--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today was an absolutely tremendous episode for you. It is the very first podcast interview ever with Zach Mefford, co-founder of Coverage Direct up in Iowa. You've heard his name. You've seen him around the scene. And now you get to hear directly from the man doing big things, doing big things up in Iowa.
--:-- Coverage Direct is an all-time agency. Absolutely love what Zach and his business partner, Ryan Swalve, are doing. These guys are kind of a yin and yang team and they just absolutely are killing it. Rocking Salesforce, but at the same time doing things the right way in their agency. So it's that really nice mix of looking forward, pushing boundaries while still operating inside the realm of what matters to an independent insurance agency, which is delivering on the product and the promise of our business.
--:-- It's just wonderful to have Zach on. Huge fan of Zach and we've become buddies. I've been trying to get him on to do a podcast for years and he finally said he was ready because he's got a couple new projects out, a couple businesses that Zach and Ryan have been working on for a while, things that they saw in the marketplace that needed to be filled. I want to talk about those. But really we dive deep on their entrepreneurial journey, being an entrepreneur and pushing forward in general, how you deal with everything that comes up.
--:-- I think you're going to love this conversation. I know I did. This is one of those episodes that is why I do the show.
--:-- Before we get there, I want to give a big shout out to the newest sponsor to the show. That is Coterie Insurance, small business insurance simplified. We use Coterie here at Rogue. Ease of business is incredibly important and Coterie is doing just that. They're making it easy to get quotes, to deliver policies. Not everyone needs to go through 17 accord forms and 47 supplements to get a quote. Some people just have a business with a few pieces of information.
--:-- One of the things that I love about Coterie is they're using third-party data sources to pull in additional information. Coterie is able to underwrite policies in no time and deliver them throughout the country. Big fan of what Coterie is doing. I know their CEO. I know Ray Lynch, who used to work at Liberty, who's now working with them. Just a great group of people who are focused on doing the right things.
--:-- If you're looking to write small business insurance and you want to make it part of your agency, but you're struggling to get appointments from traditional carriers who are going to throw minimums on you, make you jump through 17 hoops and harass you every other day about how much you're producing, Coterie is a wonderful option. We are appointed with Coterie, happy to be so, and look forward to growing with them as Rogue continues to grow. So C-O-T-E-R-I-E, Coterieinsurance.com. Go get appointed today.
--:-- With that, let's get to Zach. What up, dude?
--:-- Zach Mefford: Courting in progress. First ever podcast.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know, man. It's one of those deals where I was intentionally trying to fly under the radar just because everyone's got a lot of really good ideas, but they're just that, their ideas. And I wanted to have something tangible to talk about before I actually got on something.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Wow. Podcasts are really just about bullshitting. It's not like anyone ever expects to actually learn anything when they listen to these things. They just want to tune out for a little while.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I think about that too. First of all, I've never been accused of not being good at that. Bullshitting is something I can do really well. And two of us together, I'm actually a little afraid for the audience to see what's going to happen and who gets on a soapbox about something first.
--:-- I was thinking about this the other day as I'm listening to and getting caught up on podcasts out there in the yard working. We're doing this at 11:03 central, 12:03 Eastern on a Monday. You think about when are people most likely listening to this? What mindset are they in that part of their day? When it's Sunday afternoon and I'm not working in the yard, listening and catching up. It's interesting to think of how much different your mindset would be at different times.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Yeah. I mean, it's why I think streaming is such an interesting space. When you stream is important because you're going to get a different audience based on timing alone. You're going to get a different audience based on platform. You're going to get a different audience based on format. It's very interesting. It's not something I'm interested in doing, like live streaming, certainly not in the current season of my life or my business career. But I think it's a super interesting concept because of all the psychographic things that come into play when you make a determination on when it's going to be live, when you're going to do it, and then are you going to record it, when are you going to put it out, how is it going to work.
--:-- I was actually right before... No idea where the crypto market will be when anyone's listening to this. But as of the day of recording, we're having a pretty stellar day. The market's up about 40%, a little less than that right now. Two projects that I've been following for a very long time have had huge pumps. 50% over the last two days for one and 37% for the other.
--:-- I was listening to one of the guys that I listen to who does a live YouTube show. Then three days later, he produces that show and puts it out on podcast. So if you only listen to the podcast, you're actually three days late on his advice. He has two different shows. One is long form and the three days wouldn't matter, but one is like what's happening that day. If you want that day's information... I'm not a day trader by any stretch, but I do think it's interesting to hear. You check your app in the morning, see what's going on in the market, and you're like, why is one of the tokens that I follow, called AMP, doing this?
--:-- There's a platform called Flexa. Basically it allows you to make payments in crypto. I'm going to kind of butcher the terminology here, but the capital that they use to close the transactions in a fast timeframe is called AMP. It's basically an intermediate currency that operates between, "Hey Zach, I'm going to pay for this thing at your lemonade stand in Bitcoin and I'm going to have it happen instantaneously and you're going to get the Bitcoin in your thing instantaneously so you can hand me the cup of lemonade." Well, that transaction probably really takes about an hour. What AMP does is it bridges that so that it creates a collateralized loan for an hour between the two people.
--:-- Long story short, I've been following this for a while. Wake up this morning, it's essentially doubled overnight, which is cool. It's up 150%. So from where it was... I said that wrong. So wherever it was, it was up 50 additional percent from there.
--:-- What I'm getting to is, I logged in and I was like, what the hell is going on? I kind of had an idea. I've been following it for a while. There's a reason I invested in it. But was this the reason I thought was going to happen? So I turned on his show today at 9am. I missed it, so I'm watching the recording. Obviously we're working. And it's funny to get, "Here's why AMP is pumping this morning. Here's exactly why it's pumping this morning." You just don't get that if you're doing a podcast. It's very difficult to get out that quickly.
--:-- But I wasn't even talking about that. My thing is, and I think you and I are enough alike that you can relate to this. If we did this at four o'clock this afternoon, is it going to be the same energy as we do it now? Furthermore, what if we did this at like 8:30 our time? That's when everything's kicking, caffeine's kicking, the workout, you're feeling the adrenaline, endorphins. I feel like I have a different energy level and I'm just more ready to get on a soapbox and debate or discuss certain things so much more at that level. Then I listen to the podcast and if it's 4:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday, I'm just finally getting around to the yard work I want to get done. Is that the same?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, you're right. It's a really interesting thing. The most recent podcast that I put out last week was with Cass and we did it at like 9 a.m. Eastern time on a Friday. End of a good week, it's the morning, so nothing shitty has happened yet. I am just fired up. When you ended that one, you just went down and did like a few sets just to take that energy and do something with it.
