A Tech-Savvy Yet Human-Centric Approach to Agency Growth

So how does a hyper growth insurance agency, in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as traditional organic growth, balance the operations based in technology and the growth of their people? On today's Agent Leader podcast, I have a fantastic interview with Billie Jo Galle of TRICOR Insurance, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Operations, and has a very unique perspective on how things can and should run to make sure that people are utilizing technology and the data that they have at the highest level. Fantastic episode, enjoy. Welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. This is the podcast for insurance agency leaders to learn, to grow, to develop and ultimately become best version possible leaders who lead best version possible agencies.

00:54

My name is Brent Kelly. I'm your host. It is my pleasure to be with you today and also my pleasure to have an incredible guest, someone who has been a partner with the Sitkins Group for a number of years their agency. I got a chance to know her through coaching calls and some other experiences we've had. I've got Billie Jo Galle with me. She is the Senior Vice President, marketing and Insurance Operations and I'll add this she seems to be the chief everything officer in so many ways, for TRICOR Insurance does a great job, Billie Jo. Welcome, first and foremost, to the Agent Leader Podcast.

01:28 - Billie Jo Galle

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

01:31 - Brent Kelly

Yeah well, we're going to have some great conversation and I know that your experience, Billie Jo, is. You've got a unique perspective from an agency side of things so many things that you do and so many amazing things that TRICOR Insurance does, and TRICOR is located in Wisconsin. I've had a few other guests from TRICOR and now I've got Billie Jo and again, there's so many things that you guys have done to learn and to grow. And, before I get into some specific questions on successes and challenges that the audience can learn from, if you would just share a little bit about your background, how you got to where you are today, what specifically you do, and certainly some information about TRICOR Insurance as well.

02:10 - Billie Jo Galle

Yeah, sounds great. So, Billie Jo Galle, I have been working at TRICOR for about seven years, so I have both our marketing as in brand and advertising. I've learned in this industry you need to let people know that side of it. And then I have the insurance operations team. So that includes our service team, our data team, so the people that run our AMS system from a data and technology side. Technology side training team. We have quality assurance and training and it's just a really amazing team that we have here.

02:52

And then, previous to TRICOR, I worked at CUNA Mutual Group, so I was a part of the team that helped them develop the True Stage brand, which is a direct-to-consumer insurance company, so selling life insurance, auto and home direct-to-consumer. So we did a lot of really fun projects. But it built on my background of data marketing, so using a lot of data and technology to target market and technology to target market. I was there for 12 years in building that role and previous to that I was actually in the retail industry. I worked for Land's End for a period of time, going through college and different things like that, so it's been a really fun ride.

03:44 - Brent Kelly

Yeah, it's awesome, I wrote down on my notes. You're saying there I mean this is a positive thing, but you got your fingers in lots of stuff, so to speak. Right, there's a lot of different areas and certainly in the fact that you think of operations, I mean that's a lot of stuff. And, as you said, you've been at TRICOR for seven years. You all changed just a little bit in seven years. Is that fair to say? There's been some evolution and growth in the last seven years.

04:13 - Billie Jo Galle

Yeah, it's been really fun. So, not only M&A is a big portion of our growth, but so is organic growth. So really, the portion that we spent a lot of time building the foundation of is our intersection of data and technology in order to leverage for multiple things, whether it's marketing, it's sales pipelining, it's reporting and business analytics. Reporting and business analytics. So, you know, going from a owned by two brothers agency as well into full growth mode and backed by private equity. Now we have great partners in that, helping us with capital, as we're purchasing agencies as well. So, and really the industry is going through a shift of trying to modernize itself into the technology and data and just using that to make decisions and be more effective and efficient. So, and then put on top of that a really interesting hard market. So it's been a fun few years, yeah.

05:30 - Brent Kelly

I just think about this and obviously your impact personally, but you've got a lot of great people I mean so many good people on your team, but this idea of data marketing but then you think about the changes that you've all had, just as far as sheer volume and numbers, plus just how you do things in people and technology and what's all involved in that, and I I'm so excited to get you know your viewpoint. I mentioned just from an operation side and the part that you've got that data background, because I think there's so many agency leaders and insurance agencies that are interested in that. I want to learn more about that. How do we take the next step? What did you do? What does it look like? So we may go all kinds of places on some of the questions and conversations and I want to start by just leaving it super simple and wide open From your experience and you can go anywhere with this but you're back seven years.

