--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... welcome back to the show. Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode with our guest, Peter McDonald, the founder, co-founder, and CEO of Wunderite. Brand new insurtech company, just raised three million bucks, came out of Techstars. They're doing some really tremendous things in the data and information space, particularly with taking in information, sorting it, directing it, getting it to where it needs to go—in particular, Acord forms and other places. But making the data collection process easier, among many other things that they're doing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I got a quick peek at the tool before we did this episode. I will tell you, as of recording this intro, I'm actually getting the full demo tomorrow. Ben described it to me really as like a competitor to an Indio or a Broker Buddha. Think of it—again, I don't want to put it exactly in that box. They're doing a lot of really cool things. But data collection, getting data where it needs to go, is one of the most challenging parts of our business.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I knew Peter from a few years ago, and then I saw him starting this company and doing great things. I just reached out to him and said, "Hey, man, let's have a chat. Let's see what you're doing." Because this show is all about chatting with interesting people doing interesting things in our space. And Peter is definitely one of them. We talk about all kinds of things. I think you're going to love this episode.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, guys, I love you for listening to this show. If you enjoy this show, could you just share it with somebody? That's it. You don't have to go into iTunes and leave a review, although I'd love that—that helps. But tweet it at somebody. Put it in a Facebook group. Text message it to somebody. Just share the show. That's how more people find it. That's how more people subscribe and become part of our community.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is going to sound crazy, but the larger our audience, when I reach out to cool guests like James Altucher, Brian Keating, Carol Roth—some of these really incredible people inside and outside the industry—those numbers matter in getting those guests on the show. These busy people want to spend their time in a place where they're going to reach a broad audience. When I tell them that I have 10,000 plus raving insurance maniacs that are just dying to soak in their information, they love to hear that stuff and it helps us get great guests. That's really the whole deal, guys. So if you could, that'd be awesome.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Also, support our sponsors. They make this show possible. Today's sponsor is Podium. I've talked about Podium a bunch. You've probably heard their name. Maybe you're not sure what they do. It's really comms. It's all about comms—communications. In particular, we use them for text messaging and we use them for our web chat. What I love about the web chat—I've said this many times—is you get almost 100% response rate from inbound chats because people are on their computer or on their phone. They fill out the chat, they ask a question, they tell you they need insurance. And then what happens is, when you respond on your desktop or whatever, it's going back to their cell phone. So now they're getting what looks like a text message to them. That gets almost 100% response rate. If you're doing any kind of inbound or lead capture, 100% response rate is bananas. So big fan of Podium. Love using their tool. You can go check it out on our website right now. See what it looks like. Go to P-O-D-I-U-M. That's Podium. Go to P-O-D-I-U-M.com today. Podium. Podium. Podium.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to also give a big shout out to Donna for Agents. Donna for Agents is changing the data game, changing how you use data, changing how you understand how your customers interact with your business with their sentiment score, their centimeter score. They are tracking in real time based on comms and touch points what's happening with your customers in relation to their interactions with your agency and whether or not those are positive or negative. You can make all kinds of decisions based on what's happening in real time. Nothing against NPS. NPS is great. You should be using NPS. But what sentiment does is take it to a whole other level. It combines NPS with real-time touchpoints. Can't beat it. Go to Donna for Agents. Google Donna for Agents. Go to Donna for Agents. Check out Donna. Get the demo. Whether you use the tool or not today, I highly recommend you know what Donna is doing. They're changing the data game.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: All right. With that, let's get on to Peter McDonald and learn all about Wunderite and data and all kinds of other cool stuff. What's up, man?
--:-- Peter McDonald: Hey, Ryan. How you doing?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Good. Hey, sorry about being a few minutes late here.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Oh, no worries. I had a carrier meeting with one of my favorite carrier guys. It was one of those situations where you're just talking, talking, talking. And then all of a sudden I looked down and I was like, "Oh, we were grabbing breakfast." And I was like, "Oh, I gotta go." So I flew out of the diner and off I came because I didn't want to be late. But obviously I was.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No worries, man. Cool. How have you been and what's the latest on your side? Any update?
--:-- Peter McDonald: Oh, just every day, man. Trying to get one step closer. I know you know that as well as anybody.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's awesome. I'm excited for you. I think it's an exciting time and you got to strike all the irons hot. You don't know what's going to happen to the stock market tomorrow. You don't know what's going to cause somebody to be like, "Oh, I need this money." So when you have people on the line, you got to just get the money in the door and then move on. That's the key.
