--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Today we have one of my favorite types of episodes, a solo episode, where I'm going to break down the seven challenges that independent insurance agents in the industry in general, seven challenges that we must conquer in 2024. These are things that are absolutely going to impact our business. They're going to impact how we operate and how we navigate them. Ultimately, overcoming these challenges and obstacles will determine our success in 2024.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Just to not bury the lead here, I do not think 2024 is going to be an easier year than 2023. While I thought in general, 2022 was an easier year than 2021 and 2020, obviously coming out of COVID, that wasn't necessarily difficult. 2023 seemed to be a step back for me, just increased challenges in the market. The hard market didn't go away. Many of the agents I'm friends with are having really detailed, nuanced conversations behind the scenes about how to properly position either their agency or other businesses they own in the space, different insurtechs they may be on advisory boards of or founders of, etc.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So many challenges in 2023 that it would be nice if my feelings were that 2024 was going to be just a straight easier year, things were going to loosen up, and we could get back to business as usual. My friends, I think the idea here is we need to realign what we see as business as usual. The days of just plugging along in the insurance industry seem to be coming to an end. I've said this before, I've seen this for almost a decade. You can't build your grandfather's agency today. You can't even build your mom or dad's agency today. You just can't. The way agencies are built, the way they operate, the things we have to prioritize, how we structure these businesses are intrinsically different from how we did business even 10 or 15 years ago.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: In my 18 years in the insurance industry, my first years were the traditional model, 100% the way you did business. For the first two or three years, there was really no shaking that. It wasn't until the 2008-2009 timeframe when the internet started to be seen less as a fad and more as a reality that the industry really started on a different trajectory. We lived through the 2016 InsurTech revolution and held our ground. Now this kind of mashup of InsurTech and independence has really become a symbiotic relationship, which is wonderful. Then obviously we had the COVID years, and now we're a few years removed from that. So what does our baseline look like?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Today I'm going to walk you through the seven challenges I see in 2024 that we need to think about and properly position our business for. I'll run through them real quick, then we'll go back and address each individual one. Before we get there, anything I reference in this video will be in the show notes, whether you're listening to the audio podcast or watching on YouTube. I highly encourage you to subscribe to the show so you get more episodes. I'm going to be doing more and more of these solo episodes where I break out specific topics and break them down for you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you want the deep dive, if you want the behind the scenes, if you want to really take your business to the next level, depending on when you're listening to this, go to masterclass.insure. That's masterclass.insure. You can either join the waiting list for my Insurance Growth Masterclass, which is going to be a mastermind deep dive into everything I know, everything my network knows, everything I've learned over the last 18 years in this business. If we've already launched, you can join at that link as well. That's masterclass.insure. There will be a link below and links to everything we talk about today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So what are the seven challenges specifically? Number one is going to be the hard market, and really a 1A is that carrier appointments aren't going to get any easier to come by. I think we overvalue carrier appointments. I'm going to dig into that a little bit. But 1 and 1A are really the hard market and ultimately our access to markets to shop and place our customers are just going to be more difficult in 2024 than they were even in 2023. I see a consolidation in appointments. Carriers are focused on looking at things like contingency payments, bonuses, and all that kind of stuff. They're just reducing that and really focusing their efforts, particularly on middle market to larger agencies or high growth agencies. I think particularly the say $2 million in revenue or below agency is going to continue to face an uphill battle, headwinds, in getting market access. This is why I think you see a big move in our industry to MGA. We'll talk a little bit about that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Number two is this is an election year. 2024 is an election year, which means things are about to get crazy. The world is going to become filled with distractions, filled with turmoil. We're seeing it in multiple wars in 2023. While it's easy to say, "I don't think about that kind of stuff" or "I don't watch the news," it's going to impact your life. I believe that to not address it early is naive. We'll come back to the elections.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Three is a remote workforce and outsourcing. Four is AI. Five is limited help coming from technology partners. I'll describe that one because obviously I love insurtech and I love technology and what it can do for us. Number six is who do we trust? And number seven is organic growth.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let's get back into the hard market. One of the biggest things I've been getting since I decided to launch Finding Peak, my insurance consulting firm, is, "Ryan, how are we supposed to grow when we don't have market access? How were you able to get north of 60 different markets for your previous agency? What did that look like? How did you address them?" I get this question a lot. I'm going to do a whole video on this particular topic, so make sure you're subscribed to the podcast or YouTube. That's going to be coming out in January, and we're going to be doing deep dives into that in the Insurance Growth Masterclass.