--:-- Ryan Hanley: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. Today we have a tremendous episode for you. This one's going to be brand building and sales focused, talking about how the great, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-marketing, all-knowing, all-selling, Max Revenue has taken the insurance industry by storm, capturing producers and agency owners' attention alike and attracting a massive audience in a short amount of time as they share really relevant, practical tips, tactics, tricks, philosophies, strategies on building a book of business through outbound calling and outbound reach.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, this is an episode, whether you're in the insurance industry or you're not in the insurance industry, you are going to love this. If sales, if growth, if brand building is something that is important to you, that interests you, you're going to love this episode. And I can't wait to share it with you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I just want to let you guys know if you haven't seen it already, that we have a new brand. We have rebranded this show, formerly The Ryan Hanley Show, to Finding Peak. And the whole idea is whether you're in insurance, whether you're in leadership, you're in sales, whether you run a not-for-profit, whether you just want to be a better husband or wife or parent, finding peak performance in our lives takes intentional, purposeful work. It's around what provides meaning, dialing in on those things and being very intentional and purposeful to them.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It is where I'm going in my life. It's the thing that I'm most focused on. It's where I want to take this show. And whether that's growing your insurance agency, growing your small business, whether you're an enterprise level leader, whatever it is that drives you, finding peak performance in that thing, the path, the journey, the effort, the intentional and purposeful action is the only way to get there. Dialing in on those things and bringing in thought leaders and working through concepts and sharing those concepts is what this show is going to be about moving forward. That's why we did the rebrand. I hope you enjoy it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, if you're not subscribed to the show, subscribe to the show. If you want to get on the newsletter and get exclusive content, go to FindingPeak.com. Right now, hit pause, type into your phone or wherever you're listening. Go to findingpeak.com, www.findingpeak.com. Punch in your email and you're going to get all kinds of great stuff delivered exclusively to your email every week. Resources, ideas, quotes, things that are going to help you implement these tactics and strategies into your life to get on the path to peak performance. I love you for listening to this show. Let's get on to Max Revenue.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It was cool to finally talk to you in person. Long time follower. You guys are doing some interesting stuff. Appreciate it.
--:-- Guest: Yeah, what. How'd you get hooked up with Micah?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: We used to work at the same firm.
--:-- Guest: Oh yeah, down in Texas?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I'm out of Louisiana, but we worked in the same region. I heard him on a call one day and I was like, huh, I really liked what he had to say because he was building it with cold outbound and that's kind of my thing. I'm not from where I'm at and so I just, I liked what he had to say and I knew he had kicked ass so I kind of started picking his brain. One thing led to another and oddly enough, we still never met in person.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You guys just never met in person? That's funny. And how long have you been doing the letter?
--:-- Guest: I guess maybe 11 months. I left in January and joined a new firm and then started playing around with it at the end of last year. But it didn't really become a thing until a couple months in.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Why did you guys start it? Is this the interview or are we just jamming?
--:-- Guest: Yeah, I mean, yes and no. Depends.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Okay, yeah, yeah. Okay, I gotcha. Yes, okay.
--:-- Guest: So, just to be quite honest with you, I found the industry hard. I heard a lot of competing advice. When I reached out to Micah when I was in probably year one, he was saying stuff that most kind of went against traditional wisdom, networking, all that. So I told him, what I'm saying is what he told me really helped me. I started to see some success. As he mentored me and we went along, I basically told him, listen, I know online marketing because I've been doing this for a while on the side, just projects. I was like, I can take what you know and put a nice little bow and brand on it and we can take it out there.
--:-- Guest: I said, because I'm sitting in cubicles next to guys that are having the same issues I'm having. Everybody I talk to that's a new producer, they struggle. Most of the time there's like a 90 to 95 percent failure rate. I was like, there's a really big need for this. How do you build a book for the rest of us? If you don't have a prestigious name in your community or you weren't handed seated business, how do you do this thing with cold outbound from scratch? There's really nobody that had really covered that, I felt like. Or I couldn't find them.
--:-- Guest: I thought Randy Schwantz's stuff was pretty revolutionary, I can only imagine what it was at the time, but it was like, okay, that's great, but how do I open the door? How do I get in? How do I build lead lists? How do I prospect? I just thought there was a need for it because I was basically the same age-old thing: you make what you needed. That's kind of what it was.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Have you spent any time with David Caruthers's stuff in the Killing Commercial community?
--:-- Guest: I've talked with David a number of times. I've never gone through his course or whatever his system is, but there's no doubt about it, the dude's good. He writes a lot of business, so he knows what he's doing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The cold outreach stuff is really interesting. My entire agency was going to be based on cold outreach. When Rogue Risk, when I first went to launch Rogue Risk, it was going to be a middle market, like a digitized middle market agency. I didn't want to take on the overhead of having a huge office and all the stuff that normally comes with it, but I was going to be 50 to a hundred miles from my home doing middle market stuff, just doing it digitally. I knew there were ways to deliver the same services.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I had a Cincinnati appointment and I was like, this is good. This is going to be what I do and it'll be great. Then COVID hit and every potential prospect was gone and no one was answering the phones. We had to pivot to what we are today, which is really this digital marketing based inbound small business shop just to survive. My point in saying that is I think that every producer in the country could have an established, profitable, consistent book of business if they were willing to pick up the phones and do cold outreach, maybe some of the other cold outreach stuff like letters or drop-ins or whatever your way of doing it is. This is absolutely a method for all the financial freedom that you want. And no one will do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've been doing a version of what you guys are doing for 12 years now. I have been speaking to insurance professionals about how to grow a book of business for more than a decade. I am so glad that you guys are here because I hate talking about the things that you guys talk about. I'm so sick of it. I hate it. I can't even take it anymore because there are a couple of ways to make money in this industry. All of them involve work. It comes down to you either want to do the work or you don't.
