--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have Mitch Gibson on the podcast. Mitch is a risk advisor for HRM Insurance Services and he's also a huge content creator. One of his most recent projects is Inside Hancock County, a podcast about the county that Mitch operates in and lives in, his community. I love it. Right on the front of the website that he created for the podcast: "a podcast about community, passion, and positivity."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I wanted to bring Mitch in to talk not just about the podcast or insurance, but really about his mindset around content, content creation, and content marketing. It feels to me like in recent years, we as an industry have gotten away from content marketing. We've kind of—nothing against ads and buying leads, this is not a knock on them—but we've almost continued to gravitate towards Facebook ads and YouTube ads and forgotten that consistent, valuable, rich, deep content drives traffic to your website, builds brand value, and ultimately grows your business.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I wanted to talk to Mitch about it because there are a tremendous number of people in our industry who understand the value of content, and I believe Mitch to be one of those cats. I think you're going to enjoy this. We talk about a lot of tactics and strategies. It's a very casual conversation.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But before we get there, I want to give a huge shout out to the premier, the platinum sponsor that makes the show possible, and that is Tarmica. I've been on the Tarmica train since basically day one of this show, since they hit the scene, and there's a reason for that. Tarmica makes small commercial insurance profitable, period. You write small commercial, most of us believe it's not profitable. You add Tarmica to the mix, all of a sudden small commercial becomes profitable.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's the really interesting part. The things they are doing in terms of adding additional lines—commercial auto, workers comp, I know they're working on things like cyber and professional liability—the carriers they have. We're talking the biggest carriers in the game, not these flimsy screen scraping, auto login connections that a lot of the other players in the market have. We're talking about real API connections. You're getting bindable, quotable rates back in your agency in real time. You can do it over the phone.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: If you listen to some of the past episodes, you'll hear me talk about use cases and case studies I've had—binding accounts in 21 minutes from phone call all the way to paid certificate out the door. Tarmica is the solution. They make small commercial profitable. I use them all the time. They're a huge part of my agency. I've built them in, and I would be lost without them. I think anyone who writes small commercial that doesn't have Tarmica is doing their agency a disservice. It's that simple.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com. Go to Tarmica.com, get a demo, know what the product is about. You won't be sorry. All right, let's get on to Mitch. What's up, man?
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Shit, man. I'll just be honest with you. I'm glad we're recording today because I told Heath. He recorded with me this morning, and he told me to find out what day you're going to drop this so I can let him know so he doesn't drop it on the same day. I know he was getting mad at me because there were two or three people that I had on the show that he had also interviewed. For whatever circumstance, there was like two months where I dropped an interview a week before he was going to have the same person.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: But that's what ends up happening. There's only so many podcasts now and only so many people that are even willing to get on podcasts, so you get a lot of the same stuff. I think what's interesting about it is you do end up getting everybody's show and the way everyone interviews and the conversations are different. But you get this thing where someone will come through, hit every podcast, and then you won't see them again for a year, and then they'll hit every podcast again. I don't know that that's a bad thing.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Especially because if you're on Cass's podcast, or here, or on Insurance Guys, or Crothers, or Heath, you definitely get a different feel. Everyone's got a different feel for the show.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Right.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: I even had Cass say, "Dude, you need to join the club in the insurance." I said, "No, the stuff that you guys do is so established and so good that I don't want to even try to get into having an insurance podcast." I mean, yeah, I could have a good show, I'm not worried about that, but I don't want the headache of the same thing—"Whose guests has this guy got on?" Most of the time the stories will be somewhat the same, but it's all about the guests being able to provide some value. I don't want to do that.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Cass is having me guest host his show for three months starting in February. So there's that opportunity, which I'd rather do that than do my own thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I think that's smart. Obviously, this podcasting and talking to the industry has become such a huge part of my life that at this point I would never give it up. But the truth is, it's a freaking headache. I don't mean that in a negative way. I just mean you want to add value. I do this to help put ideas in front of the listeners and give them nuggets. Some of the stuff works and some of the stuff doesn't work, and that's the whole point. But at the same time, in an effort to do that, you have to be thoughtful. There is a level of responsibility.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't know if you listen to Joe Rogan's podcast. I love that guy. I'm a huge fan of Rogan for a lot of reasons. One of the things he talked about recently—I've been listening to it less because of the Spotify move, since I listen on Apple and iTunes and now I have to switch over to Spotify, which has been a pain—but when he was making that move or announced it, he was talking about this whole idea of platforming and who you have on. Not that I'm worried about platforming someone terrible, but there is this idea of wanting to make sure the people coming on the show have the best intentions of the audience in mind or are sharing ideas that are honest. Not necessarily right or wrong, but they're trying to be helpful.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Right.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That can be difficult too. Do you edit all your video and stuff?
