Recently, an agency CEO asked a great question, and like most great questions, we couldn’t ignore it: Why do some agencies have three times the national average organic growth rate while others struggle to even come close to being average?

Our knee-jerk response was that they don’t have a unique sales approach that differentiates them from their competitors, and on top of that, they have empty pipelines and lack any sort of ongoing training and development program for their team members. The highest performing agencies have these as their way of doing business.

This prompts another question: Why does training fail in some agencies, while others embrace it and make ongoing team development part of their DNA?

The more we researched this and looked at training across almost all industries, we came to an alarming realization: Traditional sales, service, and leadership training models simply don’t work, so stop wasting your money on them!

Studies from numerous sources...

By Brent Kelly

“Failure isn’t fatal, but failure to change might be” – John Wooden

Despite what some people may think, the insurance industry is a highly noble profession. So why do insurance agents come and go? Why do so many new insurance agents fail and experienced agents plateau?

The insurance industry offers amazing career opportunities for those who seize it. This is especially true for insurance agents/producers. I spent 15 years as a property & casualty agent and have had many ups and downs. There were moments of great success and days where I simply wanted to throw in the towel.

The insurance industry needs some new young talent and strong leadership.Unfortunately, young people aren’t flocking to become insurance agents. For those new agents that do take on the challenge of becoming a new insurance agent, many fail. Why?

I think there are three main reasons why insurance agents fail.

1- Expect too much too soon.

Let’s face...

I just returned from my 11th mission trip to Nicaragua, working with Bridges to Community, several of my consulting clients and their team members, building homes in the second poorest country in our hemisphere. It’s extremely hard work but it helps us appreciate our “real jobs.”

One of the things we do is mix the mortar. First we have to sift the sand and then we add rocks, cement and water that become the mortar. Keep in mind, there are no mechanical cement mixers; this is all mixed on the ground, using shovels. The upside to this sort of manual labor is that it provides jobs for local masons. We’re just there to assist them.

The masons decide how much of each ingredient will be needed for the day, such as eight wheelbarrows of sand, five wheelbarrows of rock, fifteen buckets of water and four bags of cement. However, if we don’t make enough during a particular phase of the job and we run out of mortar for whatever part of the structure we’re...