Episode 323: Automation That Actually Gets Used

Welcome back to the Scale Your Insurance Agency Podcast, the show built for independent agency owners who are done being the bottleneck in their own business. I'm Daniel Metcalf, and every week I'm joined by my co-host Mike Stromso, one of the most respected operators in the independent agency world. Between the two of us, we bring you the real levers that move a $3 to $20 million agency from successful but maxed out to systemized, scalable, and running without you holding it all together. Here's what we focus on. Mike brings the people side, leadership, team development, niche sales mastery, and a three-piece system that helps agencies build a business worth owning. I bring the machine side. AI, automation, and workflow design that frees your team from the operational drag, eating your margin, and your time. Together, we're building a framework that can grow an independent agency 4X to 9X without burning out your people or your checkbook. If you're an agency owner who's tired of growing by hiring, who knows you have a capacity sitting on the table but can't figure out how to unlock it, this is the show for you and your weekly edge.

Greetings and welcome to the next episode of the Scale Your Insurance Agency podcast. My name is Mike Stromps. I'm the co-host along with my co-host, Daniel Metcalf. And today we're going to be talking about a subject that is rampant in the independent insurance agency business, however, sometimes seldom used. And I'm going to prompt Daniel to unpack why not? Daniel, how are you doing? I'm doing fantastic. You might. I'm doing well. Thank you. The gift of another day. That's right. So uh let's unpack this gift of another day and help some uh independent insurance agents scale their insurance agency business. Uh that's why this is the Scale Your Insurance Agency podcast. So, Daniel, today we're gonna talk about automation that actually gets used. And Daniel, if it's shelfware, what happens?

Uh, it sits on the shelf, and we think that we buy a tool for our team and uh get it all set up, and then it just sits on the shelf, no one actually uses it.

So it's all for naught. So let's make sure that everybody's that's tuned into this episode of the podcast does not have that experience. We don't want it to be all for naught. We want it to be all for your goals and to support everything that you're pushing and leading your independent insurance agency to become. So, what we find concerning automation and actually using automation, unfortunately, is a little bit of pain. And so the pain of the situation is workflows exist. And Daniel, we talk about this a lot and we experience this a lot in helping independent insurance agents. You know, they say, we want automation, we want to do this, we want to do that. But once we pop up the hood, if you will, and look under the hood of the agency operations, and you and your team say, show us your documented processes, show us your workflows, and show us other things operationally. What do we find sometimes, Daniel?

Uh, oftentimes we find either unclear processes that many times they they'd be like, Yeah, I understand those first two steps, but these two steps, I don't really know what this means. So then I just do it this way, right? Or when this happens, then this happens. Or they might say, Yeah, we have processes in place, but we haven't touched them in a couple of years, so I don't even know if we're still following those or not. Um, so or there's poor user experience, or what we call UX in the in the software tent, right? Very poor user experience with the tools that they've already connected with to say, okay, this, you know, step one, I can put it here. Step two, I can put it here. If you have to, if you have to do a bunch of manual work as a user to put the automations in place, a lot of times the employee will just say, ah, it's just easier if I just manually do it, right? Ah, it's just easier if I just do it. Um, it's gonna take too long for me to put that all together. So why do that? Um, and then there's just no lack of accountability. Where, you know, if the team say, Yeah, we put all these processes together. Next question we usually ask, okay, show me the ones where it's followed by all every single time. And how do you measure to make sure everyone's use, you know, the accountability that they're this is getting done? Because we've seen many instances with some of our agencies that'll be like, Yes, we've worked really hard. We set up this um wonderful automation and workflow within within uh their CRM system. And we'll go through and we'll say, okay, let's walk through each one of them and kind of look to see what the results look like based on each step. And then inevitably we find out someone isn't actually following the step. They're just they're the automation stops for whatever reason, because it's not set up correctly, they go around the automation, right? Or they stop it or they do something to go around it and they don't actually follow all the steps. So what we identify is hey, we start putting the as you know, as part of a team, we put a lot of dashboards together. We're looking at a lot of numbers, especially on the on this the sales output side, revenue output side, and be like, wow, these leads that are coming in, those steps are doing really well. Um, and but then it gets to a certain spot, and this person's getting different results than this person, right? So then we start to dive in further. And guess what we find, Mike? Oh, person B who's not getting this great results, turned the automation off, or didn't set the automation, or it's not working. They're skipping that step altogether, and they're just they're not getting the same results as the one that's getting the better results. That's typically what we find where automation fails. Same goes on the service side. Where automation fails is when someone's like, ah, but that's a unique situation, or that's a unique situation. Well, that's a different situation. Oh, well, you gotta understand I was on this, you know, I'm on this road or the town I live in or whatever. There's always these exceptions. And automation is always going to fail if there's an unclear process for each of the exceptions. And how many exceptions are we talking about? Right? Are we talking about a hundred different exceptions, or is it two or three exceptions? Because maybe we just adjust the automation based on what those exceptions look like. And over and over again, we need to say it's not the automation that fails. It's usually either something's unclear, the tool that we picked has very poor user experience, or there's lack of accountability.

