RHS 048 - Jack Wingate on How to Maximize Your Personal Value

Ryan Hanley: Hello and welcome back to the show. Today we have one of my absolute favorite people in the insurance industry, someone who I kind of watched from afar for a while. I'd heard these tales, you know, as a northerner, you hear these tales of people from the south and you don't know how true they are. And then you actually get to meet them and you realize that they're amazing people who are doing incredible things. And that is exactly the way that I think about Jack Wingate.

I think a lot of people get caught up on the beard and I actually make a little joke in the episode about it because so many of the episodes of podcasts that I've heard with Jack Wingate focus on his look. He's got this big ass beard and it's baller as shit, don't get me wrong, but that's not what makes Jack Wingate special. What makes him special is the way he thinks about what we do for a living. And I wanted to talk to him about that.

This is an incredible episode. I just am so happy to share this with you. Listen or don't listen, love it or hate it. This is an episode that I personally loved. I just loved this conversation. It was one that I was looking forward to. I look forward to every conversation I can have with Jack. And I think you're going to learn a lot if you take it in.

Before we get there, I want to share with you two things. One, if you're listening to this and you're not subscribed by email, please do. Just type in ryanhanley.com into your phone or your computer and stick your email in and subscribe by email. You don't just get updates on new episodes, which you do. And if you're subscribed on iTunes or wherever, I get that you may not want the emails, but you get other pieces of content as they come out and they're super random. I don't know when I'm going to write a LinkedIn article or do a podcast with somebody else that I think is really baller, like the one I shared with David Crothers the other day. So make sure you subscribe by email if you're really interested.

Number two, I want to give a huge shout out to our newest sponsor, our latest sponsor of this show, which is Better Agency. I just made the move from Agency Zoom to Better Agency. I'm incredibly excited about that move. I am absolutely in love with Better Agency. I just am. Everything about it makes sense to me. And Agency Zoom is a great product. This is not about knocking Agency Zoom. I think Agency Zoom is a great product. I just love Better Agency. And I love, in particular, the way both William Shaw and Nick Ayers think. Just the way they think. I've talked about Nick Ayers, what, a thousand times on this show? Nick Ayers is part of Better Agency, and I can see his thought process in all aspects of Better Agency. And it just works. I love it already. I've been using it for a week. I've already gotten three new Google reviews. I've had text message conversations with clients that I wouldn't have had if I didn't have this tool. And I just love Better Agency. The fact that they then wanted to sponsor the show is just amazing. You can read into that whatever you want. I love Better Agency. I think this is a game-changing tool. I'm probably going to talk about it more. If you're thinking about a CRM, I would give Better Agency a shot, mostly because Billy Wagner uses it. If Billy Wagner uses the tool, then who are you to not use the tool, right? I mean, come on now.

All right, let's get on to the show.

[The interview begins]

Ryan Hanley: Oh dude, I can tell you. What was it? When did we? I probably locked down like March 16th was when I moved to the house. I was making some videos and I was like, man, that old Dell that I got for the business, it's slow. I don't like using my Mac because I've got limited processor capacity. Editing in Adobe Premiere was just taking forever. So I bought about two weeks ago a new Lenovo gaming computer just so I could have processor speed.

Jack Wingate: I know. When I worked for Trusted Choice, the last year that I was there, because I was creating so much video, I got whatever the most badass MacBook Pro you can get was. Every feature pushed up to the top of the little slider thing online. I could produce 12 to 15 minute videos and it would pump them out of Adobe Premiere in like 10 minutes. It was crazy. I watched that little dial just zip across the screen.

Now that same video today, with max rendered depth, all the custom controls, VBR up to 40, it's like a notch below going to IMAX. The quality of those videos. Now using this thing, if it's not like 16 centimeter pixels on the screen, my computer's locked up for an hour.

Ryan Hanley: Oh yeah. I went from 20 to 30 minutes for a render, and heaven forbid you realize that you missed something and have to change something and redo it. But this computer, the video that I think is going live today, it might already be there. I was at the lake this week and uploaded it from there. We're in the middle of nowhere North Carolina. I uploaded on this computer and it was like two minutes for an eight minute video. Again, max render depth, blah blah blah. But then again, I don't put a lot of objects other than the video in there, which makes a difference.

Jack Wingate: You don't use adjustment layers? If the lighting's really bad, I'll use an adjustment layer. This one I did, I recorded like four videos before I left for the lake just because it's hard for me to produce the content. It's not the making of the video, it's the editing. So I just went ahead and recorded four videos and said I'll just edit them one by one. This one I was like, I'm just going to see how it comes up when I publish it. See if I don't do a ton of like, I like to make the blacks a little blacker. But this one I did nothing with because I thought the lighting was pretty decent.

Ryan Hanley: Have you ever messed with LUTs?

Jack Wingate: I know what they are. I've watched Peter McKinnon. I'm like, dude, there's some crazy stuff in there. But I'm like, I'm making an insurance video.

