What's the Plan for Your Agency?

Welcome to The Agent Leader podcast, the podcast to help you, the independent insurance agency leader, to help you gain clarity on what's most important, to help you build consistency on the key behaviors and habits that are going to lead you to your best version, and lastly commitment. And that commitment is to yourself. That commitment is to your team. That commitment is to your clients and to your community. Again, all about this idea, the principle of becoming your best version possible.

And I've mentioned on previous podcasts, I will continue to because I get great feedback, our book, and if you're watching the video you can see me holding it here, but our book, Best Version Possible that we wrote this year, co-authored with Roger Sitkins, the Sitkins CEO, and myself. By the way, if you don't know me, my name is Brent Kelly, if you don't listen to the podcast. The president of Sitkins, we wrote this with intention that you could take this book, you could read this book, and you could begin to take action right away on getting your agency improvements in different areas, that you could begin to get improvements in your agency and more results.

And had some great conversations, even this past week with agency leaders. They said, "Listen, I took this chapter and I began to do it and we're starting to see some results." I'm like, "Fantastic." Now I do want to tease this a little bit and I've teased this in the past over a few podcast episodes, but we're getting closer and closer to making our official, official announcement that's going to start on January of 2023, but we're going to be using this fourth quarter of 2022 to get members onboarded and have some calls about this at deeper levels. We're taking the Best Version Possible book, all the concepts, all the wisdom, all the strategies, and simplify it into the Best Version Possible experience. Four distinct phases to help your agency get rid of the noise, the complications, the frustrations with, how do I do this at the highest level. To give you a clear roadmap of your agency's best version possible.

And I'll go ahead and mention this now. The page should be up when this podcast is released and you can learn more about it. If you want to see if the Best Version Possible experience is a potential fit for your agency, your goals, your needs, your wants, go to sitkins.com/experience its going to be the hub for all of that. We're going to have a strategy call set up where you can, if your agency wants to learn, "Hey, does this make sense for us and what we're trying to do," we want to make sure it's a great fit. We're looking for agencies that are committed to their best version, which includes growth, profitability.

And I'm going to talk today about true team development, true team development. And I you've heard me mention, if you listen to this podcast, and if you do, thank you by the way, appreciate that. But you've heard me mention, whether it's with Roger on a solo podcast, with some of the guests that I have on, I'll continue to have guests here coming up on this podcast, one thing I talk about all the time, what's the number one job of an agency leader? What is it? And it's to develop your people. Above all else, you develop your people, you develop your agency.

And even looking at the book and the experience and things that we talk, about at an individual level, if you say, "My number one job is to help develop my people." Well, I want to help my agency as my team members, whether it's producers, service team, our claim professional, I don't care, anybody on your team, my other leaders obviously, I want to help them see and achieve their best version possible. And if I and we, and I'll talk more about that today, can do a great job of that, guess what? Ultimately, our agency will become its best version possible. It's just like saying, "The goal of a sales leader? Well, to make more sales." No, the goal of a sales leader, just like any leader, is to help your sales people develop. And if you do that, guess what happens? More sales.

My question today that I want to ask you, and if you got a pen and paper, take some notes on this. If you're driving, well, be careful. But listen in, I talk about, the number one job is to develop your people. My question, my second question to this, my follow-up question is, is what's your plan for doing that? What is your plan for developing your people? Because it can be easy to have ideas, it's good intent. Yeah, we need to develop our people, but to really stop and think about, "How are we doing that as an agency? What's the plan? What's the outcome we want? What's the roadmap? What's the process that we're taking people through? Is it something that we've really thought about with intent?" Or is it more of, "If it happens, it happens, and we're doing some things and it's been okay."

And listen, it's our belief, we know that not everybody agrees with this, but I think agencies that work with us do, it's our belief that good is simply not good enough. And it's not good enough for you as a leader, it's not good enough for your team. There's too many opportunities in deeper relationships, in financial outcomes, in perpetuation, and whatever it is that you want and your agency wants that are being missed, that are being lost because we're settling for good enough.

I want to focus today on getting you thinking about what's your plan. And if I ask a number of agencies, if I had 50 agency leaders in a room with me and I said, "What is your plan?" Now of course, if they're with us, they've got one. Hint, hint. But if I just had 50 agency leaders that I met and I say, "What's your training development plan," they would probably say, a lot of them, many of them would say, "I don't really know that we have one. We do some things, we do some ..." And a lot of this might be insurance-related, which is great by the way, some of the product knowledge and education, you got to have that. But outside of that it may not be like, "Well, we do this and we do a little of this."

