--:-- Ryan Hanley: Give yourself grace. I did not. I was very hard on myself. I had very dark moments. I worked very, very long hours. I was not the best spouse, not the best father during that time. Not that I was bad, but I wasn't present. That's probably a better way to put it. I was not present enough in my family life because I was putting so much pressure on myself and giving myself, I was so self-critical instead of being self-reflective.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. What's up, guys? And welcome back to another episode of the show. Whether watching on YouTube, here, or listening to the audio-only podcast, I love you for being here, and this episode is going to be kind of a breakdown of launching my last agency, which I recently exited from, Rogue Risk, talking about things that I would have done differently from the very start.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So looking back four years, thinking about, I'm not upset about what happened or whatever, things happened the way they did, and I did the best I could, I always took the next best action, right? Which is what we all do. So this isn't in judgment of the decisions I made, et cetera. There were all kinds of extenuating circumstances. As with every agency, we have personal lives, we have marketplace, the economy. There's all different factors that come into place, relationships, et cetera.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And just thinking back, I wrote down a list of five items that just thinking through how I could have grown the agency faster. So this was really the context of what I wanted to approach today was what would I do differently in the context of rapid growth? If I was starting an agency today, thinking back to what I did launching Rogue Risk, what would I do differently today to grow that agency faster?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I wanted to put those ideas in front of you because whether you are actually a startup agency or you have been in business for 20 years, I think that these concepts, depending on whether you're launching a new product line, you're trying to take on a new market, et cetera, I think these concepts can be applied regardless if you're a startup or not. But I know that there are many captive agents who are thinking about going independent, sales producers or sales professionals inside of large call centers are always thinking about going independent.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There are producers inside of independent agencies that are either thinking about buying their book out and starting fresh or just starting, you know, hanging their own shingle and launching. And whether you're thinking local or digital, et cetera, I don't know that any of these matter necessarily to the context in which you have an agency or are thinking about starting an agency today. And I think all of them are ubiquitous. I think they're timeless. I think that these are ideas that I wouldn't categorize necessarily as mistakes, but they're things that I would do differently if I were launching today. I think they have tremendous value.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So what are those five things? Well, the first one, and this is one that once we got through the rough part of this, it ultimately became an incredible competitive advantage. So I want to be very clear. The first one that we're going to address is after a period of time became an absolute incredible competitive advantage for us. However, there was about 18 months of slog that just we got the crap beat out of us because we did not think through the complexities, difficulties, obstacles, cost associated with growing our geography too fast.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So that's number one. We launched in New York. So my home where I live and where we launched that agency was New York State and frankly, just outside the Albany area. Partially because of COVID, we were forced to grow and just get whatever leads we could from wherever we could, which we started in New York and very rapidly realized it because Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, so close to New York State, New Jersey, New Hampshire. These states are so close to New York that oftentimes, you know, being that we used primarily inbound and I wasn't focused enough on keywords and geographic targeting, which is something I would have grown the geography slower is something I would do differently.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would have been more strategic, more thoughtful in how I geographically targeted our content because I didn't do that. We were getting leads from all these different additional states. So then I started reaching out and getting licensed in those states, started getting it with commercial lines. It's much easier to get approval from carriers for states. Most of the time, once you get an appointment with a carrier, as long as you're licensed in that state, they'll just automatically grant you the ability to write insurance in that state.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So with commercial lines, it's much easier than personal lines. But we grew very, very rapidly to a national agency. And the cost associated with that is very high for a startup. I mean, once you're scaled out, the cost doesn't continue to grow after a period of time, right? It just incrementally grows as maybe you add another agent or so. But like the initial cost is somewhere between call it $25,000 and $35,000 to get licensed both individually because you have to have an individual license in every state as well as an agency license in every state.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And we were using a service to help us do that because we were a very small team at the time. And while we took on these new state licenses in chunks, we grew so rapidly and I got licensed in states that probably we didn't have enough volume to get licensed in at the time. And the cost, the management of the licensing, the management of the accounting, et cetera, reporting to carriers, dealing with carriers, feedback on different, that rapid geographic growth caused more headaches than it was worth early on.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now, I do think that if you're going to really scale, particularly if you're going to use inbound, that broadening your geographic scope beyond just your certainly 50-mile radius of your location, but even just your own state, makes a lot of sense. You can be much more targeted in how you do your content, much more targeted in how you do your marketing than we were. So it's kind of a calamity of errors that we played here to get us to the point where we were just overwhelmed.