RHS 071 - The First 7 Months of Rogue Risk

Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a different kind of episode. It's just going to be me today. It's a solo episode, no guests, no conversation outside of just me and you.

I want to share with you specifically some of the roadblocks to Rogue Risk's success. There are some aspects of the business that I'm incredibly proud and happy about, and I feel like we're very much on the right path. There are other aspects that have been trying and difficult and frustrating, and I just didn't see coming, mostly about myself. Hesitancies that I've had, failings in myself as both a leader of an organization and as a salesperson and operationally.

I thought a lot about them and I've talked a lot about them during some of the interviews that we've done recently, which I hope you've enjoyed. We've had some absolutely ridiculous guests lately and it's been so much fun to share their insights and expertise with you. I'll drip in little things once in a while, but I wanted to just take a minute and walk you through where we're currently at, where Rogue is at, and explain, talk, discuss, maybe do a little couch session on what's keeping us from getting to where we want to be.

Because we're off our targets, if I'm being completely honest with you. I'm off the targets that I had set myself for the year. It doesn't mean I can't still hit what my goals were. We're not that far off. But it's never good to do a breakdown of your business and see that you're off your goals. That's never good. So I'm constantly doing self-evaluation, probably too much. I tend to be overly hard on myself for some things and not hard enough about others, which I'm sure you can equate to as well.

I just want to say, leading into this, two things. One, I know every one of our businesses is completely unique. Rogue, your business, your situation, they're all incredibly unique. If I've learned anything in starting my agency, it's that every independent insurance agency really is its own unique snowflake, 100%. I don't mean that in the negative sense. I mean that in the sense that we've all built this based on our personalities and our needs and our situation and where we're coming from and what our history is and what our goals are. The beauty of our business is that there are quite literally 37,500 different ways to build an agency. And that's a good thing. It's a very good thing.

But I do think that there are some common themes and I wanted to talk through them. Things that I've recognized as obstacles, how I've either overcome some of them or started to overcome some of them or how I'm still working through them. Hopefully the goal here is to show you that one, if you're struggling with some of these things, you're not alone. I'd like to share with you some of the insights that I've gained from talking to some of the people that I'm blessed to have access to and how they've helped point me on the path to overcome these things. Give you some ideas for different tools or thought processes or procedures or mental models that can get you to where you want to be if some of these things are struggles for you.

I do not think that I'm alone or unique or that somehow my situation creates scenarios that no one else has to deal with. I don't want you to think that these things are excuses. There's no excuses. These are just reality. And I find it to be interesting. Plus, I haven't done a solo episode in a long time, and they're always fun. I just wanted to give you an update. I did so much with the inside early on that the inside just kind of became too much. It's not that I didn't want to keep sharing with you guys. I tried to be as transparent as I can about everything. Because I could give two shits what you think about me from that standpoint. It doesn't impact my day, obviously. I love so many of you. So many of you listening to this are friends and people that I enjoy so much. I'm sure there's a few of you out there that I can't stand, but you're good people too for listening.

Before we get there, I just want to give a quick shout out. I'm going to run through my entire sponsor list, mostly because I've never done that before. And two, I'm very proud of the people that sponsor this show. I think it's the best in class technology — not the only options — but some of the best in class technology and vendors in the entire space. I would put my sponsor list up against just about any other show.

First and foremost, Tarmica. Tarmica has been a tremendous part of this podcast. Their support has been incredible. They've become an integral part of my agency in so many different ways. I'm very invested in their success in terms of how I've built my business and where I see the industry going. If you haven't listened to my interview with Raghav, the founder of Tarmica, you need to go listen to that. Tarmica is changing the game and they're making small commercial profitable. They're adding ridiculous new carriers every day. I foresee a world in the very near future where it's Tarmica and everyone else. They're moving into personal lines and they've got commercial auto now. It's really wild stuff. I think very highly of their company and how they're building it. Very happy to have Tarmica as a sponsor.

Advisory Evolved. Chris Langell and the team at Advisory Evolved. I've said this many, many times: there is no other website provider out there for insurance agents than Advisory Evolved. Everyone else is a step below. There's Advisory Evolved and then there's everyone else. You can choose whoever you want. I'm just letting you know that there's Advisory Evolved and then there's everyone else. I've thought that for 10 years now, since the very first time that I met Chris and talked to him and worked with him on websites. He's the best of the best. That's just the way that it is.