That's a lot to unpack. So let me unpack that for everybody that's watching or listening. And thank you for tuning in, by the way. So you said, you know, we created processes two years ago, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, you know, one of my observations in working in the independent insurance agency space for over 40 years is that things are going to change. And how often are things changing in the agency space? Uh something's gonna change in the next 15 minutes, if not sooner. So we learned in our own independent insurance agency through failure. Let me be clear about that. Nelson Mandela said, you never lose. You either win or you learn. And so I learned through failure that we created a hundreds of processes, documented processes, introduced to all, and all were trained. The step that we missed is we did not assign one person to own the updates of those processes. So that might be a takeaway for you. Have one person on the team that will own the updates of the processes. And then Daniel mentioned a couple of times accountability. So make sure you have somebody within your team who all right levies, for lack of a better word, the accountability, and not from a, you know, crack the whip type thing, but from a gentle encouragement and leadership standpoint that, hey, this is very, very important because if we're not all, quote, rowing in the same direction, then we can't get to our goal. Because if we play the me game and not the we game, we can't get to our goal. So I'm gonna pause right there because and and if you missed some of the things that the brilliant gold nuggets that Daniel dropped, go back and listen to that part again because we're gonna dive into some more. So, Daniel, thank you for that. Great job. So, automation dies. What are some, and I think we just unpacked this, but let's reiterate it. Because we believe that people need to hear things seven times. Get my hands straight there. How do they make it stick?

Yeah, absolutely. We we walk them through four specific sections to get them to get their automation to stick. And it and the number one part that we have to start with is leadership adoption. So adoption starts with leadership. The culture, the leadership culture of any business, right, including insurance agency, is the lowest level that you're willing to tolerate. So if the leaders don't adopt, saying that we're gonna we're going to adopt artificial intelligence and automation, we're going to go through the steps it takes in order to do so to be as successful at it as possible, and then they need to be able to manage by inspecting it on a weekly basis. We call it AI Fridays here or AI and automation Fridays. We're gonna go and inspect.

Let me ask you to pause. Yes. AI Friday.

AI Friday.

You may want to write that one down. Back to you.

Yep. AI Friday. So we want to look at okay, how is everybody using the automations? Are the automations giving us the results that we we expect? Are is there anything broken with the automations? Is is everybody using it and repeating it on a on a regular basis? That way we get the team together and we find out because these tools are supposed to be an assistant with us, right? And I'll get into that into the fourth uh point. But we want to we want to manage to make sure that it's all working correctly and the way that we expect, because that's how we're gonna get the greatest return on investment that we've made in these tools. So it starts with the leadership adoption and making a culture shift of we're all going to use this, we're all going to build it out together, and we're all gonna succeed together and measure it together to make sure that we're getting the most out of it.