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But once we got through that initial phase and were able to kind of steady the ship a bit, our revenue kind of caught up to that expense. It became a huge competitive advantage to us. Now we were able to grab leads from all over the country. We were able to navigate different underwriting issues. If there was an issue with coastal, you know, maybe in the Carolinas, it wasn't as big a deal for us because we also had leads coming in from all over the country. And the middle of the country, while it has its own challenges, oftentimes doesn't necessarily have like the hard stop underwriting issues that come up.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Like if you're in Louisiana or coastal Texas, et cetera, Florida. So these types of things became a competitive advantage for us down the road. But if you're not mentally and financially prepared for the obstacles that are going to hit you when you grow geographically too fast, you can find yourself in a place where you can become very frustrated, bogged down, and start questioning your life decisions, which I certainly did at different times.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I would have grown slower and more strategically, and that would have started with a better content strategy from me. But, you know, we did what we did. Just looking back, I think if we could have been more strategic, we would have been able to grow at a pace from both a cost, a hard fixed cost, because licensing is a hard fixed cost. You can't necessarily negotiate that down. We could have managed that better. So that's one of the things that I certainly would have done differently starting an agency if I were to start it today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would have picked a geography and really stuck to it and matched my content inbound referral partners, et cetera, to that geography and allowed our revenue to push past some of the fixed costs and obstacles and then incrementally added geographies as it made sense. So, okay. All right. So that's number one.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Number two, we would work with simple technology that works. We would use simple technology that works. That's number two. Simple technology that works. I now have a perspective on technology that is wholly different than 2020 when I launched Rogue Risk. And I wanted technology that did all this fancy things that was gonna be game changing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I used to say all the time and I still believe this but maybe just I would articulate it differently But I used to say all the time if know best practices then I know how to beat you Like if you follow best practices then I know how to beat you is what I used to say So I wanted technology. I wanted processes that were different, that allowed us to define ourselves differently, create competitive advantages, which I still think is very important and can be done.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But in the early days, that should not be your goal. In the early days, it's write more premium. Write premium, write as much premium as you possibly can. Premium, premium, premium, premium, premium, because with premium comes revenue. So I made some decisions to use technology both inside the insurance industry and technology outside the insurance industry that to a larger organization with the disposition and will to apply these tools to train their people properly and implement them can actually be game changing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think there is technology that is not being utilized across the insurance industry that could literally change how we service, how we sell, how we improve and maximize the lifetime value of clients. You know, one of those technologies that we tried and I think ultimately failed using inside our agency was HubSpot. Now, part of that is because of the market that we served.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know a very good friend of mine and incredible agent and coach for Killing Commercial, David Crothers, uses HubSpot and his agency. And I think it works very well for him because, one, he spent time and a ton of money building it out. He's been very thoughtful about how he built it out. And he had a timeline to build it out, right? Years, not months, or even weeks. In some people's case, they'll think they're going to get something like that up and running in weeks. It's not going to happen. It's not going to happen in months. It's going to happen in years.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I also think the market that he approaches, the middle market, can work well inside of a tool like HubSpot. Now, the way that HubSpot operates, from my perspective, is the way we should be servicing our clients. It is the data model. It is the sales and service structure that how we should be approaching the insurance business. I don't know any tools inside our industry which match what HubSpot does. but the problem is HubSpot is not geared towards the insurance industry. So you really have to wedge in a lot of stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And we tried to do that and it was a failure for a whole bunch of reasons. Small commercial moves too fast for a tool like HubSpot. HubSpot is overkill and we did not have the service team that really warranted the cost that comes with HubSpot, etc. So while I look at a tool like that, I'm like, oh my gosh, An agency who can open their mind, who can be willing to train their people to use this will completely and utterly differentiate themselves from all their competitors and be able to provide a level of service and quality that I don't believe is possible using a lot of the legacy tools or really any other tools.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: However, you got to be willing to do that. And it's a big lift. And early on, you are not ready for it. No one is. 10 years in, you might not be ready for it. You have to be early on. You are not ready for it. And I wish that we had kind of downshifted and stuck with, you know, say a better agency on their CRM product or an agency Zoom, a very simple AMS. Because truthfully, guys, I think that we overblow how much information we actually need about our customers inside our agencies.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think we need basic contact information, basic policy information, et cetera. And then we need to be able to market, communicate, and service them. Our people are going into the agency portals anyways to do all the service work. You don't need all that information. You need simple tools that work every time that allow you to move fast. And this is something, this is a learned opinion. I believe that we do not put... What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode. But as you know, we do not run ads on this show. And in exchange for that, I need your help.