Hut Hut Hike Up Your Agency Playbook: Do Not Skip This Year-End Planning Episode
Hosts of The Insurance Dudes Podcast — 1,000+ episodes helping insurance agents build elite agencies
You can skip this. You can treat December 25th as a day entirely off from thinking about your agency, close this tab, and come back in January when everyone else is also just getting started. That is absolutely an option.
But if you do that, understand what you're choosing: you're choosing to begin 2021 from a standing start, competing against the small number of agency owners who used this window to get clear, get planned, and get ahead. That gap, between the agents who plan in December and the agents who plan in January, is not as small as it sounds. It compounds.
This is the playbook episode. The hike you have to take before the new year begins.
Why Most Agency Planning Fails Before February
The problem with how most agency owners plan is not lack of ambition, it's lack of structure. They set a revenue target, maybe a new hire goal, and a vague intention to "market more." Then they hit January and the urgency of daily operations absorbs everything. By February, the plan is a document in a folder nobody is opening.
Real planning isn't setting targets. Real planning is engineering the conditions under which targets become inevitable, or at least significantly more likely. That requires a different kind of thinking than most agents do in December.
The playbook audit is where Craig starts every year. It's a structured review of what your agency actually ran on this year, not what you planned, but what actually happened, and an honest assessment of where the machinery needs to be rebuilt before you push the throttle again.
The Playbook Audit: What to Look at Before January
1. Where did your growth actually come from?
Pull your new business from this year. Not your total premium, your actual new accounts. How many of them came from referrals? How many from purchased leads? How many from digital sources? How many from walk-in or word of mouth? How many from carrier programs?
If you can't answer that question with specific numbers, you've been running your marketing on intuition rather than data, and that means you've been spending money and time without knowing what's working. Fix that before January. Build the tracking, even if it's a simple spreadsheet. You cannot improve what you don't measure.
2. Where did your losses come from?
Same exercise on the outbound side. Cancellations, non-renewals, mid-term downgrades. Why did they happen? Were they rate-driven? Service-driven? Did specific segments of your book cancel at higher rates than others? Is there a producer whose retention is significantly below the agency average?
Most agencies know their loss ratio. Fewer know their cancellation reason ratio. The ones who know why clients are leaving have a significant advantage in fixing the underlying problem.
3. Who are your best clients and what do they look like?
Your best clients are not just your highest-premium clients. They're the clients who are easiest to retain, who refer most reliably, who have the fewest service demands relative to their premium, and who represent the demographics and risk profiles you can underwrite most competitively. Do you know who they are? Can you describe them specifically enough to build a marketing strategy around finding more of them?
If your answer to that is "our best clients are people who pay their bills on time," that's not specific enough to target. Get specific.
4. What did your best producer do differently?
If you have more than one producer, you have a natural experiment running in your agency every day. The gap between your top performer and your median performer is a data set. What did the top producer do differently, in terms of activity, process, follow-up, referral generation, close rate, or cross-sell conversion, that explains the gap?
The answers to that question are your training curriculum for next year. Stop building your producer development program on theory and start building it on the demonstrated behavior of your actual top performer.
5. What systems broke this year?
Every agency has processes that are supposed to run reliably and don't. The onboarding that keeps getting skipped. The renewal call that doesn't happen on time. The cross-sell follow-up that falls through the cracks. The producer accountability check-in that slides when things get busy.
Name three processes that broke this year. Decide whether to fix them, delegate them, or eliminate them. Then do that before January. Because if you don't change the system, January produces the same breakdowns December did, just with a new number on the calendar.
The Hike Metaphor and Why It Matters
Craig calls it "hiking up your playbook" for a reason. A hike is a deliberate, sustained effort that takes you somewhere you can't reach by staying in the valley. It's uncomfortable. It requires sustained effort over terrain that isn't always clear. And the view from the top, the clarity you get from having done the work, is the payoff.
Most agency owners live in the valley of daily operations. The view from down there is short. You can see what's immediately in front of you: today's calls, today's quotes, today's problems. You cannot see the shape of your agency, the trends in your book, the patterns in your performance. You cannot plan from the valley. You have to hike.
This episode is the hike. Do the audit. Pull the numbers. Have the honest conversations with yourself, and with your team, about what this year actually produced and why. Then build next year's plan on that foundation, not on hope.
What the Playbook Looks Like When It's Rebuilt
A strong agency playbook going into 2021 has a few specific elements:
A production target that's broken into monthly milestones, with a clear explanation of what activities drive each milestone.
A marketing calendar for Q1 with specific campaigns, channels, and budgets assigned before January 1st.
A producer development plan that names the specific skills and behaviors each producer needs to improve, with a timeline and accountability structure.
A client experience map that identifies every touchpoint in the client journey, new client onboarding, policy delivery, claims follow-up, annual review, referral request, and assigns someone accountable for each.
A hiring plan that anticipates growth and gets ahead of it rather than reacting to it.
None of these need to be perfect. All of them need to exist.
The Bottom Line
January is not a magical reset. It's just the day after December 31st. The agencies that have extraordinary first quarters are the ones that did extraordinary December planning, while everyone else was waiting for the clock to roll over and the momentum to appear from nowhere.
Hike up your playbook before the new year starts. The view from up there is worth every uncomfortable step it takes to get there.
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-performing P&C agency and coaches insurance agents on systems, mindset, and 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
Instrument Rated, Insurance Obsessed: Jason Levine on Flying and Agency Growth (Part 1)
One of the Pillars: Why Training Is the Foundation Every Agency Needs and Most Avoid
Matt Dietz: From Survival to Scale — Growing the Agency You Fought to Build (Part 2)
Brett Young's Mega Agency Playbook: The Operational Moves That Drive Scale (Part 2)
Mount Up and Scale: Brett Young on What It Actually Takes to Build a Mega Agency (Part 1)