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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.
08/10/2022 · 5 min read
Manage team energy through rejection by normalizing the call ratio up front, celebrating activity not just outcomes, building mid-day recovery rituals between calling blocks, naming hard days out loud, and using peer accountability. Resilience is environment design, not willpower.
08/08/2022 · 4 min read
Pamela De La Cruz grew her agency by treating personal energy as a business asset. She tracked her morning energy against team production, locked in a non-negotiable morning protocol, removed depleting tasks from her plate, and built energy awareness into her one-on-ones with producers.
07/27/2022 · 4 min read
When the numbers go hard, Bryan Taylor protects culture by separating market conditions from performance failures, handling underperformer conversations quickly and privately ("here's what I'm seeing in your activity data"), keeping the win-of-the-week ritual alive, and narrating his own resilience out loud so the team learns the move.
07/25/2022 · 4 min read
Bryan Taylor runs deliberate positivity as agency infrastructure, not personality. He audits meeting tone, runs specific recognition (Sarah handled X exactly right) instead of generic praise, and refuses fear-based management. Result: lower producer turnover, higher engagement, and a client experience that produces referrals organically.
03/28/2022 · 5 min read
Agent identity caps the agency at your personal capacity. Owner identity builds enterprise value beyond any one person. The shift requires systems thinking, real leadership over management, and permission to let your team produce results instead of you.
11/08/2021 · 7 min read
Real urgency in P&C sales is concrete risk tied to the prospect's actual situation plus a clear next step, not fake deadlines. Inside the agency, real urgency means naming the one issue you have been deprioritizing for weeks, assigning a 30-day resolution date, and treating it like a client commitment.
10/30/2021 · 5 min read
Laura Harris's framework: surrender control to documented processes, redefine winning to include team health and business value (not just revenue), and treat your process library as the one asset competitors cannot copy. Build one process, run it 30 days, refine, repeat.
10/30/2021 · 6 min read
Documented agency processes drive profitability through four mechanisms: lower error cost, faster onboarding, scalable service quality, and recovered owner time. Start with the highest-frequency transactions (quoting, binding, renewals, claims), write the steps, have someone else test them, then iterate on a quarterly review cadence.
10/29/2021 · 5 min read
Proactive agencies grow because they play offense on three fronts: client retention (reach out 60 days before renewal), team retention (ask producers what would keep them two years), and market shifts (read carrier signals early). Protect 10 hours a week for proactive work and delegate the reactive.
10/22/2021 · 5 min read
Every agency has wins, losses, and draws right now. Run the 90-minute self-assessment: score retention, new business production, team performance, profitability, client satisfaction, and owner time allocation with actual numbers. Name the losses. Find the draws that are eating capacity. Build one fix for the biggest loss.
10/22/2021 · 6 min read
Most agency owners who do this assessment honestly land in draw territory: revenue flat, team stable but not growing, owner busy but not strategic. Winning means positive trajectory and growth problems. Losing means declining leading indicators. Drawing means comfortable stagnation. The diagnosis determines the intervention.
10/21/2021 · 7 min read
Three de-biasing techniques that actually move agency decisions: the pre-mortem (assume the decision failed, list why), structured disagreement (assign one person to argue against the plan), and the information audit (where did this data come from, who has a different view).
10/21/2021 · 6 min read
Stop trusting your gut on big agency calls. Use the EGRIP framework: name your Emotions, clarify Goals, separate Reality from assumption, Integrate dissenting perspectives, and run a Planning pre-mortem. Build it into hiring, financial, and carrier decisions before you commit.
10/20/2021 · 5 min read
Four cognitive biases drain agency decisions: confirmation bias (only seeing what supports your call), sunk cost (keeping the producer because of past salary spent), availability bias (one vivid loss skews your whole strategy), and overconfidence (10 years of experience builds blind spots).
