RHS 103 - Why Obie Risk Is Changing the Way We Insure Rental Properties

Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you. We have an interview with Matt Sudica, the former founder and CEO of Skylight Insurance who just recently came out with an announcement that Skylight was merging with OB. And as we would have it, we have the co-founder of OB, Ryan Lettzeiser, on the show as well.

Ryan Hanley: Ryan and Matt, I wanted to talk about a few different things. Why? What was it about OB that made it different? Why did they choose this investment property, rental property market as a target? Where did they see the opportunity there? What did OB actually do? What was their value proposition? And then I wanted to get into a little bit about the partnership of pulling two companies like this together and having it be successful, how it was successful.

Ryan Hanley: Guys, this was actually the first time I had ever spoken to Ryan, but Matt and I have talked many, many times over the course of the last few years. Have tremendous respect for everything Sudica does and just think OB is onto it. I think they are dialed into a solution that is going to be part of the insurance ecosystem for a while. And just pumped to have them on the show, pumped to share their story with you, and I know you're going to learn a lot from this episode.

Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I want to give a big shout out to today's sponsor, Tarmica. Tarmica, I've been telling you guys about Tarmica for over a year now, the commercial lines rating platform in the insurance space. There are other platforms out there, but all of them look up at Tarmica, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com. Go to T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com.

Ryan Hanley: I was on Tarmica before anyone was on Tarmica because I saw this technology. I saw what it could do. I met Ragoff, the founder, and I was like, these guys get it. They knew how to speak insurance. They had respect for the industry, respect for carriers, respect for agents. And they weren't approaching anything from anything other than an additive solution for independent insurance agencies to grow their small commercial business. And they have been an enormous piece of Rogue's success.

Ryan Hanley: If you were to say I had to give up every other piece of technology except for one, I wouldn't give up Tarmica. I just think it's that good and if you're considering something else, just understand you are choosing a lesser solution. Go to T-A-R-M-I-K-A dot com.

Ryan Hanley: I also just want to give a quick shout out to Podium. They added seven new leads to our consistent average of website leads, which were around eight to nine. We had seven additional leads on top of that just from the web chat form this week. If you go back to the episode we did with Cam, I think it was either last episode, a couple episodes ago. You can learn a little bit more about that, but Podium's doing a great job.

Ryan Hanley: And finally, I just want to give a quick shout out to Chad Eddy at Indium. Indium is not a sponsor of the show. I've had some conversations with Chad Eddy from Indium recently, and I just think the world of the guy. I think what they're doing over there at Indium is awesome. I am proud to be a member of Indium, and I think that there are very big things to come from Indium. If you're interested in Indium, go to GoIndium.com. Again, they're not a sponsor. This is just an unpaid shout out to a friend and organization that I have enjoyed being a part of.

Ryan Hanley: But if you're looking for something more than network access, a community, I don't know, just big fan. And I think the world of Chad Eddy, so I want to give a big shout out to him. Because we need to support the people that support us. That's how communities grow.

Ryan Hanley: So with that, let's get on to Matthew Sudica, the Sudica, as he's known on the socials, and Ryan Letzeiser from OB Risk. Here we go.

[Interview begins]

Matthew Sudica: What's up, dude.

Ryan Hanley: Hey, what's going on?

Matthew Sudica: Not much, man. Is Ryan Letzeiser, you know, that guy. Yeah, he's jumping on. He's our CEO. So he was going to answer some of the product side stuff and figured give your listeners a different voice than just mine. And you'll find out real quick that Ryan's about 10 times smarter and cooler than me.

Ryan Hanley: You mean you don't want them to just hear the dulcet tones of Matthew Sudica coming through the airwaves?

Matthew Sudica: Yeah, you know, everyone's probably going to get that nice Memorial Day nap in anyways this weekend. So I don't really need them to necessarily hear my voice and go to nap early. Ryan will get them rocking and rolling. And you always bring the hype.

Ryan Hanley: I could see Sudica like 2am pack of cigarettes, here is the latest jazz hits. He's got that voice for 2am jazz radio.

Matthew Sudica: I've always said I got the face for radio, but it's nice to know I have the voice for it too.

Ryan Letzeiser: Ryan, nice to meet you, man.

Ryan Hanley: Hey Ryan, nice to meet you. Thanks for coming on the show.

Ryan Letzeiser: No problem.

Matthew Sudica: So Ryan Hanley is like the coolest guy in insurance. I love this guy. He's done everything. He's now rocking out his own brokerage. So when I knew we were doing our announcement, even before I knew it was coming out officially, I was texting him saying, hey, want to get on, want you to be the guy that asks the questions, delivers it.

Matthew Sudica: He's like the big talk show host nowadays. I guess you're like the Jimmy Fallon of insurance, maybe.

