--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode for you with the owner of Camargo Insurance, Jay Muller. Someone who I've gotten to know over the last few months. We had a chance to talk on the phone and I heard his story, what he has going on, and some of the decisions he's made in his agency.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: He is just another tremendous example of someone using an independent insurance agency to build the lifestyle, the work style, to build the exact business that they want in their life. It supports both the meaningfulness of the work and the lifestyle that they ultimately want. I think Jay's a great guy. I love what he's doing. He is putting in place some of the building blocks for what is going to be an absolutely tremendous agency. Well, Camargo is a great agency already, but he's kind of doing things to set them up to go even further. We talk a lot about that. This is a great all-around episode that I think you're really going to enjoy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I want to give a shout-out to Better Agency. Better Agency is one of the sponsors of this show. They make the show possible. I am also a user of Better Agency. Better Agency is the CRM that drives Rogue Risk. We use it for all our communications, all our emails, all our texts. We keep our attachments there. We keep our notes there. We trigger tasks out to other tools. I use Better Agency to trigger personalized postcards that I send out through Thanks.io. It's all easily managed both visually and from an agency workflow standpoint.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: They're adding new features almost on a weekly basis, it feels like. They've added all the commercial line stuff and that's continuing to get better. I've said this for a while about Better Agency. If you're a personalized-focused agency, there's literally no better CRM on the market. Now with their most recent update and what's been proposed coming in the next few updates, they are rapidly becoming just an all-around universal best-in-class CRM for the insurance industry. It is well worth your time to get a demo and at least know what Better Agency can do. That's betteragency.io. Go to betteragency.io. Get the demo. Do the trial. I think it's like 14 days for a buck. $1, 14 days. You get to try it out. Some of the best and most forward-thinking agency owners in our industry have leaned into Better Agency. I couldn't be happier with the product myself.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right. Go to betteragency.io and let's get on to Jay Muller. There he is. What's up, man? What's going on? Dude, you look amped up.
--:-- Jay Muller: I am. Ready to go. Yeah, I got my nine essential amino acids in me and I just got my workout in.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There you go.
--:-- Jay Muller: I was pounding some chicken real quick. We're feeling good. We're feeling real good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's good. You do the midday workout? Is that your routine?
--:-- Jay Muller: So what actually happened was I have a buddy of mine. He's actually a mortgage broker and he sends me some business and stuff, but he's a buddy first, right? I told him the other day that I've been getting into boxing for cardio and that kind of stuff. I added that into my workout because I just hate running. I try to mix in three to five miles when I can, but I just hate it. It's just not fun. I get done with it and I'm just like, "Ah, I ran," whatever.
--:-- Jay Muller: So about two months ago, I started researching boxing. I'm not really looking to punch anybody, nor do I really want to be punched at 40 years old, but certainly the workout. I've kind of really started to get into it. He used to be a boxer, did some amateur boxing. He's got like a whole gym in his basement. So I went over this morning and we did a cool kind of circuit workout. Then, as much as I probably should have been cold calling, I did a bunch of errands that I had to run for the family. The rest of the day, life does happen and things have to happen.
--:-- Jay Muller: Because I'm the work-from-home spouse, I get tasked often with, "Hey, can we stop at the store and pick this up? If you're driving by this store, pick this up." So I just got all that crap out of the way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, that's good. I got so far away from my workout routine over the last six months or something. I get in cycles in and out of it where I'm very diligent about it. For me, the morning workout is the best one because that gets the blood flowing, gets my brain going. It gets me in a zone for the rest of the day. But then inevitably something will happen and it's like, man, I know I'm not going to get to everything today or this week. So I need that hour or that 30 minutes. No matter what time I wake up in the morning, I just wake up and I'm like, "Got to go into the office," but then I get away from it for a period of time. Next thing you know, I'm just not as on point. I'm not where I need to be. I got to get back to doing the thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I actually started running. I am not a huge fan of running. However, my goal has been to not work hard. As ironic as that might sound, I need to be consistent, period. I don't care if I run for 10 minutes in the morning. Just move your body in the morning and do something and you're going to feel better. Don't get too far into it because that's what I'll do. I'll start, whether it's running or lifting or whatever, I start doing it and then I just want to do it more and be better and better and better. Then I build up this pressure in my head, which is pointless because I don't plan on or need to run a marathon or run fast or lift lots of weights to be healthy and feel good. That's really it. Just being consistent with setting the bar low with my workout routine is kind of where I feel like I need to be right now.
