I've heard of an agent doing a million a month. So it was in my head. Well, I was probably at all state, but it was also like, how much money do we want to make? So that's kind of where I was at too. But I also wanted, I love breaking records. I'm extremely competitive. And I asked kind of around, I was like, hey, what's the most you've heard agents sell in a month? And everyone's like a million, a million. I was like, well, I want to do a million. And eventually one day I'm going to do more than a million. But that's kind of where it's stuck from is like, what is the best and I want to beat the best? That's always my mentality. I like to be number one. I like to fight for it, I'm competitive. And so is my whole team and I love it. So when you look at the sales targets now for your staff, is it still 50 or have you adjusted since you've opened? Good question. So ladies gentlemen, welcome to the insurance sales law podcast. I have Brett Boertz, a farmer's agent from Houston, Texas who is joining me as a guest today. Brett, thanks so much for hopping on. I appreciate it. For sure, for sure. I had a rush out of home from work and make sure I could get in time. Yeah. Well, Brett, you have a very interesting story. I know a lot of agents have gotten to know you. I've gotten to know you quite well over last year. I've seen you at a couple of events. You've come to my event. And your agency has been around for about a year, a little less than that. And you're having months where you're doing over 500K in premium. And everybody's wondering, how is Brett able to do that? And I know you've shared that in public forums already. But what I want to do is quickly go over your background and the goal or some questions that interest me around how you run your agency. Because we have a large team as well. Our goal is to get to a point where we're writing a million in premium per month just from personal lines. And I also do the same thing in commercial. And I know you're very ambitious yourself. And you're not just saying you want to hit certain numbers.  So I want this to be a learning experience for myself and others who are listening in. And also have this serve as inspiration to other agents, especially if the agent who was watching this is lonely and they don't have a lot of great agents around them that they can talk to. Hopefully they can learn some great things from you. So let's dive in. Yeah, hopefully I can give some insight as that growth too. Because I know not all agencies have 22, 24 staff in their office. They may have one, two, three, four, five. And we were there at 1.2. Let's go back to the beginning where, a year ago, you were just getting into the industry. Walk me through the key milestones that you went through from the time that you got into the industry to now, just so that people have a better understanding of your background and how you got to where you are now. Key milestones. Yeah, for anyone that doesn't know, I have no idea what these questions are gonna be. Vlad was like, hey, let's hop on. I hopped on and we're just jumping into this raw. So I guess milestones. So people may know already that I started insurance at 18. I'm 27 right now. Just turned 27 the day after Christmas. So Christmas baby's out there. I definitely understand the struggle of one present. I got it. December 18. Oh yeah, December what? 18th. Oh, okay, okay. So you know the struggle of only getting one present, right? Happy birthday, happy, Merry Christmas. Yeah. But growing up, man, it was good. I had a good family though, a great family. So my milestones, I started at 18 years old. It was choice of college or insurance. And I chose the insurance route, obviously. I could never do college. I hated learning against my will, but I do love learning what I love to learn. So key milestones was, I've had a lot of people I've worked with that I learned. I think I'm good at kind of picking out what people are learning from. So I've had mentors and stuff. My cousin and my sister were mentors of mine for insurance, but also personally. So that's really helped me grow professionally and in my personal life as well. But man, key milestones. We are at all state. When we left all state that, no one really knows this in my professional career, but people do know this in my personal life. I haven't shared this before. I was the sales manager when I was, so 18 years old, I was telemarketer, got licensed, et cetera, et cetera. Later on the road, I became a sales manager. And when I was about 12- And who was the agency owner who hired you at 18? Good question. My cousin and my sister. My cousin and my sister each had an agency and I was a telemarketer and I would send leads to both. And I was a telemarketer for both of them. And then my cousin brought me directly in when I became licensed. And it was actually good I started working for my cousin because he was a lot tough for all me. I was an 18 year old, 19 year old. I didn't know how to send letters. I did not, you know, envelope address letters. I didn't know my months in order. He maybe stayed like what, 11 or 10 PM or something one night to actually memorize my months in order because I was 18 or 19 or whatever it was, not knowing that.  I'm not gonna allow that. So he made me stay in the office late and learn that, which was great. I'm pretty sure that was, he gave me tough love, but he gave me great, great advice. And I actually learned a lot of my sales tactics originally from him. So people may know him, Ryan Graham, don't know my shot and out his name. And then Brooke Beasley is my sister. Now I became a sales manager eventually and around 22 years old, they sold their all state agencies. And I didn't have anything else. I put my entire persona or I guess my entire builds up was based on, my persona was based on that. Like that was me. Like, yeah, that was, thank you. That was my identity. That's why I always say that's my, that was my identity was insurance was the sales leader. And when they sold, I had nothing for nine months. I fell into a massive depression. I've never been at. I may be just being very vulnerable over here. I was extremely depressed. I felt like I had nothing. I feel like I was nothing. Just a lot of, it was a lot of praying, a lot of time God worked on my heart at that point. So you were working at that time I was not for nine months. If anyone knows I'm a minimalist. I almost own nothing. So it's very easy for me to live off of $2,500 to $3,000 a month. I don't really need a lot. So I like to sell as many things and I like to have almost nothing except what I need. And I'm a gamer. So I like my gamer set up here. I have my monitor set up and all that fun stuff. But so that's my hobby. Now, when that happened, I reached a point where I was learning a lot. I was always self-motivated. I was always motivating people speaking and doing all this crazy stuff. Kind of like I am now, super energetic, even more so though, if you can believe it, right? Everyone always doesn't believe that part. So, but nonetheless, I fell into that slump and I finally got out of it when I started at Farmers again. But it still wasn't, I wasn't there yet. I needed to stumble one more time. And where that happened was I started at Farmers nine months later after Allstate. And I didn't, I went to independent and I was like, oh, the grass is gonna be greener on the other side. With Farmers, were you a producer or an agency owner? Good question. I started Farmers as a producer under my sister and cousin. They opened a two agency. Hey, we need a sales leader actually, a sales leader to come and train our staff. And how big was your staff? Their staff, their teams were three, four sales guys and then three or four sales ladies and men at the other office, maybe about actually five or six of my sisters. So it wasn't, it wasn't big. And as, but as we grew, I mean, I think that's a closer bigger than maybe average, but they were growing and it got to the point where COVID hit. And they're like, hey, we no longer need, this is 2020 March, you know, COVID hit. They're like, hey, we no longer need a sales leader. And I actually kind of brought it up to them. It's like, hey, y'all don't need a sales leader. They're like, yeah, I guess you're right.  And I was like, I think I'm gonna join the independent route. I just don't think Farmers is for me. I want to, I want to try the independent route. I went it, I tried the independent route. Let me tell you I hated that. Sorry, Brad, were you an agent or a producer? Oh, my apologies. I was a producer, I became a sales leader for them. I was a producer slash sales leader. So I did help manage on the farmer side, on the farmer side. So we went from all state to farmers and I helped them. I worked for my cousin, my sister again, just like I did at all state. I was a producer and I was also a sales manager a little bit above. And then I left that during COVID and I opened my independent agency. So you were the owner at that point. Yes, when I opened my own independent agency. And I struggled in that. I was a solo man operation as a star when they first started off. And I struggled. I mean, I was really motivated for three to six months. Thank you for keeping on track there, Brad and it's good because I'm ADHD. Vlad's keeping on track. I need this. This is what I have in my office too. Don't label yourself, Brad. Don't label yourself. Oh no, I think it's great. I think my ADHD is my double-edged sword. I love it. It's my strength and my weakness. I actually, I'm very positive about that. I love it. So I was a easy show. I was learning the struggles of business ownership that I kind of knew because I helped my sister and cousin a little bit but you get that awakening when you're actually the person in the seat, so to say. I failed miserably at that, to be honest with you. I did horrible. It was just me. I was super lazy about doing it. It was tough to be self-motivated at the house because it was a house operation. And I did not like the independent. There was too many different systems, too many things going on, too many things I had to keep up with. It was just a lot. Too much stuff to track in the back end. So it didn't work out. And then where it came back, that was my next stumble, right? That was my second or third stumble or a big milestone to help me kind of get to where I'm at now that I learned from. My brother, right? Now I'm introducing my brother. My brother wasn't an insurance. He was like, hey, can I invest into your agency? And I was like, yeah, possibly I could hire a producer and maybe we could actually, I could start doing this thing again, right? We'll get started again. And then my cousin came along. He's doing farmers right now, right?  