Ryan Hanley: Jimmy Fallon actually went to college in Albany, New York. He went to St. Rose College. So he's got a little cult following up here because of his college connection. But no, man, it's awesome. Meech, I've been following along with the success you guys are having and all the announcements and obviously talking to Matt every once in a while and getting the lowdown on kind of – I think we started having regular conversations before the partnership. And then you hinted at some things and then all that. And I think it's awesome. It's been cool to watch and see the rollout and very fun. So I'm excited that you guys came on here and that we can talk about this.

Matthew Sudica: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're excited to be on. And it's been about a year in the making. The Rona didn't help some situations. And anytime you form and merge and have acquisitions, and then you're also trying to do a Series A and everything like that, it just – if Ryan looks like he could use a nap due to my voice, it's because he's been putting in 100-hour weeks for years straight.

Ryan Hanley: So Ryan, I'd love to get the backstory as far as you're willing to go on OB and all that, and just talk a little bit about it. And then I want to talk through how do you merge companies and do a funding round at the same exact time. And then I want to talk a little bit about the future and where you guys are going. For Rogue, I kind of look at what you guys are doing. We have our own version, but I very much look at you guys as kind of plowing the road for companies like my own to play in the space. So as far as you're willing to go back, I'd love to hear a little bit about you and just share a little bit about the company itself.

Ryan Letzeiser: Sure. So I'll be the first to say that I'm not by trade or training an insurance guy. Matt, you know, we're fortunate to have him here and he slowly was able to download some of his tribal knowledge that he's acquired through generations of insurance agency ownership into my brain over the period of the last 18 months.

Ryan Letzeiser: But my journey begins in the real estate investment world. I came out of grad school with a degree in architecture but immediately shifted gears to what's known as the dark side in architecture. Everybody goes into school thinking that there's this happy path where you get to design whatever you want. The reality is that a real estate developer dictates the terms and most architects coming out of school are stuck designing stairwells on AutoCAD for the first few years of their career prior to getting their exams and testing done, getting their licensing.

Ryan Letzeiser: So I immediately switched gears. I went to work for a real estate development group in South Florida, pretty substantial in size, everything under one roof. And we had access to the Aon's, the Willis's, the Hubs of the world because of the volume and the amount of premium that we were paying on an annual basis. Subsequently, I saw the downturn of the retail markets and I switched gears and moved over to multi-family.

Ryan Letzeiser: There I was introduced to the independent agents of the world and just the smaller mom and pop real estate owners or investment shops or hobbyist investors. They're all kind of plagued with a similar situation in which there's limited product availability. And I would say sometimes limited domain knowledge in placing risk in the right location. Sometimes that can get folks into challenges when it comes time to acquire premium and get a deal closed.

Ryan Letzeiser: So I just saw a lot of third party providers associated with the real estate assets and originally came out with a tech solution to help them manage their assets and those third party vendors a little better. Insurance was going to be our core component for monetizing the business. This is when Zenefits was really hot and they were selling payroll benefits and health care insurance through their HR platform. We figured we could do the same thing.

Ryan Letzeiser: Turns out the real estate market still, I think, to this day is not ready for a tech solution. They're very happy managing things in Excel. But what we had found was that there was this large faction of folks that were really interested in trying to figure out a way to get better pricing, better transparency.

Ryan Letzeiser: Originally we had a partnership with Hub International and we were trying to place business with them. None of the buildings that we were getting through were ever big enough for them to handle. We started poking around and my brother, who has known the Sudica family for going on two decades now, reached out to Matt's Uncle Joe and said, hey, we have a problem. Hub is not really able to take care of a lot of this stuff. Where do we place the premium?

Ryan Letzeiser: And our relationship with Matt was then born. We really found that the types of customers that we were bringing in were more appropriate for the smaller or middle market independent agencies rather than the super large ones. Frankly, Matt just moved a million times faster than everybody else. We started off real slow, sent Matt leads, saw what kind of volume we were getting. And then Aaron and I and Matt, I think together, all collectively decided that the small hab market was just missing some product availability and started poking around that space.

Ryan Letzeiser: Now with the news of the Series A and some of the public stuff, we have a product finally coming to market that I think is going to be sufficient for what a lot of folks are asking for, especially in the independent agency space. Something very fast and cost effective and easy to place for small habitational risk, these smaller investors or hobbyist investors.

Ryan Hanley: I appreciate that very much. I actually have a few different questions that came out of that. But the first one is, just so I'm clear, are you guys carrier, MGA, retail, some version of all three?

Ryan Letzeiser: At the end of the day, it's retail because we have a limited risk appetite for our internal product. And then we are an MGA. So product availability coming live towards the end of Q2, beginning of Q3 of this year, with a very large tech-focused reinsurer that operates internationally. You could probably take a wild guess who that might be. We can't disclose that right now, but there is a product that we have developed internally in concert with Matt, myself, the actuarial team, and just outlaying the problems that plague the market.

