--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Well, everyone, and welcome back to the show.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Today we have an episode which is actually an interview that I did for Tony Caldwell's Uncaptive Agent, the Future of Insurance series. I thought it was a really dynamic breakdown of the concept of the human optimized agency — this technology-driven but human-forward concept in which Rogue was really built.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: While I've said many times that Rogue isn't where I want it to be yet in reaching this kind of human optimized agency goal, it's what we work towards every single day. Every decision that we make around technology, process, the clients we go after, the carriers that we partner with — all of it is moving towards this idea of a human optimized agency.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I thought the interview that I did with Tony was a tremendous conversation that I wanted to share with you guys. I also wanted to push you to Tony's podcast. If you Google search "Uncaptive Agent" or go to Tony Caldwell, C-A-L-D-W-E-L-L dot net, TonyCaldwell.net, you'll find this podcast. He's interviewing some great people from the industry. I just wanted to give him a shout out. He did a tremendous job and I really enjoyed our talk.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Tony has a ton of experience in the industry and outside the industry and is a great resource. I wanted more people to hear this conversation and I wanted more people to know that Tony's podcast exists and get in front of it. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I want to give a huge shout out to our title sponsor of this podcast, Tarmica, T-A-R-M-I-K-A dot com. I've talked about it a lot. If you've been listening to this show for a long time, you know that I use Tarmica, that I advocate for Tarmica, that I think what they're doing perfectly aligns with the idea of being a human optimized agency.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: As I see them start to partner with other organizations like Indium, who I'm a huge fan of, and companies like Better Agency and many others, it feels to me like we're in the early days of this true independent insurance agency renaissance. No matter your size, no matter where your workforce is, no matter who you're going after from a target market — it doesn't matter if you're in western rural Iowa or in downtown Manhattan — you can target the kind of clients that you want. You can provide them with a high quality customer experience and you can do it in a way that's easy and efficient.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When it comes to commercial insurance, particularly small commercial, there is no better tool to help you make that customer experience faster, cleaner, easier, more efficient, and most importantly, profitable. Go to Tarmica.com today, get a demo, know what the tool is about. They're adding new carriers every day — huge nationals down to super regionals — and you're going to find the carriers that you want. You're going to want to know what Tarmica is all about.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I do think this is one of the game-changing technologies that gets us to a real, honest-to-goodness, human optimized agency that can compete with anybody at any scale. That's the goal of Rogue, and Tarmica is a big part of that. I hope you can check them out, T-A-R-M-I-K-A dot com.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Okay, let's get on to what was an absolutely tremendous conversation with Tony Caldwell.
--:-- [Transition to interview]
--:-- Tony Caldwell: Hi, I'm Tony Caldwell, and thank you for joining me on another episode of Uncaptive Agency, the future of insurance. Today, I'm talking with Ryan Hanley, who's the founder of Rogue Risk in upstate New York near Albany. Ryan is one of the new generation of independent insurance agency owners who is building his agency on technology and building for the future that is rapidly upon us. So welcome, Ryan. Thanks for being with me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thanks, Tony. It's great to be here and excited to have a conversation.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: So Ryan, you've obviously been in the insurance industry. This isn't your first rodeo and you didn't start this idea to become an agency owner overnight. How did that develop? What was your previous background in insurance? A little bit of history, please.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. So I've been in the business for 15 years. I got into the business, I guess you could say by accident, although it was a very conscious decision. I met a young woman who I wanted to marry. In order to marry her, her father basically made me a mafioso-style offer I couldn't refuse.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Strangely enough, we were sitting in high leatherback chairs in the office of his house during a family get together. He essentially said, "I want you to come sell insurance for me." I accepted. Still my wife today, 14 years later. So it was a good decision, but that's how I got started.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I worked for my wife's family's agency. I was there for eight years. My wife still works there with her twin sister. At the time, my brother-in-law also worked there, so there were four members of her family. There were 14 of us total. I was a boots-on-the-ground producer and kind of cut my teeth. The classic cliche story — I was driving from strip mall to strip mall, dropping off business cards. I was cold calling. I was doing all that kind of stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This was 2007, 2008, 2009 ish. The internet really wasn't a big part of marketing strategy. People barely used email. It was a completely different time. I was really terrible at selling insurance in that world at that time. I hated cold calling. I hated interrupting people. I did not have that dog-headed mentality of "I'm just going to plow my way into this account come hell or high water." I just didn't like that. I was very uncomfortable with it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I struggled for a long time — two solid years — up until the point where my father-in-law actually had to sit me down and have a conversation about how this career might not be for you. Whether it was coincidence or serendipity, or maybe the muse just decided to perch on my shoulder for a few minutes, I walked into a conversation in which two referral partners that I was interested in engaging with were speaking to each other. One said to the other, "Let's just connect on LinkedIn."