Episode 324: Your Team Isn't Overwhelmed - They're Under-Directed

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 patch. Welcome to another episode of Scale Your Agency Insurance Agency Podcast. So happy to be here for another week of some amazing conversations that we've had with independent insurance agencies over the past week and some fantastic topics that we continue to uh unveil while we are having those conversations with those agency owners and those leaders within those agencies. Mike, thank you so much for uh joining me for another week on some fantastic topics.

Yeah, Daniel, I agree. But you know what we're finding as we open the hood inside agencies, we have a lot of opportunity before us. So much opportunity to get things done, not only to scale agencies, but one of the things that keeps coming across my plate this week, Daniel, is, and if everybody would think about with us, why are we doing the work that we're doing? And what is your end game? So I I want to position everybody as we go through this podcast, super excited to share the information that we got for you. But what is your end game? And I want you to think about valuation and who you want your agency to become. So let's get into it, Daniel.

Yeah, I mean, the topic that is continuing to come up um month after month or month that we thought would be the best for us to start talking about today is your team isn't overwhelmed. They're just underdirected. And so when you hear that, Mike, what what have you been hearing out in um in our in the conversations recently?

Well, one of my favorite responses when somebody says, Oh, my team is so busy or they're overwhelmed or whatever, I say, are you asking your teammates about their results? Or are you talking about why they're overwhelmed? And one of my favorite positioning questions, because Daniel, I think you know this by now, one of my favorite thought processes is the question is the answer. Right. Right. So position your teammates with the question, well, I'm glad to hear you're so busy. Tell me about your results. Because ultimately it's about, let's be clear here, why are we in business to generate revenue? Because it's a revenue generation thought process and leadership, which leads to the profitable equation of the agency back to evaluate back to valuation that we talked about out of the gate. But, you know, let's look into under the hood to your question, Daniel. Workflow overload, I'm overwhelmed, I'm not sure what my priorities are and what I'm doing. I'm just, if you will, reacting to everything versus being proactive. And what we're trying to help agency owners and leaders and teams understand, Daniel, is to redesign their agency, update their thinking. And by the way, I was speaking with a very influential agency leader just this morning. And we were talking about that word change. I mean, who likes change, Daniel?

You're asking the wrong person, I love change, but yes, I did all that.

Okay, so most people that you work with, Daniel.

Yeah, yeah, they don't want to change. Yeah.

Do they feel like you do? Of course not. Of course not. So and so it's positioning of thought processes. And so I was sharing with this agency leader. Instead of saying change, say we need to update how we're doing things in the agency to improve, update and improve. It's just, you know, labels have power, right? So let's get back to it. What we're trying to help agencies do is think about human work versus machine work in the agency business. And so it's about that update and improvement and redesign that's necessary in agencies, but a lot of uh agency leaders out there, with all our love to all of you, can't see through the redesign and don't understand how to do it. So, Daniel, when technology does the work of machines, people finally get to do the work of humans. And inside every agency, there's two kinds of work that are going on every single day. And it's machine work versus human work. And machine work, and and I want you to bring everybody up to date on this exact subject because it's our industry cannot hear this enough right now. Because you see it every single day, I see it every single day, that we continue to not be keeping up to date. So, machine work, things that are repetitive, rules-based activities that have predictable outcomes. Are are agency owners and leaders and teams keeping up with that, Daniel, based on what you're seeing?

