What's Your Agency's Financial Model?

Part 4 of our series on important aspects of agencies featuring Roger Sitkins focuses on Earning More.

There are some traps agencies need to look out for when it comes to earning more, does your agency have:

• Profitable accounts subsidizing unprofitable ones?
• Profitable producers subsidizing unprofitable producers?

Listen in for some great tips on how you can increase profits, improve your team, and where to invest in your agency.

Brent Kelly:

Thanks so much for joining me on another episode of The Agent Leader, for the fourth podcast episode in a row - this is a world record - we have the great Roger Sitkins with us. If you haven't been listening to The Agent Leader podcast, why wouldn't you be? The last three sessions, Roger and I have been discussing some key areas in the agency. The first podcast episode we did together in session number one was just about going deeper in your agency and some of the aspects of what that looks like. We've talked about sales, we talked last session about retention, and today we're going to be talking about earning more. What agency leader doesn't want to earn more? If you do want to earn more you're in the right spot in today's podcast. Roger, welcome back to The Agent Leader podcast.

Roger Sitkins:

Well, Brent, it's great to be back, and this is one of my favorite topics - It's not what you make, it's what you keep. How can you make more, and keep more, and that's what we're going to be talking about.

Brent Kelly:

Amen. I do want to just make sure I note, Roger always laughs when I say, Mr. Sitkins or the great Roger Sitkins. But I will tell you, I mean, Roger won't be the one to toot his own horn, but certainly as a mentor of mine and CEO of the Sitkins Group, Roger has devoted 40 years to this industry and you can learn a lot in 40 years in working with agencies and just getting results. That's really what it's all about. As I said before, if you don't have a pen and paper and take some notes, shame on you. Go get a pen and paper folks unless you're driving, be careful where you're listening to this. But seriously, take some notes of what we're going to be talking about today because really it will be about earning more for your agency, which ultimately gives you freedom, and that's what we really want.

Brent Kelly:

Our mission at the Sitkins Group is to help agencies sell even more, retain even more, and earn even more than they ever thought possible, and that's the big part of this podcast. I also want to make a note that if you and your agency team are looking to really transform your agency and just move to greater heights, please go check out our programs, specifically our all-inclusive model, the AIM model that we have. Go to sitkins.com/AIM and learn how every person on your agency team, from sales, and sales leadership, and leadership, and account management, and ongoing forums. Every person in your agency can hear a similar message to get greater buy-in and ultimately greater results. Go to sitkins.com/AIM. We’d love to talk to you and see if your agency is a fit for our program. With that Roger, are you ready to talk about earning some more money for agencies?

Roger Sitkins:

Oh absolutely. You already said the key term there, financial freedom. It's not what you make it's what you keep, as I said. But more importantly, it's the freedom that those additional earnings, those additional increases in agency value, that it brings you.

Brent Kelly:

Yeah, it does. I just want to ask you, because again, from all of your experience, I know you've seen agencies of all kinds and types, and sizes, and demographics, and geographical areas. But if you would just summarize, I think it would be great for the audience. What are some of the common traps that you see that prevents insurance agencies from earning more, at least as much as they could or should?

Roger Sitkins:

Well, the first trap is one that we talk about on a regular basis, it's a great business. It's a business where you don't have to do a lot because the bar is very low. It's a great business where you can get pretty good results and certainly fall into that semi-successful trap we've talked about before where to the outside world, "My gosh, look how great he's doing. Look how great she's doing. Nice house, nice cars, kids at the best schools, vacations whenever you want them." To the outside world and compared to the outside world, things look pretty darn good.

Roger Sitkins:

But the sad news is that when you start accepting they'll say, when good is good enough, good is the enemy of great. But when good is good enough or semi-successful is good enough, you're really falling way short of the best version possible. Best version possible of you as a leader, best version possible of your agency overall, and you wind up losing millions and millions of dollars of agency value. At the end of the day, everybody listening here will eventually leave this business whether you want to or not. But everybody's going to leave, none of us get out of this alive.