Ryan Hanley: I have the look and feel of my videos. I have this LUTs pack that I can send you. I think you'd dig it because the colors, one of them is called Viking Ham. The coincidence of you looking like a Viking and it being called Viking Ham aside, what I like about it is that they've edited the shot for you already. It pulls the blacks out a little bit, pulls the skin tones out a little bit, and then it darkens and kind of vignettes you. So if you have a center shot, or even a little to the side, it focuses the person's attention on you. I don't have to do any manual dialing. As long as I shoot it and have a decent amount of light on me as the subject, this LUT takes care of everything else. It makes it look like you're a freaking guru, but really you just toggled this one little thing.

Jack Wingate: I need that. I'm shooting now in the basement. Everyone sees the three pictures behind me, that's just our basement. I also started doing something. I put a video out yesterday where literally I just leaned up against the table with my phone this way. And then I use this stupid tool. I shouldn't say stupid because I use it all the time. You know how once you get into doing anything with marketing, you look at any marketing tool online, and now your Instagram and Facebook feed are filled with these little $60 tools? $60 to do this, $60 to do that. Have you ever heard of Splashio?

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Jack Wingate: Splashio is a great tool, but it costs like $95 a month to do four videos a month. No bananas. I love what Splashio can do for you. I love that it allows you to just upload the video and then automatic transcription with the tight. But $95 a month for four videos is bonkers. You can do that in Premiere Pro for less than $10 and not really that much more time. So one of those little tools comes through and it's called Clipscribe, C-L-I-P-S-C-R-I-B-E. Clipscribe.com, I think. It's $60 lifetime. It does the same exact thing and it's better. So my new thing is I just do these raw videos. I upload them to Clipscribe. It transcribes. It allows you to do the header. It allows you to do all the branding. You can put your logo in there. The transcription is pretty good. $60 one time. In less than 10 minutes, I'm pumping these videos out. It's so easy.

Ryan Hanley: I saw you when you were really pumping them out early on, like what, May whenever it was. I think I asked you about it and so I signed up for it, paid, whatever. Tried to upload the first one and it never went up. It showed it was uploaded, it was just spinning. Since then I was like, oh, that's an effort.

Jack Wingate: Oh man, I would get back in there. I would say that might have just been a wonky day. I use it all the time. I used it yesterday. I have slowed down on the content production a little bit because when you're doing everything, in the beginning I didn't have any clients so it was so easy to create content. But that's the hard thing. I was like, I want to put out a video a week and I want to put out, if I can associate that with a blog a week.

Ryan Hanley: Yep.

Jack Wingate: We've been so slammed business-wise that I just don't have the time. I'm working on fine-tuning some automations, which just takes time. It's like, okay, I don't have three hours or whatever it is to record, edit, do the latest thing with the thumbnails. Now I'm just geeking out on thumbnails.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. It's a while to do it. And you got great thumbnails. One mistake that I've always made as a marketer is that I do too much content production and not enough content promotion. One of the things that I've been trying to do is say, like you said, produce one video and corresponding blog post a week. That's a reasonable goal. What I would do in the past is produce a new piece of content literally every day. Maybe 500 people see each one. Instead of producing one piece of content and then making sure 50,000 people see that piece of content. That idea, I think especially, and I've banged on independent agency owners for a long time, and now I'm kind of getting my comeuppance for all the hating I've been doing. The amount of time that you actually have in your day, I think it's so much easier to promote than to create. And I think that's a better strategy.

Jack Wingate: I think what I see too. One of the carriers I represent, I don't know if we'll say names here or not. It doesn't matter. I don't care. They do, just like every carrier likes to give their agents some social media posts. So I'm friends with them on Facebook and I know every time that carrier gives them something because I get five. But guys, that's great. Come up with some original stuff. But it is hard though. You really got to be all in and understand the content game. You and I take it for granted. This is just what you do. There are people that don't do any of it.

Ryan Hanley: Right now, I'm in a battle to crack page one for the term "workers' comp experience mod" and "workers' comp XMod", "workers' compensation experience mod", "XMod". I'm in this battle because I subscribe to SEM Rush, which is a social or SEO tracking tool for people that might not know. It's like Moz or another good one is Ahrefs. That's what L'Angelo uses. I like Ahrefs. It's just a little too nerdy for me. But it's a very good tool as well. What you see is, as you create content, where your content ranks bounces around a lot. A common misconception that people have is, "I created this piece of content, and over time, if I do the right work, eventually it just kind of moves up and up and up." What really happens is one day that piece of content will be ranked 60th. The next day, it'll be ranked 14th, right on the cusp of page one. Then the next day, it'll be ranked in the 50s. Then the next day, it'll be ranked in the 20s. Then the next day, it'll be ranked back down close to page one again. It's this constant battle, because at all times, you have all these other people that are fighting for those positions. They're getting links, they're driving social traffic, they're driving paid traffic. Google is not like, "Oh, All Choice Insurance wrote a great blog, number seven, done. Check it out. They accomplished something today." That's just not the way it works. It is a living thing. You do have to keep doing the work. I think paid traffic is a huge part of it. Running PPC and driving traffic from things like YouTube, Google ads, Facebook ads to pages that you want to rank is an important part, just like good SEO, just like good organic and social media and email stuff. It pays huge dividends, but it's always moving.

