AI Won't Replace Your Agency, Better Systems Will with Jason Cass & Athena Page

Speaker A: This is the Power Producers Podcast where we are refining and redefining the sales game. Rule number one is you have to believe in yourself. You're the only one who doesn't think you belong in this appointment. The prospect has already validated your existence by scheduling time with you. Get it through your head, you belong here. Go in there, crush it and close the deal. A place where sales professionals can come to learn from other sales professionals and thought leaders that have mastered their craft. The difference between a good salesperson and a best in class salesperson is only two minutes. By spending an extra two minutes on what you might think is a mundane task in the sales game, you separate yourselves from the pack, you grow your book of business, you close more deals, and you retain your accounts as well as their peers who are still striving for perfection to achieve their why I have a wife and four kids. Failure is not an option. Real sales professionals, real stories, real results. It's no different than being a professional baseball player. You can't be a one trick pony. You have to be a five tool player in order to succeed in this game. This is the Power Producers Podcast. Production redefined. Are you ready to feel the power? What's up everybody? Welcome to the Power Producers Podcast where we are refining and redefining the sales game. And today this is going to be like a OG throwback. We got Jason Cass from Virtual Intelligence Agency, Intelligence, Brain Share, Indy Tech, the Insurance alliance, and probably a bunch of crap I don't even know about on here, but if you don't know who he is, I need to know what cave you're living in. That's right, you will by the time this is done. And both of us are probably going to be shown up by our other guest, Ms. Athena Paige, who is Jason's right hand over there at, uh, Virtual Intelligence. And we're going to talk today about really what's going on with the virtual marketplace right now when it comes to hiring labor. Um, it's an interesting time and I think that a lot of people are probably wondering, like, what's the role of a VA gonna be in an agency if AI is here and gonna be able to replace all of these people? I think a lot of people just from conversation I've had, have really been looking at it from a perspective of the, you know, Management 101 is delegate to the lowest level of competency. Right. So it would naturally be a thought pattern that if AI can come in and replace anybody, it's going to replace the people that are doing the Repetitive, mundane tasks that we originally hired virtual professionals to do. And I would think the VA industry would be somewhat at risk. And I would also probably agree with that. Under the auspices of if you have VAs that aren't trained to use the AI. Right. So there's a big difference between getting a garden variety virtual professional to work in your agency versus getting a virtual professional from virtual intelligence. And that's really what I think part of what we should talk about today is what is the difference? And what do you see from the perspective of AI that concerns you, but also what do you see that actually makes your workforce more powerful when you deploy them into the agencies who hire them?

Speaker B: That's right. Hey, David, thank you very much for allowing, uh, us to come on here for real. I'm excited because I haven't done a podcast on this. No one's talking about this but Athena and I. Specifically Athena, she's our head of sales. She talks with agencies every day. I, um, will admit, as I, as I always want to be truthful, I'm here for agents. And probably it's not so much now, it's speeding back up, but There was this 5, 6, 7, 8 month lull where we started to realize and we had people telling us like, hey, um, we don't need a virtual employee. We're going to get some AI. We're going to have. We're going to go learn how to make some bots. Which to me, if you're an agency owner, you shouldn't be learning how to make bots. But that's another topic for Jason.