Fantastic. Let me reiterate a point. You get what you tolerate. So if you tolerate everything that Daniel's been talking about, like people allowing people to free-flow on their own, operating the me game versus the Wii game, that's what you're going to receive. If you allow your processes to fall, that's what you're going to receive. Rinse and repeat AI Friday. I think those were great points. Set the day. And again, back to leadership. Have somebody own that strategy and make sure to inspect what you expect. So great stuff, Daniel. Thank you so much. Adoption is leadership. Inspect what you expect, like we just talked about. The three automations, and we love the power of three, right? Everything agency operations, right? Like the three Ps, people, process, promotion. But Daniel, let's unpack the three P's, the three automations that typically create immediate time savings. Because let's be clear, everybody, we all have the same 24-7-365. And strategically, it's how we use it. Daniel, tell us more about the three automations.

Yeah, so the three automations that typically create the most time savings, and we break it down into the three functions of the agency. So we have the rev revenue, revenue operations, we have then the service, and we have what we call admin finance on the back end. So I'll give you the one per those section, right? Number one automation in the RevOps area is reaching out to schedule meetings and meeting preps for either new prospects or you know, handling leads, gathering the data that you need from the lead, you know, from that lead or the current pro you know, the current customer to be able to then have the discussion about their insurance needs and their um or their current insurance program that they have with the agency. So that's the first automation that saves the most amount of time. The scheduling, the back and forth, the gathering of data, the getting it on your calendar, the, you know, if you're doing drive, you know, if you're if you're doing it in doing windshield time, where am I going to all these different places? How do I get there as fast as possible? The all those decisions that you have to create. So putting those in place, getting the meeting scheduled and all the data collection that it takes in order to what you're going to present with that agenda or the quote or whatever it is, that automation is the number one time saving on the RevOps side. On the service side, it's the service, it's the dreaded service inbox. The dreaded service, you're whether it's each individual service account manager, service provider receives the service requests, whether it all comes into one phone, you know, one phone tree, or it comes into one service box, if you will, or a chat bot on your website, whatever it is, it's funneling all those service requests into a manageable ticketing system that allows people to actually go and batch their service work together instead of the firefighting. That's where we see the most amount of time saved. When this service request comes in from this place, this is what this is what happens. I list out the task, it gets assigned, and then it gives us a due date of when it's going to be assigned, and it ends up in that service person's inbox, right? Or wherever you, wherever you manage your tickets for the service requests. And then they're just working at, you know, nine in the morning when they walk when they start the day, or eight or nine in the morning when they start the day, or whether your service requests are done in the afternoon or whatever that time is, they block that time. They can get one service request out, bang, bang, bang, bang. It saves a ton of time because they're not having a firefight. That switching and that firefighting, and it, okay, it came from this spot, then I got to go look at this spot, then I got to came from this spot, that all that making that proactive is where you're gonna save a significant amount of time. And then where we see what we've been working on very heavily on the admin finance side is commissions. So being able to automate your the submissions and receiving of all that data, right, that you need to do to get your commissions reconciled and paid and whatnot, gathering all the data, analyzing all the data, putting it in a place that you can then identify where commissions went to who, and then making sure that they get that they um can do the manual work to then to get them paid. That is where you're gonna save the most in the back office uh admin accounting section, right? So helping out with commissions. Um, there's those are the three places where you're gonna get the most amount of time savings automations today.

