--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you. We have a conversation with Andrew Ryan and Jack Hertvik from Hertvik Insurance. These guys just know what they're doing.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Got to meet Andrew in person at one of Paradiso's events that he did in Boston. Met Jack for the first time on this call, but knew of him and knew of the reputation of his agency. I was just super interested in everything they're doing. They're a dynamic agency. They have a joint venture going on with a mortgage company. They're an SIAA master agency in addition to all the other stuff they do. A lot to learn. Awesome conversation.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): If you are an insurance industry wonk, you're going to love this one. It's fun to have these conversations because you never know where they're going to go and you get tremendous value. Jack and Andrew are great assets to our industry. I encourage you to connect and follow things they're doing because you're going to learn a lot.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Before we get to them, I want to give a quick shout out to Podium. Podium is one of the premier communication tools in our industry. They have lots of different functions and features, but the feature I use the most and talk about the most is their web chat feature. What I like about it is it's simple, easy to use, it allows us to customize our messaging, and it pops a little message on our website that asks, "Hey, is there something we can help with? Do you need a quote? Leave us a message here and we'll get back to you."
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): The cool part is you get notifications on your cell phone. When we respond, even if we respond on our computer, it texts the person back. So the person gets a text message back. We're getting like 95% response rates on every Podium web chat form fill, which is awesome. Anyone who's done any kind of digital marketing or inbound marketing knows that 90-plus percent response rate is bananas. Podium has been a net gain to our agency, and I'm happy to have them both as a tool in our tool belt at Rogue and as a sponsor of this show.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Go to Podium.com. That's P-O-D-I-U-M, Podium.com today. Check it out, get the demo. This is what I say with all these tools, with everything we use. You don't have to use them. I'm not trying to say that if you don't use the tools that I use, there's something wrong with you. Just know what it does. Get the demo. Have someone on your team get the demo. Know what the tool does so that if you need it or you feel like it's something that could help you grow your agency now or in the future, you don't have to start looking. You already know what it is. You can start to plan around it, and you can get to work when you need it. Podium.com, P-O-D-I-U-M.com.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): All right, let's get on to Andrew and Jack. What's going on, guys?
--:-- Andrew Ryan: What's up, Ryan? Not too much. Another day in the neighborhood here.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Have you met Jack before? I don't know if you have.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: I don't think I have. I don't think so, no.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Well, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, Jack. Thanks for coming on the show.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: You got it. Thanks for having us.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Andrew texted me last night. You're like, "Hey, what are you going to talk about?" And I was like, "I don't know. You tell me." I just invite people. I don't think it's my responsibility to figure out what we're going to talk about.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Bradley did the same thing to me. This was the first thing I ever did like that, so I was freaking out. I was like, "Dude, you got to tell me what I'm supposed to be talking about so I can be semi-prepared." And he didn't tell me anything. But that's the beauty of these things, in my opinion. That's why I do it.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): There are a lot of other guys and women in the space that do podcasts and their shows are very structured. Especially outside of our space, there are tons of podcasts that are, "Yes, these same five questions, here's what they are. We go through them." It's like bio, five questions, "What book changed your life?" I shouldn't do that voice because it makes it sound derogatory, and I only mean it to be slightly derogatory. That's just not at all what I'm interested in.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I think that's more of the "my podcast is a business model" approach. You need to have set questions and a flow and people know what to expect. I think that's how you jack your numbers up and how you are able to consistently produce high volume content. Have you guys ever heard of John Lee Dumas?
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): John Lee Dumas started the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast. For a while, it was the most listened to podcast in the world. He did an episode a day. He was one of the very first guys to do an episode a day. He just interviewed entrepreneurs. It was like, "Give me your bio. Here's five questions. Tell me some Freudian question that's supposed to get you to answer in a weird way that surprises you." It worked. People listened to it like crazy. They thought he was brilliant.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I've actually interviewed him twice for different podcasts. This is technically the fourth iteration of a podcast that I've had. John's a good dude, don't get me wrong. I just don't think there's anything special about his show outside of the fact that he did the work and he's a hardworking guy. He reached out and made a business out of it. That part I have a tremendous amount of respect for. But the actual episodes, in my opinion, were boring as shit.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Nothing in my life is formulaic. I don't need that in podcasts. People would be like, "Oh, John Lee Dumas got this guy on," and it would be an awesome guest. But I felt like the formulaic nature of it meant you never really got shocked by what someone said. You never had that "Wow, I wasn't expecting that rabbit hole" moment. If you listen to Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, James Altucher, some of these other people who do podcasts, you literally have no idea where they're going. You feel like you're walking into the forest and you have no idea where you're going to come out or how you're going to get to the other side. That to me has always been more interesting. So I tend to underprepare.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: There's that whole Howard Stern school of radio. Everybody's excited. "What is he going to say next?"