--:-- Mitch Gibson: No, I don't edit anything.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: I record. I hit record when I start talking and I hit end record when we stop talking, and then I send that and an intro over to Cass's Theresa, and Reza takes care of it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't edit.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: I was wondering. I don't know if there are other agent or insurance podcasts out there, but that's one thing I'm actually going to try to work on for Heath because he likes the way I use video on how I YouTube my episodes. I turn it more into video, and he's like, "How long did it take you to do that?" I said, "Well, I do that for another reason because I've got a local TV station that shows the show every Saturday and Sunday, so I have to do it in actual video setup form so they can use it and show it." In return, that's nice for me because the video is already done, cut, and edited. It doesn't take too long for me.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: I don't know. He was getting into YouTube. He said, "Yeah, I had to take a video down. I didn't think it was doing very good. It only had like 10 views." I said, "Dude, that's fine. Just make that your hub of all your videos. You're not going to post a video to YouTube and then share it on LinkedIn and Facebook and get a thousand views. It's not going to happen, especially if it's just talking about a general liability policy. You're not going to get many people to look at that at all."
--:-- Mitch Gibson: It's more of a way for you to talk to that contractor and say, "Hey, look at this. Watch this video to become a little bit more knowledgeable about it." I feel like that's what Hanley does that makes it successful for him. It may just take one person to see it, but the message is retrieved from that guy the right way, and he's going to want to either learn more about it or give him a call talking about insurance.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. The key to insurance YouTube—not thought leader insurance YouTube, but insurance YouTube—is not view count. No, it's just not. Because you're just not going to get people daisy chaining your videos. I used to watch a lot of Peter McKinnon. I think Peter McKinnon is really cool. I think he used to be a little cooler, but he's kind of mainstream now in that space, so it's tough for him to be as cool as he was. But he seems like a pretty good dude. He racks up all those views because you watch seven ten-minute videos in a row because it's video editing. You just watch them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No one is watching a video on workers comp and then daisy chaining that into general liability, and then watching a video on commercial auto. That is not what happens. People are basically going, "I have a commercial auto problem. How do I get better commercial auto?" Okay, here's a video. 45 seconds in, they go, "This guy seems like he knows what he's doing." Click contact form, call, whatever. That's how it's happening.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So really, what you're trying to do is just establish yourself as an expert. Some of my videos, I talk for too long. I need to shorten them. Moving forward, I'm not going to go re-edit them, but you're just trying to establish yourself as an expert and give enough advice in the first 30 to 45 seconds that the person believes you can solve their problem. That's it. That's insurance YouTube. Thought leader insurance YouTube is different, but that is insurance YouTube in a nutshell.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Agreed. I was originally asked because I didn't know if you'd like—if I don't have a guest that I'm meeting within the studio here, I turn it into video. I was telling Heath how I use it. If I've got a video call on Zoom, how I turn that into an actual episode via video as well, and how quickly it can be edited. You don't need to pay hundreds of dollars to have somebody go video edit it. I'm actually going to have a call with him tomorrow and I'm going to show him how I edit my videos and how quickly it takes me—an hour, if that. I want to be able to share that and help him out. At the end of the day, help other people out. I'm a big fan of watching the episode rather than listening to it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I have been bad about that with my Capital Region Business Podcast, which I'm going to be rolling out consistent episodes starting in January. That's been really cool. I think having the local podcast business show is an absolute no-brainer. I have struggled with the video because even an hour at this point of editing is a lot. I've just found my time is getting pinched really hard. I would love to do it. I've been bad about that. I've let that go. I've just been doing the podcast episodes. I should get back into it. I think it's an awesome thing, and the long tail is a huge win. It just—I have definitely been bad about pushing out the local podcast video.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Yeah. With Bradley, and I don't know if he's got all of his slots filled on that secret project content thing that he busted out, but he used one of my episodes as a guinea pig to launch that thing. That's great and all, but for me, I can learn enough about video editing to where I don't—I mean, yeah, getting 50 pieces, 60 pieces of content back in episodes is great because no one has the time to cut that many pieces, especially if you use Adobe Premiere. By the time it renders and takes off, you've got three days worth of shit that you just waited to render off.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: For him, I just wouldn't pay $500 to have my videos cut and edited. But I've also learned how to do it and had three years of college that taught me how to do that kind of stuff. I enjoy the video aspect. It makes my stuff a lot better. I actually do mine ass backwards. I'll record the video and I use the audio. I'll edit my video from front to end, and then I'll take it once it's off and throw it in Audacity because it's already cut and edited. So I'm only editing it really realistically one time. Then I'm putting it in audio form, and there's my audio for Apple, Spotify, Google Play, whatever it is. I do a little bit backwards, but my main thing is I got to get the video done first before I'm going to turn it into audio. It just seems to work out really well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I think down the road I would love to do more video. I just don't like Zoom video very much. I find it to be so terrible. I know that's not the point. I think in studio stuff, you can make your guests look good. On Zoom, it's really difficult to make your guests look good. I go back and forth. To me, it's a turnoff watching people on Zoom. It just is. I know everyone is not that way, and I shouldn't put my own perceptions on content. But I think part of it is I'm waiting for the day when people can come back into a place and meet me somewhere to do the video, and I'll start doing it again.