The next company is Better Agency. Better Agency is the best personal lines CRM and communication automation tool that exists. Their commercial lines is coming along. I'm going to always be honest with you. If you're a heavy commercial lines agency, either tiptoe in with the understanding that commercial is not there yet — becoming fast — or just wait. But if they do for commercial lines communication, CRM, automation what they've done for personal lines, there will be no other option than Better Agency very soon. Their personal lines is just the things they're doing, no one else is doing. It's awesome. It really is. I have really enjoyed Better Agency and I use it every single day. Right before I turned this on, I was making notes for a center of influence that I have and some different ways that I support them. It's my first point of contact every day. I open up Better Agency, I get on my tasks and work through it. I think very highly of the software and I think highly of the people that are building it.

The last sponsor that we have here on the show is Agency VA, and they're our newest. I took on a VA six weeks ago, one of the best decisions I've ever made. A VA is work like any other employee would be work — training them. I have two Loom videos that I need to create today to help walk through a couple different processes: our certificate of insurance process and our workers' client onboarding process. I want the VA to handle some of the back office tactical stuff — adding contacts in, customers in, sending out invitations. That's stuff that I don't need to do and is really a waste of my time and distracts me from making sure that client is happy and building new relationships and supporting the referral partners who may have introduced me to that client.

Tom, my VA, is great and he's coming along, but he can only do what I train him and teach him to do. Agency VA is tremendous at matching you up with someone who is familiar with your technology. The VA that I have was familiar with NowCerts, which is my agency management system, and had used Better Agency before. But some other things like IWave he hadn't. I do Loom videos and I have a whole training library that I'm building out. I need to get better at building the training library out. But I think the world of Agency VA. I think the world of Wes and Ben. I know them to be amazing people who really, really care about what they're doing. They honestly care. I'm not saying other VA companies don't — that is 100% not what I'm saying. I'm just saying they do. I have a personal relationship with Wes and Ben, and for them to be sponsors of this show is incredibly meaningful to me.

All that being said, let's get on to the meat and potatoes here. Hopefully I still have some of you. I know those were commercials, but hopefully it's also just interesting to hear who I like to do business with. I always do business with people first. It's always about people.

So first, where is Rogue Risk? We are just over seven months in. We officially launched the agency on March 9th of 2020. That was the first time I actually had everything together and started prospecting business — March 9th of 2020, seven days before Emperor Cuomo shut the state down. Probably was a good move at that time, but he has since to relinquish that control. Obviously, I'm not a big fan of that, since I think lockdowns are not the answer to our future success.

That being said, I didn't sell my first policy until May. I don't really know what that means, but I didn't sell my first account until May. Doors opened on March 9th, and for almost two months, I wallowed in despair. No one picked up the phone. No one responded to my emails. It was a very, very difficult time because there was a lot of self-loathing and excuse-making.

For me personally, if I'm being completely honest with you, I was excited to a level that I've never been in business — at least not since the early days at Agency Nation when it was just full tilt leaning forward into all things and politics wasn't involved yet. I love what I want Rogue to be. I think it has a place in the market that is special, and I have a clear vision of what I want it to be. To launch it into this tsunami of COVID and just have nothing happen — I probably should have expected that. I didn't. And I wallowed for a while. I kind of got out of shape. All the things that you hit. I'm not going to say I was depressed, but I certainly wasn't in a strong and energetic mental and physical place.

Because of that, I made a lot of bad decisions. I chased a lot of technology. I got shiny object syndrome. "Oh, this thing can do that. And this thing can do that." I tried this and I spent money on this and I wasted a lot of time. Part of that is something that I've talked to some people about recently. I would love to believe that the position I sit in, the network that I have, the connections I have — I'm fairly aware of most of the things that are going on in our space from a technological standpoint, from a tools perspective. I just talk to people all the time and I'm just very aware of what's happening. I thought, naively, that that would be an advantage for me. In some ways, it absolutely is. I don't want to misconstrue that. In some ways, it absolutely is an advantage. But it also creates this shiny object syndrome. I'm drawn to, "Oh my gosh, that tool can do this and this tool over here can have me do this."

