--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today we have a dynamic episode for you. We're going to talk all about inbound leads, how we handle them, what they look like. And we are doing it with one of the best companies in the entire industry when it comes to delivering warm call transfers, when it comes to delivering commercial insurance leads to agencies that they can quote, find an issue, hopefully in one call. That's the aspirational goal, that one call close.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): That's what we track here at Rogue. I've talked about that in the past. We are aspirationally tracking to a maximum number of one-call closes, and Tivly helps us get there. We're talking to Mark McClure and Kim Reid from Tivly. You guys are going to love this conversation. Amazing conversation. Tivly is a big partner of ours, and I think it's almost a necessity for creating that base layer of business that's going to help you grow. We talk all about inbound leads, inbound calls, all that kind of stuff. Tremendous, tremendous episode. You are going to love what you're about to hear.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Before we get there, I just want to remind you guys of a few things. First and foremost, I love you for listening to this podcast. It's 2023. We're going to be getting after it. We're going to be moving in February. So this is going to be coming out in January. In February, we're going to be moving to a two-episode-a-week format. One of those episodes early in the week is going to be short format, five to seven minutes quick hitting on ideas that are relevant to our industry, concepts, tactics, insights, resources, all that kind of stuff. Quick hitters, just bam, bam, bam. And then obviously we're going to continue to do the longer form interviews with thought leaders, movers, shakers in the industry and outside the industry.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So make sure if you are not, that you are subscribed to this podcast. Wherever you listen to podcasts, you can get at it. Love you for listening, love you for being part of this community. If you want an even deeper dive, go to findingpeak.com. Findingpeak is where I am sharing all what I do, what I learn, what I think about when it comes to peak performance. Peak performance is yes, how we're doing our work, but it's also how we're creating opportunities for success — not for sex, although sex is fun — opportunities for success in our health, in our mentality, in our psychology, in our relationships, all the different things that we need to be thinking about to put ourselves in a position to capitalize on what comes down the pipe, on those opportunities created by the muse.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So if you want some of that, if you want to get those emails, you're getting articles, you're getting videos, and 90 plus percent of the content is free. So if you just go to findingpeak.com, there is a paid version where we answer paid subscriber questions. We do some deep dives into some of the highly tactical stuff that we're doing at Rogue, kind of breaking down the Rogue way, the lessons that we've learned. Guys, I've made just about every mistake that exists in building an insurance agency just in the short three years that I've been doing this. And we share what we've learned, how we've navigated those obstacles, and where we're going and how we're positioning ourselves. And if you want those insights, I think it's like seven bucks a month. So it's not like you're breaking the bank, but you don't have to be a paid subscriber. So go to findingpeak.com.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Also, last thing I'll say, it's 2023. If you're trying to maximize your income, if you're trying to maximize the income that you get from your agency, if you're struggling with carrier appointments, if you're struggling with making commitments, but you want to grow, if you're looking for access to markets, if you're looking for tools, if you're just looking for a community of insurance agencies that are pushing forward, that are pooling resources to just overall generate more income for your agency, then I highly recommend you check out SIA. Guys, being acquired by SIA and becoming part of this network and becoming part of this ecosystem has been one of the best moves that I've ever made for my business, one of the best moves I've ever made in business in general.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): And whether you ultimately decide to join SIA or not is your decision, but I think it is worth taking another look. Don't necessarily just believe stuff that you heard or read from 10 years ago or 5 years ago. This is a completely different organization in terms of how they are rapidly adapting to the modern independent insurance agency and the services and resources that they're providing. I highly recommend you take an extra look and you can do that at siaa.com. Go to SIA.com. Guys, with that, let's get on to what is a fantastic episode of this show with Mark McClure and Kim Reid from Tivly. Here we go.
--:-- [Transition to interview]:
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Well, guys, I'm excited to get into it with you and excited to have you on the call and go through everything. I know just from a few of the teaser sponsorship reads that I've done so far, everyone listening at home has kind of heard your name and heard a little bit about the rebrand. And we're going to get into all that. But from doing a couple intro sponsor reads and everyone knowing that these guys are sponsors, you'll hear it. But I've gotten a ton of behind the scenes, direct messages and just people asking, how are you using the tool? What are your results? All that kind of stuff. So I am incredibly excited to do a deep dive today and share with everybody listening.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I want to get more into the backstory, talk about the rebrand. And then what I really want to get into in the second half of our conversation today is the tactical success behind using what you guys do — a tool, a tool in the tool belt of agencies and agents to grow their business. So before we get there, why don't we do the quick origin story. Kim, you've never been on the show before. So let's start with you and then we'll work our way through.
--:-- Kim Reid: All right. Well, thanks for having both Mark and I. We're excited to be here and excited to meet you and join today. I joined Tivly when it was CommercialInsurance.net in September of 2021. But Mark and I — in fact, Mark, Chad, also one of the partners in the business — we go way back about 17 years to a lead gen startup. So we've got a lot of history together and other businesses in the lead gen space. And I was excited to get the band back together and join with Mark and Chad again as this business really started to take off. I'm kind of the organizer, the foundation planner of the group to come in and help grow the team, grow the processes, and make sure that we're scaling and enabling everything for success from the people, the partners, the systems we use. So that's it. I'll let you chime in.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): What I just heard there was Mark throws a bunch of crazy ass ideas on the wall and then you pick them off and make them happen. Is that an accurate depiction?