--:-- Guest: It's not like I'm not good at cold calling.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yup. Everybody sucks at cold calling until they do it a whole bunch and then you get better at it.
--:-- Guest: Well, I'm not good at being on video.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yep. Everybody sucks at being on video until they do it a whole bunch and then they get better at it. At this point, I'm unapologetically fed up with the people who read everything, listen to everything, and do nothing.
--:-- Guest: I think I have a little bit different slant on that, but it's still kind of the same thing. I actually think that most producers are willing to do the work. They just hear competing advice. So they don't know which one to do. If you tell me that if I just go to lunch with a couple of people a week, or I can make 200 cold calls a week, which one do you think I'm going to choose? They're always going to take the easier option.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The problem is, I think it has to do with a general sense of most people talk shit, but are actually just lazy at the end of the day. This goes for everything. This isn't just insurance professionals, but I think our industry tends to really shine a bright light on it. I use YouTube, right? YouTube is one of the areas where I have had a tremendous amount of success multiple times in my career. There's a very simple path, which I live and I've given away for free for a decade. Do this, make money. It's that easy. I've seen middle market guys use it. One of my best buds, Gordon Coyle, gets venture capital firms to send him six-figure premium E&O accounts through the philosophy that I taught him with YouTube marketing. There's a handful of people in the entire country that have ever actually done it. It's right there. Boom. It is work. You have to do it. Just like you have to cold call. Or if you're going to do Carothers' thing with the folders and the drop-ins, it's work. Just no one wants to do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't think it's competing ideas because they're always going to choose the easier one. I don't think it's that they don't have the markets because that's just a bullshit excuse or their area doesn't have enough business or whatever. To me, it is you're either a worker or you're not. The workers figure it out and are looking for nuances to get an edge. Then you have all the non-workers who are going to read every newsletter you put out, subscribe to everything you do, pay for your producer book and your digital marketing inbound guide, and never do anything. I've seen it for so long. I hate to be so pessimistic, but I've just seen it. Maybe it's a failing in me. That's why I love your brand. I've never done as good a job of branding as you guys do, and maybe that's what it is. But I keep coming back to the fact that they just don't want to do the work. They just don't want to actually do it.
--:-- Guest: I can only speak for myself. I've been guilty of that through times. But my biggest hurdle and the reason why I failed the first two or three years was because I took all this competing advice and I tried to Frankenstein this thing together. B or not to B, big firm, small firm, network, cold call. I just did a little bit of everything and it was just this ugly Frankenstein. I never just picked one path and went all in on it. I did a thousand different things. I'm a big Hormozi fan and that's one of the things he talks about: Moses, awesome distractions, picking a path and sticking with it. It wasn't until my fourth year in the industry that I did that. Then I started to experience some success. I'm not the million dollar producer, or at least not yet. That's Micah. I'm just the marketing and branding guy. I take his knowledge and put a nice little bow on it and an eyepatch and put it out there. Whether it's your stuff, which is inbound, which I'm fascinated with and I'd like to talk about at some point, or whether it's cold calling or whatever it is, you just got to pick one. When you try to do everything, that is a recipe for disaster. I did that and it damn sure didn't work. I completely agree with that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Now, you said something. Your first two or three years, I think you said you failed or whatever. Define that for me because you're still here so you couldn't have failed. What in your mind, those first two or three years when you would classify those as failed, and I understand your reasons, what does that actually mean? You didn't hit your goals? You got bounced around agencies? What did that actually look like?
--:-- Guest: I worked at one of the big ABC shops. I had a $250,000 validation that I had to hit within three years. I think I was somewhere around $200,000 after three years. Side note, I split my entire book with somebody else because I tried to do this team selling model, which we can talk about. So I brought in over what my goal was, but I split a lot of revenue. I made a lot of mistakes from a mentor-mentee spot. Once that three years was up, it was basically like, okay, you can either hit the road or you can just go straight on production. So I just went straight on production.
