--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous conversation with Mark McClure, the founder and CEO of CommercialInsurance.net, a tremendous resource for agencies looking to supplement their lead generation with high-quality live phone call transfer leads. Full disclosure, I'm not an investor, not an advisor, not a sponsor of the show, just a company that we use a lot.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I really like Mark and the way that he approaches his business. We've had a tremendous experience with CommercialInsurance.net as far as using it to supplement our standard inbound lead referral and everything we do day to day. We use it to get some live phone call transfers in targeted industries and targeted states. We found it to be an incredibly useful tool in creating consistency in our revenue and premium production.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I wanted to get Mark on. I've been trying to get him on for a long time. You'll hear us chat about that. Both of our schedules have been so busy. I just wanted to put this tool in front of you guys. That's why I do the show. I like to get high-quality tools and resources in front of you. CommercialInsurance.net is definitely one of those tools that I highly recommend. Hopefully you will enjoy this conversation.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, before we get there, I want to go through my standard shout out. I love you guys for listening to this show. It means so much to me. These days with Rogue Risk, I have been incredibly busy. There's more things to do day to day than I could ever possibly get done. However, this show and sharing these conversations is really important to me. I love growing the show. I love building our audience because more people get exposed to these ideas and concepts. It helps move our industry forward. I think this show is one small piece of the larger movement of moving our industry to its full potential.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think all the conversations happening today are continuing to move our industry to its full potential, which is not just the bedrock of business and our day-to-day lives, but ultimately a mechanism for growth, for career development, for satisfaction and purpose in people's lives, creating sustainability and profitability in small businesses throughout our country, as well as protecting our people's personal assets. That's what we do. These conversations help do that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My ask to you is that if you enjoy this show, whether it's this episode or others, share the show. Text it to somebody, share it on Facebook, social media, email your friends, share it in a newsletter if you have one. That's how we grow the show. If you ever want to give feedback, LinkedIn is the best place right now. Go to LinkedIn, DM me. I check the DMs a lot. Instagram is another good one. For those of you that follow me on Instagram, I got hacked recently. That was terrible. But since fixed that issue, now back in business. Instagram is another great place to connect with me as well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would love if you share the show. I would love if you leave a rating and review on iTunes. That helps a lot too. Guys, I appreciate you. I love you for listening to this show. Let's get on to Mark. How you doing? What's going on, man?
--:-- Mark McClure: How are you?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm well.
--:-- Mark McClure: I'm well. I'm back in Oklahoma.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Nice. Is it a good change from the ocean and the sun?
--:-- Mark McClure: I love Oklahoma. It is a great state. Nice people. My kids were happy to see their friends. When they're happy, I'm happy. I like the ocean personally, but they're both good spots.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. It's nice that you can get away like that and make it kind of a work thing too.
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah, for sure.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Cool. Well, dude, I'm excited to connect with you. I know it's been a long time coming. We had that chat the other day, but just in general, happy to connect.
--:-- Mark McClure: Same here. Same here.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Cool. Well, we'll get into it here. I think I've mentioned you guys a bunch of times on the show. We've been using CommercialInsurance.net off and on since 2020.
--:-- Mark McClure: Awesome.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Only ever off because of staffing issues, not ever because we weren't happy with the service. Mostly just at different times, I've been the only producer and just wasn't able to take the calls. That was a problem I was running into. Then I had a producer at one time too, and for some reason they're not with us anymore. So that was really why there were larger issues there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Not that I want this to be an advertisement, I don't mean it to be. I just have a bunch of things I want to talk to you about. To give everyone listening at home some background, how we use the tool today is really as a part of the onboarding of new producers. To get them up and running, to get them opportunities right away, get them on the phone, see what they can do, prove their mettle. Like, "Hey, we're going to get you some calls. We're going to get you in front of some business owners. We're going to get them to you right away. Let's see what you can do." That has worked pretty well for us. That's what we're doing today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I would love to give everyone background. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your origin story. You're the superhero of commercial transfers. There's a lot of good people out there, but thank you. At what point did you get bit by the radioactive spider? How did all this happen?