Jack Wingate: I think honestly, that moving around of ROI, let's just call it, that's why so many agents are scared of the game. For us, it's real easy. "Hey, let's go sell something." Boom, we get instant gratification. But man, I've been working on this website, this iteration for five or six years. The iteration before that, five or six more years. I've got over a decade in this. In the last month, I got two leads that hit. I do zero paid, nothing. I had two people hit requesting quotes for commercial insurance and they hit weird. The reason I know is weird is they hit some weird internal quote forms. One was for commercial umbrella insurance and one was for EPLI. Both of them were in California. Nothing I do. It's something like they had to have come from my YouTube videos because I did a commercial umbrella one. I think at some point during the whole COVID thing, I did something to talk about EPLI. So of course I had to send one to Grant Davis because I owe that guy just because anytime I need to have a question, he'll answer it. And then I sent the other one over to Daniel... God, what is it? Song? I can't remember his name. Sent him because he's just awesome. But I'm like, that's just weird and awesome all at the same time. I called a buddy of mine down here. He's a realtor and he and I work on SEO stuff a lot. I was like, "Dude, I just got to tell you what happened." I didn't make any money off of it, but that was just kind of cool.

Ryan Hanley: That's the kind of stuff that comes back and pays a lot of dividends too. Karmically or serendipitously, you're helping people find solutions. The other side of it too, if we're talking straight SEO, someone Googles something, finds a YouTube video, clicks through that YouTube video to your website, fills out a form on your website. That whole action is tracked by Google. They know that someone did a Google search, clicked on a link inside one of your YouTube videos, probably a description. [Phone rings] I get a call from California right now because I didn't turn my ringer off. And then they took an action on your website. When someone fills out a form on your website, that's a huge indicator to Google that your site has value because Google knows they filled out a form. That kind of stuff all helps. In the long run too, you say you just threw referrals at two agents on the other side of the country. Someday they're going to have somebody who's in your area. They're going to think of you. That's how we all work together. I was kicking some stuff down to a couple of New Jersey agents because I get a lot of Jersey stuff on writing Jersey. I think to a lot of agents, they'll go, "Oh man, those are shitty leads. This SEO stuff doesn't work." And I'm like, "Nah, those are..." Yes, you did not cash a check because those two people came in, but in the long game, that's a huge win that those people contacted you.

Jack Wingate: If nothing else, you just talked about how the tracking goes up and down. I never look at my analytics. I just don't have that kind of time right now. But to me, that's like, "Dude, I'm doing something right." It's that win that you're looking for. I'm not cashing a check, but I want to say this. I just got back from the lake last night because we went up there. I can work from there so it's fantastic. I feel like Jason Cass sometimes, being able to go on the pontoon boat after a day. Not nearly as awesome as he is, but we're driving back and I'm listening to you and Seth. I wanted to say this because I thought about it. I'm an idiot. I am not a smart person. I work my tail off. I grind. But it's people like Seth and you and Cass and Nick. I'm calling Nick "Nicholas Ayers" because I guess we're tight? No, we're not. But whatever. Cass. The community we live in right now is so awesome. You can reach out to any of these guys and be like, "Hey, can you tell me this?" I reached out to Jeff Shee over the weekend because I'd listened to a podcast with him and I was like, "I got a question about this thing I'll do." He was like, "Oh yeah, let's schedule something." Right now we're in that great era of independent agents working together. If in my utopian world we could get the carriers to start understanding that it's not a battle. No one has the secret sauce. The sauce is actually us. What's the magic pill? The magic pill is you being willing to ask questions and go put in work. If we can get the carriers to somehow get together and go, "You know what, Erie, Cincinnati are great. You're not competing against one another." If we can get that to happen and think about this, if you can put in something Tarmica-ish on a grand scale, you can put in, "Hey, I've got this personalized risk. Here's the stuff." We send it out into this Tarmica world. If they could, and every carrier comes back and says, "Hey, we want that. We'll take a look at that." They just give us all these options. Think about us as advisors. But we gotta get the carriers to jump on board, which they're never gonna do. Let's get Obby Knight and a couple of other big heads to get a bunch of carriers in a room and just not let them leave until we get some action.

Ryan Hanley: I love that you brought that up. I think that perception is starting to change. I think slowly but surely. I want to touch on the first thing you said. I wholeheartedly agree with you that we are living in a golden age, or maybe even the second inning of a golden age of independent insurance agents. When I first got into the industry 15 years ago, people would talk to each other, but not like this. Not like Facebook messaging Nick Ayers, "Yo bro, I can't get over the first line of this YouTube video I'm putting together. How would you position this?" 15 minutes later, "Move this around. There's no scarcity here. Try an urgency play on this line. Boom. Push this out." There's nothing in it for him. He's not getting... Yeah, I love Nick and I talk about him and he gets some run on the podcast and stuff, but that's not why he's doing it. It's not like he's like, "Yo bro, I'll do this for you if you blow me up on the podcast tomorrow." That's not what it's about. It's a hundred percent just him being willing to do that. Think about how much you helped me when I first started. I called you on the phone, we're talking, you're walking me through different things. So many agents have become so comfortable sharing their expertise and their insights. "Hey, my book is this big and this makeup. Here's what I'm using, if that helps you." You can kind of go, "Okay, yeah, they're a little different, but man, I can see what they're doing there." I was interviewing Eric Garcia from Garcia Insurance Services down in New Orleans for the podcast yesterday. He was talking about how every agency is a unique snowflake. I think that speaks perfectly to what you said about when carriers are completely open to the idea that the secret sauce isn't a process, it's the agents themselves. The whole game changes. I hope that day comes. I think there are a lot of carriers that are starting to wake up, that are embracing that more. As younger executives who have come up through their own ranks with agents like you, like me, like Daniel Sung, like Cass, they're seeing this type of agent and now they're moving into these upper management roles inside of carriers. They're more comfortable with this idea. The abundance mindset is permeating our industry more and more every day and it just makes me happy.