Ryan Letzeiser: Folks are either getting themselves into HO3 policies or an inflexible DP3 policy. We really wanted to create something that had tons of flexibility and was a jack of all trades type of policy for 99% of the folks out there.

Ryan Hanley: I love that. It's so interesting. When you really get nerdy into insurance, and I'm sure you're starting to realize this, Ryan, that at face value, insurance is the worst. It's so boring. And then you start to get into it, if you have that disposition. I would have never thought this of myself in my younger days. Every little boy's dream is to be an insurance professional when you're growing up.

Ryan Hanley: But you start to get into the nuances. The idea that you don't live in that home but you have an HO3 – even though you're paying premiums on that, you just open the door wide open for the carrier to completely deny that claim. Your agent may have the best intentions but doesn't have the capabilities to stay on top of whether you live there or don't live there anymore and how much you live there. All of a sudden that policy that was perfectly fine for the two years you lived there, you didn't notify when you moved out.

Ryan Hanley: I get that kind of inflexibility, rigidity, and lack of widespread attention to these types of policies. On a one-to-one basis, it's not like anyone's getting rich off any of these things. A $1,500 homeowner's policy or renter's insurance or DP3 – no one's getting rich off of it. So it's not like you're waking up every day going, geez, I wonder if Tom Jones moved out of his house this week.

Ryan Hanley: That's really cool. I'll be super interested in – I don't know what you can say and what you can't – but what is it like to see a problem like that, an inflexibility in policy form and in language, and now you're going to craft it? I don't want to say from scratch, but you're essentially building your own policy. I've never done that. What is that process like? What do you have to think through? What are the questions that you have to ask yourself to come to put something together like that?

Ryan Letzeiser: I think I'll let Matt kind of take over. This is where he can allude to what folks are really asking for. Matt, you start there and then I can give you the rest of the journey.

Matthew Sudica: First, I want it on record that Ryan stated Matt Sudica and his team are better than Hub International. Time stamp it. If anyone's doing a little video widget capture, now's the time. Hit record. Whatever minutes we are into this, just fast forward to that section of Ryan saying you're better than Hub and that's all I need.

Matthew Sudica: Everyone that knows me, I'm not the details guy and Ryan deferred to me on the high end of the insurance, but we have people that we've hired on the consulting side that are putting together the actual policy language. I'm sure that there's people like our buddy James that can read a policy back and forward.

Matthew Sudica: What I was really concerned with was a couple things when we were putting this product together. One, fixing a need that my own brokerage had had. This weird space going from home to rental. There's not anybody in the rental space in the country that's not vacant sometimes. Sometimes they have a tenant. Sometimes they're remodeling it. Sometimes they're major remodeling it. Sometimes they don't know what they're going to do with it. They're going to put it up for sale. So we knew we needed flexibility in the space.

Matthew Sudica: The other thing here with the big holiday weekend coming up is that I was always the tech forward guy. Ryan, you see it in the Facebook groups. I'm always posting tech and everyone doesn't like it, but now they're kind of starting to like it. I wanted to get involved with a company that was in the insure tech space that could be the company that's for the people.

Matthew Sudica: There's all these insure techs that are getting into auto and getting into home. That's great. I like a lot of them, but there's major competition and they're not a fit for every brokerage out there. Where I felt like in the rental space, we really are a fit for every brokerage in the country. There's really not a good carrier in the space. Anyone will tell you that.

Matthew Sudica: Even though there's less rentals than there is homes or less rentals than auto, I wanted OB to be in every brokerage. I wanted everybody to have us as a carrier, even if they only use us once or twice a year. At least it'll be fast, easy, and it'll be nice. Some of the bigger brokerages that love the hab space will use us day in and day out.

Matthew Sudica: For me being a captive guy, then an independent guy, and now getting into the insure tech space, I felt like I was kind of carrying a torch of allowing people to see that you can go from State Farm to independent to the insure tech space. It's not that bad. There is a lot of good in it.

Matthew Sudica: I know, Ryan, you and I are big crypto guys, or at least in our Facebook chat. It kind of feels the same way. We might be still a little early, but we are building some really good stuff that we're going to see down the line. Everyone will eventually adopt.

Ryan Letzeiser: Yeah. I'm big on Solana right now.

Matthew Sudica: There you go. Solana summer, man.

Ryan Letzeiser: Solana summer. Yeah, I'm all over it.

Ryan Hanley: So we won't go down the crypto rabbit hole right this second. You said a couple of things in there that I'm super interested in. I think this is one of the things that I've been thinking about as my own company Rogue evolves. The things that you and I were talking about back over a year ago – I'm not going to say we're nowhere near that today, but we're way different. The way that Rogue is moving and operating is much more like an insure tech. Some of the things that you're doing and saying are on our roadmap today.