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is 2009. People did not say that to each other in 2009. It was very odd. I didn't even have a LinkedIn at the time. I had heard of LinkedIn, but I didn't really know what it was. It was like this light bulb moment for me because I said, "Geez, here are two referral partners that I want to get in front of, and they have just chosen LinkedIn as the way — not email, not 'give me a phone call,' not 'stop by my office for coffee' — but 'let's connect on LinkedIn' as their method."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was blown away. I was like, "Why would they choose this?" All these questions started rushing over me. I immediately left that business function, went back to my office, and spent quite literally the next 12 hours on LinkedIn trying to figure out what it was about this platform that they would do that. That's where I learned about digital marketing, digital communication, and automation tools. That has been a big part of my philosophy ever since.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Skipping through some of this, eight years into that career, I had basically hit a ceiling at my family's agency. My last name wasn't the same as the name on the box, and that was always going to be the way it was, for better or worse. So I left and became the chief marketing officer of TrustedChoice.com. I built the Agency Nation platform and ran Elevate 2017 and 2018, if anyone's ever heard of those conferences.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I left there and became the chief marketing officer of Bold Penguin, which is a commercial insurance lead generation and comparative rating platform. Unfortunately, at that point — this was late 2018, 2019 — my brother-in-law came down with a form of terminal cancer. I was traveling three to four times a week for Bold Penguin and I just couldn't do that anymore. My wife had to step up and take a larger role in her agency. So I put in my two weeks and left that job to try to find something here in the Albany area.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Unfortunately, Albany is not a hotbed for insurance, and I wasn't quite ready to become a producer at that point. Going to be a producer felt like a step back after running 20-person teams and having a huge million-dollar budget at different companies as a chief marketing officer. Selling home and auto felt like a tough step to take, at least at that time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I became the CEO of a fitness franchise and ran six locations. We had more than 3,000 clients. In the nine months that I was there, I grew them from 2,000 to 3,000 clients. At that point — and this is probably a much longer answer than you were expecting — nine months into that job, I had two new locations coming. I had grown our internal team from nine people to 15. We were absolutely destroying it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The founder of the business decided he wanted to step back in and actually run the company again, which meant Ryan had to go. At 8:36 a.m. on a Monday in October, almost a year ago now, I found out that I was no longer the CEO. On that walk from our office to my truck, now unemployed, I basically said, "I've been mapping out this agency for years. I've had as many or more conversations with a more diverse group of insurance professionals — from the CEO of a Dow Jones Industrial Average entity, publicly traded companies, all the way down to super regionals, every size agency, every size vendor. I've had all these conversations. It's time for me to put my money where my mouth is and start my own agency." That's where Rogue came from.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: That's a great story. As I'm listening to you talk, I don't think your story is actually very unusual. Most entrepreneurs get to a point where they realize the only way they're going to control their own future is to control their own future. You've had some great experience both in the industry and outside of the industry. That's also really typical.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: What I think is compelling, and I want to explore next, is that you really had a chance to grow up and develop your skills in what I call a traditional insurance agency. The traditional insurance agency has got to evolve very rapidly right now in order to remain relevant in the future. There's been 10 years of progress in digital shopping behavior and all those kinds of things in the last six months. It's radically and rapidly speeding up.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: With your background and your new decision that you're going to be in charge of your own future, you're obviously building a different kind of agency. Tell us a little bit about the plans you have for Rogue Risk.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is one of the most interesting aspects of the first seven months of my career as an agency owner. Coming into Rogue Risk, I had a notebook full of ideas that I had derived and distilled down from literally tens of thousands of conversations. I'm sure in your position you have too. I felt like there were certain aspects of building an agency that I could kind of jump the line on because I knew the people, I knew the tools. I was very digitally savvy. I understood the basics of programming and connecting certain tools together. I felt like that would give me a competitive advantage — I still feel like it gives me a competitive advantage — but I thought it would give me more of a competitive advantage earlier.