--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Ryan Hanley Show. Today we have a tremendous guest. I want to call him a rising star, but I think he's way past that in the insurance industry. That's Bradley Flowers. Bradley is the founder of Portal Insurance down in Alabama, and also one of the co-hosts of the Insurance Guys podcast, a wildly popular podcast in our industry. It's always fun to have another podcaster on the show because they do not disappoint in volume of words. So this is a fun episode. We get into a lot of different things. Get ready for the ride because we go all over the place. But I think ultimately you come out with some incredible value into how exactly Bradley views this industry, why he went independent from being a longtime captive, and how he plans to take Portal Insurance to the next level.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, we have to thank the organizations that make the Ryan Hanley Show possible. First up on the board is Ask Kodiak, a technology platform dedicated to risk placement and insurance product selection. Having trouble writing that donut shop with a fryer? Ask Kodiak. Need to place an accountant with five employees in Georgia with a medium-sized payroll? Ask Kodiak. Find the best insurance for your clients and prospects. Know your options at Ask Kodiak. Oh, and it's free for agents. Just sign up at AskKodiak.com. All your staff can have an account.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to share real quick how I've been using Ask Kodiak. I go to Ask Kodiak to figure out what markets I want to potentially get appointed with as a new agency for Rogue Risk. I'm looking and going, okay, I want to attack this market and I want to attack this line of business. What carriers in the state of New York are writing that type of business? Who has that appetite? It helps me as an agent find the carriers that will help expand my agency. Anytime I have a question with who writes what where, askkodiak.com. Free for agents. Go to askkodiak.com, get an account and start using the tool immediately.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I also want to give a big shout out to Tarmica. Tarmica is the premier rating platform for insurance agencies, creating a better experience for the evolving agent. Tarmica was built by leaders within the insurance community and they take pride in being ex-carrier and agency employees, building technology for agencies and carriers. This is true indie technology. A single entry into your platform returns multiple quotes for all your appointed carriers. Tarmica, in many regards, is the future of how commercial and personal lines insurance will be rated. I think they are transforming the process. They're making it easy, clean, with a wide breadth of carrier integrations. In all honesty and transparency with you, the audience that I love and adore, Tarmica will be powering the front end of Rogue Risk. I chose Tarmica after doing several demos and feel like Tarmica is the best platform for helping Rogue Risk, my independent insurance agency, get off the ground. They'll be our frontline rating platform. That's Tarmica.com, T-A-R-M-I-K-A, Tarmica.com. Get in the game. You'll actually hear Bradley reference Tarmica as well today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Okay, now that we've paid the bills, let's get to our tremendous episode with Bradley Flowers. Here we go.
--:-- [Discussion begins]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's lacking.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Who, you?
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Well, you're trying to run a business, man.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I feel that.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah, it's five. Those days are coming for me too. I'm probably out of control creating content right now because I know the day that New York State will actually let me start selling insurance, it's all over. You know what I mean? I've actually had a couple carriers reach out to me. A couple of the carriers who I am working towards getting an appointment with, their major concern has been my focus on being an insurance agent over, like their words, doing other stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I've said to all of them, I do other stuff because one, New York State won't let me sell insurance today, although that will change any day. I'm just waiting for some bureaucrat in some office to press a button. But the other side of it is, once everything's rocking and rolling, that's the business. The other things are in support of that, not the other way around. And they don't understand that. I get why they say that, but at the same time, it's a dumb way for them to think.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah. I think the idea that an insurance agent can be anything other than just an insurance agent is a very foreign concept. I don't think they're wrong for thinking that because it's very foreign. There's not that many people like you and I. The other day someone was like, "Oh man, there's so many insurance podcasts." I'm like, there's like 10. There's like 10 insurance podcasts. And someone was like, "Oh, there's so many." I get the sentiment, I just thought that was funny. In any marketing, there's like 100,000. You're forced to listen to everybody.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's a difficult thing. I struggled with this a lot when I was at the Murray Group. If I was being completely honest and self-aware, I made so many mistakes when I was at the Murray Group. The truth is, if all I cared about was personal income, leaving the Murray Group was the worst decision I've ever made in my entire life. It was the worst decision I ever made if it were just about personal income, because I'd be making 300, 400 bills. Easy. I mean, 10 years later or six years later, after 15 years in the business, the way that I was trending at that time... I mean, I wrote the last month that I was there, we got 89 inbound leads and I sold 61 policies from those 89 inbound leads in one month on a hundred dollar budget.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Right. So like, I think I read that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My point in saying that is, that's because I was creating a lot of content, some of which worked incredibly well, some of which didn't work at all and was confusing and weird. I think what people miss, and I think this is why you're on the right track, is that you don't know what the pieces are that are going to get that person to connect with you or not. You have no idea. You create, you try to add value, you do the work, and some things connect and some things don't. To try to pretend like you know which things are the winners and the losers, that's the worst thing you can do.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: A hundred percent. I mean, it's just try to provide value and then you build up that kind of social equity, you get that engagement, and then eventually you post something that pops and you get some results from it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: A hundred percent. I've just had so many examples of this. Getting back to it though, I can tell you firsthand, there is a trap that I'm sure on your darkest days you've fallen into as well. If you post about certain topics in the insurance community, they're going to go crazy. Sometimes that social validation just feels really good. It is so easy to fall into that trap.