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Right now, it's just so much easier to get people on the podcast. For any of the ladies listening to this, I don't mean this to be personal, but women are a little more picky with how they look on the video. It just takes more work. If it's just, "Hey, come on, we use the video so we can see each other when we're having our conversation, but I don't publish the video," I get way more people. A lot of local business people have never been on a podcast before. When you say, "Hey, come on my podcast," they're like, "What are we going to talk about? Can we have a call to prep?" In my mind, I'm like, "We're just going to have a conversation." But to them, it's a big deal. This is a permanent thing out in the interwebs that people are going to listen to. What if they sound stupid?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So I try to remove some of the scary by just saying it's audio only. "If you say something really dumb, we can always edit it out, but it's just casual. We only use the video so that you and I can see each other and react to each other." That has been much easier to get people to come on.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Right. No, I would have to agree. The thing that makes mine unique, at least being local, is I can't—it's not like you guys. I'm not going to get on a plane and come to Ryan Hanley's studio to do a recording. So it has made it a lot easier. But with me, I finally do have a studio, thanks to Remax Realty Group for giving me the chance to have a studio here. For them, it's great because their backdrops and all my episodes—I've got that business owner sitting here locally who I'm talking to. It's more of that "Two Ferns in a Bush" type of atmosphere recording the episode wise, which makes it a lot better on my end. But you're right, COVID kind of screwed everybody in so many different ways. The reaction of how everybody's going to react to it has been phenomenal.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I believe it. I'm such a believer in the process and in the concept of having a local show and being that local talk show host. I was talking to someone the other day. The town that you're in, do you have a Business Review franchise?
--:-- Mitch Gibson: We do not. No, other than the chamber. I've recently joined the chamber as my podcast. We're part of the chambers with our agency as well, but I did that because that's a great avenue for me to add into my networking events or luncheons—which I haven't gone to too many of recently. It's a way for me to say, "Hey, let me get on your podcast or I want you to get on my podcast and talk about your excavating company. Great. Please sign me up. It's not going to cost you anything. You love talking about yourself anyway, so bring it on board. Then let me get a chance to talk to you about insurance down the road."
--:-- Mitch Gibson: I'm not going to talk about insurance on the show, which makes the show better. It's such a great way for me to use it as a way to ask for that referral or to ask for that chance to take a look at their dec pages, whatever it is. That's just such an easy way of setting up my own warm referral, per se. At the end of the show, after recording, they're like, "Oh, this can't be your full-time job. What do you do for a living?" "Well, insurance." That leads into the conversation without me even saying anything about it, which is great.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. They like the Road Runner. When you say that, they just see a cloud of smoke and they're out the door.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: A hundred percent.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: A hundred percent.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: No, it's not like that. It's not like that. I'm interested in—after you do the podcast with them and you broach, "Hey, what do you do? I'm insurance," what is your follow-up process with them? Do you just soft solicit and leave it be? Do you say, "Hey man, I'd love to take a look"? Do you come right at them? Are you super upfront about it? Or is it case by case? How do you handle that?
--:-- Mitch Gibson: I was going to say it's more case by case. It depends on the type of person, the personality that they have. I think that's my biggest plus—being able to determine someone's personality, what the personality profile kind of looks like. I see somebody, I start talking to them for five or ten minutes, and I can kind of get the best way to communicate with them.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: When I have somebody on the show, I'm going to send them a follow-up email just like everybody else: "Here's the show link, here's some graphics that you can use to put on that you've been on the show." I'll either do it one or two ways. They'll bring it up to me immediately after the show if their personality is the one that wants to learn about me at this point in time. They'll say, "Hey, what do you do full-time?" "Yeah, I'm in insurance." If it's a business guy who owns his own business, I'm going to say that I focus primarily on commercial insurance. I write both, but I go after the commercial.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: If he says, "What insurance agency are you with?" that's always a good question to ask for me: "Who are you currently insured with?" He'll be able to tell me something. I can either do one or two things while I'm sitting here talking to him. I can let him know what we do differently as an agency. I'll talk to him about what makes us different. We are completely different than anybody else in the way that we service accounts. We have a ton of contractors. So me talking to the excavating guy, big thing I'm going to talk to him about is bonds. Do they have a bonding program? Sometimes the company they're insured with is going to be their commercial auto, general liability, inland marine, umbrella, et cetera, but they might have a tough time with bonding. If they have a bad relationship with bonding, that gives me a great opportunity because Cincinnati Insurance Company will take care of it all. Cincinnati Insurance Company is our biggest carrier that we write our contractors with.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Just case by case, trying to determine who the guest is. If it's one of those where we finish the show and I'm not going to bring it up to them right away—not the first time, I won't bring it up to them while they're sitting here. I know I'm going to follow up with them via email. Two, I can always find something to give them a call and say, "Hey, I got a quick question before I edit this video. How would you like your user tag to be?" whatever it may be. So I'm going to have contact with him again. If I have that conversation with him again about "Here's the show, here's where you can find it, here's where you can stream it, here's where you can share it, tag us this," then underneath the last part of the email, I'll make sure to put: "Also, would like to know if you have any opportunity to sit down and go through just to take a look at your insurance policy."