What if you opened up a farmer's agency? And I was like, ah, I didn't really like farmers. He's like, well, how about this? Come back and work with me again, like you did back in the old days. Yep, several years ago. Come back and work with me as a producer. And I will, and I'll show you kind of how that farmer structure is played out and you can see if you like it. And me and him are expecting me to come back and maybe do 20, 25,000 because I was still found at a low point. And he was like, come back to me. I came back in first month, first two weeks didn't do anything. I just couldn't sell anything. I was like, this is not right. I'm supposed to be a top closer. I'm supposed to be a top salesperson. What is going on? There was, my cousin didn't, he didn't buy any leads in his agency. Zero leads when I was in there was just me and him at this point. So it was just me and him. So what I'm going on is I'm calling farmers.com's leads, FFQs, right? I'm calling on those. I'm getting about maybe four or five a days. He's been around for a while. So he was getting some of those. So I'm getting maybe four or five a day on a good day. And I'm working them. Well, in just second week hits and I get my first close. I'm like, finally, I feel it, you know? I'm like, finally, I feel it, but not really because it was like kind of my cousin answer the phone and got the information and sent it over to me. And I was like, I didn't do the full work. I don't deserve that sale is what I told myself. I didn't do it. So he was like, no, dude, it's yours. You didn't, I was like, no. So next week on Monday it hits and I get my, I get the second sale, right? I was like, okay, that feels right. This is feeling right again. And it gets in and from there just started snowballing. I finished my first month with 54,000, my second month with 52,000 with zero purchase leads just working farmers.com about a 25% closure issue on those. So if I got four one day, I closed one of them. And so that was, that was awesome. I love those farmers.coms. That kind of worked for a while. And then we, I did that for several, several months. I was just selling, selling, selling. I was getting, I was dusting off the rust, right? I feel like I've always, I do pride myself in my word language and stuff for, in sales, right? And doing the quoting process, et cetera. I'm a little fast on computer. So I pride myself on that. And it was kind of, it was kind of dusting off and getting the rust off again. And it felt like, now this is year 2022, this is 2022. July, 2022 is when I started back with farmers. And I worked with him all the way until, I worked in selling again all the way until March, 2022. And then I opened my agency, or I was prepping to open my agency in April, but we opened May 1st, 2023. But for April and half of March, I had new income. I just saved up a lot of money from selling and previous stuff I was doing. I was a streamer at one point, gamer streamer, I was telling them that for a second over text there. So anyways, I saved up that and I opened up at May 1st, but for about a month and a half prior, March and April, 2023, I had no income. I was just getting ready to set up and start this massive agency. If people are seeing my post on Facebook with my office space, you can see it. It's like a 3,000 square foot office. It's massive, it was a massive commitment. And it was a lot that went to that. Here we are today. Here we are today. Well, thank you for getting us out of the speech. So was the idea from the beginning when you were opening up in May of 2023 to go big, to get to a point where you have 20 plus producers in a span of a year? Or was that just something that things worked really well in the beginning and you just kept bringing on more people? What was the thinking in May? Great question. It was always planned. From July of the previous year in 2022, I said, if I like this, Ryan, to my cousin, I want to do this massive. He's like, yeah, do it, man. I mean, I'll help train some of your staff if you want to. It was great because he let a few of my people that were starring with me in May work at his office under him. And I trained them while they're in like, January and February and March for like a month and a half there. They worked for him and then I moved them over. So I had three people move over with me to that agency. That was the kickstart. And my sister. You started with three sales producers. Yes, in a way in April. Now we're going to go from April. We're at three sales producers. In May, my sister sold her agency with farmers, right? I think she was number 42 in production in the country. She did great. Love my sister. Huge role model in my life. Brook Beasley, if you all know her guys, I know some people do. But she sold. Yeah, set out to my big sis. So she pretty much raised me, you know, my parents worked all seven days a week. So she's 12 years older than me. She kind of raised me. What do you mean? My parents, my dad's a psychologist. He owns as he has his own practice and then our guest therapist. And then my mom is a teacher. She's been a teacher all of her life or a good portion of her life, I should say. Yeah. And the family's all an insurance. Yes, yes, yeah. All of us are insurance. All four of us. There's four siblings. I have two sisters, a brother and myself, all an insurance. My cousin, of course, his wife is an insurance. We have his brother, my cousin's brother-in-law is an insurance. And we have some other little extended family members that have kind of dived in, either with all state or, I guess they're not with all state anymore. They came over us and they went to a different industry. But I wanted to answer your question. I started with three in April, but when my sister sold, I hired her staff and she opened a management agency, management company called Incindo. So her, my cousin kind of went into that with my brother and I as well, I plan to fully develop into that when or if we decide to go down that route. But yeah, so they did that. She helped me out with training and stuff and compliance and what on the front end and making sure everything's all right. So that was massive. She helped take care of that side while I focused on the sales training. And at this point in May 1st, we have about six sales people, seven sale people that were around there. And now kind of jumping ahead just real quick. We're at about 13 or 14 sales people, but we have about 22 staff because there's other positions. Okay, so let's break that down. And I know you had a few people that just started yesterday, right? Yes, yeah, very stressful. Not counting the ones that, or I guess you can count them if you feel good about them. How many total sales people, what about service? Who just handle a service in your agency? Correct. So I think we have to kind of a little insight. I think I really, I do not know this. People are like, oh, this is how big my book is. I'm like, how do you track that? I mean, we're doing over half a million a month. I can't keep up with it. I think we're at 5 million in premium. I maybe 3,000 in PIF. I'm not sure. Maybe a little less, maybe more. So I have two sales people full time on that side. And then I have a third service person that works part time and she focuses on the commercial service and Spanish bilingual Spanish speaking for our personal lives.  Was there reactions to support you in that? Did you have some people who said, let's not go so fast? What was the feedback you got? It sounds like you guys make decisions not necessarily together, but you run ideas by each other. Yes, we do. It helps us bounce things off because they can correct when I'm wrong and I can correct when they're wrong.  They were talking about thinking about doing the whole management recruitment agency. And our goal was like, I want to do a million a month. I want to do a million a month. And we're like, well, if we have 20 producers eventually doing 50,000 in premium, that's a million a month. We're going to need some sales leaders in there too. But that's 50,000 a month in premium times 20 producers, that's a million in premium. And that's where we wanted to be. Right now, we're building up that. We're about half a million to 600,000 each month. So we're getting there. Yeah, where do you think that thinking came from for you to go to a million in premium per month? Because you're looking at farmers, there's not an agent out there who has consistently done a million in premium. Look at other companies, name a company. It's rare to have agents do over 500,000, but most agents, if they do 100,000, 200,000, they'd be over the moon. What do you think is different about you and the way that you think compared to a lot of other agents? Good question. I've heard of an agent doing a million a month. So it was in my head. Well, this probably at all state. But it was also like, how much money do we want to make? You know, that's kind of where I was at too. But I also wanted, I love breaking records. I'm extremely competitive. And I asked kind of around, I was like, hey, what's the most you've heard agents sell in a month? And everyone's like a million, a million. I was like, well, I want to do a million. And eventually one day I'm going to do more than a million. But that's kind of where it stuck from is like, what is the best and I want to beat the best? That's always my mentality. I like to be number one. I like to fight for