--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. We have a tremendous episode for you today with Miles Merwin, the founder and president of Advisors Insurance Agency down in South Carolina.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Miles is a pretty incredible guy in terms of how he operates his agency. I definitely say that he is on the leading edge in terms of process and procedure, his utilization of virtual assistants, and the way he thinks about his business and how hard he works to optimize his business outside of just him banging away at cold calls.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Not that there's anything wrong with that. Some people go, "I'm going to be the best producer in the agency, and that's how I'm going to lead." That's a perfectly fine way to go about it. There are other people like Miles, and this show is all about introducing you to different mentalities and mindsets, because some people are going to click immediately for you and other people won't. Some people you'll take this piece from their business and other people you take that piece.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What I love is that Miles gives you a different perspective on how he's trying to remove himself from the day-to-day and really be a business owner, a business leader, and then build the team underneath him to execute on his vision for what his agency should be. He calls this moving from producer to principal. It's a new program that he has out as well. We talk a lot about that. I think you're just going to love this episode.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I want to give a shout out to today's sponsor, AgencyVA. Virtual assistants — there are Facebook groups dedicated to them almost on a daily basis. I see posts somewhere about somebody asking about virtual assistants, who they're using, and there are all different perspectives on this topic. I've read the "just put something out on Indeed or put something on Upwork and go sort through people and find someone yourself" model. I think that's a perfectly fine model. There are a bunch of vendors available in the market who offer VA services. I have just found AgencyVA to be the best.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If I'm being completely open and transparent, Wes Anderson and Ben — these guys are friends of mine. I like them a lot. I've gotten to know them at different events and I really enjoy them as people. But they're not just advertisers on the show. I'm also a client of theirs. I use essentially what is a managed VA service. I don't have any one individual full time, but I have a part-time, we'll call it operations VA. His name is Tom. He's handling — I just did his three-month performance review — and he's doing a tremendous job taking on more of the service work. I can give him more detailed, more nuanced processes. He does a lot of data management work, and we're in the process of training him how to do introductory quotes as well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I can't speak highly enough about that process and working with Tom and the system and the feedback you get and the reliability and the quality of individual and the training that Tom had before he came to Rogue Risk. I also have someone who's helping me manage my books better. I am terrible at accounting. I'm just absolutely terrible at it. I just don't want to think about it. The idea of slowing down and thinking about putting all my numbers together — I just want to see the numbers. I just want to know: where am I at? Am I making money? Am I not making money? Do I have to work on budget? Where are we? I don't want to have to do all that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: AgencyVA provides me with a wonderful resource. Her name is Helen and she's just been absolutely tremendous. It's helping me be a better agency. It's helping me focus on what I do. It's allowing me to really take Rogue to the next level a lot faster than I probably could have otherwise. So AgencyVA — agencyva.com. Go to AgencyVA. It's hard for me to say with Advisory Evolved that there's no other website vendor. I know there are a couple other good virtual assistant vendors in the market, but AgencyVA is absolutely right there at the top. If you're going to consider VAs, you have to call Wes. You have to call their team. They need to be part of the discussion. You need to interview them. They're that good. I recommend them that highly. I've spent way too much time talking about them already. AgencyVA.com. Go there today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right, let's get on to Miles. There he is. Hello.
--:-- Miles Merwin: All right. Yeah, I just got a message from Zoom saying that my cloud recording space was at its capacity to send them more money. I was like, I want to record like two videos in the cloud and they cut my limit.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, there are some aspects of Zoom that I find to be very cost effective, and then there's some other things that they do that versus the market I feel like their pricing is off. The cloud storage is one of them. One recorded Zoom call is like a couple hundred megabits and that blows through your requirement right there. You immediately have to upgrade. And then you're like, come on. So I record everything to the hard drive.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've also found Zoom to be pretty consistent, but when I do record to the cloud, that is when I have had some problems with the audio. When I record to the hard drive, I just have to be careful about putting too much crap on my hard drives. It slows down. But as long as I clean it regularly, I find the hard drive to be the best quality.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess you can probably get some sort of external hard drive too if you needed to.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, when you have the lightning connection with Mac, you could basically use the external hard drive. Some of those external hard drives are as fast as actual hard drives if you wanted. I've actually rendered Premiere Pro videos off of an external hard drive. The issue there is those things will fritz out on you. You almost have to back up your backed up external hard drive stuff because I've had them go before on me. I luckily was backing it up, but when I was with Agency Nation, I used to put everything on one of these external hard drives and it was awesome except I was traveling and one of them just — I went to plug it in and poof, it was gone. I hadn't backed it up, so I was good, but if I hadn't, that would have been terrible. Everything gone, all recorded, all the stuff.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Dude, that's the Mac. Is that what you use?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I use a Mac. I have to have a PC over here because of Hanover and PL Rater. Travelers has gone to Chrome, which is excellent. Rater works with Chrome now.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Rater works with Chrome now?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, but the bridging is wacky. Some of the bridging is wacky. So you can do the PL rating in Chrome, but then the bridging doesn't work as well. So I mean, what are you going to do?