Roger Sitkins:

When it's time to leave and you hopefully have succession plans, et cetera, when you leave, are you going to look at what you get and say, "Wow! That's really great." Or will you have some regrets going, "Yeah, I probably should add two or three times that amount." The semi-successful trap really it's so real in our industry. I just wish people would wake up, and I guess that's part of our mission here. Just face the reality of if good is good enough at the end you won't be the best version possible and you'll have regrets. One of my favorite sayings as you know is, you have regrets or regreats. Regreats is, let's do great things, let's get great results, and let's replicate them on a regular basis.

Brent Kelly:

Yeah. Roger, I was thinking as you were saying that, there are a lot of Sitkins' principles, I guess. Whether you call them Sitkins' 100 or Sitkins 101. But if they say, what is it really all about? I think about earning more. There are two things that you say, and I say all the time to agencies. "Listen, there's profitable and unprofitable." I think it's always very, very sticky. I'd like you to share maybe two huge principles. Again, if you're not writing this down and think about this for your agency, please do so. Do you want to elaborate? I think you know where I'm going with this.

Roger Sitkins:

Absolutely. The number one is, don't allow profitable accounts to subsidize unprofitable accounts. Face the reality, 80:20 is real. If the top 5% of your customers are 50% of your revenues, that means the other 95% of the customers create the other 50% of the revenue. Where are you making most of your profits? Take a look at it and start breaking it down, "How much revenue do I have on my As, Bs, and Cs top five, middle 15, and bottom 80?" Just think of this, if you lost the top 5% of your customers, which would be 50% of your revenue, how many expense dollars could you cut, and could you cut them quickly enough? We'll go even further, Brent. What about the super As, the top 2% of the customers, average agency 33 to 40% of the revenue.

Roger Sitkins:

Let's go on the low end, say 33. If you lost 2% of your customers, there's a pretty good chance that you'd be in deep trouble. Agencies are very vulnerable when they don't do separate profit center analysis. When they're not going through and saying, "Hey, if all I had were my eight customers, what expenses would I have?" You'd go through and you would allocate a percent of rent and the equivalent full-time employees dedicated to the A customers. You would break it down as many ways as you could. You just say, "Am I making a profit or a loss on my A customers? What about my B? What about my C customers? What about the bottom 25% of the customers that are about 5% of the revenue?"

Roger Sitkins:

What happens is, because it is a great business and because unfortunately the vast majority ignore the reality of the 80:20, overall they look at it and they go, "We're doing pretty darn good. I guess we're making a profit." Well, I would just challenge you... by the way, can you make a profit on every account? Yes. Maybe not the bottom 5% of customers. Certainly you can make profit on every account if you're willing to handle it properly. But unfortunately, because it is a great business and because you don't have to do this stuff, most people are really subsidizing their less than profitable accounts with their really great accounts.

Roger Sitkins:

We've done this challenge before too. We said, look, what if you just had the top 50% of your customers and you only had that? What would you do for them that you're not doing today? Would that be a better experience for them? Could you wind up replicating them? Could you fill your pipelines up with similar accounts? Yes, but it starts with a deep... we love that word, deep, delivering excellence in every process. Well, what about a process that identifies profitability versus lack of profit on various account sizes? It's crucial in my opinion.

Brent Kelly:

Yeah. That first one there is, never allow a profitable account to subsidize unprofitable accounts. I mean, that's everything that Roger was talking about. I want to get to the second one too but I have to share something. I had a call yesterday, an agency that's part of our AIM model, our Sitkins network, our inclusive model. I asked them, I said, "Well, as you've gone through this what's jumping out at you?" And they said just what you said, Roger, they go, "Gosh, 80:20 is just something that we know but we haven't executed." You'll probably get a chuckle out of this and they're Agent Leader listeners so they'll probably go, "Yeah, they're talking about me." But it's just interesting, without giving names away, they said they had 27 accounts that had 78% of the revenue, Roger, and the rest of them were 700 accounts that had the bottom 22%.

Roger Sitkins:

Yeah.

Brent Kelly:

We see it all the time. I said, "What do you think?" It's like, you never really thought about the impact of just that top 20%, or in this case 27 accounts, and how much more opportunity is, we talk about, to round out, retain, and replicate those and what that would mean. I said, "What if you focus though?" They go, "Oh my gosh, it would be a game changer." "Why aren't you doing it?" "I don't know." It's just that idea of just getting really, really focused. The first one was a profitable account subsidizing unprofitable. What's the second one, Roger?

