RHS 046 - Jeff Shi on Finding Your Rival and World Domination

Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. I'm super excited about today's episode because we have Jeff Shi on the show, and Jeff is one of the most interesting dudes that I know. Coming out of the captive world where he grew an incredibly successful Allstate agency, which probably doesn't even do justice just explaining as an Allstate agency. He had a real operation, upwards of 20 agents, growing, just crushing the game in Allstate.

Ryan Hanley: Then recently, just in the last 12 months, I think it was about nine months ago, he moved over to the independent side and is now taking all those hardcore dynamic sales skills, marketing skills, process, and growing his independent agency, Quantum, at the same rate. It's staggering when you hear how he's growing and what he's doing. We talk process. We talk dedication, perseverance. We talk about how to refine your business, how to sculpt your agency to be exactly what you want it to be.

Ryan Hanley: You've probably heard Jeff Shi's name around the game, but you get him in a way that you've never heard him before in this podcast. It is my honor to have Jeff on the show, and I'm just excited to share him with you. Before we get there, two things. First, if you're enjoying this show, stop what you're doing immediately, hit pause, or just keep listening, whichever you want to do, but go to your Google machine and type in ryanhandley.com. There's going to be a little box that pops up. Stick your email in that box. That's how you're going to get notified about new podcasts when they come out, as well as other cool pieces of content that I find or I write or if I'm on someone else's show.

Ryan Hanley: Like last week, I shared my interview where I was on David Carruthers' podcast, which was a really dynamic and fun conversation. David is a gangster and I just love talking to him. So that was a ton of fun. But you don't get that kind of additional stuff if you're just subscribed on iTunes, which is cool. But I'd love you to subscribe via email as well.

Ryan Hanley: Lastly, I want to give a huge shout out to my people at Tarmica, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com. Go get a demo. Check it out. If you haven't listened to the episode that I did with Ragath, the founder, go back and listen to that episode. Tarmica is really changing the game for me in small commercial. Rogue is a commercial-focused agency, and when I have something come in that I know is BOP-based, instead of logging into seven different systems, I log into one system, I get the best quote for the coverage that I need. I can bind that policy and get that client what they need fast, but get it done right, and Tarmica's making that possible.

Ryan Hanley: I hope you'll check it out, get a demo. I think you'll be very happy with what you see. Ultimately, this is the future of where small commercial is going because it's making agencies like yours profitable in small commercial, and it's already making Rogue profitable. So hope you'll check that out. All right, guys, now that we got that out of the way, let's get on to Jeff Shi.

[Discussion begins]

Ryan Hanley: There's a saying that people preach: stronger together. Are we really stronger together? I'm going to say something that probably in the open market would be wildly unpopular. Even if certain people hear this, it will probably get me canceled. But I'm a firm believer in a hierarchical structure of life. Not that any group or person should ever be not given the opportunity to be as high up in that hierarchy as they choose to be. But I would be remiss if I did not think that there were high performers like yourself who are going to stand out, push forward, and lead the market, and there were people who could never, for their own reasons, do the things that you in particular have done, or others like you.

Ryan Hanley: My reason for saying that is you and others are better together when you're surrounded by other people that make you better. We are not better together when we are surrounded by people who choose not to do the things that help everybody get better. Does that make sense? I think that one of the things that I have greatly appreciated about the last three to five years of this industry are that those individuals who are pushing hard, who are trying new things, who are willing to fail, who are willing to share, are better together. They are sharing ideas, sharing technology, sharing experiences, building connections, forming alliances, whether those just be intellectual or technology or actual things.

Jeff Shi: Let's go record this because this is gold. If you want to do the intro, we are going to take it somewhere and we're going right now. You hit it, man. You just hit it. We're going right now. Okay, because I want to share with you what I have seen since I came over to this side.

Jeff Shi: On that subject, one thing in the captive world I always saw over the eight and a half years, and this was repeated to me over and over again: you might not have all the tools you need to conquer the world, but tough places produce tough people. The captive world of State Farm, of Farmers, of Allstate are what you identify as the tough places when they're dealing with an 8% to 12% close rate.

Jeff Shi: For example, I just did my own Zoom. We do internal Zoom meetings, and I bring on guests to my show. One day you're going to be invited to that show. I just started, and I've only invited my second guest. He is an Allstate agent out of Atlanta, and before that he was a State Farm agent. His best month ever with 12-month annualized auto, if you analyze all those 12 months at State Farm, was $250,000. When he came over to Allstate, his close ratio went down by four to five percent out of 100 people they quote, and his game got better. His best month was almost $800,000 in premium with 14 producers. How does he do it when the close ratio goes down lower? There's truly something about if you can actually survive that environment and make you stronger and better at what you do at your craft. In a way, it's producing some of the toughest, brightest, sharpest agents in the ecosystem.