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah, I mean, you know, entrepreneurs for sure. It only goes so long throwing things at the wall.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): You know, it's funny. One of the things that I've learned with Rogue is that every integrator — which very much sounds like you are — needs a visionary, and every visionary needs an integrator. And it is incredibly rare that you can be both. I don't know that you can. Maybe a Steve Jobs, maybe an Elon Musk, maybe someone — I always forget her name, the woman that created Spanx, I can't believe I'm forgetting her name. But if anyone follows her story, there are some very specific, rare people who can kind of be both. But for the most part, you need that yang to your yin, or you just don't get things done. So that's awesome. And I'm super excited that you're here because we can actually get some real deep answers this time versus last time. Mark, no, I'm kidding.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Right. So Mark, for everyone who missed your previous episode, which I think was back in either August or September, can you just give us the 20,000 foot view? We don't have to spend a lot of time on backstory, just a little bit. And I want to get into the company more.
--:-- Mark McClure: I'll start where we got started with a company by the name of Traffic Strategies based in Tampa. My partner today, Chad Jakeways, and I started back in 2000. And Kim joined us, I believe, in about 2003. And we became leaders in lead generation and built a great lifestyle company that was generating about 75,000 prospects a month and had the opportunity to sell that business to Rockerton. So all of us joined Rockerton. And I had never worked for anybody, but that was my first job other than picking up range balls as a kid. So as an entrepreneur for eight years, that was a great experience and I learned a lot. And thankfully, we had Kim there to organize our business and ideas and thoughts.
--:-- Mark McClure: After I finished my earn out, Chad took my role and then Kim took his role. And then when he finished that position, she ended up taking both of our roles. But long story short, we have today a group of digital marketers — some of the best digital marketers in the world — that have worked on a ton of retail brands, from Walmart to all of the brands that Kim worked with at RetailMeNot, as well as financial services brands like American Express and Chase. And I think that's what makes us unique in the business that we are in today. We have some of the best digital marketers in the world, but we also have 10 years experience running a commercial insurance agency.
--:-- Mark McClure: After I finished my earn out, I left Rockerton, relocated to Oklahoma, started a company by name at CommercialInsurance.net. And we built that up to a nice agency with right around 20,000 small business customers, a little under 20,000 small business customers, and had about 50 salespeople, service people. But we learned how hard it is to work leads and work prospects that start online and convert them into insurance policies. And that all leads are not equal. Even free leads are really expensive if you don't have a market.
--:-- Mark McClure: The combination of the digital marketing expertise that we gained at Traffic Strategies and Rockington, along with all of the commercial insurance experience, puts us at a unique position in the business. Typically, the companies that we go up against are really great digital marketers, but they don't know anything about commercial insurance. It makes it really hard to excel in this space, or vice versa. Since then, we've been able to recruit many of the team members we've worked with over the years. It's a great selling point when we go to interview candidates that they always compliment us on the fact that we have a number of team members — I can't name them all — that we've all worked together in different businesses and we still want to work together after 10 years.
--:-- Mark McClure: After we sold the commercial insurance agency, we pivoted into a lead exchange. CommercialInsurance.net became a lead exchange. And we started with about 5,000 small businesses a month that we were talking to and are up to about 80,000 small businesses that come through our exchange on a monthly basis today. So we are having a lot of fun and we are growing. We just finished a record year. Just under 900,000 small businesses came through our exchange seeking insurance in 2022. We finished the year with 41 million in revenue and are maintaining EBITDA discipline in an environment where it's really a challenging environment for 2022.
--:-- Mark McClure: We still experienced excellent growth and we're able to do that out of cashflow, which was awesome because we brought in Aquiline Capital as our lead investor a little over a year ago. And we have not had to deploy any of that cash, which sets us up for an awesome 2023. Maintaining that discipline, I think it's also a unique competitive advantage we have in this environment. We were able to grow specifically just out of cash flow since 2015. We've been profitable. Last year, we grew a little over 70%, added 203 team members, added a CFO, built out the contact center, account managers, and continued building out the engineering team. So we're really excited about the investments that we're making.