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What I pitched to the carriers that I am now directly appointed with, and the vendors that I partnered with, was this idea of a human optimized agency — an agency that injected humans not throughout the entire process, but in the moments where they actually add value. I think a common misconception is that humans need to do the work or they're not adding value. I wholly disagree with that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There are aspects of our business in which we are not maximizing our value because we're still doing manual transactional processing that is of zero value to the insured. The insured does not care who does their car change. They care that the car change happens. Now, are car changes an optimal moment to step in and ask questions where you could add value, cross-sell, find gaps in coverage or areas of excessive risk that you didn't know about? Certainly they are. But if you're processing that transaction, how often does that happen?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's the number one thing agency owners say? "My CSRs never do that work. They never stop. They never ask. They're not cross-selling. I've told them I'll give them extra weeks vacation. Whoever cross-sells the most, and no one does it." The reason is because they know their real life. If I have 37 car changes I have to do today, I can't ask those questions. It doesn't let me get to the 37 car changes because if there are five car changes at the end of the day that I didn't get to that roll over, you're going to complain that I'm not getting my work done.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If we take that idea as a microcosm and we pump it back and say, "Who is doing our car changes for us? Does it need to be Sally sitting in my office making $47,000 a year? Or could it be Tom making $7.50 an hour in Puerto Rico or the Philippines or India? Can they do the car change so that Sally can take those extra five minutes that would have been all the nonsense of doing a car change and say, 'Hey, how are the kids doing? What's going on? Oh, you're taking them to your second home up in the Adirondacks? I didn't know that. When did you buy? Why didn't you call us about that?'"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: "Well, Sally, I didn't even know that you guys did second home insurance." These are the kinds of things where our customers don't even know that we do them. They make assumptions because they're not supposed to be insurance professionals. If we're not taking the time to ask the questions, we never get to root it out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I just had a buddy of mine who writes motorcycle insurance. If you asked him two years ago, he would have told you he prides himself on the number of motorcycles he writes for his clients. He started using a program that helps him find additional things that people own. He plugs people's contact information in and it tells him, "Oh, they own this classic car." Something like 10% of his clients had motorcycles that he wasn't insuring. He immediately opened his eyes to the fact that we are not asking these questions on phone calls.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is just one aspect of what I believe this human optimized agency is. It's finding technology, automation, and tools that allow you to remove — and in my case, it's VAs too — removing the work that doesn't add value so that your people can spend more time in the places where it does. That is the core concept of what I'm trying to build with Rogue. I'm not there yet, and I would be happy to explain why I'm not there. Some of those reasons are me. Some of those reasons are our industry. But that is where I'm trying to go.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: I'm really excited to hear that. For at least five years, I've been talking about this very idea — that the CSR as we know it is dead. The people in the agency that you hire need to be salespeople focused on selling things based on relationship, and technology takes the drudgery away. I love your term "human optimized" and I'm going to steal that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Go ahead.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: It's a fabulous way to describe what I think we're headed towards. With that in mind, you're obviously a smart entrepreneur looking at the future and saying, "Cost and what people want isn't aligned with the way we're doing business today. I've got to build a different kind of agency." But you just mentioned that you started with that idea and it's not 100% today. Who would have thought it would be? You've been in business seven months and you're still building. Let me ask you this: as you think about your agency over the next three years or so, are you going to get to that place? What does that place look like?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think it's going to be really interesting. The realities are that the technology is not there. It's not there. The carriers are not there. Carriers aren't even close. I don't mean to always bang on the carriers, but the truth is, some of the carriers that I enjoy working with the most still force me to use Internet Explorer — a piece of technology that is no longer updated by Microsoft, is the most vulnerable to cyber and malware attacks, and only works on certain computers. Yet the only way to quote their business is through that portal.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I had to have a conversation with one of my marketing reps who said, "Ryan, your new submissions have really trailed off with us." I just said, "Your technology is so bad, you're losing business from me. If you're losing business from me, you're probably losing business from a lot of agents because it's taking me too much time and effort to quote something with you. If you're not thousands of dollars better, I'm simply not doing it. I'm literally not doing it."