Um they're starting to, as we help them try to rebuild their business model and rebuild a lot of the systems for to be able to support artificial intelligence and automation, we're able to have the conversation about what the difference between workload workload as an overload versus a priority and where it gets confused. So, in many instances, is if if revenue is our target, if relationships is our is our um uh true north on how we're going to get to that revenue, right? Building relationships, having that human relationship, being there for our clients, getting out in the community. When we start to look at, okay, well, too overloaded, I'm too overwhelmed, I'm too, we start to figure out, well, what's the priority level? And the other part that we start to look at um when we're rebuilding out the workflows is okay, how are we prioritizing some of this? Are we prioritizing, like, hey, does this have to do with revenue and does this have to do with the relationship? Or is this just the way we've always done it? Right? Is it, you know, and okay, as you're as you're looking at your day and all the different things that come up, let's say from this from the service department rather than from um the sales department at this point, you know, are are we making our is it is it exception-based? We're seeing a lot of that too, Mike, right? Hey, well, oh, well, this this particular producer's clients like it this way, or this particular set of clients like it that way, or well, that the and that exceptions, right? The exceptions portion of it, that's where we start to find the confusion in the difference between workload and priority, right? So it's like, okay, what's the process that we repeat every single time when X comes up, right? What's it look like when Y comes up? And are there gonna be exceptions to rules? Yes. Like we understand that. But if the exception becomes the standard, that's when we do get to overwhelm, right? Because then you always constantly have to think, well, what do I have, you know, which one comes first? Who should I work on first? Should this be a fire or not a fire? Am I gonna put my pencil down from everything else that I'm doing over here for the relationship to go do something that a robot could have done anywhere, that a machine could have done, anyways, right? So we have to start to identify those workflows at the same time. And that's really where it starts to become this push-pull. And in one of the conversations I had last week, as we were roadmapping some of this out, uh it became obvious when the person who is doing the work, right? So it gets sent over from the producer, right? Of like, okay, the producer is the one that actually start triggers this work, as I call it like the trigger. And the the account manager who is actually fulfills on that workflow kept saying, Well, yeah, then I got to put it over here, and then I got to do it this way, and then I got to put it over here, and it became redundant. And the producer's like, well, no, you don't. I'm like, why are you doing that? And he's like, Well, that's what you asked us to do. And well, and if you know, producer A says it one way, well then, but also producer B asks it to be over here. So then I have so instead of it, now I'm creating exceptions for depending on who it comes from. And that conversation was so powerful because then they could come to an understanding of how they could standardize it. And then they become to this the conversation of, oh yes, machine could totally do this. We don't need to have the human touch of this, because now that frees up so that you could do some of the other human touch work that I'd really like you to be able to do. And that's when that synergy started to come into place, um, where we could say no longer this is overwhelm. This is just how do we prioritize that work? And it really came down to that unclear ownership of who owns what in whatever that workflow might look like, right? And so then we get those, and then that's constant interrupts, as I kind of explained. Well, then producer A wants it this way, and producer B wants it this way, and client A wants it that way, and client C wants it this way, and having to constantly decide which way that each workflow should go, that's where that constant interrupt allows that work to then be look like it just keeps piling up because it's that switching, as we've talked about in many, many episodes. The switching is where the overwhelm comes in, where a lot of the time wasted is, as well as the lack of prioritization. And you know me, I'm the batched person, right? We should be batching all this work, the especially the ones where, hey, it just needs some human oversight, right? It's already been written out, it's already been drafted, it's already been reviewed. Now it's just you need human oversight that should be batched. That's how you're gonna get the most amount of time back. And then also prioritizing, like it shouldn't matter how long you take on that relationship side of it, right? That should be able to stretch as long as possible because that's relationship, is how you're going to that's what you get paid to do, right? Is to keep those relationships and maintain those relationships, um, build new ones, gain that trust, continue to service to service our clients and our community.

Yeah, Daniel, and you provide a readiness assessment organizationally for implementation of automation and technology, correct?

Yes, we do.

So you see all this data, but let's help everybody here because I can't imagine that we can say this enough. So let's repeat it again today in this episode. How many agencies out there, based on the readiness assessments that you give for free to independent insurance agencies? Of those agencies, what percentage have documented processes and systems and workflows that you can build automation on top of?

Um, straight out of the gate, less than 20%, I would say. Um, I'd have to go back to our dashboard. Um I'd say less than 20%. Now, over 50% of them have something at least written down, right? They have written down, they've got a checklist or some type of process. Many instances, a, it's not being followed by all, B, that hasn't been updated in a little while, and we know that our systems update more regularly than we like. Um and there's always what I just call that exceptions, right? Well, we well, we that is the way we're supposed to do it, except, right? That's the you know, that's we we run into that quite a bit. So that's where I'm getting that 20% where we have to get everybody together to be like, okay, what is the process? What is the standard? We know there's going to be exceptions and we can apply for that, but that should only be um one out of 10 times, not nine out of 10 times, because then the exception becomes the standard.