Jeff Shi: My goal over at Quantum is to bring our culture that we learned in the captive world over, but also bring these rock stars from the captive world over and show them what this other side is like. Sometimes they do get brainwashed into thinking the grass is not green on the other side. I will back the difference because I was an eight and a half year captive agent. I thought that this is where I belong, and I'm going to go get that blue Hall of Fame jacket. I had that same ambition. I had that same dream.

Jeff Shi: As these guys come over slowly, gradually from the captive world to the independent world, I think you can see a culture shift. I think that culture shift is already happening. If I could be the example to bring everybody over, that's awesome. But if I could be the culture inspiration to bring more people over, that's even better. At the end of the day, there's a difference between motivation and inspiration. If someone sees my agency Zoom screenshot from my company, they might say, "Oh, that guy did some high production number." That might motivate them a little bit. But if they see one, two, three, four, five, ten, twenty people start doing it, that becomes a culture shift and that starts inspiring others.

Jeff Shi: Daniel Sung, I had a great conversation with him today. Great agent, great Park Agency out of West Coast, towards California. I shared a cool story with him and I'm going to share it with your listeners. My third year as a captive office agent, I was doing good numbers in my district and good numbers in my territory. Maybe 100 agents in my area. But I wasn't doing the best number in my state out of 320 agents. There was always this guy, Frank Siambrough, a 12-year, 13-year mega agent. We call this group of guys mega agents when they have over 7,500 policies or $8 million in premiums. Shout out to Frank. He was always number one on the leaderboard. Most auto, most properties. He had a more challenging environment than I did in Northern Virginia when he's in Virginia Beach. He's at one to 2% tropical deductible to 5% to 10% going against independent agents, State Farm agents that are at $1,000 deductible. But he's always up there.

Jeff Shi: My first year, I couldn't catch him. My second year, I couldn't catch him. The beginning of my third year, we decided to open the first week of the third year like this. I sent him a fax. On the fax, I wrote, "Dear Frank, we know you're the number one agent in Virginia every single year. This year, our goal is to beat you and take over the number one spot." Then I handed the fax over to all my staff, all my salespeople in my office, and my service people, and I made all of them sign. I explained to them what the fax was, what I was going to do with it, and I made them take ownership of the challenge.

Jeff Shi: It's kind of like the Lakers and the Celtics rivalry made each other better. Detroit Pistons made the Chicago Bulls and made Jordan better. The 49ers made the Seahawks better. Rivals create competition. Competition elevates our levels. I sent the fax over. I got no response, no call, no email, nothing. A couple months later, I saw him and he didn't say anything to me. I went over there and I shook his hand. I introduced myself. "Hi, my name is Jeff. I sent you a fax a couple months ago." He said, "Yeah, I remember." He was hushed about production. He didn't say much to me. He didn't have to say much to me. I was nobody. I didn't earn my spot at the table. But the fact that he remembered that fax means he wanted to win. He definitely didn't want to give up his number one spot to some random guy like me. He wanted to win.

Jeff Shi: It's kind of like Kobe. Kobe might be a 15-year veteran, but don't think for one second he doesn't want to take that last game-winning shot. Don't think for one second he's like, "Oh, here's LeBron. I'm a 15-year veteran. He's in his prime. I'm going to be okay losing to him." He did not want to give up his spot.

Jeff Shi: Something I saw in the captive world that was cool was that we shared numbers. We shared our new business production numbers with each other. We shared how much huddle we were writing. We showed how much policy or item we were writing and how much premium we were writing. We made each other better that way.

Jeff Shi: Let me give you another example. I have two great friends from the Allstate world. One gentleman named Kevin Hamill. He was such an advanced and forward thinker compared to everybody else at the time, my second year, third year in the business. He really kind of took me under his wing until I caught up to his number. It was like the Karate Kid tiger scene where the student kind of surpassed the teacher. I never really said it to him because I wanted him to not stop giving me the knowledge that he is full of. The guy is full of amazing knowledge and he made me better. But one thing he always did: he always took a screenshot of his number to force me to take a screenshot of my number, to remind me that I was doing less than him. It's not his way of bullying me. It's his way of raising my game.

Jeff Shi: I just don't see that from some of the Facebook groups I have been in. People talk about, "Where can I find a market for this RV? Where can I find a market for that boat? Where can I find a market for this guy with 20-some tickets?" We focus on the thing, literally the 1% to 5% thing that has no direct outcome on our growth, versus the 80% to 85% thing that affects all of growth.

Jeff Shi: Another story about how my business partner, Justin, and I became close. I heard of his name and his wife. They were great agents. Both own agencies in Illinois. We met on an award trip in Hawaii. We're sitting at dinner and we're like, "Hey, bro, glad to meet you in person." We were all Facebook chatting and everything. Since then, we just kind of hit it off because we both run pretty incredible dynamic operations for our model agency size. We had 20, 30 people. He had dynamic people in his organization, and he viewed things completely differently than I view. He views his lead systems as an outbound machine. It's a CRM system. It's data leads. It's a CPA. I view my system as an inbound machine where click-to-calls, live transfers, and keep people on the phone as much as we can. We view our talent level differently. He keeps people in the rail, where I kind of keep everybody scattered. I learned a lot from him by keeping people single-focused, single-minded, and staying in their lane. They do an amazing job because now you're consistently repeating the same thing over and over again.