it. I'm competitive. And so is my whole team and I love it. So when you look at the sales targets now or your staff, is it still 50 or have you adjusted since you've opened? Good question. So we knew that right off the gate, we would not do 50,000 per producer. And we are still not. Our average production is 43,000 a month per producer. Yes, do we have producers doing over 80,000? Yes, but we also have producers doing about 30,000 sometimes. But our average is about 43,000 per producer. And I think when we started off, that number was at 30 or 25 to 25 actually. And then it grew to 30 on average. And then it grew to 35, I grew to 40. In the last couple of months, we're now sitting at 43,000. And when you look at your team of 13 salespeople, how many of them are doing at least 40,000 in premium? It varies month to month. You know that from my agency, I always want everybody to be at 40,000 or above. That's a target. And I would much rather take everybody doing 40 to 50,000 than have two, three outliers who do 80,000 and everybody else does 20, 25. Because I know I can get everybody to 40 to 50,000 every month. That means it's a repeatable process where I can plug more people into my system and have a predictable results. I don't have to rely on there's natural sales ability or their natural drive to get them to 70, 80,000. I want people to be more of systems team members, not so much relying their innate sales abilities. It's kind of like the whole Bill Belichick method where when you get into his program or the Nick Savin program, you know you're gonna do well because you're in the right system. And you might not be the most talented. You might not have all the skills but you're in the right environment to succeed. So what are your thoughts on that? And how many of you are over 40,000 consistently? Yeah, I love what you said, Vlad. That is so true. I wanna find that system to do it. I don't care about necessarily if I hire a really good sales person. I want this to know that if I were to move up and go do other things, that if we continue this system, they can be doing 40 or 50,000 a month depending on whoever's brought in. You know, I wanna get to the point where I don't have to be part of every decision. And I allow my team to kind of take the reins on certain things, which we'll get into later. But yes, that's beautiful. You're right, that beautiful. Whoever's listening, that's exactly the right mentality. I love it. I can tell you right now, I'm looking at our agency Zoom. I was pulled up last month, December. We finished at, it was rough. I think we did about 545,000, 20,000. So our producers had a good month. Others had a rough one. I had only two, three people. Three producers out of 13 at this time, or 12, under 30,000. Two producers at 30, and everyone else at 40 or above. Okay, great. The vast majority over 40. Yes, yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna say, we have about five people here at 50,000 or above. Four people, four people are at 50,000 above last month. Great, so you're out of Houston, north of Houston, but I know you mark it statewide. In Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, those are Florida, higher premium states. When you compare our premium compared to other states, we're higher, but sometimes there's a lot more work that goes into our sales because of not a contingencies and restrictions that we have. So kind of balances itself out. So realistically, for those who are listening, to get to 40,000 in premium, one has to do, what would you say, 17, 15, 17 households to get to that amount? Roughly, yeah, about 1,700 in premium for PIF policy.  First month, I want it to do 40,000. Month two, I want to do 50 and grow from there. Do you have a formula that you give your sales producers that where you say, if you do these two, three things consistently, then you can expect to close a deal a day because for me and what I teach to my staff and other agents I work with is don't complicate the goal-setting process. If you're in a state where your average premium for household is say 1,000 bucks, then your monthly target for premium should be 20,000. As long as your producers are closing one deal a day, one deal times 20 business days, that's 20,000. So the way you come up with the total premium per month is you take one household times 20 business days. So for you, how do you get someone to one deal a day? What's the formula that you teach them? Yeah, we have a little joke in the office called a policy day keeps the boss away. So let's say that. So what we do is we do like to keep it simple. Just like you said, simplicity is important. What did they say? Simple is duplicatable somewhere on those lines and the problem that we faced to be quite transparent with farmers is farmers, I love farmers and they definitely have the most money-making opportunity and that's why I forgot to mention this. It's why we came back to farmers. No other company offers what farmers offers. We've checked dozens of contracts everywhere, it doesn't exist. And so farmers has a much more systems to get used to. So we have to learn how to try to simplify as much as possible because there are more systems that require to use to use farmers compared to some other companies. And I've been with quite a few now at this point but nonetheless, we do have a little bit of process. It's also one of the coming to the first day if they have no experience I love hiring people with no experience. I think the saying is they don't come up with bad habits and then it's true. You can try to teach those good things right up front. When they come in and tell them, hey, realistically, you have no experience. You're probably gonna do about 10, maybe 15,000 your first month with our unlimited leads, I like to say. And they're like, okay, I really wanna do that 40 or 50,000 though, right? That everyone's gonna say, yeah, we'll get there. This is a three month process. Here's your goal, month one, two and three. And we're gonna show you how to get there but it'll aim for about 10 to 15,000 your first month, 25,000 to 20 to 25,000 your second month and about 30,000 above your third month, 30 to 50. And we're gonna get you there. And how we wanna do that is we have a ton of leads coming in. I want you to be able to doing about eight to 12 households and quoting a day. So your goal, your goal, right? It's starting off doing about eight to 12 households quoting a day. How do you get eight to 12 households quoted a day? You make 80 to 100 calls within our agency or text messages, right? So if you have two to three hours of talk time a day, which is awesome, I actually, a lot of people talk about calls, calls, calls, calls. In my agency, I actually preach talk time more than calls. I can kind of care less. I have people that do 20 and 30 calls a day and they have three or four hours of talk time. Yesterday, one of my top guys had over five hours of talk time in his eight hour work day. And that's phenomenal. It means he's closing, but he's building rapport on the quoting side. So I want them to have about two to three hours of talk time a day is really more important. And I want them to have about 50 to 80 text messages a day. So when they go in, I want them to actually, because people respond by text, right? So I just say. You send me a text, I reply back. Is that two messages? Good question. Yes, but the way I present it to them, that's how I track it, but the way I present it to them is they're texting 50 to 80 people. But yes, when I look at the reports, I only check on how many total text messages are sent. About 80 is what I would like to see. Okay. So we're beyond the three month ramp up period. And I'm not consistently closing a deal a day. You and I have a sit down and I say, Brett, help me out. I think I'm building value. I'm calling 150 people a day. When people pick up the phone, I do my best with not letting them off the phone. What else do I need to do to consistently close a deal a day? And I'll be happy to share with you what I tell my team, but I'd love to learn from you and get your opinion on what you tell your team member. Yeah. So let's get you on Vlad's training program. No, we did use your program though and towards the beginning did leave that out. I guess that's why I kind of posted. Some people are always like, are you always collaborating with Vlad? Are you selling this product? No, I've never even really met the guy except like two or three times, but I like it was a cool guy. And we've used his training material for about four or five months or something. But when they come to me on that, we need to look at this further. We need to look into a deep dive. I love data, I love statistics. I do deep dive into how many quotes are doing it with my sales leader, my sales liturgy. And I'm like, hey, what do you think's going on here? What's your experience? Because I can't be with the team this large all the time anymore. So I have her filming on certain things to say, what's going on? What are you noticing? Well, I'm noticing that they're only getting about four to five household quotes a day. Okay? Well, that's one issue right there because if you're doing the number quotes, you'll eventually have it. I have one girl that tracked closing ratios. I have one girl, she's got a 5% closing ratio, which is towards our lower end within our agency. I think her average is about 12%. 5% of the leads that she gets on the phone or leads at a time? 5% in general, 5% in general. 