--:-- Miles Merwin: I know. I know. And I know the changes are on the way. I don't mean to bang on Hanover. Hanover, I love you. I just can't understand how for as good of an insurance product as you could have, you could still be on the least secure, slowest, clunkiest, worst browser that Microsoft doesn't even support anymore. How is that? How did someone not go, "Hey guys, maybe we should get ahead of this whole Internet Explorer thing back in 2014?" Someone said, "2014 is a great year. Let's just stay here."
--:-- Miles Merwin: But no, I got to stop. I told my Hanover rep that I would stop banging on their technology in my podcast. So I'm going to do that. I take back everything I just said.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You can edit that out.
--:-- Miles Merwin: No, I refuse. I just strike it from the record.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now it's better. So dude, we came on here to talk about your producer program. The Producers to Principals program. In a private call, we talked a little bit about it, which I thought was tremendous. Start wherever you want to start. The name alone intrigues me. So let's get into it.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Cool. I appreciate you asking about it and coming on here and creating this venue for me, this platform. The original idea of Producers to Principals was just out of having — first of all, I wanted to open up my own agency at one point in time. A clear path to ownership is always beneficial because then you know how to do that. If that's your goal, you're going to go do it if that's what you want to do. You're not going to let someone get in your way to do that, but you've got to cut your teeth somewhere. You have to learn the business before you can go do it on your own.
--:-- Miles Merwin: I had team members who I was trying to recruit and they wanted to go open their own agencies. I was like, how do we do this? How do I recruit sharp people like myself, but then cap them and hinder them? They know from the very beginning that they have nowhere to go if they really want to open their own agencies. So I created Producers to Principals as a clear path to ownership for team members if that's what they want to do. Build a book of business, they can take it with them. I worked a back-end deal with my aggregator that I would get paid on those for the next 15 years on the back end of their production after they leave. Win-win. They open an agency, they are successful, I run an agency, I'm successful, we're friends, everything's great.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Talking with one of my business coaches, Brent Kelly — to give him a shout out — he said, "Hey Miles, what is the benefit to you doing that? I don't understand why you're doing that." So I kind of updated the language of that as a clear path to ownership. But I hope my culture is so strong you never want to leave. I hope you don't want to leave because it's better for all of us. We love having you on our team. But if that's absolutely what your goal is, this is a clear path to ownership.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Over the last few months, I was looking at my calendar, looking at how much time I was spending. I'm really appreciative of people who call me to ask for help. It's a weakness of mine. I just want to help them. So I'm willing to spend all this time with them. My wife asked me, she said, "Who are these people you're talking to? Why are you spending so much time with them? You could be spending that time with your own family. You could be spending that time in your own business to develop it further, but you choose to spend your time with random individuals you don't really know. Why are you doing that? Why aren't you getting paid for it?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That sounds like an oddly familiar conversation by a spouse.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Yeah, exactly. And then Brent Kelly was asking me in our monthly coaching calls. He was like, "Hey, what do you like to do? What do you like to spend your time on? What energizes you?" I was like, "I like to do that. But I don't get paid to do that. That's just friendly." He said, "Well, okay." So I jotted down those notes. I was looking at my calendar, how much time I was spending. I was like, "You know what, let me go back to the idea of Producers to Principals." I recognized that most of the people calling me were agency owners acting like producers still. They were asking questions about what it meant to be a principal of your insurance agency. What did that look like? How did you bridge the gap? How did you get yourself out of the production and into managing your business?