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Whether it's, "Hey, I'm new. This has been my biggest successful thing." When I say, "I've been in the insurance business for a couple of years now. Appreciate you coming on the show. Hopefully it helps bring you some business. One thing I will ask if you don't mind, to help me become a better learner and more insurance knowledgeable: can I take a look at your insurance policy to make sure that I can understand the coverages that you have, to make your policy and mine better moving down the road?" It's a way for me to get in there and see the policy. We all know if we see a policy, we can always find something that's going to help us win that battle or at least have a conversation. Whether that's making sure their classification of business is identified correctly or their payroll is assigned to whatever class code correctly, we can do that all day long. But it's having that conversation, the opportunity to sit down and go through it with him.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: I said this the other day on Cass's podcast: out of the 28, 30 episodes I've recorded, I've gotten a chance to quote 80% of them, and I've written 75% of them. Whether that's a business or their personal home and auto insurance.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's awesome.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Usually, out of that 75% I've written, every single one of them has asked me about insurance first. So I'm not saying that's going to be for everybody. It's worked out well. It's been a great tactic for me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You know, will the cat get out of the bag eventually that "Mitch Gibson's only reason for having you on the show is so he can write your insurance"?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't care. I really don't care because what I've tried to do is establish that. Right. I mean, why would they even care if they're exposure and they got this great piece of content they can share with their customers? Why would they even care?
--:-- Mitch Gibson: That's exactly right. And that's the thing that's been great – just keeping quiet. Because I'm not trying to write business. I mean, I am, but that's not what I'm trying to do with the show. I want to learn more about the community because I want to be that face. I want it so that when they think of Hancock County or Greenfield or New Palestine, they think of Mitch Gibson and what Mitch Gibson's personal brand is about. Not, "Oh, I think of Mitch Gibson and think of insurance." I want them to think about me the way that I think about myself and brand myself as a person, as a professional, so that they come to me and they know what they're going to get before they even call me.
--:-- So the biggest thing is just building that authority of myself through the show. And if I've done my job on interviewing them and building that relationship, them asking for a chance to look at their insurance – or they may run into a bad experience, or their CSR is taking forever to get them their certificates of insurance. Well, if the certificate of insurance is taking two days to get back to you, I can tell you right now we'll get that back to you in two hours. Because that's where we succeed. That's where we're so good at what we do. And then I'm going to get the chance, and they're going to get what they want, and we're both happy at the end of the day.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. That's wild. So that's content marketing one-on-one.
--:-- I actually, this morning, my kids went to school early, so like 7:30, I did an episode for the show. That's just me. It'll be the episode that comes out before this one. I was talking a little bit about some of the stuff that has worked this year and what we're going to change and how I want to set Rogue up for 2021. One of the things that I said in there – because some of these freeform ones, you don't necessarily know exactly where they're going when you start. I had some bullets that I wanted to talk about. But basically, it hit me that what's working for me is the same kind of standard content marketing tactics that have worked for a decade.
--:-- The very first time I was ever hired to speak at the San Francisco National Big I event in 2011 or 2012, those same things that I was talking about on the stage all those years ago are what sets Rogue apart in New York today. And it's insane to me. It's absolutely insane that there are still the vast, vast majority – 95 plus percent – of agencies that have literally no content strategy. And most of them think that it's nonsense. And I just keep shaking my head. The amount of inbound submissions that I've gotten, the amount of general attention, website traffic, YouTube views – not all of that is directly correlated to bound business today, but we've been in existence for nine months. If you were to take that and put it against the launch strategy of any other scratch agency that isn't coming off of a VC raise, no one can even compare.
--:-- The only reason that happens is because of content marketing and creating content, telling your story, drawing people in, sharing what you're all about, your expertise, your knowledge. And it just is baffling to me that it's still something that we even debate as an industry. There's no question that it works. So I just can't understand why people still don't do it.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Well, I think it just comes down to – I don't know if they're scared, they're just chicken shits to try. I think you guys talked about this not too long ago on Cass's show, Drink or Something on a Friday. You guys had a big old producer's show live on Facebook. Someone had talked about, "Oh, I'm terrible on the camera" or "I'm terrible at doing this." Like I told Steve over at Insurance Town, I said, "Steve, the best thing to do is just record everything that you're doing." That's the only way you're going to get better at it at all.
--:-- Just like you're on this podcast right now and recording – it's just being genuine and being authentic. If you sneeze, a cough, whatever it is, just be authentic with what you're doing because that's what people want. People don't want that robot. Don't think it's got to be cut and dry, perfect perfection before you post it anywhere. Obviously if someone wants to talk shit, they can talk shit, but you're doing something that they're not. And you'll get better at it over time. So don't be scared about it. Just try it.