Jack Wingate: Seth said it perfectly. I have this debate sometimes because I'm in my largest carrier, Erie. Erie is an old agency force. Great agents. Nothing wrong with these agents. They make great money. They take care of their clients, whatever. But I have conversations with a lot of them. They're like, "I just don't see how you're doing what you're doing. That doesn't work. It could never work." What they're talking about is the fact that over the last... It wasn't that I was smart. I just got out of necessity. I started moving to this sort of online presence. No real offices, but it's more virtual type stuff. "It'll never work. Never work. People don't want that." Here's the thing. Geico, Progressive, those people have that lower tier customer. There's nothing wrong with that. They have a certain segment. Then your Marsh's, your big boys, they have this upper segment. But that sweet spot in the middle is where every agent can play and win in a big fashion if they're willing to put in the work. It's not like, "I'm not gonna do this because it'll never work." There's a person that we all know, and bless his heart, it's a multi-generation agency. I'm not gonna put anybody on blast here. Older person owns the agency, younger person is moving up in the agency. When COVID hit, they were having to take desktops around to their people. Younger guy is like, "Jack, how do you... what's going on? What are y'all doing?" I'm like, "Realistically, we're ahead right now where we were last year. We're crushing it."

Ryan Hanley: 100%. I had a guest on and I can't remember which one it was. He was talking about his agency and said that they were ahead. Then he was like, "Oh, I'm sorry." I said, "What the fuck are you sorry for?" What are you sorry about? You're killing it. The audience who's listening to this show knows who I am. I believe in capitalism. I believe that hierarchies exist for a reason. I don't mean you keep pushing people down. I believe that people ascend to a certain level in life because they push and they learn and they adapt and they work hard. I was just listening to this. I got caught on the Facebook video feed. You ever ask something? I try not to hit that button because it's like crack. You get in that video feed and there's so much cool stuff. You can't get out of it. But I hit it today for some reason. There's a Steve Harvey video comes up. I like Steve Harvey. He's a worker, man. A dude who does like 10 shows. He makes a lot of money because he does all... He's a worker. He had this clip and it was short. He's just like, "No one got rich sleeping eight hours a day." That's what he said. That was the whole point of his clip. When that hit me, I was like, that's just so true. Sleeping besides, the idea is you have to actually put in the work. You can't just rest where you are. You have to keep moving forward. You have to keep grinding and sacrificing. I think that what COVID did was expose the people who hadn't done that work. A lot of them have adapted. I think that's a great thing. But I think it exposed a lot of agencies that hadn't done the work, that had been coasting along because this industry allows that. Independent agents are older. I can't remember what the statistic is, but it's like so many above 55 or something. It's ridiculous. Everyone can make money the way they want to make money, and it's great. But I think COVID is pushing more people to a hybrid model, kind of like what I do, what you're doing. Augmenting the human ability with virtual stuff. But some people, COVID is going to push them down the retirement road. They're not willing to put in... It's not like it's money. Does it cost money to do all this? Yes. But it's not a ridiculous amount. It's not any more than they're spending now. I'm a cheapskate. All my stuff is done on the dime. But the amount of time I put into it, that's what they're not willing to do. They deserve it. They don't need to do 100. But the problem they're going to find, and I believe this wholeheartedly, if you're an older agency owner out there listening, the value of your book, if you do nothing, starts dropping big time here in the next five years.

Ryan Hanley: I was at a Central event, this cool personalized event that they put on at Central Mutual. We're in Atlanta. God, Tom from... I'm forgetting his last name and I'm going to apologize if he listens to this or someone shares this with him. Tom and I... Mine's killing me that I can't remember his last name. He's from Reagan Consulting. He was there. We were talking about this because I was brought in obviously to talk about content and marketing. How do you build these digital relationships? How do you digitize the soul of an independent insurance agency? That's kind of the idea. Then he was talking about valuations. Ultimately, what he was talking about was how in the digital world do you maximize, in this case, your personalized book value?

Ryan Hanley: So it was a really cool event. And it was cool that Central was putting this on. One of the things that he said was right now, your valuation is not impacted by your digital presence. This was probably a year and a half, two years ago. He said, this moment, that is not being impacted. He goes, but our prediction at Reagan, and I don't want to speak for them, so if this is wholly false, they can course correct or come on the show. But basically what he was saying was that there is a good chance that in the near future, when we're valuing a business, this is good. If you can't email, if you can't text, if you don't have cloud-based records that people can get access to, or the ability to get them into the cloud. If you don't have this ability, these agency people that are buying you, they're not going to be willing to pay the same amount of money because of the amount of work that's going to go into getting them into those systems. As your system gets older and older, it gets harder to get that information into the modern technology. It doesn't get easier. It gets harder.