--:-- Miles Merwin: So I just kind of went back to that original name and said, "Producers to Principals. What if we expand that and say, helping agency owners to stop acting like producers and start acting like the principals their agencies desperately need?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love it. This concept — and I want to get into the nuts and bolts of it in a second — but this concept is actually something that Cass and I started talking about like eight or nine years ago when we were going in and doing all these conversations on marketing. I'm not going to say that this was an original idea. We were doing marketing. We were literally laying out how I had set up the group for all their SEO and inbound stuff, how Cass had done all this stuff with Facebook. At that time he was really doing well on Facebook and organic and posting. We found over and over again that people would listen and literally do nothing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What we came to realize was that our industry too often people either get caught or just don't simply know how to transition from insurance agent to business owner, which are two completely different things. You really can't be successful at both. There are people who can sell and be business owners, but it's really difficult to be insurance agent and business owner at the same time. It's very, very difficult, especially if your mindset doesn't switch, if you're not giving the mind right. So this idea to me — I think this is so important. I feel like you really dialed in on the language. Much better than what I had. I feel like you really dialed in on it as well. It's been fun to think about it.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Actually, when a lot of producers that I talked to in my team are super stoked and excited to close a big deal and land a new client, I'm like, "Yeah, that's great." But then when I talk to someone to help them come up with a new strategy or bridge the gap to a new season of their business where they're able to go impact and maybe provide two or three more jobs or take their business from one step to the next, I'm like, "That energizes me. That's like landing a big deal." A big account for me feels the same way. So it's just been fun to think down that road.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Again, the wife conversation. She's like, "Well, you still can't let this consume you that you can't pay attention to your own business." So as much as it's fun, it's still what you would call a side hustle. It's not the main thing. I have to make sure that I focus. This is something that I'm putting in my planning of what I'm teaching — making sure that you don't get distracted from the success that created the success. It's hard to be successful at success because once you have some, everyone wants to figure out how you did it and they want to take your time. So how do you keep yourself focused on what created the success in the first place and help at the same time?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What you just defined there — that idea that once you become successful, everyone wants to know how you are successful. Because we operate in an industry of sales-oriented individuals, they're completely willing to text, email, or call you or LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, DM you: "Hey, how'd you do X thing?" One of the things I love about this industry is so many of us are willing to help. You want to. You're like, "Hey, I figured this thing out. I need to tell John Smith who lives in Utah, who I've never met before, exactly what I did word for word. Hey man, you got 10 hours today? Let's do a workshop." It's so easy to get sucked into it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So how do you do that? Without giving away the rub to everything you're doing, how do we get into there? Or maybe here's a better question to start with. I am stroking this peach fuzz of a beard I have simply because I'm emasculated by your beard. How do you recognize that you're maybe stuck in this producer mentality? Maybe that's where we should start. How do you say to yourself, "You're operating, maybe you've hit a plateau or maybe you've had a down year or you just can't seem to hit that sales goal you have." How do you recognize, "I need something to happen here. There needs to be a move"?
--:-- Miles Merwin: That's a good question. A lot of my answers come back from my experience. That's a lot of where I'm coming from. Deciding who I talk to and who I don't talk to is really whether my experience is relatable to them because that's all I know — what my experience was. Through my experience, I ran into some areas where I just recognized a couple situations. One was I was competing with my own sales team and I started to not be the top producer in my own agency. I started to not be the biggest, baddest sales guy in my own agency.
--:-- Miles Merwin: When I opened it by myself, of course I was the biggest and the baddest. I hired someone and I was bigger and better than them because I was showing them how to do it. But sooner or later, they were selling more than I was. I had a couple people that I'd hired that did terrible in sales. I got rid of that person, hired another person. At one point I hired one guy and he just blew it out of the water with all the same opportunity, all the same tools, all the same resources, the same brand — everything was the same — but he produced 50% more than the last person that I had to let go and would produce 50% more than I did. Just highly efficient.
--:-- Miles Merwin: I was like, "Wait a minute. I don't have to be the top sales guy in my agency. I need to find and equip and encourage and keep accountable top salespeople." I only have so much time every day to sell. If I want to grow my agency, I've got to invest in people and producers to let them go do their thing. I can find people to do that part of my business better than me. Realizing there are people out there better than me at production was very telling at that time.
--:-- Miles Merwin: I remember at the very beginning of the business, reading the book by Robert E. Gerber, *E-Myth*. I always come back to that. Just writing out an organizational chart at the very beginning of my business and penciling each division in my business, initialing and penciling in my initial on every single position there was. Then I starred the ones that I really wanted to do and highlighted the ones I wanted to get someone else to do. As I could find people to do those, I just started penciling their initials and raising mine and let them go do that and empower them to do that. I really believe that if you build your people, your people will build your business.