5% and that leads 5% of quotes. So 5% of her quotes are sold. So she has a conversation. You consider that to be a quote. She needs to have 20 conversations or quotes to have one sale. It's not necessarily leads that were assigned to her. Correct, yeah. Our leads assigned is obviously a much lower closure issue. And I can get into that. I really have these numbers that I like doing this data. So just remind me and we'll go into that. But to answer your question, I'm like, hey, we had a talk with her. It's like, hey, I'm fine with you having a 5% closure issue. Honestly, I'll work with you to get that up. But as long as you're doing the number of quotes is the important part. Well, let's take another producer that actually has a close to about the 5% as well. Well, she's selling 40, 43,000 a month roughly, right? She's selling about 43,000. I think she's right at the average actually, ironically. And she's doing 30 to 40 quotes a day. She's doing about 15 household quotes a day. 15 to 20 household quotes a day, roughly. And it's like, well, she's got a 5% closure issue and she's doing 43,000. So it's definitely possible. It becomes a numbers game at that point. And we find honestly, yeah. Keep your thought just so I know. Your quotes, do you count a home in auto as two quotes or is that considered one household quote? Because agents track that differently. Correct, they do. They 100%, that's why I've been trying to say households and then quotes. So quotes, I mean actual quotes. A home, one quote. Auto, two quotes. But I say households. So when I said earlier, she does about 15 to 20 households a day. That's about 30 to 40 quotes a day. That's a lot of quotes. She's doing a ton of quotes every day. And she's selling about over 40,000 a month now. And she's working, she's small integrations of word language has been increasing that close ratio solely. But she's fast at quoting and that's fine. I, to be quite honest, I'm not perfect. So when people ask me, what's this process? I used to do this, I, to be quite honest with everyone that tells my team, I have failed you, that's what I tell my team. I have failed you all because I've only been able to teach you all about 20 to 25% of my total closing strategy and quoting strategy. Once again, I was doing over 50,000 a month with four to five farmers.com leads a day, which they're great leads. Not to knock on my love farmers.com. But I know if I was in a position, I would want to try to push towards 100, 150,000. I would get a little ambitious there. I don't know if I could, but I would love to try that with the amount of leads we're providing. And I say, look, I know I failed you all on that but as long as we're working together and learning incrementally, we're doing small steps to get better and better and better, we'll eventually get there. But the problem is with my strategy to be quite frank is because I've been so busy developing on the business side and I've failed on the sales training side, I call it failing, but I've only been able to give about 25% of the information compared to 100%. That's on me. And that doesn't allow them to get to their full potential. And that's why we're actually in the process of changing how we do that. I'm just trying to find someone to take over some of my tasks so I can come back to the sales training side because there's been a lot. This is our worst month in a long time. I think we're projected to do about 420, 470. So around there, 470, 420,000. And people are like, oh, that's so awesome. I'm like, yes, but we got a lot of expenses. Missing 100,000 in previous is gonna be tough. So we're getting there. And there's reasons to that. But nonetheless, the fault is on me because I haven't had the time and the ability to train these people. And when someone gets past their three month portion or two months, this is what I've learned, they start picking up the bad habits. So if you're not working with them day one every single day for the first one to two months, their bad habits start to kick in. And the purpose, right? I told you I like to hire new people at that point. My goal of hiring new people now becomes less efficient because I'm allowing them to develop those bad habits because I'm not focusing with them every single day for the first two months. That's the crucial period is the two months from my experience for 60 days, 45 days. By the third month, they're pretty much going for their own pace, right? And you just kind of correct things as it goes. But if you don't work with them those first two months, their bad habits start kicking in. I've seen it time and time again. I probably have trained out this point over nine years of my insurance career, over eight years, excuse me, not nine years yet. I've probably trained about 70 to 100 salespeople. And I've noticed that time and time again. Yes, people that I have experience and people that I haven't had experience. After two months, that's when that starts kicking in. That's bad experiences. So that's on me though. And if they come to you, which certain agents have shared with you, like how are you able to get eight quotes done a day or eight households quoted a day? People aren't picking up the phone, buying leads, we're calling them, we're texting them, we're emailing. We're doing everything you're saying that we should be doing, leaving voice notes. We just can't get people to answer the phone. How do you get to a point where you're consistently closing, not closing, but quoting eight households a day? What do you say to that? Great question. This is my secret mix of this. We buy leads, right? Everyone knows that. We also buy live transfers. I think I've said that before as well. The live transfers, people look at that and say, oh, it's 40, 60, $800, right, for a live transfer. First of all, if you're paying over $80 live transfer, it's a horrible ROI, I'm just gonna say that.  What people are, what people think of it is they look at the ROI, the live transfer, and I'm answering your question here, but I'm answering in a different way. They look at the ROI, the $60 live transfer, compared to a $5, $10 internet lead, and they're like, well, this is cheaper, let's go down this route. Cheaper's not always better, even if the ROI is better. Our internet leads have a better ROI, so a return on investment, if anyone not fall along, than our live transfers. However, why are live transfers important? I was a sales producer. Do you know how draining it is to do 15 household quotes a day, so about 20 to 30 quotes a day and talk to people all day on the phone that you have to kind of get past that first wall?  Yes, I believe in confidence in my strategies, but it doesn't mean it's not draining when you do it for six months, 12 months, 36 months. Burnout, exactly, right? And then so when you mix live transfers in there, you have people happier with their job. They're more motivated to call those internet leads because now they got one, two, or three good leads they're working from those live transfers, right? And they're working that and it's easy. It kind of gives that motivation to get back to the internet leads. And if you think, well, Brett, so what? I mean, great, they're happier. That is actually showing a better return on investment on my internet leads. My internet lead close ratio went up when I started implementing live transfers. Do I know the reason exactly for that? No, other than I know that people join live transfers better than calling it internet lead. And then I did notice that they were happier or more at the work, right? Because they had some of those good stuff coming in. That's why it's important to fuel good stuff, sprinkle good stuff in with the harder stuff with your sales team. Because we all know not every agency can lean just on live transfers or those easy calls. Like, you know, some agencies do all mailers and that's great, but the cost they're spending is I just, I can't fathom it so much to get the mini that I would need to supply my team. But yeah, so just sprinkle on the good stuff, the easy stuff, the referrals, et cetera with the tougher stuff. Because I know we have to all work that realistically, 99% of us do. How do you distribute the leads amongst the 13 team members? Yeah, we just throw it in the shark tank, grab it. That literally, that's it, grab it. That also promotes suffering and wondering if they have staff members that always fight over leads. Do you know what happened when I started buying almost an unlimited amount of leads from a work? The complaints for not someone taking their lead or something, almost not even a thing other than referrals, right? That's the one thing like, hey, they took my referral but when we have enough leads that are really complaining on who gets what, they just grab it. So explain what a shark tank is for those who might be under the leadership. Yes, thank you very much. So if you have been in the industry for a long time, a shark tank, when an agent says that it just, or any sales industry says that, it's just essentially a source. Like if you have DYL, Agency Zoom, Ricochet, whatever system is using, tons of them. What you do is you put all of your leads just in one place and the agents just go through and pull whatever they want. They pull whatever they want to work. And I keep an eye on that like three times a day. I like to quit, go there real quick. Oh, we're down to only like 200 fresh leads. Let me, let me make sure I up our accounts. We need more because we need to work about 500 to 1,000 a day right now. There's some, some weeks we're doing 2,000 a day. Other weeks, it's a massive difference. Some days, some weeks when my team is more closing than quoting, we're only doing 500 a day. So I have to massively decrease and raise those numbers daily and weekly.  