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Yes. This is terrible radio that everyone is listening to right now. But there is an episode of the James Altucher podcast... I'm going to tell this story. There's an episode with a guy named Sal something. It doesn't matter. They're talking about Larry King. So this is one of Larry King's very good friends. The guest, I think it's Sal Fussman, on James Altucher's podcast. I promise this story has a point.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Sal Fussman is on James Altucher's podcast and he's talking about Larry King. Larry King, all-time interviewer. Except there are a lot of people that don't like his style. James Altucher, at the beginning of the podcast, was very anti-Larry King's style. Sal is basically pitching James on why he thinks Larry King's style is the best, as much as you can subjectively determine that.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Basically what Larry King said was, his style was curiosity. That's all it was. He didn't care what you had done. Some producer told him, "Hey, I should interview Jack Hertvik. He's an interesting dude." Larry would show up with no idea why. He would just start asking questions. Eventually he would figure out what you were interested in, what made you unique. By the end, it would be this completely engaging conversation. He said he oftentimes had no idea even who the person was. The audience would be like, "Oh my God, look who Larry King's interviewing," and Larry King would literally have no idea who this person was.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Yeah, wow.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: Not to bring it back to insurance, but it's one of the things that I love about what I get to do because we're an SIAA master agency. I don't know if you know that.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I did. Yeah.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: One of the cool things about that job is I walk into five agencies and each of those five agencies is completely different. They're successful for doing completely different things. It's that curiosity of figuring out why it works for you and why it might not work for somebody else. If it was as easy as putting it in a box and just saying, "Hey, do this, do that," we'd all be successful insurance agencies. Watching them figure it out and having that curiosity of figuring out what works for them is the best part of my job.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): How did you become an SIAA master agency?
--:-- Jack Hertvik: It's a really strange story. Back in the early 2000s, people would send you those faxes like, "Hey, sign up for this." We responded to a fax. It was easily the best investment I've ever done off of a fax machine.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So you got fax spammed by SIAA, responded to the fax spam, and it turned into a whole business model for you.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: It's been good for me.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): That is amazing. I know the relationship with the partnership is different for every master agency. I've spoken at a bunch of master agencies and done different things for them. I'm a fan of SIAA. Technically I'm a member of Indium, the network, which I'm also a big fan of. I got no beef for SIAA. I think very highly of Matt Masiello and was very happy that he is a larger player in what the future holds with all the news that came out. I think it's going to be good for the whole channel personally. You don't have to comment on that if you don't want to, but to me and my understanding of Matt and what he wants to do, I think it's going to be great for you guys.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Oh, yeah. Matt's vision of insurance and what it's going to be in the future is spot on. I'm really excited and couldn't be happier for somebody that's such a great, intelligent person. One of the fascinating things happening in the industry right now that SIAA is going to start moving in this direction is with technology. It used to be that it wasn't as available to smaller agencies. Over the last couple of years, the tools that are now available to even small agencies to be able to do things that weren't even plausible five years ago is amazing. I think you're going to see Matt really move in that direction and help that move forward.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I think a great example of that is maybe a decade ago, when I was with the Murray Group, we wanted to do some marketing automation. There were really like two options at the time that were accessible in any regard: MailChimp, which couldn't be more basic. You look at MailChimp today, it does all these amazing things. At the time, it was literally just you put some names in through an uploaded CSV file and send an email. That was all there was. Then there was Infusionsoft, which essentially you had to have your PhD in rocket science to send an email out. Both of them were really difficult to use in different ways or limited.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Now you have every agency in our channel that could have Agency Zoom and Tarmika and these tools that just amplify our ability. It really is an exciting time.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: When we look at the Agency Zoom, Tarmika, Donna combination that we're putting together, it's really powerful.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Yeah. I know you're working on some of the same stuff we are. It's crazy because like Jack's saying, the technology... obviously we're slightly bigger than what you are, but the technology is still...
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Long, you son of a bitch.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: No, but it's crazy that the technology that helps a 35-person agency will also benefit a three-person agency. I think it will definitely help you scale. I told Ryan this last time when I talked to him. I said, "Even though I can never start a scratch agency, I don't think I could possibly do it, I'm almost jealous." Instead of taking 70, 80 years of successful history like we have since 1946, you're taking all these things that have been in place for a very long time and you have to try to make technology work in those ways. If you're starting with technology, you can do things completely differently.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: Yeah, it's almost like what we do with our other thing on the side. We just kind of throw stuff at the wall and then adjust as we go.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Yeah, it's fascinating. Hertvik Insurance, my grandfather started it. My father took it over. It's a family-run agency in a small town. It's just like every other agency out there from the standpoint that we started as a local agency that worked locally. We didn't write anybody outside of probably a 30-mile radius. There's still a lot of value in the relationships that we've built and the local establishment we've got. But being able now to use that technology to expand out and have one foot in the future and one foot in the past has really served us well. It's kind of fascinating. It feels like running two different agencies at times.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I think that's a great way to describe it. To me, it is wild that Andrew and I can jump on a Zoom and talk about automation setup. We have three people and you guys have 30-plus and we can share notes. Everything's the same and different. That to me is exciting because now it broadens the spectrum of viewpoints that you can pull from.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I was always a baseball player, a big fan of baseball. My dad at age 15 basically said to me, "I can't teach you anymore. I have taught you everything that I can teach you about baseball. Now it's time for you to go learn from other people." He said, "Everyone's going to have an opinion. Take what works for you, throw the rest out, and keep moving forward."
