RHS 107 - A Random Conversation with James Jenkins

Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... Hello everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today, actually, is a random conversation that I have with James Jenkins. It had probably been too long, but usually, once a month or so, he and I will just jump on a call and chat about business and what's going on. We just share notes on wherever we are in our own businesses and the ecosystem and other random things.

Ryan Hanley: This time, we got two minutes into the conversation and James was like, "Why don't we just turn this into a podcast?" And I was like, "Let's do it." So we hit record. What you got is, I think, an incredibly valuable and fun conversation that came out of just a randomly scheduled call. I think you're going to take a ton of value out of it because we talk about a lot of really cool things. Hopefully, it'll get you thinking.

Ryan Hanley: Questions, comments that you have about the show, hit us up, let us know. Guys, I appreciate you for listening to this show. I maybe say that too much, maybe I don't say it enough, but it means a lot to me. As I get busier here with Rogue and we kind of hit the next level of what we're doing here, I'm committed to the show and sharing with you. It takes time out of growing my own business. I think a lot of consultants would say, "Cut it out, do away with it for a year. The audience will be there when you get back." And I say, "Screw that." I love you guys too much. I love sharing with you. I love trying to get ideas in your head that might help you grow your own businesses or do something better or make a connection that helps you grow your business.

Ryan Hanley: I just feel this deep-seated obligation, in the most positive sense, to help the industry because of everything it's done for me. I want to say that I'm going to continue working this show as long as I possibly can. It has become harder for me to get episodes out consistently, but I will continue to try to do that and batch and put conversations like this one that I'm having with James in front of you as often as I possibly can. I hope you'll stick with me. If you have guest ideas, send them to me. I'm always looking for great ones. Not that I don't have enough people to talk to, but I always love talking to people who are referred into the show. Either way, I'm going to keep working for you. I hope you keep working for you. And if there's anything I can do, you know how to get a hold of me.

Ryan Hanley: Before we get on to James, I just want to give a quick shout out to today's sponsor, and that is Podium. Podium is the tool that has driven a net increase in leads to our business. It helps us text. It helps us get in front of our customers. It gives them an easy way to respond. We move those customers out to our CRM pretty quickly over to Agency Zoom, and those conversations are happening in real time. It's possible because of Podium's ability to have a text-to-chat feature that we use. We use a couple of the other features and they have some streamlined tools. In general, I like a lightweight tool that doesn't bog down my website but provides tremendous value. That's what Podium does.

Ryan Hanley: I think it's worth giving Podium a look. Go to podium.com. Just search Podium. You can search Podium web chat or Podium insurance, whatever you're going to find. But head on over. Take a look at what they have going on. If you go to roguerist.com, you can see the web chat in action on my site. We use it every day. We get conversations started and then the text feature going back and forth every single day, multiple times a day. So it's working for us. There's a pretty good chance it'll work for you. It is at least worth knowing about the technology.

Ryan Hanley: I also want to give a quick shout out to Mick Hunt. I know I give shout outs to Mick Hunt all the time, but we have been kind of doubling into our relationship with Mick. He has been doing some training work with my people and it has just been incredible. Just absolutely incredible. What Mick does at Premier Strategy Box and his team is just absolutely phenomenal. Best in class in our industry, I believe. If you're looking to go into growth mode and you need some help to get there, there's no one better in the business. Check out mystrategybox.com. Go to mystrategybox.com today.

Ryan Hanley: All right, on to this random yet incredibly valuable conversation with James Jenkins.

[Transition to the conversation]

Ryan Hanley: When I bring in guests that aren't in the insurance industry, it's usually because I just find them interesting. I always try to get them to talk through the lens of insurance, even sometimes they're uncomfortable with it. I think that's fine. Even some of their flailing to position their expertise to an insurance audience is really interesting because sometimes you can see who is either—and I won't say that I've had anybody that I thought was a poser, but certainly people that are more single track. That's not a negative. It's just like James Altucher, Clint Pulver—they were able to take their expertise and layer it on top of or weave it in with the insurance industry so nicely that they were awesome interviews. Other people as well, but those two came to mind.

Ryan Hanley: Then I had another guy whose name is escaping me who was marketing focused. I thought his content marketing advice was tremendous. There's tremendous value in the episode. But when I tried to get him to position it to insurance specifically, he really struggled. We ultimately just left it because he wasn't able to do that. I find both scenarios to be intriguing.

James Jenkins: No, dude. I can completely get where you're coming from. As I'm starting to build out this guest list for AFP, and realizing like you've said before, it doesn't just happen. The idea—it's kind of the cool thing to do now is, "Oh, I'm going to start a podcast," whether it's a local, specific to your city thing or it's super niche in some hobby area or whatever. The building of the narrative, the idea—and we're not having an episode on how to do a podcast. I think the cool thing about conversations with you is we don't really have a plan. We literally were just like, "Hey, we should record this." This is probably a good episode because it's two guys that have reasonably good things to say most of the time.

James Jenkins: I had no idea. And it's probably not me, bro. The amount of time that I have spent listening to your back catalog in the last six months, I'm a little embarrassed to say so. But when Cass reached out and was like, "Hey, I want you to consider doing a podcast," I'm like, "Okay, that sounds cool." I had no idea how much work would go into making it a thing because getting it started is not the hard part. Like Carruthers told me a year ago, staying in front of it, making sure that you deliver consistently good content. You don't just phone it in so you stay current with your schedule of episodes. If you phone it in a couple of times, most people are going to be like, "This is crap, I'm not listening to this anymore." You have to enjoy it.