--:-- Guest: After year four, I wrote some more business and I looked at it. I had an opportunity to go be a part of an agency where I had some equity. It was kind of a fresh start. I had a lot of dead weight, a lot of stuff in my book that I was like, you know what, starting over wouldn't be bad because now I actually know how to build this thing and I would do it differently. I don't think they were ready to move on because they were bought in. I have no beef with them at all. They helped me in every way that they knew how. I just needed a fresh start and I wanted to start over. When I did that, I was like, I'm going to take Micah's stuff with my fresh start and I'm just going to bring people along for the ride because he had just left his firm a year before that too. It was like, hey, watch us build our books in real time was kind of the initial thought.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm going to reframe your first three years as being a failure as that is exactly the way that those first three years should have gone. The first three years in this industry are supposed to suck. You're not supposed to know which path you're the best at. Anyone who tells you that their first three years out of the gate is either an exception, which do exist, or they're bullshitting you, or dad gave them the book. Those are your three options. The vast, vast majority of us absolutely get our ass handed to us the first three years. You're supposed to, because that's where I found my thing is digital marketing. That's how I found it. I was terrible.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was taught from one of the best old school traditional insurance salesmen. My father, my ex-father-in-law, he was just amazing. This guy had all these little old school tricks that I still use in a digitized fashion today. Just awesome stuff. Mind bending. The prospect doesn't even understand what just happened. They're just signing. I don't mean tricks in a nefarious way. Just spinning it so that they frame it better. Boom. I still was terrible. 50,000 miles in the car, dropped a million business cards off, cold calling all day, all night. I was awful at it. It just was not for me. But during that time and all that pain and suck, that's when I found that with Inbound, I could be really, really good at that. That catapulted my career forward.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When I'm talking about the people who aren't willing to do the work, I'm not talking about their results. I'm talking about the actual effort that they put into figuring out what their thing is. What you just described is actually, as much as it's terrible to experience and go through, you wouldn't be sitting here with a clear plan, understanding how to get to where you want to be in an agency that you have some equity in, you believe in, and a cool kind of partner in a separate side project like Micah, if you hadn't gone through that shitty time. That is a very natural path in our industry.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Unfortunately, you guys have it on here, you have so many people who are in either legacy situations or whatever, who simply don't know to even do the work that you did. I think that's where a lot of the problems come from. Then they try to spout off shit like they've actually ever experienced the pain and people listen to them. I have this saying: I only like to work with people who walk with a limp. If you haven't been battle tested, if you're not hurting, bruised, battered, an eyepatch because you've been through war, I don't want to listen to what you have to say because you haven't experienced the pain of wanting to slam your head off your desk and cry as an adult because something's not going well, and then build yourself back up from that. I think that your journey is exactly the journey that everyone should go through because now you know how to do your thing, as much as it probably wasn't fun during the time.
--:-- Guest: Oh yeah, 100%. On a personal note, my wife is a physician, so she does well. She's a doctor. I've got five kids. I started over at 35 to get into this crazy industry. I'd always been in sales and I'd always been super successful, but you kind of hit a ceiling there of earning potential in sales. I was like, how do I make really good money? It was like, be a financial advisor or go into commercial insurance or start your own business. It was one of those three. I chose this industry. Here I am, three years in. I'd always been successful. I was short of my mark. I've got five kids. My wife just had our fifth kid. She's ready to work less. So now I'm not only trying to do my thing, but I'm trying to replace a doctor's income, a large portion. For two years, I went to sleep nauseous. How am I failing? This isn't working. What am I doing? It was a crucible. It was incredibly humbling. Everything happens for a reason and it's all going to work out. I know what the hell I'm doing now.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's the point. So many people just never get to that point. If there's anything about my career that, when I sit and I allow myself to get negative, I think about the fact that I've had to restart so many times. Everything in my life feels like momentum, momentum, momentum, restart, momentum, restart. I've started writing a book on self-discipline. Not disciplining your children or whatever, although I do like to be slapped in the face during sexual encounters. No, I didn't say that out loud.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I've started working on this book and I've started outlining stories. I'm like, holy, this through line: restart, restart, restart, restart. I started saying to myself, here I am 42, about to be 43, looking out into the future of where I want to go. I know now exactly where I want my life to go, where I want to be, what's important to me. I had to go through all that shittiness to figure this out. Five years ago, even I didn't know. I was just surviving.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is what I respect so much about what you've done. You were willing and had the guts to restart into a new space at 35 years old. A lot of people don't have the guts for that. They would have just stayed where they were and accepted that plateau and kept going. You were willing to restart. You then were willing to push through years of not performing as well as you would like to perform. A lot of people would have pulled the ripcord and said, it's just not for me, and left. You've gotten through all that to now say, I know exactly what to do. I know exactly how to get there. I can put in the work and I've built the network to get there and now I can do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Far too many of us, when stuff really starts to get hard, and this is the part that I've put a tremendous amount of thought into, they pull the ripcord. It's cliche, but it's like, there's 10 more steps and you're on the other side of the mountain. It's right there. Then we give up at that point. Or we just say, I've gone high enough. I'm good right here. I'll just complain but stay right here so I don't have to feel any more pain. This industry, you use the word, it is a crucible. It is going to test every part of you. If you want to be successful, there's no easy path. But seemingly, when you get to the other side of the mountain, you can have a lot of fun.
--:-- Guest: I wrote an article about this a couple of months ago. It's called The Producer's Journey. I hijacked it from somebody else and just put a producer spin on it. But basically, you get to this valley of-
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The best marketers steal, bro. The best marketers steal.
--:-- Guest: Yep. Austin Kleon, I think. That is Austin Kleon. Yep. But you go through these different stages and you get down to this valley of despair where you're like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this? The thing is, if you don't see it through, then you have to, if you pull the cord as you said, and you start over, now you have to start the cycle all over again. You're still going to get to the valley of despair in the new thing. You just keep punting the ball further and further down the field. I had done that my entire life. If something didn't come easy to me, I was a professional athlete. I don't know if you knew that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'll be honest with you. I don't know really anything about you. That's why I'm loving this conversation so much.
--:-- Guest: And you shouldn't because I'm a nobody.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Okay, so that's not true. You just have a pseudonym that you use. Fair enough.