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When it comes to getting markets, my viewpoint has changed on this many different times. You can go very broad and take every appointment you can possibly get, or you can focus in on a few appointments and become very, very good at them. I did have one extremely viral video on LinkedIn. I'll try to find it and have it linked in the show notes below. I think it was 2023, maybe late 2022, but I'm pretty sure it was 2023, where I said, "What if we all just became Hartford captive agents?" The idea there was their backend, their portal was so robust, so easy to use, so easy to train my team on that despite the fact that only having one market is never necessarily a good idea and it's just not good risk management for your agency, focusing in on the carriers that make your job easy is something we don't often think about. How much time does it take to train our people on a particular carrier system?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Carriers will come to you and talk about their appetite, the niche markets they want to go after, the products they have, their pricing, et cetera. All that is great. But when the rubber really meets the road, if their system is tough to deal with, tough to train your people on, it takes up too much time, your people are going to avoid that market. You're going to spend an inordinate amount of time pushing them to go back to that market. The friction in the pace of business is going to struggle. So I think thinking about our carrier appointments from the standpoint of picking carriers that make your job easy is key.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you don't have the carriers you want today, it may make sense to join a network. That just may be the answer. I think there are a lot of incredible networks out there. SIA, my previous employer, being one of them. I know a lot of people have mixed feelings on networks. Some people love them, some people don't. But having lived in that world for a while, if you are a good fit for a network, they're incredible places and there are all different varieties. Insurance Soup has a tremendous program they're building out. If you're in that market, if that's where you want to go, there's obviously SIA as I stated before. I actually have a couple podcast interviews coming up with people involved in the network space just to give you guys a broader understanding of what they are, how you make that determination as to whether to join one, and how to maximize your participation in a network or aggregator.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The other option is to look at MGAs and build your book using MGAs. There's a little bit of workflow, but there are some new MGAs out there that are making this flow very easy. A lot of them tend to be niched, so you may have to have a few of them, but a broad spectrum of quality MGAs and wholesalers is probably going to be your best answer until you can really dial in and focus on the carrier appointments that you want. So figure out who you're going to work best with, make sure they're a market that is easy to work with. When I say easy, I literally mean getting the information into their system and getting information out. The harder that process is, if they don't do download, et cetera, you're going to struggle with your people to actually get in there. You probably feel that today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It may seem weird to say, "I don't want to do business with you, Carrier A, not because I don't think you're great people or have great pricing, but quite literally it just takes too much time to use your system." That is something I think we have to work into today's mindset.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So number one is overcoming this hard market. We're going to talk about organic growth at the end. The only way to beat the hard market, in my opinion, is organic growth. There's going to be plenty of people talking about M&A and doing M&A, and M&A is very important. But for most of you listening and watching this, organic growth is the key to this hard market. We have to beat it. We can't give in. We can't throw our hands up in the air. There are ways to beat the hard market through organic growth. We'll talk a little bit about that at the end. Ultimately, the Insurance Growth Masterclass program is going to be where I teach you guys exactly how to do that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right, that's number one. Challenge number two, the elections. Let's put this in a broad spectrum. Social upheaval, social discourse, turmoil, international stuff. There's going to be tons of election nonsense. Regardless of what team you're on or who you're voting for or where you like to position yourself, one, I do not believe that you should stick your head in the sand. If you're one of those people like, "I don't have time to think about the elections," understand you're part of the problem. You're part of the problem that we face today. There are too many good people who are smart and thoughtful who are not engaged in the conversation of what's happening in the political arena. It's how we get to places like this where we are ultimately presented with two options that no one is happy with, and we tend to fight each other for the lowest common denominator solution in our political system. That's a shame.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is not about getting involved in politics. I just do not think the answer to what's coming in 2024 with the election cycle is to stick your head in the sand. We have to be very careful about the distractions that come with allowing your mind to open up to these types of things. We have all the society stuff going on, all the wokeism and social justice and all this kind of stuff. How do we handle that in the workplace? Some of that seems to be coming out in the wash, but we have to make time to allow our brains to consider these topics so we have perspective and understanding, but not allow it to overwhelm us to the point where it takes over our lives and we're not doing our work, which is focused on growing our business, taking care of our family, taking care of our employees, our team, our teammates, et cetera.