--:-- Mark McClure: We have been very cautious on how we deploy cash and are really protective of our culture. We bring people in that we feel that we can be successful with, but also have a lot of fun, which is one of our core principles — to have fun and laugh. And I think you can do that in a growth company. We have transitioned from a lifestyle company. I know you mentioned in your last podcast the difference between a lifestyle company and growth company. We are stuck somewhere in between because we do still have a lot of fun, but I think you can have fun in a growth company and grow at the same time. Sometimes you have to work a little harder than you do in a lifestyle company. But that was our intent in bringing in Aquiline as a partner — to bring in somebody that could put some muscle behind us to start taking some risk that maybe we weren't going to take in a lifestyle family business.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): That's awesome. There's lots to unpack there, and I really appreciate that. I think just touching on one of the last things you said about the difference between a lifestyle and a growth company — that episode has garnered a pretty substantial amount of feedback from a lot of people. I think it's funny what people hear when you say something in between what you meant, and maybe what you said, or the actual words you said, and then what people actually hear are oftentimes very different. Some people took that podcast offensively. "What do I? There's no problem with being a lifestyle agent. Just because I don't grow at 20%, am I not a growth agent?" I tried to explain to the people that were reasonable that my point was more — and I think you touched on it — there's nothing wrong with being a lifestyle business. Absolutely nothing wrong. The key is to make decisions that fit into the framework of what you want that to be.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): You want to have free time. Your time is maybe more important than top line growth. You want to be able to work on the projects you want to work on. These different things take on the types of clients. You can be super picky. You can be super niche-y. There's nothing wrong with them. They're just a set of filters that if you're a lifestyle business, you need to think of. In every business, there are those things. You may say, "Hey, we're doing great. We're growing 5% per year. And I get to golf every Tuesday afternoon and Friday afternoon. And I'm freaking happy as hell." That's great. There's nothing wrong with that. But what you wouldn't want to do is take on 10 new team members in a month if you're a lifestyle business, because now you're not going golfing. You're training and talking and building culture and setting people up and doing all those kinds of things.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): It was more about the heuristics that you put into your business to match what your goals are. My point in saying all that is — how did you know? What was the impetus or what were the conversations that you were having around "It's time to do this"? You mentioned, "Hey, we brought in Aquiline so that we could take some risks that maybe we weren't willing to take." But there had to be a moment where you said, "Hey, we're this today. We're pretty darn good at this, but we kind of want to go see how big we can be. We kind of want to attack this market and we're willing to push harder." Because I can only imagine that you're probably not working less now that you've thrown gasoline on the fire. So talk me through that decision a little bit, because I think a lot of both agency owners that are listening and insurtechs that are listening, even some of the smaller insurtech oriented carriers that are listening, they're all having the same conversation all the time. So I'm interested in what your guys' thought process was.
--:-- Mark McClure: No, we had the opportunity to sell the entire operation in 2020. And we had just pivoted into a lead exchange a few years prior to that. And we made the decision that if we take the Aquiline investment, the end result could be a lot bigger than we were going to be able to get in 2020. That also meant that we were going to have to work a little bit harder and start bringing in greater talent that we just didn't have today. For example, bringing in Kim Reid. We didn't even have a CFO and didn't have any engineers on staff. As a lifestyle company, maybe we wouldn't have taken those risks. And that's okay, because we have a lot of fun on both sides. It's just different.
--:-- Mark McClure: As an entrepreneur, when things are going well, it's fun to work hard. When you get back to the corner, sometimes I enjoy that as well, in probably a sick kind of way. But where we are today as it relates to making the decision of transitioning from a lifestyle company to a growth company — when you take an investment like the kind of investment we took, it's our responsibility to make sure that we return profits for our shareholders and distributions. Today we have about 3% market share of all small businesses that are seeking insurance online, which means there's a huge number of companies that we're not touching. For us to be able to reach the other 97% of the customers, the small businesses that are in the marketplace, it means that we have to operate more like a growth company and start to bring in really strong team members in areas that maybe Chad and I were weak in those areas.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): It's funny. I made a very similar move in my own business. Obviously, I was acquired by SIA and the thought process was very similar. I had this goal of where I wanted to be, but when I mapped it out, it was like a 10-year goal. It was 10 years to get to where I wanted to be. And I am anything if not impatient. So I said, "Geez, if I partner, be acquired by SIA, I can get to that same place in about three years." So it was kind of a no-brainer for where I was, what I wanted to do. There was no other path. And then you get into it and you start to realize with a little bit of backstop, a little bit of resources, capital, whatever, if you're smart about it — and I love how you really pressed cashflow, you pressed smart management of your EBITDA, all that kind of stuff. We're still burning some capital but we're rapidly getting to the point where we want to be sustainable inside of 12 months, which hits our runway goal pretty early.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): But it's about finding the right people and knowing where to say okay. Because I think the mistake I see is that some people get that cash and it's like, "We got to go spend it. Let's hire some people. Let's buy some shit. Let's go do some stuff." And it's almost been — what's been funny, and obviously this is the first OPM — other people's money.
--:-- Mark McClure: Other people's money.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Yeah. What's been interesting for me, and I didn't do this on purpose, was when I got the money from SIA and we started deploying it, I've almost been more thoughtful in how I spend, even though there's way more of it. I've been more thoughtful in the way that I spend it. The pressure that I put on contractors and vendors has been greater since I got their money than if it were just mine. When it was mine, I was like, "Let's try this. Let's do this. We lost 250 bucks here. We lost a thousand bucks here trying this." Now I'm like, "Do we know if that's going to work? Where are we at with that? Show me." And I don't know why that is, but it seems like a decent path that a lot of people don't take. And ultimately it seems like you can run into a lot of issues if you don't think about it that way.
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah, absolutely. There's a whole new level of responsibility when you're spending other people's money. It's like a stewardship mentality. And I don't want to act like this was some grand vision of mine. It just — maybe it's fear. I just kind of stumbled into it and then doing some hindsight.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley: So it's funny that you touch on fear. I think as an entrepreneur, fear for me is a place that I go to harness strength. As an entrepreneur, it just really pushes me to get to wherever I'm trying to go at a much faster rate. So many people talk about fear and how it's paralyzing. I kind of hit on that earlier. I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years except for the 18 months during the earn out at Rockerton, and every year that I was backed in a corner too. Having that fear just pushed me to new levels that maybe I couldn't get to if I was comfortable. And so I agree. That's okay. And I love to talk about that. So many people say you should never say that. It's what drives me. I don't want to go back to that place. That's why we're so conservative with how we spend our money. But I'm glad you said that because I basically wake up scared to death every day and operate from that place. I don't ever want to go back to the way things used to be. I don't want to go back to grinding out someone else's nine to five, working someone else's vision. I don't ever want to be put back into that corner. And the only way to continue to get opportunities, the only way to continue to get people to invest in you and future ideas and current ideas, partnerships, is if you're successful.