The truth is none of the tools are perfect. No tool is perfect. No tool does everything. The big box agency management systems are great unless you want to do anything that they don't want you to do, and then you're in trouble. The raiders have really good qualities in some aspects and all of them have negative qualities in other aspects. Some of the raiders still force you to use PCs for some reason. Bridging on a Mac, it doesn't work.

My point in saying all that to you is I chased a lot of rabbits down a lot of holes early. It wasn't until recently — I'd say maybe even August — that I really just pulled myself back together and said, "Okay, I'm hitching my horse to these horses. This is what we're going into the future with." Trust me, Neon is the future of my agency. I'm going towards Neon. Seth and Sid and the entire team over there, I absolutely positively believe in what they're doing. The moment that I can get on their platform, I will get on their platform. They're early stage as well. For a brand new company like me to make the move to Salesforce, to a new platform, you have Varuna involved. I think right now you still have to go through Varuna, and there's some pros and cons to that. Not that I think Varuna is a bad platform, but I certainly don't think it's the best platform either. There's some ways there, but that's where I'm headed. I'm headed in that direction as much as I possibly can.

I think that these type of tools are the future of the flexibility that we need because I plan to be in this for a while. I'm not building this agency up to hit a number and sell it. Yes, I want Rogue Risk to support my family, but I love this shit. I love it. I love being part of this industry. I love solving these problems. I love thinking about these things and learning about them and talking about them and meeting the incredible people who come up with the ideas for all these different tools and systems and ways we do business. I just love it. It's a big part of who I am. It's as much a hobby as it is my job.

While yes, we have to make money, I'm going to make the decisions and support the people and be part of the ecosystems that I think have the best interest of our industry, of the amazing people that I love — many of which hopefully are listening — and ultimately allow us to do what we do best, which is support the communities that we live in, the markets that we serve, the niches that we serve. That's our role. I want to be part of those things because I think it's important to do that. If we just sit back, if I just sit back and throw some support out once in a while, I don't think that's enough. I think we have to be involved. That's where I'm headed.

With that goal in mind, it has allowed me to want to be able to be completely flexible, completely open as much as possible. I want to be able to serve my customers with the most talented individuals wherever they may live — whether it's the Philippines, Puerto Rico, or next door. I want to find the best people and put them in positions to win, and I need the technology that allows me to do that. That's why Neon, Salesforce, and the tools that will operate in that ecosystem are important to me, and it's why I'm building the way I am.

It's why I went from QQ to NowCerts. QQ didn't allow me to do that. Also very limited on the commercial side. Perfectly fine platform if you're a personal agency. But as I got more into commercial and more complex commercial, I couldn't do that. Plus, NowCerts being completely open, having all the Zapier connections, being very reasonably priced, being month to month — NowCerts is a great platform. Anyone who knocks it, I think, hasn't really given it its due. It's certainly not the most complex or the most dynamic system, but it's pretty freaking good, especially for the price point. The fact that they don't lock you in — and NowCerts is not a sponsor or pay me for anything, so I just want you to know this is just my take on NowCerts — the value that you get for what you pay and the fact that they don't want to lock you in.

I just had my rating company say to me, "Yeah, we know you're not using our platform anymore, but if you want to use our rater, you need to lock back into a three-year contract." I am not signing any frigging three-year contract. Boom, done, have a nice day, move on. Because the signing of three-year contracts is the old world. That is not the future of our business. That is not how we should be operated. Frankly, it's not a good sign of faith that they want to lock me into a three-year contract. That just completely rubs me the wrong way.

All that to say, I think NowCerts is incredible. It provides me with the flexibility that when I'm ready, when it's the right time, I can make that move to Neon and be part of that community. That makes me very happy. Again, that's why I like Better Agency. Better Agency does the same exact thing. Hopefully someday it will be the CRM marketing automation communications tool that plugs into the top of my Salesforce installation and Neon and is that driving mechanism for how we communicate and interact with our customers. I think Will and Nick and the entire team over there have that vision, they see it, and I think they're doing all the right things. That's why I chose that platform.

So I chased too many shiny objects. I wasted a lot of time in that space. That's been part of the reason that I'm behind.

