Back in the Building: What 30 Days Away Reveals About Your Agency

Speaker A: What do you feel like insurance agents need to do in terms of branding themselves, their agencies, the carriers they represent?

Speaker B: When you are marketing something you're not in control of, you're not in control.

Speaker A: The very last thing I do, I get agreement from them and then I, uh, end the call with making damn sure whatever I say I'm going to do gets done.

Speaker C: How many hours did your team spend last week on policy reviews? Quote comparisons, loss run extractions, now multiple that by what your producers cost per hour. That's the number that outmarket eliminates. The reason that I love Ascend is they are the only vendor focused on helping agents automate all of their manual finances and accounting practices, which is really the boring stuff. But that's really where the rubber meets the road in terms of profitability to your agency.

Speaker A: You know, we're going to write business with carriers that make it easy for us to write business with.

Speaker C: If the conditions have to be right for you to succeed, your success is conditional. It's not real success.

Speaker A: Play like champions, man. Here we go. Insurance agents from around the world, welcome to the Insurance Guys podcast. My name is Scott Howell, your fearless host and leader, insurance agency owner and insurance evangelist for iprotect insurance and financial services, based out of Huntsville, um, Alabama. And before we get started in today's episode, please help me welcome. He is a 6 foot 3 sophomore from Mobile, Alabama parade, first team all American rivals, five star recruit. He is a fantastic insurance agent and a great American. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and welcome the incomparable Mr. Bradley Flowers. How are you, Bradley?

Speaker C: Man?

Speaker B: I am, uh, really good. I am, uh, back in the office off paternity leave. Today's the first day back, so I thought, why not hang out with my buddy Scott Howell and his friend Doug and Emu back there.

Speaker A: Got my Doug and Emu back there. I call him my Chris Ball and Emu because that guy looks just like Chris Ball from the Greenwich Group.

Speaker B: Anyway, guys, I, uh, literally told Scott when we got on this call, I said, you did not pay the $80 for the Doug and Evo cut out. He said, I did. Sure.

Speaker A: Absolutely. I paid a lot more than $80 because I think I got four of them.

Speaker B: Oh, my God, why?

Speaker A: One for each agency location.

Speaker B: All right, so I'm going to tell you.

Speaker A: I have retail agency location.

Speaker B: I've got an alpha story for you. In 2015, anytime you went into any gas station in Alabama, you would see a cardboard cutout of Nick Saban yelling and pointing and a Coke in the other hand. You remember that? Remember that cardboard cutout? Every gas station in the state of Alabama. So apparently there was a chain of gas stations that shut down, and Alpha bought all of their Nick Saban cardboard cutouts and put one in each office, and there wasn't nothing you could do or say about it. So Bradley Flowers had a Nick Saban cardboard cutout in his office that he despised anyway, that belonged in a gas station. There's a larger message there.

Speaker A: Anyway, there's so many things to unpack there.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Starting with the fact that the University of Alabama, their licensing department will shut your down in about two seconds.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, Alpha was a spot. Was a partner, though, so.

Speaker A: Okay. So it made it okay.

Speaker B: I made it okay. In fact, I think they may have gotten them from the university.

Speaker A: Anyway, Bradley, tell our listening audience what does it feel like after being off for. Give me the how. What's the length of time? A month you've been off month and a half.

Speaker B: Today was day 30. Would have been day 31. Yeah.

Speaker A: How does it feel to be back in the swing of things?

Speaker B: I'll tell you a funny story, Scott. So, you know, new baby, uh, you really don't go anywhere for the first few weeks. You don't want to get sick. You really can't go anywhere. So I went to church yesterday, and I was sitting in church, and I could not figure out why m. My feet hurt. I couldn't figure it out. I'm sitting there like, man, my feet are hurting. Why are my feet hurting? And then it hit me that I haven't worn anything but house slippers for 30 days. I'm M having to, uh, to recondition. Learning how to wear tennis shoes.

