SPEAKER_03

Buckle up, it's the Internal Dude Podcast. And that's yeah, explosions. Explosions. We still haven't got to the to the level of where we can pay for those fake explosions and smoke machines and all that good stuff. Not yet, but we'll get there.

SPEAKER_01

I do have a steam machine at my office because there's a steam room.

SPEAKER_03

I just want to be lowered in by like lowered in by like cords and stuff.

SPEAKER_01

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03

Is that too much?

SPEAKER_01

Like in Spinal Tap with the Stonehenge that comes down?

SPEAKER_00

Disco ball fog machine.

SPEAKER_01

Patrick, have you have you seen Spine? This is Spinal Tap?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think this one goes up to 11.

SPEAKER_01

Right. And I love the Stone Hinge, the little tiny coming down to see.

SPEAKER_03

So And this episode's gonna go up to 11. Craig, who do we have here today with us?

SPEAKER_01

Well, my man, we have Patrick Albrecht, and he is with Associated Insurance Administrators. We're gonna be talking a little bit about commercial today. Oh, I love it. Which we don't touch on a lot, but I'm very excited. Exactly. Not enough because it's so fascinating. It's so fascinating that in our world we just avoid it. But I think that there's a lot of opportunity for a lot of agents. And if you've talked with, if you've listened to the Carruthers, David Carruthers app episode or you know to his podcast, what is uh Power Producers Podcast, which is phenomenal. Yes. You need to get yourself on that one, Patrick. But we got you first.

SPEAKER_03

So 100%.

SPEAKER_01

He is a podcast version, and this is his first podcast. He doesn't look nervous as he did at the beginning, so this is great. And he's not nervous, I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_03

Craig, what about a round of speed break?

SPEAKER_01

Speed breakers, speed breakers, speed breakers, speed speed breakers, speed breakers. Can you set the clock, please? We have 11 seconds on the clock, and here we go. Try to get through all of it in 11 seconds. Have you ever had a mullet?

SPEAKER_00

No.

SPEAKER_01

First crush.

SPEAKER_03

Don't say mom.

SPEAKER_00

No.

SPEAKER_01

That's what you would say, Mr.

SPEAKER_00

Jason. Yeah, you've already tripped me up on that. That's all right.

SPEAKER_01

We'll pass. Most embarrassing thing your mom. Oh. E.T. with a wig on? She was cute. What about when E.T. had the wig on?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Okay. Most embarrassing thing your mom ever caught you doing.

SPEAKER_03

I wish everyone.

SPEAKER_01

This is one of these things where I think if you actually answer it, then you're lying. Yeah, right. How about the fastest speed ever driven?

SPEAKER_00

Fastest speed ever driven, 145.

SPEAKER_01

Ooh, that is a respectable speed. Favorite cereal?

SPEAKER_00

Uh Fruit Loops.

SPEAKER_01

Fruit Loops, good one. How many kids? Three. Have you made cry? Please wait for the question.

SPEAKER_00

At least three. I know it'll have to be zero. Sure.

SPEAKER_01

Count chocula or count Dracula?

SPEAKER_00

Chocula for sure.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Fastest mile?

SPEAKER_00

725.

SPEAKER_01

That's pretty good. Respectable. Favorite flavor?

SPEAKER_00

Chocolate.

SPEAKER_01

I love that question. And nobody ever says favorite flavor, what? Favorite flavor. Dogs or cats? Dogs. You're lucky. The first time that somebody says cats, we're just going to end the interview. But somebody did that. One person said cats. Wasn't a dudette. Nope. What? Tacos or burritos. Taco. Yep, correct. Favorite video game. I don't know how this one got in there, but I love it. Galaga.

SPEAKER_03

I loved it. That's why that question's in there. Yeah. Is because that answer right there.

SPEAKER_01

You know when the when you you'd let them steal your ship and they take it up to the top, and then you get to have the double whammy? That was the best. Yes. Trump or Biden? Trump. Oh wow. This goes out. I love it. That might as Speed Rakers, and you just came over eleven. Just under 11 seconds.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, it's not 11 seconds.

SPEAKER_03

But you I love Galaga. I can like that sound is like imprinted in my brain when they start dropping the stuff.

SPEAKER_01

I used to play it on the sit-down one at the ice cream in town. The sit-down.

SPEAKER_03

It's always in the yeah, like wherever you had to wait for something, going out to play dinner or something like that. It was right there and it was fun to play. You never tried to beat it because it got crazy. There's no chance you're ever going to beat that or Pac-Man. Could you beat it? I'd get pretty far in Ms.

SPEAKER_01

Pac-Man. Regular Pac-Man was played. You stop Mr. J.

SPEAKER_03

I'm feeling sassy. Let's jump in. Let's die. You are sassy. Patrick. So the last question, and I forgot to ask you this, but what was the first concert you ever went to? And take us all the way back to the beginning, far back as you can ever remember.