It's at a 500, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm always changing that up, but it is a little bit of work. This sharp tank approach that you're talking about where all the leads get put into one bucket and then agents can claim those leads. So if I show up today and I'm working your agency and I see 500 new leads sitting there looking at me, do I start claiming those leads say 10 at a time and I start calling those people or do I first prioritize my follow-ups that I have, people who I didn't close from the previous days? How do I balance my day or work in your agency? Good question. So people that have experience in the industry, I've learned not to waste too much time forcing them into a certain hole. One of those, hey, don't force a square peg into a round hole. People that have industry experience, I actually don't have a strict regiment for them. And there's a reasons behind that. It's the time effort that I have to put into that to re-correct those bad habits is not worth it, to me it's for other things I can do within the agency. And I know how that sounds. Now, if I had all the time in the world, I definitely would, but I don't wanna spend time fighting them. And people may know what I'm talking about. Sometimes you have to fight with the producer to get them on a process. And I typically run into that with people that have experienced. So what I do is they go in there and they go from the bottom, actually, bottom list. I train them to go from bottom to top. So there's just a massive list of leads. They start from the bottom to the top. The top is the fresh, the bottom is less fresh. The reason of that as well though is because and within our system in DYL, live transfers appear at the very top. So if a live transfer comes in, it actually goes to the very top. So what we learned is if someone is working top to bottom, then you're actually gonna work someone's live transfer while they're on the phone with them. So we start bottom to top. But also the reason is because those are the older leads. You wanna work through those first before the fresh leads. And that's not necessary. So if it's like fresh, fresh, it came in right then and there we need to try to work it as soon as possible. If anyone knows, if you work, what do they say? An interlead within five minutes, it's got like a 360 or 540% hierarchical ratio, something like that. So it'll correct me. But so nonetheless, yeah, they get in there. They don't grab them in bulk. They do, some of them grab them in bulk and I'm fine with that. I kind of work it per individually Vlad. If someone's kind of tech savvy or not, it's how I do that process. I know that's kind of a convoluted answer. It's not the one we really wanted, but it is the truth. Yeah, it's my process. Yeah, it's my process. If they're tech savvy, I may have them do multiple at a time. If they're not tech savvy, I have them do one at a time so they don't accidentally grab someone else's lead. Yeah, and with your YL dialer, I know that's the phone system you use. Yeah. Does it have a dialer or is it manual dials? It's manually dials. There is a dialer built in. We don't ever use it. I don't really use it at all. Man, great question, right, of the hour. Their dialer is definitely compliant. It's great. I don't because the amount of leads that are coming in, they have to sometimes hang up on the call. Like if there's, so we have constant live transfers coming in. So if they're on the dialer, they have to hang up sometimes the middle of the call if the customer got the live transfer because we've sought the team. You can not allow a live transfer to go to voicemail. That is like not a level of the... I'll take it. Because they're all usually all busy working. So what I learned about that is we did try dialing in the beginning. And then you would think, okay, at least someone's gonna be available. No, everyone's on the phone, which is good, which is good. So when you do manual dialings, you can spend more time per lead. You can make sure all the data's correct. You can correct things like that. I just don't like, maybe it's awesome because I just don't like how DIYL's dialer works. I know some people love it. Some people love the Ricochet Auto Dialer. I don't like both. I've tried several companies and I've never liked the dialer because you can't spend the time you can per lead on each lead. But also because if you're in the middle of dialing, you can't hang up effectively and take that call that's coming in. Okay. Can you share a success story from any particular strategy or a method that you implemented since you launched in May that has made a huge change in your agency? Yes. I can think of two particular things in my agency in the first year and a half that we've been operating our farmers agency that have attributed to a massive increase in production. Can you tell me what one or two of those examples are for you? Yeah, I definitely wanna hear yours after ours. Ours was sales meetings.  So I was literally just texting someone about this actually right before the storm and as I was walking in my door, some agent made a post, made a comment. Sales agency, sales meetings we have every Monday and Friday and that was our biggest change. It allowed us to be on the same page or stuff and allowed me to find issues within the agency that they were having that I wasn't even aware of because they actually present stuff. It's not just me talking for a freaking hour. I don't talk for just a whole hour from we do from nine a.m. to 10 a.m. I let them interjected or have them give their concerns. Hey, Brett, we're really not liking this lead source. I'm like, okay, well, that's definitely just in your mind. I'm just gonna help say that. But I definitely believe it. I believe all leads are almost, they're not all created equal but internet leads, companies are kind of all the same. I've worked enough at this point. But nonetheless, we talk things out. We have conversations. If we don't have anything else to talk about, we just end the meeting early. There's no reason to be there for a full hour but implementing the sales meetings was so important and I think so many agencies are like, I know that doesn't matter role playing. Oh my gosh, role playing is crucial. And I know Vlad speaks to us all the time. And I wonder why his agencies do it over 400,000 in premium, who would wonder? Cause I firmly believe that the role playing has a huge part of that. That's why his producers can produce on a high levels because they're getting that level of experience. We have failed at that in our Vlad. And I've told you this before, I think at our last meeting at the mega agency conference and I've tried to do it several times and we do it a little bit. But what I tell you, I don't do it. It's because we're not doing it the level I want to. But we need to do better role playing, especially for new people within the first two months. That daily role play of about 15 to 30 minutes is crucial. But it's all right if it goes longer if it gets really good. And if it has to, you know, but otherwise about 15 or 30 minutes, that's really good. But we don't do a role playing during our sales meetings. We do that one on ones or like groups of two with people that need help. Maybe I was talking about our people with the 5% close ratios. We get them with our sales leader and maybe another person's then it'll feel singled out. We get them together. Two people usually either polar opposite someone with a high close ratio, some of the lower close ratio or two people with lower close ratios with our sales leader and the kind of role play together. I like to mix in that up and do that. But our sales meetings are phenomenal. I love that. Our sales meetings go over everything. Hey, did y'all notice Sature out of eight degrees? Hey, did y'all notice Sature's being this in this area? Hey, did you know Bristol West is killing it right now, dude? We gotta hit those Bristol West quotes. We gotta hit those foremost quotes. They're killing it. We're very big about pushing farmers products within our agency. None of us like doing Craft Lake. We don't get paid a lot on it. My staff doesn't make a lot of money on Craft Lake and I'm almost honestly, I'm fine with them walking past Craft Lake deals at times. If it's too much effort, I really am. I rather, I want them to focus on that farmers premium. Okay, sales meetings. That's one. And I do have to give you a little bit of pushback, Brett. What do you mean by you tried doing role play and everything? I knew I was gonna get called out. I knew it. I knew it. Why did I say it? I worked out a few times and I liked what felt. What does that even mean? Yes, I know, dude. You know, when someone says, I've tried a thousand things to lose weight. It doesn't work, right? I can't, it's definitely on me. It really is what I was gonna say. Do it every day. Do it every day. We gather every day at 8 a.m. At 8 a.m., we do a quick overview of the previous day, where everybody says how many calls they made, how much talk time they had, how many new conversations that they had that were over five minutes long. Because if it's less than five minutes, that's not even a conversation. We don't count that. So the goal is to have five new conversations. And I don't really look too much at the number of calls, like you said. I just wanna make sure that all the follow-ups were taken care of from the day before or people that they are working with. And ideally two hours or more of talk time means that they were on the phone for a lot of the day. So they recap the previous day and then they set a target for that day. The target is mainly around how many follow-ups do they have that day. They'll give that number. So they have to come into that meeting prepared. Everybody has 30 seconds to recap the previous day. We applaud every time someone made a statement. Yes, yes. I love it. That's good. That takes 10 minutes tops to go through everyone. And then once we're done with that, then we have one particular topic that we role play every day. Every single day we have one thing that we role play. And a lot of times we might go for a full week where we role play the same exact thing just to really make sure that we drill that point in. Because you can't just do something one time and expect everybody to be great at it. So we'll focus on something for a few days. We'll go to the next topic and then we might come back to that topic. Like for this last few days we've been working on stalling objections when someone says, yeah, let me think about it. I need to talk to someone with my spouse. So this entire week has been focused on that. We'll probably go into revisit this again in two weeks because we've got to go back to basics. Yes. Every now and then. And the way we do it is we first go over the topic. Everybody pairs up in twos and role play the topic and we come back and everybody watches two people role playing in front of everybody. So it puts people in this uncomfort zone when they're role playing in front of everybody. But at the same time you're learning when you're in the position of uncomfort. So Brett, I like you a lot and I want you to do really well. And I think that this could be one of the biggest game changers in your agencies if you start role playing every day. I agree 100% but I really do. And it's not just me. I agree and not go do it. I would say I'm a little game pout but I got to say something I love about you, Vlad. It's hilarious. Oh my gosh, do you feel like it's like a no weird way? I feel like you're like a parent or a guardian, right? And you're like, hey, you're not doing, you're not doing the dishes.  