--:-- Guest: But I had done that in everything in my life. Whenever something didn't come natural or easy to me, I quit. I did it in work because I did a bunch of different industries. I did it in professional baseball. I did it in my marriage. I left my marriage for a year at one time because things got hard and impossible. Thank God, things were reconciled. We now have five beautiful children. But I had done that in every part of my life. I'm sitting there looking at myself three years into this industry and I'm like, fuck, man, you've done this your whole life. At some point, you got to man up and you got to see something through.
--:-- Guest: I could see the fruits of the marriage piece and what had come from sticking it out. I'm also sober, been in sobriety for 10 years. Those are the only two things I had ever stuck to. I could see all this fruit that had been born out of that. I'm like, fucking do this with your work, man. You got to get through the valley of despair and you got to stick it out. Let's say it doesn't work out with this firm, Max Revenue Incorporated, whether it's this firm or the other firm, you're doing this for the next 40 years. Fucking stick it out. Excuse my language, but this is a pro cursing podcast, okay? All right. So that's kind of the story.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Dude, I really appreciate that. Do not refer to yourself as a nobody ever again, please. I'm very much enjoying getting to know you. Have you ever read this book right here? There's No Plan B for Your A-Game by Bo Eason. Make this the next book that you read. This was referred to me by Chris Paradiso. I read it in a weekend. I couldn't put it down. Absolutely couldn't put it down. It also helps that I'm single now, so I have a lot of extra time to read. I've just been reading like a fucking madman. But this book is so good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's my takeaway from what you just said that is confirmed in this book. Bo Eason was a professional athlete as well. He played football for the Oilers and then went and played for the 49ers. Then he became an award-winning playwright after football. Now he's a six-figure speaker and coach guy, not in the shitty way. He's really well-known, works with great people. This dude is completely legit. His whole shtick, and this is what I love about it, and this is what I took away from this book if I'm going to put it in a nutshell, but I still recommend you read it: You need to think of yourself at all times as you are the best.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What's up guys? Sorry to take you away from the episode, but as you know, we do not run ads on this show and in exchange for that, I need your help. If you're loving this episode, if you enjoy this podcast, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcast platform, I would love for you to subscribe, share, comment if you're on YouTube, leave a rating review if you're on Spotify or Apple iTunes. This helps the show grow. It helps me bring more guests in. We have a tremendous lineup of people coming in, men and women who've done incredible things, sharing their stories around peak performance, leadership, growth, sales, the things that are going to help you grow as a person and grow your business. But they all check out comments, ratings, reviews. They check out all this information before they come on. So as I reach out to more and more people and want to bring them in and share their stories with you, I need your help. Share the show. Subscribe if you're not subscribed. I'd love for you to leave a comment about the show because I read all the comments. Or if you're on Apple or Spotify, leave a rating review of this show. I love you for listening to this show and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you. All right, I'm out of here. Peace.
--:-- [Interview resumes]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let's get back to the episode. You're the best producer. You're the best producer trainer. You're the best husband. Whatever the things that are important to you are, you frame your brain at all times as you are the best and are going to be the best. It does a couple of things. One, you have to get rid of everything in your life that doesn't allow you to be the best at that. If you want to be the best husband, alcohol, pot, porno, a group of buddies that are keeping you from being the best husband because they take you off the path, you need to get rid of them because they don't allow you to be the best husband or spouse or whatever.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The second thing is it forces you to extend your timeline because no one gets to be the best in a year. No one gets to be the best in three years. He said he sets 20 year timelines for his life to be the best. When you think, and this is what I love about what you just said, and it's why I grabbed this book because it's what you just said. You're going to be Max Revenue Inc for 40 years. You're going to be 40 years out. When you set your timeline for 20 years, you now don't go, oh shit, things aren't working out the way I want right now, I'm going to pull the ripcord. You go, I just got to work through it. I got to figure it out. I got 17 more years. I got 15 more years of this. I got to figure it out. By forcing, by focusing on being the best and narrowing your focus onto what allows you to be the best and extending your timeline, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You now have this, you now are dialed in to what you do and you have the mindset of a setback is just a setback. You have 10 more years, 18 more years to do this thing. Who cares if you're having a bad six months or a bad three months or even a bad year because you have to figure it out because you're not stopping for so much more time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And man, I'll tell you, I have it. And he just pounds it into your head in a really readable way. That's why I like this book because I don't like books that just dive into stuff. It's like melts your brain. It's too much. I don't need all that. But those two concepts for me, I felt like I'd been kind of floating around them for a while. And when he kind of lined them up that way, I was like, holy shit, that's the thing. You got to find the thing that you want to be the best at. Cut everything else out for the most part, or at least supremely focused, extend your timeline. And now the bad days aren't bad days. They're just a freaking moment in time. Who cares? I got all this more time. It was really, to be honest with you, very, very moving.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: It sounds kind of like Benjamin Hardy's *10x Is Easier Than 2x*. I got that book right here too. That book was a game changer for me as well. Future self, right?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So you decide who you want to be and where you want to go, kind of like you alluded to earlier. And then that person or that thing becomes your rubric for all of the decisions that you make in the present.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And so it's similar. They're kind of getting at the same thing. I'll give you another one. Darren Hardy, come on camera, Darren Hardy. [Camera adjusts] Sorry, I got one of these cameras that adjusts on your face, and it'll come back around in a sec. Darren Hardy's *The Compound Effect*. This is an old classic. This has been around for more than a decade. Super fast read as well, but it's the same concept. Pick a thing, do the thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And eventually you look around and you've accumulated so much talent, experience, relationships, money, whatever, that you're just so much farther than everybody else.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And that to me is it. These are some of the things that I have worked very hard to try to teach my kids, even though they're young, start to integrate into their lives because no one freaking tells them this stuff. School's not telling our kids. Even training classes, like when you go to sales for the people that are listening at home—I have one of these cameras that follows your face, and when I bent over to get the book, it followed me and it didn't come back.