Speaker A: Claude teaches you how to do it expert, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Turbo Tax, too. But you shouldn't be doing your taxes, Right? Right, Davey? So here's the thing that I have to say is that we've now have the opposite happening. We have people saying, hey, I tried to now go get some bots. I tried to do some things. And I'm starting to realize what you said was right. Cass and Athena. There's no bot alive that can do what a human can do. And I think it's going to be that way for a long time. We do have to recognize, and you can say this with a lot of stuff, but AI will not replace VE's. But VE's who use AI will replace those who do not. And that is true. And also the third thing we have to focus on is there are three main components of an agency. It's a licensed person, it's an unlicensed person, a virtual employee, and the Third and most powerful workforce over the next three to five years will be agentic, uh, agents. There's no doubt about it. We are not there, we are not trying to say that, but let's just stop real quick and think common sense. It's on average going to take you around, probably cost you around 2,500 to $10,000 a year to run a bot. Are you going to pay a licensed person who's making 80,000 or $100,000 a year to manage that bot? No, you're not going to. You're going to look for somebody else who has high capability to do that, like a virtual employee. And then when the virtual employee is managing the bot, they also are going to be things that the bots can't do that a licensed person shouldn' do, but the bot can't do. So you're going to still have that. The last thing. Um, David, you and I were talking about this about a year ago or, uh, about a month ago when I was at your house. Since then. Okay. I just want you guys to know as a business owner, I every once in a while when somebody will call me, they will ask me that, tell me that they want to buy my business. I always tell them, no, no, no, no. About a year ago, just to see what the multiples would be for virtual intelligence. I said yes to a business and I submitted my information and the number they gave me back was very surprising. Those numbers are increasing. The multiples for our business are going up because the industry, not just insurance, but the whole all industries, are realizing that as a gentic comes, there has to be something that maintains it. And you're not going to give that to somebody who makes $80000 a year. Number one, it doesn't make any sense. And number two, someone who makes $80000 a year doesn't want to sit around and manage a bottle. That's just the way that it is. So that's my perception of what we're seeing, real life right now.

Speaker A: Yeah. So what's your advice to agencies? I mean, there's still people out there that are operating with no agency management system, office spreadsheets, no standard operating procedures or anything. And I actually like those because those are acquisition targets, man. There's a huge upside to all of that. But, you know, I think that I was just on the horn with, um, recorded with the guys from Glovebox right before this one. I mean, this is my batch recording day. So I'm literally in the saddle all day long recording podcasts and one of the Things that I talked to them about was, you know, where we're at right now, I feel like with agencies in terms of AI, is if you were to rewind five or six years ago, I feel like the industry's approaching it exactly the way they approached virtual professionals five or six years ago. Right. Social media and some of the forums online have exacerbated this point, but there was a period of time where it was almost like a bragging thing as to how many VAs you had in your agency. And everybody else is running around trying to add these virtual assistants because they think that's what's gonna take their, their agency, uh, to the next level. Sales, profit, whatever else. They're taking that exact. And guess what? That didn't work out real well for them because they didn't have like they would go and hire a va. And even if you were a VA company and you advertised that your VA was trained in something, and I'm going to go on a real stretch here and say, let's assume that person actually was trained, they still weren't trained on the way you do it, your process or procedure. Your instance, you could go in the hawksoft user group right now, post a question, and you're gonna get 10 different ways people are solving the exact same problem, right? And what I looked at is the number of people who were unsuccessful using virtual help, weren't unsuccessful because of the VA or the VA company. Most of the time they were unsuccessful because they wanted to bring somebody into an environment, did not have, uh, standard operating procedures and a mechanism to train that virtual employee on how to execute those things. And so they bring them in, they plug them in. The virtual professional's like, what the heck am I supposed to do? And look, these people are some of the best people you're possibly going to find. I have not met one virtual professional, and I've used a couple of different companies over the years. I've not met one that was a horrible person. They all come from cultures where they're thankful for the opportunity to work, they're eager to please, and sometimes that can get frustrating to an agency owner. But guess what? That's their fault. And what I mean by that is true. If you don't have the standard operating procedures because culturally these people want to please you and make sure you're happy because they're so thankful for their job, they're gonna bug the living crap out of you for every little thing that you need because you haven't set it up for them the right way. So Typically when I hear somebody complain about virtual help, my first question is, well, what was the task that you had them do and what specific thing didn't they do the right way, based on what you trained them and what SOP was? Right. And they don't ever have it. And it's the exact same thing with AI. Okay, great. You're gonna build a bot. You want agenic AI. What are you solving for? What have you actually built in terms of framework that dictates this is what you need? And I don't think that we've really strayed too far from that thought process on either of those two issues. But it's just interesting because the people who weren't successful using virtual help for that reason somehow think that AI is going to be a better option and they're going to fail miserably, just like they did trying to use virtual because they never stopped to build the framework.