So maybe you should be asking yourself, "Well, you say you're behind, where are you?" With the understanding that I launched on March 9th, my goal from March 9th was to put $500,000 in premium on the books from March 9th, 2020 to March 9th, 2021. Today is October something, 15th, I think. So we're about seven months in, just past seven months into Rogue Risk's life. I should be around $250,000 in premium. I'm just over $200,000 in premium in that time. The good news is I think I put myself in position to beat that goal. I have the processes, procedures, and people in place now that I think will beat that $500,000 goal. But I'm behind it. I don't like to see that. I don't like to miss goals. I like to be so far past goals I don't have to think about them, because I hate goals in general, but I know how important they are.

So that's where we're at. We're just over $200,000 premium seven months in. A lot of that is comp. It's been funny how the carriers I thought would be my biggest partners early have not played out as much yet. But again, we're so early. The business is so spread. I'm still in "gobble whatever you can get" mode. It's not like I'm really dialed into certain markets and certain carriers. All that is coming. It just hasn't been the case so far. Like I said, I've been a little scattered.

Chasing shiny objects. I think simpler is better. I think understanding why you use a piece of software is way more important than using it because it does something. I think believing in the people behind the product should be one of the factors. I'm not going to say it's the largest factor, but I absolutely think that it should be one of the factors that you consider.

When I think about Advisory Evolved as a website platform, I know Chris always has his customers in his best interest. He's always trying to think and build new features into those websites and new designs and new aspects so that his customers do more. He built out the local traffic marketing service, which I think any agency who wants to do local digital advertising and traffic generation would be crazy not to use Chris, because he knows exactly what he's doing and his team does. He's doing this because he has agents' best interest in mind.

Tarmica — Raghav, his dad is one of his clients. He's going to do what's right for the business. Nick, Will, Preston, McBilly — these are all independent agency guys. Wes owns an independent agency. Ben was a State Farm agent but understands the business incredibly well and works with independent agents across the entire platform. These types of people, these types of vendors, they get what we're trying to do. Truthfully, their reputation is at risk. A lot of times technologists who come into the industry and try to create solutions for us — if their solution doesn't work, they're not coming back to the industry. They're going back to Silicon Valley to do some regression analysis that they learned in B-school to find another industry to try to exploit.

But people who were born and raised in this industry, who've grown up in this industry, whose reputation is built on the connections and network that they have in this industry — that to me holds weight. Because I know that if they screw us, they're out. They're in trouble. They can't come back. People are going to remember that. That pressure forces them to think about their client's best interest at all times. I don't know if that makes sense, but that is something that I take into a lot of consideration in the tools that I use. That just is what it is.

We spent a lot of time on that. I think the lesson there is pick some horses, ride them, but do spend a little bit of time thinking about how they serve what you want to be. I think you'll get there.

I heard someone say the other day what I thought was the stupidest comment: "Better Agency is the new cool kids club tool." One, I thought that was a ridiculously juvenile comment. I don't even know what a cool kids club is, because we're running agencies. If we don't run them well, they don't exist anymore and then we can't pay our bills. It's not like we're passing cigarettes around the high school parking lot. Third, that mentality is a very scarcity-based mentality. There's no clubs. You use the tools that are going to get you to where you need to be. If your business fails, no one is coming to help you put your business back together. It failed. It's over. So choose the tools that are going to get you to where you need to be.

If Applied TAM is the best tool for your agency to win, then use Applied TAM. Good for you. There's no right or wrong answer. I think there are answers that set you up for the future in certain ways if that's what you're trying to build to, especially what I'm trying to do. But that doesn't mean that my agency is what your agency needs to be. It just doesn't. I think that's very important.

These are really tough decisions. I think the key is focus — trying to not get distracted as best you can. But also, it's balancing awareness with distraction. Are you aware of what's out in the market without being distracted by what's out in the market? I think that's maybe the core idea. But I've banged on this for a while, so I'm going to move on.

Some of these I'm going to blow through quick. I'm going to kind of jump out of order from how I wrote them down. I have really struggled being a one-man show. I work way better in teams. I've said this maybe many times on the podcast. If you listen regularly, you know this. If you don't, then this is just an aspect of my personality that I hadn't really even considered. I am terrible on my own. I need to work in teams. I need people that I can pass stuff off to.

As much as I firmly believe myself to be a world-class performer in certain aspects of running a business and just business skills in general — there's certain aspects that I would absolutely put myself up against anybody in the world. There are other aspects in which I'm like a newborn baby. I can't even get out of my own way. It's this cognitive load.