--:-- Peter McDonald: That's the other thing too. Someone said to me something that I think is an interesting point for startups and really business in general. I was talking to a buddy of mine and I was just goofing around. He said, "Well, where are you trying to get to?" And I said, "Well, world domination." I was just busting chops. Not that that isn't the goal, I guess, but I was just making light. And he got super serious and he looks at me and goes, "Well, what the fuck are you doing then?" I was like, "What?" And he goes, "Why are you fucking around with these?" Because I was asking him a question about something else. He goes, "Why are you even asking me this question then? If your goal is that, then this question is stupid."
--:-- Peter McDonald: It was one of those moments that I didn't expect to be very profound, but was. After I had a chance to sink in exactly what he was saying, it was really honest. I think too often we get hung up in these little details that honestly will have almost no impact. You get hung up on these little details that—if your goal is to be that big, just go get it done and get on to the next thing. Because all that's keeping you from doing is selling the next thing or making the next partnership or whatever. I think I can get hung up on details, especially if it's something that I'm interested in, versus just make a decision and move on. This will not impact where you're trying to go if you actually get where you're going. So just make a decision and move on.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Absolutely. We think about this a lot. We're going to redo our website, not because we want to redo our website, but because we're going to start doing a little bit of marketing. You got a little bit of experience with marketing. We just want to have really clear messaging. We want to make it easy for the team to update the website. We're already getting a lot of organic demos, and we want to convert more as we're ramping up sales. So we're working with our pitch deck designer, who's awesome. He's like, "Here's my price." And we're like, "Great. Let's just do that and move on." We're wiring the money right now. Just move on.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We've hired not one, but three different companies to do appointment setting for us—sales development rep companies. Three of them. We're like, "Let's just hire all three. Let's go for the middle packages instead of the cheap package. We'll just figure out what happens. We'll decide from there because you'll have data to go with." I think part of having raised venture capital is you basically have a mandate to go do this. You raise this money based on your plan. You now have to go execute. Our lead investor, he'll frequently tell us, "You guys don't have time to be thinking about this stuff. Just keep going. Just keep moving. Don't waste time on these small things."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's a thought that I think a lot of people—especially a lot of the Main Street agents that are listening to this—and I didn't mean that in a negative context, so please don't take it that way. But when you're showing up to a business that's been around for 10, 20 years and you have a process and this is what you're doing, and maybe it's your legacy or you're carrying on the tradition—that idea of "you don't have time" is not even a concept that I think enters people's minds. For many people in the independent agency space, all they have is time. It's like, "We have all the time in the world. We can take three months to make this decision. We can take three years to make this decision. And we're still going to make money. The business is still going to be here. We're still going to have customers."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you're trying to grow—and again, I'm learning these lessons, you're way ahead of me, so I feel like I'm preaching to the choir, but I'm also interested in your take—that concept of "we don't have time" is foreign. What is that? Has it always made sense to you? Was it something you learned? How do you deal with that concept? Like, "We don't have time. We have to grow. We can't dick around with these little things. We gotta go."
--:-- Peter McDonald: Yeah. I think honestly, this comes back to something I learned when I was working with my dad at the family agency. Loved working with my dad. It was a great experience. I could still be doing it today and be doing very well financially. But I realized that the risk profile of building or running an independent insurance agency, especially when it's been around for a while, versus building something that you think is different and has a chance, but also has a chance to not be successful—the risk profile is just very, very different. It can be hard to be working in an organization that has one risk profile and you're trying to do something totally different. That was like, "I have to do this separately from my dad because it's just too different."
--:-- Peter McDonald: I think it's okay for some organizations that their timeframe is different. It's just kind of like, what is it you're trying to do? For an insurance agency, if you're growing at 10%, that's pretty good. There are agencies that are growing faster than that, and there are agencies that are milking business and losing a little bit of business every year. But with a startup, you need to be doubling every couple of months. Never mind 10% growth. You need to do more than 10% growth per month. It's just not even in the cards. Otherwise, you shouldn't be out raising venture capital because it's a different game.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So what is this startup that you keep referencing? What are you talking about? You're kind of... Wunderite?
--:-- Peter McDonald: Yeah. So are we starting this or what, Ryan?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. We've been going since the beginning.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Okay. So Wunderite. What is Wunderite? What are we doing? High level, I grew up in the industry like you. I'm loyal to the industry. Lobbied in DC with Big I and our friend Jason Kass and others. I'm very loyal to it, but I knew that it could be so much better. I think right now, every aspect of my life has this friendly aspect—from paying friends with Venmo to Uber and Lyft for rides. It's just easy. You can click a button and have something delivered to your door, if not tomorrow, potentially today or over the weekend. I think that today, a majority of property casualty insurance in this country is still sold through independent insurance agencies. You think that's true, Ryan?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, it's true in commercial lines. It is not true in personal lines, but yes.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Okay. And therefore, since a lot of these agencies are kind of on the smaller side, and you're using the tools at your disposal, a majority of insurance in this country begins its life on a yellow legal pad.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think that's a fair point. Yep.