Roger Sitkins:

Second one, profitable producers subsidizing unprofitable producers. Now, the reality is a new producer, the old saying is it takes three years for them to be profitable. I would challenge that. If you're not making a profit on them before three years, there's a real good chance you may never make a profit. We could do nine hours of podcast just on that. But the reality is that in so many agencies, the agency principals are still the biggest producers. I can't tell you how many times, and you've seen it certainly Brent, where we'll ask agency principals, "How would you like to be paid as a producer? In other words, pay yourself the same way you pay your producer. If you're paying 40 on new and 25 on renewal, would you like to pay yourself that way?"

Roger Sitkins:

Well, the ones that understand this is a results-based business not a transaction-based business, will look at it and say, "Well, heck I already do." But so many say, "No, I would get a raise if I paid myself as a producer, but I'm not taking that because I'm trying to subsidize others." Well, again, newer producers working out that's different. But once they get past that level of, and they're at least validated, are we making an acceptable profit on them? I remember several years ago we talked about this in one of our private client meetings.

Roger Sitkins:

One of the agency principals who is exceedingly astute financially went back and analyzed all of the things that they provide to their producers. But they included all of the tools that they have, so things that help the producers create more results. We always say the tools are the agency's responsibility, the behaviors are the producer's responsibility. The agency went through and said, "What tools are we providing? What training?" Of course, because it's part of that for them. "What things do we do to support them, et cetera."

Roger Sitkins:

What they found in this agency was that unless the producer was generating at least $500,000 of revenue, they were not making an acceptable profit on them. Now, a lot of people will say, that sounds like a lot. Well, maybe it is for your agency, but here was one of the big differences. This agency now knew they had an exact handle on, okay, what does it cost to have that producer here? That producer getting ready to go out and generate more business for us, help us to sell more, retain more, earn more, et cetera. But what do we need to have a profit on that?

Roger Sitkins:

I think maybe a better word, Brent, is an acceptable profit, which we're going to get into profit models here. But at the end of the day, if you're sitting there saying, "Wow! I've got all these producers that are really retired in place, and I guess they're not hurting us." Well, yeah they are, because they're dragging down your whole culture. They're dragging down energy. They may be hurting you in your marketplace with their brands. But the producers that are just coasting, well, are you making a profit out of it. You and I have had this discussion with a bunch of the chief revenue officers several times now.

Roger Sitkins:

A lot of people say, "Well, you can never let producers coast." Well, the reality is they will because it's a great business. The key is at what level can they coast? Because a producer with, two, $300,000 of revenue, that's coasting. There's a tremendous cost or the lost opportunities there. But getting to the point say, "Okay, if they're going to coast, what does that look like?" Several agencies, once a producer starts coasting, they start reducing commission levels now. Again, that can be a whole other discussion. But I just want to challenge our listeners here to say, "Hey, am I allowing profitable accounts to subsidize unprofitable? What if I didn't do that? Am I allowing profitable producers to subsidize unprofitable? And what if I didn't do that?"

Roger Sitkins:

Many times where the very profitable producers where the owners are not, where they're getting hurt and where they're subsidizing others is agency resource. Whether it's the service team, whether it's tools, whatever, agency resource is being used to support producers that are growing. It's a status quo. I don't think anybody wants to stay flat forever. Just some thoughts here to say, "Gosh, why are we doing that?" First of all, maybe are we doing it? The answer for most are yes. And what are we going to do about it? Because knowing it is one thing, whether you're going to make a change, whether you're going to do something to improve your situation, or will you accept status quo? I hope not.

Brent Kelly:

That second part you said there, Roger. I mean, just one thing to chime in on is we talk about this in our sales leadership and agency leadership program. Obviously, every producer that were to come into your agency, if you'd bring them in, they deserve a high level of training and commitment from the agency to be successful. What's frustrating even that I see, it's certainly frustrating for agency leaders, is the amount of capacity, and time, and energy, and of course money, as you said, that gets sucked into producers who simply aren't producing. Yet we have these other producers who could just go even to a higher and higher level, but the time, and, energy, and money in many cases is invested elsewhere.