Ryan Hanley: Because we're on the path to going out and potentially doing a seed or an A – I get lost in all that crap – going out and finding someone who's going to give us money to throw gasoline on the fire. So I think backwards into what's going to make us successful. Who are the type of people that we want to involve in this project?

Ryan Hanley: When I see somebody like you, who's lived all these different lives, you said it's not that bad. To me, it's a positive on a positive on a positive. It shows that you're flexible, you're adaptable, and with all that history of being able to boil down the best pieces of a captive and then the best pieces of an independent and always having your hand in all these insure techs and working with the Hippos and the Clear Covers and the Openlys – that to me is like a superpower in our space.

Ryan Hanley: The tribalism that happens is such a handcuff to so many really smart people that limit their upside because they have this tribalistic nature to one set of one structure or another. It's just not the world we live in anymore. Certainly not where we're going. A lot of people think you and I are nuts because we see an advertisement for Hippo and we're like, oh, that shit looks cool. And everyone else is like, F them, they went direct. And then obviously we nerd out on crypto all the time. So I think I see that as a positive. Having different iterations of your career is tremendously positive.

Ryan Letzeiser: I think, to Matt's point, designing the policy from the consumer side first allows you to alleviate a bunch of mistakes that you're going to make that folks don't really see behind the scenes. The policy administration system door, the rating tables, the filings with the state departments of insurance, all the regulatory factors. If you make tweaks, guess what? You're going back to the state, you need new approvals, you need new rates, you need new forms. If you don't design it the way it should be at the outset, you're putting yourself in a position where you might have a product that doesn't sell because it doesn't meet the needs of the consumer. Or you're putting yourself in a weird position where you might be looking at attritional losses that are extreme.

Ryan Letzeiser: Just having Matt's background has allowed us to work in the right direction, basically from the bottom up rather than the top down. I think that's a huge differentiator in making sure that we at least have a product that we know we can sell right out of the gate. And then we can fine tune and make adjustments on the pricing and the rates and the structures over time that don't require us to have to go back to refile with the states every time.

Ryan Hanley: I think that's a tremendous point. I really do. A lot of the policies we sell today were built the other way. Almost all the policies we sell today were built the other way. Maybe some of the new cyber companies like Corvus, Coalition, Evolve MGA have built some of their products that way. Maybe a few of the insure techs like Clear Cover, Openly. But very, very few.

Ryan Hanley: To me, it's exciting to think that habitational rentals, multi-families, that type of product is going to be able to get that in the hands of an agent force and your own direct and partner channels as you go look for volume. Thinking that way from the outset is going to be a huge win.

Ryan Hanley: My next question for you is, you mentioned a whole bunch of things that disqualify people from writing with certain carriers. You said there's not really a good, solid, consistent product. On a macro basis, that's probably a very fair statement. On a micro basis, probably unfair. There are carriers in Western New York who are awesome at habitational that doesn't have a wood stove. They just crush that market.

Ryan Hanley: Understanding all those different factors that you just discussed, how did you consider or what were your thoughts around the ideas of the consistency of pricing and of ultimately being profitable, managing all those variables that traditionally have been disqualifiers for rental property carriers?

Ryan Letzeiser: The great thing about admitted products with the state is that you can go and rip through what everybody else has done that is par for the course right now. If you like a little bit of this Travelers policy, okay, I grabbed the SERFF filing for them. If I like this Erie DP3 policy for Ohio, okay, I'll grab little tidbits here. Going back to the original point, you grab the things you know you need ahead of time. Then you're able to boil that down and do a comp survey or rating comp survey of how those products are competitive and how they are not. You start to move the dials in ways that make sense for everybody.

Ryan Letzeiser: From that point, you can take probably your most comprehensive filing and take the majority or the bulk from there, and then make your adjustments that you need to make from that point forward. At the end of the day, your program efficiency comes out of somebody that's kind of been there, done that. Then you exclude the things that you don't really like about their program, and you hopefully can supplement with things that you do like from other programs to make it more comprehensive.

Ryan Hanley: I'm going to ask you a follow-up question only because I'm a little ignorant on this particular topic. When you're building it out for Ohio, just because you mentioned Ohio, with admitted products, the carriers who have admitted paper in that state, you can actually go in and because you have their filings and you know that they've already been approved by the state in the way that they're currently written, you can almost kind of like a buffet choose and piece together as a baseline as a starting point for what you like. I'll take some of this, some of that, piece it together and then start to have someone work through how all those pieces work together. Is that correct?

Ryan Letzeiser: Correct. For us, I will tell you who we grabbed, but we had a boilerplate and that's called a me-too filing. Generally when you have a bunch of things inside the forms or inside the rates that have already been approved by the state, the departments of insurance and the actuarial teams there tend to not give you nearly as much kickback of, hey, this might be a rate that we would deem borderline inadmissible, or it seems too low, we're not going to back this filing, or this particular thing that you are rating on might be prejudicial. There's a million factors.