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah. I know what you're dealing with right now. In January, I quit my job, my last agency, January 8th of last year. So last week was a year. From January the 8th until March the 1st, I don't know that I've ever put out better content, at least to me. I was in the zone. And March the 1st of 2019, it was like, couldn't be further away. Even I think Zach Gould called me during that two month period. He was like, "Man, you're going hard right now." And I'm like, "I know, because I'm eventually not going to be able to." If I can do enough original stuff in this two month period, I can pull from that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My wife posted something yesterday and I liked it. It was a piece that she made and she was like, "I don't really like that post." I'm like, but the point is, is that you made it. The more of that that you do, the better you're going to get at it. And then you can go redo the old stuff.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah. Plus no one cares. If someone goes back and looks at my early stuff I did for the Murray group, it is awful compared to today's standard. 99.9% of people wouldn't even publish that. I am so stupid or naive or just, I don't know, I have something wrong with me. I didn't even think twice of it. It was just, let's hit publish and go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't think that that is right for everybody. It worked for me in part because I did not have an established brand in any regard. If you have a well established brand in the community, you don't want to be going back and doing garbage stuff. I completely understand and appreciate and agree with that. But the Murray group at that time was called the Gilderland Agency. We had a website from 2002 even though it was 2011. There was no presence. We were based mostly on referrals. My father-in-law is a pretty tremendous and connected guy in the community, so he has a lot of friends and that's how we dug up a lot of our business. No one else was doing it. That's how we were able to be successful in that space. Today, the bar is higher if you have an established brand. Now it's also a lot easier to do higher quality stuff today, but I get that some people hesitate to just hit publish because they're like, "Look, we've been in business for 20 years. If we start putting out this, it'll be weird." I get that part, I understand.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Well, that's why I hired a kid that works with me one day a week as a videographer, and he does graphic design. I realized the content's important. That is kind of the game for me, and that's what's going to separate us. I realized about two months in, I was like, "I got to get somebody else to do this." So I kind of put the word out for an intern. Luckily it was right after the Gary V episode, so I got no shortage of responses. This kid Grant who works with me now, he's been with me a little more than half a year. I outsource all the editing and all that. Even if it's something that I could edit really easy, I still send it to him and he does it. He's got a different take on it.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: I did a post recently. I took my first piece of original content that I ever made and posted it. I was actually sitting right here and I had it photoshopped in and I was pointing at it like, "This is my first piece of content." It was literally made on Microsoft Paint. It was a cartoon superhero with a cape with my head on it. It was so bad. As if to say, "Look, you got to start somewhere." The beautiful thing about when you start, unless you're in a situation like the Murray Group which I would even argue that they wouldn't be in this situation because nobody's really thinking to look, is nobody's watching. When you start, you're going to get 20 views on your first video. Who cares? A lot of them are going to be your mom watching it more than once.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You're right about that. Also when you put out that MS Paint graphic, you're probably like, "Oh shit, I'm the man. Look at this. I'm killing the game right now with this graphic."
--:-- Bradley Flowers: No, right. Back then even, it was still kind of that wabi-sabi of it's perfect because it's not perfect. Even when I knew this is not quality, the fact that I'm an insurance agent doing this is going to be good enough because everybody else is doing hearsay social.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The other thing too is people really respect just the effort. I found that a lot. When I was producing for the Murray group, a not insignificant number of people said, "I decided to reach out just because I saw that you were doing stuff." It was just the fact that I was willing to put in the effort that triggered in them, "Well geez, if he's willing to try, I'll see." Maybe it didn't work, maybe they didn't like it, whatever, it's all good. But they were willing to give me a try just because I was putting in the effort of trying to help educate them and put stuff in the community. That's a big part of it.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: That's kind of like, we did an interview that dropped this or last week with Tyler Asher from Safeco. He's a great dude. We did that interview back in July and for several reasons it got delayed. Right after we recorded that, they had released their millennial study that they did, which I helped them on. One of the things they found is that millennials don't necessarily want to buy insurance online. They just want their agent to have an online presence. It doesn't have to be a good online presence, just some kind of presence because they're going to check you out online. It's like if I were to have five people come in here for an interview and only one of them's licensed, I'm going to naturally gravitate towards the person that's licensed. As a young person, I'm going to gravitate towards the person that's trying to do things and trying to make things happen.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The whole millennial thing at this point has become a bullshit filter for me. If I see you discussing millennials in any regard, other than the fact that they were 23 when we were talking about them or 18 when we were originally talking about them... I'm turning 39 next month, or I guess two months, but I'm on the bleeding edge of the millennials in 1981. It's just silly. They were young and they had more technology. That's all it is. Nothing's changed. They're humans. Some of their buying decisions are different, but they want the same things out of a relationship. They want to know that someone is behind the transaction to make sure that their family is taken care of. They just didn't have a family before, so they didn't care. You know who my car insurance person was when I was 24? Geico. You know who my car insurance isn't with anymore? Geico. It makes complete sense. It's part of an evolution. It's a rite of passage. I'm just glad that that's over. I'm glad that we don't talk about them really that much anymore. We have such a clear understanding and studies like the one Safeco did or Liberty, I can't remember. Did it come out through Safeco or Liberty?