Right, right. So cannot encourage everybody out there enough to what Daniel just said. 20% of agencies have properly documented processes and systems and workflows that they can build automation on top of. Because the common question in combining our automation and technology team with our executive coaching team and leadership and sales coaching team in ELSA, which is the operating system within Onyx, they say, Well, what do you want us to automate? Because you can't show me anything to automate. And so the work for everybody out there, and it's not fun, we know, but it's so necessary to do that work. Document your processes and systems and workflows. Daniel said checklists as well. Okay, that's part of it. But have one person in the agency own that activity and have a desired outcome and what done looks like with a deadline. And if you take one thing away from this podcast today, I hope that that's it. Because once you move that needle, then you can finally maximize the machine work within your agency. Did I get that right, Daniel? Anything to add on that?

No, that was that was well said. And and one of the biggest pieces, Mike, that I think that you that you constantly are trying to teach the independent insurance agencies is that you also have to create simplicity and clarity in what good looks like per seat. Yes. You spend a lot of time on, you have to be you have to be clear on what good looks like for each of those seats. And then you can find your A players when you when that good turns into great, right? And so that is also a piece that I want to make sure it also gets included in that one person's uh responsibility, which is you have to understand what good looks like in each of those seats, when you're building out those standing operating procedures or those workflows and checklists, and then be able to clearly articulate it and make sure that it gets repeatable, right? Every single time as much as possible. Then we can start using artificial intelligence and automation to the best of its ability.

Yeah, and that that's another great encouragement in every way. You can't scale complexity to Daniel's point. You can only scale simplicity. And what does good look like? Do not become paralyzed, in my humble opinion, with perfection. And I want to say this very carefully because look, I'm an independent insurance agent over 40 years, and I understand the necessity for detail in our industry because if we miss something, we have a gap. I get it and I get it. But as we continue to move into the future of allowing machines to do the work of machines so people can do the work of people, we've got to make sure we clearly identify each role within the agency. Let's back up to the organizational chart, right? Every person on the team has a specific role. And I remember uh when we really got clear after our third redesign, and I had a super high-performing agency leader ask me uh in the last week, I heard you say that recently, Mike. Did you say you redesigned your agency three times in one year? I said no. It was three years in a row, but year after year after year, it was redesigned, redesign, redesign after the first year. And I'll be clear here and transparent. Year one was mostly failure. It was not comfortable, it was not pretty, it did not feel good, but it's what we had to do. And it was year two that we got clarity, that we got clarity of those roles. And what Daniel and myself and our entire team are here to do to help all of you, we've been through all this stuff. We want to help you eliminate those painful moments and get you to the winds faster. So get that clarity. Make sure that you connect with somebody who can help you see that organizational picture. And it ended up uh after we redesigned the third time. I had a direct report. Everything flowed up to me through a singular direct report. Of course, I was interacting with the team to be a leader, right? But as far as decisions for the future of the organization, it came from my direct report. Because she was positioned through role clarity to connect with every team member, and she was having one-on-ones with the leadership departments, our CMO, uh, our sales leadership, our service leadership team member. She would have her one-on-one meetings with them, and then it would flow up to her, and she would get organized to have a conversation with me, and it'd flow right back down into the organization. I hope that's visually making sense to everybody, but that's my greatest encouragement, and it's a big, big missing piece. And, you know, I know you're a hockey guy and winter sports guy, Daniel, but you know what Wayne Gretzky said, right? Skate to where the puck's gonna be. Yep, yep. So, I mean, even if you don't feel you're ready for that agency organizational chart, that's the essence of scaling. Create the agency that you plan to build your future agency self, design it and plan it now, and then we will reverse engineer with you to help you build it. Versus, you know, the the definition of growth, which is it's linear. We're doing the things that we've always done, and we're gonna get the same results, which is you know, eek it out five to ten percent every year if you're lucky. And Daniel, I I know you're seeing this as well, but I have to make sure that I remind everybody right now, it's happening in pockets throughout the U.S., but the soft market, friends, is here. And I'm gonna repeat that. The soft market is here in a lot of areas of the U.S. And if you're not paying attention to your KPIs and numbers, which is another need and reason that Daniel and his team are here, because they can help you uh put the machines to work to have those at your fingertips. I saw an agency that is 10 million plus revenue recently looking at you know their numbers, the pr the total premiums were going down by the millions before they did anything. So, friends, make sure you hear hear me clear on that because it's happening right now, and so a lot of people who got used to commissions being dropped in automatically due to rate increases, well, it's going the other direction now. And so you must have a plan, you must have a system in place. So, this chaos, Daniel. I meant to say that like 10-15 minutes ago when you were saying something, but you know, when you don't have that systematic way of operating, right, or it's not handed off from producer to the service team and it gets caught up, we have chaos, right?