--:-- Mark McClure: I started my first company, Traffic Strategies, back in 2000. I just graduated from the University of Oklahoma. My dad was running a company by the name of Flowers Direct. It was just when the flower industry was taking off. I started studying SEO, became really good at SEO, and built a search engine optimization company. But I frankly couldn't sell my way out of a paper bag. Fortunately, my dad recognized that and introduced me to a guy by the name of Chad Jakeways, who became my partner back in 2001.
--:-- Mark McClure: We grew an SEO company in South Florida. We built a lot of the solutions for Office Depot, Thompson Cigar, and a lot of South Florida companies. Throughout that journey, we recognized that we could make more money becoming an affiliate. We discovered affiliate marketing. This was about the time Commission Junction takes off, 2002, 2003. LinkShare Corporation. We were also a super affiliate. We just started building proprietary websites and got really good at search marketing and affiliate marketing. Frankly, just introducing customers to businesses, whether in the retail space or the dating space.
--:-- Mark McClure: By 2004, the mortgage level really started to take off. We got into financial services and rode that wave. By 2007, we were selling about 75,000 leads a month to American Express, Chase Credit Cards, Lending Tree, Countrywide Mortgage. We met a group by the name of Rakuten. At the time, they had just acquired LinkShare Corporation a year prior for $452 million, which was a significant premium over what Commission Junction sold for just a year prior. We recognized that this would be the company we want to sell our business to, Traffic Strategies.
--:-- Mark McClure: We only had nine people and we were having a lot of fun. Fortunately, we had the opportunity to sell our business in May of 2007 to Rakuten. It became the lead generation platform for Rakuten. Our company, Traffic Strategies, joined those guys in May of 2007. Then everybody knows what happened in 2008, the mortgage fallout and the whole financial world collapsed.
--:-- Mark McClure: Throughout the journey, we developed a skill at generating online leads and introducing them to companies, no matter what industry they were in. During our earn-out process, I'm an entrepreneur. I'd never worked for anybody in my life other than picking up range balls in high school at the local golf range. I threw up the earn-out. I had about 18 months to think about what I wanted to do next.
--:-- Mark McClure: A couple of our customers at Traffic Strategies at the time were Esurance, in the personal lines insurance space, as well as Insurance.com. When we were generating leads and traffic for that group, Chad and I, and also Kim Reid who's with us again today, we would stumble upon these commercial insurance leads. We never picked anybody to buy them. We couldn't figure out why. Part of the problem was Esurance was a personal lines insurance company, so that was a challenge. Insurance.com at least felt like they should have been able to take some of those leads and introduce them to whether they sold the policy or introduce them to maybe a Travelers, Hartford, CNA of the world. But we were not successful.
--:-- Mark McClure: As I finished that journey, I had some cash and was in my late 20s, definitely plenty of arrogance. I thought, "How hard could it be to sell commercial insurance? We just did this massive deal with Rakuten, one of the biggest internet companies in the world. Maybe I should start a commercial insurance agency." I had a non-compete, so I couldn't sell leads anymore for a period of time. I finished my earn-out at the end of 2009, after the mortgage crisis fallout, and started back over in January of 2010.
--:-- Mark McClure: It was a crossroads. I was from Oklahoma. My wife and I had a baby and we wanted to be closer to our family. We relocated back to Oklahoma and hung our shingle. We brought in a partner and he and I started a commercial insurance agency. We got licensed in 50 states in 2010. We were generating all of these leads. We went to get our first appointment and told the whole Rakuten story, which nobody had heard of in the insurance world at the time. They weren't really impressed with that experience or small business insurance, frankly, specifically online.
--:-- Mark McClure: Imagine knocking on doors at Hartford, Travelers, whomever in 2010 saying, "Hey, we're really good at digital marketing. We have all these customers coming in. They want to buy insurance. You guys have policies for them. We're going to sell these policies online without talking to the customer." That would have been easier to bang our head against the concrete curb. Nonetheless, we started selling some policies through some wholesalers. We went ahead and got licensed in 50 states. The first couple of years were rough.