Ryan Letzeiser: The Roots of the world have done this with telematics and using your cell phone as an indicator of how you drive. They had to go through and basically prove to the state that the way this person takes a turn or accelerates actually is a component of risk and here's what happens. Well, if you take some of the larger carriers that have already done this, you can utilize their information, their rates, in order to say, hey, this was good enough for Erie or Travelers or CNA. You've already approved this for this particular policy. You should just approve it for us. They basically give you an opportunity to push a bunch of things forward and only have to fight or make amendments on very small things.

Ryan Hanley: That's cool.

Matthew Sudica: Ryan is way more in the weeds on this stuff than me. I get the cliff notes from Ryan. But my take on it is, we said we want to highlight some sections. If this next section we want to remove if Ryan doesn't like it. But we're not trying to rewrite policies. There's been smart lawyers and carriers that have written these policies. As we all know, they all come from this almost like boilerplate type of coverages.

Matthew Sudica: What we cared more about is combining these things that are already out there. These endorsements for vacant, these endorsements for builders risk – they're already a thing. We cared more about making sure that we had those available and that we had this all-encompassing offering.

Matthew Sudica: I guess comment below or whatever, maybe I've been watching too much YouTube here, but if you disagree, for the space, especially the rental for a broker, you want it just to be easier to provide this policy to a client. Faster, easier. As you mentioned, it's very low margin, very low premiums. We really focused on that. We didn't want to spend all of our valuable resources on doing everything from scratch where we'd end up probably almost the same as what's already been out there.

Matthew Sudica: We've been spending a lot of our time making sure that we found the right endorsements we were going to offer, the right endorsements, and then the ability – like you mentioned, the one carrier at upper New York. If you're up there and you're in New York and you're doing habitational with that carrier, you're golden. But if someone calls you from Florida, what do you do?

Ryan Hanley: So we're kind of... you could argue we could get beat out on a micro basis in an individual small town like I'm from. But in the big space across the country, we're going to be able to work with brokers so that they have a consistent feel, consistent offering, consistent pricing to offer to their clients. And that's really what our main focus is.

[Ryan Hanley addresses the audience directly]

Ryan Hanley: What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales — the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. And I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show. And I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right. I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.

Ryan Hanley: I think you're right on it. And there's a... wow. You can tell it's Friday before holiday week in my brain. The words are not coming to the brain today. There is a... I made you do this thing two weeks early.

Matthew Sudica: No, it's all good.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, no, it's all good. When Sudika calls, I answer. You said, "Hey man, we're doing it today." Screw the fact that I set the meeting for two weeks from now. We're doing it today. I thought it was today. I said, "Looking forward to doing this today at one." You responded with one question mark. And I was like, "Oh man, I got it wrong." But it's good. We're getting it out there today. We're getting a ton of questions and my inbox has been crazy on LinkedIn and Facebook. Special thanks to James Jacobs — he was really pushing us out. So I know he'll appreciate that. But due to him pushing us out the other day, I've been getting bombarded with: when are we starting? Where are we going? What's the direction of our company? Can we work with brokers? All these things. So either now or before you end, I want to address that.

Matthew Sudica: No, dude, first of all, I'm busting your chops. It's all good. And it is true — when Sudika calls, Hanley answers. So I just... I know how the game is played, man. I don't want to disrupt the ecosystem that you work in. But no, it was all good. It's fun.

Ryan Hanley: So I guess where my brain was trying to get to is there is a macro trend happening in our space right now. As agents digitize — as they start using social more, creating more blogs, YouTube, email — people move and their connections aren't just in their hometown anymore. Their connections are spread throughout the country. The inevitable result is that you get opportunities in states that you're not licensed in. That just happens. Or states that you don't have expertise in or markets in. So that's why I see what you're doing with Obie. I look at it and I'm like, this is obvious — not obvious in creating the solution, but an obvious answer for agents who are sitting there going, "Geez, my great client has a rental in Iowa where they grew up. I can't insure that." Before, what you would do is maybe just do nothing, say, "Hey, find someone up there." Or maybe you had a buddy or a friend, or you'd go in one of those Facebook groups and say, "Hey, anyone write rental properties in Iowa?" To me, all those solutions — unless it's a good friend and you're referring to a friend — aren't real. They're not what you should actually be doing, because you're the one that has the relationship. Now, with solutions like what you're providing, you can say, "I got you. No problem. We'll get you taken care of. I got the perfect market for you." And that keeps the boots-on-the-ground agent, the connection — it keeps everything right there. To me, this seems like an obvious solution for everyone listening. It seems like the next thing you should do is go to whatever website you're about to tell me they should go to and sign up.