Jeff Shi: Back to my story, because I was getting sidetracked. We met each other, and then when he went down to Texas and started blowing up, putting up $250,000 in premium at six months old. Keep in mind, really they're putting up about $370,000, then $350,000 written premium, then $400,000 written premium. He kept reminding me of his results, what he's doing in Texas. We talk once a day, once every two days, once every three days. Then we moved to talking every day because I want to understand what's driving that growth. So I started sending him my results. And of course, I'm here to win. So I want to make sure that all my people working for my organization know that we are losing right now. We're not here to lose just because some guy in Texas had higher auto premiums or higher home premiums. That's the excuse. We're not going to write that excuse. The minute we write that excuse, we are already giving up. By the way, Virginia is the 50th highest auto premium in the entire country. So we want to chase them.

Jeff Shi: Then it became a three-way competition where I grabbed Kevin Hamill. Kevin Hamill was like, "Oh, that's cute. You guys are doing $400,000, $500,000 a month." At the time, Kevin was doing $700,000. But he'd been consistently doing $700,000. So we started growing our organization and we started growing it by $100,000 of new business production more per month. Literally in 2018, January, my production was $350,000. February, my production was $450,000. March, it just went over $100,000 to $150,000 every single month. We were just pushing that machine and funding the machine. We didn't give a F about ROI. We didn't care about whether we were profiting. We just wanted to win. We wanted to win now. It was the Laker mentality. We want to win and we want to win now. I guess that's not just the Laker mentality. You can say the New York Yankees follow the same mentality. We want to win and we want to win now.

Jeff Shi: Since then, going through that growth matured us. If you look before 2018 and after 2018, that growth changed all three of us because we all became better agency owners of our own craft. There are a lot of little things. The attention to details is the engine that drives everything because attention to details is how we go from point A to point B when we're using the same people, same leads, same CRMs.

Jeff Shi: When I came over from the captive world to the independent world, I realized there's a community here that is even bigger, even better. There are people with less egos. I'm just starting name dropping. David Carruthers in Florida. He's an awesome dude. I ordered 30 of his books, his commercial books, and I'm going to send them to my team. Just some of the things I see him post, the guy gets it. He's all about helping people. It's nice to see success and people still appreciate it. That's respect to me. And the dude with messages, dropped it on my boy, Wesley Anderson. He's connected. He just doesn't have any enemies. He's like baby Jesus.

Jeff Shi: A lot of people, when they come over from the captive world, the thing they fear is losing that sense of community because they had that in the captive world. The captive world does a great job marketing and bonding you guys together between market support and the sales leaders to agent support in the Facebook groups. There's an amazing group here. But I do think we can channel it differently. The market support and the community support right now, everything I have seen is a lot of, "How do I put this SR22 policy with which carrier?" or "How do I write this harder thing that people have ever think?" When you have access to a Facebook group of 3,000, 5,000, 10,000, is that really the question you want to ask 10,000 smart professionals at the highest level of their game? What is that SR22 auto policy really going to pay us? How many times is that really going to stay on our book? People are not channeling the right questions. If everyone starts channeling the right questions and asking each other, you're going to see the game go up.

Jeff Shi: Once in a while, I see people post great questions in Facebook groups about how to properly set up a CRM, how to properly set up a pay plan that you can't just give to 1%, but you can give to 5, 10, 20. You can scale. We should be talking about how do we train our supervisors? How do we rise the tide on our chess board, taking all of our pawns and turning them into bishops, knights, queens, kings? Because we're the chess player. Everybody running their agency, they're the chess player. How do we get more queens and kings in our castle? How do we find that on the board so they can bring an army of more pawns and bishops and knights?

Jeff Shi: If I get listeners, and I think you have a lot of listeners who are independent agents, start challenging each other. Let's say I am Agent A and you are Agent B. I'm going to go find other agents who are similar to myself. Similar in premium size, similar in multi-production, similar in staff structures, similar in new business models. Whether those new business models are Google and Yelp reviews, or mortgage referrals, or commercial mindset, or CRM and buying internet leads all day, or whatever that is. Start channeling each other and find each other's rivals. I would never be here if I didn't find my rivals. I always go out there and look for people who are doing better than me, and I would challenge them and realize that they came here with the same 10 fingers I have. My 10 fingers are equal to their 10 fingers.