Brent Kelly:

You just have to ask yourself, as you just said, "Are my profitable producers subsidizing my unprofitable producers and am I okay with that?" Hopefully y'all took great note of that. I want to get into financial models, so just to give some perspective and ideas to agencies out there. I think one of the questions you ask all the time and I ask is, "Hey, what's your model?" I'm paraphrasing this quote, but something to the effect of, if you aim for nothing, you're likely to hit it about every time. I have been seeing that with agencies. Just from your perspective, Roger, why is having a financial model for agencies so important? And what would it look like? What would be some examples of that?

Roger Sitkins:

Well, without a journey in mind, all roads are going to lead there. We can try this, we can try that, we can try this. But without a financial model, I don't know how agencies make decisions. Even within producers where we talk about this. We say to the producers, "Do you want to be a million dollar producer?" "Oh yeah, sure do." "Great. How are you going to do that?" "I'm just going to write a lot of business." Well, as we say tongue in cheek, but it's true, you can't be a million dollar producer writing thousand dollar accounts.

Roger Sitkins:

For a producer we'd say, "Okay. Do you want 50 customers at $20,000 each? What if it takes you five years to get there?" It's still a pretty good model. But more importantly, coming back to the agency itself, it's understanding that we have to take in our mind a P&L and turn it upside down, make the bottom line the top line. You start with your profit number. One of my very best friends in the world who I dearly miss, he passed away last year from cancer, built a phenomenal CPA firm. One of the things that we talked about... I love him as a friend for so many reasons. But just when we would get into business discussions, he was so astute, and I learned so much from him.

Roger Sitkins:

I said, "How did you make all that work?" He said, "It's real simple." He said, "If any of the plans or when my partners would come in with a new plan of where we were going, I would always ask one question, 'What percent of the revenues goes to partner distribution?'" If it was less than 40% he would say, "Bad plan, go back, come back with a new one." In his mind, because their profit of course is distribution in their model. We look at this and we just say, "What's your profit goal? Start with that. What's your profit goal?" In our model at a minimum, we say you should have a 30% operating profit. I hope all the listeners know that means your operating revenues minus operating expenses.

Roger Sitkins:

Your investment income or any contingency income you earn is a bonus, it's gravy. In fact, you make 100% profit on that when you get it so your core operations, then your sales and service expenses what's left. When we look at the P&L and we look at the model, we say 30, 40, 30. Let's start with, we have to make a 30% profit. We've talked about this before, the secret to making 30% profit, everybody should write this down…You can only spend 70%. It's like, oh okay. Yeah, you can only spend 70%. If I have to make 30 and I can spend 70, how do I spend the 70?

Roger Sitkins:

Well, I think in the right business model, we look at it's 40% for service and administrative expenses and 30% for sales expenses. Does this mean you pay a producer 30%? No, because there are other sales expenses also. What it does mean though is, when you start looking at the bottom 50% of your customers, if not more, probably no producer compensation. Because that's one of the ways agencies lose money. That's one of the ways profitable accounts subsidize unprofitable is paying a producer on every account. There has to be that minimum account size, "Look above X we'll pay you, below that it's a house account."

Roger Sitkins:

Maybe we'll pay your first year, although I'm not a tremendous fan of that, but that works for some smaller agencies. But again coming back to just say, what's our business model? 30, 40, 30. Then when we look at this and we do the analysis within our private client group, and we do their annual assessment, and we help them set their KPIs and we're monitoring them on a regular basis, we come up with a term called GrowFit, which is G-R-O-W and then F-I-T just like profit, professional experience. We say the GrowFit is a combination of two things, your operating profit percentage and your net new revenue growth, in other words your organic growth rate.

Roger Sitkins:

You combine those two numbers, both are percent. What should it be? Well in our mind, the minimum combination is 25, but the real goal and our best agencies are hitting this and exceeding it is 40. Let's say you have a 20% operating profit and a 10% organic growth rate, then your GrowFit number is 30. Well, it always comes back then, what's our business model? What's the business model worth? Business model is 30, 40, 30, and our business model is a GrowFit of, let's say 40 or 45. But the key is to have numbers like this. What I see is once we have that as the end in mind as Stephen Covey said in the great work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He said, "Begin with the end in mind." The end in mind is financial model and GrowFit.