Jack Wingate: And I was just talking to my wife about this because they're on TAM, and unless basically because of the way TAM is set up, their only option for upgrading their agency management system is Epic. And that's a four-month nightmare. Not to mention it's so expensive.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Jack Wingate: And it's terribly expensive and it's time. And you have lost days where you're just down. You have duplicate days where you're putting stuff in TAM and in... I mean, it is a nightmare. It limits you in a lot of ways. And again, like you said, make money however you want, but I will say any agents that are looking to sell a smaller book in the state of New York, I'm your guy. Ryan at roguerisk.com. I'm looking to get in the game.

Ryan Hanley: Ditto in North Carolina. You salute me up. All Choice Insurance.

Jack Wingate: Yes. Roguerisk.com for New York, for North Carolina, go to All Choice Insurance. And I'm dead serious about that if any of you are listening or know some of them.

Ryan Hanley: The reason I wanted to have you on was not just to shoot the show like we are, although I love this. I wanted to talk about two aspects of your business that I am incredibly impressed with and just supremely interested in, because I do think they are setting you up for long-term success. Not that you have all the answers, but that your model is providing you with the flexibility to be able to navigate a COVID or, God forbid, another weather event in your state. The nature of how you have your business set up is giving you a ton of flexibility, which I think is one of the keys to sustainability for us.

And that's, you've gone super deep into Infusionsoft. Now take the tool away because there's other tools to use and that's more of a personal and business choice. But the idea, I want to talk about what you're doing in there. And I also want to talk about the distribution of your workforce and how you've brought these producers on. It's almost like they're satellite locations, but really it's just like one producer. It's not like you have whole five-person, ten-person offices in these different spaces. So talk to me a little first about your decision to go as deep as I know you've started to go into a tool like Infusionsoft to automate your business. What was the first key to say, this is something I need to do? And why do you continue to put work into it? Because you must be seeing a benefit.

Jack Wingate: Yeah, so fun. I mean, oddly enough, through the journey of owning the agency, I've always been enamored with how other businesses run their business. Because I think as insurance agents, we get stuck into seeing Joe Blow down the street has done it this way, and so we try to mimic that. That's not the real world. Other industries do things far better than we do. So, probably five, six years ago, I actually started working with Infusionsoft. And honestly, I think probably what you found is that the tool is ridiculously awesome, but you got to work it.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Jack Wingate: And at the time I didn't have the time and I didn't have the money. It's not like it's expensive, but it's not cheap. So I dabbled in it. Then about two years ago I was making the decision between going with Michael Jans's Agency Revolution or Infusionsoft again, because I felt like I needed to have a deeper relationship with the customer. I started, and finally I think someone was integrating management systems and Infusionsoft, and I was like, this is what I need to do. So realistically, I just started looking at the sales funnel, and then we brought Jared on. So I really hyper-focused on making sure our sales process was good up front. But then I started looking at it and I'm like, you know what? I can automate a lot of the just mundane stuff that we have to do on a daily basis. Again, I'm a cheapskate. I don't like having staff. So I can get the automations to where a lot of the stuff we do is taken care of, sans people, if we will.

Then I started thinking, when you order something from Amazon, the same process happens every time. I order, I get an email, I get an email again when it goes out to ship. I was like, that's what people expect now. So how can I build that in? So we started with just a sales pipeline and we automated and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked. Then I was like, I can run my endorsement processes through this. I can run my renewal processes through this. I'm still not even halfway done, but review processes too. Everything that I found that used to require a person to remember to do, now there's nobody that needs to remember. That's what I want to get to. I want to make sure that me and my people are doing the work that we should be doing, not freaking moving widgets around.

I'm losing a client today. I got this text this morning, and he was like, "I just want to let you know I'm shopping because when I signed up with you, I wanted you as the agent and I like to be able to call you and you do stuff." And that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. The guy's like a $4,000 in premium personal account. And he wanted me to answer my cell phone, do the changes myself, file the claims myself. I'm like, man, if you want to talk about risk, I'm your guy. I'm going to let my people process a change. And I'm okay with that. I'm okay with losing that guy. My dollar value isn't in making changes.

Infusionsoft is just taking me down that road. Here's the coolest one that I've set up recently. I thought this was awesome. So you probably don't do a lot of home closings, like home loan closings. You get a referral from a mortgage broker, and you got a closing three weeks from now. We were having an issue with closing dates moving, so we were always having to personally follow up. I made a quick little campaign where we set it in motion as soon as we get a yes, and it starts reaching out to the loan officers, to the realtor, making sure, "Hey, we need this, this, and this. Hey, is the closing date this?" And it just automates, automates, automates. They love it, and my team isn't having to follow up with stuff. It's awesome.

Ryan Hanley: You 100% did. You also just wrote the title for your episode. I make the titles up as I listen to the things you're saying. You won't know what it is until it comes out. And it doesn't have to do with your beard, so that's a good thing. Every other podcast I see that you do has to do with that.