Speaker A: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me get the. Let. Let Scott. Let Uncle Scott get the full visual. Had I pulled up to your house last Tuesday?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Unannounced. Unannounced. I haven't. I haven't called ahead. Do you greet me at the door like a smoky jacket and some damn. Some damn slippers like you're.

Speaker B: No. Uh, no. So I'll tell you what the slippers

Speaker A: are for and what kind of slippers I need. I need, like, a visual.

Speaker B: They're called. I don't know how to pronounce it. They're called Kyrgyz, K, Y, G, R, I, E, S. They're made from animal hair, and they look like Birkenstocks. That's what they look like.

Speaker A: Ky. What. What was after the K and the

Speaker B: Y, G, R, I, E, S G,

Speaker A: R I, uh, E. S. Okay.

Speaker B: They look, they look like Birkenstocks.

Speaker A: Gotcha.

Speaker B: So I hate being barefoot indoors. Hate me. I hate being barefoot, period. But I don't like being barefoot indoors. So for the last, you know, probably 10 years, I've always worn socks inside, right? And my freaking kids drop their juice, drop their food, like. And I, I want to give disclaimer, our house is clean, but when you have toddlers, you're going to step in stuff, you know? And so. Yeah, that's them. Um, not, not too bad. That's the exact ones I have. So I got to work, dude. I was freaking changing socks two or three times a day because I'd step in something somebody spilled or you know what I mean? And so I was talking to my brother in law about it. My brother in law, him and his wife are big, like, no shoes in the house people. And he actually has a pair of inside shoes that he only wears inside. And he's like, get you some inside. So I got me some slippers to wear inside. So that was, uh. But yeah, if you. I would not, I would not wear them outside. They've never seen me outside. But I would greet you in slippers. No robe though.

Speaker A: Now those slippers, by the way, those seem legit. I could totally see you wearing those. I was thinking about some damn Walmart house slippers. Like Scott.

Speaker B: Yeah, like Hugh Hefner. Yeah. No, but no, it's been good, man. It's been good. You know, I did, I did 60 days with Luke and then, uh, with Cal, the middle one, I did 30 days.

Speaker A: You did 45 days. It just keeps going down.

Speaker B: I did not 30 with Cal, but two weeks of the 30. We were in the hospital. He was in the hospital for two weeks.

Speaker A: Wow, I forgot about that.

Speaker B: So with this one with, uh, Lucy, the youngest, I did 30 days, but we have a nanny that comes and keeps the two oldest during the day. This was awesome. Yeah, because like, you know, you're basically

Speaker A: just, you're basically just working from home at this point.

Speaker B: I mean, I worked a little bit, I did some payroll, worked on a few accounts, um, but nothing crazy. You know, the team did a fantastic job while I was out. Um, so came back in ready to rock and roll, you know.

Speaker A: So in true Bradley Flowers fashion, we got a lot to get to today. By the way, in true Bradley Flowers fashion, here's what you always tell all the agents that listen to the podcast. If you want to find out what is screwed up in your agency, take you about a month off and try not to have anything to do with the agency. And when you get back or during that time, you are going to figure out what the hell is screwed up with your agency.

Speaker B: Let me tell you what, we've done it this the third time and we still finding stuff we found.

Speaker A: Go ahead, tell us, tell us what screwed up this time.

Speaker B: You know this time. Let me go through my list here. I have a list of 17 things.

Speaker A: Damn.

Speaker B: Some of it's small stuff, some of it. Some of it's just like stuff I need to hate. A quick 30 second conversation right now. Going into the. What happens is when you decide you're going to leave, you're going to take some time off. Going into it, your brain starts going to a weird place of like, oh, I need to plan for when I'm not here. Almost like you're doing perpetuation, legacy planning and uh. So a lot of that for us this time was stuff around accounting and billing, like ascend type stuff. Processing payments in a sin, what to do when checks come in, that sort of thing. That was sort of the pre. Bigger stuff.