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Both, I believe. It came out through the Agent for the Future, which is kind of a future thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's right. I saw a video this week of some guy that was like, "Oh, these kids need to put their phones down and spend time." Like you needed to put down the newspaper, Alfred. Even though I know it's a different scale, I've seen parents back when I was a kid. My parents really weren't newspaper readers, but I would go to my friend's house and their dad would read every single word of the newspaper for the first three and a half hours of the day and not say anything to us. God forbid we're playing in the floor and bumped the back of that newspaper, he was blowing up. It's the same thing, it's just a different medium. Yes, I know there are problems. I know there are issues. I know it is exacerbating a lot of social issues that we have. But for the most part, it's the same thing over and over.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's a really cool Twitter handle called, I think it's called The Pessimist something. It basically posts out counterintuitive stances on different topics. The other day, someone I follow retweeted The Pessimist. It was basically an article from 1964 in the Washington Post talking about how the television has completely corrupted the American child and how our civilization was about to fall apart because they were watching television when they got home from school and it was burning holes in their brains.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: That's amazing. I'm going to find that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And here we are 50 years later and we're like, "Oh, everything is so much different today." It's not different. I've been reading a lot of ancient philosophy stuff, which turns you on to all different topics from that time period. There's writings from some of the ancient philosophers about how the children of that generation were completely corrupt and didn't understand what was going on. We're talking about like 300 AD. This is always the way it's going to be. This is a natural evolution. Every generation has this same process. Different things at different times in your life become more important. Don't forget that the Beatles were going to corrupt all the young girls in America, and then Elvis shook his hips and we were all going to become polygamists and sex addicts.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Moving on from that. This started from a conversation and we just kind of spiraled.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's okay. Let's get into an actual interview because I have so many questions that I want to ask you. The first one is really, I know you've talked a lot about this on your own podcast. We'll give the audience all the calls to action. I'll have everything linked up. Everyone can go check you out. Most of them prior to the 10 out there.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: One of the 10. Just look, probably find my podcast in the ranking and then just go up. You'll find their podcast.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So why did you leave the agency? What was the impetus? I'm sure there were a bunch of reasons, but what was that moment when you walked out of work, picked up the phone, called your wife and said, "I'm done. This is it."
--:-- Bradley Flowers: I was in a situation where I was basically in the role of the agency principal. The company I worked for was very similar to how Farm Bureau is. Alabama doesn't have Farm Bureau. I answered to somebody at corporate and I could kind of run the show like I needed to, to a degree. I could not hire and scale. I had a dedicated CSR and that was it. Even if I wanted to hire someone out of my own pocket, I could not. I started on social media in October 2014. Practice, practice, practice. Got better, got better, got better. In 2017, we ran a marketing campaign that generated roughly 6,000 leads. From there, it was game on. I was like, "Okay, I finally figured out how to get people to give me their information in an insurance sense." We were generating so many leads that we physically could not handle them, not to mention the clients we had. It was hurting our experience. I'm all about the customer experience. So I had a choice. I either had to stop marketing, which I'm not going to do, stop doing what I love. I had to accept horrible customer service and mediocrity. I had people coming to me, friends, and they would say, "Man, you're really not all you're cracked up to be. This billing issue didn't get taken care of and you're talking about how great you are." Or I had to continue to work 18 hours a day for something I did not own and work myself to death.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: About March of, I'm slowly coming to this realization, about March of 2018, I went to go visit Paradiso. Which is always so much trouble. Me and Scott went together. Where I'm at, I've got four Farmers offices and four State Farm offices on the same street as my office. Captives run rampant. You have two types of independent agencies here. You have the old established family agencies, which is great. I'm friends with all those guys, but they're not really in growth mode. They don't know what Tarmica is and different things. And then you have the bucket shops. So to go up to Connecticut and see a Paradiso that's a really well-oiled, innovative, solid independent agency, it was kind of eye-opening for me. Scott and I were there for two days. We got in the car on the Uber ride back to the hotel and he looked at me and said, "You know you have to open an independent agency, right?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I know I do." That was kind of the moment I decided that I was going to do it. Told my wife like a month later, "Hey, look, this is what I want to do and everything I'm doing from now on is going to be to get that done."
--:-- Bradley Flowers: In December of last year, we went and rented a cabin in the woods to do business planning. I kind of put together what I would need monetarily. One of the mistakes I made at that prior company is for the first four years, I invested all my money into marketing. I wasn't really saving. I was saving as a normal human should, but I was not saving to open a business. We sat down at lunch and she was like, "How much do you think you would need?" And I was like, "Well, I would need this much." And she was like, "Well, we're going to have that much money extra at this date. What if we transfer that and you rock and roll?" So two weeks later, I quit my job. That's kind of how it happened.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's pretty cool, man. For those that may not know, Chris Paradiso is the owner of Paradiso Insurance, Paradiso Presents, and one of the most well-connected and selfless agency operators in our ecosystem. If you're not connected with him, I would highly recommend it. This is how Chris is: you're on the phone with him and you're like, "Hey, what about such and such company? Do you know anything about them?" He's like, "Yeah, hang on one second. I'll get the CEO on the phone." The next thing you know, you're talking to the CEO of an insurance carrier.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah. That's how all the conversations with him are. He's a good guy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I made a similar trip out to his office in Stanford Springs, Connecticut very recently. Thankfully, it's only an hour and a half drive for me, but much farther for you Southern boys. So where does Portal come from? The name Portal. Give me the backstory on that.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: I had no idea what I wanted to name it at all. One side of the argument is a name is not important because it's going to become what you are. I had a buddy that named an insurance agency about a year before I started like F&G Insurance. I was like, "That's the dumbest name ever." But then I learned about GNN Insurance. I'm like, "That name fits. It's kind of cool." It becomes what it is. At the same time, I'm big on branding and that sort of thing. The one kind of thing I had is I wanted it to look and give the perception that it might be an insurance carrier. I wanted to give that professional feel. A lot of the independent agencies here are either like The Flowers Agency, pale, male, and stale, or Flowers and Associates, nobody has any idea what the heck they do. Or you've got like Bama Coast Insurance, you're too far the other way. I wanted to be right down that middle of good, solid, but also trendy.