06:17

Maybe it's something you're working on now. Maybe it's something you accomplished three years ago. What's been, in your opinion, a great success that you've been a part of at TRICOR right and your team have done, and what did you learn from that? I just love to start with successes, because success leaves clues.

06:35 - Billie Jo Galle

Oh gosh, I could go a couple of ways in this.

06:41

One avenue that we've had is we built a very talented, robust M&A team.

06:47

So, as we're able to bring multiple in about a week, we're bringing two more onto the system in one day and that team is constantly thinking of the data and making it accurate and clean, and so we get a very good picture of what's coming in.

07:10

It's really valuable to us because it could also bog you down if you did not build a team that is very efficient at what they're doing and you would never get a view of your true business analytics as those data points come into the system. The other side I would go for that is just really leaning into being a data and technology first company. You know, when I came, they had EPIC, they had an AMS system not great at being accurate, of putting all the right things in all the right places, and we really leaned in and cleaned our data, cleaned all the workflows, everybody doing things consistently and honestly. If we would not be able to do what we're doing today, if that really wasn't a foundational starting point for us really understanding the system, how it works, why it works different ways and then just being very clean data experts, I just I feel like that gave us an edge of being able to do more and bring in other technology to use.

08:34 - Brent Kelly

Yeah, yeah, and you guys have done such a great job with that, and I mean, here's a couple of things that I could take as assumptions that are correct because they're close enough. Technology is expensive, right, certainly in different ways, right, and the upfront part of it and the other part that I see so often in agencies is that whether agencies have an abundance of technology, an average amount of technology, maybe not much. They typically only use a small percentage, in the way that they can and should, of what they have, and so I'll approach my question this way and I know that no agency is perfect TRICOR is not perfect, but you've come a long way. How have you been able, or what have you guys have done, to be able to integrate the technology with people? More importantly, how do you get the people to embrace it?

09:22

Because a lot of the M&As and things that you're doing, right, you have agencies. Maybe they've used technology in different ways. So have you gotten I don't know, you tell me, but this idea of like, almost the fear of technology to well, maybe it's okay to like, okay, we'll actually use it to. This is who we are as a culture like, right, that whole process. So I don't know if I even had a question in there, Billie Jo, but I just I love to, I love to hear more about the evolution of how you've been able to facilitate that process.

09:53 - Billie Jo Galle

When I first started on it I used actually other industries that have been through this. So you know, back in the late 90’s at Land's End we were doing email marketing in a very poor, non-automative way but using the data we had to do email marketing. So you give the situation of can't use it if the email is not in the right spot, if it's in somebody's outlook and not epic, you can't automate things. So you really start with a story around how other industries are using it. For if you remember when ATMs, it used to take five to 10 days for it to show up in your bank account. Well, that's because the data wasn't connected. It was a human behind the scenes taking the data, typing it in. And so I got to be a part of a project with the credit unions that we served at CUNA to connect the data. Well, the credit unions really wanted it because of non-sufficient funds right, taking money out that you don't have. And then it's instant. Today it's instant. You can go anywhere and take out money as much as you would like out of your accounts, kind of anywhere in the world. So once you paint a picture and then you have a vision of look at our data, this is amazing data and you can do.

11:25

If this, then that scenario. Oh, if you only have the home line, you can use automation to say, if it's home and not auto, send them a campaign that says can we bundle your package together? And it's an intersection of technology and humans, because it's not only the email that's going to make a conversion. It's going to be somebody else following up as a human and say hey, did you get my email? I'd really like a chance to talk. It's that whole client experience that you build, or prospect pipelining experience you build to really make the vision work for people, and then, when it starts connecting, they're like this makes total sense. You just got to break it down. So it's in simple terms, and we're really lucky around just having the culture of thinking forward, thinking outside the box. Don't put me in a box of thinking. Just really great talent that let's have that as our values as a team and we ask perspective and we ask for different things like that. So I think it's been really fun.

12:39 - Brent Kelly

Yeah, that's so good and kudos on the work that you've done, your team has done in that area, because it's not easy. But what I heard and took, and a couple, I guess, comments and maybe a question around this, is that we talk a lot with agencies about culture and process and if you don't establish parts of the culture, some of the beliefs that we have and I love what you said like painting the picture, the vision, this is what this could look like. This is why this is so important. Could you imagine? Again, however, people do that if we don't establish aspects of that and instead we just start introducing a bunch of processes and stuff, shockingly people reject that very quickly, like I don't want to change that.