Ryan Hanley: You have to enjoy it. This is why—sometimes I get bored talking about insurance. It's what we do all day long. We talk, we have people that we call to ask questions about or that we network with. All of us do. Sometimes I'm just bored with insurance. That's why I slip in people from other industries or technologists. I just had one of the—I hate calling them insurtech carriers because I don't think that describes who they are. I think digital carriers: ClearCover, Hippo, Pie, Branch. I have a lot of those. I try to get a lot of those CEOs on because I think the way that they're building is not without its weaknesses and obstacles. But as my agency evolves into what I feel like it was meant to be, there are realities in those carriers that make my business possible that the nationals just simply aren't interested in. I like to have them on because they're ultimately young in the business, or they're young in that business. That's very interesting.

Ryan Hanley: I think you just have to like doing it. Every once in a while, and you've probably seen this because you've done a lot of solo episodes so far, it's really fun to do a solo episode. I haven't done a solo episode in a while, but sometimes just turning on the microphone and just talking—I won't even know where I'm going to go. I just will be like, "I want to talk about this," and then that will turn into something else, and then that will turn into something else. Then I'll get to a certain point and be like, "Okay, I'm good. Turn it off." You just have to like it because it's freaking work.

James Jenkins: No, it is so cool to hear your process and to see your finished product. It's kind of funny—this is a podcast about podcasts right now, which is kind of reductive and weird, but whatever. Your approach is very different than my approach because I am literally sitting down and drafting an outline and making sure that I know—okay, I don't know where I'm going to go with the in-between, but I'm going to make sure on this episode, there's the point, there's the point, there's the point. So between those points, I have no idea what's coming out of my mouth, but I'm going to make sure that I hit my waypoints on the destination. Beyond that, good luck, dude. I have no idea.

Ryan Hanley: Just to digress for a second, I think Naka Suji, the ClearCover CEO—Kyle Naka Suji. I think what's really interesting about these folks is that at the end of the day, those of us that are doing this game correctly and running an agency, we're business owners first and insurance agents second. I think you have to be. If you're doing it right, that's how you're doing it. It's really cool to see these guys that are coming in that are tech people, serial entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley wonks or VC people or whatever. They came to insurance after they came to business. They see the potential in the insurance vertical. I think that's really cool because these guys are 100% bleeding edge business. They could just as easily be doing any other industry, pushing the conversation forward, driving the needle, making existing legacy businesses really uncomfortable like they're doing with insurance. There are a lot of carriers that I would imagine the C-suite is sitting there going, "Oh crap, we're going to have to up our game here, here, here, and here because otherwise the ClearCovers and the other fully digital native carriers are just going to smoke them."

James Jenkins: I'll give you an example of this. My business pivoted hard in August from middle market commercial to small commercial. That's really what we are today. We made the conscious decision to stop offering personal lines to anyone who wasn't one of our commercial lines clients about a month ago. In August or September, we pivoted from middle market to small commercial. We took a lot of the lessons, teachings, thought processes that I learned in Killing Commercial, which I think is by far one of, if not the best, commercial sales and operational—I don't even know how to describe it anymore. It's so much more than a course. It's a community, a system. It's almost like a religion to a certain extent. We brought that down into small commercial.

James Jenkins: In really focusing on that market, I've started to reach out to a lot of national and regional small business carriers. I'm trying to find the best portfolio of small business carriers who want to move at the pace and do the things that we want to do. In all these discussions, the number one company that the nationals are the most worried about is Next Insurance. I think they should be. I used to think Next was just like a B or C player. I no longer think that. The reason is, when they got that Amazon contract, that showed that they're a primetime player and that they're ready for primetime because Amazon would not have made that announcement, done PR, no matter what the integration actually is or looks like. Amazon put Next on the map. They made them legitimate.

James Jenkins: My very first instinct was—I called my business partners and I said, "We're going to win." They said, "Why?" I said, "Amazon just made the wrong choice. Amazon's in play in three years. You can't win with a single option solution. You cannot win with a single option solution. It doesn't matter. It's why every DTC play by every national—and I hope all of their people are listening—you cannot win with a single player option." The dirty little secret is they all have agencies behind the scenes. So, okay, so you can't win. So I'm like, "We're in the driver's seat with what we're building at Rogue."

James Jenkins: Then they bought AP Indigo. AP Indigo is an embedded insurance solution. It's essentially an agency. Now Next has the ability to shop multiple carriers while presenting themselves first on the business that they want to write. It gives them more reach and more distribution. I went, "If I were in the small commercial vertical of any carrier in this country today, Next would scare the shit out of me because they move fast, they're smart, and they obviously are ambitious." I think it's a perfect example of what you just said.

Ryan Hanley: I absolutely love the user interface, the client experience. Their marketing is on point. I see it all the time in my YouTube or Google audience—the banner ads all over the place. Once they figure out their forms, once they figure out their endorsement offers—and really those two things—their form is absolutely trash. Only insurance wonks care about that shit, though. Consumers don't. That's the thing that we have to think about. I'm super interested in your opinion on this.