Ryan Hanley: I think a lot of people get caught up in... One of the major differences from having never been a captive agent, I don't know this for sure, but I'd be interested in your take. I think this is not an excuse, but I do think this is something that I've seen people get caught up in. There are so many moving parts in an independent agency. In a captive agency, it's Allstate. You've learned the product. The product is exactly what it is. You can recall what's a good fit, what's a bad fit, how to do X, how to do Y, how to do Z like that, because it's one set of processes. Your conversion rate is lower because maybe you do just have that one process, but the flip side is you know exactly how that process works.

Ryan Hanley: I found myself getting caught up in it at times and I've had to pull back. There are so many moving parts to an independent agency that it is really easy to waste brain cycles on silly things. I'll give you a case in point today. I had an account come in. Moving company calls me. It's like $7,000 in premium. Kid wants to buy the policy. I don't have a premium finance company. So now the second half of my day is finding a premium finance company. Who's a good premium finance company? Once I get that premium finance company, how do I hook that premium finance company up to my... These are the stupid things. These are lost time.

Ryan Hanley: What we're not doing, and I hold myself accountable to this, is that I need to either find some way to have someone else do that or just simply not do it. Just tell that guy, "I only operate direct bill because agency bill premium finance stuff is brain cycles and time that isn't helping me." But hey, what if a $30,000 account comes in that you run through an excess lines carrier? That's $3,000 in revenue. If you can sign the account and make it worth your time, should you write it? Should you not write it? Because now you're agency billing, you're dealing with premium finance. It's just more to deal with.

Ryan Hanley: I completely and utterly agree with your argument that we need to be asking bigger questions and better questions. I do think there is a lot of posturing that presents as openness, but is really just ego stroking. We stay on the surface instead of really digging into what's driving success, how do we get there, and how do we do it in a way that's sustainable long-term? I just think we get caught up in "how do you write an SR-22?" But like you said, why are you even considering writing that business? Unless you're going to write 1,000 SR-22s, writing one SR-22 is not worth your time. That's the question I had to ask myself about this moving company. Do I want to make the $700 in revenue, but spend probably a day figuring out premium finance, getting it set up, running it through the system, running the process, getting everything hooked up for $700? Or do I just tell the guy, "Hey, man, I can't help you?"

Jeff Shi: To add to that, when we have a good amount of sales producers, it gives us a good amount of feedback on what change should look like on a bigger scale. A 1% change could be a coincidence, could be an anomaly. But when you see a change on a whole new level with a bunch of people, now you kind of understand things. When we see a lot of the captive users' sales producers come over to the independent world, their call time goes way down. Not because they're not hardworking anymore, but because they get stuck on working on quotes. They get stuck wanting to win. They say, "Oh, I am now running with five carriers, 10 carriers behind me. Now I am a guy that is going to win because now I have the power to win."

Jeff Shi: Some of the best agents I have interviewed in the captive world, one of their sales producers can quote 10, 15, even 20 households per day out of an eight to ten hour shift. When they come over here, they are now quoting five to six households per day because they get stuck on trying to be that Geico open book. Geico open book has very aggressive underwriting. They raise the rates on the second year, third year, fourth year, but their first year entry point is aggressive underwriting. It's tough to beat. When they see these things, they get stuck on trying to win. By trying to win now, they sacrifice winning as a whole. I see their production even go down. I have seen our own guys where people come over when they have more tools and their sales results have gone down. They cannot get out of their own way on trying to win everything.

Ryan Hanley: These are the problems that I'm living. As everyone who's listening to this show knows, I'm a one-man shop. An account comes in, I'm responsible for marketing sales. I got to go out and actually market the account and get quotes. Once those quotes come back, I have to verify those quotes. I have to package them up. I have to put the proposal out to the client. I have to sell the client. Once the client is sold, I got to onboard the client. I got to process and issue the business. When you really look at it, I can basically write an account a day. That's what I can write. That's not bad, but that's not going to get me to escape velocity.

Ryan Hanley: I think we have to be very selective with the tools that we're using. You look at the different pieces of technology that you have access to. I think we go a couple different ways. We get lost in it. The number of times, if you do a search inside of IIABA for CRM or agency management system, you'll see 10,000 conversations about the same question over and over again. Let's just cut to the chase. They're all terrible. Every CRM has holes. They do some good things. They do some bad things. These are the questions we have to stop asking and just start doing the work and building processes and flows that allow us to be more productive on a day-to-day basis. I see people asking the same questions over and over and over again, and it doesn't help you produce more business. It doesn't help you get past that point.

Ryan Hanley: Sometimes, if I'm being honest, sometimes I envy the captive side in that they just have one thing to sell. They can just be awesome at selling one thing and get really, really good at it. On the independent side, with every new market you take on, you have a new set of underwriting guidelines. You have a new underwriter to deal with. You have new timetables to deal with. You have new technology to deal with. Everybody thinks that their product and their system is the easiest, but some make you use Internet Explorer. Some you have to use this thing over here. My point is it's a trap. It's a time trap.

Jeff Shi: One hundred percent.