Speaker B: They're going to fail worse because a human at least has a little bit of thought that if you give them them at least some kind of information, they can kind of figure it out. AI is not that way. It's got to be told exactly what to do. I have some thoughts on this, but Athena, um, um, before I go on, I wanted to know, I mean, you have any thoughts on this? You're on the front lines every day. You're dealing with all this. What do you. What are some of your thoughts?

Speaker C: Well, I was giving you guys a chance kind of agent to agent to also dive in a little bit so I can get an inside scoop of what other agents are saying. Because it's very different the type of conversations you might have. Agent to agent to one communicating directly to me, I m would say the biggest pushbacks that we usually get when I speak to an agent are, um, the training wasn't there when I hired a virtual employee. Um, connectivity issues, so they're never able to be online or language barrier slash productivity. My clients are also not being able to communicate with them properly. Um, so I think that's where we've kind of also made a big difference in not only scouting, but placing a virtual employee within multiple agencies is finding not only that right candidate, but the one that has the potential to fill those roles within the agency. Really striving on finding good communication. So high English proficiency. I know a lot of agents are human, touchpoint first type of agents. We also have some agencies that are all virtual, all email. Um, so that is huge. And then training. It's not easy to find a virtual employee that already has some type of knowledge or training within the insurance industry. So really focusing on teaching them the main responsibilities that they're going to be taken care of in that agency. If the agency has SOPs, amazing. If not, our job is to also help them, create them, um, and add more responsibilities as time comes.

Speaker B: That's right. I, I, you know, here's something I want to add to this. David, this is great because I just wrote this blog yesterday, okay. And this is so great. I'm, you just, you teed it up. So you, you, you made a comparison between the way that VE's are utilized verse, um, uh, versus AI and very similar to automation. Right. I remember Nicholas Ayers used to say

Speaker A: expert, for those of you who don't know, it's well documented, uh, From Brain Share 2019, maybe the Don Cesar, whenever it was that I am an automation expert. And if you don't know the story behind that, it's because Cass was up to his armpits in a discussion around automation and he happened to be standing next to me and puts the mic in front of my mouth and said, david, you're an automation expert. What do you think about this? And I'm like, immediately crickets. And of course I had to be quick on my feet and come up with some sort of an answer.