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: I actually had to register my EIN twice because the first time I registered under another name. I called Johnny Gwynn, who is our producer at the podcast, who's an advertising genius. He's worked on many national campaigns. He did the campaign for Nokia when Nokia first became known back in the 90s. He was going to do my logo and he was like, "Come to the office. We will name your company today." I'm like, "Yeah, right," because I'd really fretted over it. We did this exercise. I've got a photo of it. It was a big whiteboard. You write down all your nicknames, all the dogs you've ever had, all the addresses you've ever lived, all this stuff. And you mix and match words. The point is not to find a mix match word to get the name. If that happens, it's great. But the point is to get those creative juices flowing.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Johnny was kind of like, "Man, what is insurance? It's safe. It's mother's arms." He's like, "Shelter Insurance." I'm like, "Can't use that as a company." So I'm like, crap. He sat back and he's like, "A port is a safe place. Well, Mobile is the port city." I didn't want to go Mobile Bay Insurance because if I ever decided to go national, that would be a hindrance. So port AL, but also portal. It kind of gives that self-service, new wave kind of feel. Basically Johnny named it in short. I absolutely love it. I was actually talking to my wife this week. I got this hat in and she was like, "You love your name, don't you?" I was like, "I love the name. It could be anything different. It's perfect."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, that's okay. I like it. From the outside, not knowing, I see it like Port AL. But from the outside, Portal, I just thought in my mind it's a new way. You're moving into a new way to do insurance, a new way to think about insurance.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: That's part of it. Portal is transitional. You're on one side of the portal, you're on the other. There's a really good podcast called The Portal too, by Eric Weinstein. Johnny draws this on the board and he's like, "That's called a Plimsoll." He's like, "A Plimsoll is on the side of every ship. What it tells the captain is if the water's below that line, we're good. If the water's above that line, we're sinking." He's like, "I've always wanted to use that in a logo." I'm like, "Well, that would actually be good because if I could brand that, it could kind of be..." That also speaks to the most coverage without breaking the bank kind of thing. That's kind of where everything came from. We got it done in one day. He's like, "Here it is."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Did you have Google Domains open the whole time too?
--:-- Bradley Flowers: In terms of?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Picking the name. Did you?
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Oh, yes. Yes. I was on the computer while he was doing that. Unfortunately, Portal Insurance is like five grand online right now. I just hadn't bought it yet. Please nobody buy it to piss me off. That would really suck.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Someone buy it and gift it to Bradley. That would be super nice.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: That would be amazing. Like one of these rich carriers that's watching this. That'd be awesome. The free Insurance Guys podcast sponsorship. If you do that, by the way. GetPortalInsurance.com is what we kind of settled on. I plan on buying it very, very soon. It's just, I don't know if that makes sense right now. But yes, had domains open and there was several things that we kind of settled on. Then I looked at the domain and it's like, this is sitting in a...
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's just funny to me how, when I'm picking a name, I'm a hundred percent just having domains.google.com open. I just want whatever I use. It's like, "Oh, awesome name. Shit. Oh, this is a great name. Well, what about get? What about do? What about real? Ah, okay. Next one." And you just do it over and over and over again. I would hate to go in when I was naming my agency and see what some of the names were. And then you have all those names that you're really embarrassed of. You're like, "Why did I ever even consider that name?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Yeah. Like originally I had thought about Bloom Insurance. Flowers, Bloom. I kind of liked it.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: And then Johnny was like, "Dude, that is like the least manly name ever." And I was like, "So is my last name. Great, thanks." But there was a lot that I was just like, man, I'm so glad I didn't name it that. At this point, I don't think it would matter, but yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm glad that you didn't do Bloom.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah. I had these in the cart, so I didn't actually buy it. If I had started the agency a year ago, before I took the metabolic job, I had a registered LLC for this name. It was going to be Indigo Coverage.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I remember you saying that. Which is so bad. And actually, I'm mad at a lot of you guys because none of you bastards told me how bad that name is. It reminds me of the Indigo Girls. Oh, it's so bad.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: I was like, I did one of those stupid thought experiments. I'm like, blue is creativity, and purple is compassion or empathy, and when they mash up, it's indigo. And now I'm like, oh my god, that was basically the universe going, "This is not the right name for an insurance agency. You shouldn't be doing this. So we're going to make you go leave the industry. Here's the penance you need to pay for that stupid name that you bought and registered with the state."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'll tell you what I like though about Rogue Risk. It's kind of got this badass undertone to it.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah, I like the alliteration. That was a big part of it. I googled "Rogue" and there's not really any other insurance businesses in the country with Rogue in their name. For me, one syllable words are big. Everyone who I interact with, I eventually wear them down until I have a one syllable version of their name or a nickname that's one syllable. I just like it. Rogue is just quick, whack. What the word actually means kind of dissolves into that. And then I threw the "Risk" on there because that's the only way I could get the domain name.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The other thing too with Portal is, I've thought about if we ever branch out into other sectors, businesses that are parallel, whether it be mortgages or whatever, that could be several different things, several divisions. But what's funny is we were in business like two weeks and you and I talked, or you talked about on Cass's show we were on a couple weeks ago, one of the big hurdles of independence. And we've certainly felt this: your customers have never heard of your carrier. Which is another reason why we wanted it to sound like that, because I want them to know us. As long as they know us, that's good. But we were writing somebody and my producer was trying to build trust. She sells the customer and he's going to call back with his payment. He calls back like two hours later and he's like, "I looked up reviews on you guys. You guys don't have good reviews." And that's when we found out that there was another Portal Insurance that does health insurance. They're like an MGA for health insurance. Anyway, I was like, we've been up for two weeks with pay-per-views. Who are all these people hating on us?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would love for one of my competitors to do that. That's great. But they're all your podcast competitors in the insurance industry reading you poor reviews of it.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: That's right. I'm going to do a keynote at one of these conferences. I'm already working on it. "Why Everyone Should Start a Podcast." I think it's great. It's only good for the industry.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I go back and forth on that idea. I go back and forth. There's a big part of me that is like, yes, create absolutely. Everyone should be creating, completely agree. I would disagree with you in that everyone should have a podcast, only in that I don't think there's any medium that everyone should be doing. I completely agree with you in that everyone should be creating somehow. I tend to go in waves. For me, I was writing on Instagram, little Instagram vignettes for like four months, just every day pounding them out. Went from like 1100 followers to 2000 followers, tons of engagement, it was awesome. And then I just kind of got burned out with it. And Instagram changed their algorithm. Instagram's algorithm sucks so bad right now. It's barely worth even being there. So then I started doing the same thing, these long form posts on LinkedIn. That's been tremendous. Then I kind of get sick of writing and I go to video.