You tell me that I need to go put a marketing campaign together to attack a certain marketplace. You know how when you do something silly on your computer, like when one of your carrier partners says they want to have a video conference and what they really want to have is a WebEx, and your computer starts screaming at you, "No, no, not WebEx. That's technology from 2005. Please don't make us fire up WebEx." The fan in your computer is going like this and it's so loud you can't even hear. The people on the other end of the WebEx are like, "What's going on? Is there a turbo jet in your office?" And you're like, "No, you forced me to use WebEx, a 2005 technology, which forces my computer fan to spin so fast that you think there's a jet engine in my office."

That's the way my brain works when I have to think about things like operations, service requests, going into carrier websites and doing policy changes — any of this tactical stuff. There are people who love this stuff. I have a list of things to do. I'm going to do this list. I'm going to check them off. I'm going to move them over here and I'm going to feel completely satisfied. I think those people are amazing. I think that's absolutely 100% amazing. That's not a knock. That is not the way my brain works.

My brain server megabit capacity goes through the roof and I just get bogged down. It slows me down and I hate it. Where if I'm selling somebody, if I'm networking, relationship building, leadership, oversight stuff, organizational leadership type activities, the bigger idea stuff, the relationship building, sales marketing — I could think about that stuff for 24 hours in a row and feel completely refreshed and ready to go. I do not slow down. I can just go, go, go, go, go and feel zero loss of energy.

I didn't really know that about myself. I've learned that over these last seven months as I've tried to do some of these things. I'm staring at my bullet journal here in my to-do list of tasks that I have to get done that I haven't gotten done. Although I did check a couple of them off this morning.

Adding the VA from Agency VA in particular and being able to say, "Here's some stuff that I really don't want to ever have to think about again. I just want it to get done." Being able to pass that off — it's like slumping off a weight. I just didn't realize that about myself. I think it makes sense kind of in hindsight.

Delegating the work that doesn't allow you to perform at your best. Make a list. I literally did this. Make a list of the things that don't remove energy from you, but energize you. What are those things? For some people, it's cold calling. For some people, it's going out and networking. For some people, it's doing the accounting books. For other people, it's doing tasks. Whatever your thing is, whatever brings energy into your body — especially if you're the leader in the organization — write those things down and figure out a way to do those things 80% of the time. Everything that keeps you from doing those things 80% of the time, give to someone else. Give to someone else.

I'm telling you, it is ridiculous how it starts to change. I'm not there completely yet. I'm not at 80% of the time doing that stuff. But working with Agency VA, working with the team there, doing these Loom videos, starting to get my new team member trained up — all of a sudden, down the tunnel, I saw this little tiny light start to shine through. It just wasn't pure darkness anymore. I feel energized for it. It's really a big part of how I started to come out of what was a terrible down cycle in my life there when I first started this. It's weird to say I started a business and I went into depression. But I was. It was tough because I wasn't performing the way that I wanted to. It feels once again like the vision of Rogue — the train's back on the tracks. It's creeping, but it's back on the tracks. So watch the fuck out.

All right, so accounting. I would put in this book, I hate accounting. I appreciate accounting. I know why accounting is important. I don't want to think about accounting. I want someone to tell me how much money we have in certain buckets, and I want to spend that money, and I want someone else to deal with it. That's what I want.

Ryan Hanley: And actually, EGVA is helping me with that too. We're not there yet either, but I want to get a budget set. I want to know: here's how much you have. If you want to do gifting or if you want to do postcards, you have this much amount. Boom, go do it. I don't want to have to figure that out. I just don't.

My brain, despite being a math major, stopping and slowing down to figure out how much money you have to spend — I hate that. And I know that makes me a bad business owner, but that's one of those things that I just don't like doing. So I figured that out about myself. Although I probably could have guessed that one.

Another obstacle is I get pulled into a lot of conversations that are non-revenue generating. This has been an interesting one for me because Zach Gould actually flipped my opinion on this. Zach Gould from GNN. I had talked about at some point somewhere that getting pulled into — I get a lot of direct messages. I've got a lot of people who say, "Hey, can I just get 15 minutes of your time? Can I ask you a couple questions?" And guys, I absolutely love that stuff. Please don't stop doing it. Please. Because if you have questions, I want to help you. It is a big part of who I am as a person. I love helping you guys. Selfishly, it brings me joy if I can stick something in your brain that helps you do your job better, make you happier at your work. It's part of what energizes me. So please don't stop.