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Before, we had these tight windows that we could do that from. If you were a middle market agency, you only talked to middle market. If you were local, you only talked to local. Now I feel like we're in this place where with technology and the fact that it's scaled to bolt to all areas, you can kind of cherry pick. A middle market can cherry pick an idea from a small three-person local agency and apply it and vice versa. I think it just makes us all so much better.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: It helps us scale. If you have the technology in place, like the big thing that you and I have talked about is trying to get all these processes. Nothing's written down. It happens, but you don't know exactly how it happens. Once you get all those processes down and then try to figure out where technology fits in, the ease of scaling... I showed you that library of videos we did for training. Just doing little dumb things like that barely takes any more time. But doing that once, now the next person we bring on is going to be super easy to train. That's stuff we haven't done before.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: You always need to be thinking about how your replacement is going to handle it. Not necessarily because you're going to be gone, but because you might advance or you might have somebody else that needs to do that job. You have to be thinking that step in the future. I do think that's important.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I'm interested in both your takes, but Jack, because I haven't spoken to you too much before, I'll let you go after I answer this question first. I had a meeting with a carrier partner this morning. It's a very good partner. He's our local rep, but he's not your standard local marketing rep from a carrier. He advocates up chain for me and has helped me get some opportunities because he believes in what we're trying to grow.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): He asked me, "How are you managing growing the business and selling?" I looked at him and said, "If I never sell another policy ever again in my entire life, I would not be upset. Not even a little bit." To me personally, selling them means nothing. Obviously I want my agency to sell policies, but for me personally... He was like, "Holy shit. I've never heard that from anyone. It's always this very ego-driven thing."
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): My question is maybe for you. I don't know if you're still selling or if you're managing or how that works. My opinion has always been that if I'm not training my replacement, I'm not growing as an individual. I feel like you should always be training your replacement. Is that something you believe? Do you invite it? Where does that fall in your structure? How do you guys view that kind of thing?
--:-- Jack Hertvik: I'm a huge believer in it. Especially because as an agency owner, you need to know a little bit about everything that happens in your agency. If you don't, it's very difficult to manage. I don't think I've personally sold a policy in a while. I had a neighbor of mine come up to me the other day and say, "Hey, I want you to write my insurance." It's almost an uncomfortable conversation where I say, "Look, I've got people that are awesome at that. They are going to take care of you. If you've ever got a problem, call me. But these are the folks that are trained and will do the best job to get you where you need to be."
--:-- Jack Hertvik: By constantly training your replacement, you're empowering everybody underneath you to do what they need to do.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): That to me feels like a big place. When I'm at a conference or an association event, I'm sure you see it in some of your events with other agents. When I find an agency owner who feels really stuck — not just struggling with one particular thing or hitting a little plateau, but really stuck — if you boil down the actual reason, it's because either out of fear of losing connection, which I think is real, or not feeling comfortable. They refuse to get out of that place.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): You can't go build JVs and partnerships and look for scaling technology and tools like Donna to better understand what's happening for cross-sell and upsell opportunities. You can't put that stuff in your agency if you're also writing the home and auto insurance for your neighbor. You can't be good at everything. You only have so many brain cycles. That's a really difficult thing for a lot of people to do.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I believe I'm wired differently as an agency owner. I'm not a second generation. I don't get any pleasure out of writing insurance. I think that's different. But for a lot of people, that's a tough leap to make.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: It's important to know what kind of agency you want to build, how you're going to get there, and always be thinking about that next step. If you don't, it's so easy to not get there. Planning helps you get there, but it's amazing how many agencies lose focus of that. You end up living in the weeds your entire life. If you keep thinking you can do 85 different things in one day, you're not Superman. Don't try to be Superman.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: There's a hard ceiling. If you're the person at the top who's still doing all that day-to-day nonsense, there's a very hard ceiling. Unless you can clone yourself, you're not going to have a break. You almost have to be planning ahead. I think Jack and Scott did a really good job with that. From me to the rest of our staff, there's always that buy-in. Your people have say in what we're doing. Because they have say, there's responsibility on their end to enact whatever direction we have. That empowerment thing that Jack mentioned is very important. I think that's huge, especially in a small agency. If you have that embedded in your culture from the beginning, it's huge.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: I spend enough time in the weeds on the golf course. I don't need to spend time in my business. Not today. I shouldn't even say that because I can't even make it to the golf course. Matt Wood and Mike Crowley and I are trying to get a golf thing together. We all kind of live in central Eastern New York. We're trying to find a day that works. We're all so busy doing all these different things that it's like finding a day when you get away from your business.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I want to transition to when you guys started using these tools. You've mentioned three tools that agents may or may not know about. They certainly should know about two of them: Donna by Arias Analytics — Google "Donna for agents" — or Tarmika, T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com. Neither are sponsors of this show, so people should know about those two tools. You also mentioned Agency Zoom. I'm sure you have other tools.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): When was it a conscious decision? What was the impetus for you to go with some of the most forward-leaning pieces of technology in our entire industry? We can talk about what they do and how they implement if we want. But in general, those are kind of the cutting-edge tech in our space. When did you as an agency decide that moving into tools like this was to the benefit of the agency? Was there a decision, "Hey, we're going to move this way"? Were you always tech focused? How did that come about?