--:-- Zach Mefford: You had to get that energy out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I was just pounding beers and crushing cans off my forehead. So yes, I agree with you. When you record definitely matters. I think putting yourself in the right mind state matters. There are definitely times when I don't prep. I don't mean prep like get ready for the episodes because I rarely ever do that. But mentally just have a second to recalibrate, get my mind right on the fact that I'm talking to somebody. You come in and you can tell the first five or ten minutes are tough to listen to. I think that goes for everything. It's the same thing out of the sales call. It's the same thing with anything.
--:-- I think sometimes we get moving so fast and we don't think about when it is in our day that we're having a conversation, and we're just not at our best. I've been more and more aware of that though. That's why I bring it up.
--:-- Zach Mefford: I have so much energy. You even said, I think it was the first time we met personally, you said, "Wow, I'm rarely in the same room as somebody that has that much energy level." I try to think, is 9:30 AM Zach the same as 4:30 PM Zach? When I make the same decision, I try to be aware of that when I'm doing really big things.
--:-- I think it also depends on what's going on in your day. You can schedule your day so that you're ready to go at 4:30. But on a standard day, I have a big spike in the morning. Then right around like one or two, I absolutely have that dip. Part of that is I drink too much coffee, which is mostly just a habit than me needing the coffee. Then I get a little bump. If I were to do a podcast recording at one or two, you can tell. I don't know if the audience can tell, but I feel like you can tell.
--:-- That's why I try to schedule things for either 2pm or later, or noon or earlier. Right at noon to two is a down cycle for me based on how my body works. I have a big down cycle there. I've started scheduling meetings post 8pm though. An eight o'clock call or nine o'clock call, I can come back in and be pretty good. I have about a two hour window from about 8 PM to 10 PM where I can be fairly productive again. It's almost like clockwork at 10 PM, I go blah, all the way down. If I get to 10 PM and I'm still working or I'm on a call with somebody, I just lose it. I just couldn't care less. I lose all functionality.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm there with you. I do it whenever. I have younger kids, so whenever they go down, if I want to get something done right then, I do have that second wind where I can just go. I just try to be intentional with my time at that point too because there's only so much of it you spend with your family. If I have something I have to get done, some sort of project, I'll just block it off and say that's it. Be dad, get kids to bed, and then boom, right into something.
--:-- But I don't think everyone wants to hear about our daily emotional cycles. So my first question for you is the car racing thing. What the heck is the car racing thing? How did you get into car racing? Why do you do car racing? And is car racing fun?
--:-- Zach Mefford: Okay, so yes, it's fun. I've been around motorsports my entire life. When I was a little kid, I used to have pictures of me next to my dad. I'm pretty redneck if you really trace my roots. Small town Iowa kid. We just had the county fair in my little town where I'm from. I don't live over there anymore, it's about two hours away from where I'm at. But I grew up with my dad doing demolition derbies, figure eights. I was around just dirt track racing.
--:-- I didn't really choose it. I know baseball was kind of your thing growing up. For me, it's being at the racetrack. I felt like it chose me. I just really got into it. I begged my dad to get me into something. Started soapbox derby racing when I was I think six or seven. The big race they have in Akron, Ohio, which they just did, I missed going to that when I was eight by three thousandths of a second. I finished second in my class in Omaha because I was just right across the river there.
--:-- Then I begged for a go-kart. I shoveled snow, I had a paper route for three years, mowed lawns, did whatever I could to raise enough money. My dad made me a deal that if I would buy this go-kart, I think it was 500 bucks, that he'd buy me a motor and we'd go racing. Well, come to find out it was the biggest piece of junk go-kart I could have ever bought. But it was my passion. That's what I wanted to do.
--:-- I had some success in go-kart racing, got into stock cars, and then life happens. College, marriage, kids, all of that. Now I'm probably having the most fun that I've had in a long time. It's something that's really not crazy. I say it's not a race car, it's a car that I race, which is really true. It's a stock class. We don't go crazy fast or anything, but it's a lot of fun. I don't have a lot of money invested in it either, because that's the part that makes it not fun. It's very similar to a gambling addiction. You just throw a ton of money at it and you're not really getting much out of it. I'm glad I don't do that yet, but I would like to get to a point in my life where I get to do something a little bit more advanced and have the time to do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's like having a boat. I'm always so excited for people when they get boats and I'm like, "Wow, you just bought something that you're going to..." The problem is up here in the north, and I know you live in the north too, but you get a boat up here and you literally get three months to use it. You get out on a boat in late September in upstate New York and you are going to be freezing cold. It's just not fun anymore. You basically get the second half of June, July, August, and the first half of September. That's it. Then you spend all this money. It's constantly broken. I love getting in other people's boats.
--:-- Zach Mefford: That's exactly what I was going to say. I don't want to boat myself. Guess whose boat I like to use the most? Anyone else's.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, you specifically know the guy who's got the nicest boat that I like to go use, which is Todd, Todd Bams.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he loves that boat life.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: He does love it. I like going up there. My in-laws have a tritoon that we get to go use every now and then, which is the best because you don't pay for it, you use it a lot. But the thing about Iowa too, and I know we can pick on Iowa for a thousand different things as you've already done before, but the lakes that I would like to go to, the one that Todd's at, that's the lake to go to. It's the quote-unquote Hamptons of Iowa, right? It's where you go. But yeah, anyone else's boat, get to enjoy it, not have to pay for it. Sorry Todd, but I really enjoy using your boat.
--:-- So, no golf? You just race cars and do insurance and family?
--:-- Zach Mefford: I'll go out on a golf course, but if you take me out there and you're a super competitive person like I am, just know that I have to mentally put myself in a different place because I'm so bad at it. I have to be like, "Hey, I'm just here to have fun," because I get so mad. Then I become something that's not fun to be around because I know most of the time what I'm doing wrong and I cannot fix it. I don't have the muscle memory because I didn't do it as a kid. I also broke my wrist and it never healed right, so I feel it pop every single time I'm trying to hold my wrist the right way. I'm a terrible golfer. I will go out there and do it if I know I'm going with some buddies that just want to go and have a good time.
--:-- As far as other hobbies, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've been this way since I was four years old trying to sell things door to door to my neighbors because I just wanted to make money. I've had multiple different side hustles and different things. I just don't know how to turn that off. If I really like a hobby for me, it would just be to start a side hustle. That's how much fun I have doing it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I get that. I would say in the second half of my life... I wrote an article about this one time. I was an entrepreneur as a kid. I used to get up at like 3 a.m. and leave my house. We had in our town, because I grew up in a town of 900 people. I always give you a hard time living in Iowa, but I'm probably from a town that's smaller than the one that you grew up in. I was out in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York, 900 people. On Thursdays was garbage day, or recycle day. Everyone would put their cans in the recycling bin. This was before recycling was like a big thing.