Speaker A: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's stop right there.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: By the way, Scott's already done all this. I've nearly died about three times in the past.

Speaker B: Yeah, you, you did it for real?

Speaker A: I, I do it, I have to do it. So. But why haven't you already done the accounting and billing with the other two kids? Like why hadn't that already been done?

Speaker B: I did a lot of it. Um, we did not have a SIN fully fledged out when calts were gotcha. So now it's. Yeah. And that was something I took back over. So with a sin, and this is a great sponsor with a sin, the way that it works is when somebody pays you through a sin, um, and that payment processes, a sin will then turn around and pay the carrier before they pay the carrier. The mga. There's an approval process you have to go through. And um, that approval process is does this money go with this account? Is the payable right? Is the receivable right? Is the commission right? All that, all that kind of stuff. We had an employee in the office that was doing it and we had other employees that would get mad at this person if something wasn't approved in a quick enough fashion, if the commission was slightly wrong, that sort of thing. So I took it back over uh, about a year ago. I was like, well, let me just handle this because A, they're not gonna get mad at me and B, it kind of keeps My finger on the pulse of what we're writing. So is this a, uh, a send approval type stuff? And then processing checks. So like when a, uh, mortgage company pays us or client pays us for an agency bill account. Since day one, I've been the one that processed those. And when the last kid was born, everything ran through the trust account. Since then. Sorry, man, I got a dry throat. Since then, Ascend has launched.

Speaker A: Not used to talking. Not used to talking this much.

Speaker B: Shoot. I don't know, dude. Since then, Ascend has launched the feature that you can actually process checks in Ascend. Almost like you're depositing. Mobile banking, right? That's a new thing. I'm still. I'm, um, still the only one that does that. So I had to teach somebody else. So that was kind of the pre. You know, things. Things that popped up. You know, one of the things is we need, you know, we're adding tech so fast, and I've always been slow to roll out tech, but with some of this AI stuff now, and, you know, I can spend a weekend and create something our agency can use. We need deeper training on the existing tech that we have before we add. Before we add new tech. That was a big one. I think we need a leadership. This was Kenneth's idea. We need a leadership powwow where we talk about. We talk about vision and direction and where we're going. That way we're all aligned. Um, we need more clarity between producers and client, concierge. And then, um, you know, outside of that, it's all a bunch of little, just, you know, piddly stuff, you know, adjusting some KPIs for. For a few people, you know, but. But other than that, I mean, nothing, nothing broke really, catastrophically. Here's what happens when you are the leader and you step away from your company and your company is somewhat rudderless for a little while, you kind of see how, A, you kind of see how important the leader is, B, your people kind of see how important the leader is. And then C, you kind of come back in with clarity in the sense that, okay, I know exactly what I need to do. You know what I mean? Especially when you have time to think about it. You know, it's very easy when you're here to get caught up in the mundane of the day to day. You know, Ms. Johnson wants this, Mr. Smith wants that, all that sort of stuff, you know.