--:-- Peter McDonald: So I've been an agent, licensed for 10 years, worked as an agent for seven years, talked with hundreds and hundreds of agencies and agency owners. And that's what I find to be true. If you really get down to it, you talk to the feet on the ground, boots on the ground producer, when they begin their process, it starts with a yellow legal pad, a PDF, or something like that.
--:-- Peter McDonald: With Wunderite, what we wanted to do is make an easier way to capture the data that you need from your customers. Make it super easy—whether it's a yellow legal pad, an insurance application, a supplemental, an Acord, a statement of values, an Excel spreadsheet—just make that much easier to collect one time, enrich it with third party data so you don't have to ask all these annoying questions, and also make it work on any device so you could work from your iPhone or your tablet. Then when you're back in the office, your account manager already has that info they need. And if you need to follow up with your customer, you just click a button, they get a quick link to open up, and they can answer questions very quickly rather than doing this back and forth with email and phone calls. "Hey, the underwriter asked me this follow up question." That's kind of big picture what Wunderite does today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So form software as a base idea, to a certain extent. Data collection. Is it customer facing? Is it just internal facing? Talk me through some of the use case scenarios because I think what you described is a major problem for a lot of agencies.
--:-- Peter McDonald: You probably know better than I do, Ryan. I was looking at your podcast. You've interviewed everyone from James Altucher to Pat Costello, Jason Liu. You've interviewed everybody. Every independent agency, they're independent for a reason. They like to do things their own way. Some agents probably would never want to have their customers logging on and touching their stuff and being customer facing. Some agents, that's all they want to do. So when we've approached software, we're like, "What do our customers want?" And then build it to allow them to do it their way. If your way is, "No, 100%, I want to pass this off to my customer. I'm actually not even legally allowed to fill in an application because we're not going to do that at this agency." That's cool. If you want to pass off to your customer, that's fine. If you want to do it 100% internally and not share it with your customer, that's fine as well. It's up to the agency to choose.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I like that. One of the reasons that I think the yellow legal pad, napkin, write it on the inside of your forearm has worked for so long is just for that reason. The business comes in different ways and we've never had a good mechanism to collect all the different ways. Sometimes someone calls us. Sometimes we meet them on the golf course. Sometimes your mom sends you a text message and says, "Hey, you need to call your cousin Susie because she's buying a home." You have all these different mechanisms.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things that Seth Zaremba and the Neon project—three years ago when he was talking about this—he made a big point about this topic. How do you make all that information more uniform and usable? That is such a big problem. When I get a call on my yellow legal pad, I ask for this information. But when you get a call, you only ask for this information. So now when we go to our agency management system or whatever we use to collect the data and we're hand typing it in, you have gaps in this field and gaps in this field. Someone said to me the other day that one of their KPIs for their CSRs—and I apologize that there's a laugh in my voice, I don't mean this to be derogatory—one of the KPIs for their CSRs was to collect email addresses. As a byproduct of that statement, you have to assume that means that they haven't collected email addresses. I was like, "Oh my God, how is there ever a human being who goes into your system that you don't have an email address for?" But it's because you're going through the yellow legal pad and you just don't ask for it. So is that part of it? Helping unify the way that we collect information?
--:-- Peter McDonald: I think there's certainly a tremendous opportunity there. My own insurance agency, when I was working there, it was 22 people. Everybody had their own kind of way of doing business and their own way of asking their questions. When I was the young guy, I was like, "Hey, somebody just called about getting insurance for their boat. I have no idea what to ask him or her." So over time, I would make these lists of 20 questions that I could ask somebody. That would give me 95% of what I need, and I could get this stuff done in like five minutes.
--:-- Peter McDonald: The unification, or the standardization across an agency, is definitely an opportunity for efficiency. It's a byproduct of using a tool like this, but it's not the goal. The goal for me was just like, "What is the tool that I always kind of wanted as a millennial salesperson?" And I think it's telling—the email thing. I wouldn't be surprised if you surveyed agencies across the country today and you said, "Hey, look at your existing book of business. How many emails do you have?" It probably is not anywhere close to 100% or even 60%.
--:-- Peter McDonald: We had an intern one summer at our insurance agency. He literally called every single customer of ours—thousands and thousands of personal insurance customers—to tell them, "Hey, you now have access to an online portal where you can log on and view your info. All you need to do, you're going to get an email, just hit the accept button." The responses that some of these customers gave us was like, "Why the fuck are you calling me? Don't call this number. Click..." We love to think that people love us and we're great. I think the majority of customers have great relationships, but people don't want to be bothered. So it's not surprising. It's almost to be expected. That's why I think it's so hard to replace pen and paper, because it's the easy tool that everybody has at their disposal. It turns out it's really hard to build software that can actually be easier than a pen and a paper.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think I would rather have someone's email than their name. I care less about their name than I do their email address. I don't know, that's just me. But what are you going to do when you do the mail merge? It's like, "Hi, friend." Or, "Hey, insert first name."