--:-- I think the key is everybody should be creating something, even if it's just tweets, even if it's just the simplest thing, if it's text messages to friends. The reason for that, at least from my perspective, is if you don't, someone else owns your story. If you don't, someone else owns the story. That someone could be a thousand someones. That can mean every single one of your customers has a different version of your story in their head. Unless you are creating and owning that story and telling them what they should think about your business. "Here's how you should think about us. Here's what we stand for. Here's who we do business with." On and on and on.
--:-- But what happens is, at least for my perspective, I feel like, "I'm not good at, I don't know how to do a podcast, Brad. What am I supposed to do, man?" I get it, but I don't know how. Okay, you know how to type. You have a computer. Hit up LinkedIn, hit up Facebook. Be on Twitter, do something. It also gets you thinking about things differently and it helps you solve other problems. If you're writing or creating on a consistent basis, it's not so much about that post as it is then a client calls you and you're like, "Oh, you know what? I was just thinking about that the other day on this little post I wrote." And now you have an immediate response for them. I found that a lot. It's just the practice of thinking almost.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah. And I think everybody should try everything. Because in 2015, if you'd have told me that I would put myself on video and talk to a camera and then post that, I'd have been like, "You're freaking nuts. There's no way I'm doing that." In 2016, if you'd have told me I'd be on a podcast... Because what happens is when you try these things, you kind of figure out what you're decent at. And then you can kind of lean into those. I used to do blog posts. I hate doing blog posts now. I think mine suck. I'm currently looking for someone to write for me. So I think by trying a little bit of everything, you can kind of figure out what the best thing for you to do is and what you're talented at or what the market responds to. You may think your videos are bad, but if the market responds to it, that's really all that matters.
--:-- I did a video about a month and a half ago. A bunch of agents were in a group crapping on Lemonade. Your typical stuff: "Wait till the claim." Okay, number one, just wait till one of these carriers comes along and they get the claim part right. Then what are you going to do? The whole premise of this video was, it doesn't matter what you think about Lemonade or what you think about Portal or what you think about Rogue Risk. All that matters is what the market thinks about it, what the customers think about it. That's it. We like to make fun of Geico's ads, but obviously they work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The Lemonade thing is so interesting to me because I have beef with Lemonade, but not for their business model. I think their business model is not bad. Look, they write standard accord form HO4s. They're not writing anything that's that much different than you're going to get from Travelers or Hartford or any of these other carriers. Nuanced, just like every carrier, but basically a standard HO4. No one has been able to really come out and say, "Oh, look at this deficiency." It's just not there. So it's decent paper. They're not trying to gimmick and scheme. It's not a bare bones policy. It's a standard form. There's nothing special about it, but there's nothing bad about it.
--:-- They have, in my opinion, three aspects of their business that I disagree with how they've handled. One is their complete disregard for consumers' desire to interact with humans during the sales process. That tells me that they did not research the industry properly. I would love to have heard they didn't believe it rather than what seems to be the case, which is they just didn't do their homework. They just came in and said, "This is like any other industry. We can automate it." That bothers me from a business model perspective. If I were an investor, I would be scared because it shows me that they were negligent in properly understanding the industry dynamics before they got in. Agreeing with and understanding are different things. I don't think that they understood that dynamic. I just think they didn't realize that was a big part of the insurance buying process.
--:-- Two, their pricing is silly. All they're doing from a pricing perspective to garner market share is buying losses. Carriers have been doing this for 100 years. This is not a new business practice. They're saying, "We want to gain market share in New York City, so we're going to charge $5 for a policy that should be $25. We're making a tactical decision that we can ride out the losses in exchange for buying market share." Don't tell me that you have some proprietary pricing model that sets you apart from the industry. Maybe be a little coy about the fact that all you're doing is something that every other insurance carrier has done when they've tried to move into a market.
--:-- And then the third part is they hammered on independent agents when they came in and their advertising is very negative. That tells me you're going to attract people who operate from a place of scarcity and negativity because you are marketing through scarcity and negativity. In the short term, it garners action. It's absolutely a persuasive technique. More power to you. I don't think you had to hire Dan Ariely to tell you that scaring the shit out of people and telling them that the old way is wrong is a great marketing tactic over the short term. I just think what they're seeing from a retention perspective and a combined ratio perspective is that you don't garner great business when you market that way. It's not attracting people who are making their decisions based on loyalty.