Right. And the biggest reset that independent insurance agencies have available to them now is that with artificial intelligence and AI, you can rebuild your business plan. So if you haven't touched your operating procedures in a while, if you haven't touched your checklist, if you haven't touched your accountability chart or your org chart or whatever you want to call it, this is the time to do it because now you're gonna have the ability to add artificial intelligence automation into those workflows. Yes. You're gonna have the time to now what is your what is your org chart look like with AI agents involved? What does it look like? Does it mean that you have to have its own seat for it? I don't know. Like there's a there's a big debate about it. I like to see them in there saying, hey, this is this is this custom AI agent that we have, this is the seat that it sits in, and this is the role that that agent's going to be with inside this department or these agents, depending on what it is. I think it's a good time to start thinking about that because that's the way you're going to be able to scale. And so a lot of people just want, you know, to look at it as well, how do I just use this as a way to enhance what I'm doing today? That's totally fine. But if You want to scale your agency, you have to be willing to at this point change your thought process on just wanting to enhance. And how are we going to scale? How are we going to use this first time in human history to be able to redesign our business model to be able to scale at the highest level? And there are a lot of headwinds and tailwinds like we're going to have in any business. You know, timing's never great. There's always like, well, it's bad timing. Well, there's never great timing. But we the time is here and it's it's out in front of us. And the biggest reset that we can come up with is let's sit down and let's build it the way that we'd that we want to, based on having all these new tools available to us. What would we do different? How would it look in the future? What would it mean if we doubled in size within the next 18 months? What would that look like? What breaks? That's usually when we first start talking to them, right, Mike? Hey, pretend pretend tomorrow you've doubled in size in the amount of premium and revenue within the organization. Which usually means you probably had to double in customers or a different type of customer base or a different niche or whatever it is, or we're or took over more total adjustable market. What breaks? And that's where we should go rebuild the first place that we should focus on to rebuild that operating system based on using tools that are available to do it. What would break?

And redesign how things operate within the agency. I mean, I was collaborating with a 4 million revenue plus agency last week who I asked the owner one of our favorite questions. I said, if you left for 30 days completely disconnected, what would break first? And his answer was I don't think anything would break. I said, that's fantastic. However, we were on a coaching session for other things that are not right. Okay. So there what was needed in that particular agency is redesign of service operations. Okay? Because as much as nothing would break, the team, the culture, has to be on board with the current way of serving and positioning the agency to operate because of their acquisition activities, it's it's a little bumpy and a little chaotic right now. So you know the bottom line is it's like exercise. How often should we exercise? Well, often. I mean, it's not a one and done thing. If you update your design and your plan, should you just put it on the shelf and forget about it? Of course not. People need to be looking at their automation technology plan often, do they not, Daniel?

Yes. Yep, on a regular basis.

Yeah, on a regular basis. And so that's where the machine work comes in.

So And I only want to back up on this point because I don't want to skip over it, which is when you said when we when we talked to the agency owner who said, if I was gone for 30 days, nothing would break. But further along down the conversation around, well, I wouldn't be able to double in size anyways, because my funnel's not big enough to be able to double in size. Well, of course nothing would break. So if something is broken, which is we don't have enough producers, we don't have enough marketing out there, we're not, we're um, we're not uh getting the kind of volume that we need in order to do to see if something would break. That was a whole different conversation. And that's also why, okay, what's overwhelming this producer team or whoever's doing the recruiting or whatever it is or the marketing to get to the point where we are going to break from a service standpoint because there's so much coming in rather than we just don't, yeah, well, nothing would break because we're not actively going out there and trying to scale from uh from an opportunity standpoint, right?

Yeah, great point. Thanks for reeling that in.

Yeah.