--:-- Peter McDonald: Exactly. Millennium Falcon.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So how do you do that then? You said it's really hard to replace pen and paper. How do you do that? What's the method? You guys are well-funded, fast-growing, highly covered, coveted insurtech company in our space. You obviously have an idea that people believe in, which is amazing. So as much as you can, what is the methodology behind that? How are you starting to do that in a way that agents that are listening to this can get excited about?
--:-- Peter McDonald: It's a great question. I think it's one of the key questions we're asking ourselves right now, because the sales thing is going well. When we talk to agencies, they get really excited. We've heard things like, "I've dreamed about this kind of software. I'm drooling over this. This is what I tried to build using a combination of Excel and PowerPoint. And this just makes it easy and intuitive the way I would expect."
--:-- Peter McDonald: One of the painful lessons we have—in fact, my product manager messaged me on Slack at 10 o'clock last night. One of the tools we have is a tool that records the customer's screen when they're using the software. It makes everything anonymous, so it turns everything into asterisks. You couldn't see a name or phone number. It's all anonymized. But you can literally watch where the person's moving their mouse and where they're clicking. Sometimes it's painful to watch your customers struggle. We're doing the right things. We're analyzing how people are using the software. But you see somebody who's trying to use the software, they're logging on, they're using it for five to seven minutes, and you're like, "Yeah, no wonder pen and paper is easier."
--:-- Peter McDonald: It's the same thing I experienced as an agent. Trying to fill out an Adobe Acrobat PDF that's fillable versus filling out with pen and paper—it's literally faster to do pen and paper. I know I'm not going to accidentally delete it because I have it there in front of me. So we spent a lot of time thinking about how do we onboard new customers? How do we implement software with new customers? How do we track their engagement? And how do we make the software so easy that it's your first time using the software—maybe you've been around the business for a few decades—and it doesn't need an instruction manual that's a thousand pages thick like software of old. It just kind of makes sense. We are extremely focused on that. We're on a journey. We're not perfect. But that's kind of the goal. It has to be super easy to use software. That's the only way it's going to make it easier than pen and paper.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So the use cases. I get a phone call and it's a new potential client and I want to collect the necessary information to give them a quote. I would have one to write up as a tab, right? I would click open a new account and I would be typing as I was talking. Or maybe just talk me through some of the tactical pieces of it. Particularly when we have products on—people who are building products like you are—I like to, as much as you can, make it tangible for the listeners so they can kind of see themselves using it. I think that really helps them get a feel for what you're building and how it could fit into their day-to-day operation.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Absolutely. To do that, let's just talk about what people are doing today. Maybe you are filling out some sort of an application on a PDF. Maybe you've done it on a computer. Maybe you've printed it out and then you've scanned it. And now you're like, "Oh, I need to get a few more questions answered from Ryan." So you put it in an email as an attachment and you send it off to Ryan. What happens when Ryan gets that email and there's a PDF attached that says, "Hey, please complete this form and get it back to me"? You got to print it out. It's terrible.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Ryan's like, "Yeah, I'll get to that later today. I'm out at breakfast with a friend." Later today, all of a sudden claims are popping up and things are happening in your day. That's not top of mind because you didn't want to have to deal with trying to open a PDF on your iPhone. So later today becomes later tomorrow. Then a fire pops up somewhere. All of a sudden it's a week and your agent is reaching back out to you. "Hey, Ryan, can you please—we really need to get this done in order to get your thing marketed on time."