--:-- Jack Hertvik: It was really out of necessity. We started a joint venture with a real estate group. We found ourselves in a position where suddenly we were getting hundreds upon hundreds of leads every week. Being able to process them all in the way that we wanted to led to us looking into Agency Zoom. That's kind of where it started. Agency Zoom really connected us. I would say it was our first system outside of our management system and our radar that we really got in depth with. Would you agree, Andrew, that was the one that we really utilized fully to its potential?
--:-- Andrew Ryan: To rewind back, two years before that we had been on Salesforce. But Salesforce... I didn't know what we were doing. You need somebody who knows what they're doing in Salesforce or has something already built out to make that work. We basically wasted a year paying for Salesforce and didn't do well with it. Then we switched to HubSpot. I actually really would have liked HubSpot. Still a big fan of them. But we still had a little issue with how fast it wasn't insurance terminology. With the salespeople, it was hard to get them to really get into using it.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: The good thing about Agency Zoom is that part of it is almost like there's a lot of stuff I can't do, but what it can do is very insurance based. You can tell it's definitely created by people with insurance backgrounds. Getting that built out, Jack's right. We had this process laid out. But then the numbers were even bigger than they had presumed beforehand. So it was like, "This makes no sense how we planned on doing this." Agency Zoom has definitely been big.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: We also had Scott's son Griffin working for us. He had just graduated during COVID, so he has a data analytics background. He was able to do lots of stuff even outside of the system to connect different pieces of technology — whether connecting to our real estate partners or whatever else — to make that flow of data very smooth and take that manual keying of data completely out of the picture. I think it's stupid because I think it should be a lot easier than it is. It's almost dumb that we had to build something like that.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Doing that and everything else we've gotten into... Tarmika on the commercial rating side is fabulous. I know you're using it now. Personal lines with what we have going would be game-changing once it's live. Very excited about that. Grange Insurance is the one that hooked us up with Donna. Shout out to them because they... Jack's very close to them. They reached out to Jack and said, "Hey, we got this thing." That's funny because I already knew Ron from Tarmika. I know Ron. It was the weirdest little thing. I didn't even know who he worked for at the time. We went through all that with them. We actually literally just got our login information yesterday.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Oh, nice. Have you jumped in and poked around a little bit?
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Yeah, we've been poking around. Jack and I were trying to figure out whether we want to postpone until we can get the integration with Agency Zoom seamless. We don't want another interface for our CSRs to go into. Part of us really wants to postpone until that integration is seamless.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I know what you mean. I know you've talked to Chris Paradiso about how he uses it. It's so funny how one tool can be used two completely different ways. He uses it to basically educate because people are doing reviews on every single policy. He has all this information on everybody. We are trying to use it to pick who we want to have conversations with. Does that make sense?
--:-- Andrew Ryan: It does. You kind of have this broken into two separate sections. You have the people who love us who want to buy from us, or the people who want to leave us and we need to figure out why they want to leave us and if they're worth saving or not.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: So those are the two pockets we're going to aim for. And I think Donna really helps us kind of dial in and figure out how to best aim our efforts. Yeah, I see it and how I've been using it so far as more of a management tool. I don't know that I'll have my people... I have Sarah on my team who currently is an account manager, but she may eventually morph into more of an operations position. I'll probably have a limited, more leadership or managerial logins and use it as a management tool rather than a tool that I have our day-to-day operators using. That's the way I've kind of viewed it so far. Obviously that's always open to change, and Don is making a lot of improvements.