13:19

I don't want to do that. Shockingly, people reject that very quickly Like I don't want to change that. I don't want to do that. I was not, I never did. You know, we've never done it that way before, all those kind of things, versus being able to kind of take them on a journey. And I always say you know, I said this in this podcast before Billie Jo that great leaders see more and before others. I see more and before. And it's not to say that we're smarter or better, but it's like there's this vision and could you imagine? It's like wow, maybe. And then I love what you said. Being able to say that we can have open communication around this allows them to have some feedback and gives them buy-in. And you know, I'd be willing to say you didn't have 100% buy-in but you probably have a lot more than you used to. Is that fair?

14:02 - Billie Jo Galle

You've got more than you used to. Is that fair? You've got more than you used to. Yeah, I think there's people that they wanted to, you know, retire doing the things they were just doing. Right, I get it. I'll probably get there someday too, but it's it's really a mindset of people that want to learn. They want to learn, they want to grow, they, they want to get more efficient. They don't want to do mundane tasks. They want to use their brains and think more and not use my fingertips data entering things. So it's really a passion of hey, if you want to get more time, all you got to do is this process in this way to get more time, all you got to do is this process in this way. Are you willing to let go of what you used to do and have that just sort of that emotional conversation? There's so much emotional tie to what we believe is the value that we bring and you have to let go of something you really valued that you did for a long time.

14:58 - Brent Kelly

That's. I mean. It's so true, you're talking about the results. You want the behaviors. But what do you believe about that? And that goes back to their values. And I love maybe your comment on this too, because you set it up about the home and auto example.

15:12

We know that technology will continue to evolve and adapt, and it has, I mean, at rapid paces and the fact that you have these experiences back. What do you say? Late 90s? You're doing email marketing. I mean, insurance agencies in the late 1990s were just glad to have computers, I think in some cases, right, I mean, there's some truth to that, by the way.

15:30

So I think about this in technology and some people can get very scared by it. Or even when I talk to producers or anybody in the business, it's like oh well, technology is going to replace me. I'm like no technology only enhance your relationship, help you leverage relationships, have you start conversations at higher levels than you would have before? And I think for some people, let's be. This is this is my real talk on this, and I'll just use producers for an example. Well gosh, if you take away these mundane tasks, then what do I do? You do higher level work. You have higher level conversations, you truly become a risk advisor, for example, versus just basic stuff that technology can do better and faster than you anyway. So I don't know again, not really a question there, Billie Jo, but just agree, disagree. What are some of your thoughts on how we can leverage our relationships by using technology?

16:28 - Billie Jo Galle

Yeah, I think I absolutely agree. It's about enhancing what's already there. We're really in a world where consumers expect instant gratification. Right, if I order something and I don't get tracking messages, I'm like what happened, something didn't go through. There's an expectation of instant communication and the insurance industry is probably one of the furthest industries behind being able to do that in an automated fashion. Can they absolutely do it in a manual fashion? They're not going to keep up. So as agencies get bigger and you go from oh, my client list used to be a thousand clients and I could fairly well keep up, but now I got four thousand and what do I? What do I do with that? How do I still keep in communication? And that experience happening in a larger volume and it's some of this, honestly, is going to either happen to you or with you, and it's a reality that everybody needs to have, because the M&A volume between all agencies is happening, which means your client and your policy count is dramatically going up and you have to keep up to it.

17:51 - Brent Kelly

There's a, and this has been around for a little while. I believe this comes from Dan Sullivan, so I want to make sure I give the right person credit. But he said this and it wasn't in regards to the insurance industry, but I think it very much can be and will be. But he said you know, what you used to get paid for you'll eventually do for free. And when I think about that, that's like the insurance placement or transaction, like that part actually is kind of easy. But he said what you currently do for free is what you'll actually be paid for, and that's the advice, it's the consultation, right, it's those going deeper into really understanding things.