Ryan Hanley: As I—so I don't even really sell that much anymore. I've gotten—the reason that I hired the producer that I did was so that—I hate selling insurance. It's just not who I am. I like running the business of insurance and I love the insurance business and I love the product. I just don't like selling it. It doesn't matter. So the more I become a business owner and less an insurance agent, the more I realize how I don't give two flying shits if their forms aren't perfect. Granted, there are some E&O concerns, there are some coverage concerns, and those parts, I think, are very legitimate. But what I'm interested in your take is, when you're thinking about a customer—they could care less, really, about the details of a policy versus customer experience. If the key is to get them insured and insured as properly as possible, and that's significantly easier with an easier customer experience, or let's make it really hard and difficult but we'll get them all the right coverages they need—what is that percentage for you? Or is that even a question? Does that make sense what I'm asking you?

James Jenkins: Well, and this, once again, sir, like our last conversation, this is the meat and potatoes of why I just love talking with you. Because really, there is no black and white in this conversation. There is entirely shades of gray. There are nuanced places on a spectrum between two opposing absolutes. One absolute, as you said, is the easiest, fastest, most seamless client experience you've ever seen but trash coverage that had a good price but bad coverage, bad claim experience when the client finds out when it's too late. "Oopsie, that policy doesn't cover that thing that just happened." That's one.

James Jenkins: The other is the legacy carrier that has a cord submission that has excellent coverage and an okay price, but the user experience—they're going to lean on the retail agent to have a good user experience, client portal, download your own certificates. They're going to lean on the retail agency to make up for their own bad UI. They may not even have a DTC channel. Where I fall on this is, for RiskWell, I'm going to lean on our resources as an agency to make up for the failings of some of our carrier partners that have a less than ideal experience.

James Jenkins: The challenge, and you said it, the average insurance buyer—and I'll steal a line from Charles Specht—the average insurance buyer has the mentality of a four-year-old. They don't know what they don't know. They're irrational, they're impatient, and they don't really care. They want it now. They want it fast and easy and leave me alone. For the direct channel, I think that's fine. If Next wants to ride the direct channel to the moon, okay, great. It's going to work just fine for them. They're going to be wildly successful because of Amazon and their aforementioned really deep pockets, great marketing, et cetera.

James Jenkins: If they're going to excel working the IA channel, the low-hanging fruit—and I don't mean this in any way as an attack on my fellow IAs—a lot of IAs don't read the forms. They don't know anything about the policy that they're selling other than it's a GL policy. The class code is right. The revenue is right. All right, cool. Sell it. Most of them don't know. They're not students of the industry. They are not professionals in their craft. They're insurance agents. They're not professionals. For that circle of retail agents, they're going to be just fine.

James Jenkins: For the people like me—and I think it's maybe 15, 20% of the IAs out there that really care about making sure it's the right product for the client—if it's a retail flower shop on Main Street USA, Next is probably a good option because that flower shop doesn't really care anything beyond slip and fall. They want premises liability. They want a little bit of coverage for their BPP and lost business income. That's it. They don't really care about that. For that kind of business, Next is great. I would go to Next in a heartbeat if I didn't have a super easy BOP with like six different carriers.

James Jenkins: But for anybody like the contractors that they push—I saw an ad for Next for an excavation contractor. It was picturing like a front loader excavator. I'm like, "You guys don't even offer the right coverage for inland marine, like leased equipment. You don't even offer that. Your inland marine program is trash. Come on, guys." What they're saying is, "We'll write liability for that." That's what they're saying. I'm sitting here going, if I'm an excavation contractor, I'm going to feel like it's a bait and switch when I call them up and go, "Oh, you can't insure my dump truck. You can't insure my equipment. Oh, you can't do workers comp for me for my employees. Oh, contractors pollution? Well, I can't get any of that with you. I can get basic general liability and sorry, nothing else."

Ryan Hanley: To an extent, I think they're really good. Next is a great example of this emerging class of carriers. It's a digital native carrier. That's the language that I use. I don't know if that's better than insurtech. I think that is better than—I think just about anything is better than—there are insurance technology companies that should be called insurtechs. I don't think Next should be called an insurtech carrier. That's my opinion. I like digital native. I think that's a good way to describe it. Digital first is another good way.

Ryan Hanley: To answer your question, it really is going to be a difficult balancing act. I think that's an area where retail independent agents are going to have to figure out, "What's our play in this? What's our position as an office? How are we going to handle the balance between fast and easy and good?" Because fast and easy and good are usually somewhat incompatible when we're talking about choosing the right carrier.

James Jenkins: Yeah. I think what I love about Next, Coterie, Attune, ClearCover, Branch, Pie—we actually have been writing more and more business with Pie. The reason for that is they write the business. If I have to—I love AmTrust. I think AmTrust is a great company for workers comp. They say no. I called my underwriter. I'm like, "You're my last nine submissions you've declined with no discussion, just decline." I'm like, "Guys, this cannot work this way." I wrote seven of the nine accounts. I know they can be written. You say you write these classes, but you're just declining everything.