--:-- Guest: It's all good. It's all good. I'll look at writing.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, yeah. You can look at my cool American t-shirt. But even sales training courses do not properly express how difficult it's going to be. They don't tell you, "Look guys, here's the five steps to sell something." What they don't say is you're going to suck at this for a decade and then you're going to get good. But if you can make it that decade, all your wildest dreams come true. Your wife will drive the newest seven series every year. You'll have a boat and a second home. Your kids will all go to private school. Your friends will all envy you, even though they used to make fun of you for selling insurance. They don't tell you that, but it's going to take that long. So there's no manual for this thing. You just figure it out or you quit. That's really what it comes down to.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So let's talk about the Max Revenue Letter because I find it to be intriguing. I've known Micah for maybe three years, five years, a while. I can't remember the first time I interviewed him. But then I saw him coming out and obviously I didn't know when you guys first launched it. I didn't know if there was anybody else with him. There wasn't a lot of—I didn't really know what was going on. What has been the most surprising reaction to it from you guys? Are people just all in? Are you getting any pushback on some of the ideas? What has surprised you? When you start creating like this and putting it out on a regular basis, you get a lot of interesting cats that start to reach out to you and respond. So I'm just interested, what have you guys been experiencing?
--:-- Guest: Yeah, so this isn't my first foray into branding and internet marketing. I had done it in another space a while back and I ended up letting that die. It was in the faith space, believe it or not, despite what my language may sound like. But I just didn't feel right. It never felt right. So anyway, I built up a pretty big audience before and that's why I told Micah, "Let's do this. I can build us an audience. We just need to take your credibility and what you know, let me package it and put it out." So anyways, all that to be said, it's been wild.
--:-- Guest: One of the big industry magazines reached out to us to do a spotlight. We're doing that soon. We get a ton of—what we get a lot of is new producers or producers who have struggled that want a different way to do things because this message of, "Hey, most of these people out here telling you how to do it, they were spoon-fed and you just don't know it. And by the time you know it, it's too late." So this idea of building it through cold outbound, people have really taken to it. So that's been great.
--:-- Guest: We were kicked off LinkedIn about four months into this thing because I used a non-politically correct word. So we had to start over. So what you see on LinkedIn is actually us starting over four or five months in.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What was the word?
--:-- Guest: Retarded. I said it on purpose. I intentionally twist the knife with things because I'm trying to make a ruckus. To be quite honest, this industry is so fucking boring. Everybody's got the same take. There's a lot of sacred cows that need to be killed. So that's what we did. Now I have toned it down a little bit because I don't want to get canceled again. That wasn't fun. But the response has been great. Micah and I get messages daily from producers saying, "Hey, what do you think about this?" or "How would you do this?" The one little product we have is like $195. We ain't trying to get rich off this thing. That's the last thing we're trying to do. We genuinely want to help because it's a fucking slug out there. It's a slog.
--:-- Guest: It's going over well. If anything, the response has been so overwhelming that I'm having to pump the brakes because I don't want it to interfere with the main thing, which is me building my book. So I'm having to really be diligent and organized with my time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: And for those of you who are listening who are interested, that's the Producer Playbook. You can go to Max Revenue Letter. I know it's a dot beehiiv right now, but if they just go to Max Revenue Letter, does that bring them over?
--:-- Guest: Yeah, that's fine.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, cool. So you just go to Max Revenue Letter, you'll see sign up for the email list. It's awesome. I love it. I still want to keep chatting for a couple more minutes, but I just want to say, definitely subscribe, it's free. And then the Producer Playbook, I know I just haven't gotten to it because I've got 10 million things going on at work, but I was going to get it for some of my production team. I know other people that have already used it and love it, a couple of good buddies of mine. So there's great content in there. I definitely want to highly recommend that if you're interested in these ideas and you want a good template, that Producer Playbook has gotten great reviews from everybody I know. So definitely want to give a big shout out to that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So talk to me a little bit about where you see this going. You guys have definitely made a stir. There's a lot of people in the industry. There's like 10 bazillion podcasts. I have been slowly moving this podcast away from insurance-specific content. I still love talking to people that are really interesting to me in the insurance industry. And I look at it more like—and I don't mean to take the hubris out of this comment—but I think of it kind of like the way Joe Rogan does his podcast. I'm not really interested in his fight night podcast. That's not why I listen to him. I liked the other stuff. So I kind of skip those ones. So I want to keep doing ones that are insurance specific, but then I want to do all the ones around it because our entire industry is filled with the same crap. "What do you do? Oh, I ask for referrals. Well, what technology do you use? I'm on Agency Zoom. Well, why are you there?" It just makes me want to barf.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But you guys have come out with a new spin, the flavor, the eye patch guy. The whole thing is counter to our industry, which I love. I adore it. I think it's phenomenal. So where do you see this going? You obviously have people's attention. That's only going to pick up, I'm sure. Do you see this becoming a training program? Do you see it becoming a consultancy? Are you just going to continue to grow and see what happens and play it by ear? Have you guys mapped out as much as you're willing to share?