--:-- Jay Muller: I feel the same exact way. The unfortunate thing for me—and I shouldn't say unfortunate because I think it's helped me in some ways—is that once I lock into something, I kind of obsess about it. With the boxing thing, I'm now watching YouTube videos about throwing punches and I'm literally saying to myself, "I am never getting into a ring." Those days are over. I don't want anyone to punch me in the face. I have zero desire. But because I'm doing it, and I do really like the workout and the mix of strength and speed and core, I really like it. I feel great. But yeah, I'm going like, "How much? What am I? Why am I researching this so much?" Whatever, it's all good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think that kind of obsession, I definitely obsess about good things for business and try to obsess about positive things or productive things as well. Although I guess the working out could be productive, but it's all good. COVID definitely, I was way off of center because of the COVID—not COVID itself, but just all the craziness. Then I probably got a little too caught up into the political stuff. Since the election happened, I basically said to myself the day before the election, "Whatever happens, whoever is the president, whatever stuff, I'm shutting it off." I'm going to very loosely follow what's happening just from an interest standpoint. I'm not going to get on Twitter and express my opinion, which I found myself doing occasionally.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is so off context and I promise everyone who's listening, we will pull this back into why Jay's actually on the show. But I have a blue check on Twitter. I got that because four or five years ago, a buddy of mine who was working for Twitter, they were looking for quote-unquote "influencers." I hate that word. Everyone who's going to say "influencer," I don't think of myself in that way. They were looking for people in other industries other than media and celebrities to give the blue check to. They wanted people in financial services, real estate, all these different industries. He reached out to me and said, "Hey, do you want this?" He said, "It does come with baggage." It does because you have that blue check. People respond more to some of the things that you write.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I am right-leaning, I could say, which is awful because on many issues I'm also very left. I'm more of a human than these machines that operate these talking heads on both sides. In general, I tend to be more of a capitalist, I guess, probably than anything. It doesn't matter. There's the whole social and fiscal thing, and for whatever reason, they get grouped together.
--:-- Jay Muller: 100%. That is the biggest shame, I think, of the whole thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is actually how it got started. I wrote a tweet that said, "I hate racism and bigotry, but I also hate socialism. And I really hate that I can't hate both of those things at the same time." That was the tweet. Because essentially what had been preached—and again, if you're listening, you're probably going to hate me if your views are different after this—but this was the thought process.
--:-- Jay Muller: You just tweeted something that... maybe this was the point. Now everybody gets to hate you for that statement.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. Now everyone hates me on both sides because people are like, "Oh, I thought you were a Republican." I'm like, "No, not really." I mean, I voted for Obama the first time. I'm not really a Republican. I'm not really a Democrat. I really like people, but I also like capitalism because I've read too much about socialism and the gulag. I read the Gulag Archipelago and I read about Nazi Germany and some things that happened in Ethiopia. I understand what happens when socialism comes in. I understand what the triggers are. So I have this very clear opinion. It's not just me like, "Oh, capitalism, America." I actually have an opinion and I was stupid enough to voice that opinion. From that day on... I said, "Stop." Surprisingly, I'm in a much better mood every day now that I'm not involved.
--:-- Jay Muller: Well, I never knew anything about the blue check. I love my LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is fun until you get the annoying automated messages. Outside of that, LinkedIn is interesting. People post interesting stuff. It's cool. I hate Facebook. I never got into Twitter. I probably should for marketing purposes, but I've just never really gotten into Twitter.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The blue check basically means you're a verified account. They stopped giving out blue checks about two years ago, so it's like a thing. To be honest with you, when I only tweeted about insurance, it meant nothing. I didn't even realize it was there. The first time I tweeted anything about politics, one, I found out how addictive it can be. When you see these people who say crazy shit just to get more attention, I kind of got a taste of that. I had a tweet actually go viral that hit like 1.7 million people.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I wrote, this is before Andrew Yang went super identity, intersectional politics person. When he was just talking about fiscal and problem solving, he seemed very rational and very thought out. I was like, "Hmm, if you took this guy and attached a Tulsi Gabbard as a VP candidate, that combo could give Trump a serious run for the money." That was the tweet, something like that.
--:-- Jay Muller: Oh my God, dude.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My likes were... my phone, I had to fix my phone. It was insane. I was like, "I can see why these people get addicted to this." It was crazy how many people were just hitting that like button. It's not healthy. What I learned from the last six months of not having the self-discipline to not get involved is that I completely understand why celebrities and media personalities and people get addicted to saying this stuff and having these opinions and being so inflammatory. It is intoxicating. It really is. It's intoxicating to look at your Twitter and see 7,000 likes on a post.
--:-- Jay Muller: Yeah. On some level, we all like to have attention. It's this amplification of attention. Of course we're going to like that. Who wouldn't like people liking you? When you can multiply that times a gazillion, now that's a powerful thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Even though rationally, it's unhealthy. But dude, I want to talk. To reframe our conversation, we had the opportunity to talk maybe a month ago. It was still nice out. I was pacing my pool when we were having the conversation. We were just talking a little bit about your story and your background and the things that you have going on. We were talking about a whole bunch of stuff. I was like, "Man, I just want to have this conversation as much as you're willing to have it in this format." It was the kind of story and some of your thought processes and the way you approach different things. What really hit me was you having the guts to kind of refocus and do that work. I think there's something really, really powerful there. One, I appreciate you coming on. Two, why don't you jump in a little bit? For people who haven't met you before, tell them a little bit about you, about the agency, and what you have going on. Then we can go from there.