SPEAKER_00

First concert, still college. Oh wow. Back in the day.

SPEAKER_01

Wow.

SPEAKER_00

So Birmingham.

SPEAKER_01

Filling it. I'm feeling it. I can feel it calling in the air today. Was it were you at the one where it was the wasn't it that he sang that song was to some murderer and then they went and got him or something? I don't know. Story about that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, there's all kinds of uh stories behind that. Yeah, well, take us back. Very memorable. And I was 18, I think 18. Yeah, 18. In 1990? Uh went with a couple friends, and there were a couple older women next to us who were probably 30. I think we're and uh it was a lot of people.

SPEAKER_03

You got wasted, didn't you?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Nice. That is fantastic. Yeah, we're about the same age because I was 18 and I think it was 1891. So yeah.

SPEAKER_03

Well, I'm already filling it, so let's go back to Phil Collins and what got you from filthy Phil all the way into today rocking in the insurance business for over 20 years.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Fill it up with a bunch of information.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, so uh one of my favorite movies growing up is Top Gun. Yes, we had to do uh uh went to the Air Force Academy. Oh didn't get to fly coming out of there, a lot of different reasons, long story. Anyway, we need to flip it.

SPEAKER_01

Because you drank at the Phil Collins concert. Do I got in trouble from drinking at the Phil Collins concert?

SPEAKER_00

That's it. But uh was an engineer in the Air Force for five years, got out, got my MBA while I was in the Air Force, and uh wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I came out, but my dad was in the insurance business, so I said, well, let's get truck. And 21 years later, here I am.

SPEAKER_01

Well, take us through that. So you gotta fill in a little bit of the details.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I didn't want to waste your time.

SPEAKER_01

Well, that's what we're here for. We're getting to know each other.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, let's see. Started out working for my dad, did that for about six years, and then being the entrepreneur he is, sold the business and to work for the company that he sold it to out of Atlanta, which was a fairly large-sized wholesaler management general agency and did a lot of work on the marketing and sales side for them. About the time they were going to get me to move to their home office and take over their marketing department, I uh got the opportunity to come work here at AIA, and that was about seven years ago. Came into AIA as a business development uh marketing, sales, just kind of working that side of the business. They were looking to expand into other lines besides WorksCon, which is uh kind of the bread and butter of what we do here. And so I came in and helped them with that. We acquired a small access and surplus lines wholesale operation down the road and then uh grew it and sold it. And uh now we're uh gone through a recent reorganization, refocus on our work comp program, looking for opportunities to grow that, and they also wanted to change up the leadership in the company, and the president role had always been with one of the owners who's not here in the day-to-day operations, so they moved the president role into the company, and I took it took that position about four months ago.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, love it. Well, welcome, Mr. President.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, yes. I want to know when you first started, what was the marketing and sales department? What did that look like at that point?

SPEAKER_00

Here or when I first started in the insurance?

SPEAKER_03

When you first started in the insurance business, and I I want to know that whole evolution.

SPEAKER_00

So for us, and I've always worked in the wholesale business, so I've been in that uh our customers are the retail insurance agents, uh, we represent multiple insurance company markets, and uh and our marketing is geared around getting insurance agents to want to do business with us versus the competitors that are out there for mostly commercial lines. We've done some personal lines over the years, but marketing was at that time was really door to door. I mean, we were on we had multiple marketing representatives, and I spent a lot of time doing that myself when I first came into the business, is going out and uh getting in front of our customers and trying to sell our uh sell what we did at the at the wholesale operation there. So uh a lot of knocking on doors, and back then it was a lot of cold calls, so it wasn't uh like we have it today where everything was laid out, well organized, and we figure out where we're gonna go, what we're gonna say before we even walk in a door back then was go to a small town, and if there were free insurance agents, you were knocking on doors and looking at your list and asking to speak to that guy. And one of my favorite, I mean, not a great story, but one of my favorite stories is walking into this insurance agent. I pulled my list out and I said, Can I speak to so-and-so principal? Passed away last year. So one of those interesting calls where you walk in and have to kind of backtrack and think on your feet as quickly as you can while you're uh working through that. You still get them to say, Oh, well, do business with us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I would have said, So do you have a Ouija board?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Exactly. So it was a lot of handwritten notes and coming back and distributing those out to the uh underwriters and letting everyone know where the opportunities were and trying to market from that standpoint. But it was it was very relationship-based, and there's no you know, that's still a big part of where we are today. You know, that's one thing that hasn't changed is the the relationship aspects of marketing and getting to know your customer and understanding what their needs are, and uh face-to-face makes such a big difference and we've said over the last year with everything that's been going on with COVID.