Let's get you back on track. You're hounding me on it. I love it. It's like I have someone to be able to keep me on track, which is awesome. And I love how you're not afraid to dive into that, Vlad. It's like you're willing to share because you know it works. It's not something you think that works. You know it works. And I 100% agree with you. So my current strategy right now is because I do wanna get onto that level that we're doing role playing. It sounds like you do group role play. Are you fine? Do you think it's still fine that I keep doing my, is it all right if I keep doing my little groups of role play instead of a one big team? If you do group role plays, that's fine. That's in addition to the collective group meeting every day. So Monday and Friday sales meetings, really in my view should be Monday through Friday meetings every day. That way you share the news. So the way we do it is everybody does a recap from the previous day, we role play, then we share any updates and news and then we break and everybody goes, it's ready for the day. 30 minutes, one hour. 30 minutes is usually what it takes to do all of that. So at 8.30, we're done. They have 15 minutes to go get coffee, check in. And at 8.45 is when we like to start dialing and getting on the phone. And that's one thing that I also learned is if we start at nine versus 8.45, that 15 minutes can make a huge difference. That creates that momentum in the beginning of the day. And when you take 15 minutes of productivity, multiply that by 13 sales producers on your team, that's a lot of productivity that you can buy throughout the day. But that all said, it also helps with comradity. It helps with the team knowing what's going on at all times. They don't have to wait till Friday, on a Tuesday to share what's on their mind. They know that they can bring something up in the following day. But that aside, is there something else that you can share with me that you have implemented in the last year since you've opened that has made a radical change in your agency and the production that you have? I'm trying to really think. You put me on the spot here. I've never really think about it. I'm always thinking about what we can do. Sales leaders have definitely really helped. Having a sales leader has been tremendous. Pulling someone up to actually come in and actually help you on the sales floor is amazing. What does your sales leader do every day? So a sales leader helps them do quotes. So I'm more of the sales leader for the psychology, talking about, hey, this is the word language, this is how we overcome stuff. She's more on the side of, hey, this is how we overcome these quote issues, objections, she's more of the tech side of figuring all that stuff out, figuring all those problems.  All the, they're so funny in our office. They call Vlad to say, I was like, I'm going to go meet Vlad today. And they said, oh, the good looking guy with the nice hair. You know, they always say that good looking guy with us. You've got a little fan club in my agency, okay Vlad? All right, so. But anyways, she's awesome. I love her so much. She helps out with the team and does that on those things. But I want to say one thing that's really helped is learning, specializing people in different departments, commercial department, life specialist department, an agent support department, which we can talk about if you want to, a quota department. So those departments will actually help build the team, sometimes they're non-producing departments like quarters and agent support where they're supporting the agent. Some people call them on borders, but it's a little different on how I run that role. And they build up the team. They make their jobs easier. They make the sales teams easier. And by doing that, that allows them to be happier with their job. They retain your sales people longer because they have an easier job. It's all right to make your people's job easier. Isn't that crazy to think? That it's all right to make your team's job easier if it helps them stay longer it keeps them happier and helps them produce more. It's a very, very bizarre topic. It seems like in some spaces I talk with, but nonetheless, if you want me to talk, I would like to talk about those specializations. So we have a quota role that failed miserably the first three months and it wasn't the person. The person who brought in, interviewed him. He did, I brought him in as a work interview. I don't care to talk to you. Show me if you could do quotes. Can you control C? Can you control V? Which is, if you don't know, that's how you copy and paste really fast. How fast are you on the computer? Are you like me or are you a gamer? Can you have three monitors up and work all three quotes at the same time? Can you be fast? Right? That's who I want to bring in. I want to bring in, usually it's typically a young person that's really well and diverse with computers. They grew up with computers, not just the one person that's fast with computers, but they grew up with it. And he came in, he's awesome. It didn't work out for the first three months because I was figuring out the role of something new.  I'm horrible with analogies, guys. Bear with me and awesome ADHD. So I'm all over the place. But nonetheless, I was telling him, do everyone's quotes, do everyone's quotes. And their job is to just go sell those quotes. They need it. What does that mean to do everybody's? That means they get on the phone, they talk with a person or maybe he gets on and does texting and emailing to these customers to gather information that leads have come in. And he does the quotes, right? Essentially his job was to get the information or be given the information into the quotes. The sales person's job was to take the quote and go sell it. That was inefficient and here's why. My team was just not, and I, once again, I kind of forced them into this role. Could I have forced my team to abide by the rule? Yes, but I took a different approach and I elicited them. And they said, hey, Brett, we see what you're trying to do. We appreciate you trying to save us time, but we want to do our own quotes. But you know what we don't like doing?     Can he just do all the quotes we don't want to do? And I transitioned the role. And that's what I learned, right? Listening to your team is so important. And I transitioned that role and he was willing to work with it. The coordinator, he's like, yeah, I'll try it. He was already, he was doing 40 quotes within five hours, by the way, if he wants to know how fast he was working. He's doing about 30 to 50 actual quotes, like quotes within about four to five hours. So he's fast. That means he could do about a hundred if he worked any hour a day. So I transitioned. I was like, okay, we're in the process of trying to get him to learn craft-like quotes. We're just touching that this week. So I can't really talk about that, but he's been doing all of our flood quotes. He's been doing all of our other miscellaneous, tiny quotes and they love it. They just email him and they say, hey, can you just quote, look like here's a customer for this flood quote. Or, hey, I have a presentation with a customer tomorrow at this time. Can you make sure the flood quote is done by then so I can present the flood quote? Perfect. The producer does the auto at home what they're used to. They're auto used to doing this. And then now we have him doing the quotes they don't want to do because I know they don't like doing those quotes because if they did, we would have more flood policies. We'd have more, what foremost policies we'd have more boat policies, more RV policies, et cetera. So I know they don't like doing that. So I have him gonna come in and do that and they just email him to do it. Just do it. And he just shoots it back to him. And then now they present it to sell. That has been working so much better than just having him do all of their quotes. So once again, work with the team seeing what they like to do. That's our quarter role. And usually once again, you find a young person so you don't have to pay them too much. You need to make sure that the amount they make, and this is just the truth. It's not like I don't want to pay them. The only way that's cost effective is if you're paying them less than what your sales producers make with just their salary or just their salary and commission put together. So that needs to be, someone usually trying to find a starter job is the best fit for there. Now, let me think here, we're agent support role. I'm kind of rambling here. I love it. That's just me. I talk too much, my team tells me all the time. But our agent support role. So our agent support role is kind of what some people see as an on-border, but it's a little different. When you have a team this big, you have to have someone that's making sure compliance is 100% up to check. As you know, Vlad, you may be, I'm terrified of compliance, man. Me and my sister, we're like, is this right? Is this right? Is everything right? We gotta be sure everything's right. We're always tripping over it. When we brought the agent support, it gave me peace and I can actually sleep. I have actually had trouble getting in my personal life. I actually had trouble sleeping for about six months. Always thinking about potential compliance problems that could happen with the team growing this big. It is a major concern. You gotta make sure every T is crossed, every I is dotted. And we try so darn hard on that. And so to just make sure everything's, we're training people the right way. Like, are they still doing it the right way? Did they forget the right way to do it? Just, you have to constantly go back and train. Like you said, go back to basics. Agent support checks over the policies as they're binding or after they bind. Make sure it's actually bound. Some agents that are very new, they hit that if you're no farmers in Texas, you can hit the bind button, right? Cause Texas has so many requirements to write a policy. People say you all have super high premiums.  