Episode 344: Stop Collecting Ideas: How Insurance Agency Owners Actually Get Things Implemented

Welcome to the Scale Your Insurance Agency Podcast. This podcast will give you all of the tools to scale your insurance agency and live life on your own terms. Wherever you are today, if you're stuck or well on your way to the success you desire with the right people, processes, and promotions in place, you will be unstoppable. And now I'd like to introduce your host, Mike Stromzo.

Welcome back, everybody, to the next episode of the Scale Your Insurance Agency podcast. And it's the season. It's the season of the year when there seem to be lots of insurance conferences going on, lots of learning, lots of preparation, lots of activity. Phenomenal. Excellent. Love it. That's how we did it. That was part of the contributor to our ability to grow and scale, our own independent insurance agency business. I get it. But let me give you a picture to think about. You come home from that conference, that learning event, fired up. Your notebook is full. Your remarkable, whatever device you use or whatever method you use. Your notebook, your remarkable, your laptop is full of notes. Better renewal process, better referral strategy, or implementing a referral strategy, new technology tool, new automation, a new producer accountability system, a new producing team, whatever it might be. Then Monday morning arrives. Emails pile up, a team member needs help, but team member doesn't show up. A client has a problem, two clients have a problem, and more and more and more. 30 days later, the notebook, the remarkable, the file on your laptop, sitting there untouched. It is no accident. I believe personally that everything happens for a reason. It was no accident this morning in my study that I ran across these two quotes just for you because we're doing this podcast today. One, it doesn't matter what you know, it matters what you do. Two, I don't know who the quote is from, but I love it, by the way. Second quote: innovation without execution is hallucination. That one came from Thomas Edison. And that's exactly what we're talking about today. Action. So if you've ever gone to a conference, gone to a learning event, gone to a webinar, and got all these great ideas, and 30 days later nothing has happened. Does that sound familiar? So let's talk about how to turn ideas or turn anything that may already exist on your desk into action. Because it's critically, critically, critically important. And you can be looking at all the next great ideas, all the shiny objects, and everything else that's coming your way. But without action, nothing matters. Because, like I learned from Nelson Mandela, which I love, love, love this quote, by the way, you never lose. You either win or you learn. And so by you taking action, one of two things is going to happen. You're going to win or you're going to learn. And those lessons are lifelong and they're super valuable. So have no fear. And I could go into the seven fears, which I have my desk right here, because I'm as human as the rest of us, but not today. By the way, if you want those, shoot me an email. VIP at uplife.com. VIP at upplife.com. In the subject line, put seven fears. I'll be happy to kick them back to you. Let's get back to your action plan. And by the way, if you ever come to one of our live conferences, you won't have this issue because we intentionally make sure that you leave with a documented action plan before you even leave the event. We don't let you out the door until you have that action plan. But if you go to some other events, here's your action plan. Which by the way, um, if you're interested in any of our live mastermind events, it's upmastermind.com. Uppmastermind.com. See you there. So here's your action plan to get you to implementation. One, choose fewer ideas. And most importantly, choose them deliberately. An idea can be excellent, but it could be the wrong action item for your agency. So here's some questions you can ask yourself or your team. Or both. One, does this item directly support one of our current goals or priorities? And if it doesn't, it's gonna add some chaos to the mix. Don't do that. Number two, what specific problem will it solve? What specific problem will it solve? Number three, what measurable benefit do we expect from this action item? What will happen for the team? What happened for our clients or for our communities? Side note, those were always my top three reasons for everything. Our team, our clients, our communities. Our team, our clients, our communities. Those three. Next, is this a good idea? Do we have the capacity to implement and maintain it? Look, you can start something all day long, but if you don't finish it, it's useless. And if it's not documented and trained within your systems, it's also useless. Because it has no predictability, and it's not valuable because it's not finished and trained and part of your systems. Which aka, the valuation of it as part of your agency's value, does not exist. And this may or may not apply. What will we postpone to make room so we could do this? Of our already burgeoning at the top limit of our capacity already. So what we do, and I'm gonna give this to you two or three times during this podcast, what we do is we ask everybody to write down their list of 12. Write down their top 12 list of things that they learned at the event. So stay tuned in the podcast. I'll give you the rest of it in a few minutes. So make that list and then decide which item on this list of 12 items. And we don't want 20, we don't want 30, 12. When my teammate Andrea and Andrea Wyatt and I first learned this philosophy many years ago, when we were coming home from Chicago on an airplane from a marketing conference that changed the future of the marketing and promotions department in our agency, we actually had 13 items, not 12. We were overachievers, right? But we had 13 and we had a systematic way that we developed them and we got the long form, what this done looked like on there, and we had a deadline, and where we had a larger item or maybe a bigger project. Sometimes it had separate deadlines. You know, phase one, we're gonna do by this