Roger Sitkins:

But the other thing is you start identifying your key performance indicators. The key performance indicators that are helping you to make decisions. One of them of course is revenue per employee or spread per employee. Let's just look at revenue per employee. Of course we get into closing ratio and retention numbers, but just look at revenue per employee. This is a great way to make a great leader even better. All too often we've seen an agency where people say, "Oh, we're behind, we're understaffed, we need more people. We need this, we need that." Maybe you do, but maybe people just are not very effective.

Roger Sitkins:

Historically what we have found, throwing more people at the problem is rarely the answer. Go back to the source of the problem. Why do we need more people? Are the ones we have ineffective? Are the ones we have not using the technology we have available? Are we not training them? Are we not holding them accountable? But probably the easiest example is, let's just go back to revenue per employee. Brent, let's say that you're one of the members of my team and you come in and you say, "Hey, Roger, in the service area we need to add a new employee. Things are really backing up there."

Roger Sitkins:

Well, historically, if I don't have a model to look against I guess I'd say, "Well, okay, hope it works out." But if you came to me with that request, and I knew that our revenue per employee goes 150, which is too low, but I'm using it as an example, here's what I would say to you, "Brent, how will that person directly or indirectly help us generate an additional $150,000 of revenue this year?" If you can't tell me specifically how that person's going to help us hit our KPI of revenue per employee, I'm going to say, "Go back to the drawing board, go back to the drawing board."

Roger Sitkins:

But if you, as one of our team members, you've been part of the planning session, everybody buys in and you came to me in the right culture and you'd say, "Hey, Roger, I need to have another person in the service area and here's exactly how this person will help us generate another 150,000." Just think of the power that gives a leader to just say, "Well, how does that impact our key performance indicator?" Now the reality is, are there times when you'll hire somebody and your overall key performance indicator, the actual results, drops because you've hired somebody? Yeah, that's a ramp up period. But again, if the person requesting the additional person, the additional team member, cannot tell you specifically, "Here's what's going to happen as a result of having this person," then I say, "Sorry, go back."

Brent Kelly:

Yeah Roger, I'm just listening obviously and just thinking at a deeper level as you're sharing stuff. But I think the thing that just, I hope that listeners got, you said it becomes a decision-making tool. I think I see so often, and you do too, that agencies make decisions based on a feeling. Sometimes that's okay I guess maybe, but it doesn't have substance behind it. Well, I think we might. It's like, well, is that really going to get you to where you want to go? Just goes back to awareness creates the right actions. If you don't know your model, how can you make the proper decisions? So much good stuff that you shared there. Again, I appreciate you going through those different examples because just it's truth. It's truth.

Brent Kelly:

I want to ask you one more question with the time we have left, Roger. It really goes into you think about earning more as we talk about. In fact, in our CEO bootcamp that we run, one of the mistakes that we see is that agencies step over dollars to pick up dimes. There's a lot of meanings behind that, stepping over dollars. Well, one of the biggest dollars they step over are the people that are already in their agency. Question is, how well are you developing, and training, and mentoring, and coaching your team? The answers are sporadic, but typically it's, well, not enough. I'll just ask you, do you believe that agencies right now, are they investing enough in resources and training to the people that are part of their agency, their greatest asset?

Roger Sitkins:

Well, you gave me a softball there. I could hit it and say, "Well, only those that are involved in our all-inclusive model and get everybody on the same page. But here's the reality. If you look at professional services firms, you look at the National Training Directors Organization, I can't remember exactly what it's called now. But the studies have shown that the highest growth, highest profitable, the most profitable professional services firms which certainly agencies fall into that category, are investing 2% of their revenues in the training and development of their team members.

Roger Sitkins:

We've talked about this before, and done some webinars, but when I look at the best practice's numbers, the average agency, and this is a best practice agency, it was at 0.4% of revenue, less than a half a percent. Now, that makes zero sense to me. Now, certainly, and by the way that 0.4 includes continuing education credits, which are crucial in our industry. You need people to constantly be doing those things. But I look at this and I say, "Why is it that you would not develop your team on a regular basis?" Well, number one, you're going to get semi-successful results even if you don't.