Speaker C: Hey, guys, it's Bradley. Let me ask you a question. How many hours did your team spend last week on policy reviews, quote, comparisons, loss Run extractions now. Multiply that by what your producers cost per hour. That's the number that Outmarket eliminates and that's the number you reinvest into writing new business. Go book a demo at outmarket AI. Uh, our agency runs on it. Scott's agency runs on it. Several of the top 100 brokers in the country run on it. Over 250 agencies and growing fast. Owners are winning new business. Cutting errors, getting their producers back to selling. Your client data never mixes with another agencies and is never used to train AI models. Best in class Enterprise security. Because this is the most sensitive data your agency holds, you're up and running the same day. No integration, no IT project, no setup. Outmarket AI today. Hey guys, it's Bradley here. I wanted to talk to you today really quick about Ascend. Ascend is different because they're the only vendor focused on helping agencies automate all of their manual finance and accounting practices. On the agency bill side, they make agency bill feel like direct bill, which is like music to my ears. In an agency that operates in an ENS world, they collect and send the payments automatically to carriers on direct Bill. It'll even help agencies fetch commission statements, reconcile, fix discrepancies, post statements back into the ams. Like with vendors like Vertafore and Applied Help agencies close their book faster. That is you and your people get paid faster. It's basically like all of your carriers download commissions, even if they don't download commissions. And we all know a lot of them don't do that. They're changing the game for agencies focused on efficiency because it's the one place for accounting and service to get full visibility and moving money in and out of the agency, taking a bunch of the manual work away. They're also rolling out some really nice, unique features powered by AI uh, that help agencies be efficient, like manually creating or automatically creating invoices from carrier quote docs, using it to suggest matches when you're reconciling commissions where policy data doesn't align perfectly between your AMS and your statements. There's a lot of really cool things that Ascend is doing. And guys, I was a user of Ascend first before we ever decided to partner with them on the podcast. I highly recommend everybody out there check out Ascend. Hit your wagon to them. They're going places, really smart folks over there. Check them out@useascend.com tell them that the insurance guys podcast sent you. Thanks.

Speaker A: Let's back up for a sec. We got so much to unpack Here, let's go back to making sure that everybody listening to this understands some things. We just heard Bradley say the word client concierge. So about three weeks ago, I'm at the Paradiso Mastermind out, out in Phoenix, Arizona, and I start hearing that we now have account managers and CSRs. So that is not an interchangeable word anymore, apparently. Now you have producers that produce account managers that, you know, cross sell. They're going to have their, probably more than likely their license. They're going to cross sell, they're going to upsell, they're going to remarket. And then you have CSRs that are doing all of what I call the back of the house stuff. First time I've heard this. I've always thought the word account manager and CSR was almost interchangeable, but apparently not. And now we have Bradley, first day back from 30 day paternity leave, talking about client concierge. What is a client concierge?

Speaker B: For the client concierge role in October of last year.

Speaker A: This sounds like a Billy Wagner term.

Speaker B: So I went to, I went to Billy's office. Yeah, I wanted to fly in and just like him, take me through the whole thing. And you want to hear everything. And you're going to like, when you go to a mastermind like that, like, you sent me your notes, right? You took a lot of notes. But I bet it was just like one thing. You're like, hey, this one thing right here, right? And so, you know, there's a famous story where Albert Einstein is learning how to play golf. I told this at the second One city world Tour. And I'll tell you behind the scenes in just a second. But Albert Einstein's learning how to play golf. His golf coach tells him, all right, keep your left arm straight. Tilt your head back a little bit. Make sure you turn your hips. And he gave him like 12 things to do. Albert Einstein reaches into his golf bag and throws three consecutive golf balls. And the coach only catches one, drops the other two. He says, one thing at a time, please. So here's a man that everybody would describe as a genius. It's like one thing at a time. And the overarching message of that in a conference form is just find one thing. Let's just find one thing and implement it. Right? The funny part of the story is, is I actually had three ascend golf balls and I had picked somebody in the audience. I'm m like, hey, I'm going to throw you three golf balls. I want you to drop all three of them. It was Louis Liao. And he called all three of them. The athlete in him, he just couldn't help it. And so he catches them. Um, and then he, like, fakes dropped. I'm like, oh. And it was. It was. It's still on my Instagram. Anyway, so I went there. I went there, wanted to see the process, but really I'm looking for one thing, right? Like, what's the one most highest leverage thing we can do that will, you know? And so Billy has created this position called client concierge. And what it is, is it. It sits, it supports the producer and the inside salesperson. The idea is you hire people. Everybody that you hire starts out in client concierge, whether they have experience or not. Now, our version of that is if you're a legit producer at a current place, like, we might make an exception, right? We start you in client concierge. And what client? And there's. There's several. Billy, forgive me if I brutalize this. I'm going to talk about our version of it. There's two levels at Portal Insurance for client concierge. Level one is producer gets the lead producer sends the lead to you. You quote it, you send the quotes back. Level two is producer gets the lead producer sends the lead to you. You quote it, you deliver it to the customer. And then level three is you bind it. Okay? The idea is they're quoting for the producer. They're sending the stuff back to the producer. The producer gives them a feedback loop and says, hey, quote this differently next time. Try this carrier. So they're learning how to quote. Essentially, they get a little fee if they might, if the producer buys it. And then to level one, level two, level three, based on certain KPIs, and then they go into inside sales. When they go into inside sales, they still do the client concierge job, but then they're also selling stuff for themselves. And then eventually they make their way to a producer. So the idea is, uh. And this was the one thing for me, because it solves two problems. One, it allows my producers to move quicker because I don't want my best salespeople pecking numbers into a keyboard. I want them on the phone. Salad, right? And this problem's a little different for, like, me and Billy, because we don't really have raiders other parts of the country. It's, you enter the info m in one time, you get the quotes.