--:-- I would take two garbage bags. I'd get up at 11 years old with two garbage bags at 4am and I would walk the entire town and be able to collect about $40 worth of bottles. I'd be dragging these two bags back, dump them in my backyard, and then go to school that day. That weekend my mom would take me to the thing. That was my very first job. Then a million things after that.
--:-- I basically found out that my parents, one worked for the railroad, the other was a secretary. They worked those jobs forever. When I was growing up, it was like, get the job with the company, get the pension. That was what was drilled into my head. So I couldn't see an entrepreneurial path out of this town that I grew up in, which I hated. There are some kids that are all right, but I hated the town. I hated being in this small, hickey, country, terrible town. It wasn't even hickey because it's upstate New York. It was just like people who never made it. If anyone's listening to this from Nassau, my old town, I'm not trying to be a dick. Anyone who grew up there knows what I'm talking about. If you're still there, it's a choice. It just wasn't a prosperous place.
--:-- Zach Mefford: How much did you get for a can? I'm just curious.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Five cents at the time.
--:-- Zach Mefford: That's what it is in Iowa too. I did exactly the same thing. On my days that I could go do it, I would go find cans in different places. Our town was not quite 900 small, but we didn't have days to pick up recycling. The recycling thing was this huge container behind some of the buildings. I'm living in a railroad town, grew up in one I should say. That's where they take everything. So I didn't have that option. I was literally going and picking up litter, taking it to the grocery store and turning it in for that nickel. But that was the opportunity. That was the hustle.
--:-- Then I would buy baseball cards. Then I would trade the baseball cards. They were essentially the currency between my peer group that we used to get things done. "Oh, you want a new wiffle ball? Hey, I'll trade you this card for that wiffle ball." That's how we survived.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I basically saw no entrepreneurship in my ecosystem. The only path that I saw out was going to college, getting the degree and getting a corporate job, which is what I did. I hated every second of it. I had this entrepreneurial disposition, but to get out of this town, the only way I could see was go away to college, get a job. I basically spent 15 years after that trying to work the corporate structure and I either hated it or was fired over and over and over again.
--:-- Then I kind of got a taste of it building Agency Nation. I got a little taste of it at Bold Penguin. All that was someone else's company. Got a little taste of it at the fitness business, but again, someone else's company. Then when I started Rogue, it was like, "Oh my God, how did I wait till I was 39 years old to start this? This is crazy. I can't believe..." It was like being brought all the way back from a mentality standpoint. That is a very odd concept. It's like you need to be taught it, like you were taught race cars. No one ever taught me entrepreneurship.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Definitely nothing mechanical. I'm far from anything mechanical in the race car. I just kind of feel like I'm... Anybody who watched Days of Thunder, there's a scene where Cole Trickle is talking to Harry, talking about, "I just can't tell you how to make changes on a car because I literally have no idea what you're talking about." I'm not quite that bad, but I'm close. I like to drive. That's what I was doing. I'm no mechanical engineer or anything.
--:-- The card thing, I had my first actual legit... I'm going to send you a photo of this. I literally still have the hand-painted sign that my mom helped me put together. "The Card Shack" is what it was called. It was one of the businesses that I first officially had that I can remember. But I remember having, you talk about your parents having an influence on you whether they realize it or not. My dad was in the car business for almost 30 years. I would just hear him talking about these guys that were buying the different vehicles and they own their own business and they did this. He definitely wanted to be an entrepreneur. He just didn't know the first thing about how to become an entrepreneur where you would get to go and do it, because it's really hard.
--:-- I didn't have that grooming. I definitely didn't come from that type of lifestyle. But I do remember specifically him and one of my uncles in particular talking about how much they wish they would have just started this or they wish they would have done that. I now know that they were intentionally projecting fear or guilt or whatever emotion you call it. I just remember thinking, "I'm going to go do this. I'm going to go do something because I don't want to have that 'I wish I would have.'"
--:-- My father-in-law actually summed it up so well when I was talking to him about going into a business. He's an entrepreneur as well. He said, "Look, the way he looked at it in his corporate job when he was leaving, there's risk if you stay and there's risk if you go. You just got to look at both sides and say in five years, where do you want to be and what can you live with?" For him, and thankfully for me, it was, I would have rather gone down in a blaze of glory knowing that I tried than never taking that first step. The action is the hard part for a lot of people.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I completely agree. I think a lot of people struggle with the judgment. "What if it doesn't work? Will I be able to get another job? What will people think? What will people say?" I also think the older you get, the more solidified perception people have of you, it's very difficult. Now I can give two fucks what anyone thinks. I think that is a superpower that I have developed. I didn't always have it, but I certainly do today. That has allowed me to make this move.
--:-- I was talking to Cass and he said, before I started, "I'm not saying you shouldn't start Rogue. But are you worried at all? Let's say it doesn't work. Does that bother you?" He wasn't saying it to dissuade me. He was just trying to make sure I'd thought things through. I was like, "Look man, I've been fired from the last three insurance jobs. The last three jobs I've had at this point, there's only up from a perception standpoint that I can have in the industry. There's not a lot of places that I can go from here."
--:-- The other side of it too is, when you take this on, and I'm sure you would consider yourself blessed to have Ryan, your partner with you. It's one of the things that I definitely miss, not having someone. I know there are additional challenges to having a partner for sure, but I will say almost every single day throughout this journey, I have said to myself, "I wish I had that person that I could say all the things that were on my mind to and have them help me work through which ones were the right things and which ones were just the crazy ideas."
--:-- My point in saying that is, when you go on this path and you take your own thing, if you do it right, you start to surround yourself with other people who don't care what people think, who want to push forward, who are willing to take risks, who are willing to try things, who will listen to your crazy ideas and not think that they're crazy. They just listen to them as ideas. There is this whole much larger subgroup of people who listen to what you're saying and they're like, "You're crazy. That won't work. That's bananas. It's not the way we do it. What makes you qualified?" All these things. If you can get away from those people for a minute, all of a sudden the whole world opens up to you. That's what I feel where I sit today.
--:-- Zach Mefford: That's them projecting their fear on you.
--:-- Zach Mefford: What they're afraid is gonna happen when they're trying to bring you down, because they're not able to do it. And so they just want to try to stop anyone else from doing it. So I had a couple thoughts on that.
--:-- First of all, you're right, I am incredibly blessed to have not just a business partner, because partnerships can be messy. There are things about them I really don't like in general. But specifically, Ryan, my business partner—I've said this before to you and I'll officially go on record so you can hold it against me—Ryan's literally one of the smartest guys I've ever met. Outside of insurance and all those different things, the way that he thinks through things, his process, he's just one of the smartest guys.
