One of the Pillars: Why Training Is the Foundation Every Agency Needs and Most Avoid
Hosts of The Insurance Dudes Podcast — 1,000+ episodes helping insurance agents build elite agencies
Ask most agency owners whether they believe in training and they will say yes. Ask them whether they have a training system, something documented, structured, and consistently delivered to every new team member and regularly revisited with veterans, and the honest ones will admit they do not. The gap between believing in training and actually doing training is where agencies lose the people they most need to develop and fail to develop the ones they keep.
The Pillar Framework
Craig has been working for some time on articulating the foundational elements of a high-functioning insurance agency, the things that are not optional, that cannot be skipped, and that, when absent, create the specific kinds of problems that most agency owners misdiagnose as personnel problems or market problems.
Training is one of those pillars. Not training in the sense of a two-day product knowledge session when someone is hired. Training as an ongoing, structured, intentional system for developing the capability of every person on the team, new producers, veteran agents, service staff, the owner themselves.
The reason Craig calls it a pillar rather than a feature is that without it, the structure of the agency rests on a foundation that is fundamentally unstable. The agency that does not train consistently is permanently dependent on who it can find who already knows how to do the job. It cannot develop talent. It cannot retain people who want to grow. It cannot maintain consistent quality as it scales because there is no mechanism for transferring standards.
Why Most Agencies Do Not Train
The answer is not that agency owners do not value training. Most do. The answer is that training has the wrong urgency profile.
Training is important and not urgent. The client service issue that erupted this morning is important and urgent. The carrier audit that is due Friday is important and urgent. The new hire whose ramp timeline is running long is a concern, but it has not yet become a crisis. So training gets the treatment that most important-but-not-urgent things get: it gets scheduled and then moved, scheduled and then moved, until it stops getting scheduled because the calendar is full of urgent things.
The agencies that crack this problem treat training with the same scheduling discipline that urgent things receive. They put it on the calendar as a fixed, non-negotiable commitment and they build the rest of the week's schedule around it rather than inside it. Craig recommends blocking training time first on the weekly calendar and treating it with the same cancellation policy as client appointments.
What a Real Training System Looks Like
It starts with a curriculum. What does every person who works in this agency need to know to do their job at the standard the agency has committed to? That curriculum has to be written down, not just understood by the people who currently deliver it, but documented in a way that can survive personnel changes and scale without the owner in every training session.
The curriculum breaks into levels: foundational knowledge that everyone needs from day one, intermediate skills that producers develop in their first six months, advanced capabilities that separate good agents from exceptional ones, leadership development for the people being prepared for expanded responsibility.
Each level has materials, assessments, and practice opportunities. Not just information delivery, practical application that produces real feedback. Role plays. Call reviews. Live observations followed by specific debriefs. The training system is not complete unless it includes a mechanism for verifying that the learning actually happened and the skill actually developed.
Craig is specific about the role-play resistance that shows up in every agency that tries to implement this. People hate role plays. They feel artificial. They are embarrassed. They would rather skip it. Craig's response is direct: the embarrassment you feel doing a role play in front of your colleagues is far less expensive than the embarrassment you feel losing a client because you were unprepared for an objection you had never practiced handling. Role plays are practice for the real thing. The real thing has real stakes.
Training Veteran Agents, Not Just New Hires
One of the most common training blind spots is the assumption that training is only for people who are new. Veterans do not need training, they have experience.
Craig challenges this directly. Veteran agents have experience, which means they have deeply ingrained habits. Some of those habits are excellent. Some of them are the wrong habits practiced so many times they have become invisible to the person executing them. The veteran who is underperforming relative to their experience level almost always has a habits problem that training is the only tool to address.
Regular skills refreshers for veteran staff, done respectfully, framed as professional development rather than remediation, produce measurable improvements in performance and send an important cultural signal: excellence is a standard that everyone is expected to maintain, not a level you achieve and then rest at.
What This Means for Your Agency
Audit what your training actually looks like right now. Not what you intend it to look like. What a new hire experiences in their first thirty days in terms of structured skill development. What a six-month employee gets in terms of continued coaching on their craft. What a veteran producer receives in terms of regular performance review and skills reinforcement.
If that audit reveals gaps, and it almost certainly will, pick the most important one and fix it first. Build the training session. Document it. Schedule it. Deliver it. Then build the next one.
The Bottom Line
Training is not a program you buy and install. It is a commitment you make and a system you build over time. Craig's solo is a clear articulation of why that commitment is not optional for agencies that want to grow, retain exceptional people, and maintain quality standards as they scale. The pillar is either load-bearing or it is not. In training's case, it absolutely is.
Catch the full conversation:
About Craig Pretzinger: Craig Pretzinger is co-host of The Insurance Dudes podcast and co-author of The Million Dollar Agency. He runs a high-performance P&C agency and coaches agency owners on building the operational pillars that support durable, scalable growth.
Level up your agency:
Listen to The Insurance Dudes Podcast
Get more strategies like this on our podcast. Available on all platforms.
Related Episodes
3 Leadership Traits the Best Insurance Agency Owners Embrace That Average Ones Ignore
Instrument Rated, Insurance Obsessed: Jason Levine on Flying and Agency Growth (Part 1)
Coach Craig Keeping It Kosher: What Real Coaching Looks Like in an Insurance Agency
Rewind: Randy Thompson on the Coaching and Teaching Tidbits That Never Get Old
Matt Dietz: From Survival to Scale — Growing the Agency You Fought to Build (Part 2)