I want to walk you through the importance of this and then some ideas of what you could do to help expedite or to help you maybe get some clarity on developing a plan. I think one of the first things that we see is, this comes back to this culture question. First of all, before we even get to a plan is, the question I jokingly asked agency leaders is, "Well, what do you want to be when you grow up? What does it look like?" I ask it to myself and my team, "What do we want to be when we grow up? What does that look like? What do we represent? What do we stand for? What have we achieved? Why is that important?"

And I know oftentimes this comes back to talent recruiting, or part of talent recruiting is talent development. And I've mentioned this before, that if you want to recruit the best talent, the best talent wants to know the plan for how they're going to be developed. But part of that comes back to culture. If I have a fuzzy vision or mission statement and we don't really know what we stand for, as much as sometimes people don't like to hear this, that people do want to be part of an organization that stands for something, that matters for something beyond the paycheck. Money is great. I'm all for agencies making more money, it gives us so many more opportunities.

But we figure out the disconnect sometimes of why isn't some of the best talent or why can't we get some certainly capable or higher level talent into our agency? There's a lot of competition. We know that. There's a lot of noise. We know that. If you're not clear on who you are, what you stand for, and why it's important, why should anybody else? So just think about that, about, "Do we have a clear vision and mission on what we're doing?" I think part of that too comes back to, what is the agency's way of doing business? What do we stand for, what do we not stand for? And understanding that.

I think part of this too with a plan is that because we want to please everybody and everything, that our plan or our development structure is, well, it's all things for all people. That doesn't really work very well. When you understand what you stand for and say, "This is our way of doing business," are there going to be certain people within your agency if you get very clear on that work there today, and/or people you may want to bring on to your agency that may not resonate or like that? Yep. Probably now is a good time to discuss that. Let's talk about that now. Because last thing we want to do is bring someone on that then we have to disconnect with, and we know the process of that, it's no fun. Or have people on our team that just hang around for year after year when they could go flourish or do something for themselves and their family and their lives that make a difference. And maybe it's not at our agency, and that's okay. That's okay. So understanding what the plan is, what's our agency's way of doing business.

I think one of the things too that why having a plan is so important, is I think what happens at agency leaders, and I get because I'm very similar to this, my team would say this. I'm working really hard in different ways of getting beyond some of these things. But one of the things that make top entrepreneurs and leaders top entrepreneurs and leaders, and they do great things is, yes, they're visionary, but they also have ideas all the time. There's always a new idea. "This should be the new thing we should do. This should be the new thing we should do. This should be the new thing we should do." And there's lots of talk, but there's very little action or execution around it.

You come in and you're all excited on a Monday, because you read something or you heard something or you had a conversation with someone, and you're going to share the team how this is going to change our world and change everybody's world. And all this new stuff that we're going to have to start doing. And maybe it's a process. Maybe it's a tool. Maybe it's a piece of technology. Maybe it's a new resource. I don't know. And you're all excited. By the way, you've done this many, many times before. And so you walk out of that room, maybe it's a virtual room, but maybe it's a real room, and they all wait for you to leave, the door closes or the Zoom window shuts off, and they look at each other and they go, "Don't worry. We don't have to change anything. This too shall pass. Don't worry."

And part of this is that if we don't have an overall development plan, what can happen is we begin to try to implement processes of resources and tools repeatedly, versus saying, "This is the culture," and establishing the culture of who we are, why it matters, what we stand for, all those good stuff. And then be able to say "This resource, this tool, this process, it fits into our culture and here's why." And by the way, it doesn't mean everybody's going to get. It doesn't mean everybody's going to agree with it. But your chance of getting buy-in to develop your team at a higher level is much greater of getting that because, guess what? It fits, it aligns with the culture that's been talked about and reinforced again and again.

And I think this is a critical mistake that agency leaders make, is that they start a improvement or a change, whatever you want to call it, and they start with a process, versus being really clear with the culture around first and introduce that process into the culture. And there is a key difference of that. And again, there's a reason why agencies don't always buy in on that.

And then here's the last thing part, is the plan, is in many cases, agency leaders just don't know how. And maybe that's where you're at. "I'm not quite sure how I can best develop my people." And one of the things that'll happen first of all, is I think agency leaders can sometimes put a great burden on themselves. I think as Spider-Man says, my son love Spider-Man, "With great power comes great responsibility." I almost forgot. "With great power comes great responsibility." And as an agency leader, there is great power so to speak, there is great opportunity, but there is a great responsibility.

And I think sometimes I'll talk to agency leaders and you're already inundated. I get it. You're overwhelmed with all the stuff you got to do. And, "I've got to talk to these carriers. And I have these people, and I've got my team here. And I've got this book of business here, and just all this noise. And so they put this pressure. "Now you're telling me that I got to go around and develop my people too?" Well, yes, but this is not a solo project. This is a group effort, but you have to be intentional with how you're going to do it.