Speaker A: Uh, by the way, let me stop you right there. Let me tell you what else is different. And I've always kind of taken this with a grain of salt. They don't have the service arm that the rest of us do. Now, if you want to sit here and, and live on Candy Mountain and think that, that a producer never gets pulled into a service issue, well, then you have lost your damn mind.

Speaker B: They're handling the quoting, so it's freeing up your producers. The other piece of it, of the, the producers that we have had come work for us that haven't done great. The overarching common denominator is they either don't quote correctly or they don't quote the right carriers. They get a familiarity, they go to the same two or three. Well, this solves that. Like Billy's exact words to me were, by the time they make it to be a producer, they are freaking quoting ninjas. If they're to lose a deal, it's not because it was quoted wrong. So we, uh, started hiring for that position in October last year. The first person we hired in it was a intern. Uh, and we have since hired three more. Three or four more, I can't remember exactly. But yeah, it's been a nice addition. But there's back to my thing that I mentioned. You know, there's some. We need to add some clarity between them and the producers around, like, flow and who handles what and things like that. And it's 100% my fault that there's no clarity. And that's, that's kind of like day one. Like, we're working on that today, so.

Speaker A: Well, just be glad you're not in North Alabama, because middle America, uh, soft market, all the blue blood carriers are. It's a race to the bottom. And it gives all of your competition this ability to call your clients and go, hey, man, insurance is dropping. You're probably paying too much stuff.

Speaker B: It's soft here.

Speaker A: And more than likely, more than likely they're gonna get that quote from that captive carrier or the shop down the street, and it probably is going to be less than what they're paying right now, especially when you throw in the table stakes of new business discounts and weird. Dude, it's hindsight being what it is, uh, if I had to do it over again, I would rather be in a hard market than a soft.

Speaker B: Oh, 100. 100.

Speaker A: Clint's been saying that the last month or two. Like, dude, if I could just go

Speaker B: back to a hard market is we need a hurricane. That was a joke. That was a joke. That was a joke. Oh, yeah, yeah, it was funny. I had a conversation with Kerry Wallace several months ago, and she was laughing and she said, yeah. She said, everybody thinks the hard market is the hard part. It's the soft market. And uh, see, and see, when I started Portal, the last time we had a soft market was when I started Portal. So it was like we had nowhere to go but up. You know, you wake up every morning, it's like, we're going to write.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: You know, and so we're, we're doing some things like, like we, this agency right now has, uh. I told that to the team to start all this to the team this morning. Literally never been stronger. But we have, we, we have a lot of improvements to make too. You know, we are Alabama after they won the national championship in 2009. Like, pretty good. Wow. But nothing like a few, you know what I'm saying? Like, not to say we're like. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like we're good.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: But like it's. Things kind of fell in place for us recently and you're one or two bad problems away from that not being true, you know, but uh. And I'm, I'm having to learn and develop as a leader, man. Like, you know, it's as you, as you move up in different tiers of business, there's different skill sets that are needed. You know what I mean? And you're better at, you're better at this than me.