Speaker B: But anyhow, you did sound really good, David. You did, you, you made everybody think that. But that was funny. That was funny. That was absolutely hilarious. Um, but we were the same way. I remember Nicholas Ayer saying one day he said, if you just take automation and you put it on to automate your leads, you're just automating more problems, right? Because they didn't have a standard operating procedure. Same thing with ve, same thing with this. But here's the deal. This actually occurred to Elon Musk. This is what the blog is. In 2018, he had to create 5,000 cars a week or Tesla was going to go out of business. And he had six months to do it. And so he created the algorithm. And the algorithm is number one. It's five steps. Number one, analyze and question everything that you are doing and put a name to it. If there's somebody that had that put a regulation. He said, regulations are actually only recommendations. He said, a regulation. If somebody put a regulation on it, go to the department and don't find out what department put that regulation on. Find the person who did that. Number two, which I really, really thought was great, was delete, delete everything that you normally don't need. Okay? Number three, this is where agents get it. Organize an SOP everything. You don't do the SOPs until you delete all the things that you don't need. Number four was accelerate the time cycle. Most of us will try to say, hey, if I get a ve, I can do this faster. No, you can't. You still are doing things you shouldn't be doing, and you have no system or organization to it. And this is straight out of Elon's mouth. Number five, Automate. And automate last. He said that he was. He took 100%, um, blame for this. And his actual, um, um, saying is, is agent, or humans are underrated. And where that saying came from was from his algorithm, because he tried to automate everything in this book I'm reading, I thought it was great. He told his people to go cut a big hole in the side of the building so that it was big enough that he could cut. Literally cut these robots out, like, literally with. With. With these. Whatever you cut, metal cutters or whatever. And he would drag these. These, um, things out. And he said to himself, it was my fault that I thought that we should automate first. Automation should always be the last thing. And if you think about it, virtual employees are kind of manual automation. They really, truly are. They do a lot of the jobs that we can quote, unquote, automate. That's a bad way of saying it, but it's true in the way it is. So think about that algorithm. This is something, though, to make yourself feel better, agents. This is something that Elon just learned in 2018, but he had to go through that to learn that. So keep that in mind. Number three is sop. Number five is actually automate. And so it goes right along with exactly what we're saying. It's the same.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's something I talk about all the time on here. And I'm not comparing myself to Elon Musk by any stretch, but, I mean, from a practical standpoint, as an agent, we need to be looking at everything that comes across our desk and asking the same four questions. Do I need to do this? Can I delegate it to somebody on my team here in the office? Can I audit, um, can I delegate it to a virtual employee, or can I automate it? And if I can get down all the way to the end, because there's plenty of things that I could delegate that I could also outsource, but I could also automate. Well, if I don't need to delegate or outsource, because, uh, it can be automated. And done well, then that's when it's going to get automated. But it's got to pass through those other filters before we ever get there. I can't just automate every single thing in my agency. It'd be ludicrous to think that that was even possible. And I fear that there's people in our peer group right now that that's their sole mission is to figure out how to make an agency where literally it's just operating autonomously without them being involved in printing money for them. Um, I don't know that that's ever going to exist, man. Like, that's a fool's errand, in my opinion.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. Now, let's look at the makeup of an agency. Let's say we have an agency of 10 people today. From looking at our research, about nine and a half of those are licensed. So you've got about one virtual employee out of those 10 on, roughly. So you got nine licensed, one on non licensed. Understand that in the future, and when I say three to five years from now, that same office is going to be about four to five licensed people, two to three VE's and about 20 plus agentic bots. That's what that same agency is going to look like. Our costs are going to be dramatically down. But people, uh, hear me out when I say this. Licensed people are those who are going to go away or, or be less. Not go away, be less, not the ve's. And it's not because VES are taking over. It's because we come from an economy in the 70s and 80s where things were so cheap that you just hired somebody and was like, hey, just go get them licensed. And that's how we built out.

Speaker A: Now we're realizing it's not even the 70s and 80s. It was last week. Like, we're still doing that, man. We still do it. Yeah, to Your point, you're 100% right on this because. And, uh, I'm actually. I hope that. I hope you're 100% right, man. I've seen you forecast enough stuff that's come true that I think you're on the right path with your thought pattern here. But I think what it's going to do is it's going to make those licensed people. The only licensed people that are going to work in agencies are the ones that are the absolute top of their game. All these people that you hire just to get them licensed and they sort of loaf and coast by doing just enough to make a living or whatever. They're not going to have an opportunity because the number of licensed jobs is going to be shrunk in the agency and the competition is going to go up.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker B: No, absolutely, absolutely. It's just things are changing. It. I mean people, I've said this when I speak and people are like, how dare you say that licensed people are going to go away. That's not what, what I'm saying. I'm just saying that the, you know, the, the rules of economics allows it to be that way and there's other options. We didn't have other options, uh, in the past. So, so anything. Athena, any thoughts?

Speaker C: I had actually never thought of it that way. So that's very interesting. Um, I've always thought of AI as a compliment. So if one person, two people were able to do something in 20 minutes now that one person should be able to do that in a lot less time. So the fact that now there's going to be a lot more competition, you're going to be licensed, cool. But you have to be the best of the best. You're not just going to find a random person, train them and expect them to produce the same as someone with a little more experience and also passion for what they're doing.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I also think that'll be true as well. Um, for VE's. That is why we chose to go with high quality VE's. I say it all the time. We are not the least expensive on the, on the street. There's no way we are and we don't want to be. We're going after high quality VE's because we're also looking to the future of the VE business. Somebody who is unqualified, that's not going to be able to handle, to have the technicality to handle bots, to be able to work in an agentic office. Those are not the people we're trying to go after. We're going after those who have college degrees. Who's somebody that you would spend 50 to $60 an hour to hire here in America? Rightfully so. We would. And that's, that's another staple that we have. I think other VE's, uh, companies are growing faster than us, but we don't look at how fast we're growing. We're looking at the quality and our retention. And our retention shows that we're doing something right. Definitely are.

