In this episode of "The Insurance Dudes" playbook, Craig delves into the significance of principles for your insurance agency. Principles, also known as core values, serve as guiding lights that must be strictly adhered to for your agency to thrive.
Craig emphasizes the importance of living these principles and making decisions based on them, rather than solely focusing on individuals. He shares personal experiences of big corporations where core values were displayed but not followed, stressing the need for authenticity and alignment with principles.
The core values Craig believes in are: 1. Be Kind: Treating clients and everyone with kindness and respect creates a comfortable and positive environment.
2. Be Honest and Ethical: Agents at the agency strictly adhere to honesty and ethical conduct during sales calls and interactions with clients.
3. Be Helpful: Agents aim to provide assistance and support to clients and colleagues, promoting a teamwork culture.
4. Be Resourceful: Critical thinking and self-reliance are encouraged, allowing agents to learn from mistakes and become more successful.
5. Be Real: Authenticity is valued, and agents are encouraged to connect with clients personally, instilling trust and passion.
Don't miss out on this engaging and informative discussion on how principles can drive your insurance agency toward success!
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!
Hello, and welcome to another playbook with insurance dudes. And you've got one insurance dude named Craig Pretzinger. That's ready to dive into the principles for your agency. What the heck are principles? And why do we need them does even matter? This is crazy. You can't quantify that stuff. I know. But it's really, really, really important. Because you already know that purpose was so important, though. Now, let's look at principles. That's your core values for that before, right. Righty. Okay, well, welcome back. This is Craig. And I know that during the jingle, you are leaving a review. But if you weren't, it's time to do it. So you can just hit pause and go down to the scroll down and click the little five stars and leave a little thing. And we'd really appreciate that. And then what, when you finish that, then go over to YouTube, and just click subscribe, just in case. You don't have it on YouTube yet. So we really appreciate that. But let's talk about principles. Right? Let's talk about let's talk about principles. Oh, I almost want to say we're talking about practice, talking about practice. So no, we're not we're talking about principles, we're talking about principles. So what are principles? Well, it's the second P, that's the first thing nailed that. And it's a really, really critical piece of the overall framework. So if, if the purpose is the why, then the principles are the how that support the why. Hope that makes sense. So it's the core values. So these are going to be the core values that guide the agency's behavior, and the agency's decision making, right, these are the things they're going to help us make sure that all of the other components of the the other three P's, your people, your processes, and your and your performance, are all interwoven. Utilizing your core values. So again, this is one of those exercises, where you're gonna have to sit down and really come up with these things that are the guiding lights that are non negotiables, that must be adhered to, for your agency to be be real. Now I I've worked a couple jobs in my lifetime, here, where, where it was at a big corporation, and they had the values and they had the they had the core values, and they had the thing and they they went through all of that they even had them up all over the campus. And the interesting thing was they weren't followed, I noticed that as people are more fearful of of leaving their box, the less likely those core values were to be actually followed. So we want to, we don't want that, right, we don't want us to be like a big corporation that has a bunch of stuff but doesn't do it. We want to actually walk, talk the talk and then walk the walk. So the talk is putting down those core values, the walk is enforcing those core values and making decisions to guide the behavior of your agency. Based on those core values, we don't break the core values, their non negotiables. So let's look at let's look through the lens of the core values that that we created here in the Pretzinger agency that you can use for yourself or, you know, sit down and come up with some some core values. And you want these core values to support your overall purpose. Right. Very, very important. So what we did was a while back, we sat down and had a meeting one of our daily meetings, we have meetings every day, I know that we we hammer that home, if you're not having daily meetings, you got to go back if you're new, new to the insurance dudes, go back, find some episodes on meetings, you'll hear us talking about it we talk about every week in our elite dude call. So so really critical that we that, that we leverage that. So what is the first core value that that we came up with as a team when we were putting all these things together? Well, the first thing is be kind. So this is Be kind and it's everywhere. It isn't just be kind on the phone and it's be kind to your to to the folks that you're working with. It's be kind to everyone around you. You know, these things can can also overlap and affect your personal life to being kind creates that ripple Fact. And what we want to do is create a place that's comfortable. And people like to be, right people want to come to a place where everyone is guide, where every bite where their peers, treat them kindly, and where there's a mutual respect for everybody not some thing where everybody's just beating each other up or not, not treating each other nicely. Or with clientele, sometimes clientele could be our, our customers can be a little grouchy, the rates went up, we still need to be kind, we need to come from a place of kindness, and a place of compassion and wanting to help. So that's, that's our first one is being kind, really, really important here. And it makes it gives everybody the warm fuzzies be honest, being honest, is really important. We also have be ethical, kind of the same thing. But we wanted to reinforce it, because it's so important. In our sales calls, we do not lie, they do not make things up. They, they they adhere to the script. And the script doesn't deviate too far from that outline that they use when they're talking to people. But they want to come from a place of honesty, and a place of kindness when they're delivering the script when they're talking to them. Next thing is to be helpful, we want to be helpful, right? We want to we want to come from a place of we're here to help in the same way that Jason I created the podcast because we wanted to be helpful to agents, we want our teams, and to be helpful to our clients, we want to be helpful to our teams, everybody should be helpful to each other. It also is can be looked at