--:-- Peter McDonald: A week goes by. You finally download it, but the form's not fillable. So now you print it off, but your printer's not working, or it's out of ink, or the paper's gone. Finally, you print it off. You're looking through the application. By the way, you probably don't know how to answer the questions. So now you maybe want to hop on the phone to ask your agent, "How do I answer these questions anyway?" It's not tracking all that stuff. Finally, you kind of scribble in some answers. You take a picture with your phone because you don't even want to try and figure out how your scanner works. You email it back to your agent. It's taken you a week. It's taken you the frustration of dealing with multiple tools.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Then the agent gets it and is happy. He sends it to the underwriter, maybe fills it in himself or herself digitally. Then the underwriter is like, "Hey, you left question seven blank. Or you answered yes to this question. Can you elaborate?" And you're like, "Ah, crap." And you gotta go back to the customer. "Yes, they do this thing." Go back to the underwriter. "Oh, okay, they do this thing. Can you give me even more detail?" And you're like, "This is a waste of time." That's kind of how the process works a little bit today.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Now imagine Ryan's out walking his dog. I've pre-filled an application on Wunderite—almost like using Adobe Acrobat. I can fill it in on the PDF. I can fill it in on the web form. And now I can just say, "Oh, there's four questions I need Ryan to answer." I select those four questions and I can send them to Ryan. Ryan gets an email. He clicks on this link, brings him right into the application. He doesn't even see the PDF. He just sees four questions and that's it. Yes, no, maybe 100%—hits done. Now I get a notification. "Hey, Ryan logged on. Ryan finished the application." I'm happy. If Ryan had questions, he could put a question in the form. Not only are we saving all that data in a structured, reusable format to your earlier point about how to make that data standardized and valuable, but it's also filling out the PDF. So I can now use that to print off whatever application I'm working on.
--:-- [Discussion continues...]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: 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, or 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 have 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, and 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 of this show. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I like that. I like that a lot. Especially, that happens a lot in telephone sales. You're talking to the person, you gather as much information as you think you need, and then you didn't realize that a roofer in West South Dakota needs this extra question about whatever. Then you have to make another phone call or hope they respond to an email. I like that a lot. That's pretty cool. So basically what they get is their user experience is just a website or a portal, I guess you could say.
--:-- Peter McDonald: It's a website, yeah.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: With the questions that are necessary. They hit submit, they're done. And on the back end, I'm getting all the information I need. Now I have it all collected in one place without sending them the whole thing for them to scan through. I have one customer right now who nitpicks every word on the application. I'm just like, we're not even answering that question because it doesn't apply to you. That's pretty cool. So are you guys kind of mapping to Acords today? How does that work?
--:-- Peter McDonald: Yeah, Acords was one of our core objectives. I think back to one of your earlier questions about how we think about doing all this stuff as a startup versus a traditional business. One of the things we do is we make quarterly objectives. One of our objectives for this quarter, ending quarter three of 2021, was getting Acord forms on Wunderite. By the end of the month, we'll have 15 of the top Acord forms, 125 to 130 kinds of things on Wunderite.
--:-- Peter McDonald: When I look at it, Ryan, one of the reasons I created Wunderite is I just hated filling those out so much when I was a producer. I think it's the best experience in the industry for Acords. It's still not perfect. There are some things we had to delay on the engineering side to get this objective achieved because Acords are kind of funny. You look at a two or four page 125, it has 550 fields on it. The amount of data on there is insane. It turns out there's just some complexity to making this thing so intuitive and easier than filling out a printed Acord. But yeah, we have Acords on there and that will continue to grow. I think there are about 850 Acords in total. Some have been deprecated over the years. When you talk to agencies and agency owners, there are probably 10 to 20 Acords that people use all the time. The rest are like, there are 50 varieties of the work comp form, one for every state, or there's this random endorsement that one person needed at one point but isn't used very frequently. It's the 80/20 rule—80% comes from 20% of the forms.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Will carrier supplementals be on the roadmap down the road?
--:-- Peter McDonald: Carrier supplementals actually came before Acords. We already have them. Part of our onboarding process is, we say, "Hey, send me your 10 forms or 20 forms that you use most frequently." If we don't already have them in our forms library, we will digitize them as part of onboarding.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's pretty cool because those supplementals are where you get crushed. Most agency management systems can map at least some of the information in a very poor way, but those supplementals—there's no way to map the info. Maybe they're fillable, but that's a big-time tech upgrade when you get the fillable ones. Then you're printing it out and writing down answers, and the underwriter can't understand your handwriting. I always say, there are parts of our business where I have to have respect for where we came from, but the fact that we got here is a miracle to me in some cases.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So, you sit in an interesting nexus from my perspective. You have this agency background—your dad had an agency or still has an agency.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Still has it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So you're well-versed in where we've come from and how a traditional standard agency operates. But now you're building for helping standard agencies evolve as well as more digital-focused agencies, giving them the tools they need to grow. I'm interested in where you see the big wins. Beyond the one you're attacking, which you saw and are efforting on, where are some of the big wins in our space going to come from? I look at Next Insurance getting A-rated on AM Best this week. I've been talking about Next for like two years because no one believed me. They all thought it was crap paper. AM Best just gave them an A-. You can say whatever you want. AM Best just gave them an A-. It's legit paper and they're not going anywhere. That business model is one of the things coming down the pipe for us. What else do you see?