--:-- When you break down Lemonade, it's really tough. I would love to have access. I think Lemonade has done a tremendous number of things. The fact that we're having this conversation still is a testament to what they've done. From that regard, I'm happy that they're here. I just think it's important to understand what their struggles actually are and that they are real. All those three things that I just mentioned are very solvable problems. Very, very solvable problems.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: For me, it was the attacking the agents. I felt that was as silly as the pricing, especially now that you're slowly starting to hear about them giving some contracts out. I had a conversation with a carrier recently, a carrier that has both captive and independent. The person representing the company said, "Look, we know that the independent model is the way to go. Because if someone goes to one of our exclusive agents and that person doesn't fit our model client, they're going to manipulate and try to do whatever they can to squeeze them into that." Which is either not good for the customer because they're paying way too much for a product that's not adequate, or it's not good for us because something's been manipulated to make it work. The direct model is not good because customers lie or don't understand what's going on. She's like, "An independent agent, if they don't fit in what we want, they're just going to take it somewhere else."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's such a complex issue. If I were running a carrier right now, if there were a magic wand that I could wave, from a high level—anyone working for a carrier, take this thought for what it is, 30,000 foot, there's a million nuances—I think a flow that could be very advantageous to the industry: if I were working for a mid-market mutual and I had the ability to wave wands and make things happen, I would absolutely go direct. I would go out in front of my agents, then I would push all that business into my independent agencies. There's a couple reasons for that.
--:-- One, there's no better retention mechanism than a well-run independent insurance agency. You don't get better service. You don't get better advice. There's no better relationships. It is the best mechanism for retention. As a broad sweeping swath, it is not always the best mechanism for new business growth. I think there are many independent agents that are tremendous at new business, absolutely tremendous. But in a broad sense, on average, the median agent is not tremendous at sales but tremendous at retention. So I get that brand out in front of the agencies. I'd push people to my independents. If I wrote them direct, I would absolutely be pushing them to my independent agents.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: There's some profitability things there too. The idea is if you moved everything to the agents, but understood what they were going through, I think the carriers can be better partners in helping the agents. What's happening is carriers are like, "Agents, you need to become better sales mechanisms." And the agents are like, "We want to, but we're just not really sure how to do that. And you're not giving us the tools." And they're like, "Well, we don't know what tools to give you." And then they give them a tool and the agent's like, "That's really great except I didn't need that tool. I needed this tool over here." And they're like, "Why didn't you tell us?" And it's because I didn't know. It's because we're not all playing the same game. I would love to see more of that. Carriers who do that stand out. You hear about the Acuities and some of these others that are really making moves and providing those power plays.
--:-- Or give me the ability to go direct to consumer. Look at Attune. We recently got appointed with Attune about two or three months ago. They custom built some landing pages for me that people could quote and bind their own commercial insurance. Are people ever going to get to that point? Do you necessarily want that? No, but I think that's a step in the right direction. What I liked about the landing pages is they were custom built for different niches. There was a landing page for barbershops, a landing page for restaurants, and so on. It was a really well-built page and they let me put my pixel in it. How many carriers would be like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, we're not doing that"? So I think there's a lot of Attunes out there and there's going to be more and more of those as we go on. Where we kind of struggle with it is more on the auto side. A lot of the auto carriers don't want to do that because they would rather just do it themselves.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How do you like Attune so far?
--:-- Bradley Flowers: I wish they had a few more classes, but I love them. I love the rating program. I'm coastal, they're an admitted BOP a thousand feet from the water. Inland they can write, which is unheard of. Everything else is E&S. I wish they had some GL and stuff like that, but I think it's great.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know that's one of the ones you're talking to. I had a call with them the other day. I really liked what they had going on. I thought it was a really interesting model. I'm working on a deal with Facebook. It's me, Facebook, and I got to pick one carrier to partner. Attune was that partner. We're running some test ads essentially and everyone's sharing the data. It's a lot of fun.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: You, Zucks, and Hobson.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I had to sign a Facebook NDA. I'm thinking about framing it and putting it on my wall. It was kind of cool. I was like, "Hey, I just want to clarify, if I make a video talking about Facebook, y'all aren't going to..." They're like, "No, it's good." They're like, "We will shut down your internet forever." I don't really want to get on your bad side. But it's come in handy too. I have a buddy that had an ad that he had a difficult time getting launched. I was like, "Hey, go in on the backend and look at this guy's account. Tell me what he's doing wrong." And they did. That's a cool project that's been in the works actually since Agent 2021. We're super excited about it.
--:-- We have just a few minutes left and I want to be respectful of your time. I would be remiss because I've never actually had this conversation with you and I've just been waiting for the right time because I know where it could go. What was it like to spend time with Gary Vee? What was your experience like?
--:-- Bradley Flowers: I got to spend... I met him once before at a speaking thing he did in 2016. Then Agent 2021 happened. We got to spend some time with him there. They had a speaker breakfast, so that was kind of cool. Then the Senior Bowl Summit, which I helped found last year here in Mobile—college football all-star game—we had a business conference and Gary came in for that. Simply for the connections. I got to have dinner with him about a week after Agent 2021. It was strange. And I mean that in a good way. Seeing him not in a business setting was interesting.
--:-- I've been around some of these guys, like the Grant Cardones of the world. They walk in a room and it's like, "I'm here, MF." He just walked in like, "What's up, man. What's up. Hey, yeah. Hey, yeah. What's up?" Just very... And you're like, "Wait a minute, you're normal? You're not..." We're in a crowd of people and he's the quietest dude there. Not saying anything, just listening. You've heard him say that, but literally it was almost weird. It was a little off-putting. It's like, "Wait a minute, I'm expecting bravado and all that." He and I had a conversation right when he got there. He gets pulled away, talks to everybody, and then like an hour later circles back to me and brings up what we talked about, wanting to know more genuinely. So that's kind of cool.
--:-- Then the conference was the next day. Then going to do the podcast, which was four months later. He's meeting with Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty was in the room immediately before us. I had no idea who Jay Shetty was at the time. He goes from meeting with Jay Shetty to a meeting with his COO, to a podcast with us, and another meeting, I think with the PureWow guy. The office is right there. To see him in that super business mode and how different that was from a social dinner was really interesting. I think we put people like that on a pedestal sometimes and think they are that way all the time, like the way we see on Facebook, when it's actually the exact opposite.