--:-- Jay Muller: Sure. Before I dive into it, we always have music pumping in here, and I have no idea if that's important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You're good, bro. You're good.
--:-- Jay Muller: All right. So, the Jay Muller story in a nutshell. Family insurance agency, same way that many of us have gotten into it. My dad ran the agency. He was a partner. I got into the business around 2007. About five years or so in, I was starting to really have some success as a producer. Built my book. Money was good. Taking home a nice paycheck. But I just had this feeling that what we were doing was unsustainable in a lot of ways. The amount of work we were doing was becoming ridiculous. The way we were doing it was becoming more and more clear that it was completely archaic.
--:-- Jay Muller: That's not to knock on that agency at all. It was and is an amazing agency that built a book of clients who love them and that they service extremely well. But the game clearly was changing rapidly. It had changed rapidly, and it was passing us by. I think there are many agents in this situation where life is pretty good. You're making good money. The family's happy. You wake up in the morning, you do your thing. But you're seeing that things are changing and the path to real change is not an easy one. It's not a clear one.
--:-- Jay Muller: There were a number of triggers that pushed me over the edge and caused me to tear down the entire thing, really risk the entire thing. I had to be operating in a space where I was willing to just throw it away to be able to move past that built-in structure that kept me doing what I was doing. I think it was probably 2017 or in there. I just kind of reached a tipping point. I was working myself ragged. I was working nonstop. My book of business was growing, but because of some kind of complicated ownership structure, I couldn't hire people around me to help me. The opportunities were still coming in, so I'm just selling and selling and selling. I just can't do anything to change the way that I'm operating, or felt like I couldn't.
--:-- Jay Muller: I remember telling my wife, "I've got 10 years and I'm done. If I do this for another 10 years and I'm still here, I'm promising you today, I'm going to sell this thing. Wherever we are, I'm done. I can't do this to you anymore. I can't do it to myself anymore. I don't feel good as a father when my day is all about going into a grind that I know doesn't have a long-term future because of the way that the organization is set up. I'm just doing it to take home a paycheck so that I can retire early." There's nothing really wrong with that, but it was just eating me apart. Because it was such a huge part of my life, that became a very unhealthy thing for everyone around me. It became this toxic thing, which was so unfortunate because it's a business that I love. It was just eating me up inside.
--:-- Jay Muller: So I kind of changed a chip and said, "Okay, I'm just going to do this for 10 more years and I'll be out." Around that time, my son was getting a little bit older. He was probably like three or something, started to talk a little bit and engage more. I really think it might've been fatherhood that pushed me over the edge. I just decided, "No, I'm not going to do that. I love this business. I want to change this business and build something that has power for the next 30 years, not the next three. I don't want the image of me as a father and husband to be this guy that just goes in and works every day for a paycheck and is kind of miserable because of what he does. What the heck is that? What kind of example am I giving?"
--:-- Jay Muller: So I really started thinking about, "Well, what do I really enjoy doing? If I'm going to change this thing, what do I enjoy? What am I good at?" I realized I would like to lead a team of people. I would like to introduce people to the amazing careers that insurance has to offer because it is an amazing industry to get into. We lose sight of that sometimes. I get a high off of empowering other people. When I can show someone else a path to success and help them achieve that, I love that. So I knew that if I could build an organization that could offer success, that could successfully empower others and show people a path to success in perpetuity, that that was a scalable thing.
--:-- Jay Muller: I started to create this vision of what the organization could look like, even though I was still very much in the day-to-day of the other thing. I took some time every day, usually before the day started, before my head got bogged down with emails and all this other crap where all of a sudden the brain is spinning in a zillion directions about what is very urgent right now. I would just think about this vision of what could be. The idea of the power of visions is something that I've continued with as we transitioned to this new model.
--:-- Jay Muller: I think the most important piece about creating a powerful and effective vision is that it is completely detached from how you're going to achieve it. Maybe that's counterintuitive, but when I found that when I'm stuck in the how, the how is what creates the vision as opposed to the vision itself. It has to start with the vision itself. Saying, "Okay, five years from now, not just with my business, but with my professional life, with my family life, what do I want that to look like?" I'm standing outside of the house, looking at it, describing it in as much detail as possible. What does that thing look like? The more times you run through that process, the more real it becomes. Then you can back into a path to get to that place.
--:-- Jay Muller: If somewhere along the line you're like, "Okay, I want to be a billionaire in five years," well, okay, maybe we do need to think about the how there. But you really got to check yourself when you start thinking about, "Well, I can't do that because of this, or this is not going to work because of that thing." So I started developing this vision of what I wanted the agency to be and exploring opportunities of, "Okay, what is something that could allow me to get out of this path that I'm stuck in?"