Ryan Hanley: I have personally been, and this is something I'm working on right now, I've slowed my production way down to try to figure out this problem in my agency. I can't bring another producer on right now in my agency. I couldn't do it. I would have no ability. They wouldn't help me scale because I have one computer that I do 80% of my work on, and then I have another computer that I have to use for certain systems that are terrible to use, but they only work on something like Internet Explorer. These are small little problems.

Jeff Shi: Can I tell you a funny story? We saw that. We were running a team hard and we're like, "What the hell?" Let's just call her Jennifer. I'm going to give it a fictitious name. Why is Jennifer writing $50,000 with a captive carrier? If you analyze the auto, she's probably writing $70,000, $80,000. She comes over here and she's writing less. On an analyzed base, she's barely hitting $50,000. So we literally took our carriers out of our radar system. At first we had like nine, then we went down to eight, now we have three or four. We just said, "You know what? If we're not winning with these three or four, we actually want you to move on." That has really allowed our people to learn the coding platform better, to be faster and more efficient. Jennifer's production has gone up. If we could give advice to those people who are making that transition where they're having all the power, I would recommend them to relinquish some of that power and just hone in on that specific punch, and then let it punch harder and faster.

Ryan Hanley: I think what you just described is something that I've actually started to consider. I haven't done it, but I was looking at my rater the other day.

Jeff Shi: How many do you have in there?

Ryan Hanley: I have seven carriers right now. Seven carriers for auto, eight for home.

Jeff Shi: Who's the time trap? Would you agree sometimes that could be a time trap?

Ryan Hanley: Oh, 100%. And here's the hardest part. Some of the carriers that consistently come up with the lower premiums are actually the worst to deal with in terms of actually issuing and binding. So what happens is I have to make this conscious decision. Do I put it with Travelers who's going to cost me an extra 30 minutes because their system is so difficult to deal with, but they have a good product and good rates? They have good rates in New York. They absolutely do. And I like Travelers' product. I have no beef with their product. But their system is very, very time intensive to deal with. So do I go there or do I put it with someone like Safeco whose rates might be slightly higher in New York State, also a good product, but their system works like a snap. It's bing, bing, bing, quote issue done, move on to the next account. These are the hard decisions.

Now, I will say there are companies that are solving this problem. I actually just interviewed Ragath Tana from Tarmica, the founder. Dude, I had a phone call the other day for a commercial lines phone call: quote, bind, issue a BOP in 21 minutes. Quote, bind, issue with Liberty Mutual in 21 minutes. Got the guy on the phone—it was an art studio moving from one location to another, wanted to quote his insurance. It wasn't a big policy, but the guy calls me, I pull up Tarmica, punch the information into the system as I'm talking to him on the phone, doing some relationship building while I'm doing it. Bop, bop, bop. Rates come up. Liberty Mutual, 600 bucks. Perfect. "Hey man, how does $600 sound?" "Sounds great." Click. Credit card. Bound. Onto the next thing in 21 minutes.

Now, to me, the fact that that is essentially—and maybe I'm crazy—but 21 minutes in personal lines for me, there's no one that can do that. Not even close. And I've never used EasyLinks. I'm a PL rater. It's certainly not possible, not in New York state because the rates are always so different. And I don't think that's necessarily a PL rating problem. The rates are always different.

These are the things where I've started asking myself, do I really need all these carriers? What's more important: that I can quote three people in a day or that I can quote one person in a day? If I have seven carriers, I can probably only quote one person a day. It just takes too much time. But if I have three or four carriers that I know really well, I can probably quote three to four people a day by myself. Or I just have to hire someone and have them do it for me. Those are the options. How are you going to grow? How are you going to scale?

Right now, my goal is to scale in commercial lines. I can quote if I get away from—I need to start being more selective with the classes of business that I target and the classes of business that I'm willing to write. If I do that using a combination of Tarmica and Cincinnati, which is very quick to turn around quotes of a certain style, if it fits their appetite, everyone else I have works through Tarmica. I can quote, bind, issue commercial lines policies very fast and effectively. Eventually, I'm going to get to a point where I can start to work in a part-time VA to help me with some of the back office onboarding stuff that eats up my time, then I can quote more. My hope is that within this first year of business—if you consider March 9th my first day—within this first year, I can have a full-time employee who's basically doing everything that is transactional in the business.

Jeff Shi: A guy launches a business during COVID on March 9th.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. We're doing all right though. I'm breathing on $100,000 in premium, which isn't a ton, but for March and April being essentially lost months, and then watching the economy slowly come back together for May and June, I'm not unhappy with that. Things have to keep ramping and the process has to get better.

Jeff Shi: Do I think what I hear you saying is that what independent agents lack that captives have based on their training is really solid, consistent discipline, workflows, and processes? I would wholeheartedly agree with you on that. I wouldn't say all the captive agents are disciplined, but when you come from a tough environment and you can only—here's your square, you got to grow within your own square—it kind of holds them to a tunnel vision. Did that make sense?