--:-- Mark McClure: I think one of the things that I'm hoping comes out of the recession that's coming — which I think we all can kind of say, if it's not here, it's coming, how low it goes we'll see — is that these ridiculous concepts of "at the end of the day, all that matters is results." You either produce results or you don't. You can sound great on social media, you can dress well, you can say all the right things, you can read the right books, you can take the right online course, you can go to the right conferences. If you're not getting results, it doesn't matter. I tell this to our sales team a lot. We have some people on our team who are talented, but I can also tell sometimes they want to be part of that LinkedIn celebrity thing a little bit. I'm just like, "Guys, the people who are LinkedIn celebrities are one of two things. They're either incredibly successful and produce massive results and they're a LinkedIn celebrity as a result of that, or they're completely full of shit. And you know which one you are." You have to produce results. So for me, it's this fear that I have this vision, I have this mission, and I'm not going to get there. And that's what drives me. That fear is like a hate fire that just — hate for going back to the way. I don't want to go back.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Yeah, absolutely.
--:-- [Transition to Tivly brand discussion]:
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So let's move on from that. So Tivly. Talk to me about Tivly, talking about the brand. CommercialInsurance.net — it's funny when I first heard, when you first told me or got the email, I can't remember who I was talking to. Maybe it was Samantha on your team, who's awesome by the way. I think she sent the email or I was on a call with her and I kind of hit me and I was like, "Tivly. Okay." It didn't immediately make sense to me, but once she explained it definitely did. But I was like CommercialInsurance.net was so on the nose. It was like, "What do you guys do? CommercialInsurance.net. Oh, okay, great." And again, it's a long name, tough to write, a lot of syllables. I get it. But talk to me a little bit about the brand, the name. I like how concise Tivly is and all that. So just talk to me about the thought process behind that.
--:-- Mark McClure: I'm going to let Kim talk to you about that because she spent a ton of time and work with Catchword, the agency that helped us with the rebrand. I'll just start with CommercialInsurance.net was a domain name that I purchased in the early 2000s when I recognized that nobody was using any forms of digital media to drive commercial insurance leads. It ranked really well from a search SEO standpoint back in those days, but it was really long. It was a .NET. And what I didn't know along the way as an entrepreneur is that a lot of talent didn't want to go to work for a domain name that sounded like it came out of the nineties and was not .com. We're lucky that Kim knew us and knew our capabilities and where she could add value to our company. She took a bet on us. But part of it was just the fact that it was a good brand for its time, but it was time to sunset that brand. And it was important to our investors, and keeping them happy is important to me. So with that, I'll let Kim talk about the rebrand and how it all came about.
--:-- Kim Reid: Yeah. I think going back to the point on growth, this business has grown a lot. Probably started more lifestyle, definitely evolved into a growth company in 2021, 2022. And as we evolved and the team got bigger and you get further and further from when Mark purchased the domain in 2000, it just started to feel a little bit dated for who we are and what we represent. We want to represent new ideas and making improvement and great digital experiences and efficiency. And it felt like we had a domain name and not a brand name.
--:-- Kim Reid: When I first joined, we were trying to do it all ourselves, which was Saturday morning text message threads of "What about this name? What about this name? What about this name?" After a couple months of doing that on our own, we decided let's get some professional viewpoints on this. We talked to about five different agencies, a mix of ones that specialize in everything branding, PR, all of that. And we ultimately decided to go with one that really specialized in naming because that was our goal. We want to get a brand that we're really excited about, proud of, that's broader than insurance, that gives us flexibility in the future, that is short, snappy, modern, and has meaning.
--:-- Kim Reid: So we partnered with Catchword and they have a really structured process that starts with a ton of research into what we do, who we are, interviews with a lot of our employees to really identify what do we stand for. Their terminology would be our brand pillars. It's similar to values, but not taking the words of values, but more how do you live and operate. From there, that gives kind of the who we are so that we can find names that make a connection to a component of that. So one of our brand pillars was "yay sayers." Something that came through in all of the interviews was this ability and desire to find a way to say yes to partners, to internal employees. If somebody needs something, if there's a way that we can do it better, smarter, create something that we haven't tried before, how do we start with yes and figure it out?
--:-- Kim Reid: And I think that's how this business got to what it is today, how Mark evolved it from the agency it was to what it is today—looking at the needs of partners, looking at the needs of small businesses, and trying to make it better, trying to add more solutions that they need and just create positive outcomes.
--:-- Kim Reid: So we looked at, I think, 400 names overall. It's a funnel; we kept narrowing it down. And Tivly was one that really resonated with us because of the connection to positivity. That concept of positive resonated so well with the "yes," "yay-sayer" side of our culture and the goal we have of making experiences better—better for agents, better for the businesses. So we ran with that.