--:-- Peter McDonald: Anybody who's been around in the industry for a long time has probably heard a lot of things like "this is the end of the independent agent" or "this carrier is going to dominate everybody." Insurance is actually driven by economics. Liberty Mutual is an enormous insurance carrier, but it's a fraction of a fraction of the market share. We're big believers in the independent insurance agent model. We bet our business on it and don't think that's going away at all. I just think insurance agencies need better tools. For too long, our tools haven't made us look professional. They haven't accentuated all the great work. You talk about the human element—insurance agents do a fantastic job on the human element and the relationship. One of the hard questions, and I know it's a question you're probably asking yourself, is how does that human element scale? I think the answer is we need better tools to do our job. That's where we see a lot of opportunity.
--:-- Peter McDonald: What if you could make every insurance carrier look like a Next or every insurance carrier look like an Openly? Make all insurance carriers easy to interface with, even if the carrier themselves hasn't been able to digitize as quickly as you'd hope. That's where there's opportunity. With Wunderite, not only are we filling out forms, but we're enriching data. If you give us your address, we pull in 170 data points. If you give us your vehicle identification number, we pull in 50 data points. There's all this extra data we're pulling in to help agencies get data to their carriers. I think there's a big opportunity for independent agents in general to have more intuitive digital workflows.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Where on the scale of importance to an agent—not a fully digital one, but an agent trying to position themselves for the future—how important is data? This is a question I get quite a bit. An agency that's maybe second generation, started out more traditional, and is trying to morph to being digital enough to position themselves well for the future. Everyone talks about data. Carriers talk about data. If you want a headline in anything, just put the word "data" in the headline. How important actually is it? How do we use data or position our agencies in a way to use data that can help them be successful? I think agents are lost in the concept. They're like, "I always collected information. What does this mean? What am I getting out of it?"
--:-- Peter McDonald: I think insurance is the original big data industry. Let's start there. You and I are both math majors. Actuarial science was created because of insurance. That has morphed into whether it's called big data, AI, or ML—a lot of that comes from mathematical modeling. There's nothing new under the sun. If you look at Lloyd's of London in the 1800s, they could tell you the weather anywhere in the world and where every ship was at any point in time. They had a tremendous amount of data. Part of this, to your point, is headlines and hype. The reality is we as agents have a lot of good quality data. The key to being successful as an independent agent is to do your job really well—have a lot of good relationships, leverage those relationships to win business and provide business to your carriers.
--:-- Peter McDonald: I don't want to downplay the importance of data. It's super important. For example, do you have every email for every customer? That's an important piece of data. Can you segment your book of business by NAICS code by industry? Could you say, "Show me all my roofing customers" because there's this new thing they have to do because of something in South Dakota? If you don't have that, you're going to be at a disadvantage. I think a lot of agents could, without buying into some of the hype, look at their existing book of business and supplement their customer data. It could probably be pretty valuable.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: There are probably some small wins, some low-hanging fruit. I think that's a really good answer. I completely agree. We have to be cognizant of the data points that actually help our business. The ones you mentioned—email, phone, cell phone number. A key data point is whether your customer is okay being texted. That's important, but we don't think about it. There's no reason to go so far as to be worried about it. Pick the 20% of data points that are going to deliver 80% of the value and just focus on being very good at those. Don't get lost in this wave of...
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I lost you again, Ryan.
--:-- Peter McDonald: You got me now?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I got you now. Okay, so let me ask you some questions. I've kind of been a little bit of a fanboy following you along. You've interviewed a ton of people on your podcast. It's prolific. I think you have a YouTube video on your website for every possible thing you can search on insurance. Any possible question, you've got sound effects, spiffy editing. I think if you go back in time to look up your original "100 Questions in 100 Days" for your New York State Disability Insurance video, there were no sound effects, no spiffiness. I think there's hardly any audio in these videos. Why was that video so influential for you in the early days?
--:-- Peter McDonald: Because it solved a problem for so many people. The point I make in keynotes around that particular video is that you never know which piece of content is going to be the content that changes your life or grows your business. You just have to create them all. I was finding a lot of people trying to cherry-pick the piece of content that was going to change their agency. I was like, "I don't have a clue which piece of content is going to work and which won't." So just create them all.
--:-- Peter McDonald: What happened with that particular video was about six months after I produced it. This was "What is New York State Short Disability?"—which is now New York State Short Disability and Paid Medical Leave. That Paid Medical Leave has been added on as an additional coverage to that policy today, but at the time it wasn't there. It was mandatory in New York State. It's a crappy little policy from the perspective of an agent making any money on it. It's mostly used for pregnant women who run out of days off—they can use that coverage to get some income. One of the major carriers—I think it was Zurich, but it doesn't matter—sent out non-renewal letters. They were getting out of the market. They sent non-renewal letters to every single one of their customers saying, "Upon your renewal, you're going to have to find someone else." Everyone went, "What the hell is this? I don't even know I had this policy." They started Googling it. The term shot up in Google Trends. They started Googling "What is New York State Short-Term Disability?" And who was the only human in the history of the world to ever answer that question online?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think that makes you the original OG YouTube insurance influencer. I feel like since then you've been on this mission to educate and help people reach their peak performance. You've had quite the journey—CMO at two of the most well-known insurance agency orgs. And now you've created this insurance agency. Again, I'm kind of a fanboy. As a business owner, why would I do business with Ryan Hanley?