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Very tough one, but we have to be aware elections are coming. It's going to cause turmoil in your life. It's going to take up brain cycles. So cordon off time, time block. Maybe once a week for 20 minutes, you engage in the news just to know what's going on. Or you take 20 minutes on a Tuesday morning and 20 minutes on a Friday morning or a Saturday morning, just to engage your brain in those topics so you're aware of what's happening. If there are changes that you need to make, if there are things you need to do, you don't want to get blindsided by a customer who has an opinion on something that you've never even considered and don't know how to answer or how to relate to. I don't think it's okay in 2024 to be like, "Well, I just don't do politics." That to me is a cop-out. If we're talking straight insurance terms, that's not proper risk management for your life or your business. So be aware it's coming, but don't allow it to take over your life. It's a tightrope. We can talk more about this. I'd love your thoughts for how you do that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, if you're listening on the YouTube channel or via podcast, head over to the YouTube channel. I'd love for you to comment. YouTube is a great place to comment on these episodes. I'd love your thoughts on how you're handling hard markets, elections, or any of these other topics. Share them in the comments below. We can get a conversation going and really use this video and conversations we have on future videos as placeholders for important conversations in our industry.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So, number one, hard market. Number two, elections. Number three, remote workforce. This one's been coming for a long time, but VAs, big part of the conversation, seem to have had a huge push. Now we seem to be maturing into that conversation a little bit. There are a lot of people who still are hesitant to engage VAs. I completely understand that. When we think about remote, let's take virtual assistants outside of the United States out of the conversation for just a second. Let's put a pin in them. I want to come back to a remote workforce.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I cannot tell you how many people, dozens, 50 plus people over the last six months have sent me messages either on LinkedIn or Instagram asking about how we hired at my previous agency because we were able to get people from all over the country, high quality people. We have to start expanding our workforce outside of our local community. It is great to have people who live in your local community, especially if your local community is the primary source of business. We want people integrated in. However, if you limit your recruiting to just individuals who live within a 20 mile or 50 mile radius of your agency location, you are so drastically reducing the talent pool that you can pull from.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's no reason why, say, if you're in Tennessee, you can't have an account manager who lives in Florida, who's licensed in Tennessee, that just works remotely and can handle all kinds of incredible work. If people do still walk in, yeah, maybe you need to have a receptionist, but that doesn't mean if you have four account managers, all four of them have to be sitting in that building. You can outsource to another state. Or if you're going to go all the way to a VA in another country, there are all kinds of different services that can help you with that. Agency VA, et cetera, all the competitors. If you Google them, you'll find them. Pick one that works for you that you like working with.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Remote teams are going to allow you to maximize your ability to spend dollars and get human optimized results back. There's just not enough people in our space in these local communities to pull high quality talent. If you can, God bless you. If you're in a major metropolitan area, can you probably find people? Yes. But for most agencies out there, especially my rural agencies, my Northern agencies, it is very, very difficult. I say Northern because a lot of the Northeastern agencies tend to be grouped in, many of them in small communities. There's a tighter concentration of agencies in the Northeast. It tends to be hard to pull from talent, or the talent just bounces from agency to agency.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you're looking to get fresh blood in, I highly recommend looking for single moms. Look for moms with young children in particular. This is a market that many traditional agencies toss these women out or do not give them good work environments or really make their lives very difficult. They're incredible professionals, licensed, wonderful. If you can deal with a little flexibility in your schedule, you can pick up absolute rock stars who will change the course of your industry. It happened at Rogue Risk 100%. I cannot tell you enough how many women are sitting on the sidelines because they don't fit the traditional model of an independent insurance industry.
--:-- [Interruption for sponsor message]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode. As you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes, etc. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. They all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoy creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Find them and bring them in even though they may not live in your community. They can provide tremendous value to your agency and help your clients. I think we have to deal with the remote workforce. Obviously there's tons of stuff to talk about with VAs, but to maximize the human capital that we have in our agencies, we have to start thinking about our business as remote first.