--:-- Kim Reid: It also was a short name, easy to type. After typing commercialinsurance.net for a long time, five letters was really exciting. There's nothing wrong with domain modifiers—there are amazing businesses that have them—but a goal of ours was to have the domain match the brand name. That limited some of the options as well.
--:-- Kim Reid: From there, we just created meaning all around it. The logo has meaning—it represents the two sides of the marketplace and us as the connector. The colors have meaning. We're navy and magenta. We're that classic insurance corporate navy with a pop of color that represents the fun and new and bright things we're trying to bring to the industry. We launched in November.
--:-- [Host (Ryan Hanley) interjects with a brief ad break for the show, asking listeners to subscribe, rate, and review.]
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): It's awesome. I love all that. I think in the insurtech startup world, the work that you did probably feels a little more familiar. But to a lot of agencies listening, especially anyone that's legacy or even some of the legacy carriers, it feels like that work you did—which at some point I'm sure was absolutely grinding, mind-numbing, and you wanted to kill yourself because picking a name for a business is terrible.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): For you to say all that and walk us through that thought process, and how this idea of positive outcomes is a pillar of your business—being a "yes" company, finding opportunity, finding ways to be successful—that seeps down not just to your employees or your partners, but to your customers. It seeps into every filter.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I try to talk to my own leadership team about filters—think in filters—because I can't make every decision for you, and your individual people can't make every decision for you, the manager. There are going to be all these individual decisions made at every level. If we are developing at the high level as leaders in our business, through our brand, our culture, and these types of exercises that you did in the rebrand, it gives your people a set of filters to make decisions through. You can feel more confident that they're going to do something that may not be exactly what Kim would do, but it is the right thing to do in that moment based on these filters you've given them.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I feel like that's how you get to scale. That's how you scale success. And it comes all the way back to the work that you just described. So few people are willing to do it, so I give you guys a lot of credit for that. I'm sure there was a moment where you were like, "Just pick a name. I can't take it anymore."
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): As a performance-based marketer, I'm not cut from the PR cloth. I had to really challenge myself to let Kim and the experts and even Chad get in there and help make some really hard decisions.
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah. At what point did Mark go, "Let's just pick 'Best Commercial Leads on the Internet for Insurance dot com' and go with that?" There it is.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Exactly. It would have to be at least 50 letters long. The URL is available.
--:-- Mark McClure: We had a funny name so that he would laugh every time we had to say our name. There were all kinds of considerations. I started with "Butter." It was "Butter" that I had originally picked. I'm glad we didn't land on it. We had identified butter.com and "smooth like butter." I'm so glad they talked me into saving a ton of money on the domain name and landing on Tivly.
--:-- Mark McClure: With the story that Kim just put behind it, it's meaningful. We live in such a negative industry sometimes as it relates to small business owners, because there are "no's" around every corner. "No, you don't have enough experience." "No, how am I going to get any experience if nobody will insure my business?" "No, you're not big enough." "You haven't been doing this long enough."
--:-- Mark McClure: We've tried to amass a number of different types of insurance agencies, brokers, and carriers that can write insurance for a wide variety of businesses so that we can say, "Yes, we can help you." As an entrepreneur, I hate telling people "no," especially when they're a startup and they have a dream and they're willing to go all in to make it work. There's nothing that drives me more than listening to stories of entrepreneurs that are willing to put it on the line and do whatever it takes to make it happen.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So "Butter" didn't make the cut. Although I do like "smooth like butter."
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So what does a positive outcome look like? How do you determine a positive outcome? If you're always working towards positive outcomes, how do you start to track that? How do you measure it? What does it mean? Because it can mean a lot of things to a lot of different constituencies and stakeholders. Positive outcomes could be for your investors, for owners and shareholders, for employees. Do you prioritize whose positive outcomes are most important? How do you manage all of that? Maybe this is selfishly one business owner to another—how do you manage positive outcomes for all the stakeholders when sometimes they can conflict with each other?
--:-- Mark McClure: Kim, do you want to take that, or you want me to take it?
--:-- Kim Reid: I'll start super high level, and then I'm sure Mark has a lot to add. I think what we like about "positive outcomes" is it's flexible. It doesn't mean any one thing to one group. We look across several stakeholders.
--:-- Kim Reid: I came from Rakuten. I spent about nine years at RetailMeNot. We always said, "Who matters more? Is it the retailers or the shoppers?" The reality is you always had to create good experiences for both. There were times we were building products that focused on one or the other, but we were only a successful business if we did good for both sides.
--:-- Kim Reid: We look at both sides. First, the customers—the small and medium businesses that need insurance. That's all about customer experience. How do we create great customer experiences? How do we understand what scenarios create bad customer experiences, identify those, and create a game plan to continuously optimize and address those friction points?
--:-- Kim Reid: A lot of this team has significant insurance background, especially from Mark running an agency. But a lot of this team also has digital performance marketing experience from Rakuten days and several different companies. So how do we take that experience to create great customer journeys through digital, through combining human and technology? And not just create great experiences on our own website, but power and enable great experiences on our partner sites.
--:-- Kim Reid: What we can do to create a great customer experience on Tivly.com, we can power on other partner sites as well. That's part of our triage services using the form. We create great experiences, then leverage the learnings, the tool sets, the technology, the people, and enable that for our partners as well. In that way, we start serving both sides of the marketplace. And then for the partners, we look at what their success metrics are and continue to evolve our services, our offerings, our platform to align with their goals.