--:-- Tony Caldwell: What's interesting about that comment is I just interviewed a senior vice president for the Hartford, who was talking about how carriers are really beginning to look at agencies and asking, "Are you using technology well, or are you making us spend a lot of time and expense to handle your submissions?" I immediately think, "Okay, we've got a whole bunch of people here. It's like the Tower of Babel. We're all saying the same things to each other, but nobody's doing anything about it."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There are carriers that are doing something about it. Hartford is one of the leaders. Hartford is absolutely getting business from me that is stealing it from this other carrier that is not doing the right things. Chubb is another one. Chubb is not perfect, but they are making strides and making it easier. I think they're doing a lot of the right things. I know there's been some negativity towards some of their digital stuff and automation over the last five years, but in the time that I've been writing with them — which I've had since day one, which has been a blessing — I've seen improvements already. I think we are trending in the right direction, but the truth is we're not there today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: In the Northeast, we have a lot of mutuals and really small regionals that may be in two or three states. Some of them, their technology is right on point. Take Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock is obliterating some of the traditional carriers simply because they've completely changed the way that we underwrite business, or at least the way that you quote business. We're not talking about some fancy insurtech startup who doesn't know the industry. We're talking about Bill Martin and a group of people who've been around for a long time. They're in nine states and you can now get a homeowner's quote with them with two pieces of information: name and address. That's a bindable homeowners quote. Bindable, not "now I need a hundred pieces of information to validate it." Two pieces of information, bindable homeowners quote. That is changing the game.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What I get from traditional carriers is, "Well, they're only in nine states. We'll see how it goes." I'll be honest, the agents don't care how it goes. I don't care how it goes. I've watched all these legacy carriers. I've watched their rates go up and then come back down, then they buy some market share, then they harden. Then they have the audacity to question a company like Plymouth Rock. Maybe their rates will go up. Who knows? But all I know is I can over the phone have a number in front of someone in minutes — like two minutes. That is what people want. They don't want phone call, information, follow-up email, couple texts. They don't want that. They want to call and have their problems solved.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There are different levels of coverage needs and different risk exposures. I'm talking about fairly standard two cars and a home and you want to put an umbrella on. That should not take time. When you have something like you're in a flood zone, or you're high net worth, or we're talking about packaging second homes and some toys — that's a different conversation. But the people who call who just have two cars and a home and you're going to pop an umbrella on the end — that should not be a five-email, two-phone-call, 40-question-touchpoint. It just can't be today.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: A couple things I want to unpack there. You're really saying something that I say a lot: the agent is competing with Amazon. Not that Amazon is selling insurance, but that's what's setting the standard in a consumer's mind about what service ought to look like. It's immediate, thoughtful, anticipating issues and problems. Recommendations are done automatically, but it's fast. You're saying that's really important to you as an agent. I get that.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: But the really interesting thing is, just as Hartford is telling me they're going to look at agents in the future about technology adoption, you're saying you're pushing back and going, "Yes, that's also what I'm looking at today." I'm assuming you're a new agent. You probably wanted to gather as many appointments as you could get, but you're already making cuts. You're like the coach of the basketball team and it's the second week of the season — it's time to cut a few people. Are you actually getting rid of carriers based on that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I have not gotten rid of any yet, but there are at least two that if they come in and have any gripes or want to give me any flack, I'm just going to say go. I don't care. It means nothing to me. I believe there was a time when carriers cared about the relationship with agents. I am positive that if you have $5 million in revenue or some number, they do care. But do they really care? I don't know.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's not a knock. I don't think they should care about me. I don't need them to have some deep, emotional, heartfelt relationship with me. What I really want is for them to make this relationship work by just doing their job, doing what they promise. I will do my job for them, which is frontline underwrite, be honest in my submissions, and sell the product. That is what my job is. That's my side of the relationship. I'm going to do the frontline underwriting. I'm going to be honest in my submissions. I'm going to sell, sell, sell.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If I do that, all I want in return is a system that works. I want honest feedback and an open mind to my underwriting. I want pricing that is at least reasonable. Give me good, reasonable, consistent pricing as best as you can. There's always fluctuations. If we can just uphold those two sides of the bargain, we're all going to make a lot of money.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But what happens is you get, "I want manufacturers." Then you submit a manufacturer and they go, "Yeah, but not manufacturers with joist and masonry built before 1965 who have a building that's two stories tall that happens to be where the moon aligns with the sign of Aquarius in May." You're just like, "Oh my God, what are you talking about? You told me you want manufacturers. I'm handing you one. Write the account."