Roger Sitkins:

But when I think of teams, with my background playing football in college and just looking at what goes on in teams, I can't imagine any professional team that doesn't have ongoing training and development of their team members. Whether it's the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, National Hockey League, okay, those are all sports teams. What about symphonies? You think orchestras have training and development, or just a touring band. I'm a huge Jimmy Buffet and Eagles fan. Two years ago I was fortunate enough to go to a big outdoor event in Orlando where they were both there, the Eagles and Jimmy Buffet. Jimmy Buffet opened for the Eagles, what a great concert.

Roger Sitkins:

But they practice. They practice. Think of, now that things are opening up again, and you're going to hopefully go to some live theater, you're going to go see some musicals, whatever is exciting for you. How much preparation and training do they do getting ready for the event? All right. I can't imagine. I guess I shouldn't, I can imagine. I can imagine because I see it every day. But the reality is that your team's not going to get better if your people don't get better. Certainly to do the things that train them in the skills, the processes, and the attitudes, the mindsets it's crucial. Yet most won't invest.

Roger Sitkins:

Well, studies have certainly proven and we've proven the return on investment is phenomenal if you'll invest in your people. If you don't invest in them, I don't think you have any reason to complain about why they're stagnate, "Why aren't they growing? Why aren't they handling more?" It'd be like taking a football team and say, "Hey, just go run around for a while and figure it out yourself. We don't have to work out. Don't worry about a training table. Do whatever you want. We probably won't win any games this year, but we'll be out there." It's obvious I could get on a soapbox forever on this one, but it's just so amazing when you see the difference with, in our case our golden program of course is the producers creating new revenue.

Roger Sitkins:

We look at agencies that are growing at five or 6%, which is pretty much the average now. Then we look at producers that have really committed to the skills, the processes, the attitudes, and getting better all the time and constantly being reinforced. We're seeing 10, 15, 20% growth and large producers books of business because they're doing the right things, and because they have their team members aligned with them. One of your sayings that I absolutely love, and this is all part of training and development, it's getting everybody on the team to understand this. We have the same goals, but different roles. I love how you share that with people. Yeah, I mean, if you don't invest in them, don't expect much from them. I guess that's an easy final response.

Brent Kelly:

Well, I mean, there's so many different takeaways to that. I mean, I could probably go for 20 minutes too, Roger because you know my passion around just growth and development of people. But one of the things that we've shared for several years now in our programs is that, what if you just got 1% better a week? I think you could do more than that, but let's just say 1% better a week and you go, "Oh, that'd be pretty good in a year." Let's not even use compound interest. Let's just say that it's just 1% direct and you take two weeks off. That's 50% better. Now, it doesn't mean it's just better and they grow just money financially. Yeah that could be part of it, but I'm just talking about growth as a professional.

Brent Kelly:

Then you multiply that and say, "Well, my team's got 15 people, or 20 people, or six people, or 48 people. What if they all got 1% better?" You go, "Wow! We would be a really good agency." Well, then why aren't we doing that? "Well, it's just, it's been so crazy. It's been so busy. I really don't have time to get better." Which is always just the craziest things that we hear. I mean, what? The greatest investment that you can make is in yourself. I think the greatest investment you can make as agency leaders outside of yourself is into your team, "How do I get our team to get better?" This is paraphrased in different ways.

Brent Kelly:

We use this for sales leaders, but this is true for agency leaders. When I say, well, what's the number one job of an agency leader and you get different answers. Well, increase revenue, to grow sales, to be profitable. Now, the number one job of any leader is to improve their people. I mean, that's the job, that's the number one thing. How are you going to do that? Before I have my wrap up, Roger, again, I appreciate you. First of all, I want to thank you for coming on with me and investing basically a couple of hours here. If we look at these four session, and I know my guess is if I ask nicely you may come back again, is that fair?

Roger Sitkins:

I would love to.

Brent Kelly:

But just as we wrap up all of these sessions together, and again, I do appreciate you very much for doing that. I know the audience will appreciate your wisdom and what you've shared. Any just final thoughts that you want to share with the audience?