But I was not being good about budgeting my time with those conversations. I was scheduling them at times during the middle of the day when I should be prospecting or networking or doing Rogue work. And I started to get down on myself. Then I stopped taking them all together. And that didn't feel good either, because if I'm not helping people, it's almost like I'm not breathing, if that makes sense to you.

Then Zach Gould said to me, "You, this is part of who you are. You connect people to other people. You connect people to things and ideas. If you're not a connector, then you're not being true to yourself." Or some version of that. I'm paraphrasing a little bit of what he said. And man, I don't know if I just needed permission or the way he framed it — life is all about framing — the way that he framed it just clicked over. And I said, I don't have to stop these because it is like oxygen. Helping people, especially our peers, colleagues — it is like oxygen to me. But we have to be smarter about how we do it.

I think this is a big problem for everybody, right? We schedule conversations and we schedule meetings about things that may be important, but at times that impact other aspects of our life. So what I'm saying is I think we all should be the connectors that we want to be, but we have to be smart about when we schedule these things. I've really started to push a lot of them to Fridays. And then strategically at the end of the day, sometimes I have to drive to pick up my kids from different things. If I know I have a 20 or 30 minute drive, I'll schedule a call during those times. So I've tried to be much more strategic about those calls.

But I was really terrible about them. I think part of it was I was feeling so down about the business very early on that I was scheduling a lot of these calls to make myself feel better. Because like I said, it is so important to me. But we have to be smart about these things. I think connecting, growing our network, building relationships inside the industry and whatnot are really important to success. I really do. I just think we have to be smart about it. And I was not smart about it early on. Much more smart about it now, or trying to be. Still never perfect.

The last one that I really wanted to talk about — and this one really surprised me. This was probably the most surprising, maybe the second most surprising outside of my complete lack of technology discipline which I had early on — although I would love to make an excuse and just chalk that up to being a drunken asshole in the springtime during the early COVID days — is prospecting hesitancy.

I have continued to struggle with cold calling. I just really have. I've just really continued to struggle with cold calling. And Mick Hunt and David Carruthers continue to pound me over the head with needing to do it. And I love them both dearly for it. And I've been picking up the phone more often, but still not enough. Still not enough. And I ask stupid questions like, "Well, what if this person does this?" And those are all just excuse and delay tactics from what I really need to do, which is pick up the phone and make calls. And if I screw up a call, who cares? Detach yourself from the outcome. Detach yourself from the outcome. I literally write that some days.

I've started doing cold calling affirmations, if you can believe this. I literally will write before I start cold calling: "You are a cold calling gangster. You have value. What you're going to ask this person." And I just kind of make it up. But I literally just affirm myself before I — if that's even a term. I just do these affirmations. And I'll write over and over and over again: "Detach yourself from the outcome. Detach yourself from the outcome. Detach yourself from the outcome. The outcome doesn't matter. The activity matters. The outcome doesn't matter. The activity matters." Over and over and over. "You are a cold calling gangster. You have mass value. They should be —" I wrote the other day, this was like last week or something. I started doing this last Monday. I wrote, "Oh shoot, what did I write? Oh, if they don't want to listen to you, then they're the idiot." I'm writing all these things. And I don't even know how to do affirmations. I've never done it before. But I'm assuming it's just talk positively about yourself to get myself in a position where I can make calls. And it helps a little. But basically, just picking up the phone and calling and actually dialing the numbers is what helps the most.

I just can't believe that after 15 years, I'm still hesitant to make phone calls. I just assumed — I don't know why — like I've sold six-figure advertising packages to carriers when I was at Agency Nation. I've been in meetings, seven-figure deal meetings at Bold Penguin and other places. I sold a hundred-life workers comp account the other day. And I don't want to say it wasn't easy, but it wasn't like it was difficult. You just did your job. Talk to the person, talk to them about what Rogue 365 is all about, and da-da-da-da. And the fact that I still hesitate to pick up the phone drives me bananas.

And the days that I don't do it, I get to the end of the day and I feel like less of a human being. I just do. I feel like a loser on the days that I don't make my calls. I feel like I let the resistance win. I let it win. And it drives me nuts. I would have never — I thought I was going to be completely past this. Mentally, rolling into Rogue Risk a year ago or whatever, I said to myself, I just never even considered that I'd have prospecting hesitancy again. I thought I was completely past it. And I'm breaking myself of it.