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I just had a carrier decline flat out — "No, we don't want it. We don't write it" — and then have a big agency come in behind me and go, "Oh yeah, we'll write it for you." I was floored that this still happens today, considering all the nonsense that we get from our carrier partners on a consistent basis. We can get off carriers in a second because there are so many who are doing amazing work in different regards.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There is now a carrier that I will never write ever again. Anytime I see them, I will do everything I can to rewrite their policies. It will mean nothing to their bottom line and no one in that carrier will ever make less money. But they now have an enemy in the marketplace because their underwriter flat out told me no on a first-in submission. Then when a larger agency came behind me, they go, "Well, I think we could find a way to get that done." I lost the account. I also look like an idiot because I told the guy, "Yeah, they declined me." Then all of a sudden he gets a side door submission from another agent who looks like the schmuck.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Those are the kinds of things we have to get out of our industry for my generation of agent. Where it used to be that there was no mechanism to talk about these things — you couldn't get access to certain carriers because of where you were located or just the lack of openness and communication — now I can go into IAOA's Facebook group with 7,000 agents and go, "Here's exactly what these guys did. Be very careful of them. Do not take them seriously." Not that I'm going to do that because I'm not using this carrier's name on purpose, I'm not going to put them on blast. But you can do that, and that happens.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All these iterative actions that used to kind of grind an agency down or leverage the fact that they were small — all those things get spread. You just can't treat people like that anymore today. I have 40 agents that are my generation — 35 to 50 year old agency owners — who are all growing like gangbusters, who are all going to be the prime time middle market players in their regions in the next 10 years. They all know what this carrier did now. I think that ends up being a problem long term.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: That's not really any different than it's ever been. That kind of behavior has been going on for a long time. I think what you're really saying is that the communication capability is so widespread. It's interesting because consumers now don't buy anything by and large without a whole lot of other people saying this is okay. My wife never buys anything without looking at reviews. People are looking at your reviews as an agency owner making a decision. You're really saying, "Hey, we're finding ways to create a review system for insurance companies, and that's going to impact their ability to generate marginal profit in the future." That's a change. That's different than what it's been.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: Thinking about change and difference and how you're building your agency. You were telling me earlier that you've basically got people doing things for you either on a contract basis or as employees. They're obviously not located in your office. How do you feel about the future of the agency workforce, either from a locational point of view or skill set? How are you going to build your agency as you grow with people? What are you looking for? What do you think will be different for your agency than your father-in-law's?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I'm going to use a buddy of mine. His name's Spencer Holden. He runs one of the most successful high net worth insurance agencies in the entire country, Erickson Partners or Erickson Insurance Advisors. We were having a wonderful conversation about remote work and how with COVID, he was able to increase the overall productivity of his team by taking them fully remote.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm not going to share his secrets, but I will say, I think the tools of today, the API, the ability for companies to have API connections and reporting... It feels like some of the agency management systems are starting to adopt, although they're definitely under pressure because there's so many new players in the market today due to their lack of effort for so long. Then you have agencies who have straight moved to Salesforce.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That being said, the cloud computing, the general disposition of employees, work from home — it's now proven effectiveness. I think what it does is it allows you to hire the most talented people, the people who are right for the situation. So if you have a personal lines producer and she lives in Staten Island, which is three and a half hours from where I'm sitting, but she's perfect — she's exactly what I want, exactly what I need — I can hire her today. None of my personal clients care where she lives. They just simply don't care.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think they care that they can call her. I think they care that they're talking to a human that they have a relationship with. I think they care that she's experienced, that she cares about their success, and that she's going to do what she can to make sure they're in a good program. I do not think that they care even a little bit that she is not sitting in the office next door to me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think having people in your office is wonderful as well, especially if your prime target is 50 miles around you. I think you can outsource a lot of the tasks that do not add real value to your agency. The VAs I use — AgencyVA is who I use. I like them because they are insurance industry specific and they have specific software which manages their VAs. There's far less likelihood of any funny business going on there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The key with VAs, and I think we Americans have to remember this, is that these are just human beings too. They just live in a different country. Oftentimes they are way more thankful for their job. A lot of these people have college degrees. It's just cost of living that makes them cost effective, not their lack of skillset.