Matthew Sudica: Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you brought up that point. I feel like you might have been a fly on the wall in some of these conversations I've been having with Aaron and Ryan. I'm always clearly pro-broker. You mentioned this Facebook post — that's what I always see. "Hey, I have a friend that has a rental in Missouri. I don't write there. Who can help me?" You get a thousand posts. You never know who really is good or not good. And sometimes you're offending people because you went to the first comment or whatever. So we are working on that. We'll have people who are appointed with us and writing a lot of business, but we're also trying to work on in the background right now — exactly that. How do we create this Facebook post forum, if you will, where instead of going to Facebook, maybe it's backed by a couple brokers, but the licenses will be taken care of. You're a licensed broker, you'll be able to go in some fashion — either intro your client right through this portal that allows the quote, and you can still be part of the journey. And then maybe you're able to see your policies outside of your book type feature. I'm probably making Ryan cringe because he's thinking about how many engineers he's going to have to hire on all these ideas I have. But this will happen in some fashion because once again, the rental market — we know this — it's not home and auto. It's not a hundred policies a month type of thing. It's onesie-twosie, threes for the average broker. Even like you're running — I know it's not your main focus — but you probably still get a couple here and there. So if you have the ability to just say, "Hey, someone wants a rental in Florida, go to our site, you type in maybe six things of information, it shoots out a quote with an email that you're CC'd on that says, 'This is our partner at Obie. They're helping you out with your rental in Florida.' You can still see it going. And then a year down the road after you've been doing this, you can look in your portal and see all that you've done — 30 referrals and how much premium that is. Maybe that will inspire you to get a license in that state or those states and actually be a broker with us permanently. Or maybe you're just like, 'I love being able to see who I've referred over. I can answer quick questions still for my clients about policy number or whatever.' That is the core of Obie, which will always be there — we were brokerage turned insuretech. Or at least a good part of us was. Everything we built, I think we'll be solving these problems that I'm constantly seeing, you're constantly seeing. Even now, I consider Ryan and Aaron insuretech nerds like me too, or insurance geeks like me. So they're seeing it. That's also what we get to do with Obie — we're going to have a product, we're in the rental space, but ideas like that can be multiplied. So let's say you get into your space like you talked about with Rogue. That same technology for those instant referrals all over the country might be something that you're calling me up like, "Hey Matt, how do I get the IP for that over at Rogue to do workers comp or whatever you're going to focus on?" So I think Obie will start out with one direction in the rental space, but I think you'll see our company overall solving a lot of IA channel type problems as well. And we're able to do that while growing a rental business.

Ryan Hanley: It's awesome. I think more solutions, in my opinion, is always the answer. About 10 minutes before we jumped on this call, I just got an eight-unit quote back from a single state mutual company who came in with a ridiculous rate because I wrote him an email and sent him all these pictures for the unit and said, "Look, I know this isn't your target. It's super clean. Great." I wrote him this big long story and they come in a thousand dollars less than the next highest quote in the market. That's really difficult to beat. However, that also took me a couple hours to put all the information together, to write the story, to call the underwriter, to do the quote in an Excel spreadsheet that you then email them. It's not scalable. So that's a great solution on the other side. If I have a simple two-family that flies in and the guy's ready to go, why would I just punch up Obie and go, "Okay, here's your rate, boom. How's it sound? Great, boom, closed. Good. Here's your tailing. Get your payment information. All right, you have coverage. Rock and roll." I don't think — and this goes back to my comments before about tribalism — I feel like we are in this place where there are still a lot of agents, and it's not a negative, I understand that they're riding the horses that got them to where they are. But my only point is, you can ride the horse and have the motorcycle and the Elon Musk rocket ship. You can have all those things. In different situations, they all make sense. That's really why I love having you guys on here, telling these kinds of stories, talking about these kinds of solutions and making them tangible for agents. Because I don't think any one solution is the answer anymore. It's really about finding for this particular moment, this particular client, what's going to get this person what they need. And it's not always a mutual. It's not always a national. It's not always an insuretech. It's not always a captive. It's having access to all of them. So I think you guys are right on it. And the more that you can facilitate that, I think the better.

Matthew Sudica: Yeah, absolutely. And Ryan, to your point on having all three — you said horse, motorcycle, rocket ship. A lot of these agents that are maybe listening to this that are still a little anti-insuretech, or maybe they just don't know, I want to remind all of them: go back five years, 10 years, 20 years — I don't know how long they've been an agent. There was a time when Yellow Pages was scary. There was a time when Google Ads was scary. There was a time when using the phone and calling people was scary. There's always been something that was scary as a new marketing tool or a new tool. How many people listening were scared the first time they had to go from film to a computer and a monitor? Or from one monitor to two monitors? Or work remote on a laptop? So I think what I'll end with here on that subject is that you're 100% right. Keep what's comfortable for you, but give 5%, give 10% to this new journey. So you can stay going down the same career path that you've always done. And I think one, as individuals — Ryan, myself, I know you are as well, Ryan — I can also take phone calls about insuretech in general, what's happening, how to get involved, just as much as talking about being a partner with Obie, because we might not be a fit sometimes. But more than anything, I want to say that this insuretech space is not here to take anybody's careers, jobs, or move people out of the way. It is just a new tool, a new thing in the woodshed, a new rocket ship. We couldn't be more pro-broker. We couldn't be more wanting to be part of the space and not take over the space. We're here to make all these brokers' lives better, faster, and easier. And have a crap ton of fun on the way out.