Speaker C: That's right.

Speaker A: It's no different than what we do in the agency world, man. I mean people who win on price, lose on price all day long. And uh, you know, if you're having a race to the bottom in the pricing war. You know, you can't expect to be driving around in a Rolls Royce on a Hyundai budget. It's just not going to happen. And no offense to anybody who drives a Hyundai. They've come a long way since I was in high school and you can get one for 49.95 brand new. But at the end of the day, you know, I think again, agents are fickle, man. Uh, you know, they're hypocritical and fickle people because we bitch and moan about people who only want to buy on price and they don't want to hear the benefits in what makes us different and what our value proposition is. But then when we go to our vendors, we do the exact same thing we hate so much. And kudos to you, man. I mean, I learned a long time ago that there's a benefit to being the more expensive option. The perception that comes with that is one of a higher level of professionalism and a better work product. So I would never want to be the lowest price and I don't want to be the middle priced. I'd rather be the most expensive because I think I win more.

Speaker B: Retention saves us money. That's the way we look at that in the VE business. There's eight weeks of training we have. That's a lot. Having, uh, an actual live human trainer who is training somebody how to work in an agency, putting them in an agency and then staying with them and shadowing them. Our competitors have three, four, five days of training. So. And they pay them next to nothing. So if they lose somebody, their retention doesn't bother them, they just get somebody else in and throw them in an agency. To us, high quality and then making sure our retention is way bigger deal than growth to us because we have a lot of money invested in those people. I mean, Athena will tell you, she's the one who personally talks to every person that comes into our portal. We'll have 300 people a month that will, that will try to get into it. And, and we have to now go through a process because we're looking for high quality people. I'll tell you something, David, I didn't know this and I think agents need to know this. This is very important. I, I mentioned this on my podcast. If you're not American and you don't speak English or uh, if you're, if you're American, you just don't know this stuff. And this is one of those worldwide things we learn outside of America, there is a way that you judge how people speak English. Okay. And it is based on a B and C. It's A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2. I didn't know this before. I knew this. The, the highest quality person. Somebody who speaks like, ah, Athena. By the way, Athena's in Colombia. She's Colombian. She lives at bottom Kia. If you want to speak like her, she would be considered a C2. That is the highest level of proficiency. They speak clearly, very little accent. They don't kind of try to reach for words when they're halfway through a sentence. And then you have a one, which is barely. That would be like equivalent of like me trying to know, know, uh, Spanish. Right. But flip it around for English. That would be like me. Um, so I don't know that. That is one of the things that's different when we go through. Athena doesn't let anybody through that doesn't say speak a C1 or a C2 and we go after C2s. Those are some of the differences. So sometimes a lot of agents are out there be like, well, I don't like those foreign workers. They couldn't communicate well with my team or whatever. Well, yeah, that's probably because you got an A or a B and you paid a thousand dollars a month for them. That's why this stuff happens. And when you see this behind the scenes and you're trying to do what's best for agencies like we truly are, you see that that's why there is a cost involved in a lot of this stuff. You want quality, you're going to pay for it. That's just the way it is. Athena. And, and because I'm. She's actually from. Did I say that right? Did I say the, the C1C?

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: Okay. All right, Just making sure.