Great stuff. Thank you, Daniel. Let me recap that for everybody and add a little bit on for your understanding and mindset. So we talked about rev opportunity, rev revenue opportunities, I mean sales, right? Get clients, that's part of the rev opportunity, keep clients, which is the service and retention opportunity. Simple business plan. So we're talking about intake of information. I mean, how can we serve people the best at the highest level? We talked about 24-7, 365. It's a busy, crazy, growing digital world. And people want autonomy and they want to be able to do things on their own. So we need to give them that opportunity. And that's where the automation comes into play from an intake standpoint. So make sure you position your automation to do all of that. I remember in our agency, uh, Andrea White did a great job of you know making three or four different ways that people could provide us information, whether it be email, text, uh, you know, it wasn't a chat, but it was something similar to that. So they had three options based on where they were in the world on any given day to be able to fulfill that. And they were waiting to be led. We told them what we needed and they simply did it, including their deck pages and everything else we asked for. So that's one. Two, service, which is retention. But what I wrote down and took away from what Daniel just said, you know, time blocking is big for producers in the agency world. I mean, they've got to block their time and then the green zone time, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. They've got to block that precious, you know, high performance time. Same with the service team. And we used to have, you know, uh, I can't remember what we called it, but Tuesdays and Thursdays, our account managers and CSRs had free time where their calendar was blocked so they could put their head down and do all of that batch work without interruption, without phone calls. And one of their teammates would cover. We had teams within our service department who would cover each other on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And so they had that free time to put their head down and do the batch work, and then they would flip-flop on Thursday. So, you know, if Erica had a free Tuesday, she would cover for uh Julie, for instance, on Thursday. So she would have the free time, and it worked wonderfully. So think about it like that with regard to automation as well, and combine the two. Because when technology does the work of machines, people finally get to do the work of humans. And oh, the all-important, and this continues to come up. So, Daniel, forgive me, but I have to mention this because it came up again yesterday, it came up the day before, it came up again last week. In agencies today. Independent insurance agents have a servant's hard-to-serve people. Sometimes they forget their business owner's hat and they're not paying attention to their numbers and their business, their PL and balance sheet, and oh, the IRS keeps lurking. And they don't see it coming because they're not paying attention to the business side of things. And guess what? All of a sudden, they are handcuffed, and there's the key is lost. So please make sure that you use that. And Nano's talking about commissions and reconciliation, and he just touched on the surface. There's so much more. So, Daniel, great stuff, great stuff. So, handoffs, templates, and triggers back to three, right? Tell us about that.

Yeah, so I don't know. When I was working at an insurance agency a number of years ago, we used to call it the swivel chair handoff, right? So I remember right, we know it we all started begging for swivel chairs instead of the you know, the chairs that just had four legs on it, right? So we all wanted swivel chairs. What's that?

Did you just have wheels on the bottom?

We had to have wheels because our desks were in a big open down the wheels and stuff. Oh, yeah, we had the U desks, you know, the whole deal, right? And and so to give you the analogy, the swivel chair is okay, if I have to go to the left side of my desk and that's where my phone is, right? And I got to answer the phone, right? And then, oh quick, I got to swivel back over to my computer to answer my emails, and I had to swivel back over to hand because there's somebody walking in the door that's gonna that needs something from us. We're constantly swiveling from one side to the other. And that's what we call switching. And that switching is where you never get the opportunity to sit forward and get the work that's in front of us done all the way through. And automations can help stop the swivel where everything ends up face forward for you, right? That's what we have to start thinking about. When we start building out these work workflows and processes and checklists, and we look at how we're gonna add automation to it, it's where are we going to get it so that the handoff is right in front of our faces to get it done instead of us having to go from this person to this person to this person, grabbing it from over here, and this person over here is gonna give it to me. How do we make it so that it just ends up right out in front of us and then we batch it and get it all done? That's where we have to start thinking through some of these things. I know it, you know, we had a conversation with a couple of agencies as we're building out workflows, and it makes sense to do things like, oh, we just assign accounts by the alphabet, or we assign accounts based on, you know, um, who's who doesn't have as many accounts as the next person and all these different things. We start looking at the workflows of like, what would it mean different if we just, you know, we assigned it to what made sense to the where we didn't have the swivel chair, right? Where it makes sense to where how we get it all into a into maybe a team instead of it being to an individual, things like that that we're trying to work through. That's where automations can really stick. Because as soon as someone has to create a handoff manually or someone has to swivel their chair around, a lot of times they'll just say it's just easier for me just to do it than it is for me to let the automation do it instead, right? Because then I gotta I still have to go and enter myself into that process rather than just letting it work. But if we set it up correctly without the swivel chair, that is when we'll find the best automations for us.