--:-- Another thing that I thought was neat: he gives the impression that they're filming him 24/7. They're not filming him 24/7. It's like three hours a day. It's scheduled. You get so much content out of that little amount of time. So that was kind of cool to see from a creative art standpoint.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: At Agent 2021, I got to meet him twice. Once very briefly, and once I snuck my way into the VIP lounge. I just literally harassed the woman who was at the door, telling her that I was a speaker and I think I was supposed to be there. I say harassed in a reasonable way. I was just like, "I'm a speaker. I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be here." And finally she's just like, "Whatever, just go in."
--:-- [Sound of dog barking]
--:-- Oh my god. Hold on one sec. Of course my dog's going to go bananas in the last two minutes. Hey, inappropriate. Say hello, Isabella. You got to leave this in. Hey Isabella, it's inappropriate for you to be barking during podcast time. Got to be used to dad doing podcasts by now.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah, at this point, she knows.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Sit. There's no immediate danger. Sit down.
--:-- So I worked my way into this room. Then I saw Michelle Linka was in there from Florida. So I see her in there. We're chatting. I had met him earlier. He basically has a line of people and he's just talking to them. I didn't want to get in line because I wasn't sure, "Am I supposed to be here? Am I not supposed to be here? I don't want to be that jerk who doesn't have the right ticket." I wanted to spend some time and get to know him because I've consumed so much of his content. But at the same time, you don't want to be that guy. Ego, whatever it is. But she's like, "Look, I don't want to wait in this line by myself. Wait with me." I said, "That's fine." So we ended up waiting. It was cool. I got to hang out with her a little bit. She's really interesting and a very good person. I really like her. So that was fun.
--:-- Then we get up there. Man, I just was like, "Choose this line." Got 150 people at least right at this VIP dinner. This is at the end of Agent 2021 after he's done the keynote, the meetings all day. You see him all over the place. This is a long ass day. From work and conferences, by that time I don't care if you're introvert, extrovert, or on amphetamines, you are toasted. It doesn't matter how much money they're paying you. You're always like, "Is this shit worth it?" You've just run out of energy and brain power. And here he is, one after the next after the next.
--:-- Michelle gives him a big hug. Snap, I snapped a photo of them. That's cool. She talks to him for a minute. Then I'm like, "Hey man, we had a chance to... we bro hugged before, we got the bro shot before." I was like, "I just wanted to come up and..." I just wanted to say something to him. And dude, we spent seven minutes just talking about business stuff. "Hey, this and that." Asking about the insurance industry. I asked him, "How come I don't see any of your content focused on the insurance industry? I don't see you with any insurance clients." He had a really interesting perspective on that, which I did not disagree with. Basically, insurance carriers thus far have been unwilling to approach social in a way that is meaningful. He's like, "I'm not going to waste my team's time trying to convince these guys to do what they should be doing. When they start to come around, I'll start to engage in that space." I'm paraphrasing. That's basically what his stance was.
--:-- Then we started talking about the Bills. He was just a super good guy. I walked away and I called my wife. She knew that I was excited. I was texting her, "I'm going to get..." I just said to my wife, I said, "Take out who he was as someone who presents himself in the public space."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You do the same as a speaker, as someone who tries to add value through information, education, entertainment. Whether you agree with what he says or not, the way that he operates is exactly the way that you should operate. The eye contact, the way he engages with you, he is present in the moment. He is listening and responding. You could disagree with every one of his takes on everything, but the way he operates himself as a public persona is absolutely, positively the right way to do it from my perspective. I took so much as a speaker away from meeting him than I did from anything he actually said.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yep. I see that stuff too. I'm sure you get this too, where I get three insurance agents, five insurance agents a day reaching out to me, which I don't feel worthy of, but it happens. A lot of times you have to give advice. I see them giving advice to people and you almost have to... We had an insurance agent in Pakistan reach out to us wanting advice. I went into this ball of anxiety. I'm like, I want to help this guy, but I have no idea how to give advice to someone selling insurance in Pakistan. I kind of dumbed it down and thought, okay, how would I give this advice to someone in Alabama? I did that. I see that when people ask him questions, you're not sure what the answer is for that person, so let's give a 30,000-foot view.
--:-- I learn a lot from that, especially the interacting with people. I did a conference for NAFA Alabama. I've been speaking on their circuit. They mistakenly booked two keynotes in one day, two hours apart. They had already paid me for them, so I did it. By that second one, I was so exhausted. I did not want to talk to anyone. I think I drove home without the radio on. But you see somebody like that and you're like, well, if he can do that, I can certainly do that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. It was a big reason I took on the anti-inflammatory diet and started eating and exercising the way that I did about two and a half years ago. Elevate 2017. We got to the last day. I was supposed to do a fireside chat, the closing keynote, with a guy by the name of Michael Preem. He does work in the insurance space, but he's not a thought leader. He does his business credibly, smart programmatic ads guy. I thought, he has such an interesting perspective on our industry. I would love to finish with this high level. Programmatic is something most agents would never think about, but it's so interesting, the pixels and the technology and the tracking.
--:-- Okay, dude, I got five minutes into that keynote and I looked at him. I leaned forward and I said, "I can't finish. I can't do this with you. I'm not here. I can't be at your level." God bless him, he picked up on it, stood up, walked out front, and I just sat back and let him finish. He turned around and said, "You're okay?" I was just done. I had nothing left. That's a big reason why Gary got in shape. You have to be in the right space to give the audience what they deserve. You have to think of yourself like an athlete, because otherwise you're going to give a boring presentation. You have to think that deeply about it.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah. So I got a question.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Go ahead.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: You may have talked about this, but I don't think I've seen you talk about it. What is your why? What motivates you? What's your purpose?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's an interesting question. I've never really spent a whole lot of time thinking about that. My why? I love helping people. I've always loved helping people. My personal success has never been important to me. I hate goals. I just hate goals. I'm just going to try as hard as I effing can. I'll get as much as I can get because I'm going to try as hard as I can. I don't know what my goal should be. I was emailing with Cass and Wes Anderson the other day because I was like, these carriers are going to want a goal for me. What should be my goal? I'm going to do as much as possible with the resources I have, reinvesting into my business. That's as much as I'm going to produce. I can tell you a million, I can tell you 500,000, I can tell you 10 bazillion. I have no clue. As much as I can do.