I think what you just described is the battle of our generation of agency owners. I think this is our flag, our hill to climb. This idea that the transaction is not the value that we add to this process. It's part of the business. You have to figure out a way to make it happen. It has to work, but it is below the barrier to entry. There was a time when good service was... I used to stand on stage and say, good service, good price, ease of business. These are just the bar. You have to be able to get over this just to get on the ride. I don't even think that's the case anymore. That's the little dragon ride that goes in a circle and bops up and down. You want to get on the roller coaster, you're way past that.

I think this idea of maximizing your personal value to the experience that the person's getting... If you're maximizing your personal value by doing a car change, then your agency doesn't really deserve to be more than a small, personalized, non-standard business. Because you're taking your time and applying it to very low hourly wage stuff that can, for the most part, if you work with a service center, be done by the carrier and probably done faster and more efficiently than your team can do it.

Jack Wingate: I actually just had this debate with my wife the other day because we were talking about service centers. I try to use every service center that I can. I'm still working on that process. I have wins and losses in that area. I said to her, when you take a car change... This all started because she got a call on a Saturday afternoon to do a car change. And she's just like, "Son of a bitch, this is the last thing I want to be doing." This person was referred to me, and she's very good to her clients and it's part of why I love her and part of why her agency is so successful. At the same time, she's doing $15 an hour work at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon.

I said to her, you're going to take that car change. You have to log into TAM, put it into TAM. Then you have to take that same information, log into the Safeco system or whoever the car insurance is with, and log it into their system again. Think about that when all you could have done is gone, "Hey Tammy, great. I'm going to forward you right now to our Safeco car change specialist, and they're going to do this for you. Thanks, Tammy. You have a great day." Then the call goes to Safeco, Safeco does it for you, and then the change downloads into your system. You just think about the difference there. The quicker we can understand where we maximize our value and that that person is not helping you do that... I think this is our battle. This is our mountain we have to climb.

Ryan Hanley: Well, and here's what you get. If you talk to some older guys and even some younger guys who have just always done it this way, they'll think that using a service center is crazy. "I can't believe you're giving up... not even the comp points, but I can't believe that you're doing this because then you don't control the customer." For me, I'm not a service center person, but I think that if you have a plan for however you work your business, as long as you have a plan for that, then it's right for you. If Ryan Hanley says, "Rogue is service center oriented, we want all that going there," as long as you can find a way to circle back the value to the client... The client doesn't care how stuff happens, they just want it to happen.

Jack Wingate: Yes.

Ryan Hanley: For us, we found that Erie's our largest carrier, they don't have a service center, doesn't matter. But if you ask most people, "What happens when Sally takes the car change at your office?" "Oh, we take it in and it gets done. And our clients love that." Okay, that's what's supposed to happen. But how are you gaining any value versus a service center? Now, if they were like, "Every time a car call comes in, we review the account, we cross sell, whatever it is," if they're doing it and it's a plan, that's good.

Jack Wingate: I know that every change we get, we open a ticket and the customer gets a text and an email saying, "Hey, we got your request." Going back to that Amazon thing of I'm going to tell you way more than you want to know. You got the request. Then when we finish it up, we close the ticket and they get, "Hey, we're done with it. Here's your ID card automatically." We're business processing. And then, "Oh, by the way, we need you to do one more thing. Click here." Boom. It's taking them to Google to give me a review. I'm gaining value even if I don't get a sell out of that. Because it's the review. So I've got a plan. You've got a plan. People who said there's no value in service, it's not the service that counts. It's the plan. What your plan is.

Ryan Hanley: 100%. Because you can follow up with that same process with a service center. You can do the same thing that is said about VAs. "No one wants to talk to Samantha who's in the Philippines." First of all, no one friggin knows that Samantha's in the Philippines. Second of all, do you think they honestly care if Samantha's in the Philippines? If Samantha is doing a great job and helping them with their thing and walking them through whatever problem? No, no one cares. By the way, the endorsement process that they were talking to and getting fulfilled by my VA in the Philippines... 100%.

I was actually talking to Wes Anderson about this maybe six months ago. This was during the fall. He and Ben, his partner, have a really large call center in Puerto Rico. Now you have bilingual, English first language speakers, but you have native Spanish speakers who are wholly proficient in English. So now you have US citizens who are pure bilingual speakers who can take calls from Spanish speakers, who can transfer, who are completely understanding the English side of it as well. You've just added a whole other discipline to your agency, if that's something you need. If you have a contingency of clients who speak Spanish and you want to offer that, these are the type of things that are at your disposal.

I think what it comes back to is what you've said: this idea of having a plan. You don't need a VA to have a VA. You need a VA if the VA helps you execute on the plan that you're trying to provide. The truth is, I don't know that I'll always be a hundred percent service center forever. I know there are certain service centers like Cincinnati's, like Hanover's that I have had incredible experiences with. Absolutely incredible experiences. I've sent my clients to them. My clients have come back and said, "That was great. I have no problem ever calling them, no problem emailing them." And they talk to your clients as if they're part of your agency. It is a pure, real relationship. I don't think every service center operates that way. Every VA isn't the best fit for your agency. Sometimes you want the person sitting in your office. But I think what it comes back to is what you said: having a plan. Not just doing it because a slick speaker on a stage told you that VAs are the future. Do it because it helps you execute what you're trying to do for your clients.