--:-- Miles Merwin: At some point, if you find that you have not enough time to run your business, not enough time to develop your people, recruit, your business is stuck, you're not growing, you've built your business to a quarter million dollars in revenue or a half a million dollars in revenue and you haven't grown in years, then something has to happen. You're stuck. I got stuck at one point and I was trying to find a mentor to understand how someone's already passed this barrier. What did we do? I couldn't find anyone local. So I reached out to Brent Kelly at Sickens and he gave me a network of people that owned agencies between three and 30 million in revenue and just started asking me a lot of questions.
--:-- Miles Merwin: The goal of Producers to Principals is to find those people. I'm not going after Brent Kelly's clients. I'm trying to find those people between a quarter million in revenue and a million dollars in revenue who've been taking five, six, ten years and they're still there. They're asking the question, "Why? Why am I still here? What do I need to do to get to the next level?" So to answer your question, if you just find yourself stuck — I was talking about one of the rally cries in my agency: time, relationships, and financial security. If you're not creating more flexible time in your life, you're not developing deeper relationships, and you're not creating more financial security for yourself, your business, your clients, and your team members, then you're going in the opposite direction.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things that I found even in my own business — I'm staring right here next to me. After this call, it's my next thing to do. I have about two hours of service work to do. There is nothing that drains my life force more than service work. I don't mean that to knock service work because it's very, very important. I don't discount its importance. These are things that have to get done. I can't wait to have someone to do this work because the things that I'm good at and the things that I know can grow the business, I'm struggling to find time to do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's interesting is what it has taught me — the purpose of sharing this is what it has taught me — is how easy it is to find yourself on a plateau, to get to a certain point and just find you literally do not have the time to, or — and I think this one is equally important but less talked about — you don't have the brain cycles. You don't have the mental energy to grow your business because it's spent in so many different places. If you haven't read the book *Atomic Habits* by James Clear, you need to. One of the core ideas that I took out of that is every time you change your focus — you're thinking about a policy change and now you're going to take an inbound phone call and then you're going to try to call someone about something else that has to be done and a carrier rep interrupts you and then someone slacks you about a billing question — every one of those mental jumps from task to task to task, you're not using equal energy. You're taking massive energy burns to transition your brain from one task to another, especially if it's from problem solving creativity to just straight focus, logical execution. Major, major burns.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Your body naturally doesn't get to things like sales. Your lizard brain tells you don't do creativity, don't do high effort activities because we don't have a lot of energy left. That's why everyone says cold call and do that kind of stuff in the morning. It has shown me how easy it is for you to hit these numbers, whatever your number is — 250, 500 — and you just find yourself in this plateau and you just can't move forward. I can see it as clear as day how it happens to so many people.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Something you said reminded me of going through the process of working through your agency from scratch like you are and like I did. There are a lot of agency owners that have never done that. There are a lot of agency owners that have never actually had their hand in every piece and section of their business as it was created. That is a unique ability of you as an owner of your agency further on down the line because you have the ability to walk into any stage of your business or any section, any division, and pick up and be useful. Your team knows, "Hey, Ryan knows how to do this. He's not just telling me. He did it. He knows it." That's powerful.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Thinking about building a team and building people so they can build your business — when your people on your team know your story and know that you sat in that seat and you did it, it's easier to create a culture around that. They appreciate that and they'll listen. You've sat in that seat versus if you get a boss that has never done what you do and they come in and tell you the top 10 tips to make your day more efficient and better. You're like, "What are you talking about? You've never even done this."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. This goes for so much of life, not just running an agency. It goes for everything. Sports. People want to see the scars. If you're not beat up, if you haven't been bruised and scrapped, if you haven't scraped a little bit, if you haven't been in the fire at least to a small extent, it's very hard to respect what you're hearing. I think this is why traditionally middle management gets a lot of flack both upwards and downwards. I think people feel like they haven't been in the fire. Why we put entrepreneurs on such a pedestal is because a lot of times we've seen them openly in public, different companies, different decisions. They've taken this heat. If you come out the other side, it's very difficult not to have respect for them. I think that is important. I'm all for playing to your strengths and outsourcing your weaknesses. But if you don't have your hands in it a little bit, it's very difficult to drive forward.