I want to touch on two things. Thank you, Daniel. That was awesome. It's easier for me to just do it. I intentionally paused right there because I wanted you to digest that, and I'll repeat that. It's easier for me to just do it. Does that really serve your organization the best? Does that really serve your customers the best? Does it really serve your teammates the best? Is that taking away opportunity for a teammate to grow, to learn, to flourish? Oh. It's just easier. I'll do it. I'll pause. I was going to use a word. Okay, I'll just say it. Selfish. I mean, we don't, we shouldn't be selfish. We should allow other people to grow and to learn to flourish as a team. And the other thing that I came up with, and I'm going to drop two more on you. And I learned this one from a $1.5 billion revenue company founder. And he said, when I evaluate all the decisions I've made, because I asked him, I said, how did you do it? I mean, what was the key? And this is what he said after long thought. When I evaluate all the decisions I've made and how I got there, there's one common theme. It's team. It's easier for me to do it. That's not team, that's I. And there is no I and team. You can't win if everyone does not have the same vision. And ladies and gentlemen, it's no accident that today my message was about vision and my reading. And it said in Proverbs, where there is no vision, people perish. So share the vision. I'm only successful, and here's the key, and this is what I thought about. I'm only successful because of the balance that you need within a team. It's that balance, and that's what Daniel's talking about with combining the automation and the people and everything else that goes along with it. After all, you're only as good as your weakest link. So unfortunately, in business, sometimes we are positioned to make difficult decisions. And we have to make sure everybody's on board. But you know, I was talking about this with some super high-performing agency leaders uh this week. John Wooden, who said the the uh UCLA basketball icon, who said, discipline yourself so no one else needs to. So it's that discipline. And it's that discipline when you're at the U-desk with a swivel chair to discipline yourself, to be focused on the task at hand and not to squirrel as we say. And I look, I squirrel with the best of them. But it's discipline, and I'm aware of that. So back to accountability. Daniel, I veered off path here, but I hope that tied everything together for everybody as we think about our future and how we're going to automate it at the highest level to maximize our ROI. So, Daniel, let's tie together agency operations, meaning documented processes, the SIA way of how we do things, right? Workflows within those processes with the team, and ultimately their behavior, not software features.

Right.

And if you have any questions for me to tie that in, please do. But what are your thoughts?

So when we look and work with agencies around, you've heard us say it in a couple different episodes. You can't throw software into your agency and then build your agency around the software. You need to build your agency processes around the behaviors that you want to institute into the agency, right? Around the behaviors, and then you find the right software that can match the behaviors that you want for your agency. You also want to look at then how do I automate those behaviors over and over and over again, where the software tool can allow us to automate those behaviors. So when we're trying to work through, hey, yes, we can go help you save time, we can help you scale your business, show us your workflows. A lot of times we see workflows that were built because that's what the tool allows you to do, right? Or the tool gives you access to. Instead of saying, well, let's look at the behaviors how we'd want to do it without the tools, right? Or all these features, and then we can find the right tools or we can create features within the tools in order to automate those. That's that is the big business um decisions that we have to start to make, right? Those are the those are the business plans we have to make. We have to we have to create a new, a whole new way of thinking about some of these around behaviors. And how are the behaviors going to change, Mike, now with artificial intelligence? This is something that has been a conversation in many, many weeks now. Is not only, yes, can we build out our workflows based on the behaviors of today, yes. But how are those behaviors going to change as artificial intelligence gets more adapted and artificial intelligence gets even better, right? And and we start getting a more agentic AGI area. And what we're looking at is how is our behaviors gonna change with our customers on an AEO standpoint, right? Where people are looking up businesses on ChatGPT or Copilot or Gemini, Claude, right? How are behaviors going to change with the new version of humans that are now getting age where they need to have insurance? How are their behaviors gonna change? How about our new employees, right? Based on how we know what kind of new employees that we're going to hire, or what, you know, there's always gonna be turnover, right? Based on what the way my agency is gonna look, what are those behaviors gonna change? So we need to build the workflows around behaviors and then let the tools assist us in maximizing those behaviors.

