Failure Is Inevitable: What Covid Week One Taught Every Insurance Agent

Week one of Covid taught insurance agents that failure is inevitable and uncertainty is the operating condition, not the exception. Lean on existing relationships. Expect to fail at video selling and remote operations before you get good. Build internal confidence that doesn't require the environment to cooperate.

What happens when every rule your agency runs on disappears overnight?

March 2020 didn't feel real in real time. One week you're running a normal agency, prospecting, quoting, doing lunch appointments, shaking hands at networking events. The next week all of that is simply gone. Not declining. Gone.

For a lot of agents, that first week was a genuine identity crisis. So much of what had defined their daily work, the in-person relationship building, the office rhythm, the face-to-face close, evaporated overnight. What do you do when the activity you've built your business around is no longer available to you?

What Jason kept coming back to in that first chaotic week was a principle that sounds almost counterintuitively calm for a crisis moment: failure is inevitable, and that's okay. Not okay in a passive, give-up kind of way. Okay in the sense that struggling, pivoting, getting things wrong, and trying again is the actual process, not the exception to the process.

Agents who had built their confidence on "I always know what to do" were paralyzed. Agents who had built their confidence on "I can figure out what to do" were already moving.

What actually held up when everything else got scrambled?

There's a small, ridiculous detail from that week that kept coming up in conversations: the hand sanitizer shortage. It sounds trivial in retrospect, but in the moment it was genuinely disorienting. You couldn't find it anywhere. When you finally did, it was marked up 400%. The whole thing felt absurd, and it kind of was.

But here's what the hand sanitizer shortage was actually revealing: the difference between scarcity that matters and scarcity that doesn't. People were stockpiling something because it felt like control in a situation where control was gone. The same panic-hoarding impulse was happening in business. Agents were rushing to do something, anything, just to feel like they were responding. Cold email blasts. Frantic social media posts. Pivots that made no sense.

Jason's take was simpler. Breathe. Assess what's actually true right now. Your customers still need insurance. They still have questions. They still have renewals coming up. The product didn't disappear, the delivery channel just got disrupted. That's a different kind of problem than most people were treating it as.

The agents who paused to think clearly in week one put themselves miles ahead by week four. The ones who panicked and sprayed messaging everywhere mostly damaged relationships they'd spent years building.

Three things that held up when everything else got scrambled:

1. Relationships you'd already built were still there. Your existing book didn't vanish. Customers who trusted you before Covid still trusted you. That trust was actually more valuable in uncertainty, lean into it.

2. Failure isn't the opposite of success in this business; it's part of the path. Every agent who figures out how to sell over video, work a remote team, or prospect digitally is going to fail at it repeatedly before they get it right. That's not a detour. That's the work.

3. Humor is load-bearing infrastructure for your mental state. The hand sanitizer jokes weren't just gallows humor. They were a pressure valve. Agents who could find something absurd to laugh about in week one were demonstrably more functional by week three. Take your business seriously. Don't take the absurdity personally.

How do I build an agency that produces results without depending on in-person?

The Covid disruption was an accelerant. Every weakness in your agency, your dependence on in-person prospecting, your lack of a digital presence, your inability to manage staff remotely, got exposed fast and hard. That's not comfortable, but it is useful.

Use the data from that exposure. If the first week of a pandemic revealed that your agency couldn't function without in-person activity, you don't have an operations problem, you have a system design problem. What would it look like to build an agency that can produce results regardless of whether your team is in the building?

The mindset shift Jason kept coming back to is this: stop treating uncertainty as a problem to be solved and start treating it as a condition to operate in. Uncertainty isn't going away. Markets shift, carriers reprice, pandemics happen. Agents who build resilience into their self-concept, who expect to fail at new things and stay in the game anyway, are the ones who compound year over year, regardless of external conditions.

If you found yourself paralyzed in week one of Covid, that's valuable information. It tells you that your confidence is still external, still dependent on conditions being normal. The work is to build the kind of internal confidence that doesn't require the environment to cooperate.

Why is your relationship with failure the only thing that matters in a crisis?

Week one of Covid was a masterclass in the only thing that actually matters in a crisis: your relationship with failure and uncertainty. The agents who treated it as a catastrophe got stuck. The agents who treated it as a hard pivot, disorienting, yes, but navigable, started building the skills and systems that would carry them through. Failure is inevitable. What you do immediately after is the whole game.

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About Jason Feltman: Co-host of The Insurance Dudes and insurance agency owner. Jason brings an unfiltered take on the real challenges of building an agency, including the weeks when everything breaks at once.

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