--:-- I think a lot of people are scared to talk about the profession that they're in for a quick period of time. Like I know for me, I would love to start – and I'm going to – make some videos like you do on specific insurance topics and just bombard that as a content marketing tool. Not trying to necessarily get tons of views on it. But if I contact or get in contact with one person because of it, it's done its purpose. It's done its job.
--:-- So scared to talk about what they're doing, scared to talk about general liability policies. They're afraid they're going to say something that's not correct. Or – I hate to say it – one company's general liability policy is different from the other. So they're really probably not going to know exactly if you messed up or something. But at least you're practicing, at least you're putting stuff out there to become more knowledgeable and help your content marketing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to address the "buttoned up perfect" thing because I think what people don't necessarily understand is you either have to be super produced – top level, top 20 podcast, NPR, those podcast networks with the super well-produced, wide-range audio, closed circuit, you're in a studio setting with sound dampening. You either have to be that, or you have to be real. Anything in the middle is awful. The quasi-produced stuff – you have a narrow band microphone but you're trying to produce it like it's this super professional thing – that sounds awful. It sounds like you're trying really hard and you're not good. You're trying to make up for the fact that you don't have good content.
--:-- So you either have to be – and there is a bar where the audio quality or maybe you're coughing or saying "um" or "ah" all the time, that becomes a little annoying. If you listen to it, you'll be able to tell. As soon as you're above that bar, you are fine. It's go. I think the worst thing you can do is probably not do anything. If you have something to say, that's probably the worst. The second worst is to try to be something you're not. You're not a $5 million podcast studio network operation. You're not that. There's very few people that are that. So don't even try to be. Just have a good quality.
--:-- This mic that I'm talking on right now – I have people all the time that email me and they're like, "Oh, your mic sounds so good." I bought this mic for $64.99 on Amazon. It was an Amazon Basics purchase and I bought it in 2013. So what's keeping us from having a podcast? Your audio quality? I'm in a room that has no sound dampening. It does have a carpet. I do have some stuff on the walls, but it's basically just an office. And I'm using a $65 mic that I bought before my child was born.
--:-- These are some of the things that I struggle with because I know the real reasons are the things you said. People are scared. They know they can't be consistent about it. They don't want to be judged by what they say. They're worried that no one will be interested, so they don't do it. But I just keep coming back to – I feel sad. But now that I actually own an agency, I'm actually happy that so many people are scared to create content because I feel like I'm just going to blow right past them. And you too, right? You're just going to blow right past them.
--:-- What I can do now is create a video and target it to a town that anybody who's listening to this lives in. I can be in your customer's YouTube feed, Facebook feed, Instagram feed. I can be anywhere that they're watching TV. If I'm really feeling froggy, you can advertise on Hulu and Apple TV and all these other things for all the pre-roll stuff. You can just drop stuff in and there's nothing you can do about it. I can act as if I operate in your town and there is nothing you can do.
--:-- And then when they go to check me out, I have tons of blog posts and tons of videos and I'm explaining this, and they can dig in. By the time they actually fill out that form, they don't care where I am. They already feel like they know me and they're 95% sold. And you can't do anything about that because you have no presence. It's sad, but now that I own an agency, I'm actually kind of happy that everyone doesn't do it because it just creates this tremendous runway. You're so far out ahead of all your competition. How do they even compare?
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Agreed. I got talking to another agent about this the other day, and he called me and was like, "Well, how much time does it take you to do what you're doing?" I said, first off – and I mentioned this on Cass's podcast, and I'm pretty pissed off he bleeped my F word out because it really just adds. I use it as an adjective. It's one of my favorite words because when I talk, it's with such passion. It just flows, comes out.
--:-- I said, "You're not going to get it done nine to five. And if that's what you're looking for is a nine to five job, then don't reach out to somebody asking for advice on what to do better." People think, "I don't have enough money to start my own little show" or "I don't have enough money to start a video but I want to have a good sound." Okay, well if you've got an iPhone 10 or higher, you've got a 4K shooting camera. You can go buy a clip-on mic from Amazon for five bucks and it sounds pretty decent for your guest or whatever. You've got Zoom, which is free, one-on-one. You can go get a mic on Amazon for anywhere from 40 to 75 to 150 bucks, whatever you want to get. You can start a podcast for under a hundred dollars, easy. It's just whether or not you're determined enough or you're passionate enough to do that consistently.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: "How much time" is the wrong question to begin with. If your first question is "How much time does it take you to do that?" you're not going to do it. Go do something else. If this were an if-then chart, that's the "then" that says go make cold calls. Nothing wrong with cold calls. But podcasting, video – it's not for you. If your very first question is "How much time did this take you?" that's the "then" side that says go do drops or go to the networking event, because this channel is not for you. That's a bad first question. You're already thinking of all the reasons why you can't make this happen. Because the next thing you're going to say is, "It takes me an hour and a half and at my agency we do this or this or this, so I don't have an hour and a half. Sorry, Mitch. I can't do it."