--:-- Miles Merwin: There are so many conferences, Ryan, and there are so many resources out there for us to go use. If you don't take the time to go find them, research them, write them down, it's sometimes easy to go do those things and find the nuggets, find the breadcrumbs, find the cannon shots versus the bullet shots. It's so easy to go find those, but then once it comes to implementing those things and holding yourself accountable to make sure they get from finish to end is where the breakdown happens. I think I said this in a podcast with Jason Cass — I prefer coaches over partners. They're a lot cheaper.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Coaches are expensive. I spend a lot on coaches for myself, but they're cheaper than partners. A partner will take 50% of your revenue or your income from the business. A coach takes — you know, it's how much that's going to cost. What I've found is by having a coach who's not a partner, or a coach who's not your spouse, or a coach who isn't a team member that you tend to — and you're paying for their time — is when you're paying them to ask you, "Hey, we talked about these three things. You said you're going to get these three things done. Where's the results?" It's like a personal trainer.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Do you have any experience there, Ryan?
--:-- Miles Merwin: It's like a personal trainer. If you could work out on your own and get the results you needed, you wouldn't hire a personal trainer. You hire a personal trainer because they give you some accountability and some tips to get it done.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I learned this the hard way. I have taken up boxing for aerobics. I'm not punching anybody in the face nor do I want to be punched. Maybe if I was younger I could see the draw. I can see why people get into it. But at 40 years old, the last thing I want to do is take a shot to the face. But I do love the aerobic. I love the competition. I love the hand eye coordination parts of it. I love all that stuff. So I've been training on my own. I have some buddies that used to box and they gave me some pointers. "Get this move down. Once you do that, get this." Then they said, "Come to our little gym that we have in the basement of one of their houses and do the gloves, the pads on the hands."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I thought I was going to vomit after about five minutes. I'm doing 10 three-minute rounds on my own on a heavy bag and I'm working. I'm drenched head to toe by the end, but that's me. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Then I'll step away for a second, then I'll come back. With the gloves, it's one, two, four, five, five, four, one, two. Bam, bam, bam, bam. "Oh no, you're gonna step back. Now I'm gonna throw one at you. You got to duck." Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. I literally thought I was gonna heave. It was like two-a-day NFL practice.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It reminds you that on your own, you can work incredibly hard. Yes, there are some of us cut from a different kind of mold where on our own we just push ourselves to the nth degree. But I think for many of us, having that person to stand there and go, "You made this commitment. You are not holding up to it. This is what you got to do," it just keeps you pushing forward. It's important.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Why do you think more people don't have coaches or mentors? Every time you reference Brent Kelly as a coach — who I think the world of — every time you do, I say to myself, "That just feels like a really smart decision." It just feels like a great — I have no idea what you guys talk about. You've mentioned it at a high level, but that just feels like a really good decision. But I think the vast, vast majority of people don't do that. Why do you think that is?
--:-- Miles Merwin: Well, I think for one thing, before I hired a coach, I had the thought of, "Well, I've gotten this far. Why do I need someone telling me what to do?"
--:-- Miles Merwin: The reason you open your own business is because you didn't want someone telling you what to do. And in the insurance business, average is really excellent and you're doing pretty good. You're probably making really good money. So you're comfortable. Do you really want to work harder or work smarter? Do you want someone telling you what to do? You haven't had anybody keep you accountable for a very long time. It's uncomfortable to do that. And you're paying for something that's not concrete. It's very abstract. Although as insurance professionals, we should be very used to doing monetary transactions on abstract concepts. That's what we do all day long. But it feels very foreign.
--:-- Miles Merwin: I think it's like your wife asking you if you want to do some marriage counseling. "No, I'm a man. I'll take care of my own relationship." You don't want to go get marriage counseling. It's the same thing for your business. I just found I was not happy with standing still and not knowing direction. I wasn't satisfied with thinking I was going to have to take three years to learn something I could probably learn from someone else in two or three months.