--:-- Mark McClure: We put in about $750,000 in the first year and generated $64,000 in top line revenue. That was not quite the college stride. The next year, we put in another $800,000 and generated about $200,000 in revenue. After two years, we were just completely getting taken out of the woodshed and starting to understand how hard it is to build a commercial insurance agency staffed with insurance agents. Generating leads is in our DNA, so that came naturally. But the first couple of years were pretty tough.
--:-- Mark McClure: Throughout the journey, there was a guy by the name of Brian Lippel over at Travelers who introduced us to Mark Schmetlein, who was running Travelers at the time. I was just about ready to quit and do something different. They flew nine executives out to Norman, Oklahoma. We didn't even have a conference room. There were just four insurance agents in an office on Campus Corner. We told our story. Mark and Brian gave us the confidence to keep going. "Don't give up. You're on this." This was 2012. By 2013, we were cash flow positive. By 2015, we had returned all of our investment and built a small commercial insurance agency.
--:-- Mark McClure: We built our book over the next few years. We probably sold way too many contractors and learned some lessons on how important renewals and cross-selling are. We were really good at generating leads, not so good at service. Customers were coming in the front door and going out the back door just that fast. By 2018, I had a few partners who love the insurance business. I had spent eight years building this agency with 50 salespeople and service people. It just wasn't the size of a company that I had dreamt it might be. I wanted to get back into the leads business.
--:-- Mark McClure: I had the opportunity to divest all of the insurance assets. I sold the insurance book along with all of the insurance producers, service team members, and even some accounting members over to a middle market brokerage who needed a small business insurance unit. I retained all of the digital assets. I started back over in the fall of 2018 with about $190,000 a month in revenue, a couple million dollars annually, from just selling the leads that we were not selling insurance with. We were essentially cherry-picking the leads when we had the insurance agency and then selling all of the overflow, the bounce houses, excess and surplus policies that either we didn't have expertise in or maybe would not renew.
--:-- Mark McClure: I started back over in 2018. We had about 15 people on the digital marketing side. I reached out to my buddy, Chad Jakeways. He had a number of startups and was back at Rakuten and built out their search marketing team. I convinced him to get the band back together. Chad and I got back together in January of 2019. We were doing just under a couple hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue. First year, we finished at $5 million in revenue selling leads. We built out a real-time bidding platform for a lead exchange. We had about 5,000 leads a month that we started with and ended that year at about $5 million in revenue. We were cash flow positive.
--:-- Mark McClure: The next year, we did $10 million. COVID hit in March of 2020, so that was a bit of a challenge. Last year, it just took off for us again. We finished the year at $24 million in revenue and are on track to do about $43 million this year. Our business today, bread and butter, is introducing small businesses to insurance agents, brokers, and carriers throughout the country.
--:-- Mark McClure: What probably makes us unique is lead generation is in our DNA, but also running a commercial insurance agency for eight years and understanding that all leads are not good leads for everybody, especially if you don't have a market, even if the lead is free. That experience gives us a competitive advantage in the space and understanding how important it is to make sure, from a customer experience standpoint, you're introducing customers to somebody that can help them. But secondly, our customer is also the agent or broker or carrier that's purchasing the call, and we want to make sure that they have a market for this risk. If not, we allow them to return it, and we try to place them elsewhere.
--:-- Mark McClure: We also offer inbound telemarketing services, which a lot of insurance companies use for capacity challenges. Whether you have a smaller insurance agency with a couple agents or even these large carriers that have a couple hundred agents, staffing licensed insurance agents to work the amount of traffic that we can generate is a challenge. We even struggled with it when we were running our agency. Through that, we've built these capacity solutions that allow us to be on the front lines of many insurance carriers.