--:-- I'm on an advisory board for Donna, and I spend a lot of time giving them feedback. They have so many upgrades and feature enhancements coming that are... I see it as a place where I love the idea of it being integrated directly with Agency Zoom from an operator perspective. Now we can do the trigger fires and all that kind of stuff, which to me is the next level.
--:-- For those that don't understand, the quick breakdown of Donna is agency book analytics. Their defining characteristic as a utility is its ability to give you real-time feedback on the sentiment, the actual disposition of someone towards your agency based on email conversations, text conversations, phone conversations, and policy administration. It's taking how many claims, how many call-ins for different things. They're very close—it's in beta right now—to being able to say, based on the words used in emails to you, how often they're emailing, how often they're texting, the words used in text, what is their sentiment?
--:-- I think about it like you guys. You have all this high volume. There's no way for you to gut how people feel about your agency. When you have that many people coming in, it's impossible for you to gut that. So what if client 59 in that week comes in and all of a sudden their sentiment for the first two months is an 80 and all of a sudden it drops to a 60? You'd have no idea. You can't catch that in net promoter score. So that happens. Now, all of a sudden Jack gets an email that says, "Hey, home auto umbrella client dropped 20 plus points sentiment, something's wrong." Now you as Jack the leader, or Andrew, whoever, can come in and go, "What happened on this account? What's going on?" And now you can actually find and solve a problem in real time.
--:-- This is the second largest expense in my agency. I pay for it, so no one can accuse me of getting this for free. I invested in it early because I want to be a high volume shop like you, but in small commercial. There's no other tool that gives me the ability to do that down the line. It's a game changer from a customer experience standpoint.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): What's up guys. Sorry to take you away from the episode. But as you know, we do not run ads on this show. In exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in—men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. 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. I love you for listening to this show, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Yeah, we just... when we first started doing this, we said, "Hey, look, I just want to be able to go to each one of my CSRs and say, 'These are the five people this week that are most likely to leave the agency, and these are the five people this week that are most likely to buy something from you.'" Because before, we were just choosing 10 random names out of a hat and being like, "All right, let's call these people this week and see what happens." So it really gives us some direction and empowers them to do what they need to do.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): This is the kind of tech that gets me so excited about what we're doing. It's not about technology; it's about what you can deliver to your customers. Something like Donna, coupled with something like an Agency Zoom or another CRM—I don't want to knock just plenty. Better agencies are great CRM. I don't want to knock them. Nick and all those guys are friends, and I wish them nothing but the best. But I look at that and I'm like, this is bringing us closer to delivering on the real value proposition that every independent agency actually has. We do a good job of it, but man, this is taking us even closer.
--:-- Now you could actually get to the point where for a middle-aged man, a 45-year-old guy, Sally in your office is the one who will have the most productive conversations versus Tammy or Johnny or Timmy. And then for younger millennials or zennials, maybe Tim's the best person to reach out to that person. Eventually we'll get to that point where you can actually be that targeted in who reaches out, when they reach out, what they're asking about. It blows my mind what we're going to be able to do in the not too distant future.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Right, and it's funny because a lot of other industries, this is old news almost. The stuff that we get excited about in insurance is crap that other industries have been doing forever. Look at Tarmika, for example. How long has someone been trying to build a commercial lines rater? I remember even the first time I told Jack about it, he just kind of shook his head and said, "Yeah, I heard this story before." I was pretty sure the government was shutting all these things down, like why else wouldn't it have happened by now?
--:-- I think we're finally at that point where things are still kind of happening slower than we like, especially on the management system side. But I think we're finally getting to that point where people like you and I—we're not a tech company, we don't even pretend to be tech companies—but we can cobble something together that does what we need to do. The fact that we're there will just kind of snowball, and everything will happen very fast from this point onwards.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: I think that slowness though is really important. So many agencies—when you walk into your average agency, they're not using any of this stuff. They're almost afraid to use a lot of it. You're never going to win those agencies over by saying, "All right, you got to implement these six systems and change everything about the way you do it." You need to be able to go in and say, "Hey, look, we're going to set up a timeline, and we're slowly going to build it." I know I've heard you on the podcast say, "Hey, look, there's systems I want to use and I'm a big fan of, but I'm just not there yet." You got to take it step by step. That's where so many agencies go wrong in technology. They try to do everything all at once, and then they wonder why they're confused and it's not working.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I recently had the pleasure and the honor of speaking live at the Kentucky leadership conference a few weeks ago. It was freaking amazing to be back in person talking to a live audience. It was so much fun. My energy bucket was refilled, just having random conversations with people that ask questions. It was awesome.
--:-- I was talking to Tara, their executive director, about this tech stuff. I brought up Tarmika, Donna, a couple other things that I use. She said, "Geez, some of these tools I've never even heard of." And it wasn't a knock in any way. She said, "Half our membership, if I go and walk into their office, they're still using hard files. These are dusty old offices. They make money. They have clients." She said, "How do you go in and tell that person that they're doing something wrong?" For their constituency where they live, the type of people they want to write now... is that the future? Absolutely not. We know that's not the future.