--:-- When it comes to insurance though, I have still not found somebody that I think would hold a candle to what he's able to do. He's been on the carrier side and he's been mostly commercial on the agency side too, but he just knows so much that other people forget. I think some people take that for granted. Watching how things have gone with the business, it really helps having someone like that, not only to talk through those things, but also the yin and yang. The joke is, I push him outside of where he's comfortable and he pulls me back when things are getting a little too far down the road. But it works for us.
--:-- It's not just having a business partner—it's the right fit. I've told him, we could do so many different things and we've both dabbled in other things outside of what we're doing here, but I just wouldn't want to. That's how well things have worked for us.
--:-- I will say too about this core thing: when we started this initially, I call it blissfully ignorant. Or just the fact that I didn't think about it enough. Failure wasn't an option. We were just going to make this work. That was my mentality. We're going to find a way to do it.
--:-- I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how great it is to have a spouse that supports you through all that. There were times—nobody wants to hear sad sob stories—but I remember we found out we were expecting our second child the second day into our business. She came to me crying. I thought somebody died or I did something incredibly stupid that I had forgotten. That wasn't the case. She was just really worried about how I was going to perceive that because she cared that much about making sure we got to where we were.
--:-- It was tough. It wasn't easy. There were times where we had to go without certain things. There were times where I look at my bank account and it's definitely not where you want it to be. It's scary. That's years of putting up with that—not going on vacations, not going out to eat, not doing different things—to get to a point where you get to enjoy it.
--:-- My point is, you see these people that enjoy things when they get successful. Like you said last week on your podcast, I don't have a problem with people as long as they're on the same playing field. They should be able to appreciate and enjoy their success. It took a lot to get there.
--:-- Zach Mefford: I think that is something. Who was it the other day? Someone we both know tweeted—I'm going to forget who—maybe Mike Crowley or Brent Kelly. They tweeted out: never look at where someone is today and try to compare yourself to them because you have no idea.
--:-- I struggled with this a lot in the first few months of Rogue. The pandemic hits, I don't sell a policy for the first two and a half months. My agency exists. I'm literally lighting money on fire every day because whether you're writing business or not, it costs money to run an agency. It costs money to run an agency even if you don't have a physical location. It still costs a lot of money.
--:-- So all that being said, I'm looking around going, "Jesus, I know what I want to do. I have this game plan of how to get there and nothing's happening." Look at these guys. It is so easy to get caught in that spiral. For a lot of people, especially a lot of producers, they get caught in this: "Man, I'd love to go do that. I'd love to have what my agency principal has. When is it going to be my turn?"
--:-- You really have two options. Before I was a little more empathetic to this position. Now maybe my position is a little more draconian. Either suck it up and enjoy the life that you have at the agency you have, or go start your own thing and shut up. Those are your two options. Continuing to complain and produce less than you should because you're thinking about things that have no value and are probably intrinsically negative—that is not a path forward.
--:-- It can be done. You guys have done it. There's 10,000 cases that we can bring on here of agents and agencies that have plowed through it. You just have to be ready for the lean years. But the other side of it is nice.
--:-- [Host interjection]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's up, guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode. 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 enjoy creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace.
--:-- [Back to the episode]
--:-- Zach Mefford: You got to be ready to embrace the suck. You just do. I've had the luxury of having a few really good—they're not even mentors, that wouldn't be fair to say—but people who gave me advice every now and then.
--:-- I remember I was at the State Farm route for a little bit when I first started. The agent there told me, "Look, for the first three years, you just embrace that suck. From year three to five, you're not comfortable, but you feel like you can breathe a little bit. Years five to seven, you start to get to a point where you're like, 'Okay, this is going pretty well.' And usually after seven, if you do it right, that's why you did it."
--:-- I always had that in the back of my mind. I had another really good contracting client, a really successful guy, that told me, "The problem with you, Zach, is you keep trying to push yourself and you're comparing yourself to somebody that's 10 years into their business." You can't do that. I appreciate the fact that you want to push and drive and be there, but at the same time, you have to embrace the reality of where you're at right now and say, "Okay, what do I do to be the best version of myself with what I have right here so I can get to that?" It's okay to see that out there as something you want to get to, but you gotta find a way to take care of what you do this hour, this day, this month to get to that point.
--:-- Lastly, to your point about the complaining stuff, I've definitely seen that in the different roles that I've had. I think the thing that people really get into their own head about is they just want to plan and plan and plan and plan and never take action. Stop trying to make everything perfect before you go move. Make a step, do something. It can be done. It is going to be difficult. But stop trying to think you have to have everything perfectly laid out before you start.
--:-- There are going to be clients where you just screw it up. There are going to be clients where you think you're trying to do the right thing and it just doesn't work. Recently, we lost a client on a communication issue. I had a client that I was basically waiting for the renewal—we had a claim, doesn't matter. There was an account that we basically had the hole shot on. My metaphors on Mondays are not for metaphors when it comes to Ryan. You turned it into racing too, which I like. We blew it communication-wise. It wasn't escalating. A whole bunch of things.
--:-- I stepped back and I was upset for a minute. I reached out and we lost the opportunity. It was very frustrating. I took an exhale and I said, "Look, we have to work this process. This process is eventually going to work." The process of me stepping full-time back into production so that communication doesn't get missed—that is not the answer. We have to keep pushing forward to get to where we want to be, understanding that now we know there is a broken piece in this chain and we're going to fix that.
--:-- Those are some of the moments that are really scary because if you're working in a place, especially going from big corporate to starting your own agency or being an entrepreneur in general, the processes are already there. When you're working for another agency—this is what I took for granted at my wife's family's agency—they already had processes. They had 40 years of processes that worked. I didn't have to figure out a COI process or a renewal process or a BOR process or a follow-up process. None of that. You can subscribe to different programs and jump start some of that, and that helps, but you still have to implement them and make them work and train your people on them and execute on them. You're gonna screw things up and you just have to keep moving forward.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: As far as your process went, are you a visual person for the most part?
--:-- Zach Mefford: Yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. So we started doing this—wherever we put something out as a plan, we start putting together these graphs and showing the work. I can't tell you how much that changed my ability to walk through this process. I'm still not the attention-to-detail person. The operations side of everything that we do has always been run by Ryan. He's a lot better at that kind of stuff because he thinks things through that way. But once I can see it, I can be a lot more engaged in those processes. I have to visualize it. If I'm just writing it down, it doesn't make sense. I have to see a box: "Here's what happens. If this happens, it goes here. If this happens, it goes there." Walking through that—I think it's just the way that I learned.
