Page 4 of 43 · 845 total episodes
10/31/2025 · 5 min read
Mark Flockhart built Valor Insurance Group on four reinforcing pillars: content that educates clients before they have a claim, carrier placement matched to risk profile, lead filtering for fit over volume, and documented training that makes the team's expertise transferable.
10/24/2025 · 6 min read
Empathy is structural, not personality. Engineer it into the agency with pause protocols (one clarifying question before any response), curiosity about what is driving behavior, and weekly team rituals that surface what is hard. Empathetically engineered cultures retain clients and producers.
10/20/2025 · 5 min read
Susana Gibb runs her agency like a director runs a production. Confidence is rehearsed, not waited for. Listening means hearing what's under the objection. Authenticity beats scripts. Accountability is collegial because ensemble work demands it. Hire for the non-industry competencies and your producers stop sounding like robots.
10/10/2025 · 6 min read
Kettle uses machine learning trained on satellite imagery, weather, and vegetation data plus funded community-level mitigation (controlled burns, brush management, defensible space) to actually lower wildfire risk, not just price it more precisely. For agents in wildfire and catastrophe states, this is the distribution opportunity replacing the carriers walking away.
09/27/2025 · 6 min read
Melissa Dillon teaches insurance agents to treat failure as data, not verdict. After every miss, ask what specifically did not work instead of "I'm bad at this." Build psychological safety on the team so mistakes produce learning instead of defensive behavior.
09/19/2025 · 6 min read
Approach clients, team, and family from genuine care rather than fear or transactional calculation. Clients detect the difference, and it shows up in referrals, retention, and team stability. Brian Ahearn's love-based framework treats love as an active decision in each interaction, not a feeling that happens to you.
09/16/2025 · 5 min read
Roger Short built Life Insurance Academy on a trust-first sales model: every interaction must reinforce the same brand promise, agents lead with understanding the client's risk (not price), and educational infrastructure makes product mastery scalable across a team. Consistency is a learnable discipline, and it's what converts leads into loyalty.
09/05/2025 · 6 min read
InsureGrid eliminates insurance agents' biggest time drain by replacing manual policy-data collection with a secure prospect-authorized data share. Twenty prospect conversations a week at 30 minutes saved per conversation is ten reclaimed hours. Speed-to-accurate-quote becomes a real competitive edge.
08/29/2025 · 6 min read
Julian Chambers writes ten Medicare Advantage policies a week by treating personal development as production infrastructure: a morning routine that prepares his mental state, daily activity numbers locked to a target, and consistency over intensity. Network marketing taught him the discipline before insurance did.
08/15/2025 · 6 min read
Don Wilson's insurance branding playbook makes the agency impossible to forget: target one specific demographic, run physically memorable prospecting (oversized novelty checks, hand-delivered pastries), and put employees first so client experience follows. Authentic and unconventional beats generic and digital.
08/08/2025 · 6 min read
Private equity buyers value insurance agencies on revenue quality, multi-year retention, low owner dependency, clean financials, and consistent multi-year growth. Build to those metrics whether you ever plan to sell or not, because they are also the operating metrics that make the agency cash flow.
08/01/2025 · 5 min read
Surviving a scratch agency through a hard market means increasing client communication during rate cycles instead of going quiet, hiring producers for resilience indicators not production history, building retention systems in quiet periods, and treating AI as a tool to remove repetitive workflow tasks, not a replacement for trusted advisors.
07/16/2025 · 6 min read
Build an insurance agency worth working for by screening producers harder, running honest performance conversations at week three (not month three), and helping every producer articulate their why. Culture, not a $10K raise, is what keeps the good ones.
07/09/2025 · 5 min read
Tung Le grew a Houston Allstate agency from launch in March 2020 to $12 million in premium by separating service and sales headcount past a critical book size, using zip code loss ratio data to guide marketing spend, and refusing to onboard bad hires under scaling pressure.
07/02/2025 · 6 min read
Cassidy Arbeli left a successful captive agency to build a multi-business independent operation with documented systems, a real team culture, and the structural freedom to step away without the business collapsing. Her framework: systems before scale, culture as a recruiting advantage, and closing the business education gap.
06/25/2025 · 5 min read
Dan Kitajima built a $17M captive agency, then his carrier non-renewed $6M in policies right after he signed a $20K monthly lease. The forced jump to independent gave him market access across twelve carriers, higher close rates, broker-fee transparency, and a more profitable book per premium dollar.
06/18/2025 · 6 min read
Survive insurance agency adversity by documenting every core process, removing problem clients before they cost more than their revenue, and treating acquisitions as a way to buy infrastructure (not just clients). Ben Bucher built multi-state agencies on lessons learned during near-collapse.
06/12/2025 · 6 min read
BJ Hill built Summit Insurance to $18M in premium in Loveland, Colorado by running his agency like a championship basketball team: culture in the daily reps, structured 90-day onboarding, accountability without blame, sharp self-awareness, and grit that outlasts talent.
06/05/2025 · 5 min read
Pick one or two commercial verticals, learn them deeper than competitors will, and build referral pipelines with CPAs, commercial bankers, and attorneys serving that niche. Specialty books renew at higher rates, escape price competition, and compound lifetime value the way personal lines never do.
06/05/2025 · 5 min read
Spend 70 percent of every call understanding the client and 30 percent presenting solutions. Treat every no as data, not defeat. Use CRM and automated follow-up at 30, 60, 90, and 180 days to amplify the relationship, not replace it. Continuous learning is the only consistent production predictor.