--:-- Miles Merwin: The other thing that helped when having a coach and working is allowing my team to get the same message from that coach as well. The coach works with me, but if I need them to, they'll also work with my team. As I'm relaying information back and forth, it's like you're teaching your kids how to do math, they go to school for two weeks, come back and they're like, "Oh yeah, I learned this math." And you're like, "I've been trying to teach you the same thing for three months." Then you went to school for two days and learned it. When your team hears it from a second voice, it just helps that buy-in. I had to get outside my comfort zone and say, "Hey, I need someone to push me." And it's not my own team members. I can't vomit my ideas on my team members. My wife doesn't want to hear this stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When I do have a team, I tend to be a very transparent and open leader — good, bad, mistakes I'm making, things that aren't going well, number transparency on whatever. What's interesting about that is who delivers those messages. I could say I want my team to know everything, but there's a huge difference between me delivering them or someone else delivering them or a consultant coming in and delivering that information. Not right or wrong, but who delivers the message is often just as important as the message being delivered.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This speaks to having a coach. You as the leader of the agency are going, "I've been telling Steve to say it this way for six months." Then Miles comes in and in 10 minutes Steve's got the script down pat. Everyone reacts differently to different people. I say this all the time: I've been hired to speak in 37 states except for the state that I actually live in. The coach comes in out of left field and everyone's like, "Wow, she knows everything," even though you're like, "Wait a minute, I've been saying the same stuff."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So my next question for producers to principals. You've realized you've hit this plateau. You're looking around saying, "Geez, I've been stuck at $350,000 in revenue for a long time. Not that I'm necessarily unhappy, but man, I'd really love to push this thing forward." What's the first step? What is the first concept you need to wrap your head around? How do you get started in this transition? Based off my experience when I saw when I got stuck, what were the top things that we did to move our agency to the next level?
--:-- Miles Merwin: I just brought on my first client that I'm working with one-on-one. He asked me that same question: "What do we start with?" We start with the things. "Hey, I want to know what are you concerned about most. Let's find out what those things are." Usually it's always, "I want written processes. I want written down exactly what our unique process is." To back up from that, usually it's, "Well, who are you? What do you stand for? What does your team think you stand for? What is your story? Is it written down?" It comes back to starting at writing out, which seems super backwards. It's just writing out your story, writing out exactly who you are, why you opened the agency, why you believe that clients should choose you, why prospects should find you, why people should come to work for you. What is it about your agency that makes you unique? Have that stuff written down and memorized.
--:-- Miles Merwin: When you're onboarding clients, working with prospects, writing out processes, and trying to get buy-in from your team to change the way they do things, they're not doing it anymore because you told them to do it. They're doing it because they believe in the agency's message. Prospects aren't deciding to insure with you because you had the best price. They're insuring with you because they believe that you bring the most value, that it's a good fit ethically, that it's a good fit religiously for them if you both are the same religion, that it's a good fit in your community. They see that you're very involved in your community versus their prior relationship. It's all those abstract things that you're writing down and cementing when you're onboarding clients and onboarding team members. You have an onboarding message. From there, you can start writing out processes. Because if you know that, it helps you drive your process.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. One of the things that came to my mind while you were talking was the idea that you were saying all these different things — maybe the client buys from you based on religion or community or message or whatever. I think one of the things, and I made this mistake early on, and part of me believes this is natural, is that you start chasing things because you think it's the right way to be versus who you actually are.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I find this because sometimes I get caught between wanting to be local — I do enjoy the community I live in, I enjoy the people, I have a lot of friends here, I've lived here for most of my life — and being digital, which I also believe in and love. I have clients all over the country. I have clients all over the state. I have clients that find me especially because of the work I do in search engine optimization. For some reason, I'm popping in Virginia right now. I got all these businesses calling me from Virginia, literally four in the last two weeks. I don't know why Virginia, but they're all from Virginia. Some of them I outsource, some of them I write through Indium. I get caught in, "Is that the right move for me? Or should I be focused on the capital district — Saratoga, Albany, Troy, Schenectady — the area I live in?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My point in saying all this is, I think we go to things like IAOA and you hear David Crothers talk about middle market. All of a sudden you're like, "I want to be middle market." Then you hear someone else talking about personal lines and you're like, "I need to be a personal lines guy." Then you hear someone else talking about charity and you're like, "I need to be like her. She does all this charity stuff." You start putting on different clothes than who you actually are. That's a really difficult topic for a lot of people to grapple with.
--:-- Miles Merwin: You have to first find yourself before you can start going out. It's easy to be dragged. It's being successful at success. If you don't know who you are, you'll be dragged in every direction. If you dig a hole and you don't have a certain thing to put in it, it's just going to fill up with crap. Until you write out and define who you are, what you want to do, what you're all about, you are just going to go in every direction. Once you write that stuff out and something comes across your table, you're somewhat prepared to say yes or no because you can tell, "Hey, is middle market what we could be good at? Let's look at our messaging. Let's look at what we're strong at. Let's look at where we're at. Could that fit into what we're currently doing?"