--:-- Mark McClure: The customer will call in. We might answer the phone on behalf of the carrier. We try to make sure that they have a market before we put a caller in the hands of the insurance agent. If they don't have a market, then we will match them with one of our other 200-plus agents or brokers that can help them. It's beneficial for everybody. It's a better customer experience. Why send them to a carrier that doesn't even have a market for them? They may be told, "We don't have a market. You're not big enough. You have too many claims." Nobody wants to hear this. We try to match them with somebody that can help them. It's also a bad agent experience to spend even 10 minutes explaining why you can't help somebody. It's a waste of everybody's time and it's just negative energy. We remove that friction. It generates incremental income for the carrier and frees them up to spend more time with the customers that they actually have a market for.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Lead triage is such an important part of the equation. What's funny is we don't generate anything near the volume that you do, but on our own, we do a decent amount. Lead triage is the hardest part of it. You can be as targeted and keyword optimized and SEM optimized as you want, but you're going to get stuff that doesn't fit what you're looking for. You simply can't help. Every minute that you spend on the phone or dealing with an account that you just know you can't help, as much as you want to be good to people and not blow them off because that's negativity you don't need in the world, it crushes your bottom line. It also crushes the morale of people.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you're sending leads to somebody and they get excited, they see a lead come in, they call that person, and they find out it's a dynamite manufacturer on the coast in a stick-built building that also has forest fires next door, that just crushes their soul. When that starts happening over and over again, they feel defeated. They don't want to pick up the phone. They don't want to make these calls. That's how you burn out a sales force or a service force. I really like your point about making sure that only the leads that you want to write or can write get to you. That is a huge part of the equation. You can have 500 leads, but if you have to sift through them to get to the 100 that you can actually write, those 400 leads are going to kill you. They're going to destroy your business.
--:-- Mark McClure: That's why we lost so much money in the beginning. We were able to make it through, but we had some really good friends who were kind enough to give us a pat on the back to keep going. It's challenging, it's expensive, and it is negative energy.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I know we currently, I'm for sure not your biggest seller, but we sell. We've started the back-end process in our system where we're pushing leads back to you guys. Then you can push them out to the markets and the agents and the carriers that actually can write certain lines that we either don't have the in-house expertise for, don't have the markets for, or for whatever reason have decided it's not a place that we want to be. Trucking is a good example. I think there's always a huge opportunity in trucking. We get a lot of truckers because they see the stuff that we do around commercial auto, so they'll reach out. We just don't have the in-house expertise to be a trucking firm. So exposure there for sure.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You guys provide us with a good outlet to say, "Hey, unfortunately we're not a good fit, but we're going to send you over here. Call this phone number, go to this website, and they'll get you all squared away." Then people are happy. They're just looking for a solution. I think a lot of agents get hung up on the idea that because I can't help you, you're going to be mad at me. These people called you because they're looking for a solution. If you're willing to say to them, "I'm not the solution, but I'm going to send you to the person that is," that makes them way happier than you trying to fumble around and figure out some program and it takes 10 weeks to get them insurance because you're not really an expert in it. That's the worst case scenario. "Hey, I really appreciate the call. Would love to do business with you, but can't. I'm going to send you over here." That's a way better process.
--:-- Mark McClure: That's good to hear. Thank you.
--:-- [Ryan Hanley delivers a mid-roll message asking listeners to subscribe, share, comment, and leave ratings/reviews to help the show grow.]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm interested a lot in the idea of generating inbound leads in insurance. Obviously you dealt with it full frontal when you were trying to go out to the carriers. I think today the disposition is a little different, still not what it is in other industries, but a little different. For a long time, we've been dealing with this concept that any consumer that would go out to the internet and search for an insurance agent that way is a bad lead. I would love for you to talk through the evolution of that and maybe put to bed that concept based on your experience.
--:-- Mark McClure: That is certainly a challenge that we had early on when we were trying to seek our original appointments when we were an insurance agency. The sizes of the businesses that we saw in those days, many people refer to them as micro because they were really small. We're starting to see larger businesses now. They're still small businesses, but they're businesses that have been in business for significantly many more years than they were in the beginning. It seemed like we had a lot of startups in the beginning. We still have some today, but the quality of the leads that we're seeing come across today, even somewhere in the middle market range, is just significantly better.