Jack Wingate: And here's the thing, and that goes along with any automation platform, anything. My job as the owner of All Choice is to identify and fix bottlenecks. That's all I do. When we brought Jared on, we figured out there are bottlenecks in our sales pipeline that I can automate messaging so people aren't dropping out because they didn't hear from us in a day. There's bottlenecks. We just brought on... shout out to Wes, even though he won't call me back most of the time. Wes Anderson, he lives and dies by his calendar. If you ain't on my calendar, I ain't picking up the phone. But I brought on one of the VAs from Puerto Rico because we weren't able to outreach to leads fast enough. I can fix that. She's off, boom, boom, boom, does it.

That's where most people in the agency world have gotten fat and happy. They think that their process is just good and that this is just how we do it. My team hates me, I bet, sometimes, because I'm like, "We got to try this. This is a better way to do this. I think this will work." And if it doesn't, I'll scrap it real quick, but I'm really willing to try something.

Ryan Hanley: I think it comes back to this idea of being flexible. Nobody saw COVID coming. If you were to list the top 10 things that agency owners are worried about, a pandemic, a complete total economic shutdown from a pandemic, wouldn't even make the top 20. Nobody saw this coming. I think the lesson is that this type of flexibility, releasing our dogmatic views on what works and what doesn't work, that's really the key. Caruthers always busts my chops because he says I use this example too much, but the Bruce Lee "be like water" idea. Two years ago, you probably never thought, "I'm going to look for a VA in Puerto Rico who can help me outreach to my leads faster." But because you're open to being flexible and understanding that you have some deficiency in that area and you're willing to try it... The worst thing that can happen is you call Wes and go, "Hey man, it's not really helping. We're going to table this." And he goes, "Okay, no problem." That's literally the worst thing that can happen.

Jack Wingate: Yeah, exactly.

Ryan Hanley: I think I went down a rabbit hole there. I'm sorry.

Jack Wingate: No, dude. That's what this show is. People listen to other shows for a coherent linear narrative. That is not what this show is about.

Ryan Hanley: Let me ask you this, man, because I want to be respectful of your time and we've been chatting for a while. What do you see from where you are? You have some older school carriers like Erie, you work with some of the nationals, so you've got a full spectrum there. You have this distributed workforce. You have some younger producers, you got some hungry guys like Jared. What do you see? If there's another mountain, if there's something else that's kind of on the horizon for you that you see as another challenge that you want to make sure you're prepared for, is there anything out there that you're looking at going, "We might not be ready today, but we're working towards being able to climb this hill"? Is there anything else coming? Like you just said, I don't know that we were ever intentionally preparing for COVID. We thankfully, and again, this is sheer luck, that I was already moving this way. So we're good there. But I think the one thing that we are really trying to do here, and again, this is not secret sauce stuff, but my business partner is much older than I am. He'll be retiring in a few years. He taught me how to sell and there's no one better in this world at bird dogging somebody to get a sale. He's old school, but he's trying to move away from the day-to-day stuff. So he's starting to adhere to some of our processes now where he kind of lived outside of everything. It was funny because I said, "Look, man, if you just allow me to do this and you enter the leads this way, you watch and see the success."

His whole sales point of view, and I'll wrap it up, I'm going a long way around here, but his way of selling was, "I see what you got now. I'm going to come in there and I'm going to try to beat it by 10%. Commercially, I need to beat it 20%. No one will move." That's a fallacy. Same thing with personal lines. "Oh, you only pay this amount of money? I'm going to give you this coverage. I'm going to tell you maybe you don't need medical payments instead. I'm going to save you a little bit of money." That was his sales thing, and it worked uber successful. But I said, "Watch this. That game is done, I think."

I think the consumer of today, especially with COVID happening, all the people that didn't have coverage for whatever, whether it could be had or not, that's a debate for a different time, now more than ever, they value your knowledge. The agency owners of the world who always like to bitch and complain about Geico doing this with the direct model or whatever... show some daggum value and stop selling like they do. We sent a proposal for my business partner to a person. I said, "Remove yourself from the situation." I had my Director of Operations, I love titles, I had him send our video proposal, which we do a Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze option because we found that we weren't selling enough umbrellas and upselling because people were just reading the font. "Here's the number." We get a message back immediately. "Oh man, this video is awesome."

Right now in the state of North Carolina, we have 30/60/25 for our bodily injury and property damage limits. In the last week, I think we have sold three or four people that had 30/60/25 to 250/500/100 with a million dollar umbrella. Why? Because we just showed value. We just told them what they needed to know. So long way around to get to that... The next hurdle we as the agency force have to get through is competing like we always did. We have to get to the point where we have value. Because otherwise, Amazon can automate the crap out of something and can say, "Hey, you got $5,100? Here's $5,100 at a better price." So you've got to find a way to present your value to someone and tell them... Who cares about insurance? You don't care about insurance until you have a claim. When you do, it's really a big deal. But you need to let people know why you're better. That's age-old kind of truisms there, but it's true. The agents of the day, if you sell like you have always sold or you try to sell based on price alone, man, you're dying in the water.