--:-- Miles Merwin: I bid on David Crothers' program, but I looked at it and said, "Hey, does this make sense? We have all the right carriers. We have all the points of differentiation that actually make sense in middle market commercial. Who are our competitors in town? Do we have the right knowledge? Do we have the right team? Can we effectively just flip the script?" The only problem with going after middle market at this current moment is our pipeline. That's the only reason why we can't go up to middle market at this time. If we had the pipeline, could we work in this capacity? 100%. We just need to flip the script on our pipeline. But if we had no processes, no procedures, no commercial account exec, no markets, and now we want to go flip the script and be middle market, that seems like more of a long-term goal. Probably not. But we've worked ourselves up to a certain situation where different opportunities now make sense. Again, if you don't have anything written down for where you're at, what you want, where you want to go, what the belief system is, then anything that comes at you seems like a great idea.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the accounts that came in from Virginia from an SEO call, I took the call. I talked to the guy. Super nice guy. Great kid starting this fitness business. He's got four trainers. I was like, "This is great. I love helping these people. I love helping people who are starting out." I know a lot of agents are like, "Oh, this guy's probably going to cancel in six months." I just like them. I like helping them. There's something about feeling like I'm getting them started on the right foot. I'm setting them on a path for success versus just whatever. But at the same time, I was like, "Man, this kid really needs somebody in Virginia." There are certain accounts in other states that I take because I feel like I can help them and be of value from here. And then there are other accounts where I'm like, I had a trucking account — anything trucking I outsource. But I had a commercial auto account in Texas and I just was like, "I can't be of service to this guy." Even three or four months ago, I would have wasted days trying to find a commercial auto market somewhere for trucking in Texas. This is stupid. I think it is a process. It's part of just being disciplined, not just saying yes to everything. Man, is it important. It feels trivial, but it's just not.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Once you run through that situation a couple of times, you get burned. It's going back. I know this stuff is like scraping a chalkboard, but writing down your sales playbook — what is it that you're willing to accept? Sandler Sales Training is one of the programs we're involved in. The best day to lose a sale is on the first day. If you can't find pain in the situation and what makes you different in what you do, it doesn't fit their needs and it doesn't meet your minimum account revenue size, it doesn't fit your agency and your model. Then the best day to lose a sale is on the first day. Just part with them. I use this term over and over again, and I learned this from Sandler Sales Training: "Maybe the best thing we could do today is just be friends." Otherwise, we're probably not going to like to work with each other. I don't know if this makes sense to work together. Let them choose to go some ways. "Yeah, it doesn't make sense. Great."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to be respectful of your time, but I do want to give everyone — we've talked about how to know, we've talked about what the first step is: writing down stuff. I'm awful at that. Although Loom helps me. The writing part I would probably never do, but documenting stuff with Loom. If you buy the $3 a month increase for the Teams one, you can create the team folder and categorize all the looms. I've been starting to do that. That is very valuable.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So where do you hope to get to? You figured it out. We've talked a little bit about the first step. We're not trying to give away the secret sauce to this Producer to Principal program. What is an achievable result? They've worked with you for six months. They've worked with you for a year. How do you determine success? How should someone determine success from a program like this?
--:-- Miles Merwin: There are a couple things after six months that say you've had success. One is I can just ask a couple of questions: "Hey, what makes you different than the other agency down the street?" And you know exactly what it is, and all of your team members know exactly what it is. If that's all you get out of it, that's a huge accomplishment right there. The other one is that you know exactly what your target client is. If I ask you, "Who is your target client? What fits your agency? Who are you going after?" If someone comes to your agency and says they want this, are you saying yes? Are you saying no? Defining that.
--:-- Miles Merwin: If I asked you, "Hey, what are you spending your time on as a principal every day? Tell me what you spent your time on," and you are getting closer and closer to 80% of your time being spent on strategy, training, teaching, writing out processes, recruiting — 80% of your time is on that work. It may be even networking to drive opportunities to your team. 80% of your time is on that. 20% of your time is fixing emergencies for your clients. 20% of the time is hopping on a call to do an insurance review still. 20% of the time is someone was out that day, so you were the producer in the office that day. 20% of the time you're still telling your buddies at the country club that you'll write their insurance and you personally continue to do it. That's happening 20% of the time. 80% of the time you're acting like the principal of your insurance agency.