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The beauty of today is that there is no right or wrong way to do it. You can go fully remote across the country. You can go fully VA. You can have everybody in your office. You can have everybody local but working from home. You can have some hybrid method. That is the beauty of today. What solves your clients' problems best, and how do you make the people happy who can solve those problems for your clients? Whatever shape or form that takes is available to you. That is what I love about where we are at in this moment — the pure flexibility and vastness of options that agency owners have at their disposal.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: So we've talked about... and I think you've given a really passionate reason why people ought to think about maybe changing the way they handle employees in terms of distribution. How do you think about that in terms of clients? You're trying to sell commercial insurance primarily. That's what your personal interest is in. But you have a niche market there in New York. Are you now thinking, "Hey, I can sell insurance in California and Nevada and Massachusetts and Florida"?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I already do. I think it depends on the line of business. I want to go back to how I finished the last one. When it comes to how you formulate the clients that you bring in, your marketing strategies, your prospecting strategies — again, we have so many options. Every possibility is on the table. You want to only sell insurance through a custom app that you build? You can do that. I don't know it's the most effective way to do it. I'm not even advocating it. I don't even have one. But what's great is that is a possibility.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Who do you want to serve? How do you want to serve them? Having been a chief marketing officer for about five years in total, I made a ton of contacts in the marketing space. So I actually write marketing accounts, marketing companies. It's not high volume stuff. It's not middle market businesses. But I'm serving these clients that I can speak their language. I know all their problems. Between Hartford and Chubb, I have two great carriers to write their full package. Because of my partnership with a different market access company — although I highly advocate yours as well and have many friends who use a different master agency — ultimately the network allows me to do that. That is the beauty of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My specialty is really workers comp. I write a lot of contractors, write a lot of comp for contractors. I've started to work into marketing agencies and I've also started to work into technology companies. Startups, tech companies — some of my markets are dictating that. I have a couple markets that really, particularly Hanover, Hartford, and Chubb, all just love technology companies. They have great programs. All three are kind of best in the business. That gives me options and has guided me into the tech space.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's the beauty of the tech space: these men and women could care less where you're located. Most of them don't even ask. I have to tell them where I'm located. I don't even know why I'm saying it. I just feel obligated to share with them where I'm sitting. They could care less.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Another interesting thing: I haven't sold one account on Zoom. Not one. All this talk about Zoom, Zoom, Zoom — everyone's going to want to do Zoom. I'm not saying that's not true because I have buddies who did it. I haven't sold one on Zoom. It's been email, text, and phone. I do do video proposals. I think that's probably a big part of the reason why I don't need to do Zoom — because I do video proposals. But I haven't had to do Zoom. People just haven't needed it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to take this back to if you're a traditional agent. I don't want to say that like it's a bad thing. It's a wonderful thing. You're probably killing the game and you're certainly making more money than I do. So some part of you should be saying this guy's full of it. But if you are sitting there and you're looking into the future and you're feeling uncomfortable... I know plenty of agencies that would be classified as traditional, but they're loving life because they have a great process. They have zero stress. They know in the next five years they're going to sell and they're perfectly happy with where they're at. It's all good in the hood. You should do nothing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, I think there are things you could do to maximize your agency value. But in essence, you don't have to do a whole lot. You're in a good spot. But if you're looking out 10 years and you haven't started to make some changes, you're in big trouble.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: On my podcast, I just had a guy, Dax Craig. He's a co-founder of Pi Insurance. I really like Pi Insurance. They're a workers comp only carrier. They write in I think 30 something states, 40 something. I know they're not in all — actually I think Alaska and Hawaii are the only two states they're not in. So maybe it's like 47. I like them a lot. They have a great product. I like the way they handle it. I've written quite a few workers comp policies with them. For what it's worth, it is similar in many regards to working with say an Amtrust or an Employers from a workers comp only standpoint. You're getting good service. They're easy to work with. The coverages are all there. The policy forms are there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: They also write direct. They're gobbling up some of the small business market and they're not paying us commission. That is going to become more the rule than it is the exception. There's nothing we can do about it. I think it's great. The companies that only work with IAs — I do try to place more business with them if I can. But the truth is Pi's rating and service right now is on par or better than most companies that'll write contractors workers comp, which is what I write. If I have office risks, I usually put them with Employers. But if I'm writing contractors, especially artisans, Pi is just dominating the New York market. So what am I supposed to do — cost my clients more money to put them with a quote unquote traditional carrier?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My point is, all these different avenues start to eat into our margins. We lose one account here. We lose one account there. One guy who would have been referred to us now gets picked off before he picks up the phone. He just goes direct to somebody. Then we have some digital players from outside the space. We have all these people building super niches all over the country.