SPEAKER_01

So did I don't know if you may have done this, but back in the olden days, before there were CRMs and lead management systems and all this stuff, we used to so I learned, I mean, I did sales at a car dealership for a while, and that was just more walk-on traffic. But I went to Merrill Lynch, and when I was there, it was a ton of prospecting. And one of the there was pre-CRM. I mean, there were computers, but the internet was pretty new and there wasn't social media or anything. But what we did was we had folders, so you had like paper folders, and they were numbered one through 31 and for the day of the month. And you would just, if you called somebody, you had your slip, because they'd hand you leads, like they'd take the printout from the dot matrix, you know, and they'd cut all these leads and they'd give them to you. You'd get whatever a day, and and you call them, and whatever the result was, okay, I'll follow up in two weeks, then you'd put it in the folder that was the 14th, if it's the first, and that was our CRM. And I think I already fell asleep. I know. I know Jason knows nothing of those days.

SPEAKER_00

So yeah, art was a bath, and you pick out the territory that you're gonna go visit, that territory, and then from there.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. No, I actually was around during those days. Um when I was in my early 20s, I got a job at AAA. You know triple A insurance, Craig? I've heard of them, yes. Yeah, that's in Celp. Anyways, got a job there. They trained me, they actually paid really well. I couldn't pass the well, I was probably the wrong candidate for the job first off, and I was you know, more focused on my music career, let's say. And I didn't pass the test, but I was working there and selling under their umbrella, and they did, they had the folders. I didn't do well. Oh yeah, no, I was fired. Did you use the folders? No, I didn't do anything, I just showed up, hung over, and right just the party days.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's those those were the days, uh, insurance association meetings, the conventions, the conferences. It was one big party.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Um of course a lot of networking got done there too.

SPEAKER_01

So yeah. Well, and that's the thing with events now. It's there's a good amount of value that you can grab, but there's so much value in talking to the other agents and and learning best strategies and that kind of thing. Yeah. So hopefully that'll happen again someday.

SPEAKER_00

Well, and we're starting to get back into that. We um have been able to visit a few agents in this area in the last you know, month to two months. Starting to see that open back up. But we learned a lot over the last year, and we learned a lot about how we can get more value out of that space meeting by doing some pre you know pre-work on the uh lead generation side of it and qualifying those leads and then going through that process of making those uh introductions and conversations and determining where that value is, where that opportunity is, and then engaging with the uh with the face-to-face. Nowadays that's so expensive. Back when we were talking about the early days, it wasn't that expensive to send somebody out and do those uh knocking on doors and calling on people, and you might visit with somebody and not get anything out of it, but no big deal. But now it costs us two, three hundred dollars just to send have somebody walk through the door of an insurance agency. And so to try to manage that, we've spent a lot more time the last four or five years really trying to develop out our uh our systems and platforms to give us that uh give us that advantage on the front end.

SPEAKER_01

Well, everything is so analytically driven now, and I think it was just so challenging to really do that back in the old days, you know.

SPEAKER_00

Data's gene now, so yeah, you can figure out how to get it and do something with it. Uh I mean we have so much data now, it's getting to the point where how do we filter through it as efficiently, find the you know, find the real opportunities.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. You can get in that analysis paralysis if you take all of it and try to use it because it's like because it's so awesome, right? Ah, I have all this stuff.

SPEAKER_00

But spend all day looking at data versus picking up the phone and calling the customer and building that relationship.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we do a ton of calls. We have a telemarketing company off to the side, and and so we just there's so much data that you can look at, but we'd like to focus okay, how many dials, how many contacts, and just keep it simple. And really, it's the same kind of pipeline that you'd would have done back then. Yeah, just easier to track it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

So AIA is the wholesaler, right? Right. And I'm not as familiar with wholesalers in our business, only because from the retail side, we're we are captive, so not really anybody comes and talks to us. I know when I was at Merrill Lynch, the wholesalers from the mutual funds and all that would come in constantly. And I'd love I'd love meeting with them because they would always come with a great idea. That was their way in the day. Hey, you have a minute? I have a great idea about prospecting. So is it similar in you guys are connecting with agents where you come up with some some great ideas to get your foot in the door?

SPEAKER_02

Hey Jason. Yes, Mr. Craig. That was another awesome episode, wasn't it? Well, if people want to get a little bit more action and learn how to do uh like 100,000 premium of even the worst internet lead, where could they go?

SPEAKER_04

They can go to live.teledude.com. Ooh, that sounds exciting. Are we in a video? Yes. It's a weekly call that we're doing right now that will it's live and it will show you the process. The entire process.

SPEAKER_02

I love it. Let's do it.

SPEAKER_04

Let's do it. Sign up right now live.teledude.com.

SPEAKER_02

Live.teledude.com. That's live.teledude.

SPEAKER_04

Hey great. There's a new community that we are starting that I cannot wait to tell everybody about. It is our live texting community where you and I are going to answer people's questions and give them free content. Right. We have a talk to them. Yeah. Which is awesome, but they have to offer 520, 214, 2219. 520, 214, 2219. It's gonna be awesome. It's gonna be our new community where we're gonna get back to everybody that we can. Um calculator. I mean everything. I can't remember it.

SPEAKER_02

I'm gonna make it right now.