deadline. Phase two, we're gonna do by this deadline. You know what happened? We got them all done. And by the way, the other piece to that one was accountability. So once we got clear on what Dunn looked like and we wrote it out to what Dunn looked like so we were both clear, we had three hours on a plane. Is this clear? Yes, yes, yes. And then we gave each other a copy back and forth and we huddled on a weekly basis to check our progress. That's how we developed the complete marketing plan that we created for our independent insurance agency. And that's what we teach. That's what we teach and help agents install in their agency. So that list of 12. Next, turn the idea into a clear assignment. And like I just described, those that list of 13 items that we had, we got total clarity on that because we were very specifically clear on what done looked like. Okay. So if you say something like, we need to improve referrals, that gives you very little to execute. What does that mean, right? What does it mean to improve referrals? More useful than that would be when you describe what the outcome looks like, who's the accountable owner, what's the deadline, what's the evidence of completion, and what's the scope of the work? So let me give you some examples to work. Okay. So here's an outcome. And we'll just use the referral process as a teaching example. So the outcome is make referral requests a consistent part of our triple A client communications. Now, if this is your first podcast, welcome. Secondly, what triple A means, we segmented our clients in our independent insurance agency business, and we just decided to use A for every client unless they were a C client. And if they were a C client, we would not reinstate them, we would not rewrite them, we don't want them back at all. But all of our A clients are AAA, AA, and single A, triple A was our best of the best clients. And they comprised almost 80% of our revenue, too. And that's the power of client segmentation button. Make referral requests a consistent part of your AAA client conversations. That's specific. That's the outcome desired. The accountable owner is the service leader. Because if they're existing clients, that's the service function. The scope? We're going to pilot with two account managers before expanding. These account managers are on the phone with our best customers fairly often. And so we're going to pilot with them to see how it works. Make sure our scripting is right, making sure that the conversations go well. Maybe we'll pull some of the call recordings and evaluate there. Not to critique or hold accountable the AMs, but to learn from it. What can we be doing better? How can we do this better? Do we need to update our scripting? Do we need some training? By the way, if you're sitting there thinking, I've got an account manager who's been here for 25 years. I can't hold them accountable or they don't want to learn anything new because they're set in their ways. Is that being a team player? Just curious. All right. So the scope is to pilot with two team members before expanding. The deadline is to launch the pilot within the next 15 days and review the results 60 days later. The completion standard, the team members are trained, the requests were documented, and they're in our systems. Remember, anything that's not in your systems didn't happen. Agency management system as an example, if you have one. You might be thinking, what do you mean? Of course I have an agency management system. I'm going to say there may be a time in the future when agency management systems are not where everything is housed. Yes, I said that. Why do I say that? Because we have a member that's going to be teaching at our upcoming mastermind about how they've created a triage system where that is the primary source of function, not the agency management system. I thought I'd let that sit for a minute. Let's get back to it. The completion standard. Two uh team members are trained, request documented. And remember, if it's not documented, it never happened. Referrals are tracked and follow-up assigned. And lastly, how do you measure success? Qualified referrals generated, and our conversation turned into more new business. It was passed on to the sales team and they converted. Win, win, win. That's what something specific looks like. And remember, to be terrific, you've got to be specific. Simple. Remember, a task assigned to everyone becomes a task owned by no one. A task assigned to everyone, it becomes a task owned by no one. Everything that's a priority item in your agency needs to be owned by one person. It doesn't mean they're doing all the work, but they are the owner. They know its desired outcome. They're clear on that. There's a deadline and they know what that is. They know the status at all times. And they know who's doing each piece of the steps. It may be all them, and it may be somebody else that got involved. And the person that owns and has the authority needs to be able to take action without having to ask somebody else all the time. Here's your next step, number three. Break the implementation into visible milestones. Break the implementation into visible milestones. You see, a distant deadline makes it easy to say, ah, I'll get back to it next week. A series of small actions leads to one big result. A series of small actions leads to one big result. Or in sales, a series of small yeses leads to one big yes, which is the close. So establish a sequence, short sequences that lead to the result that you're looking for. Okay. Back to our referral example. Week one, define when to ask, the wording, and how to record the request in our systems. Week two, train the pilot team and role play via practice. Or practice via role play, I should say. Train the pilot team and role play, aka practice. Weeks three to four, run the pilot and review the actual conversations. And if you're recording calls, great. In my humble opinion, recorded calls are one of the greatest training grounds of all time. We didn't record our calls to micromanage every call or anything like that. We wanted them for training. And of course, if there's a critical situation where it's, you know, the client was