--:-- Jay Muller: There was sort of a shakeup in ownership structure, we'll say. It was crazy. We had a meeting and I just saw the opportunity. It was like a gigantic lever that smacked me in the face. It was like, "This is the thing. This is the opportunity to take control of this organization and move forward." I didn't let it go a minute past from when I saw it to when I said, "This is happening." That was early in 2018. From that moment forward, all of 2018 was making that happen and planning for 2019 when we implemented our new agency model.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There's a lot there to unpack. Thank you for that. The first thing that I want to talk about or ask you about is something that I have found very much in my own work and just life in general. I don't want this to sound too fluffy, so take it for what it is. I find that if my work isn't feeding my soul in some way, if it's not satisfying me, or if I'm not getting a sense of fulfillment from it, I'm kind of a shitty person in every other aspect of my life. It drives my wife crazy because she'll say, "Our home life is so good," which it is. I'm blessed. I have a tremendous spouse and great kids and a good family. She'll say, "Why does it matter what's happening at work?" I really struggle to detach what's happening at work. It doesn't mean everything has to be going good, but the work has to be satisfying. If it's not, it carries over. It bleeds into other aspects of my life. Is that what you were finding?
--:-- Jay Muller: Absolutely, yeah. I don't have any problem working very long days. I still do that. I think that the most effective business leaders oftentimes don't do that. They find a way to be really effective with the time that they have. But there are periods when you just got to do that thing. When I was in that space of, to your point, my soul was not happy with what I was doing, then you pile in these long hours on top of it. It's just like, man, this is... I don't want to say I was miserable because I wasn't. I wasn't a miserable person, but I was not a happy person outside of work. That's not a good thing for me or anybody around me.
--:-- Jay Muller: To me, that's the beauty of this business. One of the things that I've learned from Rogue is that you can craft an insurance agency into basically anything that you want it to be. It can be pure sales, Wolf of Wall Street kind of stuff. It can be laid back. It can be local. It can be digital. It can be niche. It can be generalist. I was just listening to Steve Holly on Carothers' podcast. He runs this great, he calls it a generalist main street agency, three locations, yet he's driven off a HubSpot. There's nothing traditional about Steve Holly's operation. Even in that is its own monster. He is very digital, but also local.
--:-- Jay Muller: My point in saying all that is that there's definitely a disconnect because of how flexible our career is. There is definitely a disconnect when you don't feel rewarded. Because you know, logically, "I can turn this thing into something that really makes me happy. So why isn't that there?" It's a very weird feeling.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. We're in such a crazy spot now and have been for years because of... it's been said over and over again, but it's so true. There are all these shiny objects out there. It's like, "Oh, I can change it by doing this thing or that thing. I'm going to buy this solution or that solution." There is no solution that can be purchased. There are zero solutions that can be bought in this lifetime, and certainly in this business. That was a lesson that I learned as I went through this process. When I did finally sort of set myself free from this other structure, I was like, "Oh, I can't do this because of that. All right, now I can do whatever I want." I was at Elevate in 2018 and I think I bought every shiny object that every vendor was offering. I was like, "Oh crap, I can't put it all together." So then I had to restructure it all with a better, more clear vision. I don't know where I'm going with that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, I get it. You almost want... I very much did what you just described. I had a whole battle plan rolling into Rogue. Seven days in, zombie apocalypse happens. I was planning on tackling the fitness market. It doesn't exist in New York state anymore. My next plan was to go after the restaurant market. That doesn't exist anymore. Now I'm literally the two campaigns that I had figured would be the first six to twelve months of the existence of my agency are not. I have not set my agency up for personal lines. I was going to be commercial. I was going to go after fitness and restaurants. That was my plan. Gone. Completely toast.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All of a sudden, I started filling that void with, "Well, what if I change from this tool to that tool?" I had this awesome build-out from Austin Moorhead and Infusionsoft. Then, "What if I changed from that to AgencyZoom? What if I changed from AgencyZoom to Better Agency?" Which I love, actually. I love all three of those tools. You can't go wrong with any of them. I'm on Better now, but I changed three times. I went from this tool to that tool to try this program, because I was trying to fill this void that you just talked about. Something feels wrong. Something isn't working. Ultimately, we'll get to this. Instead of figuring out what I actually wanted and executing, I was trying to do all these different things, hoping something would be a magic pill.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's funny is that we've been told a million times not to do that. Ten million times. Every person ever said, "Don't do that." And yet we still do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I want to talk about this. Then I want to take this into where you actually went. I love this concept of detaching the how from what you want. I'd love for you to break that down. Where did you get that from? How did you figure that out? How did you stay detached? Because my mind always goes to... I'll give you an example. There was something in Better Agency that I wanted to do that they haven't released an update for yet. I know it's coming, but it's not there. My mind immediately goes to, "Well, geez, if I just switched over to this other tool, I know it can do it right now. So why don't I do that?" That is such a ridiculous mental jump. I immediately went to the how of achieving this thing I want to achieve, instead of staying focused on the broader vision of what I was trying to do, having some perspective and understanding and pushing forward. How did you stay detached from the how? Where did you get that idea to begin with?