--:-- Mark McClure: This tells me that it's very similar to the shop that my father built with Flowers Direct and Flowers.com. That was back in the late nineties. Selling flowers online was a pioneer move if you were doing that in the late nineties. It took about six, seven, eight years for the public to be aware that you can go online, search for flowers, and check your credit card in. I think we are just still in the very beginning stages, a very similar concept to how flowers were in the late nineties. Customers are just now figuring out that they can go online and at least search for quotes and try to start to find an agency, carrier, or broker that can help them. As they become more and more comfortable, I think we will see commercial insurance online explode into more of the hockey stick that I was hoping we would see in 2012. It's just taking a lot longer because it's a difficult product.
--:-- Mark McClure: What keeps me up at night is dreaming about selling these policies online without speaking with the customer someday and managing loss ratios and making sure that they classify themselves correctly. We're still pretty far off on being able to do that in mass. There are certain classes you could probably do it with, but to be able to scale that at a much larger range is going to take some more time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I think getting people to buy online initially, I agree we're far off from mass adoption, but you can definitely grow a business rapidly getting them to buy. The problem is retaining. If you do not have the service model, what I've seen a lot of our competitors do that are digital commercial brokers is they get a channel partner or two, they buy a ton of leads, they run a ton of ads, they get the leads in the door, and they can write them right away whether it's a human or direct binds. They're writing business and putting business on the books. Just look at Newfront and Renegade and some of these others and what they've done. The problem is they can't break 40% retention.
--:-- Mark McClure: Because, from my opinion, the CFOs take over and they make the decision to outsource. I know I'm pretty sure at least one of those two, and just in case I'm wrong I'm not going to name which one I think it is, but at least one of them outsourced their entire service department to India. That sounds like a great idea from a financial perspective. Nothing against the people of India or people of Indian descent. But when you're in a different time zone in a different country with a different accent and a non-native speaking English person who is trying to service your policy and it is obvious that they are not the agency that you originally worked with, you don't get retention. That is the part that kills people.
--:-- Mark McClure: Can you scale this business using American service? I think the sales process can be much more automated with really light human touches or direct binds initially, especially for certain markets and certain size accounts. I don't know that you can completely do that on the service side yet.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't think we're there either.
--:-- Mark McClure: We may never be there. We saw the retention for standard lines business in the 80% range, which I understand is lower than you see with a really good firm like a Gallagher or a Hub or some of these large brokerages. That was for the standard lines customers. The non-standard customers, the groups specifically if they were brand new, you saw retention rates just be significantly less. Being able to focus on the right classes that you know are going to most likely renew, whether it's years in business or payroll or number of employees, is a much smarter way to attack this concept than trying to be a generalist, which is what I tried to do at my agency. We built up a nice book. We had maybe 15,000 to 16,000 customers active. But we didn't do a good job keeping them because we had way too many contractors and got really addicted to putting new business on the books and not focusing on that service aspect.
--:-- Mark McClure: Over time, I would expect that the quality of the customer continues to improve. Do you ever get to a level that you might see offline? No. But can you scale offline at the same rate with the same economics? Probably not.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's the big lie that I think is still being perpetuated today. I give all due respect to everyone that built standard, local, super regional, even up to national agencies in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s based on very tried and true best practice traditional methods. They did it the way they had to do it. They did it well, and it worked. I give them all due respect. You cannot build that agency today. I look at agencies that are starting up with "I'm going to join the golfing thing, I'm going to join a networking group, I'm going to ask for referrals, and I'm just going to cold call my local market." It doesn't work. If your local market is the entire northeast, maybe. But then you're starting to expand into what would be considered a digital agency anyways. If you have an established book and you're getting referrals from agents, can you incrementally grow with traditional methods?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes, it's not dead. But if you want to scale your business, you want to grow, and you don't want it to take 25 or 30 years to get to the point where you actually have a team and back-end support and all this kind of stuff, you have to go digital, or digital has to be a large part of what you're doing. And then all these realities that we're discussing come into play.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I feel like I used to get this all the time because I've been talking about this stuff, especially content marketing, less ads and stuff, more content. And that's how we have a very high close ratio on our inbound stuff because of all the video work that I do. People watch a lot of videos. But they used to say, "You're trying to take the easy way. You just don't want to do the work." And it's like, this is just different obstacles. This isn't easy. There's nothing easy about what we're doing. There's nothing easy about what you explained and all the trials that you went through, and you're one of the best lead generators in our industry. There's nothing easy about it. It's just a different set of obstacles. And I don't like that mentality. I think that's a very narrow mentality to think that way.
