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06/12/2025 · 5 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.
12/18/2023 · 6 min read
Build an innovation culture by creating active curiosity (not just psychological safety), running monthly idea sessions, keeping an actively maintained idea pool, inviting outsider perspectives, and asking curious questions before evaluating any undeveloped idea your team brings.
11/13/2023 · 6 min read
Build a coaching culture by training managers to ask questions instead of giving answers, deliver behavioral feedback weekly, structure peer learning sessions, and measure coaching behaviors (not just production) in manager evaluations. Psychological safety is the floor that holds it all up.
11/08/2023 · 6 min read
Insurance training fails because telling producers things doesn't change behavior. Phil Geldart's experiential approach builds skill through designed simulations, full-commitment role-play, and structured debriefs that anchor the lesson in the body, not just the head.
10/30/2023 · 5 min read
Build leaders inside your agency with a structured pre-promotion track: escalating responsibilities before the title (run a meeting, mentor a new hire, lead a project), goal-oriented mentorship pairings, codified owner instincts, and measure leadership development the way you measure production. Stop being the bottleneck.
10/25/2023 · 6 min read
Merchant Fleet CEO Brendan Keegan keeps the agents who ask business questions, not policy questions: what's changing in operations the next 24 months, where's driver turnover hurting, what does loss history reveal? Most agencies plateau because the owner is still the top producer. Stop fixing problems; build people who can.
09/11/2023 · 5 min read
Micromanagement is the costliest mistake in insurance agency leadership: it drives out your best producers, makes quality dependent on owner bandwidth, and caps the agency at the owner's attention. The fix is consistency: documented standards, trained execution, accountability against the standard instead of constant supervision.
09/06/2023 · 6 min read
Build empathy through three trainable capacities: perspective-taking, emotional recognition, and responsive action. Practice it in coaching debriefs (what was the client feeling at each stage), model it as the leader, and use it in accountability conversations to fix root causes.
09/04/2023 · 6 min read
Empathy is a trainable skill, not a personality trait. In agency leadership, it's the ability to understand a producer's or client's experience well enough to respond effectively. Teams led empathetically outperform on retention and sustained performance under pressure.
08/09/2023 · 5 min read
Core values only work when operational. Translate each value into a specific behavior, make visible decisions that cost you something to defend it, reference it in hiring and reviews, and keep the list to three to five. Your real principles are what you reward and tolerate, not the poster.
08/07/2023 · 5 min read
Your insurance agency's purpose beats your marketing budget because it filters hiring, retention, and client decisions faster than any ad spend. Make it specific enough to test against real options, co-create it with your team, and live it before you put it on the wall.
08/02/2023 · 5 min read
Owner ego shows up as control: rejecting team input, overriding the processes you wrote, taking credit for wins while blaming the team for losses, and rewarding loyalty over loyalty to the agency. Hand off one piece of authority for 60 days, then ask what makes their job harder.
06/21/2023 · 5 min read
The six traits that separate exceptional insurance agency leaders from average ones are not personality gifts, they are learnable behaviors: attitude, empathy, work ethic, coachability, self-control, and energy. Each one can be measured, trained, and reinforced inside your team if the owner is willing to model them first.
06/07/2023 · 5 min read
Agency owners know when to push and when to pivot by separating execution problems from structural problems. If better process, skill, or time would change the result, it's a dip. If the constraint is the market, carrier, or product itself, it's a cul-de-sac and the right move is to pivot.
05/29/2023 · 5 min read
Agency success that costs your marriage, kids, or health is not success, it's a very expensive hobby. Real success means a business that funds your life without consuming it. Redefine winning before the bill comes due.
05/24/2023 · 5 min read
Five leadership lessons from running a multimillion-dollar insurance sales team: lead with recognition (3-to-1 over correction), coach from the numbers, monitor floor chatter, anchor on process over emotion, and stay humble enough to learn from your producers.
05/22/2023 · 5 min read
Set agency goals that actually move premium: pick an annual revenue number, split into quarterly milestones, monthly production targets, weekly activity quotas, and daily contact counts. Share every level with the team and run a 30-minute monthly review on a standing agenda.
05/17/2023 · 5 min read
Three non-negotiables for P&C agency owners: an enforced communication standard with one defined channel and cadence for raising concerns, a deliberate work environment built on immediate, specific recognition, and direct conflict conversations the owner does not avoid. Skip any one and culture rots while the systems still look fine.
04/26/2023 · 5 min read
Three leadership traits separate the best insurance agency owners from average ones: radical ownership of outcomes (no externalizing blame), coaching instead of directing (ask more than you tell), and relentless transparency about strategy and vision. None are personality, all are practiced behaviors.
09/14/2022 · 5 min read
Three qualities separate high-performance agencies from ones that plateau: a documented accountability culture with daily leading indicators, a consistent training system (not one-time onboarding events), and alignment between marketing, sales, and service. Score your agency on each. Fix the lowest first.