First of all, the best agencies we work with, the best agencies we see, they empower more leaders. So this idea is, it's not me alone. This isn't me. This is an addition, where it's one, plus one, plus one, plus one, plus one, plus one. It's, "I'm going to empower this one," and this may be a period of time in development of other leaders, but identify who are other people that could be champions of the message, that can be great leaders in your organization. How do I empower and equip them so they can help me spread the message?"

Any great organization is very good at doing this. But sometimes in agencies we see there's this ... The agency principle, or maybe there's two, maybe there's three, and then there's this big disconnect to the bottom. And they're trying to sporadically develop all the people. And A, they're not equipped to do all that, because they may be out of some of their comfort zone or expertise. And B, they simply don't have the capacity. So what are we doing to multiply leadership versus add along those lines?

And the second thing, and this may sound very self-serving when it comes to this but it's true, is you can find a third party, a coach, a consultant, and that is what we do. That's what we do at Sitkins, is we help your agency develop your people. You're still the leader, it's your agency. We want to help equip, empower and educate in different ways that we can, and provide positive reinforcement and a different level of credibility. I may have shared this story before, but I've learned this in my personal life as well, of having this third party credibility and what it's done to help get the job done that I want. At the end of the day, what we want is the result. I don't often care how I get it. I want the result. As long as it's ethical and all that good stuff.

But I'll give you a personal example of this. About four years ago my oldest daughter was getting ready to go into high school, and she was playing basketball and was doing pretty well. But father, daughter, we're out in the driveway and shooting hoops and talking about things and having a good time and all that. But I'm always looking to help her in different ways. How can I help improve her game? Because there's things that I know I can help her with and I want her to be her best. So she was out in the driveway, shooting hoops, and I noticed a couple things like with her stance and her arm angle, shooting the ball. I played basketball most of my life and love the game, so I believe it was very helpful advice. Well, what do you think a, at this point, teenage daughter says to her dad, who she hears all the time. "I know, I know, I know, I know. He says it all the time."

And it wasn't long after that that we were outside in the driveway and my neighbor walked by, walking his dogs, and he happens to be a basketball coach, by the way. There you go, hint, hint. And we were just talking and I was sharing with him about some of the things we were working on. And he said, "Well, show me what you mean." And so she would shoot some things or whatever. And then he of course responded, "Well, you should do this. And maybe look at doing this, and make this slight tweak." Very similar to the message that I just shared with her. Very similar, if not almost identical, but he said it in a different way. He had a different level of credibility. He had a different voice. He reinforced what I was saying in many ways. And suddenly my daughter went from, "I know, I know, I know," to, "Oh, like this? And would this be right? And tell me more about this."

So I tell you that story, yes, we would love to find a way to be a partner with your agency to help you do those things. But regardless, if it's us or someone else, someone in your community, find people that align with your vision, your mission, your culture, but will help give you greater credibility and reinforce with your entire team. Look for those opportunities, because they are critical in agency and team development. All right, so that's a big part of talent and development.

Now, overall, what happens and what are some of the pitfalls that we see in agency development with their team? Some of the challenges of, again, this might be a great idea, good intent, but there's lack of execution. Well, here's a couple of things, or actually three things, that I see. And I've mentioned this maybe in different ways, but three things that I see around this. Why is there a lack of talent development, or what happens to the agencies, some of the pitfalls they have?

Well, number one, I think that the development or coaching or training is incomplete. And what do I mean by incomplete? Well, it's not for everybody. "We've got a few people from the team that may go to a training session," or, "We're going to have a few people go out and try to get better," or, "We're going to pour into a few people, but the rest of the team, sorry, good luck." Now maybe it's because there's lack of resources, or maybe it's because we're not sure how or whatever, but the point of it is, it's incomplete. And what could happen is ...

First of all, does that make your agency better? Well, I think so. It's better than doing nothing. But what happens? Well, some people, all of a sudden you've got maybe different cultures or different discussions that happen in the agency. "Well, I thought that we do this," or, "I heard this," or, "This would be the way." And the other person goes, "I've never heard that before." And now we've got more conflict and we've got more frustration in communication. So I think part of it is, it's incomplete.

Secondly, I believe it's sporadic, not systematic. A better way of saying it is that there are training development events, which, by the way, are better than nothing, but there isn't a training development process. Even when I go out and speak and do keynotes, that is an event. And I want to help agency leaders, insurance professionals, get better during that event. But here's what I know, and this is going to sound weird for me that gives keynotes, but it's true. I know that on that particular day of the keynote I am not going to change someone's life or their business. I'll say this again. I know that on that particular day, now listen to my words, on that particular day, I am not going to change that person's life or business.