Speaker A: I do.

Speaker B: You know, I've been doing a lot of self education around like leadership and things like that, working on myself and things. Try to. Because like, I truly view it as like I work for them, not the other way around. And I'm trying to be there for my folks, you know.

Speaker A: Well, I don't envy what you're going through right now relative to turnover and change and things like that, because I've been through that and uh, I'm kind of on the other end of that right now.

Speaker B: Ah. Yeah.

Speaker A: Ah, growth mode. Hired. Hired some, some, some rock stars. And all I tell people when they call me is like, man, when I'm going through the worst of the worst. And I've been through the worst of the worst. I've been through the three people leave and in a two week period, all I know to do is get up in the morning, put my clothes on, come to work, try to have a positive attitude.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And just stay the course and be, be at work every day and go to work, try to get 1% better every day. I know that sounds, that's a microsomsoism and it kind of sounds a little corny but if you can just get bet 1% better every day in your agency, uh, that's something I think a lot about every day is like, are we, did we. When I get in my car to go home at night, did we get 1% better today? And if we did, I feel like

Speaker B: we won the day over. You know, we had a commercial account manager quit. To be honest, the work product was not great and I think this person saw the writing on the wall and didn't want to get better. So the alternative was to take the easy road out and leave.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, we had an intern quit. You know, it hadn't been nothing, nothing crazy. But we are, I'm, I'm like firmly in account manager hiring mode big time. And it's the, for the right person, it's a great opportunity. And my thing, and I say this to every job candidate, uh, I do not want people that want a job. I want people that want to be here. If you want to go to work, get paid and go home and not be a part of something great, there's other places you can go. But if you want to go, if you want to go to work, get paid really well above market and feel like you're making a difference not only in your customers lives, but in the industry, that's where you come here. And so I'm in the point where I'm like aggressively hiring, but I'm also. It has to be the right person. There's been times in the past where admittedly where I've been like, no, you got a license and you can fog a mirror. Come on. And all of those people haven't worked.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so now it's like, okay, like the building isn't burning down as we are right now. Let's like take our time and really try to find somebody like really perfect. And I got a bunch, dude. I spent, I spent a lot of time over this past month recruiting online. A lot of competitors, employees have Bradley Flowers in their DMS right now. Um, a lot of. And ah, so, uh, we've got some interviews set up this week. So. Well, the next time we, the next time we do this, I'll probably have uh, some really, really good account managers.

Speaker A: Hey, let me, let me tell you what I learned because you said it a little while ago and I want to make sure because the only reason we do this podcast is for these insurance agents. So Bradley said a little while ago and I've always believed this, people used to ask me, scott, why do you go to these classes? Why do you go to this stuff that Nationwide offers? Like, I don't understand. And I'm like. Because every time I go to like an educational insurance event of some kind, I always take away one thing and that, and that one thing, man, it could, it could change your whole agency. But let me tell you, I'm going to tell these agents what my, my one takeaway is from the Paradiso Mastermind. That is the simplest thing you could possibly do as a leader. I realize this does not apply to the guy and girl that maybe are sitting in office together and there's just two of them. But if once, Bradley, if, uh, anybody understands this, it's you. Once you grow and you get up to 10, 15, 20 employees, you start losing that day to day interaction with a lot of them. And the one thing I heard that really caught my attention, that I want to start doing, and I haven't implemented this yet, is a 15 minute check in with one employee per week. So, so basically, you know, for agencies like ours, where people are spread out, or maybe, maybe it's one location like yours, but you got 15, uh, 20, 30 employees. You pick one employee, one employee a week, and you just go sit down with them for 15 minutes and say, hey, tell me about, tell me about how things going in your life. How are you doing? How's your family? How things going? What can we do better 15 minutes? And, and I don't think that's too much to ask of a leader.