--:-- My personal goals have never mattered. I've never been like, I want to be a top 10 speaker. I want to be on this list. I can give two flying shits about that stuff. It's always been about how can I help Bradley Flowers be the best version of him? What do I need to say to him? Who can I connect him with? Can I share a tool with him? Can I help him do this thing over here? Can I put him on blast on this thing that I have over here so that he can get up on his? I try to find good people and help them.
--:-- The hard part about that is I think a lot of the setbacks that I've had in my career is because I haven't had a clear goal. You're right. I haven't had a "I want to be this thing." Cass is like, "I want to build churches in Cuba." That's what I want my life to be. Everything I do is so that sometime in the near future, I can build churches in Cuba. That's my goal. That's my why. My family, yes, but build churches in Cuba. He can then make all these decisions to get him to that thing. I think I'm starting to get that. My kids getting to a certain age have started to produce that thing for me. I just never got as much gratification out of my own success as I did watching someone else rise up and helping them do that.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: You said something that reminded me of another Gary story that I think is going to be really cool for you and your audience. You said churches. Out of all the things that happened after that, a lot of good happened. This was probably the coolest thing. You mentioned regardless of if you agree with the message or not, watching how he operates. I apologize for breaking this up, but I wanted to say this before.
--:-- I go to a very Southern Baptist church. Technically it's non-denominational, but technically it's Southern Baptist. About a week after we did that podcast, I was sitting in the cafe drinking coffee on a Sunday. The preacher walks up to me. This is a church of a thousand people on Sunday. He says, "Can I ask you a question?" I said, "Sure." He said, "How do you know Gary V?" It was almost like trying to keep it a secret. I said, "Well, I really don't know him. I've just made a lot of good chess moves that have put me there." He said, "Man, I would love the opportunity to tell him that a lot of the stuff he preaches about is the same stuff we preach about. It's just laced with F-bombs. If you can put that to the side, it's the same message. Be a good person, do right by others. Take care of your family, be a hard worker." I thought that was the coolest thing that's happened since that whole deal. When you said that about casting the churches, it reminded me of that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This stuff is so interesting. You throw in a little drip of serendipity, some luck, the muse touches you on the shoulder, and that's how things happen.
--:-- One of the things I thought was really cool about the decade change was all the stories of where someone was in 2010 or 2009 and where they were in 2019. I think that's really powerful to keep in your head. Obviously you could do that every year. I'm here today and here's where I was 10 years ago. People putting the pictures out and the stories out and where their journeys have come. 10 years is a long time and it's tomorrow. Following the right people, using the right people as guideposts, guide rails, connecting with the right people. I think of the group of people that you and I and some of our other friends constantly back-channel, talking and bouncing things off each other and sharing. There's no way I could get this agency off the ground if it wasn't for that.
--:-- I'm going to give a huge shout out to Jack Wingate from All Choice Insurance. Before this call, he just gave me an hour of his time. We were just talking for an hour. It wasn't recorded. It wasn't for anyone's benefit. It was just he and I talking about really Rogue and All Choice. What do I want to be? How does it line up with what he's doing? What advice can he give me? That kind of selflessness, I feel like in some regard, that is a very special aspect of the independent insurance industry that is unique. I don't think many professionals give of each other as much as I have felt agents are willing to give to not just me, but to so many of their brothers and sisters in arms. I think that's something our industry should be very, very proud of. You don't even get that on the captive side. Having been on that side for several different companies, that's an independent insurance agent. That's what that is.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah. For me too, I don't really have an end goal so to speak. That's a thing that I enjoy, playing the game of business. My end goal would be to be successful enough that I can play the game of business for the love of the game. The hardest part of starting Portal, honestly, has been all the things I've had to say no to. I want to get to a point where if somebody says, "Hey, I have this great business idea, but I don't have the money," I can stroke a $100,000 check just for the love of helping get that business off the ground. That's kind of my thing. There are a lot of great byproducts of that. I'm going to take care of my family in the process. I'm going to take care of myself in the process. I'm going to help a ton of employees. There are a lot of byproducts of that that for a lot of folks is the why, but that's kind of mine.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hey man, this has been tremendous. We've been all over the place. It's my favorite kind of podcast, just rapping, talking shop. Tell everyone who's listening where they can connect with you and what they should check out to get to know you more, the podcast, all that kind of stuff.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Yeah. The podcast is The Insurance Guys Podcast. It's anywhere there's a podcast or you can go to theinsuranceguyspodcast.com. Me personally, I'm at Bradley Flowers underscore on Instagram and pretty much Bradley Flowers everywhere else. Send me a DM. Getportalinsurance.com. That site's not quite where I want it yet, but it's enough that I'm comfortable if you take a look.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Everyone give him a quick page load so that you can see his Google Analytics go up and get that little shot of dopamine when he sees his Google Analytics jump up.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Hey, don't do that if you don't want to see me on your Facebook feed for 180 days.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Spoken like a true marketer. All right, brother, we're out of here. Thanks everyone for listening. I love you for listening. We're out of here. Peace.
--:-- Bradley Flowers: Thank you.
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