James Jenkins: I called my guy and he goes, "Well, geez, you haven't submitted anything with us in a month." I said, "Go look at my report." He goes, "Well, there's a lot of declines on here." I said, "So if you decline nine things in a row, how likely do you think it is that I become less likely to keep coming back to you because I just am assuming a decline?"

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. It's like an abusive dating relationship. If you're on the market and you're casually dating a lot of people—and I don't mean to make light of domestic violence at all. That's not my point. If you're dating four people, and one of those four people might smack you around from time to time, or just be verbally abusive, or just be non-physical violence but in an abusive relationship in general—if you're casually dating four people, you're never going to go around that person because you never know when you're going to have a bad experience.

James Jenkins: Yes.

Ryan Hanley: So yeah, verbally abusive. Sorry, I again don't at all make light of domestic violence at all. I'm probably a terrible person for even thinking about that analogy.

James Jenkins: That's all right. I like when my wife smacks me in the face. That's a whole different podcast though.

[Both laugh]

James Jenkins: I think that, I completely agree with you. I've been honest with all my carrier partners. I say, "I basically take every appointment I can get at this point." I say to them upfront, "I don't trust you. I don't trust you. You have to earn my trust as much as you want me to earn your trust." There is Coterie, who I really like. There is Next, who for certain things I like and write business. There is Pie, who not for everything, but for certain things I really like. They've been—I'll tell you what, I had some problems with Pie early on. They're not a sponsor of the show or whatever. I'm just an appointed agent with them. I had some problems with some of the things they were doing early on. I got on the phone with my direct contact and the VP of our region. In two months, those problems were fixed. Now we're writing consistent business with them because they made some changes. They actually listened and said, "Oh, hey, here's a simple fix to that problem that will make us write business."

James Jenkins: I'll be honest with you, this is the struggle. You get this a lot of times from regional mutuals, but the nationals are tough. At the same time, I've had some really good conversations with Liberty who's been really open to me. That's a company of 55,000 plus people. I think the key is we have to demand more in a reasonable way from our carriers, not just taking what's given to us. If you have a problem, if you're able to present a business case to them, which is what I'm trying to do—I have a business case. I have a marketing plan. I have a whole deck that I sit down with these carriers and I go through and say, "Here's what we're trying to do. Do you fit this? Are you interested?" You get a lot more—like I'm pitching myself to them, but I'm demanding stuff in return.

James Jenkins: Unfortunately, what too many of our brothers and sisters in arms do is go, "Please give me an appointment. Please, please, please, please give me—okay, take the appointment. And now I'm just going to bitch about you." It's like, well, you didn't set the rules of the game, then you can't really complain now.

James Jenkins: I think one of the most important things that emerging agents and even tenured agents need to pay more attention to is stewarding those relationships well and thinking of it as a two-way street. To your point, someone in your shoes—because of the business model that Rogue has set up—it doesn't really hurt you to take on a bunch of appointments and throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. If you need to retire some appointments because they just don't work with your business model, okay, Rogue's not going to miss a beat at all.

James Jenkins: There are a lot of agents like RiskWell, for instance. We're the other end of the spectrum. We're very careful with who we take on. We have that conversation. I use the analogy of being a head coach on a football team. I have to put 22 best players on the field—11 for offense, 11 for defense. I need a quarterback. I need one, maybe two quarterbacks. I need a star running back. I need a wide receiver. I need a lockdown corner who's going to shut down the other wide receiver. To use that analogy, I don't need seven running backs who do exactly the same thing, who have the same skill set, who deliver the same solutions. I want one or two running backs. Once I got that, good. I don't need that anymore.

James Jenkins: We retired our nationwide contract because there was so much overlap with Liberty and State Auto. We have chosen to not take on CNA as an example because Chubb and Hartford, between the two of them, 100% cover CNA's appetite. I encourage our brothers and sisters to think very intentionally about the relationship. Like you said, bring a business plan to the meeting: "Hey, this is what I'm doing. This is where I want to be going. These are my marketing efforts. This is what I bring to the marketplace. Do you want this? Does this fit with what your carrier wants to do?" I know you and I both do that. I would venture to say that the overwhelming majority of our colleagues aren't doing that. I think everyone is better when the agency principal comes ready to play. If the agency principal is ready, all of the producers are going to fall in line behind however the principal is doing business. The industry as a whole is better for it.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, and you said this very early on, and this is the key. You have to choose whether you're going to be a producer or a business owner. Neither solution is wrong. Neither solution is wrong. But if you're trying to be top producer and business owner, these are the things that fall through the cracks. Rightly so, because there's a million things that need to be done if you are top producer or if you're a business owner, let alone if you have both those hats on. Maybe you can be both those things if you are really properly staffed underneath. If you have—so good.

Ryan Hanley: My personal opinion is that most agencies are drastically understaffed. I think that's a big part of it. I think we all get hung up on optimizing revenue. What happens is you're running around doing 10 million things. Things are falling through the cracks. I've seen this in my own business. I just had a woman that I saved $750 on. I don't write auto anymore. I did it because a guy referred me to her and I was like, "Oh, I don't want to do this." But she was very nice. Saved her $750, better coverage, got her an umbrella. She left me a three-star review because we messed up her billing, which we did. I thought I had her on autopay. We didn't have her on autopay. We only made the down payment. It was a mistake on my part because I haven't gotten to documenting the issuance process yet. We're documenting everything in our agency right now, but I just haven't gotten to that process yet. That step gets missed. Three-star review on Google.