Now what I can do and my goal to do, is to seed things in their mind, give them different levels of awareness, give them maybe a tool or resource that they then can go out over the next week, month, years, and begin to engage in a process that will transform their life or their business. The event is a catalyst for change, it is not the change. An event is not a ... And we'll see this like, "Oh, went to an event. Everything's better." No, it's not. You now have maybe some of the resources and ideas and maybe you've changed your level of thinking, which is fantastic, but now it's, what are you going to do? So if I talk to people and I say, "What's your development strategy? "Well, we send people to an event twice a year." That is not a strategy." I'm sorry. It's better than nothing, but that is not a strategy. There's not a process.

And here's the last one I would say on this, of what happens in talent development, a mistake that we see, it's not reinforced. And it's not reinforced by the leader. It's not reinforced by the leader. And I'm going to share a story on this, and a real example. In fact, I'm going to have either the agency principal or the sales leader with me on a podcast again, because these results in this story is really incredible. And this may be a bit of a brag, but it's about the agency. I mean, it really is. And what they did is incredible.

So an agency that we partnered with about 18, 19 months ago officially, part of our network, the year prior, so 2022. They had just started working with us for about five, six months. But during that year, their net new, or their new business revenue, excuse me, their new business revenue for 2022 up to September, about when I'm doing this podcast, was $600,000 in new business revenue, in revenue, $600,000 in 2022. I'm sorry, 2021. I'll get the dates right. In 2021, last year. 2022, this year up until September, they're at 1.2 million in new business revenue. So they went from 600,000 in 2021 to 1.2 million in revenue in 2022. That's a big jump. My math isn't very good but that's 100% growth.

Now did we have something to do with that? Yeah, I believe we did. Some of the things that I just mentioned, we helped them do this, but here's the thing that really jumped out. They got very focused on what's most important and got rid of the noise. They followed a process that I just mentioned, a systematic process, but what it really helped them is that from the very top, the leader, the sales leader, they continue to reinforce the power of this message. They continue to reinforce why we're doing this, the reason of where we're going, why it matters to people. They continue to reinforce some of the strategies and behaviors, versus, "Okay, here it is. Good luck." It was consistent reinforcement. And it was reinforcement from the leader.

I have seen agencies, we have seen agencies, that go, "Okay, you said to develop the people. I've sent a majority of my people, or they're going to get training here, or we're going to get better here. We're going to go to this class. We're going to do whatever, "which is great, "But I don't really have to do it. I don't really need to be part of it. I don't want to deal with it at all, at all." And guess what happens to those agencies? They never get the full traction that they could have. Now, do they get better? Sure. I don't know how you wouldn't, you'd probably get a little better, but did they get the full traction? No.

This agency that I mentioned, what makes them unique and special, and again, we have a lot of agencies that do this, I love this, is that from the very top the agency leader says, "This is important. I'm not going away. I'm doing some of these same things too, maybe in a different role, but I'm part of this too. We're doing this together. We're doing this together." And in this specific example of this agency, they reinforce and empower the sales leader. "Hey, we're doing this, we're getting better. I'm here to continually empower and reinforce the sales leader." So at every level it was reinforced. Guess what happens? True transformation, true change.

It all comes back again to my number one job or role of a leader, of any agency develop your people. And my question to you again is, what's your plan? All right, what's your plan? Doesn't mean it's going to be a perfect plan. It doesn't mean you're always going to follow every single step of the plan, that's not feasible, but you got to have one. And it's one that matters. And one that you can navigate through and help navigate your people through.

Because again, if you just go back to the idea of best version possible, and you start to have conversations with your team and with your other leaders, who then empower your team and say, "Listen, I want to know from you, what does your best version possible look like? I want to get to know you, and utilize our team resources and tools and things that we're doing as part of our culture, and how are we going to align to do that." And if we do that across the scope of our agency, just like this agency that I mention did, that went from 600,000 in new business revenue to 1.2 million, we will, as an agency, continue to strive to our overall best version possible.

So I can't wait to share with you more about the Best Version Possible experience, the roadmap, what it's going to look like to make it applicable. You can actually do it, that your entire team gets involved. That we're going to walk you through a systematic process that isn't complicated. That's key. It can be done and be done efficiently and effectively. Go to sitkins.com/experience to learn more about it. We're always here to help you, again, to be your best version. We love to have a strategy call with you, but if you want to take our book and some ideas and try to implement them yourself, hey, go for it. I want to add value to you and your agency as you move forward. I wish you and your agency all the best in your success. Thanks for listening.