--:-- But I think by having a plan, regardless of its speed—whether it's a three-year plan or a three-month plan—having that plan and slowly implementing this stuff gives you such a competitive advantage. In one snapshot, you'll never be able to fully understand it. But if you look back, you'd be like, "Oh my gosh, look how much further away we are from our competition."
--:-- I do video proposals using Neoteric Agent, Grant Botman's thing. I get these emails back: "Oh my God, I've never seen anything like this before. This is amazing." All it is is me for three minutes talking about someone's policy in a video. You would think this was revolutionary technology. It speaks to the opportunity because of where we are as an industry. While it is slow, for the agents that aren't slowly implementing, it's going to change for them overnight. They're going to wake up one morning and realize that they're in a completely different industry than the competition is.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: Truthfully, you look at Next Insurance and what they're trying to do. You look at Coterie, Attune. Next just bought AP Indigo. You have Coverhound, Milo. These are the people that I compare Rogue to. We're not there yet. They don't have me in their list yet, but they will someday. I don't know that many agents are awake to the fact—and maybe the people that listen to this show probably are, so I might be preaching to the choir. If you're willing to listen to me pontificate as often as people do, then they're obviously aware to some extent. But these guys' opportunities aren't even going to get to the local level pretty soon.
--:-- Deals like your JV—every deal doesn't even hit the retail market. It's just a partnership that goes to you, and you guys are servicing it and doing a great job. Those opportunities aren't even hitting the market. They're going right to you. That is happening. That's the move in our space. It's not that your guy down the street who's using you today leaves you for Next. That's probably not going to happen. What's going to happen is the next guy doesn't even get to you because Next or Milo or Rogue or someone else picks that person off because they used this tool, or they signed up for this service, or they got this license. There's going to be less and less people who make it to the true retail market, both on personal and commercial life. It's going to happen across the board. Being able to have the tech that allows you to create those partnerships like you did with Agency Zoom—that's something that needs to be considered moving into the future.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: We always joke about how when we would walk into a mortgage person's office or a realtor's office, they'd look at us like, "Oh crap, here's another insurance agent. You're the third guy that's walked in here this week." Fighting that ground war, picking it off realtor by realtor, is a difficult game. I think every agent out there has great relationships like that that have really helped them grow their agency. Those are good things to have. But man, those can be difficult to strip away. When you can get to the top and kind of choke that pipeline a little bit, it's a heck of an advantage.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): When you guys are taking on the SIAA master agency thing—and you don't have to give me any intimate details, I'm just interested in general philosophy—when you look out over your agents and the things that they're struggling with and some of the places that you might see easy wins... So you walk into one of your member agencies and you're like, "Hey, here's an easy win for you." What's one or two things that you see that maybe people listening at home could be potential easy wins? This is a general question, so you can take it wherever you want. It can be any part of the agency, but just some easy wins that you've maybe started to advise or that you see in the place that you sit.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: Technology is the first one, but I think we've kind of hit on that. Right now, I think the biggest thing is everybody's complaining about people. Everybody's saying, "Man, I can't find anybody." We're going through it right now. We've got a whole staff of people that have come back from COVID and are working in our office today. I guarantee you there's a few of them out there that are like, "Man, I miss working at home."
--:-- There is an entire marketplace of CSRs out there that are being told they have to come back to the office that aren't happy about it. We're seeing some agents having a lot of success now hiring a CSR out in Missouri. Whereas before, your talent pool was kind of within 20 minutes of your office. What COVID has taught us is we can expand that. The people that I know that are successfully hiring people are doing it that way. They're finding those people because they're good, they're qualified, and all they want to do is work from home. If you're okay with that, man, I think you can find some really talented people right now. I think that's one of the easier wins that's out there.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I love that. My producer that I hired lives in Illinois. He's in a different time zone, and it has had negligible effect. I wish I had better processes. I think that's the key. You can hide poor onboarding and processes if someone's in the office because you just be like, "Hey Jimmy, you don't do this." But that exposed in Rogue the lack of documented processes you have. Andrew and I were talking about that, and I actually started building out that Google Sheets thing that you showed me. It was a simple solution to a problem, which I actually really like. But man, I agree with you. I feel like I hit a home run with him. He's in a different time zone, and it has had zero effect on our business. There's no need to be keeping everybody so close to you. It's difficult, different to manage. There's a different relationship that you have to have there, but it's certainly plausible.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Yeah, I completely agree with you. That's a great point.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Anything else? Anything else you see? Hiring, tech, any other places?
