about if we grow too quick, right? Oh, I have actually had somebody say this, to me, if our agency grows too quickly, I'm not sure that I can handle the pressure, I'm gonna have to hire more staff, I'm gonna have to invest in new technology, it could all get out of control. This was actually said to me. Now, let's think about that. Let's remember, has there ever been a time when something doesn't come up? When there isn't an issue? When everything is just great? Maybe there was and when there was what happened very shortly thereafter, something came up, right? There was no way for it just to run for everything just to run smoothly, and for no issues or challenges ever to come up. So why would we make a good challenge, something that prevents us from doing that thing, we need to be mindful and observant of ourselves and the things that we say so that we can diagnose if we're making ego based decisions. So these are the kinds of things they're going to prevent us from from being sick from successfully putting these things into place. So that is the ego. That is what could prevent you from from utilizing these five P's. So before the next episode, I would love it if you could sit and think about this. And and if you ever listen to him to Tim Ferriss, he talks a lot about this. What what does he do on a on a typical day, a lot of the time he spins on a regular work day is spent thinking, Warren Buffett says I spent a lot of time thinking this is real important. Not doing thinking. Remember what Einstein said I mentioned it right at the beginning. The more than knowledge, the lesser the ego, the lesser that knowledge, the more the ego. We want to trust that we can make the right decisions, we can do it by observing our ego and seeing where that ego falls into place and how it's maneuvering us. And we can put a stop to it. We want to break those patterns. And we want to we want to start getting bold, because the only way that we're going to grow the agency to maximize income and maximize equity is to break those patterns. I will see you next episode. And this time, I promise you we are going to dive into the first P which is purpose. I look forward to it. Don't forget to give us a review. Don't forget to Subscribe on YouTube. Don't forget to subscribe on the on one of the podcast platforms. And don't forget that you're awesome. And you are an insurance do to do that. And we appreciate you. Thank you so much