--:-- Jay Muller: Yeah. I think there were kind of two critical moments that helped me with that philosophy and, to the best of my ability, live to it. I'm not going to say I'm there all the time. But it was when I was first creating the vision for the new model of Camargo. I was blessed with an amazing business mentor who really helped me when I was faced with a crisis that I didn't know how to handle. One of the first exercises we really got down to was, "Where do you see Camargo Insurance in five years?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I want to talk about this. Then I want to take this into where you actually went. I love this concept of detaching the how from what you want. I'd love for you to break that down. Where did you get that from? How did you figure that out? How did you stay detached? Because my mind always goes to... I'll give you an example. There was something in Better Agency that I wanted to do that they haven't released an update for yet. I know it's coming, but it's not there. My mind immediately goes to, "Well, geez, if I just switched over to this other tool, I know it can do it right now. So why don't I do that?" That is such a ridiculous mental jump. I immediately went to the how of achieving this thing I want to achieve, instead of staying focused on the broader vision of what I was trying to do, having some perspective and understanding and pushing forward. How did you stay detached from the how? Where did you get that idea to begin with?
--:-- Jay Muller: Yeah. I think there were two critical moments that helped me with that philosophy and, to the best of my ability, live to it. I'm not going to say I'm there all the time. But it was when I was first creating the vision for the new model of Camargo. I was blessed with an amazing business mentor who really helped me when I was faced with a crisis that I didn't know how to handle. One of the first exercises we really got down to was, "Where do you see Camargo Insurance in five years?"
--:-- And as soon as I started running down a path of how to do this thing or that, it was like, "Well wait a second, I didn't say how are you going to get there. What do you want it to be?" Because I felt like I was in such a trapped situation, I really had to just focus on the vision. There was no how. The how was insane. The how was a totally crazy idea, which we finally did, which involved risking everything. So if I'm focused on that thing, I'm never going to be able to focus on what I actually want it to be. So that was the first time.
--:-- Then I met another business leader here locally who is really into this vivid vision process. That's where I took that to another level and took it from just the business to life overall. You break it down. It's literally a process. Say, okay, what is my vision of my business? What is my vision of my career, which is different? And then what is my vision of my family life? And what is my vision of my personal life? Those are different things. A lot of times we just group them all together. When I saw the way that he created his own and how it evolved over time and the power of thinking through those things, I just loved it.
--:-- When I'm really using that idea to its fullest—and I will not tell you that I stick to this all the time, it's like working out, I do it and then I float out of it, then I get back into it—it's when it's in the morning before anything starts. That vivid vision is a document. I have it saved in Google docs and it literally gets updated. I go in and say, okay, these things changed. But it's always, what does this thing look like in five years? Whether that's me, my career, Camargo, or my family. And describing it in as much detail as possible.
--:-- There's a lot of power in the brain. It either limits us or it empowers us depending on how we use it. When we get stuck on how we're going to do something, it becomes limiting because it's a loop, as opposed to expanding it and saying, well, anything is possible. Once I got a little bit better at that, it became a lot of fun because then, if I'm detached from the how, I can envision anything I want.
--:-- For example, my family and I are moving to Spain next year. That's something we've been planning on for over 10 years. It's not like I created that yesterday in my vivid vision. But she's from Spain, her family is over there. We've been planning that return for a long time. I will continue to run the business. I'll be back and forth. I've been doing that for probably 10 years where we go over there every summer. I usually come back for a couple of weeks, take care of anything else, and then we're over there for usually a month over the holidays. During different periods of our life when we've had to be there for certain things, I've probably spent six months or more per year there. So it's not out of the blue.
--:-- But those kinds of things—if you think about if I told you today, "I'm going to leave the country and move my family somewhere else," you'd say, "Well, how are you going to do that?" And I'd say, "Why not?" News flash, nobody has to see anybody in person anymore. So why are we sitting where we are? Really, why? Why are we here? Just because I was here before. That's it. I think, wow, that's crazy. I don't mean that in a negative sense. That just takes this idea of envisioning what you want and executing on it to a whole other level.
--:-- The idea of running an agency from a different country, specifically a country across the ocean where you couldn't just—if there's a problem, you can't be there the next day. You have to—I mean, maybe you can, but it's not like you want to do that, nor is it easy. You can't just leak down from Canada or something. But then we think about it, okay, we use VAs this year. They're in India. So how come I'm in Cincinnati and my VAs are in India and half my team is across the river in Kentucky? The other half is here in the office in Cincinnati. The other whatever percent is here in the office and the rest of them are somewhere else in Ohio. It's all fiber optics.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I'm with you. I have a VA who lives in the Philippines who's right now experiencing a typhoon and hasn't had power for two days, but he is safe, which is good. My producer, she lives in Staten Island, which might as well be a different world from upstate New York, across the water. She's three plus hours away. We've never even met in person ever. And we work perfectly fine. We Zoomed yesterday for an hour and a half catching up. It's just funny.
--:-- I think that this way of thinking—there is something very appealing about being the local agency, right? "Hey, stop in." There's something appealing about that to me. But I actually put a lot of thought into this a couple weeks ago. At a certain point, you have to mash who you are against what you think sounds like a good idea. Being the local agency here in Albany sounds like a good idea to me, right? It sounds nice. "Oh yeah, he's right over there." But it's not who I am. I have probably less clients in this area code than I have otherwise. Everything we do is virtual. Everything we do has nothing to do with us breathing the same air.