--:-- We talk about this when we bring on a team member. We have our pillars, which I've gone over before with you. The two things that we ask every single person before we bring them on board, that they have to commit to, is they have to be flexible and they have to be forgiving. You need to be flexible because we still run things like a startup. I hope we never lose at least some aspect of that. We move fast, we break things, we fix them, we find out how we can improve, and we move on. We don't dwell on what didn't go right. We just focus on what we can learn from that and move on.
--:-- But you also have to be forgiving of the fact that neither one of us claims to ever have everything totally figured out. I don't think we ever want to have everything figured out because that means we're not trying new stuff. You have to forgive the fact that we might spend time and energy and effort in doing something that doesn't work. That's okay, as long as you don't take it as a deal where we wasted your time. That's the culture that we try to create here.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Which also allows us to take on and pilot different ideas that our team comes up with. We show them the same sort of grace if they have an idea and it doesn't work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I'm a big fan of no ideologies in life. I think people are too easily persuaded by ideology. It's probably part of the political issues that we have. It's a big part of a lot of the discontent that we have in our country.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Don't get us on that soapbox. You and I are going to go all—I don't even think we disagree on many things. It'll be a libertarian podcast for sure.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. But in general, what I mean by that is—I've said this to the last two people that we've hired, I said it to Sarah too. We have three people here in the US and then we have a staff person in the Philippines as well. When I say no ideologies, what I mean is just because we have a process does not mean that process is the process or has to be the process forever. It means that whatever process is currently in place is our best attempt at the right process at that time. When we put that process in place based on what was going on in that moment, that was what we believed the right thing to be doing.
--:-- I tell everyone who comes in—I got a woman named Leslie. She lives in Florida. She just started with us last Monday. She's already helping us reimagine some of our touch points on our COI process, the better document that got done, verification, all that kind of stuff. We didn't pick up on that. I've been doing COIs for a year and a half now. She just came in and goes, "You're missing a step where you notate the validation of accurate information." I was like, that makes sense. Operating under the assumption that it's correct probably isn't the right way to go.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Did this person come from an insurance background?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, yeah. She worked for Amwins for six years for commercial insurance. Bringing her in and just—my point is, I think if you're going to embrace an entrepreneurial spirit, whether you're a 40-year-old business or a four-day-old business, you have to fully embrace it, not just at the leadership level, but all the way down to your people. You have to communicate that disposition.
--:-- This is my philosophy, and I think you share it: if you're going to be entrepreneurial—I'm doing air quotes, you guys can't see me—but then you're going to treat your people like worker drones in some big corporate entity, you are going to have a lot of problems. I'm not going to say you're going to fail. You are going to have a lot of friction and a lot of issues.
--:-- I feel like too often it's "do as I say, not as I do," or we're unwilling to empower our people. I say, "Look, you're not the boss, but I'm super interested in your perspective." I firmly believe in a hierarchical structure of any organization in order to be effective. I'm not a flat-businesser. But from a communication and feedback perspective, you need to have that flat structure. You need that person to be able to say, "Hey, this isn't working and here's what I think should work." It doesn't mean you'll put it in, but they need to know that they can make those suggestions, that they're not going to be penalized, that they're going to actually be rewarded potentially for making those suggestions, even if you don't put it in place.
--:-- What you get out of your people is this sense of commitment and understanding. When shit goes bad, they're trying to fix it, not just looking at you for the answer. I've already seen that in the short time that I've had a team. It's been wonderful. If we can continue to cultivate it, it's yet to be seen. But man, I said to them last week, "Guys, I know we haven't been together for a long time, but I couldn't be happier with the way that this is going."
--:-- Zach Mefford: Yeah. It's good. We go back and forth on this, and since this is turning into mostly an entrepreneurial podcast, we're going to get some more stuff. I think this is great. I don't mind.
--:-- What we have found is there needs to be boundaries. You got to figure out—there's some sort of structure that everyone craves, especially in an organization. They just kind of know where the boundaries are. But inside those boundaries, and they can be as wide as you decide to make them, you empower them to make decisions. Then you follow through by saying and showing and carrying the fact that, "I'm glad you made that decision. Was it the right one? No, not in this situation. Maybe it wasn't. But that's okay. I'm glad that you tried that. We figured out it didn't work and that's okay."
--:-- That goes back to flexible and forgiving. We can be forgiving of somebody who goes out of their way to be empowered to make something and it turns out not to be the right decision. We do the same thing every day that we're trying to do. We don't ever put them in a position where, "That was wrong. You knew you were supposed to..." I don't like this whole idea that we're the military and everything is a standard operating procedure.
--:-- There needs to be guidelines. There's structure that has to be a part of that. But we don't try to create a culture in which people aren't empowered to try different things and push. It's really created some of our best ideas, especially operational. Everything we do is mapped out now. As you've seen in Salesforce, there's structure to everything that's there. But there's still going to be great area where you have to make a judgment call or figure out what's in the best interest of our client. That's where we want to really push people to think for themselves and decide what's best.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. It's like our current culture has lost all concept of nuance. You can be structured and hierarchical and still open and flexible and, in your word, forgiving. You can be both of those things. But we have people who are like, "This is the process. You press this button, then this button, then this button. If you don't do it in this order, and if I can't track that you did it in 17 seconds, then you're out." Then we have this other group that's like, "It should be flowers and rainbows and we'll dance in a circle at noon together and do a big kumbaya."
--:-- I'm just like, both those solutions are wrong. There's always—maybe it's mostly singing and dancing and flowers in our hair, but you need a little bit of structure. In that military way, eventually people just break down in that system and there's no creativity.
--:-- I feel like all this gray area is the job of the leader. The leader is the gray area. It's managing the gray areas, managing all the stuff that can't be put in a flow chart and doesn't involve weaving flowers in your hair and making everyone feel like a unicorn on a rainbow. That's the real world, in my opinion. The real day-to-day is we have this process, but it didn't work. What are we supposed to do? She's got an idea for it. Can we use that? That's the job. The job is sifting through. If you're too structured or too loose, neither one gets you to where you want to be. You got to be able to bounce off of both.
--:-- Zach Mefford: So what I would say to that—because I do agree, we're definitely not on one side of either spectrum—one of the things we do is we track most everything that we do. A lot of that is because we want to hire people that are motivated and are competitive and want to be a part of that type of environment. I'm not talking about a boiler room setup, but I definitely want there to be some competition back and forth. I'm my best when I'm competing against something and there's a prize at the end because that's just the way that we're wired. That's what we want to attract to our culture.