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're 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.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But 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 and 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 it listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let's get back to the episode. Enough of an emphasis on how easy it is to train our team on a tool, right? So towards the end of my time as the CEO of Rogue Risk, one of the largest factors in choosing to bring on a new piece of technology was how easy is it to train our team on this tool? If it takes weeks or months of training, we did not want it because it's just not worth it. It's not worth it to have to spend that much time training your people because they forget things and they got to reference things. They need to help desk function constantly, simple, easy, intuitive tools that allow them to do their job fast and efficiently, because really talking to the client, solving their problems is what we should be doing every day.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And then we just log into carrier portals to make changes and do the things that actually need to get done. Right. But if your people are bogged down with how to use a system, they're not thinking about how do I solve my client's problem. And we got there over time at Rogue, but early on that was not what I did. And mistakes were made. So just some things to think about. That's number two, simple technology that works.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right, number three, I would have launched my agency with a co-founder or a team member. I launched solo. And if you're trying to sell and grow, and I know so many of you who launch solo operations to start, right? You hit this point where you're like, I can't do everything. I can't prospect, sell, service, onboard, do the accounting, talk to carrier reps, find new products, do the quote. I mean, it's so much work for one person. And not just that the workload is too much, constantly having to shift gears in our brains, right? It's like decision fatigue, right? We're thinking about something here and then all of a sudden we have to shift our entire function from prospecting to sales.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And then it takes our brain a few minutes or to reset. And it also takes a large amount of energy to reset our focus. So our energy level is constantly going down in big chunks as we move to service and then back to sales and then to onboarding. And then we have a call with a carrier rep. And I think that while you're probably saying, Ryan, I can't afford a team member. Maybe that means you need to save a little more money before you launch. Maybe Maybe you need to make that team member a co-founder and give them upside in the business or create a rev share deal or something where you can have somebody to help remove some of the burden of the different thought processes that you need.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know, and I said this the entire time I was there, I needed an integrator. If you know EOS, I needed a COO. And towards the end, I found a group of people who took on those tasks. But if early on, very early on, like day one, I could have launched that agency with a partner or a co-founder or a team member who had that organized, detailed, task-oriented brain to my kind of creative, visionary, sales, marketing-oriented brain, Rogue would have grown much faster. And I think we probably could have sidestepped a lot of the small decisions that held us back and even maybe many of the other items that are on this list, the other four items on this list we could have sidestepped if I had that person who was the kind of yang to my yin if that makes sense.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I would highly recommend and I absolutely would not start another agency not that I really considering starting another agency but like if I were I would not absolutely 100 would not launch without a co-founder and not even a team member. I would not launch without a co-founder, someone who was invested and was that kind of yang to my yin. I just wouldn't. And I highly, highly recommend that you consider that. If it's a spouse, if it's a friend, if it's just somebody you respect, if it's somebody that you recruit, recruit a co-founder. The person doesn't have to be someone in your inner circle to start a business with them. Recruit somebody, interview somebody, spend time with them and figure out who the right fit is because ultimately, if we're growing these businesses to make money, to have a lifestyle, to build freedom into our lives, et cetera, to be challenged, if we're constantly doing things that we hate, it's going to take us away from the things that we love and it's not going to be what we think it is, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That startup journey is not going to be this, this, this tough, but rewarding and satisfying journey. It's going to be frigging miserable. And I would absolutely 100% recommend and myself, this is what I would do. I would not launch another retail agency without a co-founder. I really wouldn't want to launch any business without a co-founder, but particularly a retail agency. Okay. That's number three.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Number four, I would focus on referral partners sooner. We went inbound marketing first, which I think you can do side-by-side referral partners. So I did a lot of, in addition to the content work that I was doing and the inbound content work and what we teach, the stuff that we're teaching both in the insurance growth masterclass and in our higher level kind of premier consulting that we're doing and coaching, which if you're interested in either one of those things, go to masterclass.insure. If you're interested in the insurance growth masterclass, that's going to be kind of a membership where we're going to be teaching how to both, you know, fill your funnel, the one called closed system and ultimately our onboarding process that I've developed over the last 18 years and that we teach here at Rogue Risk.