Ryan Letzeiser: You said it took you hours to put together stuff for an eight-plex. At the end of the day, we're trying to take that burden off your hands so you could spend that time prospecting and getting more customers. You shouldn't be... We have data enrichment solutions now that will calculate replacement costs on your behalf. It'll furnish all of the data. We scrape, I think, 15 different sites now, and we have over 1,000 data elements that we can plug in to help enrich data. You'll see that starting to go live here in the next 30 to 60 days. All you have to do is enter an address, and it's going to pump out a quote for you. Spend your time being an advocate for your customers. You don't have to worry about whether or not their relationship is going to go to an insuretech because they love you for going the extra mile, getting them a quote extremely fast, making it competitive, and then being a risk advisor to them rather than just somebody that sells a commodity because it's occupying so much of your time to put all that stuff together. At the end of the day, that is what we are — we're helping speed up and we're helping empower the agents and the brokers of the world. We're trying to be an advocate for them so they can be an advocate on behalf of their consumer.

Ryan Hanley: Amen. I completely agree. I know this is the first time you and I have ever spoken, but Matt knows this. The first two words I wrote down when I started mapping out my agency was "human optimized." The whole construct, the lens that I use to view every decision that we make in our agency is: how do we take the best aspects of the traditional model — connection, relationship, compassion, caring — all those things that make a traditionally run agency amazing? And how do we make sure that they're placed into the transaction and into every interaction with a customer in the right moments? Instead of... My vision was, I remember sitting in my wife's family agency listening to the CSRs. A phone call would come in, and they would — this isn't a negative because they do a great job — but they would be trying to get that customer off the phone as quickly as possible because they knew whatever that customer was asking them to do was then going to take X amount of time to get done. My thought was, there has to be a way to make it so that actual transaction processing time can be reduced so that instead of spending five minutes on the phone with the customer and 15 minutes transactioning, I can flip that and go 15 minutes on the phone building relationship, connection, finding other things to cross-sell, asking for referrals, making sure everything's okay, double-checking data points in our database, and then only five minutes transacting. How do we flip that on its head? That's what we're working on every day. And it sounds like you guys are on a similar journey. So I couldn't be more on that path.

[Ryan Hanley shifts the conversation]

Ryan Hanley: Hey guys, I want to be very respectful of your time. I have some questions about — and you don't have to get into details, that's not what I'm looking for — but I'm super interested in this process. You found each other, we heard a little bit about that, and then decided this is going to be something that makes sense. Lighthouse — Skylight, it was Skylight. I knew there was a light in it. They all have park, light, sky, or something. So Skylight and Obie come together, you form this partnership, and then go out and get some capital. There's a whole process. Just talk me through — not the details of this and which part — just how do you manage through that? That's a moment where there's a lot of moving parts. If you're not on the same page, if you're not communicating, working well together, a lot of things can fall apart. I'm sure it wasn't perfect every moment. That's not the picture I'm trying to paint. But you've obviously done something right as a group, as a leadership group, and as an overall company to get to this point where you've combined, you've raised money, and now it's go time. How do you navigate that? What did you learn? Is there any advice that you can give people when they make these kinds of connections? Because I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who either are in the early stages of a partnership or are considering a partnership or a merger. I'm just interested in what you learned from that whole process because there's so much there.

Ryan Letzeiser: You said one word that I think will ring true, and it doesn't matter whether it's friendships, family, your spouse. The word was "communicate." I think just ongoing — Matt, myself, and my brother Aaron all had a really good open line from the day that we got started. Matt can probably speak to this as well. We dated, I would say, before we got married for a while. Matt proved to us what he was capable of, and I hope we were able to prove to him what we were as well. At the end of the day, I think your communication, your level of integrity, and doing what you say you are going to do — evaluating that over a period of months and even over a year — allowed us to form a more meaningful bond and feel a lot more comfortable about the direction we were heading. Rather than us all feeling like in some way or another Matt was a cog in our wheel or we were a cog in his — the reality is that that wasn't the case at all. I think we formed mutual trust along a period of time that was paramount in where we're at now.