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah, me too.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So, as far as the lead generation space, the digital space in general, digital consumers, what kind of stuff do you see coming down the pipes? Are there any general trend changes? Any major shifts in how people are buying, how they're shopping? I know some of this is kind of your sauce, and I don't want you to share anything you're not comfortable with.
--:-- Mark McClure: I think every year that goes by, you start to see more and more customers gravitating online. I shouldn't know these percentages in the back of my head, but it is certainly growing, and I think we're at the very beginning. The quality of the customers, as I mentioned earlier, is starting to improve as well. We're seeing that in the retention and loss ratios with some of the carriers we work with that report their data back to us so we can make sure we're feeding them the right calls.
--:-- Mark McClure: As far as what the future looks like, my hope is eventually we get to a point where we can ask the customer: do they want to talk to an agent? I think that's not going away, at least not during my working career. Or do they want to purchase online? If they want to purchase online, most likely to protect that customer experience, we'll take them down that route for those that have that ability. And others we might steer through the call exchange, which is a network that we've built today. That's what the future looks like. That's what we're working towards. It's not rocket science. Focusing on the customer experience and making sure that you're making that small business happy because you're introducing them to somebody that can sell them a policy in the way in which they purchase it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I agree with you. I will say that a large portion of the inbound leads that we get—or a significant enough portion to mention—are actually customers who bought D2C that realized that they now needed help. And that happens a lot.
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah, it's interesting. We get a lot of business from Next. "Hey, I bought a Next policy and I can't get ahold of anybody." Nothing against Next, because we actually write some Next as an agent. But you click a couple buttons, you buy an insurance policy, and then all of a sudden you start to go, "Is this actually what I need? How does this work? How do I get a COI?" There's all these things.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I'm with you. I am interested in and hope to someday be able to facilitate the customers who can purchase policies direct and have it done in a way that they're purchasing the right thing and they feel confident in it. I think that always needs to be backed up with a phone call or a place where someone could call a human. I have this philosophy: if you don't feel like if something goes wrong, there's somebody you can punch in the face, you're not comfortable working with that business. It doesn't matter where they are. If you think to yourself, "If something really goes wrong, I got nobody that I can fight," people just struggle with that.
--:-- Mark McClure: Better you than me.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. So it's a really interesting problem. But I think there has to be a way to educate people throughout that purchase process. And there are some companies that are doing some interesting things. Maybe I'm interested in your feedback on this, but what it looks like to me a lot of times is people have good ideas, but every new question, every piece of explainer content or explainer video that you insert into the form process reduces overall conversion rate. It's super easy if it's four questions to buy a policy—you're going to get the max number of people. But if it's eight questions that get them a better policy, your conversion rate is going to be lower. It feels like what happens is a lot of people come out with these good ideas, these processes that work. And then they look at their conversion rate numbers, and the conversion optimization starts to eat into those questions. Now all of a sudden you're back down to four questions again in this very remedial process, but maybe the book's not as profitable. It's a really interesting dilemma.