Ryan Hanley: I called her and I was like, "Tammy, we had a great—I thought we had a great relationship. We worked through all these things. I got you, I saved you all this money. We got you this better coverage." She's like, "Yeah, Ryan, but geez, I mean, how could you?" I wasn't going to fight with her. I wasn't even going to tell her to change her review because we earned it. I'm okay taking those lumps because I want my team to see—I want to see that. That was our fault. That fell through the cracks because I was doing a million things. I was processing her account at 9 PM at night. I was like, "This is why I have to get myself out of producing." Because I can't document process, manage process, build new relationships if I'm also processing payments at 11 o'clock at night.

James Jenkins: Totally unsustainable, man.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, it's a big issue. You're not going to take four hours on a Wednesday to create a carrier partnership deck that's going to walk through your business plan, model, and future if you also have a billion other things to do. You're just not going to do it.

[Discussion continues...]

Ryan Hanley: Sorry to take you away from the episode. But as you know, we do not run ads on this show. And 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 you're 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 it 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: Well, I know you and I are both very familiar with EOS, the Entrepreneur's Operating System. I think there's a lot of really positive things there. There are some definite challenges.

James Jenkins: Okay, right here, baby. Okay, literally yesterday, we just had our quarterly yesterday and it's on my desk right now. We had a full day off-site. We do that once a quarter. But awesome. To your point, there are, in my mind, three absolutely critical seats that have to be filled, not just two. Because I think, to use Caruthers' language, that cold-blooded killer, that sales-first team member, sometimes that's the agency principal in an optimal situation. But to use the EOS language, if the visionary is stuck also being the integrator, that ops guru, that make-sure-everything-just-hums-like-a-machine person, I don't see that anyone is in an optimal situation. And I know there's a lot of people that will comment in these groups, "Oh, I'm a solo operator and I'm great." I'm like, yeah, your version of great is a lot smaller than my version of great. I am probably one of the most self-confident people in the entire industry, but I'm also realistic. And I get that in order for me to reach my goals, which are big, scary, massive, take-over-the-world kind of goals, I need probably at least 20 to 25 people total at a minimum. And that's if all 20 to 25 people are like freaking rock stars.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

James Jenkins: So when we talk about those three, the visionary has to be one person, someone who's just completely comfortable being the forward-thinking, look-over-the-three-hills-from-now kind of person. You got to have an integrator. Jobs wasn't anything until Wozniak joined him. And for non-EOS people, think COO as integrator.

Ryan Hanley: Oh, yeah. Sorry, I should have clarified that for those that aren't familiar. Just because people may not know EOS.

James Jenkins: Yeah. Integrator is Steve Wozniak. Visionary, obviously, Steve Jobs. Bill Gates was great, but he wasn't anything until Steve Ballmer found him. And the two of them together, Steve Ballmer, Integrator, Bill Gates, Visionary. You go down the list of, what's it called? Jim Collins, Good to Great. Go down the list of Good to Great companies, all the big names, Google, Apple, whatever. All of them have one visionary and one integrator. And you look at the great agencies in our industry, almost all of them have a visionary and an integrator, two people. The third person that often gets missed is that just rockstar sales monster, who all they're doing all day every day is taking meetings, closing deals. They're not involved in the back office at all. They don't care about HR. They don't care about process documentation. They don't care about building slick, cool automations. All they want to do is talk to people and sell stuff and close deals. That's what pumps their blood. And I think if we, as the agency principal, if we are ego-driven enough to think that we can be both a great visionary and that cold-blooded sales monster in our office, I think we're really missing a good opportunity.

Ryan Hanley: I agree with you. Completely agree. I actually think there's one more position. I think you need a head of insurance. I think you need someone who runs the insurance operation. And what I mean by that is there is so much more to an insurance business than just insurance. So if you're going to be growing, and again we're talking about growth-focused agencies, if you are running—and I mean this in the most non-derogatory way ever, so please everyone listening, do not take this personally because I don't mean it to be—if you are operating and even growing a lifestyle agency that allows you to golf every Friday and do this stuff, which is amazing, it's completely amazing, and hopefully I sell my business before I ever have to choose to do that because that's my goal. But that's not this, right? That's a different thing. You can kind of flatten out and take on multiple roles when you've established yourself, you're mature, you're 20 years in, people know the deal, you have this rock-solid base. I think you can take some of this away. That being said, when you're growing, you need this. And this is how I've mapped it out in my—I'm still learning EOS, we're only a month in—but what do they call the chart with the positions? Accountability chart. Your accountability chart. So I think you have visionary, integrator. Then you need, next to the integrator but slightly below, like on a chart, would be head of insurance, head of revenue. So those two positions aren't the integrator-visionary relationship, but they're that next layer down. Because you need someone who's making sure I's are getting crossed, T's are getting dotted. Someone who's reading policy forms, someone who's keeping up on, you know, this company's claim services is a two out of five. We need to look someplace else. Where's all our business going? What's the flow? Where are our bottlenecks? What are our unprofitable lines? That's all insurance. And then you want someone next to that person who is the polar opposite, which is grow, baby, grow. Sell, babies. If it's fog in a mirror, we're putting it on the books and then we're going to the next one. And at the end of the day, we're going to pound our chest and yell and listen to whatever gangster rap or rock, straight up Wolf of Wall Street.