acting uh unreasonably, of course, we would pull it and put it in the file. Or now comes to in today's environment, so many systems automatically put it into the file unless you have storage issues. I digress. So week one, define when to ask. Two, train the team and practice. Number three, run the pilot and review actual conversations. And days 30 through 60, amend, adjust, update the process, measure the results, and decide whether to expand and continue or not. Something I've learned so many years ago in my marketing evolution. As marketers, we test. As marketers, we test. So just keep testing. Just keep testing. And if you get to the point where, hey, this is not a good initiative, then cut it and move on. It happens. And what does the the discussion look like with teammates or your leadership team as an example? What will be completed by next Friday to continue to move this forward and prove that it's a good idea to keep doing this. Have that conversation. It's a business decision. Nothing personal against anybody. Step number four: create accountability that helps people finish. Remember, accountability breeds responsibility. So execute a briefly implementation review from the leadership standpoint. And know the person that owns that initiative or goal knows the status at all times. What did we commit to completing? What did we commit to completing? One, what is finished? And where's the evidence that is finished? What are some of the blockers that are in the way? Because if things aren't getting done or it's off track, then there's a blocker somewhere. And by when? And five, what's the next commitment? What's the next commitment? When a deadline passes and nothing gets done, it's critically important you stop and identify the cause. It may be unclear expectations. Maybe the team doesn't have the capacity. Maybe they feel they don't have the authority to make a decision when they do. That way you do not clearly identify all of the steps and what done looks like and give them the authority during the training. Or just lack of follow-through. But that could be many things, like capacity or other things. Most importantly, immediately address what happened and move on to a next critical action step, credible action step. So fix the issue and begin taking action again. Look, shiitake happens. I get that. And lastly, step number five. Define finished before chasing the next idea. Define finished before chasing the next idea. Buying software or the next automation piece is a purchase. Training the team, that's a milestone. Implementation is complete when the intended users consistently follow the process and someone owns it going forward. Yes, someone needs to own it going forward. And in saying that, I I think back to many years ago when we originally started creating the tasks and the workflows in our own agency. And within a short period of time, I'm going to say it was less than four months, we had over 400 tasks and workflows documented. It was miraculous. It was a blessing. However, yours truly, for To assign somebody to own the updates. And after a period of time, in inspecting what we expected, things weren't being done correctly. And after some digging, we identified how come this isn't happening per the documented task or workflow? Well, something had changed. Software had changed, protocol had changed with the company, whatever. And I said, aha, I forgot to assign somebody to own the updates. So we quickly shifted and assigned somebody to update on a monthly basis. I think monthly is a good check-in point, unless it becomes urgent. I mean, if your team hard and fast knows that it changed, they can stop and update right now. I'm not saying no, don't do that. But I think, you know, as far as checking with the team, hey, going through and making sure, and I hear a lot of agencies calling them SOPs nowadays, which is standard operating procedure, fine, whatever, whatever you call it. So if you're checking with your team, hey, you know, is anything updated on the SOPs? Is it anything within our SOP intranet not working properly for anybody? Nope, we're all good. Great. Next check-in, following them up. Make sure that everybody is trained, that people are consistently following the SOP processor workflow. Okay. And then somebody owns is ongoing performance. And then if it's a new idea, you also want to check, is it actually being used? One. Two, is it producing the expected benefit? Three, is it documented well enough to repeat? And four, who will maintain it? Who will own the updates? Most importantly, in what we teach, and you can create this as well, simply. It's simple. If you go to any learning environment, whether it be a live conference, an online conference, or a webinar, whatever, and you get all these new great ideas, consider creating a parking lot. That's what we do. We have a parking lot where all of these great ideas are housed, but it does not immediately get implemented on our quarterly goals unless it's an exception situation. It's really that simple. Because all we want is your higher achievement. All we want is to help you hit your goals. All we want is for your agency to grow and scale like it never has before to levels that are mind-boggling and beyond your dreams. That's all we want for you. But adding more chaos to your operations isn't part of that answer. And it isn't part of that strategy to get you there. Remember. And these came down my study funnel this morning. It doesn't matter what you know, it matters what you do. An innovation without execution is hallucination. Your next action determines everything that's going to happen in your future agency business. So make it the right one. And if you'd like to chat and make sure it's the right one, happy to do so anytime. And if you got great value out of this podcast, please share scale your insurance agency.com. Please share scale your insurance agency.com, which is the URL to these podcasts, with anybody you know. So they can get access to this episode and any others. So they too can learn how to better scale their insurance agency so we can all see each other at the top. I will see you there. Until then, take action. I'll see you in the next episode.