Ryan Hanley: I truly believe that wholeheartedly. When I first had accounts come in, I hadn't sold a policy in five years. The first couple of leads that came in and I'm quoting them up and I'm selling, I could hear myself. It was like I was two bodies. My mouth is selling straight on price, and there's this voice over my shoulder going, "What are you doing? Why are you talking that way?" It took me kind of getting back into it because it's so easy. The easiest thing to say is, "I'm saving you money." That's the easiest thing to say. It takes some guts, I guess, is probably the best way to say it. But it wins. It's how you win. It's the only way you win long-term to say, "Look, I appreciate that you want to save some money, but if you get in a car accident, that's not going to take care of your family." There's a million ways to say that and you have to be true to yourself, but that's the only way that we move forward. Digitizing that is the key.

Jack Wingate: Well, you think about it. I don't know David Carruthers personally. I think we might have communicated via Facebook, but I guarantee you, because I see you doing it, right now you're positioning yourself, I'm assuming with his help, kind of tutelage, kind of training, to get away from that. "Hey, yeah, you have workers comp, and yeah, we can go get you a price, but how can... I'm doing the same thing everyone else is doing, except now I can show you how moving forward we can do X, Y, and Z." That's where we have to be advisors, man. The worst thing that we ever did was bastardize that term "trusted advisor" because it does exactly describe what we need to be. We are in the trust business. That is why people buy insurance. People buy insurance from Geico because they trust Geico. As crazy as that is to independent agents. They're like, "How could you trust these guys? It's a gecko. They have all these exclusions on their policy." And it's like, because Geico speaks to the consumer over and over and over again with the same consistent message and they trust that they're just going to be there. They trust that it's an operating entity that's going to continue to exist. It's not hard to dismantle that trust, I think when we really get in. But if you try to compete with them on that level, they have way more price trust than we do. When it comes to price selling, the consumer trusts them a hell of a lot more than they trust us. If you can step away from that, that's the whole key, man.

Ryan Hanley: If anyone has listened to this show for long enough, how many people who've been on the other side of the microphone have said this? We've said this thing so many times. It's not easy. You've got to change your mindset. I think the key is doing things like, I know you had Crowley in to sit in one of your sales meetings. It goes all the way back to how we started this about surrounding yourself with other agents, sharing information, talking. If you had a bad sales day or you said something stupid, talk to somebody about it. Call somebody up and go, "Dude, you're not going to freaking believe what I just said to this guy. And he didn't buy and I'm an idiot." And the person on the line goes, "Hey, it happens, man." And then you feel better about it and you move on and you learn.

Jack Wingate: Sometimes too, man, you've got to have that support system. I guarantee you've gone through this. Shame on me for not... I think I texted you a couple, almost a month ago, and said, "Hey, man, how you doing? We haven't talked lately." Bad for me. But sometimes you've got to get out of your own daggum way. Get out of your own head. But you need people around you to... Not everyone is stupid as I am just to think that I know what the hell I'm doing. Some people actually need to hear, "Hey, look, man, you're okay."

Ryan Hanley: Dude, hey, man, I appreciate you. I appreciate all the help. As we've gotten to know each other and become friends, it's been very meaningful to me. I just appreciate all you're doing. I think you're running a world-class shop. I love that you continue to grow. I'm chasing you. You know what I mean?

Ryan Hanley: Like that. And I mean that in the most positive way. Like I look at what you're doing and the way you think about your business. And it's definitely something that I aspire to. And I'm just glad that you'd give us some time today.

Jack Wingate: Dude, I tell you what, I was talking to somebody the other day. I said this: in my perfect world, if I could do what I do now, and I can bring on people like Jared, who's just been fantastic, and if I could grab Ryan Hanley to join the team and let's freaking become like the Avengers and just handle all my content and run New York — dude, that's my perfect world, man. Because dude, you're awesome. I can't say enough.

Two or three years ago, I was driving to the lake. You know, in North Carolina, going backwoods. And I'm listening to a podcast with you and Jason Cass. And it dawned on me. I said, "You know what? I'm not stupid for thinking the way I've been thinking." Because you guys were just hammering it home. I was like, "These guys are saying what I've been saying." So it gave me the trust and the faith to go, "You know what? I'm not crazy." And you guys are a huge part of the reason that we're here. So thank you for what you do. That's not just me blowing sunshine up your ass.

Ryan Hanley: I'll take a little sunshine up my ass.

Jack Wingate: Hey, man, I'll blow it up Jason Cass's all day long because he needs to hear that. He's not confident enough.

Ryan Hanley: Someone said on Facebook, "Oh, man, we're never going to see sports again." And I just said, "It's all Cass's fault. This is everything. It's all Cass's fault." I don't even know what you're talking about, but I'm just assuming that Cass is the problem.

Jack Wingate: All right, brother. But hey, I appreciate you. Be good.

Ryan Hanley: Thank you, brother. See you.

Jack Wingate: Thank you.

Ryan Hanley: Thank you.

[End of interview]

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