--:-- Guest: Oh, no, I'm an open book. To be honest with you, we're just going to kind of see where it takes us. I know that both of our number one priority right now is regrowing our books. So that's priority number one. This is just kind of extra on the side, just because I like making a ruckus and I like doing it. We've had a lot of agencies reach out to us and offer us quite a bit of money to come out and train their guys. We may do all that one day. I'm just kind of right now trying to build my book and Mike is trying to rebuild his book. We're just sharing as we go along. Whatever comes of it is what comes of it. If it turns into some great consulting firm, whenever that's time to happen, it'll happen. But we're going to both get our books to a million. And then once it gets there, we'll see what the cards have in store for us.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. To me, that is how the best consultancies work. I look at Mick Hunt. Mick Hunt is one of my very best friends. I love Mick. One of the literally best humans I ever met in my life. This dude's done it twice. Literally built an agency once as a team member, employee, kind of a head of operations, then did it again on his own agency, then did it again. Everything that he talks about is based off his own beats. You can hear it in the way he talks about it. You can hear, "I've said it the wrong way and gotten the door shut in my face this many times to learn how to say it the right way. And now I'm teaching you." You can hear it in the nuances and the way people talk versus other people that I know for a fact overestimate their numbers just so they can seem like they've done something so they can put a program together. And then when they talk, it feels an inch deep.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That to me feels like the right way, what you guys are doing. Because you could figure out you don't want to do freaking workshops. Workshops take you away from your family. Workshops take a tremendous amount of mind space. That kind of stuff is, once you have a bill, you can kind of do it multiple times. But another good buddy of mine, Matt Namoli, and his partner at GNN Insurance, Zach Gould, they created the Babalon program to teach people about their referral shtick, building referral partners. They did that for a year and a half, two years, highly successful. They made a lot of money, but they got toasted on it. The travel and everything took you away from your family. So I think you guys are going about it the right way. I'm actually excited for you that that's the way you're doing it versus in five years or three years wanting to have this many clients. I feel like you start to skip steps when you do it that way.
--:-- Guest: Yeah. Whatever's going to happen will happen. A lot of times opportunities present themselves that you never even could have imagined. So that's kind of the path we're taking. At the end of the day, I think this is the best industry in the world. You can make a damn good living for 20, 30 hours a week. If I can grow a million dollar book, a two million dollar book, make half a million dollars to a million dollars a year and work 30 hours a week, that's a pretty good living. So if anything comes above that with Max Revenue and that turns out to be some great thing too, well that's great, but I don't need it. It's just what we say where I'm from, it's lagniappe. It's a little something extra.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love that. So let's say I'm listening to this. I'm a young producer, or I'm struggling, or I've been thinking about doing cold outreach. Your philosophy, right? What's maybe one separator that you found? Not to give away—
--:-- Guest: I'll give it all away. I don't care.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So good. I like that. That's my philosophy as well. So what's one thing that for you, having now been in it, feeling like you're starting to figure it out enough to talk about it, what's one thing that you feel like a lot of people get wrong or is a nuanced issue that people tend to miss that can make a big impact?
--:-- Guest: Okay. So unless your last name is Kardashian or Biden, you're probably not going to network your way into validation. For validation being, at most firms they give you a three to five year window where you have to hit a certain revenue target or else they let you go or you go on a draw. You've really got to have some connections to be able to pull that off. So what happens is you get a lot of young producers who look at the other guys in the office and they don't see the receipts for how those other guys built their book. By the time they do know how they built the book and they see behind the curtain, they realize that a lot of guys were tapped on accounts or brought in on accounts or whatever. I have no beef against those guys. I throw shade on them in my posts, but that's just to make a ruckus. Honestly, if somebody wanted to give me a million dollar book, I wouldn't not take it.
--:-- Guest: So what you got to realize is that if you don't have that networking ability, if your dad's not the head of lending at some big local bank, if you're just what I call "the rest of us," the 95%, you've got to build it with cold outbound, in my opinion. If you're a middle market guy, you're going to have to do some level of outbound. And in that outbound, it's a volume game. I know this is a bitter pill, but you just have to, whether you like it or not, there has to be a certain number of calls. I found my sweet spot to be around 25 to 30 a day. Micah does more like 40 or 50. We have different targets, different niches that we go after.
--:-- Guest: I would say, look at your agency. Where do you guys have success? What niches do you have where you have all the markets? Once you know that, build a prospect list of 300 to 400 names, start banging out 25 to 50 calls a day. If you make enough calls, you will find somebody who's in pain. That's low-hanging fruit. You can go in there and solve that problem. Then as you make those calls and you build up that cold calling and you learn how to get through objections, you can start to convert some people who maybe they're not unhappy with their agent, but they're at least willing to let you take a peek under the hood. They have unrealized pain.
--:-- Guest: It's kind of like a doctor. You got three people. You got people that are healthy, they know they're healthy, and they don't care what you're selling. You got people who are like, "I might not be healthy, I'm willing to do a checkup." And then you got people who are just in pain. When you first get started, you're looking for the third. But as you get better and you develop your cold calling skills or cold emailing or whatever you choose, you can start to pick off some of those in the middle that are kind of undecided. So that's all I would say. It's nothing revolutionary. Anybody who's done a lot of cold outbound already knows this. But for some reason, our industry has taken a hell of a long time to catch up.