--:-- But we also want to do it in a way where we can decide what's really important enough to have conversations about. What are we tracking that's going wrong to the point where we have to coach to make this better? Explain the message in a way that isn't, "Hey, you did this wrong. Here's why you did it. This is why we need to do it." It's, "We've noticed this to be a trend. Here's something that you could maybe try different to be able to do this because at the end of the day, we're all trying to get to this goal." When you make it about the team but individually track different things, it creates competitiveness. It also creates really obvious ways to coach when things aren't being handled.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'll give you an example. The most recent person that I hired, I said, "Tell me why you're not working at your last job." She said, "Well, I got in trouble for missing my task number a lot." I thought that was a really interesting thing to say because not a lot of people would be honest about that. I said, "Okay, what does that mean?"
--:-- She said, "I'll give you an example. I had a client at 3pm on a Friday call me. He was really struggling at a dealership to get this truck, or he needed some piece of equipment from a tractor store. He needed to get it off the lot to do a job over the weekend. I was going to contact you and something was going on—the company wasn't closed or wasn't responding or there was an issue. It took me two hours to get this guy off the lot, back and forth, seven or eight calls. I had to get him off the lot because he couldn't do the job without the tractor. The company wouldn't have been open on Saturday. So I got him off the lot at 4:40. But it took most of my mental energy for almost two hours. And I missed my number."
--:-- She said, "On Monday when I showed up, I got a call at 8:35 that said, 'You had 17 tasks completed instead of the 22 that we require.'" I'm making those numbers up. She got like a demerit for it. She said, "I will do what's right for the client always at the expense of a few extra tasks." Because that guy is our job, right? Isn't that our job? She goes, "That's our job."
--:-- Now, I think there is a management piece to that where you have to make sure people aren't just blowing through time because all the agents and principals are like, "You don't understand. My people will just talk all day." I get that. But you have to understand: do you want that person who's going to get the 22 tasks done every day because that's what's important? Or do you want the person who might miss on the tasks?
--:-- I think the really important piece to take out is being willing to dive into the situation deeper to understand why they missed the task number, not just go, "Hey, you missed your task number. Demerit you. Come over here and let's slap your wrist." Which one of those things is your culture? Your culture might be, "Screw him. He didn't get off the lot. Too bad. Get your 22 tasks in. We don't care." Or your culture is, "We're perfectly fine. Just notate your task management system why you missed a couple, just so we know. All good."
--:-- Zach Mefford: So here's the gray area for us. That's pillar four for us. I tell her—I'll tell you our pillars. I think I have, but I don't know. We talk a lot, so I don't know when.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You've told me before, but I couldn't tell you what they are.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Well, I want to say it again for the record. This was back in the 700 square foot little office, just Ryan and Zach hanging out. We had a good day. I like to remember—maybe we're having a beer. It doesn't matter. We were laughing about how we just wrote this account that we didn't have any right writing. Like it was just—we shouldn't have had this opportunity, but we did. I was looking at Ryan and said, "You know, the bar is so low in our space sometimes that really there's only four things you have to do well to be able to earn this business."
--:-- One: just be nice. Start off by being nice. Two: tell the truth always, as soon as possible, and definitely when it's not in your best interest. So if somebody is better off going where they're at or what they're doing, tell them that. Do that because they're going to respect you and give you the opportunity later if it happens. And if it doesn't, it wasn't meant to be anyway. You just save yourself a lot of time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Always be available. That's one that we put out there. And then people that are really important that need to have certain things like this, maybe you had to stay late at night to get that done. You're available and your people know how to get ahold of you or get things resolved quickly.
--:-- Zach Mefford: The last one, probably the one that people overlook the most, is we initially said give a shit. Just give a shit. Be nice. Tell the truth always. Always be available. Give a shit. That's all you have to do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. See, look, my number one core value is "we give a shit." That's it. We call it "genuinely care" now because we have grandmas that come into our office every now and then. I don't want anybody to be offended by the language. But the idea is if you can show empathy and just show people that you care and really go above and beyond to do that... to your point about the last one you were talking about, that small vegan with mozzarella stick... just taking the time to help them understand that. Nobody's doing that. There's not enough "give a shit" in this world, well outside of insurance and in a lot of different businesses. If you can just show that, it goes a long way. That's what that person was doing for us. That's a gray area we're not going to hold against them if they don't hit certain numbers for that. But again, to your point of agency, you want to say we'll be on the phone all day. There are certain metrics you have to look at and behaviors you can coach into and out of your system.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Let's get to that piece because we've talked a lot about the philosophical side of the business. I think it's pretty funny that we both have "give a shit." We use a poop emoji on our internal documents.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. Ours are: we give a shit, we hate to lose, we solve problems, and we are accountable for our actions. The one that I picked up on the most, although "give a shit" was a given, was the solving problems piece. My philosophy was that everyone can do the easy stuff. The easy stuff is easy. It's why every insure-tech dick who comes into our space picks the easiest mainlined coverage, automates it, and goes, "Look at this amazing miracle I've done. I've automated renter's insurance." Congratulations. I'm just not impressed. Automate when the renter's insurance person also has a pit bull with four bites in a high-rise apartment that had a loss. They're also a hedge fund manager with $50 million in personal assets. When you get into those situations, it's all the hard stuff that makes this job valuable. We're valuable because of the problems, not because of the easy stuff. I wanted it clear as day in our core values: when someone calls and has a problem, we are not going to be the agency that just goes, "Sorry, we can't help you because we have to do fucking ACORD forms." I'm going to bitch about ACORD forms forever because they're stupid and I can't believe we still use them. That being said, we're never not going to do them if that's what it takes to get the job done. We're not going to slough you off because it's going to take us an extra ten minutes to fill out ACORD forms. We're just never going to do that.
--:-- Zach Mefford: You're preaching to the choir on that, man. That's a problem that needs to be addressed.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So let's talk about Salesforce and cool shit. We're going to go probably just a couple minutes over because I know you have an extra block of time after this hour that we allow.
--:-- Zach Mefford: I do. I have an important meeting after that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So let's talk about some of the fun stuff. You have two fun things. First, you use Salesforce and you currently use Veruna. On top of that, you did your own customization layer. We'll get all the nitty gritty details, but why Salesforce? I am actively trying to get to Salesforce. That's kind of a known thing, mostly because I believe you have to know what's going on with your data. You have to own your data. There is no current solution in the marketplace that allows you to do that like Salesforce. Talk to me about the decision to move to Salesforce and some of the things you thought were important when implementing it in your agency.
--:-- Zach Mefford: That's a great, loaded question. Going back to this idea that we're driven by problems. Ryan and I were talking about getting to your core, like Simon Sinek says. At the end of the day, when Brian and I talk about the things we really want to go after, we want to make money. Everybody wants to make money. But what really drives us is going out and finding what the problem is and trying to fix it. On Monday morning when I wake up and I know there's something I can go fix, that's what drives me.