Like, yeah, but there's so many requirements to sell a policy. It's getting crazy. So they help make sure there's requirements done. And sometimes people press bind, a new person right in their first couple of weeks will press bind. Think they bound it, but really they just sent the documents to E-sign. You know what I'm talking about? This in the documents to E-sign. And so their job is to make sure that those are bound and show them what that means. Follow up on contingencies, signal discount is the big problem with most agencies and ours especially. So I don't like selling signal actually in the beginning. I like doing it on renewal, but if it is done in the beginning, it has to be done with our agent support to make sure the person actually signs up, does their 10 trips, et cetera, et cetera. So their job is to then make sure compliance is in check and to take tasks off the sales producer's table. Could producers hate making sure all their documents in order, they hate making sure everything other than just talking and selling the policy is done. So her job is to come in and do that. We have one person doing it right now. I would like to grow it to when I get more salespeople. So one person is good enough for about 13 or 14, 12 salespeople. But what I am gonna do is I'm gonna for, if you are wanting to try this role, I recommend this, have it a half and half role. Grab one of your service people or hire a new service person. Maybe you're coming up where you need a new service person. Let's get half of them doing service, half the role doing service and the other half being that on-border or agent support. They can call the customer and they can find out about life and financial products when they call them the day after the policy's bound. You can call them to say, hey, by the way, everything's looks good here. Before I let you go, I wanna let you know we also have life insurance or retirement features. Do you wanna talk to our life specialist or when do you have a chance to have to look at talking to a life specialist or do you have that currently with where you're at? Yes, okay, perfect. You can have more. Just checking, but yeah, we like to present that. I'm kinda jumping over the place about that. I like that role a lot. Very helpful. And once you get beyond 10, 15 team members, you start offloading things that you can do yourself and you start looking at problems that are occurring in the agency and you want to put people in those roles. And it's very tempting to find these support roles and hire middle management, sales leaders, more service, sales support, but those roles generally don't directly contribute to revenue. And when you look at your sales producers, it's quite easy to track the return on investment on them. And to me, I don't even look at return investment. I look at break-even. If I know that when I pay my producer, their base, when I pay them the commission and I pay taxes on that and I pay for the marketing for each person, my goal is to make sure that not only do they pay for themselves, but there's a little bit left over to pay for those sales support roles. How do you justify that hiring the middle management knowing that in your first year, second year, there's no renewals coming in and you have to get debt to get started? So debt aside, because I know that a lot of agents who are starting off have to do that, how do you justify bringing on these middle management roles? Yeah. So yes, you definitely shouldn't hire people, right? Is I think getting a business owner, you shouldn't hire people, just a hire person to make your job easier. You should be really in the ground working the trenches to make your business grow with your team. Our break even is about 32,000 and premium per producer. So they need to be at 32,000 to break even. For some people it might be a lot more. Now, knowing that I like to take these numbers and I also include the people salary. So as our sales goals go up, they're saying, hey, we need some help doing that. I say we can hire someone to bring in a position that won't be producing, but we need to make sure as a team we can get our averages up from 43, maybe to 45 or 47 or whatever that is. And we can't kind of calculate that. But you're definitely right. As a smaller agency, I wouldn't recommend a full-time agent support and I would not recommend a full-time agent support. I would do a half and half, half service, half onboarding or agent support. I gotta ask, do you have a light that turns off and you don't move? It's annoying. It just started. So that's what you're doing. That's hilarious. Okay, so, but the quota is a great entry role in that. Y'all probably know, anyone that's listening may know that your producers are definitely skipping out on certain quotes. Would you agree, Vad? I mean, I'm sure we all would have been perfect, but just play it. Skipping out on quotes? Yeah, like skipping out on certain quotes. Like do you see a producer's forgetting to not ask about flood or not doing a flood quote? We're not doing an RV or camper, right? So when you have that quota, that actually can help actually generate that revenue because they're helping find those issues. But you can also, you know, you could say they're a telemarketer quota. You can have them make the calls and then get the information and pass it off to a sales producer. There's different ways to implement these roles, but I just wanna preface one thing. Just because we have it and it works for us, it doesn't mean the exact same process for that position will work for an agency at a different size. And I'm very transparent about that. I don't think agent support is very effective on a smaller side agency. I think as you grow, you will have to grow into that. But one thing is I wanna say is don't be afraid to invest into your team. Don't be afraid to invest into the leads and marketing they need. If you don't give them leads and they can just, if they really wanted to, they could make the risk and go open their own agency, right? So, but don't be afraid to invest in these leads to make them grow and don't be afraid to hire more people to try to push that. Now, be responsible through time. If you know you're too busy doing that, then you have to find a way to offload every time I'm doing mass hiring like I am now. I have to find a way to offload some of my tasks to someone else or to something else, an automated system to have time to hire and train those new people coming in. Because your new people will not work out if you just hire and expect them to sell 50,000 or even 20,000 or 15,000 a month of premium. It requires energy and effort and we have to realize that. Okay. When you look at short-term long-term goals, so when you're looking at short-term next 12 months, what is Brett Bortz going to do in the next 12 months? What is top of mind, what's top priority? In the long-term, I'm gonna put three years into long-term, three to five years. What is it that you want to accomplish during those two key milestones? Okay. You said 12 months and I love two options, by the way, only ever give two options, especially 80 SADHD people. We can't do more than two. One year and then three to five. Okay. Love it. So my one year short-term, I wanna get this year. Can I say just this year to the end of this year? My goal is to get everyone on the team, and I've shared this with everyone, to 50,000 an average premium. We're seeing about 43, I wanna get to 50. As you all know, rate increases are coming up. This entire year, all companies. So that will help, right? But I also wanna make sure I'm putting systems and processes in place to work with my team and leads and maximizing that, min-maxing as a game return, min-maxing, minimizing and maximizing everywhere to get to that 50,000 from 43,000. So that's our first goal. I wanna get there, about the end of this year. Explain that, maximizing and maximizing. Yes. So min-maxing is like, what's an example? But what you're essentially doing is you're trying to maximize just the minimum amount. So let's say you're doing something 97% great. But if you can get just 3% more and the effort is low, 3% more to fit into that automated system or process that's working, then that's gonna maximize the outcome even more so. So it might just be a small little change that you have implement that may give a 3% to 5% return and the time it takes is low. So that's kind of what I'm talking about min-maxing on that end. But anyways, our goal for this 12 months, 50,000 per producer, about the end of the 12 months is our goal. Honestly, our stretch goal is 60,000 a month per producer. I wanna try to go way above what I have seen. People probably do it out there. Probably plenty smarter people out there, and I wanna try 60,000 by the end of the year, but our goal is 50 per producer. But also our goal is by May, I wanna have 21-ish salespeople, but by the end of the year, I wanna have 24 salespeople is where I wanna stabilize. My office can support 24 salespeople. So that's where I wanna stabilize. I wanna sit around 24 salespeople. I don't wanna grow bigger than that to be quite honest, unless there is reasons I'm foreseen. But as of right now, for the next three to five years even, I would wanna stay 24. Within three to five years, I actually potentially personally, if my personal will be honest, I wanna possibly sell this agency and maybe go with a