--:-- I have a couple clients that I've seen, but I'll be honest with you. I have a client I just took on who paid me with a hard check, and I regret it. I will never take a hard check ever again. Just the process of dealing with the check and dealing with the company—I will never do that ever again. I'll never take cash ever. We're just not that agency. I think that's a tough thing sometimes, marrying what sounds or looks like a good idea versus who you actually are. There can be some disconnects and bad decisions made there if you don't have the vision that you're talking about, if you're not playing to a point.
--:-- David Carothers beats me up about this all the time because he can be so focused and he's so good at it, and I can be very scatterbrained.
--:-- Jay Muller: Well, me too. You see that blackboard back there?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I was going to say, that's a pretty impressive blackboard you have behind you.
--:-- Jay Muller: Well, yeah, but the notes are written in every direction possible. It's like I never went to kindergarten or something. I have a hard time keeping things in a normal structure. It's either in a spreadsheet or it looks like that. There's no in-between.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So, you were feeling discomfort. You were a grinder. You were starting to feel that what was going on at work wasn't really feeding your soul. Those are my words. I don't want you to sound overly ethereal if you don't want to be. But then you created this vision. You started to really think about what you wanted the agency to be in five years, removed the how, which I love that. I get caught up in the how. I'm going to put some thought time into that idea because I think that's a hang up for me. And I don't know that I've ever thought about it that way. And then you make this move. So let's get to the rub here. Let's get to the—so then you make this power move. Talk us through this.
--:-- Jay Muller: Yeah. So I saw an opportunity to make it happen, and I just knew that was the opportunity. I also knew that opportunity was going to involve a serious amount of risk and it would be painful. My family was going to need to be on board with it. It was going to hurt financially for probably a period of years. But it was the right move.
--:-- During that period of 2018 through early 2019, I moved my family three times. We lived in three different homes. I'm big into real estate investment. That's my other passion. So it's not like we were in the streets or something. Things were fine. But what was really paying the bills all of a sudden was completely put at risk. I wasn't sure whether or not we were going to come through the other side of it. I needed to make sure that if we didn't, my family was in a position where we'd be okay.
--:-- So we sold our home and we renovated a duplex. That renovation went off the rails. So we were living by my parents, which got a little bit old with young kids in the same household. So we got a short-term apartment. Then finally ended up moving into another rental home, which is where we're still living. It was a period of very rapid change. I remember telling my wife during that period that I feel like every day I wake up and I might make three potentially life-changing decisions. It was really like that because I didn't know what the result of this whole process was going to be. I knew that by the end of the year, something would have happened. For better or for worse, something was happening. The wheels were in motion.
--:-- Operating in that space after a while became cool. It became empowering. Because every day I had to wake up and just be ready to make big decisions all the time. Once I got comfortable in that space, I realized, wow, I can take this thing somewhere.
--:-- Finally, we came through it. We got the deal we needed. During this period where I wasn't really sure what was going to happen, I'm signing leases to build out office space for a business I don't even know I'm going to have. I'm recruiting people, selling them on this vision of something that isn't really there yet. And we got it.
--:-- So January 2019, my second worst nightmare came true. We made all this happen, and literally I had not hired a single person into the new business. I signed this expensive lease, built this brand new, beautiful, awesome office. Hindsight, maybe not a great decision. I walk in the doors January 1st. I had hired one person, but she was not going to start until springtime. And we had this business to run. Clients needed ID cards, needed to add and remove vehicles and drivers and all the other stuff. It was myself and two other amazing people that I am forever grateful for that came with me on that journey.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Did you basically buy out your book? What did you do? As much as you're willing to talk about it. You don't have to get into specifics, but did you start your whole new agency? Did you buy your book out? Did you buy another agency? You made this big move. What was the move?
--:-- Jay Muller: Essentially the agency split and we retained the name. That's as basic as I can describe what happened. We were Camargo Insurance. We are Camargo Insurance. We kept our book of business and the other various owners and contractors and things went their own way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Gotcha. That makes sense. So that's a big move. You become the sole owner of this new entity that retained the name, but is way different than what it was before.
--:-- Jay Muller: Yeah. So then it was like, all right, well, there's no excuses now. We can build whatever we want. There is nobody else that I can turn to and say, "Well, I can't do it because of this or that." It's all on this guy.
--:-- So then we're managing this book, and we don't have a lot of people. So we need service centers. Without service centers, we just cannot survive. And if we're going to stay focused on this vision of what we know it can be, I need to find a way to actually work on the business. That involved putting some processes in place to make sure that I was not talking to everybody that called in that wanted to talk to me. That was painful, honestly. I enjoy talking to my customers. I'm not going to say I enjoy every single conversation sometimes, but the book grew because I liked what I was doing. And now it's like, all right, I can't talk to Joe and Jim and Sue because I just don't have the luxury of the time to talk to them. This is a very urgent situation. What we need to do to make this thing work is start building a team right now. And we need to make that team effective right now.