Speaker B: I think that's good. I need to do a better job than that. Um, it's just so hard, man. Like, you get, you know, you got stuff to dig.

Speaker A: Yeah, but if, but if I can't carve out 15 minutes in a freaking

Speaker B: week what I've done, Come on, man. What I have done.

Speaker A: And maybe it's just a phone call,

Speaker B: maybe it's just a phone call job, wanting to get FaceTime with my boss and I would think of excuses of stuff to talk about that. You know what I mean? And uh, what I've done is I call it making my rounds and I'll put it on the calendar. Not every day, but a good. And uh, where I just like go to each person, hey, how's it going? What's going on? You know, and, and what you can do too, if you have two or three people in the same area, you can like hit them all at once. But that, that works too, you know. But, uh, yeah, it is, you know, and same thing with Vas, dude. Like, I remember Wesley Anderson told me he's like, man, how would you feel if somebody hired you, put you in a cubicle and never talked to you again? Like, you need to, like, bring your vas on zoom and like, chat with em. Good stuff. So, yeah, it's, uh, uh, it, it is important for sure.

Speaker A: So I think the person at the. I want to give credit where credit is due. I think the person at the event that I was at that brought up the 15 minute check in was none other than Mr. Billy Wagner. I mean, I could sit here, dude, I could sit here and just read off his notes of him getting up and talking a lot of. A lot of good information from a lot of people. But, you know, that was the one thing that really resonated with me, that I thought, man, I need to do a better job of just once a week checking in with somebody. But I normally don't.

Speaker B: You can do too, is if you have, like, managers in place, have them do that and then you check in with the managers, you know?

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, you have to make sure, though, that they're intentional about it and they handle it the way that you would handle it, you know?

Speaker A: Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. Last thing I'm gonna talk about.

Speaker B: Let me tell you one more thing, though.

Speaker A: We're gonna get off.

Speaker B: I'll tell you one more thing too, that we've done. This was Kenneth's idea. I was not involved. Uh, last Friday, the whole team went out to lunch and the only rule was no talking about work. It was great. It was fantastic. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker A: That's phenomenal. The one last thing I wanted to talk about before we got off this podcast. And by the way, guys, I'm gonna be down in Mobile, Alabama, podcasting Monday and Tuesday of next week. Bradley and I are going to be together. I've got a lot of crazy stories I got to tell you guys about, but one thing I want to remind all these agency owners listening to this right now is the summertime is the absolute worst time of the year for a lot of your staff members, a lot of your team members, the people who've got two, three, four kids. You know, you get on that schedule during the school year and it's pretty easy. You know, you get up, you get everybody ready, get them fed, you get them off to school, you figure out something to do with the kids in the afternoon. But, buddy, this summertime thing, for a lot of agencies that hire people who have kids, it is tough on team members. And I, I guess my point in that is try to have A little grace. Man, I know it's frustrating. I get frustrated sometimes with. Well, I can't, I can't be on that meeting at 1 o' clock or 3 o' clock because I got to go pick the kids up. Uh, but it's, it's, it's real.

Speaker B: It is, it's real. It is. And that's, I think, culturally, one thing that has given us a bit of a leg up on our competition is we understand that employees have lives. You know what I mean? It's, it's kind of like the whole, like.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: You know, when Covid happened, I had, I've talked about this a few times with Agency ought to reach out to me. How do I m. Ensure my people are working the full eight hours and they're working from home? I'm like that. Like, they're working from home. Laundry on the top. Like, you should measure 100. Measure output, not input.

Speaker A: But hey, hire Scott Howell. He'll do a whole lot.

Speaker B: Everything has a line, you know what I mean? Like, I'm not gonna pay you to work from home, and you're spending half the time, like taking care of your toddler, you know what I mean? So it's like everything's. You have to be. Well, like, empathy means, like seeing it from the other person's point of view, not letting the other person run all over you, you know?