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Jeff Shi: Look at a thoroughbred racehorse. They get these blinders put on them because they're not looking at what other people do. They're focusing on their straight line. When you have a captive carrier, you're pretty much running that straight line. Versus the independent agent, they're like, "Oh, I can do that artisan trucking over there. Oh, I can do that moving company. Oh, somebody just posted they're buying $50,000 on non-standard auto on three homes or three autos." You kind of like seeing what everybody is doing in every direction. This is a much, much bigger world. It's a huge world between all the carriers, and then you have the sub-carriers, the MGA carriers, and just endless things. Sometimes it sidetracks us from our game plan.

How many independent agents do you think are out there on January 1st every year making a game plan and writing down specifically how much preferred home, preferred auto they will write and with how many carriers? I think the best ones do that, but I would say the percentage is low. If you think about what we're being paid on preferred auto and preferred home, it's pretty good premiums. It's much better premium than some of the non-standard stuff. Non-standard stuff falls at 300, 400, 500% higher. And yet we get drawn into this easy hanging fruit. Those are the mousetraps. That's the cheese in the mousetraps. That's rotten cheese.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Jeff Shi: I would challenge you: find who the Ryan Hanley rival is and push each other up. Someone that will push your buttons. After I met my partner Justin and after I met Kevin six years ago, they have pushed my buttons. They don't have to do much to push my buttons. Kind of like when you talk trash to Jordan or Kobe, it's on. All three of us were super competitive, and we went on this time period between 14 to 18 months where we elevated each other to where we are today.

Ryan Hanley: I like what you're saying. I think it's very important. I think that you have to be selective with who you choose. I think those people will naturally present themselves. Coming out of the sports world, it's really easy. I was always an athlete. I have found it more challenging in this space because patience is more a part of the game. In sports, someone pushes a button, you forget pain, you forget being tired, and you just go to work. In the business world, what I find to be very different personally is that oftentimes that pure aggression that you get in sports puts you down paths that I tend to chase.

What I have found is a huge weakness in my game so far has been I chase everything. I can see a marketing angle to every market. And what that does, especially when it's just me—I can't wait till it's not just me, but it's just me—every time I chase something, that's lost time. Time is the most valuable thing that someone like me has. Not just me in a solo shop, but really any shop that hasn't hit that true escape velocity, that's still grinding. It's not your bank account, it's your time. Every hour, I've had to become very, very structured with every hour, with every minute that I have. That wasted time costs more than a lead that I didn't write. It costs way more. That's a tough lesson to learn. I'm learning it the hard way right now, but I think that's a good thing.

Jeff Shi: You didn't come out of this. Here's the thing, you're learning it. You just said you're learning it. Learning it is going to give you experience. Once you get that experience under your belt, you're like, "Oh, that was expensive." And then you're not going to do it again.

Ryan Hanley: I said the other day, and I think this is the way that I'm going. Because I have this show, I get a lot of outreach for people who want to work with Rogue. That's an amazing thing. Don't get me wrong. I feel very blessed that that is the case. The unfortunate part about that for me is that one, I can't feed everyone who wants to work with me. And two, it creates distractions.

Case in point: I wrote a workers comp policy with a carrier through a wholesaler that I just shouldn't have written. I should have just told the person, "I don't have anything for you." Because now it's another trap. Now when that insured needs something, they come to me. I then have to figure out what they need and explain that to the wholesaler. The wholesaler has to explain it to the carrier. And then the carrier has to deliver on whatever that thing is. Twice already, I've had the carrier—somewhere in that phone tree, something happened that wasn't supposed to happen. Now I'm trying to figure out this problem. If they were written with Hanover or Cincinnati or Guard or one of my direct carriers that I'm starting to get a good feel for, I'd know how they work. But now I don't even have a direct relationship with them. So now I'm calling the MGA going, "What's going on here? Why are they putting this? Are you going to fix this?" That's an hour and a half of my life. That's an hour and a half that I'm not prospecting. I'm not quoting someone I can actually write. I'm not coming up with a proposal for someone who I want to sell.

I'm using my own experience as a microcosm—not that you should feel bad for me—but I think this is one of the major issues that most independent agents have. They try to write everything. What I am rapidly working towards is I don't want to write everything anymore. I want to say no to more than I actually write. I think that's the only way to really scale quickly. Just be like, "I can't help you. Sorry. Have a nice day."

Jeff Shi: Can't hold you on your carriers. Next, look at your raters and see who you want to take out, and that will raise your performance.