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And then I've been teaching agents for about five or six years now on the side. And then we have kind of one-on-one coaching with your agency, more hands-on. That's kind of our premier coaching program. And if you're interested in that or just learning more, Ryan at findingpeak.com. And just before we move on, I'll also say, if you're listening to this on iTunes or Spotify or some sort of podcast, please make sure you subscribe. You cannot get this show in any other place now. You have to subscribe to the feed that you're listening to. And if you're watching on YouTube, love subscribing. If you have questions, comments, issues with something I say, something that, you know, an item on here that you would do differently when you start up that you don't see on this list, leave it in the comments. We're starting to get great comments on the YouTube channel. It's a wonderful place to collect them and allows me to respond to all those comments, which I do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And hopefully over time, we can start to pull up some of those comments, bring them back into the show and share some of these ideas, concerns, questions, et cetera, that you have with the broader audience and get them answered. All right. So number four is I would focus on referral partners. And so what I did was I worked on content and I did one-to-one outreach. Now, one-to-one outreach, maybe the first few weeks, the first few months, that's the best way to go just to get some wheels spinning. But ultimately, to hit escape velocity and to hit it faster, you need to find places that are going to send you volumes of leads because it keeps your cost of acquisition down.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's one of the reasons why inbound is such a high priority for me. And obviously over the course of the show and the podcast and all the work we're doing at Finding Peak, we're going to talk more and more about inbound. But I love inbound marketing and all the sources, which I would put referral partners as one of, because it keeps cost of acquisition down. It keeps CAC down. If you're going out and buying leads, if you're using Google ads, you're probably paying a high premium.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We also don't consider our time when we do cold calling and outbound prospecting as part of the cost of acquisition. So one of the things that almost no one talks about, and while I'm all for outbound marketing and while I love to bust the guys at Max Revenues Chops about everything they do, I love those guys. I love what they're teaching. I think it's phenomenal and highly recommend the work of Trey and Micah. but oftentimes we don't have a conversation around outbound in regards to if I spend eight hours making a hundred calls, are you counting the cost of acquisition into any clients that come out of those calls as the time, the eight hours of time that you took to create, to do those hundred calls or whatever, however much time it takes, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Maybe you do a hundred calls a week and you're taking 20 hours out of your week to make all those calls, are you counting your per hour expense, right? Like if you're a producer, your per hour expense might be $200 an hour, $150 an hour, $100 an hour, whatever it is. Are you adding that to the cost of acquisition in addition to materials cost, et cetera, of attracting a lead and writing that business? I don't think anyone's doing that. I certainly don't see anyone talking about it. And to me, it's like this hidden blind spot that we just kind of shove under the rug, where then when we talk about inbound marketing, like, whoa, I spent $100 on Google ads and only got one lead, et cetera. And that cost me this.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So we put all this emphasis on cost of acquisition with digital marketing and that kind of stuff, yet in lead buying, yet when it comes to outbound, we don't do that. So to be fair, I believe that true inbound and content marketing done right, what we teach at Finding Peak, provides the lowest cost of acquisition opportunities to fill the top of our funnel. We then, through a process, we qualify those leads, we close them, etc. And if we use the one called close process properly, we can drastically improve conversion rate on inbound leads.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And that brings the cost of acquisition down even more. So in my opinion, referral partners and inbound content, if you were just to focus on those two things and you had some runway, right? I wouldn't even do one-to-one prospecting. All my prospecting would have been if I had more runway than I did. I didn't have enough runway and this is some planning that I would need to do. You know, I would do better in the future, right? If I had more runway or a proper amount of runway, I would focus on all my outbound prospecting would be on referral partners.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And then every other minute of the day until I had a solid flow of business coming in would be on creating content, creating content outbound, right? So half my day prospecting referral partners, half my day creating content. And then eventually once the wheels start spinning and leads start coming in, now you really get ripping. You can dial those things back a little bit to a more reasonable level. And now you have a consistent flow of low cost of acquisition business coming in.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's not what I did, right? I did focus on content, which was great. And I would do that again, a hundred out of a hundred times, but I focused on one-to-one outbound prospecting to kind of prime the pump. And I think that's just a slower way to go. Again, you hit a huge account, And that's amazing, except for startup agencies who hit on huge accounts. Now, all your time is spent servicing that account, which to go back to having a team member or a co-founder, maybe you're able to do that if you already launched with someone with you, which I did not.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So, okay, I hope that makes sense. So number one, grow our geography slower. I would have used simple technology that works. I would have launched with a co-founder or a team member, and I would have focused on referral partners sooner than I did.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The fifth and final thing that I would have done differently at my agency upon launching that agency is I would have spent more time working on the onboarding process. Early on in Rogue's history, and this was well before we were purchased, we had a very low retention rate. And a lot of that had to do with the flailing of a startup agency. So some of that is just natural, right? We're figuring out our flow, figuring out systems, et cetera. But I would, you know, If I'm being truly self, if I'm being honest in my self-reflection, I did not give almost any time to the onboarding process. And that was a big mistake, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If I could go back, I would have, I spent a ton of time thinking about my prospecting process. I spent a ton of time thinking about my sales approach, how I wanted to differentiate us. And ultimately that's, you know, that's where we refined and defined our one call close process. but what I didn't spend any time on was our onboarding process. So we would, we would get great prospects. We would qualify them. We would sell them amazing. And then when it came to the actual onboarding and, and passing it off to our AEs or account managers, that process was complete crap.