Speaker A: Well, you know what? That rolls into my second point, which is what I have tattooed in 3 inch old English letters across my shoulder blades.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I have a business to run, so there has to be some kind of happy medium. And so I lost an employee who was damn good employee about three, uh, or four months ago. I guess it's been, what are we in June? July? So June. So April 1st, she. She quit. She left. We were going to try to do the 1099 contractor thing, but then after talking with you and C.J. apparently, uh, C.J. hunts and Pillar, who used to do a lot of that stuff, has figured out it doesn't work for the most part. But she ended up getting mad at me. But I probably told her no less than 37 times. I, uh, have a business to run. I, uh, I'm sorry. I hate it. I'm sorry you can't ever come up, come to work. I'm sorry that you have all this tragedy in your family. One thing right after another after another. After literally every two weeks, the most tragic event that could possibly happen would happen to her. And to this day, she's still mad at. She is pissed off she, she took her shit back to our prizeful office and slung it in the damn office. And I'm sure would not even return a phone call if I called her right now. But I've got a business to run, brother. I got a business to run. I wish we could all sit at home and watch the fucking view every day in our underwear, eating damn Cheez Its and, you know, jerk off and take a shower and then go outside and jump in the swimming pool. I wish that's what we could do. But we've got a down business to run here and eventually you just gotta fire people.

Speaker B: The story about that email you sent me the other day about the dog, that's, that is pretty mad. That's pretty messed up.

Speaker A: Uh, no, that's too, that's too fresh. That was like Friday, I had one, I had one Friday. Send me an email.

Speaker B: Let me say, I don't think I

Speaker A: can talk about it right now.

Speaker B: Person shouldn't have taken off. We're not saying that at all. It's just kind of a wild thing to send in the email anyway. We can, we can move on. It's fine.

Speaker A: I, I, I want to say it, but she sends me this fairly long

Speaker B: email about her downtown, like right then, like right, like right, I can't work.

Speaker A: I can't work. And I'm like, well, damn. I, you know, I get it. I, um, understand, you know, I'm, I'm sorry. I think, I think my only reply to her, you know, pretty lengthy email was, I'm sorry for your loss. I mean, what do you say? I didn't know what to say.

Speaker B: So here's my point. Bring that up. That's not one of these, like, oh my God, can you believe this person could take off from this? It's kind of, I completely understand. I would have done the same thing. It's just kind of crazy. It's kind of wild. Like, yeah,

Speaker A: this is y', all. This is like 2:30 on a Thursday. All right, brother, I'm gonna close it out. I'm getting ready to head south, guys. As we end every episode, rewards come from action, not discussion. Get your ass out from behind that desk today. Go out into the big bad world and become the mayor of your village. If you want to ride a bunch of insurance, you need to know every single person in the state that you live in. You can't sit in your damn mom's basement with the lights turned off playing Fortnite and sell damn insurance. That cannot happen. Go write good business for the agencies that you represent. Go make money for your family, for your wife, for your husband, for your kids college fund and your parents. And in laws like mine that are struggling out there, go make money for them. Write good business for the agencies that you represent and go write good business for the carriers that you represent. Bradley Flowers, I'm headed south. I love you guys. Guys, you were listening to the Insurance Guys podcast and we love each one of you. Thank you so much for being a part of our family and we'll see you back here real soon. Take care. Thanks for listening to the Insurance Guys podcast. If you need to know more about me or you need to get in touch with Scott, you can always reach me at theinsuranceguyonline.com or email me at scottprotectinsurance.com and if you need to get in touch with Mr. Bradley Flowers, go to portalinsurance.com or email him at bradleyportalinsurance.com Guys, we love you. We thank you so much for listening to our show and being a part of our family and we look forward to seeing you again next week on the next episode of the Insurance Guys Podcast. Take care.