full-time marketing and recruitment agency and training, consulting right within CINDO, or maybe my sister, my other sister wants an opener agency and I'll help her do that, or maybe we'll keep doing this agency. But I have kinda ideas of where I'll go within that period, but I like to take on that one year at a time, one year at a time. Okay, is commercial gonna be a big part of your growth plan moving forward or not really? Oh, yes, yes, how do I forget that one? So this year, we're also trying to focus on life and FFS even more so, right? Everyone says I'm doing life, these two are doing more. I actually took one of my producers, so we got Frank, he did a write on the producing of the PNC, but he is phenomenal at life. He's been doing it for 43 years, 45 years, something crazy. I feel like he keeps changing the years on me every time I talk to him, but the house is playing. But he's doing that forever and he's super smart on life and financial services. So I'm gonna, let me just adjust my camera here real quick again, we've been doing, he's gonna be doing the life and financial services this year. So I promoted him from doing full-time PNC to doing full-time life and FFS to cross sell our book and to try to network and try to find ways to generate that life and help teach our team about life. So I don't have to do that anymore. I can help teach more about the PNC and he's gonna help teach you on the life and the financial services that he will be handling. And then we're having, we had a commercial specialist, we don't anymore and I would like to bring another, we had a month-readed 957,000 in premium or 978,000 premium, it was so shy of a million. And that was because we sold like a massive commercial policy of like 450,000 in premium, I think. For farmers or no? No, it was not. Farmers rejected every policy line, which sucked. It was a craft-like product, I believe. But I'm also not smart on commercial. So he went through that and he was able to get it taken care of, which is awesome. He was way smarter than me.  But I want to hire someone again this year to be our commercial specialist. I don't like my PNC lines, people to do commercial. It's too much time, it's too much to learn. I want them just to push it to a commercial specialist and they may get a referral bonus and he or she does the whole commercial process and gets that taken care of. I just don't have to focus on that. So that is also a goal this year.  Okay, well, I appreciate you sharing all these key insights and lessons that you learned along the way to wrap things up. What advice would you give to not even a newer agent but an aspiring agent who has done everything they could and their mind to grow? And now they're at a point where they want to scale and they want to get to a point where they're doing 100, then 200, then 300,000 in premium. What are some blind spots that they need to keep in mind that you haven't gone through that growth over last year? You can speak from experience. What are some things that they need to keep their eye out on as they grow? Yeah, one thing I recommend at least spending a couple hours a week, a month on off time, either on a Saturday, a Sunday, after hours, just figuring out information. What are your close ratios? What are your RRIs on stuff? Figuring that stuff out actually does help. It allows you to make decisions that will allow you to expand your business because you can see what's working and not working already with you. The second thing is, I would say, is make sure you have multiple lead sources. If anyone doesn't know, there's massive changes coming to the lead market. At least I keep hearing about it. I've never read it myself. In July, they're gonna have to start working directly, which lead companies will figure the way out. One thing I would say is we'll figure out a way, we'll figure out a solution. We'll always figure out a way to overcome any obstacle. We're very strong about that and belief in our agency. And the lead companies will figure it out, but just know that that's kind of like a notice to say, make sure you have multiple lead sources. Don't just rely on your one lead source that's bringing in. There's plenty of good agents out there doing 30 to 50,000 a premium a month. Well, you're focusing on one lead source, maybe two. What happens if you just try to tiptoe into these other markets so you have that extra potential coming in and actually focus on that? So having multiple lead sources has been great because when one thing shuts off, you have something else to rely on. So multiple lead sources is my recommendation. And don't be afraid to ask these lead companies and say, hey, what can we do to get a better price? How many leads do I need to buy to get the dollar amount that I need to get my ROI? Right, because you've already done your ROI calculations at this point. So what do I need to do to get here? I need the lead about this price to be able to get the return. And it doesn't hurt to be nice to these people. Apparently it's not a, I talked to all my lead providers and they always tell me, it's like, I wish more people spend more time with me and I wish people, they wish people treated them as humans. Same thing as us when we're on the phone, right? With the reason our point to build rapport in the beginning is we wanna make sure that we generate that rapport with the customer. So they see us as a human at that point. They're less likely to hang up in your face. They're more likely to work with you. When you start putting the customers to work on your time, they're more likely to work with you. For example, someone says, call me at 8 p.m. and let's get this, you get to stay in care of her. Call me at 8 p.m. and get in a quote. It was like, hey, I'm gonna be at home with my brother at 8 p.m. Probably having dinner, I will be free. Can we do a time tomorrow at lunch or can we do a time tomorrow evening? I'll say to undo a lunch or do you undo evening tomorrow? I always give two choices. That's a big thing with our agency by the way is we only give two choices. And I think you kinda do that too ironically Vlad. When you give something to a client, always give two choices. That's my only real strong, a mini strong piece of sales advice. That one is the most important with always end with a question. As long as you end a conversation with a question and you keep the conversation moving around that straight line process. That's something I believe in. End of the question, give two potential answers if possible. This has been fun, Brett. Thank you for having me. It has. I appreciate it. We'll have to do this again soon. I'll be watching your success as the years go by and we gotta do this again, at least in the next six months. See where you're at. For sure. And Nate, just know that we're gonna be coming after y'all. I love competing against you guys. We talked about our agency. We love doing that competition against other agencies. So we're coming after you too. So. I'll see what you're gonna be. Thank you so much. Thank you guys.


Sword and Shield, the games based off the greatest weapon pairing of all time is out and you know what that means, time to catch a metric truck ton of Far Fetch and evolve them into the chattest, baddest, raddest Pokémon of all Pokémon.  First thing you're gonna do is find a Far Fetched. After beating the thickest boy in town, head to Route 5, where the tall grass is looming with the duckers. If you're in Shield, then you're out of luck because I was gonna say, trade it from a friend with sword, but we all know that requires friends. If you want multiple ducks and don't want to waft through all the wabs, there's a daycare conveniently nearby and you can breed a female with anything with a flying or field egg root. Your easiest choices are likely a Rook-a-Dee or a thick, cheeky nut boy. Now that you have your Fardo in order to evolve it, it needs to land three critical hits in a single battle, which is hard to do without killing the enemy when you're as chad and meta-breaking as this buff-ass bird. First thing you're gonna need is a leak, boost the rate of critical hits and can be found held by wild Far Fetch or stolen from somebody with a copy of sword after you beat them up and stole their Switch because remember, only friends give you free leaks. Once you have a leak or the focus energy, technical record, you get from the NPC by the record store in Motorstoke. No wonder it's closed down, how are you supposed to do business selling records when wankers like this bloke are giving them out for free? Train your way cooler ducklet to a level around 20 to 25, make sure it has peck, sand attack, and rock smash.  Your Far Fetch will take a look at the moldy pizza and go, I'm gonna put some dirt in your eye. Which is your cue to start spamming sand attacks until it gets more blind than a romantically hopeless anime protagonist. Once it's in a cycle of blind flailing, this is your chance to peck the ever-living heck out of Stun Fisk. It's a pretty tanky Pokemon and being steel type means peck will only slowly massage it to death, or painfully torture it depending on your perspective of how it feels to be stabbed by the Angry Bird. Keep your fetchmen healthy when the occasional attack from the enemy lands and you should eventually get your three crits. After you do, make sure to finish it off with a rock smash because it won't count if you pansy out and run away like a fire type sweeper after somebody sneezes on it. Watch the pretty particle effects and you have the Chattis of the Braddis to totally annihilate the Galar region. Now you know how to get surfetched, you're welcome.


I am not your cup of tea, because I am made too strong and frankly too hot for you to enjoy. Maybe you can tolerate me in tiny sips, but I don't want to be tolerated. I want to be devoured by those who value all that I am, who do not wish I was in any way watered down to meet their tepid tastes. You won't be everybody's cup of tea, and that's fine. Stop trying to change the tea and be the brew, the beautiful brew that you are. Cheers.