--:-- Mark McClure: I had written down something very similar: experience. From our representatives' perspective, sometimes I say our biggest customers are actually our team members. We need to make sure we're creating an environment and putting them in a position where they can help people. Because when they have to say "no" all day long, that's a really negative experience for our team members.
--:-- Mark McClure: If we are forcing our advertisers—whether they're agents, brokers, or carriers—to accept risks where they don't have a market or they've identified they don't want to take the lead, that creates a negative agent experience for those who are paying our bills. That's also important.
--:-- Mark McClure: But probably the most important of the three is if we focus on the insured experience. Making sure we help that small business owner find somebody who can offer them a reputable company to insure their business—hopefully A-rated, for a reasonable price. It doesn't have to be the best price or the cheapest price, but it needs to be fast. That's what we pride ourselves on: taking them through the journey as fast as possible so it's a good experience for all three stakeholders. If we can do that, then as investors in the company, the money will follow.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Yeah, I think that's good. Kim, you said "constantly addressing friction points." This seems like one of the key aspects of a growth-oriented business. Whether it's an agency, a carrier, an insurtech, whatever the business is in our particular industry, someone who is in more of a stasis or a lifestyle state has hit that point where their personal income is great. One of the characteristics is they stop addressing friction points. They start saying things like, "This is the way we do it. Our clients appreciate the way we do it. We're not doing it a different way, even if it's easier."
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): One of the things I've heard on this show from interviewing hundreds of individuals like yourselves is that internal culture or personality characteristic where you just can't abide a friction point. You may have to deal with it for a period of time, but it bugs you. There's something inside you that says, "We can do that better." You might not be sure how yet, you might not have the technology, you may have to build something or find a partner, but it bugs you that it happens every time. You need to remove that friction.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): That feels like a fairly ubiquitous characteristic of growth-oriented cultures and people in general. Having friction in their business just bothers them—unless it's purposeful, which sometimes you want purposeful friction. But that's often not the case. It just bothers them.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I want to take these last 20 minutes or so and talk through some of the questions I get. I don't want to get into things like lead quality, but how are you finding the partners that work with you are the most successful? What are some of the characteristics? I always say to people when they call me about you guys, "Look, you're going to write business if you work with these guys."
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): One of the very first things—and this is me talking to whoever's calling me—is you have to be able to answer the phone. A lot of agencies, a lot of agents, a lot of producers, especially today, especially if they're part of Gen C—the worst generation—they just don't want to be on the phone. They're allergic to it. I shouldn't say the worst generation, but the worst generation at phone skills. If you can't answer the phone and do your job over the phone, that seems like a pretty big problem.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): In a lot of agencies, the phone will just ring into infinity, or it rings to the principal's cell phone who is on the golf course three days a week, or they turn their phones off from noon to two for lunch. You've got to have a good phone game. That feels like step one. Tell me if I'm wrong. But what are some of the other characteristics of successful partners? If I'm sitting here thinking, "I've been considering these guys for a while," what are some of the other successful things you see partners doing when they work with you to write more business?
--:-- Mark McClure: You want to start with that one?
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Mark, you want to start?
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah. From an advertiser perspective—your agencies, brokers, or carriers who are purchasing risks—the best thing they can do to be successful is make sure they provide us with an appetite and spend the time to build an appetite for the risks they want to write.
--:-- Mark McClure: One characteristic unique to Tivly is that we not only ask for filters that include state, class, and line of business, but we also start to drill down into specific questions that are important to that advertiser. We kick out questions that may be important to them. For example, if it's a landscaper, there are some buyers who don't want to work with landscapers who carry ladders that are over six feet wide because they're probably doing more than landscaping. That's a filter we allow advertisers to buy.
--:-- Mark McClure: Taking the time to build your filters within the campaigns—not just providing us with a list of states and classes you want to write—is key. If you're a generalist and you're successful with that, that's one way to do it. But the best way to build a profitable book is to give us filters that are going to protect your loss ratios. Is it years in business? Is it revenue? Are they kick-out filters by class? It depends on whatever the specialty is for the advertiser.
--:-- Mark McClure: As it relates to our publishers—the groups we work with to purchase leads—it's not a secret that we generate a lot of our traffic through declinations that come out of insurance carriers. These old-school carriers that have in the past been able to say "yes" to those they can write a market for, but say "no" to the balance—which is usually a pretty large number—providing them with a solution that allows their agents to say, "I don't have a market for you today, but I have somebody that can help."
--:-- Mark McClure: Whether they're giving out our phone number, doing a cold transfer, or a warm transfer, they're at least offering that small business owner an opportunity to find what they're looking for. That generally leads to building a relationship that allows us to be on the front line. There are many insurance carriers and brokers that we actually answer the phone on behalf of. We do all the triage work up front.
--:-- Mark McClure: What does that do for the company? We answer the phone in four seconds. Some of those companies have over ten-minute hold times. They're missing tons and tons of businesses. From an experience standpoint, nobody likes to be on hold for ten minutes and then put through an IVR system. That's a solution that makes our publisher insurance companies successful—offering them the ability to answer calls in volume.