--:-- Jack Hertvik: Within SIAA, we're really pushing a lot more of the commercial aspect. It goes back to exactly what we were talking about on the personal side—that market is changing so rapidly. Making sure that you've got your foot at least solidly in the commercial lines market is really important. That's one thing that we're doing a lot of right now is going in and teaching about niche marketing. "All right, look, we're going to choose two classes of business, and we're going to go after them. We're going to learn as much as we can about them. We're going to become that person for the state of Ohio that does that, maybe even for other states as you kind of branch out." That's kind of the big one right now—going in really niche marketing in commercial lines to build that business.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): How many states are you guys in?
--:-- Jack Hertvik: Gosh, 30.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): How have you managed that? Do you have someone who's specifically like a compliance person?
--:-- Jack Hertvik: That's a big question that I get because we technically are licensed—I shouldn't even say technically, we are licensed in 16 states. Through our relationship with Indium, we're basically able to write in all 50 states. I get people who ask, "How do you... what if you sign the wrong document here and there?" It hasn't really been a struggle. We have a basic list of the documents that need to be signed in a state. It hasn't been that much of a struggle.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Have you found that? Oh yeah, no, it's painful. It's one of those things where I always thought that if somebody could pass a law that allows us to get a national insurance license... The licensing part is brutal.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: Yeah. I would vote for that person to be president tomorrow. So we've got an office manager that handles all that. It's almost impossible to not have somebody that specializes in it. I know there's a lot of companies out there that do it. I'll give a big shout out to who we use. It's an expense because you're essentially paying someone to do this, but ILSA—I-L-S-A INC, I think is their website. If you search ILSA insurance licensing... I can't remember exactly what it is. But man, I send them an email and say "Illinois," and a week later we're licensed in Illinois. That has been a godsend. Obviously I'm hoping that they don't mess anything up. They don't seem to. They've been doing it for a while. They seem to do a great job, so that's why I'm recommending them.
--:-- But the other side of it is it's not in-house, and you're paying an expense for it. It's not like you're just going to NIPR and getting the license. Someone is doing the work, and there's a cost to it. But that's who we're using.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I won't mention names, but I know an agency that went through a fee with the state because the guy got his non-residence license and he was there, but he also had to go to the secretary of state and register his name there. How would you know that? That's not something that I would know. He got a $500 fine because he didn't do it.
--:-- I'll tell you—again, I get why it sounds like this. ILSA is not a sponsor of the show. I just use them. But they taught me that. I was on the phone with them, and they're like, "Hey, do you want to do the secretary of state file and have us send any tax documents?" I said, "Well, is that... I never heard of that before. That sounds weird. Is that really necessary?" They said, "Well, it's not necessary, but you could get a fine." I basically just said, "Whatever it takes. I don't ever want to get anything in the mail that says I owe anyone money if I can avoid it. If an extra couple hundred bucks helps me avoid it, I'm going to do it."
--:-- There's also fingerprinting in a couple of states that is difficult. A lot of states have ancillary documents where you may think you're licensed, but if you don't send the documents in within a certain amount of time, it voids the license. So you're sending your license to carriers saying you're licensed in a state, but really you're technically not. Sorry, Vermont, but we've since fixed that problem. So if anyone from Vermont is listening, we're good now.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: When I said it wasn't difficult, I meant the writing and managing of insurance policies in those states hasn't been as difficult as I thought it would be. But the licensing is brutal.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Yeah. There's always that concern about, "Hey, geez, is there something in that state that I don't know a ton about?" We've always been a little hesitant about doing that one-off sometimes for policies. But on the whole, I don't think it's that big of a risk. If you got business, more often than not, you're going to try to find a way to write it.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Yeah, I agree.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I want to be respectful of your guys' time. This has been a tremendous conversation. Thank you for taking the time with me. This has been great. I'll leave you with this—and I'm interested in both of your perspectives, and you're not allowed to say ditto—but just the next three to five years. I'm going to give you a little bit of context. I see this as a defining period for the next 10 to 20 years in our business. I think we're in a true transition moment from analog to digital.
--:-- I just had a conversation with Nigel Walsh, the head of Google Insurance, which will have come out before this conversation. So go listen to that one. He basically said there are two things happening. There's digitizing, which is a traditional agency becoming digital. And then there's digitalizing, which is native digital businesses. He said traditional are digitizing, and more and more digital agencies are coming into existence and gaining share. So we're in this tumultuous period. That's why I think the next three to five years are defining. You're going to define where you fall in the next 20 in this period. Obviously to me, it seems like you guys are on the right path. But do you see yourself positioning? Are you thinking about that? Is there any future move that we haven't talked about that you see coming that you can talk about that will set yourselves up?