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's number three. Number four, artificial intelligence. Guys, this isn't hype. Artificial intelligence is not hype. We're going to do a lot on artificial intelligence this year. Not like foo-foo-y, "everything's going to end." I want to teach you guys. I have some friends in the industry who are going to help me do this. We're going to be sharing. Some of them are just thought leaders. Some of them own agencies. Some of them have actual tools that we can use. We're going to be talking a lot about how we can leverage artificial intelligence because this is a game changer. This is an internet level 1999 to 2004 level shift in how we work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you are head in the sand on artificial intelligence, you're going to get mowed down. I don't mean to be apocalyptic. I'm not saying this year, if you don't engage in artificial intelligence, it's all over. I'm not being so pessimistic. I'm saying this is a keystone shift, a monumental point in our culture, in our world, not just in our industry. If you're one of the agencies that are starting to think about how these tools, even if they're just saving some time for your marketing team or saving some time for your agents by using this tool or that tool, and you're just starting to cut some extra minutes out by leveraging the scalability of artificial intelligence and the automation that comes with it, then you're going to start to see small benefits, incremental changes.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm not saying you scoop out and your Salesforce put in a chatbot and everything changes for the better. No, we're not there yet. We're not even close to there. But I can tell you, there are a lot of people working on solutions that are producer enablement tools that when they're ready, when they're fully ready for the market, are going to be game changers. It's not going to be this year necessarily. They're not mature enough. But over the next three, five, certainly 10 years, the way we think about artificial intelligence will be the way we think about Wi-Fi and the internet today. It's just part of how we operate.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I highly encourage you to start to adopt this this year. Make finding one or two AI tools and implementing them and really starting to capture value out of them a priority. I promise it's going to open your mind to what's out there. Again, lots of education needs to happen, lots of learning, lots of conversations, lots of exposure to different tools that are there, different technologies. But we cannot stick our head in the sand with AI. This is not a fad. This isn't something that's just going to come in and go. This is something that we won't even realize is there one day. That's the scary part.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't want to go too deep on this topic right now, but there will come a day in our lives when AI is so ubiquitous, so integrated into everything we use that we're not even going to realize it's there. If that's when you wake up to AI, you could be in trouble. You're going to have competitors that have created such a gap between you and them that it'll be hard to catch up. That's what I worry about.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's the cool thing about AI. Right now, it's very democratized. You do not have to be a huge mega business, mega agency top 100 to adopt, implement, and reap value from AI. So now's the time to engage. Again, big topic, especially if you're an agency owner, you have 10,000 things on your brain. But guys, if we can find small places to start to try these tools out, and I'm going to have tons of information over the next year coming out as we really dive into this and Finding Peak really catches its legs as the premier insurance consulting firm around organic growth in our industry, that's what I'm positioning Finding Peak as. So guys, lots to come on AI. Just do not stick your head in the sand.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right, so we've gone through four major challenges: the hard market, elections and distractions associated with such, remote workforce and really thinking remote first, artificial intelligence. Number five, I listed as a limited in-industry tech help. What I mean by that is not to knock the InsurTech founders and CEOs and entrepreneurs out there. I love you guys. I've invested in a dozen or so different tools and track them and keep up with those founders and want to help. I believe in those tools and what they can do for our industry. I'm a huge believer in InsurTech. I don't see any tool coming that just changes the game, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's no easy button tech solution coming. No tool you implement that you press a button and suddenly AI, remote workforce, VPNs, downloads, all of it just gets fixed. That's not happening. So if you're waiting for the perfect tech solution, you're never going to find it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We have to be smart about our tech solutions and take them seriously. Positioning our agency with tech, both in-industry and out-of-industry, is so important. There are tremendous conferences. I did a keynote at Jason Cass's IndyTech event back in August on this topic. I'm going to be speaking at IndyTech again. It's a tremendous event. I highly encourage you to consider attending. There are tons of conferences around technology. It can become overwhelming.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I promise you, listeners of this show, to be a purveyor of solid tech solutions. I will be very candid and upfront about the solutions I've invested in and believe in, and the ones I'm just interested in and want to learn more about. I hope that transparency gives you the ability to trust recommendations, ideas, and the people I put in front of you. But there is no easy button coming. We have to keep our eyes and ears open, because piecing together the right tech solution, committing to it, and working through what inevitably won't be perfect for your workflow is a big part of making 2024 a success.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of my major regrets with Rogue Risk was how often we switched technology solutions. With a young agency, it makes sense to flail a little between solutions as you try to find the best fit. But we changed too often. I tried to chase too many rabbits. While we were still very successful, that's one of the major things I would change about launching Rogue Risk. I kept chasing the rabbit because I had ideas of things I wanted to happen and found there isn't a perfect tool.