James Jenkins: Yes.

Ryan Hanley: You need to have both of those personalities, because I think that is the yin and yang to the visionary-integrator yin and yang that runs the actual business. And I put a lot of thought into that. Right now, I need an integrator. I am not an integrator. I'm just not. That's where I fall apart. The plans that we have, the partnerships that I'm building, that's where I'm best suited. And what I'm struggling with today is I need an integrator. I need someone who wants to take all this shit that I've come up with and actually make it into the things that I know it can be. And that's kind of where I'm working towards. But you can't think this way, in my opinion, and you've said it, we've kind of beat this up. If you're trying to grow at pace and wearing too many hats, you just can't. You don't have enough brain cycles to get here. And I've only really been able to make this leap in the last five, six weeks since Matt joined. Sarah was a great start, my account manager, and she's awesome. She got some of the service work out. And then when Matt joined, now I had 90% of my service work and 90% of my sales work taken off my plate. And man, just in the five weeks that I've had both of them, we're on a whole other trajectory.

James Jenkins: Oh, man, I love hearing that. And just yesterday with our Q3 quarterly prep, we had the whole conversation of activity qualifiers. For a full hour, my team and I ran through literally every generic activity that we do in the office: quoting, service, claims, remarketing, prospecting, building channel partner relationships, et cetera. Literally a full hour of the whole terminate, automate, delegate, do-it-yourself thing. And there was so much in there where they're like, "Oh, we're doing this manually." I'm like, "Why are you doing that manually? Why haven't I built an automation for that? That should be automated." "Oh, I'm sending out those reminders and the checkup with people." It was like, "I built an automation. Why are you not using that?" "Oh, I hit 'no' in Better Agency when I get to that screen." It was like, "I spent three hours building that campaign. The text, the email, the copy, the timing, it's beautiful. You're not using it." He was like, "No, should I be?" I was like, "Yes, you should be using it." So just having that terminate, automate, delegate conversation, and only if it passes those three filters, do you as the agency principal need to do it? Man, coming out, I had a full head of steam coming into the office this morning. I'm like, "That was really good. We have a better grasp of the day-to-day activity." And my guy, I hired him back in February, and he's feeling down because his production this month is behind pace. But I keep telling him, I'm looking at the leading indicators: your activity, your calling, your prospecting, your setting appointments, you're talking to people and going out there and doing the work to fill the pipeline. And he's looking at lagging indicators. He's looking at his pending pipeline that has—the conversion is not where he wants it to be. But I'm sitting here from the bigger picture going, "Hey, you're doing the right thing. The activity is the right thing." I think too often, as agency owners, we get stuck on lagging indicators that are nothing more than an example of what's already happened. Whereas we really should be focusing hard on those leading indicators, knowing full well that as long as we are faithful to take care of the action on the front end that needs to happen, the results will happen. It's just a matter of law of large numbers. Because I pulled his quarterly, I'm like, "You had $195,000 in premium production between April 1st and today." And he was like, "Really? Okay. No, that's cool." And just having that activity check, rather than being stuck on numbers, because depending on what you're into, like Caruthers said 100 times on his podcast, the tail on a lot of these deals can be really long. You can be six months and not hit anything, and then all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam, and you got half a million in premiums sitting in front of you. So I just think it's really important that we, in this conversation of how do we set up for growth, how do we get ready to exit that initial startup phase, we've got to be more focused on activity. Because the cool little widget, the automation, the new tech thing, the new vendor, the silver bullet doesn't exist. Faithful activity is the way to grow.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, so I don't know, there's my soapbox for that.

James Jenkins: No, no, I know. I think those are great points, and I just piggyback on them. I talk to Paradiso a lot. He's a mentor, I guess. A-plus, to be able to have the conversations that I have with him. He's really the one that got me hooked on EOS. I was starting to read the book and really get into the idea far before we implemented it like a month ago. One of the things that came to me was just, if you can separate yourself from the business, if you can rely on the process and procedures and you know what they are and you have faith that your people are following—and yeah, you always got to check up on them and you got to be accountable, and that's what the meetings are for—but when the processes are in place and you can wake up in the morning and go, "You know, that email came in. I don't love that email, but I know that Johnny or Tammy or Sally or Sue or Jimmy, whoever's in charge of that email, is going to work that thing through our process to solve that problem." Then you don't have to give it any more than the singular brain cycle that it takes to go, "Johnny's going to handle that." And then you can open your mind up to what are the bigger issues that have to be solved. I've talked about it before on the show. During the summertime, I was in a very dark place emotionally. Here I launched this business. It's a dream. I've been deriving this concept for years and all these conversations. And then COVID hits and I'm not selling and blah, blah, blah, every excuse in the world. So much of it was I couldn't get out above these day-to-day things. They just felt—I couldn't get out of the day-to-day. And since I've removed myself—and if people looked at my agency, looked at the revenue and everything that we had, they'd go, "You shouldn't have two employees. You're losing money every month." And I'm like, "No shit, I'm losing money every month. But you know what we're doing?" I'm willing to burn a thousand or $1,500, whatever our burn rate is right around there right now, because I have the money in the bank and it's not like I'm not properly budgeting. But I'm willing to burn that today and live off scraps personally to build the agency that is going to have rocket ship growth in the not too distant future. But if I just kept plugging along and being one of those d-bags in IOA that was like, "Oh, you didn't hire your first CSR until like $2 million in premium. And you're an asshole." You know, you're giving away revenue. I give away revenue to my employees all day if it means that I'm going to hit my goal five years from now. I didn't build this to get rich tomorrow. I built this to one, shove it down the throat of every a-hole who's ever typed in the comment section of something I've created, "What has he ever done?" Which you know who you are, because you're probably still listening to the show. And I love you for listening, but you're still an a-hole. But thanks for the motivation.