Uh the balance within a team for sure. But uh you're absolutely right. Nothing would break, and and that's one of the greatest things about the independent insurance agency industry, and it's one of the most detrimental, is it breeds complacency. Because, I mean, as of right now, and that may change in the future based on everything that we're seeing happening around us, and I'll pass on that pathway right now. But you know, they keep dropping commissions into the operating account month after month after month, and so people look at their operating account and say, Oh, I'm good. So, back to the top of the show today. What is your end game and where do you want to be? And as and uh I speak this into existence. Now I'm thinking about other things in that conversation with that agency owner where we pack other things that need to be updated to use our word for the day, right? So, yes, it's your perception and your perspective. So let's make sure that we put a bow on today, Daniel. Yeah, about stopping chaos from becoming normal and what's the weekly reset look like.

Well, the weekly reset is manage your KPIs, looking to see what the results that we were expecting to get and what did we actually get, that will help stop the chaos, right? That'll help keep it where everything's becoming normal and stop the chaotic piece of it to say, is everything operating the way that it should? Because we should, you should see it in the numbers, right? Uh they don't lie. They don't lie. And then the issues that come up as you're saying, okay, we're going towards our goals and we didn't hit this number, this number, what are the roadblocks? What is the what is the reason why we're not able to hit these numbers? And that's when that's when you'll start to hear, right, what what the blockers were to us hitting those numbers. And that's where you go and attack those blockers instead of creating more chaos, where, well, now go do this and go do this and go start firefighting. Okay, let's put a process together in order for us to be able to uh rectify whatever that might come from. And so to really put a bow on it, Mike, like what we what we're explaining up to this whole episode is the idea between direction versus overwhelm, right? Prioritization over overwhelm. If you want to scale your agency, this decision has to be from the leadership level that I want to scale this leadership. You ask the question, what do I want it to look like? It's taking time, sitting down and saying, instead of just saying, hey, I want to go and make my life easier or more efficient, I truly want to scale. And if I'm gonna scale, what would this look like? And what does scale mean to me? What's my valuation that I want it to be in five years or 10 years? What does that revenue need to look like? What does the margins need to look like? What, and then if you have the time to sit there and paint that picture, you then can have to look at each one of your seats on the bus, right? Your or your org chart. And then you're gonna have to look at what are all the workflows that each one of the seats on the bus is good enough, and then you can then attach artificial intelligence and automation in order to make their jobs as effective as possible. Doesn't matter if it's sales or what we call RevOps or service or admin back office finance, that that is where you have your ability to attach those to get to the next level. Can you use AI and automation to make your lives just a little bit easier for the money that you make today? Absolutely. But that's the difference between scaling and not scaling. And that's where we're trying to do a better job, Mike, of explaining to people why we're on this podcast, right? Scale your insurance agents podcast. These are the tough conversations you have to have with yourself. These are the tough conversations that you have to have with your team about where are we going and how are we going to get there?

100%. And you will receive what you tolerate. So create the plan, set the standards for your team and that weekly reset based on the KPIs. And that's great information, Daniel. But from an operational standpoint, from the executive leadership and leadership chairs, we always communicated exactly where we were at and the KPIs and everything else that was necessary from the operational standards point. Via, I know this is so simple, weekly team meetings and then huddles within the operational units. What's working, what's not working, what's working, what's not working was the conversation. It was simple and quick. It wasn't intended to be uh, you know, holding people accountable necessarily. It's just operationally. You know, we want to make sure that the rhythm is systematic and consistently improving and progressing. So take everything that you know, what Daniel said and his wisdom and and the operational standards that we've learned and to point, I talked to it earlier about you know redesigning the agency three years in a row. The reason that we were successful in year three and and after that was because we had structure, operational structure, and systems. And and preparing for today, uh, I came across James Clear from Atomic Habits, super well-loved book. You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And everything that we just talked about this morning is part of your agency operating system, which is what we help with. So great stuff. Anything else to add, Daniel, before we wrap this up?

No, I think this is just such a timely and important topic, and I hope um everyone was able to get at least one little gold nugget um out of our conversation today.

Yeah, absolutely. And and if something that we talked about today perked interest in your mind or your heart or your or both, we'd love to jump on an onyx scaling session with you. So somewhere around the in the show notes or around this podcast recording, there's a link. Just click the link and we'd love to jump on a session and learn more about what you have going on. See if we can help you identify that gap, the gaps that may be going on in your agency operating system. That's what it's all about. Um, and we just love to learn more about what agents have going on and to help them uh down that pathway. Daniel Metcalf, great job, sir.

Yeah, you too, Mike. Thanks for having me.

All right, everybody. See you on the next episode.

You got it. 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.