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Yeah. Or you may follow that person on social media – Facebook or Instagram is my favorite thing. This has happened multiple times. Like, "Oh, I just don't have time." And then you go through Facebook or Instagram the next day and they were out at Kilroy's downtown Indianapolis hammered drunk till like three o'clock in the morning. Didn't you just tell me that you didn't have time, but you can go out and tie one on every Saturday night? That's fine. Be that person. Because there's plenty of room for us to grow and take more. So that's okay with me.
--:-- Sunday morning – I love my pops and I love a good glass of whiskey or whatever. But the last thing that I want to be is hungover on a Sunday morning. Because on Sunday, I'm doing all the stupid graphics that I put on social media. I drink a cup of coffee and I make those graphics on Sunday morning. Then I schedule all of them for the week. Then I hang out with my family.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Have you shared with your listeners what you use?
--:-- Mitch Gibson: I use Canva.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was going to say, because those are so easy. Things like that in Adobe Spark – you can create 20 pieces in an hour easy. As long as you know what messages you're trying to put out.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Yeah. So I started following a guy by the name of Jack Butcher. He has a course that was on sale that I bought for like $49 one-time fee. It's called Visual Something. He basically gives you – it was worth the 50 bucks. It took me an hour to go through it. He showed a framework and methodology for consistently creating visuals that tell a story, have an impact, and push your brand forward. I went through that course, picked up the information. Consider that like my CE. Then I used a $12 a month paid version of Canva so that I get all the features and the scheduling tool. I produce the images and then I write from Canva. I schedule them throughout the week and that's it. That's my Sunday mornings – a cup of coffee and Canva, and then I'm done.
--:-- Now it's like, "Oh, look at all the graphics he's doing." I get people talking about the graphics all the time. And I love the graphics because I get a lot of attention. But it literally takes me an hour in the morning over a cup of coffee on Sunday because I'm not hungover.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I agree. As long as you sit on the front end and just go through it. For me, I use Adobe Spark. Similar thing. If you go into Adobe Spark and pre-put your brand colors, your logos in there, it's automatically going to pull that when you pull up to start a new Instagram post – whether portrait or square – fill it out, done. You're done. It's really super simple. So that piece of "I don't have time" is a bunch of BS. I hate that answer. "I don't have enough time for this." Well, I don't care. All of us – you have kids, wife, agency owner, podcast, other podcasts. You've got stuff to do, working out. I've got two kids, a wife, house, goats, coach baseball, podcast. So the whole "I don't have time" is an easy way out of saying you don't want to do something. But at the end of the day, don't come back and ask me for help.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Yeah, exactly.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is my thought on content, and I am definitely a little bitter on this topic because I've just been talking about this for so long. It just is insane to me that people still don't do it. There's just so much to it. I guess I geek out towards that versus other people who are really good at accounting. Some people are awesome at their agency management system. I'm fucking terrible at an agency management system. Now Certs is easy to use. I can still barely use it. There's nothing wrong with it. Just the idea of investing my time into figuring the nuts and bolts of how to use that – I don't go there. So we all have to pick our things.
--:-- But what's crazy to me are the people who believe that it's important and come up with the excuses. To me, I don't think knowing the ins and outs of my business are important. That's why I don't do it. I know the parts that are important for documentation, but whatever.
--:-- So having templated emails for cold email – that's something you can do. That's content marketing, right? Do you have a cold email structure? Do you do a newsletter? Do you do social media graphics? Do you have PDF flyers that you can email to people? Do you have flyers that you can mail to people? Content marketing and content in general is not just doing videos and blog posts, which I think is what it really gets lumped into. There's so much more to it.
--:-- I spent an hour this morning sending cold emails to people with high experience mods. I literally have a templated email. I put in the guy's email address. I throw up a templated email that pulls in the same subject line. It pulls in the first sentence. Then I do a Loom video where I'm like, "Hey man, this is a cold email. We've never spoken on the phone before. The reason I'm calling you is because your experience mod is 73% higher than the plumber down the street. Do you have a plan? If you don't have a plan, I would love to sit down with you and walk through what you could be doing to get that experience mod down." Then right below it is another templated line. Boom. I'm not even typing. We've removed all the friction. This is idiot proof. The next line is, "If you want to learn more about this program I call Rogue's 365, click here to learn more. Sincerely, Ryan Hanley. Have a great day." Boom. It's that easy.
--:-- So all I'm doing is literally popping someone's email address in and creating a 45-second Loom video that is custom to them and hitting send. That's content marketing. And as much as that's only like four lines of text, what those lines actually are – I spent some time thinking about it. What do I think is going to draw somebody in? What do I want my hook to be? If you have a high experience mod, you're sick of paying more than you should and you wish you had a way to get out of it. And you don't. So that's what the hook is. Whatever your thing is – if it's auto or D&O or contractors or bonds – you come up with your hook. But that's content marketing. Your flyers are content marketing.