--:-- When we started our agency, we didn't even know what the impediments were. We didn't understand what was stopping us from getting where we were trying to go. But we knew it was broken. We knew there was technology out there that could make these things happen. It's now just over five years turning to a point where we could solve that problem.
--:-- When we decided to go to Salesforce, the truth was we were looking at moving AMS systems. One of the largest had picked up what we thought was the most open one, and TechCanary was acquiring that. We had meetings with people in the organization trying to figure out how we could use that because we saw it as the way to get to what we ultimately wanted: don't tell me how I'm going to do my business. Give me the opportunity to work on a platform that lets me tailor it to how I want to do it. Something as simple as adding a word track to a form that fills things out and adds it to a comparative rating platform was one of the things that held us up the most — the duplicate, triple, quadruple entry.
--:-- When we looked at the different options out there, there were plenty of things you could use. But what we liked about Salesforce in particular was because of the way it was built on that open platform, we could plug in darn near everything we wanted right away without having to put a whole lot of effort into it outside of what we did with an AMS system. We weren't trying to use it for the things people try to make it. It's the same reason why Better Agency gets so much attention — they were creating what agencies need without trying to call it one thing or the other. We weren't trying to be an AMS that was a CRM. But at the end of the day, the majority of agencies still don't have an AMS that talks to a CRM that talks to a comparative rater that talks to their VoIP, their email, and all these different things. That fragmented tech stack needed to be solved. Salesforce provided us with what we felt was, albeit expensive, the easiest way to quickly get where we wanted to go without hiring a team of engineers to build out our own products. So far, it's been money well spent. It's not if it can be done, it's how much and who does it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think about where the industry is going. Both of us are building for where the industry is going to be in ten years, not where it is today. Seth Zaremba and the team at Neon, the whole vision behind why that product was created and what it was trying to do — the idea of value and data. As you scale a business, you can't manage without data, without being able to actually track where your data is going. Right now, if you were to say, "How many tasks are your account managers doing every day? What tasks are they doing and which tasks are costing the most money?" You could probably snap your fingers and have that information. 97% of our industry is going to go, "Well, I've been doing this for 30 years, so I know what's going on," and they have no freaking clue.
--:-- I'm with you. I've run down AMS 360. I've run down Applied Epic. If you're going to scale in any capacity, the only other two options are Nexsure or Sagitta, which are bananas. We're not even playing in that world. The fact that some of the biggest agencies in the country run on them is kind of a joke to me. Then you step down to the HawkSofts and the NowCerts and the QQ Catalysts and all the others whose names I don't know. You just can't get there. There are too many warts. None of them are perfect. That's not to say if you're running a nice, simple, straightforward business — and I don't mean anything negative by simple, I mean you're doing just personal lines or a certain niche commercial business — any of those systems can't work for you. But the next level has to be something bigger.
--:-- Zach Mefford: You're right. The way I look at it, let's go back to where you started with the data. We were the pilot of the pilots with Neon. I love Seth and his mission. He's one of those guys where you just say, "How high?" and I'll do whatever he asks me to do. We tried making some of those things work for our process. Ours is a little different because we work with affinity groups. But the data and the stuff you're going to be able to do with it, especially at scale, is amazing. For our specific business case, there were some efficiencies that had to happen because without those efficiencies, we were never going to get to the point where the data could ever be utilized. We had to make our business work at a faster level to follow through on the promises we made to our partners, and that was missing.
--:-- If you take all these different technologies and try to figure out if they can adapt to the simplest things — let's not talk about where the puck is going right now. Let's just talk about how we get from having duplicate, triplicate, quadruple entry of different forms and make it so these systems can talk to each other. Start there, then get to the point of full capability. That's where I think we've had our biggest wins. We figured those things out.
--:-- I get it. People have Zapier and they've figured out a way to Frankenstein things together. It works for them. That's great. But in our instance right now, when our producers log in, when our CSRs log in — by the way, they have their own separate instance because we only do sales on one side and service on the other, that's how much we split things up — when they log into that org, outside of going into a carrier's website to make certain things you cannot do in there, they live inside that org. Everything they do sits right there. They're not logging into other programs. They're not trying to push this to connect over here and then have to go into a different screen. It all lives in one place. Short of the comparative rating portion, which we went down the road of doing with the two largest. I think you share my opinion on this — we're very long on Tarmika. I've seen what this personalized side is going to look like and having those together. That's our bet. Outside of that, everything is in one org. You don't have to bounce around. It's there. Then we customize those things to what we want. Without going into too much detail, you've seen it. The efficiencies that come from that — everyone's talking about this huge, big level stuff, which is great. But if you can't get the simplest things done first, that stuff doesn't come. We had to be really focused on the simple day-to-day tasks before we could get anywhere near matching the capabilities of what Salesforce has.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I completely agree. We're going to have to do another podcast here in a couple of months because I have a million more questions. I didn't mean to talk so much about business philosophy to start, but I want to talk a little bit about ZipBonds too. You have multiple entrepreneurial endeavors happening at all times. You have the agency, you have another kind of technology solution you're working on which we won't name but is very interesting, and then the next big project you recently announced, which I'm super happy for you and excited about, is ZipBonds. What is ZipBonds? Why should agents be interested in ZipBonds? Talk to me about the problem you're solving there.
--:-- Zach Mefford: I appreciate it. When we initially had this idea a few years ago, we were trying to finish up the Salesforce integration for Coverage Direct. Ryan runs point on all things Coverage Direct now, and I'm running and taking off on Zip. It was a problem we saw because we worked with a lot of contractors and the process was more complicated than it needed to be. The impetus was: how do we make it easier for these contractors we're working with to find and get access to small contract surety and bid these jobs? They're intimidated by the idea of where this is.
--:-- We had some discussions with a carrier we've worked really well with that was presenting some different ideas, but we didn't set out to say, "Okay, we're going to take the surety world by storm." Because we're attracted to problems, the more we started to peel that onion and get back to what the core issue was, we felt like we could bring some value to that space. Where we started to where we are is completely different because in the process, we figured out there are certain things on the backside of the house that need to be changed and need different opportunities for both carrier and agent level. At the time, there wasn't a solution out there when we started this to provide that.