I intentionally let that one sit for just a moment to make sure you take that all in because it's tying all of it together into the agency operating system. It's marrying its people, its processes, its promotion, workflows, along with the automation that they've chosen to use in their system, and about having that plan, and more importantly than that, because Daniel said AEO, I believe, and I'm gonna piggyback on that in just a moment, because there's a lot of people, and I heard it this week again, from other agency owners who understand technology more than others. They were talking about SEO, AEO, and GEO, right, Daniel?

Yes.

What is GEO again?

I have no idea. I only know AEO and SEO.

Okay, Verdef. See, things are changing fast. Right. We talked about that in the beginning. I mean, it's happening that fast. So, you know, we know what SEO is search engine optimization.

Yep. And then AEO is artificial intelligence engine optimization. Okay, yeah.

And so GEO is, I mean, go to AEO and check it out or Google that stuff. GTS we call it. You know, you'll learn. But anyway, it doesn't matter. What my mind went to is I need to invest in experts in that space to counsel me to get it done. Look, there's a lot of stuff I don't understand. One thing I have learned invest in people who are smarter than you are in what you want to accomplish. Invest in them and get the heck out of the way. Don't be the bottleneck. Deep experience. Trust me, believe me. And to build on what Daniel just unpacked for us about workflows around behavior, it's kind of like character. It's like habits. But most importantly, your character, your habits, your decisions will result in your outcomes. And so be clear on what your desired outcomes are. And that's the kind of stuff that you know we want to learn. Uh, what are the desired outcomes? What are your goals? What do you want to happen in the future? Where do you want to be? Do you want a 4X? Do you want a 9X? Do you want to go beyond that? First time in human history, right, Daniel?

First time in human history.

We are positioned to do all of that and more if one chooses to do the right work. Great stuff, Daniel. Thank you so much for helping us unpack all of those thought processes. Again, to wrap it up today, Daniel, when you hear automation that actually gets used, anything else to add?

No, I just want to reiterate the items again. So the adoption always starts with leadership. So if you adopt it and you inspect it on a weekly basis, this is where you're going to get the greatest return on investment and making automation stick. Then you the three automations that you typically create the most time savings comes in one of three buckets: either your RevOps, your service ops, or your admin finance ops. If you really want to get automation to stick, reduce the swivel chair work. Focus on how we can look at handoffs, create templates, find triggers on certain behaviors that happen over and over and over again, and look at that as we're building out the workflows. And then last, build the workflows around behavior, not whatever the software that you've chosen, the features that come around it. Go around the actual behaviors of your customers, your prospects, and your employees.

Great stuff, Daniel. Thank you so much for all the gold nuggets and brilliant information that you've shared today. Hey, everybody, thank you for joining us on this episode of the Scale Your Insurance Agency podcast. If you something perked an interest in you today about something you heard, and you want to take a deeper dive and have a you know an extended conversation on all of this and more, we're happy to make that happen for you. Check the show notes of this episode. There's a link to schedule an Onyx scaling session. Uh, we'll be happy to jump on that with you and you know unpack your questions and your vision and everything that you've got in your mind and your heart and your soul for your agency and help you with that. Thank you for joining us on this episode, and we will see you on the next episode of the Scale Your Insurance Agency podcast. Have a phenomenal, incredible, one-of-a-kind day, everybody.

That's a wrap on this week's episode of Scale Your Insurance Agency. Quick reminder: everything we talk about on this show is built to do one thing: turn your time into profit. More revenue, more margin, more freedom without adding headcount to make it happen. If something landed for you today, please share it with another agency owner who needs to hear it. This community only grows when good operators help each other level up. Please subscribe, download, and share our podcast and all your other favorite podcast engines. And if you're ready to stop figuring this out alone, Mike and I are both in the field working with agencies right now. Please reach out. Find us on LinkedIn or on our websites, and we'll tell you exactly where your biggest opportunity is to scale. Until next week, build the system, protect your time, and scale the right way. See you next week.