--:-- It just drives me nuts that we're not putting thought into these things. With the remaining time that we have, I want to hit you with this question because this is one of the core things that I talked about on the episode that I recorded this morning, but will be released right before this one. I believe that in the next five years – we've been talking about it for a while, I don't think it's necessarily had as much of an impact as maybe five years ago we thought it would today. So in 2015, we were talking about the idea of brand. Brand still probably isn't as much of a separator in 2020 as we would have thought it would be. But I am doubling down on the idea that five years from today, your brand will be the reason that someone buys from you. That will be how you connect, how you tell that story, your ability to build that brand. That is going to be the defining thing more than anything else. I feel like we need to invest time and thought into this. The pace of brand importance is only picking up, and COVID has blasted that forward.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Well, I think it's funny you say that and funny that we record the same day that I was putting together a list of guests for when I am going to guest host Cass's show. There's a guy who's not in the insurance business. His name is Todd Saylor. He owns a company, or his personal brand is "Wired Differently." We're all wired differently. There's not a person that mimics Ryan Hanley. There's not a perfect person that mimics Mitch Gibson by his DNA, makeup, everything. So we're all different.
--:-- He's talking about brand and all of this. One thing that resonated with me – and this might not sound new to you – but there's two types of brands. When you think about branding yourself, it's one: the brand that you decide what the principles and your perseverance are behind it and your passions behind that specific brand. Or you have the brand that others and other people decide for you.
--:-- So you talk about the importance of the next five years of your brand and developing that brand and being consistent with it. You can say all day long, "I want to start this clothing brand" or "I want to start the Mitch Gibson brand" or "the Ryan Hanley brand." But what is that? Do you spend time thinking about the building blocks of the person that you are?
--:-- I think it kind of gets mixed up too. A lot of people – maybe more agency owners than producers like me – think they've got to brand that agency so much. You do have to brand the agency, but you've got just as much to brand yourself as a producer and as a person. That brand of who you work for is not going to work either.
--:-- That's for me when I reached out to Bradley Flowers back in January of this year. After me going through a whole bunch of life crap – I'm at the age of 25, and I feel like I live a 50-year-old lifestyle. I've been through hell and back already, which I'm thankful for because it's helped me learn a lot. I think I went through that for me to pick up my phone and DM Bradley Flowers and start having conversations. Kim gave me the book to success of "Here's what I think you should do." And guess what, guys, it worked. It's working. I'm not done yet. It's working.
--:-- But then on the back end, learn about – help me think about my personal brand and my personal self. I teach baseball to kids one way. I write insurance one way. Mitch Gibson lives a different lifestyle. Those three are three separate brands. And my personal brand myself was below those other brands. So I kind of had to regroup that and throw Mitch Gibson on top. Because if Mitch Gibson isn't happy and Mitch Gibson isn't putting himself and his core values in the best chance to succeed, none of the other ones are going to work.
--:-- So I developed my – I put my first and last initial, MG. It's kind of like a crown logo. The four concepts of that are: be passionate, have passion, enthusiasm, attitude, and effort. I can control those four things day in and day out. If I can control those things day in and day out – they take no skill – everything else will come along with it. If I'm showing up not passionate about insurance, I'm probably not going to have a successful day in the insurance business. If I show up and I don't have a good attitude, it's going to piss everybody else off in the office. If I don't show up and have good energy, having negative energy is going to be contagious to others.
--:-- So what is it? Passion, enthusiasm, attitude, and effort. If I'm not putting in good quality effort, no one else is going to put in good quality effort, or no one else is going to want to be around Mitch Gibson because he's not carrying those four core values of who he is as himself. Because that's how I teach my players. That's how I want the people who are buying insurance from me to understand what type of person I am. I'm that passionate, energetic person who's going to go out of his way to help you out because he cares. He's adding value to yourself.
--:-- And from there, Mitch Gibson is here. What does he do? He's a coach. He has his podcast. He's an insurance producer. And he loves his family. That's what people – in 11 months in – now when they see my MG logo, or they see the Inside Hancock County podcast logo, or the HRM Insurance logo, or the Indiana Nitro baseball team coaching logo, they know who Mitch Gibson is and they can associate myself with that brand. But it all starts with your personal brand. You don't have to come up with some logo or stuff like that. Just know what your personal brand is that's going to help you be more successful in the field of work or line of work that you're in.
--:-- I think that we've all kind of – you do it really, really well. You're really sharp at it. But others might not know where to start or where to see. And I think it's got to start with yourself. Correct me if I'm wrong.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, I think you're right. I think the most – well, let me pump the brakes. Or just not pump the brakes. Back up a sec. I think what happens is you can't hide behind your brand. I think what you said about being intentional is absolutely 100% correct. I think most people are not intentional about their brand at all. I think when they are, they're trying to be intentional about their business brand. And I think where the biggest issue comes in is if their business brand does not connect with what reality is.