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I got another good buddy in Connecticut who does real estate investor insurance. He writes in like 17 states and almost every week he's adding another state. He probably writes property in your state right now. He lives in Connecticut, his office is in Connecticut, all his people are in Connecticut. My point is, everyone can reach out into other markets and add value, and consumers are responding to it. So if you're just a 50-mile man or woman, and you're not doing the things you need to do to build fences around those clients, every day you have more competition. I think you'd be doing your entire team and certainly the valuation of your business a disservice by not trying to update.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: So Ryan, I'm hearing about four or five really key things that seem to be your philosophy about the future. The first is distributed workforce — hire people where you get the best quality talent. Second, pick insurance companies based on technology and what they can do for you in terms of saving you costs and speeding delivery to your client. Third, really focusing on the client experience. Fourth, niche marketing across geography. And fifth, really not being afraid to use market access providers or other people to broaden the carrier set so that you can solve clients' problems. It sounds like that's the way you're building your agency.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: For somebody that is listening to us talk and is maybe thinking about either changing the way they're operating or starting from scratch the way you have, any last words of advice you can give them about the agency — like skating to the puck, where you see the agency being in three to five years?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I'm going to take these out of order and I want to add one caveat to one of the things you said about choosing your carriers by technology and pricing. That said with the bar of they have great coverage forms, good quality products. Obviously that probably goes without saying, but I didn't want people to disregard that stuff. If two carriers have equal coverage forms, equal quality, A-rated companies, I would lean towards the one who's pushing into technology because they're going to be your partner in the future. The ones that are lagging behind or acting as if it's not important or not prioritizing it — the cost is the cost of time. It's your time. Your people's time to do business with them is a real expense that no agency owners are calculating. I shouldn't say no. The median agency owner, the standardized agency owner, is not thinking about their people's time as a cost to their business. That is where that carrier starts to lag behind.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is the problem that Seth Zaremba is solving with Neon — tracking how much time effort, how many activities does it take? How many communications back and forth does it take to get a quote out of a carrier? When we start to think at a deeper, richer level — and I'm not saying you need to go this far. He is on the spectrum of nerdiness that is beyond most of us. But what I'm saying is, with all things being equal, the reason that I would suggest you start to lean towards a technology-driven carrier is because they're going to reduce the amount of time taken out of your people's day to do business with them. That is a real cost in 2020.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So where are we going next three to five years? I think I would like to have somewhere between three to five commercial programs built out with program owners for each one of those three to five lines. Beyond that, that's really where I'm going — I want to get to these commercial programs. I have ideas for what they're going to be. Marketing will be a huge part, branding will be a huge part of our agency. But ultimately I want to run a profitable growing agency like anybody else.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't sell insurance to sell insurance. I sell insurance so that I can take my kid to baseball games and stuff. I don't want to be a producer. I know that in our industry, oftentimes the big ego in the room is the producer. "Oh, I sold this account. I sold that account." I could give two flying... whatever about selling an account. It doesn't mean anything to me. I want to run a successful agency. I want an agency that's set up to grow. I want to run an agency that pays me an amount of money that allows me to live the life that I want to live. I want to make my people happy. I want to make my clients happy. When I'm ready to go, I want that agency to be easy to sell. I'm going to sell it and I'm going to get out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This isn't this big ego-driven thing. I purposely didn't put my name on the agency. This isn't the Hanley Agency. I don't need someone stroking my ego because it's the Hanley Agency. There's nothing wrong with that. I know a lot of you probably have your name on your agency. It's not your fault. It's what everyone did for so long. But this is just where I think I want to be replaceable in my agency. That should be my goal. I am providing an environment for my people to be as successful as they can so that I can go live the life that I want to live. I want to play golf.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I may look young on the screen, but I'm 40 years old. That isn't old, but I'm certainly not 25. I'm certainly not at the very beginning of my career. I'm in the prime years. I have 10 years to get this agency to the point where it is just cooking on gasoline. If I want to step away for a month and take my kids to spring training games down in Arizona, I can do that and not feel like the thing's going to fall apart. That is what I'm building towards — a well-run agency business. I could care less about producing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I still cold call. Tony, this afternoon I have an hour and a half worth of cold calling I'm going to be doing. Cold calling still works. Cold email works. Networking works. It all works. You just have to put time into it. So I do some traditional things. I do some digital things, all with an effort to build an agency in which I don't have to be part of for it to work well. That's where we're going.