--:-- Mark McClure: You'd be amazed at how many insurance companies, brokers, and even agents will purchase web leads and not call them for one day, two days, three days. It's crazy. Sometimes groups will put us on the front lines to do that work for them. That's not where we make our money, but that's how we make our partners successful. And that's what puts us on the front lines of what we're told are some of the best leads in the business.
--:-- Mark McClure: I'd love to get your thoughts on the value of our leads. We probably should have talked about this prior to this interview, but how do we stack up against the competition, and what can we do to continue to improve our business?
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): In full transparency to everyone listening, we pay thousands to Tivly every month because we get good business out of it. I read something the other day: "Don't listen to what someone says, listen to what's in their portfolio." We pay money to Tivly every month for leads. We have two very targeted niche campaigns and one mass buying campaign that we run. We do that because it feeds our producers.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I've talked before about how one of the ways we use Tivly is to feed new producers leads to test their mettle—get them going right off the bat with qualified, ready-to-go opportunities. If they mess these up, then we know where we need to train them. Not that we kick them out the door, but now we get to hear them on the phone in real time, addressing someone who has presented a need, who is actively on a call. We have the backup data. How do they ask the questions? How do they frame our business? How do they solve problems?
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): From there, we feed a couple of specific niches that we have. It's constant activity. The unfortunate part about buying leads in general—I like that you call it "buying risks"—I would classify what we get from you as more than leads. Leads are kind of like "this might work." What we get from you guys is "it's yours to write." It's more than that.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): If we're talking about lifetime value of a customer, then first-year ROI to me is not as important. When we're buying a lead, let's say I pay you guys a hundred bucks. It's a live call. "Hey, we have a five-person landscaper with 1.5 million in revenue on the phone. They need GL and workers comp. Can you help them?" Yes. Boom. We just paid a hundred bucks for that. Now I have a producer talking to that person.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): What a lot of agency principals—not carriers, some of the larger entities will see past this—but what a lot of people who struggle with the value proposition think is, "That's a hundred dollars out of my pocket, and now I'm talking to this person." What they fail to think about when comparing those types of opportunities versus all others is the time and material expense that goes into generating other types of opportunities.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Let's say I go to a networking event. I'm there for an hour, it's 20 bucks to get in, I buy a beer at the bar, and it's an hour of my time. That math is most likely more than a hundred dollars. If I meet someone there and want to do business with them, now we're going to connect on LinkedIn, do the back and forth on scheduling our first call or meeting, then do the get-to-know-you meeting and gather the info. When you stack all that up, now we're talking hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in terms of time and expense getting that opportunity in the door.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): They might not have bought that opportunity, but they're not thinking pound-for-pound. "Wow, I just got all of that for a hundred bucks in the snap of my fingers today with the person on the phone ready to go." We close on the opportunities that we don't mess up. And we mess them up—we have some training stuff we're working on. But when we're really cooking, my personal close ratio was just north of 60%. We're currently close to 50% at Rogue Risk. I want to get us back up over 60, and I think we can be as high as 75 if we dial in some markets.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I don't mean to be selling you guys. This is what we do all day. This is the way that I think. I think about this for all campaigns. I think of Tivly like a campaign. I have many different streams of leads coming into Rogue Risk. I think of them all as campaigns or projects, and each one is set up a little different.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): For us to be successful with Tivly, what we found is dialing in the appetite and the dials to a particular carrier. We're going to be launching a transportation one with you guys soon. We do construction and contracting just in California right now because we have three carriers in California and two producers that do contracting and construction in California—which is very hard to do. We don't have as much competition, and in the competition we do have, we have experts taking the phone calls and we have all the markets we need to be successful. Those do very, very well.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I think where people get hung up—the transportation one will be geared towards Cover Whale. We're going to be gearing that call campaign towards what Cover Whale needs to be successful so that the leads that come in, the ones we answer the phone for, fit their appetite. When my transportation producer takes that call, there's less of a chance of it not fitting that appetite because we're setting Tivly up for that.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Our mass campaign is the same way. We continue to tweak and dial and add an industry, remove an industry to set it up for our big three: Travelers, Hartford, and Nationwide.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So like Great American a little bit too, just give Great American a shout out. So, you know, we're setting up for those guys so that those leads that come in, the questions we ask, we know they fit the markets and we're going right to market with what we hope. And our biggest, we call them STMs, shit that matters. Our number one STM in sales is one call closes. As our one call close number goes up, our cost of acquisition, our return on investment goes up.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): There's a very clear—my brain's not working—very clear relationship. Sorry. Right. Wow. I've done that. I promise I've talked on that radio before. A very clear relationship between one call closes and return on investment.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So that's a very long way of saying, if we match campaigns to carriers that we want to write business with, we put producers with expertise on those inbound calls, and then we tweak the dials, appetite, size, whatever, geography to match what that particular producer's expertise is and the carrier they want to write more business with, you will be highly successful. 60 to, I think, north of 75% close ratio on these leads. That's my personal take.