--:-- Guest: Let me say one more thing. You got to remember that when these older guys in your office built their book, they did it in a different time. They joined the country club. They were part of the social clubs. Everybody knew two to three guys. Now, thanks to this little invention called the internet, everybody knows 10 to 15 brokers. You've got to do something that stands out above other people. Everybody is getting the LinkedIn requests. It's about having the right message at the right time to the right person. Even if they play golf with 10 other guys at the country club, if you're the guy that calls them when they get that work comp audit and they're furious, guess who they're going to take a meeting with? It's going to be you. They're not going to pick up the phone and call three or four other people that they know. If you're the guy that calls, you're going to be the guy that gets the meeting.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I completely agree. And to be honest with you, just on my ego comment, we have this weird thing in our industry, and I only know this from all the hate that I've gotten over my career for pushing inbound. We have this ego thing that the best producers, the best agencies work off of referrals. If you work off anything other than referrals, somehow you're not doing your job. There is this really odd thing that I can't wrap my head around. I've heard the argument. I've gotten the comments.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Actually, Cass and I were talking the other day because we had a bunch of young podcasters that we kind of talked to. We were giving them shit because we were like, "You guys don't understand how easy you have it today." When I started podcasting 10 years ago, there's an article in the Insurance Journal which specifically references Cass and I hating on what we're doing, advocating for inbound marketing. One of the largest publications in our industry wrote an article hating on us for advocating for inbound marketing. So this idea that if you're referral based, that means you do a good job and you're a good agency, and people who have to cold call or do inbound, they just can't figure it out and that's why they have to do it. I do think there's a big part of that. Unfortunately, that gets perpetuated.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But to your point, you asked about inbound. The same exact philosophy that you just described, replace outbound with inbound, and it works for the same exact reasons. The difference is some shoppers need to be called. Some shoppers go to the internet, which is why I advocate for both. You need to have an inbound and you need to have an outbound. I think the inbound is a derivative of your outbound. So you call and the guy gives you an objection, write it down. Answer that question in an inbound, in a YouTube video, put it on YouTube. You call and you get three, write those three down, answer that. Literally the inbound is just answering these calls. Maybe not that specific person, but all the people who that person is one of 10,000, 100,000 people who have that same objection or question.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So that guy goes to the internet and goes, "What is this experience mod thing?" Bam, now he finds your video, watches your video. Now he calls you. Or when you call, he's seen your video. So the idea is they work for the same exact reason. The difference is you're trying through volume to drop in in a moment of pain, but you're going to have a higher per interaction hit ratio. Yes, you have to do that. And in addition, you add inbound as a derivative of your outbound. What you get is they now on their time get to do the same exact thing. So now 10 p.m., this guy's got his kids to bed. He's looking through his documents going, "What the freak? Our mod went up again this year. What is going on? What is an experience mod? Why is it important?" And now your videos are showing up, your content is showing up, and he's going, "Who is this freaking Ryan Hanley? What is this agency? I need to call these guys." All of a sudden I get an email. It's the same concept, just capturing either side of the equation, in my opinion.
--:-- Guest: I'm fascinated by that. I was reading that the second biggest search engine is YouTube, behind Google. The reason why I know that is because at one time with one of these other projects, I was running Facebook ads and all this stuff. They were talking about why YouTube ads are so much more profitable. It's because it's actually intent-based. When someone goes on YouTube, they have a problem and they are searching XYZ. Whereas on Facebook or Instagram, you're scrolling, you're shaking your head. So it's intent-based. That lead that comes your way off of YouTube is so much more valuable and your conversions are so much higher. So I've been fascinated with that. I reached out to you like a year ago or six months ago to try to pick your brain on it, and we've just never been able to link up. Can I run you through a couple of my objections?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, yeah. Hit me.
--:-- Guest: Okay. Mid-market. I also now feel like a dick for us not connecting. I don't know why that happened. I'm sorry.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: No, it's fine, bro. It's all good. Everything in its due time. So it's fine.