--:-- So if you're saying that service is what's most important to you, but you're getting COIs back in two days, you're lying. That's worse. It would be better that you didn't do anything than try to create a brand that's misaligned with where you are. Now, it's okay to be aspirational. It's okay to say, "Here's where we're trying to go with our brand. We're not there yet, but we're working there. So if something doesn't work, let us know because this is where we're going. We're not there yet." If that's part of your branding and part of your messaging – "Here's where we want to be and we're efforting to that thing" – that's fine.
--:-- But I see a lot of people make the mistake of, "I would love to be this, so I'm going to make my brand try to be this." But that's not who I actually am.
--:-- I was talking to Cass a little bit about podcasting – and I'm going to apologize to you, we'll have to do another episode because I got to run to a client call in a second – but I was talking to Cass and we were talking about the Ryan Hanley Show. His team helps me a lot to put this show out. We were talking about how his show is very kind of buttoned up. He's got his three questions at the beginning, two questions at the end. It's very templatized. He doesn't curse. I mean, he does a great job, obviously, but it's different.
--:-- My show is very tangential. It's very conversational. Most of the time I have literally no idea – I just hit record. I had no idea where we were going. I had no idea we were even recording until like 20 minutes ago. You called me out on the thing and I was like, "I would love to talk to you. Let's do it." I don't mean call them out in a negative way. Like you said, "Hey man, when are you going to be on the show?"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And I said, you know, screw you. Let's do it. Monday. So, this is great. And now I want to do a second episode because I have so many more things to talk to you about.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But I think the issue is, it has to match up. It has to be to who you are or it does not fit. You're not going to be able to hide behind a brand that doesn't match who you actually are. And that's the most important thing that I think a lot of people lose. It doesn't mean, "Hey, I'm real. I can be whatever I want." No, you don't get to be an asshole. But it's certainly—if you're not an outgoing person and you're trying to have an outgoing brand, that's a weird thing. If you're not super energetic and passionate, people are going to see that. And the opposite is true.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So, I don't know. It's funny. You said the last thing and I'll let you go, obviously you got to go, but speaking of say service, and then you come back with two days with a certificate of insurance, it's obviously a complete lie.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: I saw an ad—and I'm not even going to say who the insurance company was, but I'm sure we can all probably figure this out—but they mimicked the Jimmy John's Freaky Fast delivery. And they literally mimicked it 360 degrees. It's kind of funny because I'm actually making one and I'm going to post it and make it a funny little thing. But it was just like on top of a delivery car. Jimmy John's logo on the left-hand side. Jimmy John's name. And then on the bottom it says "Freaky Fast delivery." And it was big in that.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Well, they changed it and put "Freaky Fast quotes." It was a sponsored ad. I mean, big company, big, big company. And the comments were blown up with people saying, "It took two days to get my quote back." "I got this back in 18 hours. Freaky Fast is not that." It was such a bad ad. If you're not gonna pull through, I mean, especially for as big of a company as you guys are, to put that out there as a carrier and not get shit back within like a couple—when I think of Freaky Fast delivery or a Freaky Fast quote, and you call me for a quote, like a little small contract, I could write those things left and right all day long. A thousand dollar premium. I get in there and quote bound and issue those things in no time.
--:-- Mitch Gibson: But if you were to call me at five o'clock and me not get it to you until five o'clock the next day, and I told you I'd have it—I mean, get out of here. Come on now. That's just ridiculous. But they got people to click. I mean, it got people to click on it, but they weren't getting the quotes and the results.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, what happens is, that's probably a disconnect between the ad, the third party ad company that they're using, and how the company actually works. So someone in an ad room said, "Oh, that worked really well. We could turn that into quotes. That's a great idea. Let's do that." And because the carrier probably doesn't spend any time thinking about their advertising campaigns, they're outsourcing it to some overpriced third party. They push the ad campaign through and it's obviously a disconnect versus what really happened.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So, again, that's a really good example of how you have to be intentional and authentic to what your brand is. And it's okay. And then promote that thing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And we're going to do an episode too. I got to run. I hate that we've run out of time, but that's okay. It gives us a reason to do a second episode. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you for coming on the show. I'll have all your contact stuff. Where's the best place for people to hit you?
--:-- Mitch Gibson: Instagram, a hundred percent. That's my bread and butter. I love Instagram. Personal page: Mitch underscore Gibson 24. Mitch underscore Gibson 24. And then I've got a business page where more of my content marketing is pushed out as Mitch R Gibson. Then you can find my podcast, Inside Hancock County Podcast with Mitch Gibson.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Awesome. Thanks, brother. So appreciate you, man. Have a great day.
--:-- [End of interview. Audio cuts to a different, unrelated recording.]
--:-- Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. That's really good! You go fuck yourself with your fat fucking ass.
--:-- Speaker 2: Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, Bubbles?
--:-- Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah, me. Yeah, me. Take it. Yeah, me. Yeah, me. Take it. Take it.
--:-- Speaker 2: Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, Bubbles? Yes.
--:-- [Audio cuts to a promotional advertisement.]
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