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's the very last thing I'll say. If you are a producer and you're sitting there going, "Wow, that sounds great. That sounds sexy." It is. It's very sexy and fun. Don't get me wrong. It is also completely awful. So if you can find an agency that you can grow into and feel satisfied and feel respected and have the tools that you need and possibly down the road when you've earned it, maybe become some sort of equity partner — if you can find that one, it absolutely exists. I will not be the sole owner of Rogue Risk by the time this thing gets sold. I know that. Those opportunities exist in the marketplace. I would look for those opportunities first.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you are unhappy... This agency has cost me valuable marriage capital. It's cost me time with my kids. It's cost me stress, anxiety. I've spent a ton of money that I'm not making. I'm technically on a month-to-month basis profitable today, but as a whole, as an investment, I certainly haven't recouped what I put into it. If I screw something up, I'm the one that gets sued. These are the things I think as young producers we don't think about when we glamorize becoming an agency owner — all the choices you have to make, all the pressure.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm not saying don't do it. Obviously I did, that would be hypocritical. But I do think that if you can find an agency that you can become a part of that will help you be what you want to be, I think you will be much happier long-term in that scenario than starting from scratch. Starting from scratch is pretty awful.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: In my book, *Uncaptive Agent*, which was published this year and really talks about the process of starting an insurance agency, one of the things that I did right up front was to make the point you're making — here's a gut check for founders. You really got to think through the fact that it's not going to be easy. It's going to be difficult and there's going to be a sacrifice, and whether or not you're really willing to make it. Thank you for making that point. I think that's true in spades if you're a startup, but I'll also observe that it's also true if you just want to own an agency. Even if you buy the agency, you still have a lot of risk, a lot more work, and it's different. Not everyone's cut out for that.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: I think we're going to have more agencies in the future than we do today in all likelihood. Entrepreneurs who have that fire in their belly can't be stopped. But there's many others who maybe have a banked fire and have to decide that they want to fan that thing into flame or, to your point, go have an easier life. I'm glad you recognize that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The only reason that I had to start this agency is because I've been fired three times. That was pretty much case in point that I don't do well as an employee. In truth, I would prefer to have a partner. I would love to have someone who I could bump into every day and run ideas off of and keep me on track. I would much rather have a team around me. Now I'm building that team.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: A lot of podcasts that I listened to with agency owners who have started their agency in the last three to five years — they talk about all the amazing stuff and then they kind of joke about the stress. I just want to let people know who may be sitting in that seat thinking about starting their own agency: think about what it would feel like to look at the closest wall and run as fast as you can face first into that, and then do it three times a day. That's basically what you're signing up for. You're just going to run into this wall three times a day and hope that eventually you knock the wall down. But you never know when it's going to happen, if it'll ever happen. You come out with a lot of scars, a lot of black eyes. It's not fun, but the other side of it can be.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think there'll be more agencies. I think for a while, there's going to be a lot more small agencies because the big guys are just... what do we have? 700 plus transactions for two years in a row now. There's so much consolidation. I think there's going to be more. I think networks like the SIA, OAA — I think this model is going to be a huge part of our future. I think there'll be a lot of different versions of networks, shared equity environments, different types of operations, franchise models like Goosehead, Quantum just entered the marketplace, Brightway.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The standalone "I do everything on my own, get my appointments on my own" — one, I don't know that that's actually optimal today. I don't know that's actually the best way to do it. And two, I don't know that you can. I just simply don't know. Unless you are essentially a quasi captive, I don't know that you can do it that way. I think finding a network, partnerships, equity networks — there's a lot of different variations. Finding the one that fits right for you is the best play.
--:-- Tony Caldwell: This has been a fascinating conversation. I'm really excited for what's happening in your life and your agency. You started on March 9th, the week before COVID really just sort of crapped on us, I guess is one way to look at it. But you're being successful and you're proving the point that you can be successful even when you have adversities if you've got the right mindset and you've got a great business plan. And as you said, you're willing to work hard enough and run into the wall three times a day. So congratulations on where you are now and where you're going. Thanks for being with me. I really appreciate it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you. Thanks, Tony. I appreciate it. I know I didn't give you much of a chance to talk. You caught me too early in the morning on a Monday. But no, this is great. I just appreciate you doing this podcast. These conversations are super important. Thanks so much.
--:-- [End of interview. The following appears to be unrelated audio or a different recording.]
--:-- Speaker Unknown: Charlie, that's really good. You go fuck yourself and your fat fucking ass. Thank you.
--:-- Speaker Unknown: Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, Bubbles? Yes. Yes. Thank you.
--:-- Speaker Unknown: Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, Bubbles? Yes.
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