Ryan Hanley: You got to love those haters, man.

James Jenkins: Yeah. And two, I know where I want to be five to seven years from now. That's the key to me is five to seven years. I have a specific place that I want to be. And to try to maximize my personal income or profitability in month 16 doesn't make any sense in getting me to where I want to be five to seven years from now. And I think that's just something that we have to really think about: where do you actually want to be? If this is a, "Hey, I want to feed my family and have a good life and I don't want a lot of stress and I just want three or four hundred customers that pay me my number, whatever it is," that's amazing. But know that, and then set your agency up for max profitability day one and all those things. I want to be in trade journals and newspapers. Call that an ego thing, but I want to build something that I want. I want people to be scared of RiskWell. You know what I mean? That's what I want. It is a motivation. And I know you share similar ambitions. There has to be trade-offs in certain places.

Ryan Hanley: Well, and I think the beauty of having the right mindset is hearing you say, "I want an empire," doesn't in any way make me nervous or jealous or anything. Because I know you and I both have the abundance mindset of having fellow warriors you're standing next to, and it's okay. There's more than enough pie for all of us to eat.

James Jenkins: There's more than enough pie.

Ryan Hanley: There's more than enough pie. And I've said this many times in other conversations, the IA channel has to stand together because the direct writers, the captives, the monolith national brokers that are gobbling up small agencies as fast as they can find them, those guys are the enemy. The privately held, locally focused—even I shouldn't say locally focused all the way because we're in 37 states and counting—but the IA channel, people like you and me and Paradiso and Carruthers and the rest of our colleagues, we are so much better off when we stand shoulder to shoulder instead of facing off with each other face to face. Because when we are constantly looking and eagerly helping each other—I was talking to Brandon Smith from Montana, and he and I were both at the Better Agency thing in Arizona back in April. And this was before I launched the podcast. And I'm like, "Hey dude, I see what you're doing. I totally respect what you've built the last several years. How do you deal with building your empire at the same time as being a good colleague and setting aside some regular time to help all of the people that ask you questions and message and email you asking for help or advice on such and such? Because it's happened faster than I thought it would. But I'm to the point now, because of just being active in the group, I get five or six requests every week for, 'Hey, can you help me with such and such? Can we hop on a call?'" And he told me, "Put it all in one day. Block out a set of hours all together in the week. And if somebody wants to talk to you, make them talk to you then." And just having that tribal mindset of the independent agency, the retail IA, we are a tribe together. And the faster that we look at that as a real thing, like an actual thing, and give of our time, post helpful things, share all of the secrets that we can, knowing full well that 99% of the time, someone's either going to be missing the opportunity or the drive or the knowledge to implement whatever secret you shared with them, but freely giving of whatever we have for the betterment of the independent retail channel, because we really are in this together. And if you win, it means that I win because you're stronger. You have more cashflow. You have more freedom to hop on calls like this and put better podcasts out for the betterment of all of our friends and colleagues. And I don't mean to get on a kumbaya soapbox here, but I think we have to address that. The guy that was giving you crap, whoever that was that was throwing shade in the comment section, those kinds of people just need to be drowned out with so much positive energy that—I mean, literally this morning, and this is the last thing I'll say on the subject because I'm beating a dead horse right now—there was a thread where a colleague of mine in Arizona that I've had referral stuff with previously posted asking for help with a couple of Airbnb properties, one in Oklahoma, one in Tennessee. There were a couple of people that commented before. I don't pay any attention to that. I'm in both of those states and Airbnb properties are something that we do extremely well. So I simply commented, "Hey, we're in both of those states. We can do that really well. We're well equipped for that. Let me know if I can help." And then it ends up being like a freaking comment war with a butthurt dude who ended up ending it on a positive note and turned it around and made it a, "Okay cool, you guys have a great day." So I'm cool, I'm not upset with this person. But it was just the whole animosity between us. I'm just like, "Wait a second, hold on. It's okay if more than one person comments. That's totally fine. We're all in this together." And I even said flat out, "Hey, do you want this? Are you in both of these states? Because I am." And it ended up being no big deal. But just the whole—guys, can we not fight each other? The whole idea of throwing shade on another retail IA in any way, because we're not the enemy. The captives, the directs, the big nationals, yeah, they're the enemy.