Matthew Sudica: Yeah, I would agree. Communication is always number one in a marriage, everything, right? For me, I'll speak personally — I've been in quite a few partnerships now. To be honest, most of those didn't go as you first dream it up. Everyone meets, it's just like that first night we met — you talk about a relationship, everything's all exciting, that first drink and that first date. And you tell yourself little fibs and little things. You maybe agree that, "Oh, I like going to the art museum too." And then when it gets down to it and kids come and you're buying a house and someone loses a job — when hard stuff happened, then you really see what comes out. So to Ryan's point, we did get to go through some hard stuff in the dating phase, which helped. For me, it was when I had for the first time an unbelievable respect for my partners. I've always been the hard-working guy, or felt like sometimes I was holding up my end and others weren't. And at every turn, Aaron and Ryan were putting in just as much, if not more. The other thing with the partnership was, I loved for the first time being able to get rid of two-thirds of my workload. Ryan and I are actually really good friends outside of work and get along really well and have personal interests. But from a work standpoint, him, Aaron, and I couldn't be more different. I still remember the solidified period — we did this whiteboard activity. I knew this was when it was perfect. We drew three columns and wrote up on a spare thing all the stuff that someone as a CEO — Ryan's our CEO — but like, what does someone as a business owner have to handle? We started going through them, hands up, hands down, real simple kindergarten style: who likes doing that or who thinks it's good? Every single person almost took their own third and was happy with their third, and super pumped they didn't have to do the other two-thirds of the stuff. Ryan's brother Aaron handles the HR, legal, write-ups, contracts, and stuff like that. That stuff used to make me sick. So to me, that is another strength of a good partnership — you're all counted on to do certain aspects and everyone's kind of in their wheelhouse. We've all been entrepreneurs. Probably 90% of the people listening to this are top of the flagpole — they are the boss. And it's tough. So that is the advantage of having a partnership — if you get it right with all those other things, communication and everything, you really can work on the things that you are the best at. I see Nick from IAOA is now doing that big marketing gig for A Better Agency. That was always his wheelhouse, but he had his own brokerage and was probably getting distracted with other things. Now the guy's on fire because he's in his wheelhouse, probably got a couple other partners doing the other couple things. To relate to the audience and give Nick some props — yeah, I think that was our partnership thing: communication, trust, and trust when things go bad. A little date before you marry. And honestly, being able to get rid of the things you're not the best at and concentrate on the things that you are. That's probably a longer answer than you wanted, but I actually think partnerships are probably the most important decision you can ever make. They're harder than starting a business from scratch.

Ryan Hanley: I get that. I fantasize about having a partner sometimes because I've become keenly aware of the aspects of this business that I just abhor. I just can't — doing them makes me sick a little bit. I just don't even like doing them at all. But at the same time, then you're counting on someone. You have to hope that they do it. You have to hope they're as bought in as you are. So that's wonderful. I'm very happy for you guys. I think it's great. I think what you're doing is tremendous. I think the product that you're bringing to the market — there's an absolute need. And I just wish you guys nothing but success. If someone's listening to this, I know you said it's not available yet that agents can start writing, but do you have like a beta list or a place that they can go put their email in so when it does open up, they can get contacted? Or how do people just find out more so that they can be aware of when it does open up?

Matthew Sudica: Yes. That's the guy. They can reach out to me via my email, which is [email protected]. This is actually a topic that came up about 30 or 40 minutes right before this call. We're going to be doing some social media posts here over the next few months with some contact type forms that people can fill out. What we want to find out right now is who's in the states that we're first launching with, who's interested in it, create this database so that way we can have agents start to — as we get closer and closer to launching in their state — maybe get on for a test pilot, or we can start to work with them. So one, see social media posts. And two, if you are super eager, like some have been — DM me, I guess is what the cool kids say — slide into the DMs on social media or email me.

Ryan Hanley: The CMO in me says, pay one of these army of engineers that you have to create obrisk.com/beta with a simple Gravity Form that allows people to fill out information. And then you can just collect it all right there. If you want, just send me your WordPress login and I'll create it for you right now. It's killing me that you don't have a contact form where I can send people. But no, [email protected] is the best place, or slide into Sudika's DMs — which is just the subtle sexuality of that statement. That'll never get old for me. People stopped listening to the three of us probably 15, 20 minutes ago. That's the thing that we're saying now — they've already stopped. They got done with their Peloton ride, they're done listening. But no, we're going to have that Gravity type form. Honestly, you're smarter than me, Ryan. I hit up our CTO before this call and said, "Hey, I need a form or whatever." I think we have a contact form for regular contact, but we're trying to build one just for this. So your questions, as always, are just a little ahead of the game. We will take care of it shortly. By the time you post this video, I bet we have something.

Ryan Hanley: Sweet. Awesome. Well, hey guys, I appreciate it. I appreciate you spending the time, sharing your story. I very much look forward to what's going on, and I'm sure the next big thing that comes out — love to have you back on and talk about it and share with the audience. So thank you.

Matthew Sudica: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Ryan Letzeiser: Thank you, Ryan. Appreciate it.

[End of episode. Promotional segment begins.]

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