Your agency has plateaued employees.

Originally I was going to say “plateaued owners and producers,” but the reality is you cannot afford to have any employee who has “retired in place.” We talked about this in our Profit Zones articles in the May and June issues. As I discussed at that time, if you have any RIP employees who aren’t following the system, not doing their job and not embracing change, your agency will plateau because RIP becomes contagious. That’s why every employee must be viewed as a Profit Zone.

Often, it’s the employees with seniority who not only refuse to do certain new and agreed-upon tasks, they get away with it. In other cases, there are employees who just don’t care. Either way, their attitudes and actions have a negative impact on all other employees in the office.

At most agencies, there are two kinds of workers. There are the ones who dread their jobs and only show up to “make the donuts.” As...

This month I want to challenge you with a theme we’ve often discussed:

What’s the cost of doing nothing?

This applies to those who consistently do the same old, same old and brings to mind two of my favorite adages: “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got,” and “What got you here, will keep you here.” The strategies, tactics and behaviors that you’ve used to get your agency where it is today probably won’t continue to serve you in the future because the world is changing so rapidly. Consequently, the cost of doing nothing new continues to skyrocket. So if you’re unable or unwilling to take the initiative to start doing things differently, there’s a good chance you will eventually kill your agency. While I doubt that anyone really wants to kill his or her agency or deliberately sets out to do so, there are plenty of ways to destroy an agency. Here are the top five agency killers.

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