--:-- Miles Merwin: If you started out at zero of your time acting like a principal, and after six months, 30% or 40% of your time you're acting like a principal, I would say that's success because you're moving in the right direction. I'm not going to expect you're going to be at 80% because you have a lot of habits to overcome. You have a lot of team members to train and build up. It can take a year and a half to two years to really get through a lot of those things. You're getting your percentage of time where it's being spent moving closer and closer to 80% of your time acting like the principal of your agency.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. You've described my promised land. I'm probably at the zero right now. I think that's tremendous. Another thing you hinted at that is important to bring up is the idea that all of this takes time. I have to coach myself with affirmations about patience. Everything takes time. You're not going to write a hundred homeowner's insurance accounts tomorrow. You're just not there yet. Not enough people even know that you exist yet. You have to have realistic expectations. The negative voice in your head is telling you, "Miles is writing 100 counts a week. What's wrong with you? You're as smart as Miles. You make all these bad decisions." You see how other agencies are doing and you want to be like them. But they're either further along — they've been open longer, or they're further along in their strategy and their ability to be the principal of their agency, or they've empowered a team to do it. It's not Miles writing 100 policies. I've written five policies in the last 12 months and it was probably a mistake. It's my team that wrote 100 policies.
--:-- Miles Merwin: Exactly.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So where can people listen to this and say, "I just want to learn more. I would love to work with Miles. I want to get a bunch of free consulting from him." Where can people learn more about the program, connect with you? Hit them with the deets.
--:-- Miles Merwin: In the next couple of weeks, I should have a really simple website coming out. Every great business starts with a website. I'll have a website out in the next couple of weeks that I'll be putting out that people can go to. I hope to develop that into providing actual member area resources that you can go to and grab nuggets from there. I'll have a link on there that basically says, "Hey, 15 minutes. Let's do a discovery call. Let's talk for 15 minutes." I'll have a link on there. I love Calendly. It's amazing that you can click on Calendly and schedule time. This feels so awkward, Ryan. At the end, before you can schedule, it's going to ask you for payments for an hour meeting. It's just going to ask you if you want to schedule time. Here it is.
--:-- Miles Merwin: I'm looking to do some sort of monthly thing where I can put out information, whether that's BombBomb videos of nuggets and things that I'm learning along the way. A lot of what I'm doing is just what I've experienced and what I am experiencing through my journey going from this point of revenue to this point and what we did to get there. A $10 million revenue agency is probably not going to listen to me. They're way past me. That quarter million to $1 million revenue agency is probably where I'm going to be most effective. If you're a two, three, four million dollar revenue agency, go hire the Brent Kellys of the world. That's who I hire. But I didn't hire them until I was at one and a half, two million revenue going forward. It's like seed capital.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's a great spot to be. This is an exciting time. A lot of new agencies, a lot of new agency owners, a lot of people going out on their own. I literally just talked to a guy today who was thinking about joining Indium. He needs programs like what you're discussing. These kind of thought processes. A lot of times the agency size that you just described gets left behind because of the agency size. I love that you're picking it up. I love the name of the program. I'm super excited that you're sharing what you've learned, man. I appreciate you coming on the show. I highly encourage everyone listening to check it out. What's going to be the URL for the website?
--:-- Miles Merwin: It's like a page off of my insurance agency right now — advisorsinsuranceagency.com. You can look me up there. You can look me up on LinkedIn. Just search for Miles Merwin in South Carolina and you'll find me. My phone number is everywhere. You can get in touch with me. Facebook Messenger. All the above. You can slide into Miles's DMs.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Last thing and then I've got to roll. The point of this is, fortunately the insurance industry has done me very well financially. I don't need another dollar from someone. I need nothing. The goal is to make this attainable, to just help people. I've got to pay for my time, but I'm not looking to put a boat in the driveway. I'm not looking to make my living off of this. This is where I see a need. I want to make it so that it's accessible. Pay for people's time to be respectful. That's really what I'm looking to do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You're the man, brother. I appreciate you.
--:-- Miles Merwin: All right, my friend. Thank you for your time. Be good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, me. Take it.
--:-- [End of interview. Promotional content follows.]
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