Ryan Hanley: There's two carriers in my rater right now who have tremendous products. There's no doubt their products are great. Pricing is absolutely horrible. Just having to look at the number that's pulled back every time offends me and distracts me from what should be happening. I feel bad because—and I hate that, some people are probably like, "Why do you feel bad? That's stupid." But the marketing rep is nice, and the carrier's got—I'm like, "Hey, I would love to put some business with you, but I don't even—" Why do I feel that way? That's stupid. If their pricing is so far off that I haven't even been able to sniff a policy with them yet, what am I doing still quoting them? I've had four months. I haven't put one policy with you. What am I doing? Why are you even there? It's not worth it. It's a distraction.

Jeff Shi: Plus, the only way you get any real power in the industry is to have volume with at least one carrier. Otherwise, they don't care. What carrier goes, "Oh hey, you have $25,000 premium with us. How can we help you?" They don't give two shits. They could care less what you have going on. Co-op dollars? They don't care.

Ryan Hanley: It's just interesting. These are lessons that I'm learning doing this every day. I chase some excess lines nonsense. I said to my wife today, "Why am I even quoting excess lines?" In what world is the amount of effort for an excess lines policy worth the $500 in premium and commission I'm going to get? Not that I couldn't use $500. But if my hourly rate is probably $50 an hour on that policy, is that really what we're doing here? You're going to scale on $50 an hour work? That's not what's happening. It's just another trap pulling us away from real production.

Jeff Shi: We've been talking for a while, and you kind of brought up this idea of the trap. I shared some of my experience. If there's someone listening, an independent agent listening, or a captive who's thinking about it, or maybe it's one of the new Nationwide agents who just went independent—shout out to all the Nationwide agents, 15, 58 of them. Freedom. Congrats on your freedom. If anyone has any questions or needs to connect with anyone and you are one of those agents, call me, call Jeff. We'll straighten you out. But actually call Jeff first because he can take all those phone calls. I'm busy.

What advice would I give them to avoid that trap? What's the best piece of advice to avoid that trap so that they can free themselves up and be successful? The best piece of advice they have to understand their own business model. They have to understand what made them successful at Nationwide and don't change from it. There are certain things that made them successful. Let's say commercial lines made them successful. Let's say it is delivering furniture. You have a big commercial book, 20% of your book, as a Nationwide agent, and that delivers furniture. Now we get all these other options, all these other choices. "Let's go write people who deliver computers. Let's go write people who deliver pizza. Let's go write people who deliver missiles." Let's not. Let's go back and figure out how we can deliver more furniture. Let's figure out the State Auto, the NetGen, the Safeco, the Travelers of the world. Let's take that capacity of underwriting that we didn't have before to add to that and go back and deliver more furniture. Corner the market harder.

Before they can go after everybody, there's a level of success of not wasting too much time per household and go on the next one, on the next one. I always say when you open up that pipeline, open it at two, at three, and cap it at four. Always play with the four options and then truly understand the carriers that you're selling. For 20 years, when you sell one product, you know the product you're delivering. You know the trust you're delivering. You get to back that trust. You get to say convincingly, "If I sell this policy today, it's a policy I will also sell to my mom. When you get in a total loss, I know you'll be alright. You know why? Because I put my mom in the same policy and I know she'll be alright."

At the end of the day, everybody in the independent carrier world tries to put up our mission statement, our culture statement, and then say we back a trust of our piece of paper that we're selling, the air that we're promising people. There's still very few companies that deliver. I put up a survey in a Facebook group. The survey was, "Hey, if your mom was in a total loss, who would you wish her carrier to be?" Out of all the responses, with 40-plus carriers all there, 10-plus countrywide carriers, maybe another 8 to 10 super regional carriers, consistently 80% of the answer was surrounded by four carriers. At the end of the day, if I could give them that advice, it's make sure everything you sell you understand the trust you're selling. That makes you a better salesman because you believe in the product.

Ryan Hanley: I'm going to have to just say that is the lesson that I've learned over the first four months of my time. I think I made the classic mistake of expanding too fast and too many markets. I feel like every dollar of marketing spent, every inbound, every opportunity that comes from that marketing, I feel like I want to try to figure out some MacGyver way of writing it so that I don't waste that lead. It's not helping me.

Dude, that advice is the best advice. That is exactly the right advice. While we've been on this call, this stupid account that I referenced, this workers comp account, she's emailing me right now. I'm just like, I don't even want it. I just want to say, "Go back to your old carrier. Go back. I don't even want you anymore. I don't want to work with you." I should have never written the policy in the first place.

Jeff Shi: I got a challenge for you. On the subject of this account, figure out what you want to make right and figure out what you want to make a year in your first year in total money taken out in commission. Then reverse that. If you want to make $10,000—I'm just throwing a random number out there—if you want to make $10,000, how much premium does that have to be? If that's how much premium it has to be, let's just say $100,000, then you divide by 45 working hours a week times four weeks. 21 working days is the average law per month. Then you just take that premium and you say, "You know what, I'm going to divide that." Every single hour, every single day, this is the premium that needs to come into the house. I am never going to go under that. If I am going under that, then I need to readjust because this continues while you're going down the slope. People once they go down the slope, there's no break. They're just going down the downhill slope. This allows you to measure your speed and make sure that your direction, your trajectory, is launching you. Because it doesn't matter about how fast you're going down. If you're going down and not hitting the target, then you have to climb back up the hill, which is going to take a lot of time. Then you have to relaunch yourself down the hill to hit your trajectory. Make sure you understand what your time is worth. No matter what you do every single day, the time has to be worth it.