Speaker C: Um, I did want to add to what you were saying. Um, because I feel that about 30% approximately of the agents I speak to on a day to day, um, have either tried a virtual assistant before, whether it was with another country or a company or either they did a direct hire. And I have noticed that we grab all their little pain points and things that they struggled with onboarding, managing, growing with their or, uh, scaling with their virtual employee. And we've been able to fix that. So when they onboard with us, they no longer have those issues. So I think that has also made a big difference and impact not only on the quality of individual that we're able to find and place in an agency, um, but the way that we Train them to integrate into that agency seamlessly. So that has made a huge difference. It also has been very, very frustrating. When you speak to an agent, they're like, ah, uh, we already tried this. It's just not for me. So it's like, give us a chance to show you the difference between someone that focuses on doing this and making it right. Because that's what we've been focused on for the past couple of months, making this process the correct way to do it.

Speaker B: Well, the other thing I'm focused on is producers of Paradise. I don't know about y', all, but, uh, we're kind of looking forward to that, too.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I got freaking Chase Courtney lighting me up on taxis to go away.

Speaker B: Well, he's worth it, though. Chase is worth it.

Speaker A: We'll see him soon enough. I want to switch gears just for a second, because I think one of the other things, you know, specific to using virtual professionals is the integration into the culture of the agency and how that really needs to be a very intentional process. And I think that there's a big gap between the agencies who do that really well and the ones who don't. And many times the ones who don't really make. From my experience and looking at it and talking to people in the conversations I have, they're usually going to be honest and open because they're typically over a couple of beers or something. There's no effort at all made. Right. Then, next thing you know, you've got a virtual professional who's literally. They're geographically removed from the operation, but they're also kind of removed functionally from the operation as well, because there's never been any real intentionality behind that. So, um, my question is, what does virtual intelligence do to assure that the virtual employee is assimilated into the agency's culture initially? And then what mechanisms do you guys have in place to make sure that that doesn't fall off and that person's thriving in the environment? Because I know that you have as much interest and investment in that person being successful in the agency, not just from a financial standpoint, but from a responsibility standpoint. They came to you, they wanted a good opportunity, you thought you gave them one, and now all of a sudden, you stuck them with an agency that was a dog that somehow made it through your vetting process. How do you make sure that these people are assimilated in the culture? And are there tools that you have for the agencies to help them with that process?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, David, I'm just You know how I am. I'm like you. I'm gonna be real, uh.

Speaker A: Man, I threw a scene to the Heat and she dropped off, man. Or connection.

Speaker B: I wonder what.

Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that was for her, man, when she comes back on, but go ahead.

Speaker B: Well, I. I'm pretty sure she'll have some things, but I think she'll be kind of like us. And I'm. I'm just gonna say it because I'm. I'm a lover of agents. I think it's the greatest industry God ever created. But agents are absolute. Um, and the reason why I say that is, is we, um, have agencies that will call us, and they want to fight the fact that they get five days off, because that's not part of their plan, their vacation plan. Um, we have some agencies who accept the cultural things that we say, like, hey, here's who they are. Here's some things that you should do. And most of them are like, no, Jason, I got an employee. Get out of my way. I mean, that's the God's honest truth. And what's amazing is, is those Ve. Those agencies that have, um, lower revenue per employee cost, have two to three VE's. Those VE's would swim across the ocean or the Caribbean for that agency owner. And then you have some of our VE's, which are a lot of them, who say, if I ever could get out of this agency, I need to get out of here. Because they understand what. What it is to be in good and being bad. There's not a whole lot that we can do. And, David, I'm really kind of giving you behind the scenes. Once we once. Usually somebody gets a virtual employee from us, we can't ever get them back on the phone. That's just the God's honest truth. They're busy. They have other things going on. What we have found out to have the success that you need to have is you've got to get them connected with somebody who's already on the team. You'll already find out. They've got to have one or two people bring them to your sales meetings, bring them to your service meetings, actually give them jobs. True story. I put Sophia in charge of. Did she come back in? I put. There she is. There she is. Athena, I don't know if you heard, but I think you heard what he was asking there about how we try to help them culturally. Um, I. I was, uh, Sophia, in my office. I love telling this story. It's so great. She's from Colombia. I put her in my office. Eight months into it, she comes to me, swear to God, that's what she says, David. She says, you know, I want you to know I've been working in our claims and our claims department sucks. And I was just like. And my first thought was, is like, dude, you've been doing this for eight months. She's 24 years old. I'm thinking to myself, how dare you. She then gives me a list of things that she would like to do. I picked a couple of them. I said, execute those. Boom. She comes back. She comes back, starts showing things. People on my team are like, wow, this is really great. Uh, we start getting Google reviews based on our claims when we don't normally ask at that point in time, which was amazing. Mentioning her, um, Eerie came up with a new bonus system that if you have so many claims that you turn in yourself versus them, turning them directly into the company, you get bonused on that. We were in the top 20% and earned a bonus the very first year due to our claims department, which was made by a 26 year old. It's because I brought her into the realm. And what we talk about it a lot. You, me, and you've maybe talked about this before in our agency. We have. It's not so much just our VE's. Everybody has their own piece of the empire and they all know that. And we include the VE's in that they are part of their empire. When I go there, I expect them to grow their empire. So there's cultural norms, but really it just has to do with the fact that you have to think about a lot of these people have grown up their whole life wanting to work for an American corporation. And what you have to do is you just have to work hard to let them know and show that they are approved for that. Athena's back on. Now, Athena, if you have anything to kind of add to this.