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: At face value, that makes complete sense. Many of you are thinking, "Yeah, Ryan, that's kind of your personality." Maybe you believe that. I think it is my personality. I'm always pushing, always trying to find better things. I want you to know that this was a failing of mine. It's something I'm working on as a human, as a leader, as a business professional, and will work on with my clients at Finding Peak. We need to pick technology solutions, commit to them, and find ways to work and optimize inside the tools you already have. Changing is a major problem. When you do change, change with a purpose. Know why you're changing and understand the benefits you're trying to get out of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm not saying just stick with where you are. I'm saying be purposeful in the technology you choose. When you commit to a piece of tech, commit to it. Rapid changing in systems destroys company culture, destroys productivity, and wastes so many brain cycles. So be careful through that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right. That's number five. Number six: who to trust. Depending on when you're listening to this, I am having this conversation with Billy Williams, one of my great friends in the industry and a mentor. He wrote an entire post on LinkedIn about how there are a lot of people who haven't seen any success in our industry and are now trying to teach people how to do things they may have learned. His thought was that we have to be careful of hucksters, of people who don't necessarily understand what they're talking about but want to sell you something that may or may not work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I agree with Billy on a lot of what he said. My response to him, and the reason I'm sharing this on the show, is that Billy and I are going to have a full conversation on this topic. I cannot wait for it. If you're listening to this in the future, go back and find the Billy episode. If not, it's coming. My point was, yes, we have to be careful of hucksters and charlatans who would willingly sell us something with limited to no value. At the same time, we do not want to stifle young voices.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There was a time 15 years ago when I'd only been in the business two and a half years, and I was starting to share things I was learning in digital marketing. That allowed me to become one of the major voices in this industry around digital, content, social, and building brand. This broader idea of inbound marketing and what it could do for an agency. Since then, a tremendous number of agencies have built off my concepts and shared their own voices. If we stifle young voices or voices new to the industry, we risk losing insights that are new, nuanced, and novel. We risk losing those ideas and voices.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Billy came back, and we're having a tremendous conversation on LinkedIn. Tons of people have chimed in. I encourage you to go to the show notes of this episode and visit that link. Share your ideas on that post. It's a balance. We have to balance and be mindful of who we're listening to and who we trust.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I did a whole thing on Instagram about this. I put a lot of content on Instagram. If we're not connected there, I encourage you to do that. It tends to be more focused on personal growth and growth as a leader. Leadership, business, life. It's not specific to the insurance industry. I put this whole piece together on Instagram around incentives dictating action. When you're trying to figure out who to trust, who to follow, who to bring into your headspace, look at their incentives. How are they incentivized? If their incentives don't align with yours, or if you can't understand what their incentives are, you may want to think deeper about what they're saying and where the advice is coming from.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I have to be completely candid. Billy's post made me really think about myself. I have a very specific situation. I had an agency. I'm not with that agency anymore. Now I'm a consultant. Yes, I am selling coursework, a mastermind, and the Insurance Growth Masterclass. I'd like to believe after 18 years, being an agent for eight, founding and running an agency for almost four, being part of Agency Nation, Trustchoice.com, Bold Penguin, and all the speaking and consulting I've done, that I do have something to sell and I can be trustworthy. But I also understand people may question it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Multiple people have reached out to me and said, "Why not just start another agency? If you were so successful, why not just start another agency?" Being candid, the answer is I got burnt out running a retail agency every day. Not the insurance stuff, not the growth stuff, not the marketing stuff. I got burnt out on downloads not working, the agency management system not talking to this system, this carrier having a problem with that, not being able to get a hold of an underwriter. All the nonsense. So much of our business is absolute nonsense that isn't about running and growing the agency. That's what makes being an agency principal so difficult. Managing that time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm kind of burnt out on that for a little while. I'm not saying I would never run a retail agency again. But I want to see if what I know, what I've learned over these 18 years, if I can teach others how to apply it to their businesses and see similar growth. I've shown I can do it in an agency I'm working every day. I now want to see if I can teach these concepts to you guys and get you similar growth. Help you build that foundation that I didn't even realize was a hard market until I started reading articles. We were just cranking.