James Jenkins: I have a bunch of thoughts on what you just said. My opinion has changed on this quite a bit over the years. I've been doing the whole talking head thing for a long time. My opinion today is that we really don't have competitors or enemies in the space. I don't see the directs or captives as enemies. It's a different market. Every one of our national carriers also has a direct arm and an internal agency and would rather write the business themselves and have us write it. Their marketing is terrible, but that's not the case. There are some super regionals that are amazing and would never do that. I believe that. But I guarantee at some point in their history, not too recently, they've had someone in some meetings say, "Hey, what do you think it would be like to go direct? What do you think we could do? Do you think we can test this?" So what I really think is we are all our own enemy. The enemy that we're fighting is ourselves. That's kind of very Carl Jung, philosophical type of deal, but it's where I've kind of gotten to. Because the guy who's yelling at you in the comment section because you answered a question after him of who can write Airbnbs, and it's like somehow in some crazy land he thinks it's a first-person-to-comment-wins game. That guy's got his own issues that he's dealing with, which are most likely he's hurting for revenue, can't figure out how to get it, and trolls away at people posting who writes and where so that he can try to pick up business. That's not a knock. We're all at different places. We all have our own struggles. I'm not trying to knock that. I'm saying nothing wrong with that. I think that more than ever, internal, personal, and organizational development is the key. There are no enemies because everyone is someone we can either learn from, share with, or build a partnership with. I know agencies, and I'm sure you do too, whose number one referral source is State Farm agents who can't write a certain line of business in that state. They've built some relationships. State Farm agents send their commercial auto to them. So it's like, okay, State Farm is the enemy, except there are IAs who either used to be State Farm agents or used to be Allstate agents or their biggest referrals. My point is, as much as it sounds fluffy and it's not sexy and it's very, very hard because it's really tough for it to be tangible, the more I've gotten into documenting systems and processes in my agency—and it's been a huge commitment for us in the last six, probably eight weeks, really since Sarah got here—I realized how I didn't have any, and we were a complete effed-up mess. I needed to do this. I just started to say, we are our own worst enemy. To your point, there is so much business that we both could grow to be world-shaking empire builders and never bump into each other once. For that reason, I think it's just about finding a community or a couple communities that help you build the internal culture and process so that you can be what you need to be. Whether it's killing commercial, if you're in the middle market, or you just like sales and commercial, whether it's something like Cass's thing or getting really deep into Better Agency's community because there's tons of great stuff in there, or whatever, find a very positive place and invest internally. Because as you get better internally, specifically with systems and process, one, you realize that you don't need every new tool that comes on the market, which we've all made that mistake, myself included.

Ryan Hanley: Yep.

James Jenkins: Two, you'll see, "Wow, this person really is an incredibly amazing person who's been undervalued and can take on even more," or, "Wow, he's an a-hole. He really needs to go. He kind of pisses everybody else off and is super negative." I wouldn't have said this six months ago, but having taken this journey of documenting systems and processes and an internal evaluation and setting ourselves up for something bigger, I've just realized that it just doesn't matter. There's so much business available. That's really the key. I don't know. I'm going to leave this right here.

Ryan Hanley: After talking with—and I'll send you a copy of this—I was talking with Matt Namoli. Because absolutely, I mean, just a legend. He reached out to me first week of June and was like, "Hey, dude, I'm on a mission to help 20 people this month. And you're one of the 20." I'm like, "Cool. All right, let's do that." There's a win. 45 minutes of conversation later, where do I buy that lottery ticket? I want that once a quarter for the rest of my career. But he helped me, because I'm on that same documenting process journey. And I know you've got a hard stop in 90 seconds, so I'm going to stop talking.

James Jenkins: Yeah. Putting the processes into the bigger picture, figuring out starting at the top of the agency itself, the core values, and to use your term, I think it was "human optimization."

Ryan Hanley: Yep.

James Jenkins: Where the org chart, people, right seats, documenting the roles and responsibilities, all the way down into departments and then core processes and then ground floor training on how to do specific things. Once we do all of that, we as agents in general—once RiskWell does it, once Rogue does it—man, so much more opportunity for growth. But if you don't have all of those steps, all five of those things done, you are your own worst enemy. And I think that's a great place to stop this episode from my perspective. Dude, always enjoy our conversations. I'm very glad you said, "Hey man, why don't we just make this into a podcast?" Because we probably would have had this same discussion whether we were recording or not.

Ryan Hanley: We totally would have. As always, just awesome. See your success. Podcast is great. Before we sign off here, I want you to tell everyone where they can listen to it. But definitely want to get together offline because I have a few offline questions. Unfortunately, now is not the time because my seven-year-old is graduating from first grade in 15 minutes.

James Jenkins: Bro, that's awesome.

Ryan Hanley: But hey, the agencyfreedompodcast.com. The only thing that I would ask is I don't want to steal time from Hanley. If you know anyone in the captive world who wants to know more about the independent world, or someone who is a former captive and wants to be better at the IA game, share the podcast with them. Agencyfreedompodcast.com, or listen to it on the Agency Intelligence Podcast Network, the same place you're probably listening to Hanley's show. So there you go. There's my pitch. Subscribe to both. Listen often. Comment. Share. Guys, I'll speak for James because I know he shares my opinion. Absolutely love that you guys take time out of your day or your activities. You have so many podcasts, so many pieces of content to listen to, and the fact that you choose this show, us, our conversation, and have listened this long, it means so much to both of us. Thank you.

James Jenkins: Thanks, guys. Y'all take care.

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