Ryan Hanley: My goal for this month—like I said, I took a step back from hardcore producing, from outreach for the sole purpose of what I realized was I didn't have this process, this idea. I didn't have that time calculation in place. I hadn't done that work. I was so concerned—

Jeff Shi: You're too busy shopping for moving policies.

Ryan Hanley: At the beginning, I was just like, "I gotta figure out how to write shit." Just that simple thing. How do you issue a policy? How do you do that? That's hours of time trying to figure out how to do that the first time. What I've realized is there are probably five carriers that I need to have. If I have those five carriers, maybe four of which are commercial, and then another cross-cut of four of those five are more personal lines focused. If I have those carriers, that's all I need. A big part of me—and I just haven't had the balls to do this for whatever reason—a big part of me just wants to say, if one of those five carriers can't help this particular individual, I need to just move on from that individual.

Jeff Shi: Start by taking the other ones out of the raters. Just pull them out of the rater.

Ryan Hanley: Without a service person, I need them to have a good customer care center. If they don't have a good customer care center, they're not really of use to me. I need them to be able to turn around good, solid, consistent rates. I think that's the solution: hone in on what you're best at, what you can do, know your products as well as you can know them, and then push forward. I'm going to make it my goal between now and the next time that I have you on, which I'm assuming will be in a couple months, to do exactly that. This is what I've been working on all week. We're talking on Tuesday, but even last week before the 4th of July holiday, I was working on this too. It has just become so blatantly obvious.

I'm sitting here staring in my email next to the Zoom box that we're talking in. I got a random flood quote with no home and auto. The guy just wants a flood. That's it. Why am I working on that? That's freaking nuts that I am quoting a guy just on his flood.

Jeff Shi: Right.

Ryan Hanley: Right.

Jeff Shi: I challenge you to find your rival. I challenge you to find someone with a similar business model that's going to make you better. Like the Seahawks made the 49ers better.

Ryan Hanley: If you're listening to this and you want to be rivals with me, you want to have someone come after you—because I'm looking for someone to chase. I can't chase this guy. He's in a different class right now, at least for the foreseeable future. I'm sure someday I'll be knocking on his door, son of a bitch. I will come to that.

But yeah, man, that's the deal. I want to be respectful of your time. I appreciate you jumping on. Dude, it's always awesome to chat. I love where we go with our conversations. For those of you listening at home, every once in a while, I just randomly call Jeff or Jeff randomly calls me, and this is exactly the meandering kind of conversations that we have. I think they're fun. I'm glad we could share them.

Where can people get at you? Learn more about Quantum, what you're doing. I know you had one of your people—I hope I don't get her name wrong—Caitlin Eggers? She was on Cass's podcast. If you haven't listened to that episode, go listen to it. It's great. I think the things you're doing at Quantum are tremendous. I think that independents have so much to learn from captives, just as captives are starting to learn from us. Different models. I know a lot of people see us as rivals, but we're all doing the same stuff. I think what's important is that we just keep sharing. So I appreciate it.

Jeff Shi: One thing I love about that podcast is some people might not click on the podcast because her title is Director of Education. But once they hear that podcast, they realize, "Oh, she was in the trenches. She sold herself. She went door to door. She led a sales team. She trained sales people." That's one thing that we're trying to raise as a culture in our organization. I don't care what you do. If you're helping people get licensed, if you help people onboard, if you're a brand ambassador, we want people from the sales world.

Ryan Hanley: To be honest with you, this is the last thing I'll say. Today I was brainstorming an idea for a local group. I got a couple of buddies who are salesmen as well. I want to start to put together just a local networking group of salespeople, people who sell for a living. I think so often we just don't spend enough time together. In certain industries like real estate, real estate agents will get together. But moving into the future, if there is any job skill that is going to continue to be highly marketable, it's the ability to sell. You have to be able to sell. No matter what you do, you have to be able to sell. You're a doctor, you gotta sell. You're a lawyer, you have to sell. You're in manufacturing, you have to be able to sell. You're a not-for-profit, you have to be able to sell. This is an incredibly important part of success. Too often we focus on marketing and we forget about sales. We can't forget about it.

Jeff Shi: Yep. I agree.

Ryan Hanley: All right, brother. Hey, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming on the show. I'll catch you the next time.

Jeff Shi: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[End of interview. Promotional message begins.]

Announcer: Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not with the One Call Close system. You'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we used to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle tested, the One Call Close system eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit masteroftheclose.com. That's masteroftheclose.com. Do it today.