18:22

And then that part of it too is you know, one of my favorite books called humans are underrated and just talks about what are some things that humans can do that computers never can or would be able to excuse me, and it's emotion, empathy and teamwork and collaboration. And you know you talked about this internally, but emotions matter. Humans are really good at that, computers not as much, but they get the stuff done. You need to get done. And I just think about it's so funny, as you said this just today, I'm like, oh yeah, I was the same person. I was dropping my kids off at school this morning and I realized that my windshield wipers were like oh, these are starting, these are starting to get a little old. And by the time I got to the office I already had ordered windshield wipers that are coming tomorrow through Amazon. You know, it's like instant gratification, like see it, get it done Next, but there are higher level things, yeah, so it's such an important thing.

19:17

I want to take maybe a different side of this. Talk about some of the things you're doing. Well, we know there's always frustrations. There's always going to be frustrations. What are some of the biggest hurdles maybe you've overcome or you're working to get through in your position right now at TRICOR and when it's operations, technology, data and how are you dealing with that?

19:39 - Billie Jo Galle

I think one of the biggest hurdles we have as the industry's modernizing AMS systems are not quite keeping pace with what's needed. So some of the automation we need we use software as a service. We do not own our AMS system. We have to take whatever they're working on and updates they're doing. We can give input but we don't build it Right and so we have all these ideas and things that we give them and it's just like we need these to happen faster and keep to keep up ourselves.

20:23

And because we don't own that and we don't make decisions on what they choose to work on, um, it becomes highly frustrating when you're trying to get the right data out of the system. Or why do I have to check a box here to get the commissions to calculate? Why does that just not check itself? Um, that, especially if you've worked outside the industry, and especially if you've worked outside the industry and industries that are have just made it through a modernization like retail, highly frustrating, like I remember when I first came and I'm like so they download a pdf into the system.

21:07

That's a policy, but the data is nowhere else it's. And that's a policy, but the data is nowhere else. It's inside this PDF that a human would have to read to compare the new policy. Interesting because in the mortgage world and your change in mortgages, there's AI reading those to make sure that one mortgage legal language matches the other. You know from different companies, so it's just interesting, yeah.

21:36 - Brent Kelly

It's a challenge. Yeah, I mean. Obviously. It all of a sudden hit me just thinking of you, came from outside the insurance world and popping in. I can't think about. I just can't imagine how many different times you're like why are they still doing that? Like what, what, what, what year are we in? Right, it happens so often. We know there's a lot of great data companies and tech companies that have continued to come in. A lot of it's integrated and all those things. Maybe this is part of the frustration, maybe not, but where do you see and maybe this isn't fixed yet, or you're in the process of it, or it's coming down the road when do you see some of the major areas of duplications? We're replicating things we don't need to replicate. There's bottlenecks, there's friction, Is there a certain area? I'm sure it's more than one, but that jumps out at you. That goes this is something that, as an industry, you know we need to address. We're certainly a track where we hope, you know, we can resolve down the road.

22:30 - Billie Jo Galle

There's a lot of really great things happening in the world of AI as it comes to taking out that policy data. So our biggest, you know, exposure is when we move from one carrier to the other. For the most part because we have 200 plus carriers, they all treat things different. This is an endorsement, this is not um. You could have outsourced that work to another human doing that. That has to one by one compare documents.

23:06

So there's a lot of work being done to build that as it content, like machine driven learning, is perfect for reading one thing and then reading the other and giving you the compare, because a lot of it is the same wording is just different spots in a in the policy. So there's some really great tools coming up for that bottleneck. There's no way we could look at every policy that we had, but you should be right. And huge bottleneck there, just data that isn't surfaced when we do proposals and an expectation of a customer is well, show me last year, show me this year, even five years ago, when we like what has changed in our evolution and it's just that would manually have to be all pulled together for the most part. So it's frustrating, yeah.

24:14 - Brent Kelly

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm sure there are people listening. I know there are people listening that are going yep, yep. I agree with all that. Yeah, very true. Well, I'm interested. My next question and I, when I say this, I said it seems to be self-serving. I don't mean it to be, because I'm generally curious, but you know, we've had a long relationship with Sitkins and TRICOR. You've evolved over the year. We've evolved in different ways as well. I think COVID is part of that, amongst other things, and as you continue to change. But from an operations perspective, if you could say there was one thing that you've taken out, whether it's a principle that we have, or strategy, or process, it could be anything what jumps out at you most, Billie Jo, just some of the most impactful things from our relationship together.