--:-- So it started with screening calls that are coming in and having somebody manage my email inbox so that people were getting taken care of, but I didn't have to see all that stuff. Everything went to my voicemail and then somebody else looked at it and distributed those voicemails accordingly. That created a lot of time. Not to say I wasn't getting dragged back into all kinds of stuff. I absolutely was.
--:-- Then I really got down to focusing on building a sales team. Our focus was, I'm going to bring in awesome, killer B2B salespeople from other industries. It's just not in the cards for me to afford to bring on an experienced insurance producer. First of all, it very rarely happens that somebody just switches shops. And if they do, why? There's always hair on that dog. Always. No way you slice it, there's hair on that dog.
--:-- So I wanted to bring in people and show them the power of this industry and help them succeed in it. We hired some really awesome people that were young B2B salespeople in other industries. They were literally door knockers. They just crushed the door knocking, old school. That was the way the businesses they worked for were set up, and they just crush it. So I taught them the insurance side of things and they went out and sold.
--:-- My whole idea upfront—I'm not an automation ninja. I love the idea of technology. I am terrible at technology. I love thinking about what it can do, but you put me in the system and say do almost anything, I am the biggest Luddite that you've ever met. But I realized that's okay as long as I have somebody else on my team that can help me with that piece of it, and I can provide direction on where I want this thing to go.
--:-- Out of the gate, we didn't have that. We were on Hawksoft. It does fine managing your policies, but it's not going to create anything amazing. It's not really a CRM. It's not going to do anything from an automation standpoint. I don't have a marketing background. I knew that marketing needed to be a core part of what we do moving forward, but that's not going to just become a thing overnight. So I said, all right, I'm going to build a team of door knockers. That's what we did. Once I got a team of door knockers bringing in revenue and building experience, then we could say, okay, let's focus on the next level.
--:-- How do we make Camargo really very similar to what you talk about with Rogue Risk? I call it empowering. How do I empower my people through technology? I just love that idea of empowerment in all of its senses. When we talk about where our industry is now, there is a lot of potential in empowering people through technology. You call it the human optimized agency. So once we had that foundation, it was like, all right, let's get serious about what technology we're using and how we can truly build an integrated solution that's going to empower people to do this thing in a better way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How was your process for getting the salespeople up and running? How long did it take you? How did you do that?
--:-- Jay Muller: It started with the right people. The right people on board that have experience in B2B sales and like it, and just happen to be in an industry that's not as good as insurance, which by the way is almost all of them. If I could get those people in, then it was, okay, just do what you do. You already know how to do what you do to get out and build a relationship and get in front of somebody, going from cold to closed. We're sitting at this table because you know how to do that. So go do that thing. When you bring in the opportunity, I will help you structure the underwriting, structure the submission.
--:-- Then we hired experienced—our first account manager came from the carrier side, from claims. Allie Vaughn. She's amazing. She's now our operations and innovation manager. She had a claims background with Liberty. So she had the insurance background, but not any agency baggage, which honestly was a benefit. So my producers would bring it in. I would kind of get them together and say, okay, this is how you submit something. These are the carrier sites. These are the underwriters you got to talk to. Here's what an accord form looks like. Here's how you complete it. And got them working together.
--:-- Shortly thereafter, we brought in an experienced account manager from another agency that had that experience. The idea was bring in the inexperienced salespeople and partner them with somebody with experience on the service side.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think I agree with what you said about in-industry talent being very difficult. It's so hard. I know there's a lot of good producers that work for agencies that they don't love. It doesn't mean they're in bad situations. They just don't love it there. The grass is always greener. I oddly get a lot of calls from producers from around the country who want to work for Rogue, which is weird because this thing is a shit show right now. I have a vision and we're on a path, but I would be very intellectually dishonest if I were to tell you that this is a smooth sailing ship. It's just not. We're still piecing things together. I still got to do a lot of stuff.
--:-- So to my point, when you bring people in from outside the industry, they don't often come with the baggage or the expectations that an in-industry producing person comes with. Also, they're just less expensive and you can help them get to the point where they are valuable. They do have a ton of experience.
--:-- When I think about this—and I think about it a lot because I am not the world's best producer—I envy when you're like, "I grind and sell and call and bring the business in." I'm a marketer. I'm really a marketer, and I feel like I have some decent technology and leadership skills. But I am a marketing person. I am not a salesperson. I'm just not. I can sell, but I am not that other side of the coin where you just show up and you're like, "I'm going to sell a bunch of stuff and get all jacked up and smash beer cans off my head." I am not that guy. And I'll do the beer can smashing, but the natural salesman, that's really not me either. It was like son of boss syndrome who's really stubborn. So I was there long enough that I just kind of figured out what I was supposed to do.
--:-- But the people that are on our team now, they are light years ahead of me from a natural talent standpoint. I've thought about this a lot. I can't wait to—I want the producer I have down in Staten Island. I love having her because she's former life insurance. She still does some life on her own. She has her own life insurance agency that she runs, but not P&C. I feel like my job is just to feed her opportunities. I want to get her the carriers, the opportunities, and I want to make sure the workflow is behind her so she can just call and sell and call and sell. That is what I'm good at. I do not get motivated, nor do I feel any energy from calling and selling and calling and selling. It's an odd thing.