Speaker C: Yeah, my apologies. I'm not sure what happened. Tech issues. Um, but to add to that, I do believe that incorporating a VE into your team really does mean incorporating them into your team. Treat them as one of your staff members because they are. Just because Uncle Sam says that they're our employee, they are part of your team and they become such a big asset. And, um, I might not be an agency owner, but I get to speak to them every day. And they really do tell me like I would, I don't know what I would do without this person in my team moving forward. Um, so they really do become a valuable asset, not only in their team, but As a friend, as, ah, absolutely everything else that consists with the growth of that agency in specific as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty, Pretty amazing, to be honest with you. There are best employees at our agency.

Speaker A: What have we missed, man? What else you want to. What else? We got time.

Speaker C: Um.

Speaker B: No, no, no, no. There's no time limit, man. I appreciate, uh, you having us on here. I can't wait to be a, uh, producers in paradise. I just want people to realize that virtual employees are not going away. They're only once again, as I kind of alluded to the beginning, I mean, the multiples are going up for these businesses, which I have to tell you, even though with my mind thought is blowing me away, I'm realizing that not only was my thought correct, but it's actually a lot bigger than that, than I. What I was suspecting. Um, and so I. I think that, uh, they're definitely not here to go away. I do think that, uh, there's a lot of value that we can learn. And also, uh, education. Um, just. Just this is. I'm not here to represent them, but, uh, we were just talking about this this morning. $289. You can get CISR education for. For a year for. Through The National Alliance. 289 a year. And your people can. And they can take as many as they want per person. Rve that we have, her name is Lord Lynn. She's actually just passed her second CI CISR class. And what was amazing about that is, is when we were bringing this up, that is one of the things that we have is an lsm, which is a lot more broad. And. And what. And once again, just as for everybody out there that has a virtual employee, the virtual employees who are excelling the most are in agencies that mandate that they use the ls, uh, lms. So it's just not like, hey, you hire them and you put them there. No, just like your normal employees, you're sending them the training, you're giving them the training, and they become unbelievable in your office. I can't. I can't. I can't stipulate how much they are. But that's all I have. In closing, if Dean, if you have something.

Speaker C: Well, that's like in any industry. I mean, the more you learn about something, the better you become. Um, if you find a person that's capable and has potential and you continue to feed them information and teach them, they will adapt to the industry and they will continue to grow with it. Um, so that's it for me as

Speaker B: well, Athena, Jason, Alvaro, and Andrea will be with you in two weeks, Mr. Carruthers.

Speaker A: And we appreciate what.

Speaker B: We appreciate what you're putting on. It's exciting. And that website I was on, looking at what I sent you an email, I was like, dude, that website is cold. And then you got that music on there. Oh, my.