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah. I've been dealing with that since we started. Our original business plan was to be more of a lending-free commercial insurance. We figured out pretty quickly that even though we could generate the traffic and we could get the customer started down the funnel of the underwriting questions, we never could get them to press the buy button. A few of them checked out and bought the policy. Others checked out about the policy misclassified. That forced us down the route of building out the contact center, because that's how the customers today are wanting to buy. We're not in the contact center business because we love contact centers. We like our contact center, but at the end of the day, that's where the buyers are. I would expect it to be like that for the near future. Eventually, somebody is going to be able to figure out how to underwrite these policies online correctly, but it's going to take both strategies to make that work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I completely agree. I think the point that you made—we've seen just in the last two years, but I've seen throughout my career in general—the size of businesses that are going online is increasing as well. A lot of people will say, "You just got all those consultants and Main Street small businesses." We get a lot of those, and we get a lot of contractors too. But we wrote a $40,000 manufacturer the other day.
--:-- Mark McClure: That's awesome.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We did. We have a nice one that my guy is working on right now. It's a manufacturer in California. I'm going to butcher what it is, but one of my guys is working on it. The other week, we had a $15,000 premium account, a $25,000 account. These aren't $250,000 middle market accounts, but they're medium accounts with real risk and a couple of policies. These are business owners that have been around for a while. This goes back to America right there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I am currently making the mistake that you described. We have what we call a "no customer left behind" policy. Outside of nine classes of business that we simply do not have a market for—mining, transportation, home healthcare, human transportation, a couple others—we'll write anything else that comes through. We try to disqualify people who are not serious about purchasing now. That's what we look for, less than what type of business they are. If they're kicking the tires or they're thinking about starting a business in 2024 and getting some numbers, we can't help you. But if you opened up a mobile food truck business and you need insurance, and to get into this farmer's market you have to have a COI, and that's the next step for you as an entrepreneur—that's what I hated about this business when I first got into it. Everybody told me not to be a generalist, and I just really want to help these entrepreneurs, whether it's the mobile food truck person or a handyman.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I found that the fact that I went very wide, very quickly has caused me immense amounts of stress and caused all kinds of things to break, because it's a very big problem to solve versus one niche that you can build towards. But at the same time, it has allowed us to consistently put revenue on the books. It has given us experience, scope, and scale that I think not a lot of people have. As we start to work the problems out, we're at 86% retention. We're still retaining business. It's been a very interesting process. I'm positive that as we grow with more pace, that number is going to come down a little bit for a while. But these feel like solvable problems to me. I know there's going to be some tough decisions, and "no customer left behind" isn't always going to be 100%. But I feel like it's an aspirational goal worth trying to go after, only because everyone tells me it's not possible. For that reason alone.
--:-- Mark McClure: Maybe with your transaction with SIAA, it possibly is. Maybe you're not the one writing it, but it could be another agency that has that mining specialty. So you've kind of hit it. What SIAA gave us was the breadth and the experience and the scope to now start to build out pockets of expertise that we can start to write that stuff. I think that generalist question is so interesting. I think everyone who says you can't be a generalist is right, which is why I want to figure out how to do it. Because if we can, then I was right there with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. We were semi-successful. We were barely profitable. But it's a mountain of a task. Whoever figures that out, there's a lot of money at the end of that rainbow.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Awesome. Mark, I appreciate you coming on. I appreciate you spending some time with us. I wanted to get your company in front of our audience. I wanted to talk a little bit about leads because we've been so successful with them, and I love sharing tools that we're successful with on the podcast. If someone's listening and they're going, "I've seen their name, but where do they go? Where do they get signed up? Where do they find out if CommercialInsurance.net is a good fit for them?" Where should people go?
--:-- Mark McClure: I would just have them go to commercialinsurance.net. They can call into the contact center, and we'll put them in touch with one of our team members who can identify what their appetite is and see if they're a fit for our organization. We usually can get a customer up and running within a few hours. Just go to commercialinsurance.net and place a call. There's also a web form you can fill out if you're interested in purchasing leads. We can take it from there. We really focus on trying to sell the best leads in the business. Our dreams are to become the largest aggregator of commercial insurance new business opportunities. We need all the customers we can. Thank you for the time today and for sharing our company with your audience and your experience.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm glad. Thank you so much.
--:-- Mark McClure: All right, man. I appreciate it. Wish you nothing but the best.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes, sir. You too. Good night.
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