--:-- Guest: Most of what I chase is between $10,000 in revenue and $100,000 in revenue, which shrinks your buyer pool considerably from small business. Now, you just told me about Gordon Coyle, which I totally get. Let's say I focus in manufacturing. How many CFOs or directors of operations in manufacturing are going to go and search that type of video? Because at least when I think about it, and it's probably wrong thinking, I'm thinking, "Oh, that $50,000 manufacturing CFO, he already knows that answer. He's not looking for that on YouTube." Is that a false assumption?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. That's projecting a perceived reality onto what actually is reality. They're all humans. I run an agency with 25 people. I Google HR shit all the time. Shouldn't I know? I'm a four-time executive, two-time CEO. I have 25 people. I don't know shit about HR. An HR software might be like, "Ah, we don't have to answer that question. A guy with 25 employees, he should know the answer to that question." I don't freaking know. I go to YouTube and I go, "How do I get rid of this person?" The point is they're just people. They're good at some things, not at others. Some of them will know. Some of them won't know.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Here's the thing, dude. You only need one person to watch that video and reach out to you to win the account. MrBeast is going to have 10 bazillion views. Your video might have a hundred. But if it's the right hundred people, that's all that matters to you. You don't need a bazillion people to watch your video to get a million dollar book. You need the right hundred people to watch your video to get a million dollar book, especially if you layer those videos appropriately.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Take that manufacturer with $50 million in revenue. Figure out what the top 20 questions that they have are. I did this for a while back at the Murray Group, did a little bit at Rogue too. When I did an outbound prospecting call that wasn't going well, and I could kind of feel that it wasn't going well, I would reverse course. I would say, "Hey, sounds to me like you're in a good spot and I'm super happy for you. Can I just ask you one question? This has nothing to do with you buying insurance from me. I like to create content about this stuff and I like to answer questions. What's one question that you have that you commonly have?" Most of the time they'll say yes. And they'll go, "You know what? I really struggle with the idea of that." Bam, write it down. I just got another question. Now I know what a potential prospect could search on YouTube for that I want to put out there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Then you create a playlist. You answer those 20 videos and you do it over and over. People go, "Well, isn't it all small business?" From a volume perspective, yes, it is going to be more small business. But if you have a way to filter it, a lead comes in and it's a $500 BOP, send it to a rookie unless you want to write that stuff. We write it because that's our model. But I tell people all the time, you don't have rookies in your organization. Just send it to a rookie. Refer it to a buddy down the street who's just getting started. He wants to write that stuff.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The other piece is you can say, "How we saved a $50 million manufacturer 11% on their insurance." Tell that story and then do it again and again and again and target those people. You're going to put it out there and you're going to get 25 views. What a lot of people do, especially people listening to this podcast, is they'll say, "Oh, I'm only getting 25 views." You need one person out of it. You're not going to get 100,000 views. You need one person to like it, to see it. Then boom, do 100 videos. If one person who's a good prospect for you contacts you on every video you create and you create 100 videos, you just got 100 perfect prospects into your agency. That's it.
--:-- Guest: Yeah, and here's the beauty of it. You make it once and it goes forever.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Forever. Right.
--:-- Guest: It's, you know, you write a blog post, it goes to the bottom of your feed. You put out a social media post, it goes to the bottom. Your YouTube is like the thing that keeps paying you because it only gets more valuable the longer it sits there.
--:-- Guest: And it only ranks higher and higher the longer it sits there. And I'm not trying to create a bunch of copycats, but I know the value of it. I've just talked myself out of it for forever.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. So this is what I used to say from stage all the time when I talked about this topic. I'd say, I think of every blog post, every YouTube video—because blog posts, if you're ranking proper SEO, there is—but like, so I think of every blog post, every YouTube video, as a salesperson working for me 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They don't take vacations. They don't get sick. They don't take paternity or maternity leave. They don't get pissy. They don't take smoke breaks. They are working 24 hours a day, seven days a week selling for you. And when you create your headlines, when you fill out your description of a YouTube video, when you put calls to action in a YouTube video, think of it as a salesperson. Every single one is a salesperson. And if you build them that way, people will contact you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Right. Like another mistake—and I gotta wrap up here in a second, just to be fair to the audience and fair to you. I got to go pick my kids up from school. But one of the things that I see a lot of times when people will send me their videos is they don't actually ask for the business. Two things, actually. They don't tell people who they are and they don't ask for the business. They just start talking. And then at the end, they just end it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Every single template, I use this shit. I do. I use the hook, reward, return or hook, retain, reward model. So it's like the hook is the first sentence. "Today, we're going to talk about how small business owners can save 25% on their workers' compensation tomorrow." Here we go. Bam. There's the start. Then there's a little tiny bump. And then I say, "Hi, my name is Ryan Hanley, founder and president of Rogue Risk, where we do insurance differently, specifically by giving you knowledge and information to make the right insurance decision." Now they know exactly who we are. Then I retain them by giving them the information. At the end, we get the payoff, which is, "If you like this kind of relationship with your insurance broker, we would love to work with you. We're in all 50 states, so we can come to where you are. And we have many ways to get ahold of us. You can give us a call, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whichever way you choose, we look forward to working with you."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Every single video is exactly the same. If you watch them, there's like 475 videos on our YouTube channel. That is the framework for every single video. I say it over and over and over and over again because it's easy, it's clean, it's consistent, and that's what people want. They're not looking for flashy, showy, crazy camera angles. Decent audio, decent video, clear, concise answer. Give me what I need. Get out the door. I'm telling you, this shit works. It works every frigging time.
--:-- Guest: All right. I'm going to do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. And if you have any questions, bro, just reach out. I promise this time I will take your call.
--:-- Guest: Big league in the shit out of me. Trust me. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. I'm just kidding.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But no, dude, it has been so much fun. I'm glad we have had a chance to connect. I've loved getting to know you. This will not be the last time we chat. I love what you guys are doing. And I'm so happy to share what you're up to with the audience. What are the places where they can find more about you, more about Max Revenue, like the whole thing? Just take me through it.
--:-- Guest: Just go on LinkedIn and go to our profile page, the company page. All the links are there. Or you can go to maxrevenueletter.beehiiv.com and everything will be in the heading. If you like what you have to say, great. And if you don't, that's fine too. There's plenty of ways to do this thing. And if you don't like our way, that's fine. Go find another one. It's all good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Awesome, bro. Appreciate you. Be good.
--:-- Guest: I'm going to jump. Booms!
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Thank you.
--:-- [End of interview. Promotional segment begins.]
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