Speaker A: Yeah, we got, uh, we got a whole soundtrack of stuff that we created for it. Listen, I want to say one more thing. If I'm an agency principal, which I am, and you really want to figure out the best way that you can use AI at a ground level and also incorporate virtual employees, not even just virtual employees, but your entire staff, the first thing you probably need to do is the one thing we joke about all the time, right? How many times have we said, man, if I could only clone myself, if I could only clone myself, I would have all these people who could do all this stuff. Well, I went through that process with Dross, the AI guy that I put inside of Killing Commercial and Basecamp. And it was actually a relatively easy process for me to do that, partially because it was able to learn, because I have so much content out there. So over 140,000 pages of content, Thousands of hours of coaching calls, group calls, podcast interviews of me on other people's podcasts, of me interviewing people. But it became a social profiles. Like, it's linked to everything. And the cool part about it is it continues to learn. So every new blog post gets fed to it. Every social post I do gets fed to it. And the reason I did it was, honestly, it wasn't because, uh, I'm m lazy. It's because I wanted people to have access to me for things they had questions about when I might not be readily available for them. And so now we joke about it, but the people in Killing Commercial and soon to be power producer Base Camp, they have me in their pocket 247365 where they can go ask questions and they're gonna get answers. And I've got people who will message me on a regular basis saying, hey, how would you handle this? How would you handle that? I had one this morning from somebody in Killing Commercial and my first response back was, what did D. Ross say about this? And you might look at that on the surface and say, well, that was lazy. Why didn't you just answer that person? And, uh, the answer is not that I'm that lazy. It's because when you have a tool that was trained with that much information and you can go in and ask it a question, the answer you're gonna get back from that is actually gonna be better and more thorough than what you're gonna get from me pre coffee at 6:30 on a Friday morning when I'm just trying to coast into the weekend. Right. And so where I see that applying with an agency in a virtual professional relationship is you've got to go and build yourself first because now when you bring that person in, they've got the core training, they've got the lms. But what about the stuff on the fly? If you've got yourself cloned or your agency's SOPs? Agencies SOPs inside of a mechanism for them to ask on the fly, they're not going to be standing in your doorway or your virtual doorway breathing down your neck for an answer that they can get in real time at that point. I think agency principles are spread thin in some cases by design, in other cases, because we just scaled our agency and we're really good salespeople, but we're not necessarily the best operators. And we've allowed ourselves to be in that position for far too long. And so if we can take what we know or the way we've always done it and get it into some sort of an AI, uh, chatbot or whatever else, and now your team can go to that and use its knowledge base, 90 to 95% of the questions they have are going to be answered without ever interrupting your day.

Speaker B: True that. That's right. I love that. D. Ross, that's a great idea. And agents should take it as, oh, it's crazy, man.

Speaker A: Like, I have people every day that text me like, this thing is scary. I really do feel like I'm talking to you. Except I think it's smarter because it literally remembers everything I've ever said. I don't. You know, and so the person this morning I said, I want you to go type it in, come back and tell me what the answer is. And the answer was ten times better than what they would have gotten from me on the fly on email. I'm only going to answer what I'm willing to type with my thumbs on my email while I'm laying in bed.

Speaker B: Yep, I hear you.

Speaker A: So anyhow, we're going to wrap it up. Listen, Jason, Cass, Athena, Page, Virtual Intelligence. Thank you guys so much for spending some time with me. Hopefully you and the audience get something out of this. I would encourage you to reach out to Jason and Athena and their team. If you're into market or even if you're just exploring the market, go let them educate you and help you in your journey in understanding how you can implement and integrate virtual employees into your operation. You'll thank me when you do. So everybody have a great week. We're going to catch you next time. See you.

Speaker C: Bye. Mhm.

Speaker A: You've been listening to the Power Producers Podcast. You can follow Killing Commercial Interview Insurance on Facebook and YouTube. And if you want to take your

Speaker B: game to the next level, next level.

Speaker A: Check out our book, the Extra Two Minutes and our website, killingcommercial.

Speaker B: Com.