Roger Sitkins:

Yeah. Brand new thought based upon what you were saying, the 1% a week. What about 1% a month? Just 1% a month. That's 12%. Well, the average growth rate right now is 6%. If you just got 1% better a month and you compounded that over a few years, you'd be at 12%. It takes a laser focus on the most important issues and takes a laser focus on knowing what's really going up. Just 1% a month will be phenomenal because it would be double what the best practice study is showing for the average agency today. Can you get 1% better a month? Well, not doing what you've been doing now.

Roger Sitkins:

Right now the property rates of course are going up, all the rates are going up. We're getting into a hard market based on a lot of reasons. Agencies will get an artificial growth, but it's not new client growth, it's existing client growth, which is fine. Take it. One of the beauties of the business. We're just sitting here and saying, "Hey, if every one of our team members just committed to getting better every week, every month, every quarter, and we talked about it, that is our culture." The culture is, how do we get at least 1% better all the time? Something we talk about whether you use the 1% or 2% number doesn't matter. But only one or 2% of people can really implement long-term meaningful change. Well, within an organization, it takes a leader that's committed to it and a leader that constantly reminds people the journey that they're on.

Roger Sitkins:

This goes back to, again, same goals, different roles. To each individual, to each department, what's your purpose? What's your role on this journey we're on together? When you get leaders that start talking that way, communicating that way, and constantly reinforcing it, it's really exciting to see what happens to them. By the way, they earn more and they have financial freedom.

Brent Kelly:

Yeah. There's that word, freedom. Absolutely. Well, just some thoughts for me on this. Again, I know I've mentioned our all-inclusive model several different times. But just two things that I want to share with you and why this model has been so impactful and why, if you're an agency, as Roger just said, that's committed to getting better, and to earning more, of course to sell more, to retain more, and to earn more, why it's been so successful. I think two things jump out at me, Roger. Number one is we want to give you a process and not just a... not an event, but a process that your entire agency can be part of and learn together.

Brent Kelly:

If you think you're going to... I think we've all dealt with this, but in mind, "Oh, where's the magic pill? What's that secret thing I need to do? Well, the magic pill and secret thing is doing things very well for a long period of time. Well, that's a lot of work, Brent. Well guess what? That's what the best do. We want to give you an actionable process that you can really do by basic principles. The second part of it is holistic. I know that many agency leaders, one of the biggest frustrations they see, Roger, is the fact that, well, I'm onboard or this person's on board. This person, she's excited, he's excited, but their service team is not, or vice versa, the sales team is not, or the leadership is not.

Brent Kelly:

What we want to provide an agency is a way holistically that every member can go, "You know what? This is something we can do. This is something we should do. This is something we must do. We owe it ourselves. We owe it to our agency. We owe it to our clients to be better because ultimately it's going to provide that word again, freedom." If you want to learn more about that program in particular, again, go to sitkins.com/AIM that's for all-inclusive model.

Brent Kelly:

Also, one final note. I did a workshop just this week, our summer series workshop. I'm going to be doing two more, one in July, one in August. There's no charge for these. The one I'll be doing in July based around sales, go a little deeper into the sales process, sales philosophies. August will be more about productivity and utilizing that one, the only diminishing asset, Roger, which is time. If you want to register or learn more about that, just email us at [email protected]. We've got an email domain, [email protected].

Brent Kelly:

It'll go to our team, they'll get you registered, no charge. Get you in, make sure you're registered for July and August those workshops. You don't want to miss those. It'll make a huge impact on your agency as you move forward. By the way, there's also maybe a possibly a special offer if you attend that. I'll give a little tease there. I want to thank you all for listening. I appreciate you. If this podcast added value to you, please leave a review or rating or subscribe. We love to have more agencies get involved. Again, Roger, huge thank you to you. You did so well, Roger, that I'm going to invite you back. Is that all right?

Roger Sitkins:

That's absolutely all right.

Brent Kelly:

All right. Hey, thanks for being a listener. Wish you all the best in your success.

Listen to More Episodes in This Series

Part One: The Four R's

Part Two: Decisions Determine Your Destiny

Part Three: Stop Renewing Accounts