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would love to teach others. I want to teach others. Obviously I want to get paid for that. But it made me question myself. I think that's a good thing. I'm excited to share that with you. Who we trust is going to be a big one. You put the wrong people between your ears and you can take actions detrimental to your business. We have to be careful about that, especially with more and more people wanting to sell products and courses. I don't want mine to get lost in the noise. I want it to add value. That's probably where my own desire comes from.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We're not without our own insecurities. I want this to be the most valuable course you've ever taken. I want you to feel confident that you have someone in myself and the team I'm building at Finding Peak who can help you get where you want to be. But I also know I'm surrounded by tons of others who look and may sound similar but don't actually know what they're doing. They just want to take your money and give you limited value. How do you separate yourself? That's something I have to overcome in 2024 as I try to help you guys.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Last but not least, number seven: organic growth. Our businesses may be improving. I know a lot of agencies that had banner years in 2023 that didn't grow organically because premiums went up. To me, that's playing Russian roulette. If you're not constantly focused on organic growth, you're playing Russian roulette with your business. A carrier could come in and wipe out contingencies. We've seen carriers dropping commission rates, going out of business, entire niches getting obliterated because of changes in laws or the pandemic. If we're not constantly, unendingly, neurotically focused on organic growth, we're putting our business in jeopardy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Being an absolute monster on organic growth should be the number one goal in 2024 from my perspective. That doesn't mean you can't focus on M&A, retention, or renegotiating contracts with carriers. If you can get that done, good luck. But if you're growing, if you're putting new business on the books and have a systematized process for consistent numbers, for maximizing the output of your production team, then you don't have to worry about all that other nonsense. The other stuff just comes out in the wash. Carriers come to you. They want to offer benefits and bonuses because you're growing. You don't have to worry about losing one niche or another because you're growing. You don't have to worry about new technology or an employee going crazy for a day because you have systems and processes that create foundational, consistent, organic growth.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You set that up in 2024 and the other six things become fun things you think about on the weekends. Organic growth in 2024. Don't rest on your contingencies. Don't rest on premiums increasing. Don't rest on referrals. Referrals are just one source of organic growth. We have to find ways to build consistent, foundational inbound traffic to our business and processes that allow us to grow and put numbers on the books. That's the game.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: M&A is great. If you can buy agencies, there are opportunities in the market. Looks like rates might be coming down. I've heard some rumors. I'm not a Fed chairman nor do I pretend to be one. But from the economic people I read, it looks like we may get a few drops in rates. If you have loans on your business and that's holding you up, maybe there's some relief. There may be relief in the M&A market in terms of liquidity possibly coming back. But who the hell knows.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: For my money, even if I'm interested in selling or buying this year, I'm laser focused on organic growth. Grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. What's funny is if you do that, everything else seems to become easy. That has been my experience throughout my career. If you can figure out organic growth, everything else becomes easier.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So those are the seven: hard market, elections and distractions, building a remote-first workforce, understanding AI, coming to the realization that there's no easy button InsurTech tool that's going to change the game, being very careful with who we trust, and ultimately, organic growth. Organic growth is the reason I founded Finding Peak. It's why I called the mastermind the Insurance Growth Masterclass. Organic growth is the linchpin to not just survival, but thriving in the independent insurance space. You can be great at M&A. That's awesome. But organic growth leads to M&A opportunities. Organic growth, organic growth, organic growth.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My friends, I love you for watching this show. I know we're at about 40 minutes, which is probably long for a solo episode, but I hope you found value in this. If you have comments or questions, leave them in the comments on YouTube or share this on social. You can always reach out to me if you have questions about what's coming with the Insurance Growth Masterclass.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you're looking for a speaker this year, I'm re-engaging in the speaking tour. I have a couple of really interesting keynotes, breakouts, and workshops packaged up and ready to roll for 2024. Dates are starting to fill up already, which is very exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of you in person again. It's been a couple of years of light speaking and I want to take this message out to the world.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you need consulting help, reach out: Ryan at FindingPeak.com. Let's talk. I love you guys for listening to this show. Let's absolutely crush 2024. I'm out of here. Peace. Thank you. I'll see you next time.
--:-- [Promotional segment begins]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Sound impossible? It's not. With the One Call Close System, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we used to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle tested, the One Call Close System eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit MasterOfTheClose.com. That's MasterOfTheClose.com. Do it today.