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I think we would do such a great job on the front end have all these good feelings And then onboarding process would would create a mismatch in expectations which ultimately would create poor feelings And and I think that that was a place that we spun our wheels quite a bit early on And and and I take that on my shoulders That's something that, you know, we then fixed that, right? So obviously, because constantly looking at numbers, constantly reflecting on our business, you know, eventually when I got a few team members and we started really thinking about what was going wrong and where people were leaving, et cetera, and asking people why they left, we started to fix that problem and our retention started to go way up.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And, you know, I think by the time we were in the mid eighties, by the time we ultimately, the agency ended, but that early on, man, it would have been incredibly helpful if we, if I just spent even just a few days, right. Even just a few like weekend nights after the kid went to bed, thinking about the onboarding process and putting some simple comms in place, thinking about how we had the handoff from, you know, when it was just me and one service professional, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think that's a very intimate process. And it could have been very easy if I had put more time and effort into what that handoff looked like. I think we could have created more like true fans to the business. I think that we could have provided people just simply a better and higher quality service. I think there would have been less confusion with some of our clients. And while, you know, eventually we did fix that process early on, it was a bit of a mess. And that's something that I definitely would have put more thought into, or would put more thought into launching a new agency if I were to do it today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So guys, these five things, I think, hopefully make sense, right? Geography, being very slow, methodical, intentional about the growth of our geography, with the understanding that I do believe we have to expand our geography in order to scale and grow from the standard kind of mindset. Simple technology that works. Your goal is to write more premium. It's not to have the fanciest systems, especially early on or really ever, but early on, fancy systems don't mean jack. Write more business, simple technology that works in our industry is the way to do that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would have launched with a co-founder or a team member. I would have focused more on referral partner sooner. And part of that is maybe having a little more runway so that I don't have to do that hand-to-hand combat early to get some revenue in. I could have spent that early time working on or even having a referral partner in the bag when I launched, right? That would be best case scenario. And always in conjunction with content.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And then I would have spent more time on the onboarding process upfront to make sure that when we did work people through our process, which I do believe even back in 2020 and 2021, our sales process was best in class and only continued to get better. I, you know, and I'm very proud of the sales process that we, that we had and that, you know, was kind of built and cultivated back in my Murray Group days. And then through all the work that I did in between there. And then, like I said, I've done, you know, some kind of ghost coaching and consulting projects on the side and have for years just because I want to help people and et cetera.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It really came to be exactly what I wanted it to be. And I'm sure it can always get better. And that's what Finding Peak is all about is making sure that this process doesn't die in our industry that I truly believe what we're doing at Finding Peak can be an industry changing process. We can redefine a best practice for our industry for this particular piece, right? Not the whole thing. I don't know enough about all the different parts to redefine the whole industry, But for this one particular thing, inbound growth in a retail agency, I do think we can redefine a best practice.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But if then that handoff through the onboarding process is not done right, it all falls apart. And I did not know that early on. I wish I did. Towards the end, as we grew, I obviously figured it out. And I think we had a phenomenal onboarding process at the end, or at least a much better process, but certainly did not at the jump. So I guess my last thought on all of this, guys, is if you are early on or if you are considering launching a startup agency, particularly in the independent space, give yourself some grace. I was often very, very hard on myself. I put incredible expectations on. And I felt like the entire industry was watching me, whether they were or they weren't.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And you guys could be like, I didn't give a shit about what happened to you. So, you know, whatever, you know, there's a little bit of ego in there, I guess, in saying that. But I felt that I felt like, man, I'd shared so much over the years with you guys about my thoughts on how things should be done. I didn't want to then like blow it. I wanted to prove to you guys one that I could do it, I guess, which now I feel very confident in that. But I also wanted to show you that these processes that I believe in work so that I could teach them to you so that the industry could use these things.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've never been one to bottle everything up and keep it completely hidden so that no one can ever have it because that's not how we grow as a space, right? And I'm a firm believer in positivity and not – what is it? Rising tides lift all ships, all these cliches. So my point in saying that is give yourself grace. I did not. I was very hard on myself. I had very dark moments. I worked very, very long hours. I was not the best spouse, not the