--:-- Mark McClure: It's great to hear. I bet your underwriters love you.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): They don't, but we're getting—
--:-- Mark McClure: Well, the fact that you're dialing in and your hit ratio is so high, that makes their job a lot easier for sure.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): We'd ask for a raise. The hard part—this is completely off topic—but our underwriters, we have a love-hate relationship with us, mostly because they don't know how to handle us. They're so used to having relationships with traditional local agents. Because we're not big enough to be thought of as like a New Front or a Siege or a Renegade or one of these mega digital agents. So we're in that in-between phase where they kind of want to put us in a local agent box, but at the same time we operate like one of those big ones. So these underwriters are getting hit seven, nine, 15 times a day and they just start—
--:-- Mark McClure: I went through it for years and eventually it'll start to snowball.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Yeah. Well, they all say the same thing. As soon as you hit a million, we start paying attention to you. So, okay. We're on our way.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So yeah, that's kind of been our process. And again, I don't want it to be just like that. What I just explained to everybody, that's how we set up every campaign for everything. That's how we set up stuff for SEO. That's how we set up stuff for paid ads. That's how we set up stuff for referral partners. We do it all. We match producer, market, to lead source, and then we create a campaign around it. It's kind of how we think about it.
--:-- Mark McClure: Well, interesting. Yeah. So I think it's almost like thinking about it like niching a generalist agency.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): We're very much a generalist agency. The way I explain my business—and again, I don't mean to talk about Rogue so much—but the way I explain my business is: if you ever watch Gold Rush, I don't know if you guys have ever seen Gold Rush. For some reason that show just speaks to me. I have absolutely no idea why. But it hit me one day that what we're trying to do at Rogue is be essentially the gold shaker deck.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Basically, they take these huge goops of pay dirt—which is shit and good stuff mixed in, the gold being the good stuff—and they throw it all on the top of this shaker deck. You guys can't see the hand gestures that I'm doing at home right now. They're amazing. But it gets blasted with these big jets, then it gets blasted with smaller jets, and then it shakes out the big rocks through big holes, and then it falls down, and then the holes get a little smaller and a little smaller and a little smaller until the gold comes out the ass end of this thing.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): That is what we're ultimately trying to build with Rogue in the various versions of our business—both at Do It Yourself, a Select Team, and a Premier Team. I just want to find every avenue I can for opportunities, throw them in the top of this shaker system, and then have the gold come out the bottom wherever it's most appropriate based on the customer experience and the needs of that particular customer. So you guys are a big part of that. So yeah, it's great to hear.
--:-- Mark McClure: Yeah, when we were running our agency, and even today, my mind was Deadliest Catch. So same concept. You might go fishing and catch nothing and you know it's going to be a really cold winter, but you know when you do, you put it through the same process. So yeah, it's interesting.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So we're kind of at our number. I would love to leave you guys with something. If I'm listening at home—wherever I'm listening, most people probably don't listen to this at home—but if I'm listening and I'm trying to hit it hard in 2023, I think we're all finally out of COVID mentality. I think we're all firing on all cylinders for the new versions of our business, quasi-remote, whatever, wherever we're going.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): I see for the agencies that are ready to go, you guys can be a big part of their success. I think both as growth or as a foundational layer of consistent sales, which I think a lot of people don't think about. I think they only think, "Hey, I want to grow. I'm going to go buy some leads." Well, yes, that can be the case. But I tend to think of you guys almost more as a consistent base. Like I can count on this many leads coming from Tivly every week. And if we hit this close ratio, I know there's just a base layer of business we're going to do every month. Bam, here it is. It's between X number and Y number of premium. And as long as we keep buying it, we know we're going to be right in there. That's really, really important to success.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): So if I'm thinking about it, who is the perfect agent or agency? Let's just think agent, agency. What would be a great case? You're sitting there and if you look like this or you're thinking this way, give us a call today. And we're going to get you there. Kimberly Kay, I'll let you bring us home.
--:-- Kim Reid: I just think it's anybody. As Mark said, we're getting 80,000 small to medium business partner leads, risks, every single month coming in looking for somebody who can write a policy. And if you write commercial insurance policies or are connected to that, you fit. You can come in and customize it—to your point—create the campaigns, create the filters, create the bid price that makes sense for your specific goals. You can set daily limits. You can set hourly limits. You can day part. So if you're looking for commercial insurance business partner leads, we're a great fit. You can just go to tivly.com, go down to the footer, "Commercial Insurance Leads," and we'll follow up right away and help get you set up.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Awesome. I will also say, I'll just toss this out there. Anybody who's listening that has questions and wants to ask me before, hit me up. I'll be completely honest. I'll give you the good stuff, the bad stuff, the mistakes that we made, how we've optimized over time. We've been using you guys for—I think the spring is when we started, or maybe even a little before then. So we've been buying leads from you guys for a while. So we're coming up on almost a year and we've learned so much. So happy to answer any questions everyone has. You can DM me on LinkedIn or wherever your favorite DM places, and happy to answer those questions too.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): But tivly.com. T-I-V-L-Y.com. Go to Tivly.
--:-- Mark McClure: And is it okay if people want to connect with either of you on LinkedIn? Is that cool?
--:-- Kim Reid: Absolutely.
--:-- Mark McClure: Awesome.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Please do.
--:-- Mark McClure: Awesome.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Hey, thanks, brother. Happy New Year. Yeah, looking forward to crushing 2023 and being a partner with you guys. And I wish you nothing but the best.
--:-- Mark McClure: Yes, sir. Good day.
--:-- Kim Reid: Same to you. Let's do it.
--:-- Host (Ryan Hanley): Thanks.
--:-- [End of interview. Promotional segment begins.]
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