25:44 - Billie Jo Galle

I believe that falls 100% in putting in process the high performance team meetings. I think they are hugely valuable alongside the contract. So when we have contracts that we're like you do this, I do this and it's very clear, it's easier to have the conversation around okay, the salesperson's dabbling in service and not making sales, or the service person isn't doing what they're supposed to be doing. That's been really impactful for us and because it's time management, it really comes down to people recognizing oh yeah, I did stop at your door probably 15 times today. Every time you get disrupted. They say it takes 20 minutes to get back into your routine.

26:37

If you get disrupted a lot at your door, it's owning your day. You have to own your day, you have to own your time and the HPTs of like we meet every Monday. This is what we talk about. This is our rundown of what is the most important. It also makes you feel, as a human, like you're running the show. The show is not running you. So I think a lot of the control and consistency really came across really well for our employees.

27:11 - Brent Kelly

Yeah, that's great to hear, and, again, it's one of those things where, as simple as that may seem or sound, that majority of agencies don't do it at all or don't even think about it. It's just oh, what do you mean? And I think it's important. I love that you said the contract too, because it's one thing. Oh, you should do more sales and you should do more service. Well, what does that mean? And every agency takes it a little bit differently.

27:31

But this idea of same goal, different roles, and we talk about appreciation, respect and trust. And one of my favorite phrases and maybe you've heard me say this before and I always tell this to groups high-performance teams. You have two choices you either prepare or you repair. Which one do you want to spend more time doing? And you know, oh, because you mean we got to have a 20 or 30, whatever it is, you know minute meeting on Monday. I'm like you could, or what you could do, is interrupt each other the entire week and be frustrated that we didn't talk about it before, and that, to me, is the foundation of those high performance teams. So I appreciate you sharing that, Billie Jo. All right, I have one final question, which is my favorite question and, I don't know, maybe it's the hardest question, so it's a decent day right Wisconsin.

28:29 - Brent Kelly

Not bad right, nice day. So you're going to go out. Let's say it's. I know it's lunchtime here coming up as we're recording this, so you're going to go out. Maybe you're going to go for a little walk and you happen to bump in to the younger version of you, and that younger version of you looks at yourself today and says, oh wiser, more experienced, Billie Jo, if you could give me one piece of advice right now, in the next 30 seconds or so, what would it be?

29:05 - Billie Jo Galle

I think what I've learned is every from. From a career standpoint, every situation is valuable. Every time you find yourself being asked to do something that scares you a little bit, you don't know what you're doing to build wisdom from. You know, there's a lot of projects I was the creative manager at true stage and all of a sudden I'm in the project for automated underwriting, working with it to tell them how to do their automated underwriting. You know it's - take those situations because they're all valuable in learning and pushing yourself and stepping outside your box.

29:55 - Brent Kelly

Yeah, that's great and it's. You know, it's the common phrase that I say and it's not mine. But you know, get comfortable being uncomfortable, and that's one thing that I think it's easy to say as a catchphrase. Get comfortable, being uncomfortable, and oh yeah, right on. And then it's like a situation appears yourself and you're like oh, don't like that at all. And you know, I don't know enough about it, I'm not smart enough, I'm not used to that. It's different. And most people, the human areas, you know what. I will avoid that at all costs versus you know what. I'm going to take it on as a challenge. I may do great, I may not, but I'm going to learn the heck from it. And you start stacking those experiences. You really do grow as a human.

30:46 - Billie Jo Galle

Absolutely. You know they. When you have kids, they just send them home with you and you're supposed to know what to do. Right, and you figure it out. I, you know everybody's really smart and they just need to let go of the fear of failure.

31:03 - Brent Kelly

Yeah, that's a. That is a great point, isn't it? Think about how many. I had a conversation with someone else. It's like, well, they don't have instruction manuals for this or this. I never thought about that with kids, you know, or like I don't know enough yet. It's like, well, all of a sudden you have a kid's like you better figure it out. Best that you know how and we keep learning. So well, listen, it's been a pleasure to have you on here. I knew you'd bring great value and different perspective. I bring great value and different perspective and we appreciate being a partner with us and being part of many of our programs and conversations, and I love just having these conversations to get your perspective and I applaud your growth. It's awesome of all your experiences and I know you'll continue to ascent to a whole bunch of new and exciting things in the future. So thanks so much for being part of the podcast.