--:-- Peter McDonald: Our value proposition is ease of business, over-communicating, and education. If you go look at our Google reviews—we're a startup like you guys, so there are parts of my business that operate the way I'd like and parts that don't yet. But what I'm proud of so far is that when you look at our Google reviews, the people who leave positive reviews always talk about communication, education, and taking the time that other people wouldn't take with them. That's why I focus on small business. I believe that too often organizations of all types who sell insurance see a small business come in and say, "That's not profitable for whatever reason," and they just try to plow that person through a process or completely disregard them.
--:-- Peter McDonald: What I tell my team and bang them over the head with is: I don't care if their premium is $872 or $87,200. You answer their questions. You teach. You take the time to solve their problems. They're people. They're small business owners, particularly in this time when they're literally under attack by our federal government. Help these people solve their problems. That's why they came to us. You never know who is the son, niece, uncle, or nephew of some woman who owns the biggest whatever in her town. They'll hear about how great their experience was, and now you're going to get her business too. That's philosophically what we try to do. From a user experience perspective, we try to be incredibly easy. We're 100% virtual. We do everything online, so we make it very easy for you to purchase your insurance.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Every class I've gone to in insurance, they all say segment your book, 80/20 analysis, trade down accounts. You want to work on the fattest accounts, the biggest commissions. What I'm hearing from you is almost the opposite. It's like, "Hey, look, smallest accounts, spend the time." How does that scale? How are you scaling that at your business?
--:-- Peter McDonald: That's the technology that we have to build, which is why I'm doing the seed round. What we're missing is a universal sorting mechanism for our agency. The reason people don't niche down is because they don't have the technology. They have to work off brainpower. When an account comes in and it's a roofer in Texas, if you don't know where that goes, there are too many brain cycles to figure it out. So you throw it on the floor. The only people who know where roofers in Texas go are insurance agents who are in Texas who write roofers. They know the market. But what happens if you're a national agency trying to write that business? You can make it unprofitable by trying to have Tommy or Sally or Jimmy or Tammy figure it out every time, or you can build a piece of technology that allows them to easily sort. What we're essentially working on is a revenue-driving version of Ivans, I guess you could say.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So knowing your backstory, your ambition, Rogue Risk is just the beginning. You have big plans. It sounds like it's a revenue-driving version of Ivans.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Yeah. What I'm trying to do is save costs on things like building direct integration. I don't want to be a comparative rater—they exist. We love Tarmika. We work with RT Connector. We work with Pathpoint. I don't want to be the final destination. We're in the layer in between. Business comes in—I don't care what way it comes in. We sort it. We get it to the market it needs to go. That frees my people up to have the time to answer questions, solve problems, develop the relationship, and close the business. Then I have an entire team on the backend working through a series of triggers from a service perspective.
--:-- Peter McDonald: To answer your question about the 80/20 rule, I believe in the 80/20 rule. I just say "fuck the 80/20 rule" for what I'm trying to do. The reason I say that is because everybody else lives by the 80/20 rule, which means I'm going to go the other way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love it.
--:-- Peter McDonald: If everyone's going to do the easy stuff, right? I look at our competitors in the market. Our competitors are AP Intego, Bold Penguin, Lair, CoverWallet. They do the easy stuff really well. I can't knock a single one of them on how good they are at doing the easy stuff. You know what? I do the hard stuff easy too. The reason for that is today, I don't have someone telling me "this isn't profitable for this reason, scale, scale, scale." I don't have that yet. Maybe someday I will. Hopefully I'm at a point where my business model proves that I don't have to do both. I just look at the industry and creating another version of one of those companies is not interesting to me. I see why they did it. I know why they did it. It's super easy on a regression analysis and some MBA class to look at it and go, "If they process everything through and no one touches it, it's low cost." The difference is they get their business through Google Ads and high cost of acquisition methodologies that forces them to do that. That's not how we operate because I'm an SEO savant.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's not true.
--:-- Peter McDonald: I'm just an idiot with a camera who gets up too early and decides to do videos instead of other things. Because of that, we're able to build a layer of inbound traffic that is essentially free. We're going to write an account today that's $100,000 in premium. It came in through my website. We worked the account. It took two or three weeks. We will not meet this company in person. We will bind that business and we will service that business.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love it.