from every angle here and think of it this way, it's also helpful to not interrupt people and and ask them every time that somebody needs something. Hmm, right. So being helpful doesn't necessarily mean every time somebody doesn't understand how to do something that you jump on it, and you're helpful in that way, it can also be helpful to them, if you allow them to try to figure things out. So don't get lost in helpful as being an appeaser or the people pleaser. That isn't helpful. Being helpful is is enabling somebody to be more successful and, and be more understanding. So somebody may need help in understanding how certain policy works or understanding that certain policy jacket. Well, some of that stuff doesn't need to be told from a agency owner point of view, or doesn't need to be explained or taught by appear. These things can be found, right on your age or on your carrier's intranet, or from the Google, right. So the next, the next principle or core value that we have is Be resourceful. We want people to get think critically and are resourceful, right, that don't have to have their handheld constantly, and are willing to learn and aren't afraid to screw up by by learning themselves, and then taking on and trying to do it. And then learning from the mistake if there is a mistake, remember, not building airplanes are not doing brain surgery, nobody's gonna die. So it's okay for people to make small mistakes as long as they learn from them really important. So we can be helpful to somebody by not necessarily helping them every time they're there. They want to use us as a crutch. Because we're actually helping them to be resourceful. So, again, see how I walked through those things in order to make sure that the decision to help or not, was based off of the core values. And then I had to be ethical, but let's tie that in with be honest. And then of course, be real. It's so important to be real. A lot of folks come into this business. And as soon as they get on the phone and start talking to to a prospect or a client, they get all they get all in their professional tone, and I'm going to help you and I'm going to talk like this, which is totally uncharacteristic to how they normally talk. And people want. They want reality. They want to talk to somebody who's authentic. And it's it's so obvious when somebody isn't being true to their to themselves and talking from they're speaking from their heart. We want to speak from our heart, we want to connect with our prospects. We want to have them like us and want to do business with us and understand that all of the other things being kind, being honest, being helpful, being resourceful are are the the core values that we have in our agencies. We want them to be passionate about that with the with the prospects and the clients and they're going to see that right. We want them to see our Our agents, we want them to see who they are, we want them to be real with the clients. And that's such an important and refreshing piece to bring to the table, when we're interacting with our, with our prospects. And a, this is important to from the agent standpoint, right? From our standpoint, as the owner, we want to be real. A lot of agents seem to and and I'm guilty of this as well, a lot of agents, we tend to differentiate ourselves and put ourselves up on this pedestal where we're the leader. But in doing so we can alienate ourselves from the group, we want to be the leader, and we want to have the authority. And it's important to have that authority, it's important to be the authority to be the figurehead, and to help our team. But at the same time, it's also really important to be real, and not be some false leader. And what do I mean by that? I mean, be authentic and be true to who you really are. Because then you're the real you and you're delivering your real values and your real purpose. And that is, that instills a lot more trust and passion in your team to follow you. They're going to follow somebody who's real, versus somebody who is saying all the things that, that everyone is saying, just to be saying those things, it's really important to differentiate that. And again, going back to that ego, and looking at what are we saying, Am I saying those things did I come up with? And this is what you may ask yourself, as you're creating those core values? Are you being authentic? When you're creating them? Are you being real? Is this the real you coming through? Because if it's not, it may be time to take a look at at who, who we really are as an agent, if it isn't something that's going to resonate with the team, and help to create a really strong team. And, and resonate with the clients and create a magnetic agency that attracts people really important, really important. So then living those principles, right? Once we've had those principles in place, we're going to live those principles. So we're going to make decisions based on that I said earlier, I think a few episodes ago, when I was introducing the concepts that we make our decisions based on on the principles instead of on the people, right, we're not going to make our decisions and say, Oh, well, he's a good dude, or he's not or whatever, though, it's not about the person. It's about the principles and the core values and the purpose. If somebody if some if the way that somebody is operating if their modus operandi is such that it doesn't line up with our core values, that we need to reject them. And we're rejecting them, not because of them, but because our core values don't necessarily align with the way this person operates. And we're going to try to flush all that out in the interview, when we're talking to people, when we're before we bring them on, we want to make sure that we're asking questions and putting them in situational in situations that that tests that. And we'll get more we'll get more entrenched in that when we get to the people. The people episode. So let's see. In the same way that we talked about how purpose in the last episode was a fundamental differentiator for our agency, and it was the it was the first big cornerstone of the foundation that we put down. The core values were equally as important. Once we had that, that wide defined that we had to have the What's that, that that helped to support that. And that's how we came up with our core values. And we always go back to them, we always look to whether or not the things that we're doing today are supporting and in alignment with those core values. So that's where I'm going to, I'm going to leave it at that. And I hope this was super, super valuable for you. If it was smash that subscribe button because we need you around. We would love to keep helping with more important and valuable content, but we need you to be listening for that to happen. And we encourage you to share this with anybody else you know, share it on Facebook, why not? Why not? Why not? Go ahead and share it. So we will see on the next episode, where we get into the third P low third P Thank you for listening. Talk soon.