I am going to be — my goal, and this was one of the things I wrote down in my journal. Big shout out to Chris Paradiso who got me on the program called "Living Your Best Year Ever" from Darren Hardy. It's really good. I'm matching that program and diary notebook thing with a bullet-style tracking journal that I'm using for prospecting and for task management. I'm kind of combining these two ideas to get myself done and get myself back in order and have a process and a flow so things get done and I don't miss things.

But the idea was I want to be the absolute best cold caller in this area. I want to be the best cold caller. I want to be able to cold call anybody and get through, because then I want to train someone else how to be the best cold caller so I never have to cold call again. But oh my gosh, I could probably train somebody to be an amazing cold caller. Picking up the phone, I'd rather punch myself in the face as hard as I can. It's absolutely insane. I can't believe that here I am, 40 years old. I have 15 years in the insurance industry. I've been a CMR. BMO twice. I own my own business. I've done 350 keynote presentations the last 10 years. I've been the CEO of a company. And I can't even pick up the freaking phone and tell somebody that they need to do their workers comp with me. Oh my gosh.

If you feel me on that, know that you're not alone. But the only thing that you can do — and I know this, logically I know this — the only thing you can do is pick up that phone and call. Just pick up the phone and call. Let them call you an a-hole. Let them say no. Let them blow you off. What is the big deal? Call the next number. Ryan, I'm talking to myself now. Now I'm doing my affirmations before I have to make my calls.

But all right, guys. So these are some of the early roadblocks that have kept me from getting to where I want to go. Based on my current pipeline, I do have a personalized producer now who I'm feeding a lot of leads. Shout out to Frank Jimenez and his team at Quotly for helping us drive opportunities into Rogue. She's doing a wonderful job so far. I think she's been with us for three weeks now. She's already got an account on the books. She's got a bunch more in a pipeline, so that's really nice. I want to get her up to a nice consistent flow of inbound, get a process behind her that allows her to close business and be successful, which will just provide a really solid base for the agency as I go out and go after commercial. Then we can start to duplicate that process, get some more people in here, and continue to grow and provide the human-optimized insurance experience that I believe is uniquely possible from independent insurance agencies. And that's where we're going.

So guys, I hope that this was somewhat valuable to you. I hope that you at least found it interesting. I don't know if you did or didn't. I'd love your feedback on this episode. And the last thing that I'd say is if you enjoy the podcast, share it with friends. Just tell somebody about it. Tell someone. Get them to subscribe on iTunes or wherever, Spotify. We're on all the stations. We're on iHeartRadio if you listen there. Or like I said, we're on Spotify, Google. Just tell somebody about it, only because I want the message to spread. If you think it's valuable, that's it. I do have sponsors and that's nice. But they mostly just pay the bills. I'm not making a lot of money. That's never been the goal, to make money from the podcast. It's about sharing ideas.

And I just appreciate you guys so much. I just really do. And I want — if this is valuable, if this kind of episode is valuable, I can do more of this. I can talk about — we can dive into the things that were very specific things that we're doing. I'm happy to talk about my content strategy, happy to talk about our sales strategy, our prospecting, where we get our leads from, where we get our opportunities from. I can talk about all that stuff. So just hit me up. DM me. LinkedIn's a great spot. Hit me up on LinkedIn, send me a message, connect with me if we're not connected. Let me know what your thoughts are. You can always email me, Ryan at RyanHanley.com. I try to respond to as many of those emails as I can when time permits.

But either way, guys, I wish you absolutely, positively nothing but the best for you and for your lives and for your family's lives. And I want you to be happy and I want you to be healthy. And I just want this business to be fun, because it should be fun. It takes a lot of work. It's really hard. And if we can find ways to make it fun, make it interesting, and have a good time and not take ourselves too seriously while still making good money and helping people, there's no better place to be. So with that, I'm going to get out of here. I appreciate you so much. Have a great day. Go crush it. Peace.

[Sound of a voice, possibly a recording or outro clip] Voice: You go fuck yourself with your fat fucking ass. Thank you.

[Different voice, possibly a character or outro clip] Voice: Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, Bubbles? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, baby.

[Another voice, possibly a character or outro clip] Voice: Take it, he's my brother.

[Sound of laughter or outro music]

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