--:-- Jay Muller: Everybody's wired differently. That was really one of the—talk about that theme of empowerment again. One of the empowering things about going through this process of changing the organization and saying, "I'm going to lead and run an organization, not be the organization," was that I was able to recognize my own deficiencies, of which there are very many, and then hire awesome people that can do all those things way better than I can. Now all of a sudden we have power. I can kind of stay in my lane. Now I got to be the one that's captaining the ship, otherwise it's going to go in any and all directions and that's not good. But I don't need to be the person that's connecting technology because I'm going to do that really terribly. I don't need to be the person that's creating relationships from nothing because that's not good. Now you put it in front of me, I'll crush it.
--:-- That's an exciting thing. Once you turn that corner—and I can tell just from listening to your podcast, you're heading that direction. It's going to be fun because you're going to be able to focus on what you like. That was what I found. When I finally got to the point that I could focus on what I liked, then it became really, really fun. And I was surrounded by good people that were focusing on what they loved. Then you've got this synergy of awesomeness.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, I think that's great. From talking to so many agency owners, and this isn't an easy thing regardless, it feels to me like many of the agency owners that really hit their stride, that really wake up every day and feel really good about their agency, have taken that step to remove themselves from the stuff they don't like doing. Some of them still love to sell, which is great. They've put themselves in a position where they still sell a lot. They like that. That's what you choose to do. The point is they've removed everything that they don't like to do or they don't have a solid skill set in from their day to day so that they can focus on the things that they are good at. That to me feels like a defining step in an agency's evolution when you're able to do that.
--:-- Jay Muller: Absolutely. This board here, it kind of ebbs and flows on what I'm tracking on it, but having something really big and in my face helps me stay focused on it. Otherwise it's gone in a flash. I had the old quadrants: Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. Important but not urgent, urgent but not important, blah, blah, blah. The idea is that most of us end up working on the urgent and important quadrant because it's urgent and important. You got to get it done and it's important. Just having that up in my face and knowing that my objective is to be running this thing, not being in it—that's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take time to get there. But if I'm tracking what I'm doing on that board, every time I find myself operating in that important and urgent category, it's like, well, why am I there? Why am I doing this thing? Am I doing this because I just want to? Am I doing it because I had some failure of process and that's why it ended up on my plate? That really helped me keep things moving towards that not urgent but important quadrant, which I think is important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think what you're doing is awesome. I think the way you're approaching the agency is just another tremendous example of crafting this thing to be what fits your life and what you want it to be. That's one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on and tell your story and talk a little bit. I think it's very easy to get caught up in what everyone else is doing. I remember IOA this year in San Diego, which was awesome. You talk to so many people and they're telling me, "I do this and I do this." It's so hard not to leave an event like that and be like, "Oh, I should be doing this thing over here. I should be doing this. I should be going after this thing." Even Crothers talks about that a little bit. I was just listening to his podcast, that's why he's in my brain, about him coming out of one of the IOAs and now he's in personal lines and stuff.
--:-- I think it's very easy to get caught up in what you feel like you should be doing. What I think is awesome about your story and Camargo is you made the very tough, very risky decision to build the agency to what you wanted it to be. Nothing's ever perfect and nothing's ever exactly, but you are on that path and you're taking the steps forward to get there. I think more people need to hear that we can build these things however we want. You want to forever be a one-person show? God bless you. You want to have 100 people? God bless you. You want to be the local agency? Amazing. You want to be fully digital clients all over the country? Whatever. All of it is possible. But I think it's what do you want? What do you actually want to be? Who do you want to work with? I love this core idea that I hope people take away: If we remove the how and we really think about what we want, then the how kind of solves itself to a certain extent.
--:-- Jay Muller: Well, focusing on the vision is the number one most important thing when trying to do something big, whatever big means for whoever is trying to do it. Focus on where it's going, and then back into the how. It's a reversal of thinking through it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, dude, I appreciate you. I want to be respectful of your time. Where can people get at you? You said LinkedIn is the good place to connect if people want to just connect with you and see what you're doing?
--:-- Jay Muller: Absolutely, yeah. Love the LinkedIn. Jay Muller. CamargoInsurance.com is our site. But yeah, ping me on LinkedIn. Love to connect. To your point, learn what everybody is doing in this industry because there are a million ways to do it and we can all learn from each other. We're at a really cool point in time where we're sharing and empowering each other.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, it's awesome. All right, buddy. Hey, appreciate you coming on. Be good.
--:-- Jay Muller: Yep, you too, man. Thank you.
--:-- [End of interview. The following appears to be an advertisement or outro.]
--:-- Announcer: Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not with the One Call Close System. You'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we use to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle-tested, the One Call Close System eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying yes more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit masteroftheclose.com. That's masteroftheclose.com. Do it today.