--:-- ZipBonds is focused on all things surety. Our initial focus was on that small contract piece, but we've built out a database of over 5,000 commercial surety options where you go, you click, you select what you need, you pay for it, you print it off, you're done. That's the pass-through. But we also were really intentional about hiring and bringing on the right team members with a strong underwriting background. Our model for agents is: if you have a surety option that comes up, you just zip it over to us. We take care of everything for you, present it back, and then you go off and present to your client. We wanted it to be more of a concierge type of system. We're setting this up and piloting it currently with a few agents to make sure we get all the kinks worked out before we go live at scale.
--:-- It's focused on being what Chris Green has done to the flood insurance arena. That's what we're trying to be on the surety side. We want to be that turnkey division that takes care of your surety for you, either because you don't have the options, you don't have the expertise, or you just don't want to spend the time and energy doing it because you don't do it enough. At the same point, we're able to provide a similar comp plan that you're going to get from a carrier if you did all the work yourself anyway.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Are you guys a carrier?
--:-- Zach Mefford: We are not the carrier. No. We have worked and are still currently in negotiations with creating what we call a "broker in control," meaning we have underwriting authority. We want to become somebody that can not only help you initially get that standard type of business or small contract, but one of the things that was really frustrating for us when we started: let's say that carrier says no to a piece of business. Then what do you do? You go to a broker. That broker is going to send you a form. Sometimes it's not even a fillable PDF. You're just getting this. Now you're explaining everything all over again. It's frustrating.
--:-- We wanted to create an experience where if we're your turnkey surety division, we help you out with the stuff from commercial, small contract, large, fully underwritten surety programs, but also help broker out things that are more difficult. We don't want to only be that. Because of that, there's a certain type of agency that's going to want to work with us and others are going to say, "No, I just want to do that stuff myself." That's fine. Nothing wrong with that. But that's what drove us to create the solution.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think there are very few agencies in the country that should be doing surety themselves. My reason for saying that is: why waste your time? I'm a huge fan of ProWriters. I answer eight questions and I get nine compared cyber quotes. But not just compared on rate — I also get a 30-point breakdown on all the coverages that the different carriers have for that line of business, for that class of business, for that size business. I understand cyber probably better than most agents, but I don't understand it as well as an expert. By doing that, it allows me to understand what the market looks like from a pricing perspective and make a relatively educated decision on which two quotes I should present and break them down for people. What I don't have to do is be appointed with CFC and every other carrier. I don't have to be a super expert on cyber. I get a quick say.
--:-- I think the same exact thing about bonds. Don't be a bond expert. Send the bonds out. Have someone else come back to you and go, "Here's your two best options for this bond. Here's the best option. Here's what it is." Then get back to selling and prospecting and running your business and building operations. People are like, "I don't have time to automate," but we're still putting stickers and stamps on our bonds. I'm like, "How much freaking money are you making on that? Probably not a lot."
--:-- Zach Mefford: On the commercial side, we've set this up so you're making the same amount anyway and we're doing all the work. On the other side, it's very similar to the contract. I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the space, but definitely far from the dumbest. I struggled with this when we first got it. I still remember the first time I tried to crash a surety bond because I was cold calling commercial contractors. This was almost ten years ago now. I called the one carrier we were working with at the time and his answer was basically, "You don't know enough about this. You need to send this off to somebody else to be able to do that." I remember how that made me feel and thinking, "There's got to be a way to have that be a better process." We're creating a similar type of setup, but you can position it better.
--:-- You don't have to do this every single day. If you don't do it enough, you're going to run into this question over and over again. How much time are you spending trying to figure out how to do that when you could go to somebody that could do that for you? We created the solution we would have wanted when the idea came up. It didn't exist. We were trying to figure out how to do that. Then all of a sudden it's like, "Okay, well if we can't find it, we're just going to build it."
--:-- I still remember presenting the idea to a carrier about what we would do. We were asking for their feedback on it. This was mid into our Salesforce thing for the agency. We said, "Look, we don't even want anything to do with the time here. Just do these things, run with it. We'll be happy to advise or give our opinion, whatever you want us to beta test it." In the middle of trying to explain this — this is pre-pandemic — somebody asked a question about the colors and the logo and stuff. I could just tell this wasn't going anywhere. I paused or muted the phone, looked over at Ryan, and said, "We're just going to have to build this. They don't understand what we're saying. It's clearly an option that's needed because this carrier was asking us to help them with it because they wanted something like that." That's how a lot of the things we do end up being what they are. We figure out we can't explain it well enough or it's just easier to build it ourselves. That's what we've done.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I, for one, am very happy that you and Ryan are out there because our industry needs people who are willing to take risks and who see problems and don't just bitch about the problems but try to find solutions to them. That was probably the thing I disliked the most about my time at Trusted Choice and Agency Nation — not the organization itself, but the number of people I ran into in our space who wanted to complain about things and not present solutions. I think that's one of the things that attracted me to you and to Ryan and what your guys' mission is and why we've always kind of stayed close over the years. I love that your mentality is, "Is this something that's important?" You have this framework you walk through where at the end of it, one of the answers might be, "Well, we'll just build it." I think there are so many people in our space that don't have that. One of the boxes at the bottom of the Plinko board is not "we build it." It's just not. I think we need to cultivate and share more stories. I hope everyone who is unfamiliar with you and Coverage Direct and ZipBonds and every other project — you're going to have to create your holding company empire page with all your portfolio companies under it pretty soon.
--:-- Zach Mefford: We have to draw pictures for our attorney and CPA. I don't want to take away from the fact that people say we're distracted from that. It's far from that. We have a really great team behind us helping us figure out all this stuff. It's not just us. This is why we've always tried to fly under the radar. We don't want to make a big deal about certain things. But now I think we have solutions that we can really help other agents implement and we want to do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Where, other than Coveragedirect.com and Zipbonds.com, what's the best place to connect with you? LinkedIn, Twitter?
--:-- Zach Mefford: I feel like I have the best Twitter connections with the insure-tech or insurance space on Twitter. That's where I'm at at night. If you're one of those people that only want to see tweets about business, I'm not the right one because I'm always posting things about my kids and racing and different stuff. But yeah, Twitter's the best place to find me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's your handle?
--:-- Zach Mefford: I think it's just my first and last name. I should know that off the top of my head. It's @ZachMefford on Twitter. That's my personal one. That's where I have the most conversations. LinkedIn's good too. I just feel like I'm on Twitter more than most platforms.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know we went long here, but I do think it was an awesome conversation. I look forward to the next time. I'm glad I popped your podcasting cherry. That makes me very happy.
--:-- Zach Mefford: I appreciate going on the first one. I wanted to make sure I had something tangible to talk about. I really didn't think this conversation was going to be about entrepreneurship as much as it was, but I'm really glad we got to talk about it. That was fun.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm passionate about that too. Cool. Well, thanks again, man. We'll talk soon.
--:-- Zach Mefford: Thank you.
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