--:-- Peter McDonald: I believe in the serendipitous nature of the world. It's the only reason I'm here. If I then go to screw the small people, pass them through, only work on the big accounts, I am literally going against the core concept that has essentially driven every ounce of success I have: just treat people as well as you possibly can as often as you possibly can, regardless of their situation. That's my business methodology. It probably will never be published in one of the books that future MBAs will read, but it's how we live and breathe.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It's funny because it's actually already published in one of the most famous MBA books of all time: disruptive innovation. If everybody is moving upscale to the bigger and bigger fishes, that's where the competition becomes. If you can go the opposite direction and target the things that no one else is targeting, there's enormous opportunity. The question is how you execute on that. That's the challenge. I love your passion around it. I know that if you're focused on this every day, getting up early, you're going to be successful at it. If everyone's going upstream and you're focused on the small and non-standard, no one else is looking at it. Forget about the 80/20 rule. I love the passion. That's awesome.
--:-- Peter McDonald: Whoever wrote that must have been listening to the podcast. Clay Christensen.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Anyway, I know exactly. I've heard him on Alistair's podcast before, and he said that. Frankly, that is the big part of it. I don't think—and you probably feel the same way—there are other companies that have either started ahead of you or are in their fourth round of funding doing things that, if put into a box, would categorize you around them. You're fighting a fight. You're the newcomer on the block. I think the worst thing we can do, unless your role is going to be to simply out-execute people—which is just as hard in my opinion—is to just be different. To literally look and say, "For better or for worse, that path is already way too worn for there to be a huge upside. It might make me fall off a cliff if I go this way, but at least I'll have a good story."
--:-- Peter McDonald: My dad always said, "Hey Peter, there's music inside of you. You can't go to the grave without trying to get that music out." I feel like for me, success is maybe Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's self-actualization. It's executing on my vision. I've always wanted to build something on my own. I've always wanted to challenge myself to execute on these ideas. That's what I'm doing with my company. It's the best thing I could possibly be doing. It's what I have to be doing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that, man. I'm so happy for you. I think some people see men and women like yourself who are trying to build something out of nothing. People have said this about me, so maybe it's the same for you. It's not about getting a huge exit or a great press release or being on the cover. All those things are awesome. I'm not denying that. But it's like why you go to the gym. You're not going to... It's just, "How good can I be?" That's all. That's what Rogue is for me. Rogue is not about how much I sell for or how many policies, although those things matter. I want to know how good I can be so that someday when I hang them up, I can go, "You know what? That's how good I was. I couldn't have been any better." Wherever that falls on the rankings, that's as good as I can be. That's all I want to know. I just want to see how good I can be. I think it is very difficult to find that out in most situations where the buck doesn't stop with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I feel like that's the most compelling reason I'd want to do business with Rogue Risk. If I'm an entrepreneur, I want to work with a person who looks at his business and says, "How good can I be?" It's not about the numbers, although I track them because I have to know the numbers. For everybody else, we live in an M&A marketplace. It's "What's the EBITDA? What's this? What's that? What are the multiples?" At some point it's a numbers game. If I'm working with someone who's like, "How good can I be?" That's amazing. I love the passion. Dude, I appreciate you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So where can people get at you guys? Go get the demo, check it out. I think Wunderite is doing awesome things. I know a ton of people in the space who have checked you guys out and were very enamored by what's going on. Where can they get at you and where can they get a demo from Wunderite?
--:-- Peter McDonald: Connect with our sales team. Go to wunderite.com—W-U-N-D-E-R-I-T-E. You can call 888-WUNDERITE. I know one of the reasons you got Rogue Risk is because the domain was available. We've been kind of scrappy trying to find domains and phone numbers. That was a fun milestone for us recently. You can call 888-108. You can go to our website, just hit "Request Demo." Our sales guys are awesome. They're both insurance industry veterans, so you'll be chatting with peers. It'll be a lot of fun.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Awesome, dude. Appreciate you. Appreciate you coming on the show. Nothing but the best. Love it. Thanks, Ryan.
--:-- [Closing advertisement]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Close twice as many deals by this time next week. Sound impossible? It's not. With the One Call Close System, you'll stop chasing leads and start closing deals in one call. This is the exact method we used to close 1,200 clients in under three years during the pandemic. No fluff, no endless follow-ups, just results fast. Based in behavioral psychology and battle-tested, the One Call Close System eliminates excuses and gets the prospect saying "yes" more than you ever thought possible. If you're ready to stop losing opportunities and start winning, visit masteroftheclose.com. That's masteroftheclose.com. Do it today.