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Sounds like a question for you, Andrew.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: I 100% agree with you. But at the same time, it's going to sound weird coming from me—you gotta remember that our current client base, we have an office that's like an hour west of us. It's funny because those people compared to people here do business completely differently. The type of marketing you got to do, everything is different out there. So I think there's definitely a future that we'll talk about in a second, but I think currently you can't just go digital and forget everybody else. I think 90% of clients out there still do business the old way. That's what they're used to. Even if you're rolling in new things, you can't just pull a plug one day, plug it into a tech outlet, and expect all your clients to just want to do business like that.
--:-- Even when we roll out stuff internally—a lot of what we're talking about with Agency Zoom, we're just beginning to use that to manage current clients. We didn't even have a book uploaded because we've been doing business with some of these people for 20 years. We don't want to completely change our type of communication with these people without making sure that it's flawless. Don't get me wrong, we're going to make mistakes. But I'm trying to eliminate those mistakes and have the mistakes be with my 1% of new business clients, not my entire book.
--:-- As far as the future, I think there's so much crazy stuff. I'm super interested in someone figuring out a way to leverage a lot of what's going on with bitcoin. I listened to Cesar Ambo's thing the other day. I don't know that that's the answer, but someone's going to figure out some way to tokenize all these transactions. It's going to be really interesting when that happens. I think that'll trigger a giant domino effect all the way down the chain. So I think that's something you got to be ready for.
--:-- Just kind of evolving with your clients. I don't think any of us sitting here can say, "Hey, this is how we're going to do business in five years." I guarantee if all three of us were sitting together five years ago and look where we are now, none of us would be talking about anything that we're doing right now. You've got to be nimble. There's a couple of things that Jack and I always joke about—we don't want to be the first to try a brand new phone system, and we're never going to be the first person to try a management system, to be honest with you. Those are two things that we just need to make phone calls and store our policy information. Let me try it and see what breaks.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: Exactly.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: We're not going to be first adopters for those things. But lots of these ancillary technologies that are able to connect... I think the big thing with the next step is that you notice that all these companies that we've talked about—literally every single one of them, even Better Agency—they're able to integrate with these other third parties. There was a pipe dream for a long time about having one management system that does everything you need. I think that's a bunch of nonsense. The problem is that even if you build that, you're not going to be the best at anything.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: You're not going to be the best CRM. You're not going to be the best AMS. You're not going to have the best technology in the backend with analytics. You're just not going to have all of that.
--:-- So in order for you to take that step, Jack and I had Griffin on staff. We almost had a tech person in the office. But I almost think that's something between that tech person and that marketing person in the office. Those are the two biggest additions we've made.
--:-- That's really kind of playing in your head, because we don't really have 40 hours of tech stuff for somebody to do in the office. But the hope is that we're going to have them. The hope is that we might get a couple of them. That might be an extremely important position. So you just have to position yourself in a way that whatever comes out, you've got to be ready to adopt and try to figure out how to work it.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it's a big concern moving forward, what that's going to look like. And we think about it all the time.
--:-- When you talk about digitalizing agencies, there's an aspect of a skill set there that most agents just don't have. I always say this when I listen to podcasts like yours—there'll be people on there and they'll talk about, "Oh, we built this platform and it does this or it does that." I'm like, man, I can't do that. That's not who I am. That's not what my staff is capable of doing. If I'm going to build an agency like that, I've got to fire all these people and bring in a bunch of programmers. It's almost like a different world.
--:-- So right now we're taking that digitizing route because I think that it's something that we can do and something that we can do well. And I am a big believer in the idea of community. When I first started in the industry, I never thought I'd end up in insurance. I got good advice from a friend of mine who said, "Hey, good people that are going to change the world are going to work in every industry. You're going to have to do it wherever you're at. You can do good things."
--:-- From a community standpoint, we're really big in the community and we want to make sure that we're a big part of that. That's part of the joy in it for me. So I think there's always going to be that aspect of being an agency that can deliver a product that feels very digitized to my customer, that feels the same as if they went directly with The Hartford, but is also a member of their community. Or a member of a community where they look and say, "Hey, that guy's doing some really good stuff for his community. Those are the type of people I want to work with."
--:-- I think you need to build it digitized, but it needs to still be a brand. It's still got to be somebody that people want to work with.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I think that's the perfect way to end this. I couldn't agree with you more. I think you're right on it, man.
--:-- Well, hey guys, this has been tremendous. I appreciate you sharing time. There's a lot of dollars per hour being blown right here—the brain trust of Hertvik Insurance here on the podcast.
--:-- All jokes aside, I do appreciate it. I love you sharing your expertise. I think it's tremendous. These kinds of conversations help just incrementally give people little ideas, little nuanced concepts, little turns of phrases that help open their eyes to what's available to them if they want that. So thanks so much.
--:-- Andrew Ryan: Thanks for talking to you.
--:-- Jack Hertvik: Thank you.
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