Niches, positioning, carrier selection, pricing — the strategic calls that determine whether your agency grows 10% or 10x.
28 episodes from Craig Pretzinger & Jason Feltman, hosts of The Insurance Dudes Podcast
11/15/2021 · 5 min read
Agents who know exactly why they're building their agency make better decisions under pressure, stay consistent longer, and recover faster from setbacks. Craig unpacks why purpose isn't a soft topic — it's a business fundamental.
11/08/2021 · 7 min read
Urgency is one of the most misunderstood forces in agency management. Most agents either manufacture it artificially — creating pressure that clients resent — or fail to create it at all, leaving deals and decisions in endless limbo. This episode is about building real urgency that serves clients and moves agencies forward.
10/29/2021 · 6 min read
Most insurance agencies are playing defense — reacting to calls, managing problems, responding to market changes. The agencies that grow consistently have figured out how to play offense: getting ahead of client needs, market shifts, and competitive threats before they become crises.
10/29/2021 · 5 min read
The old saying is that the best defense is a good offense. Most insurance agencies run the opposite playbook — reacting to threats rather than creating advantages. This episode makes the case for flipping that equation before the market forces you to.
10/22/2021 · 5 min read
Wins, losses, and draws. Every agency has all three, but most agency owners keep score selectively — emphasizing wins, minimizing losses, and ignoring draws. The agency owners who grow consistently are the ones who score honestly and use the full picture to improve.
10/21/2021 · 6 min read
Knowing you have cognitive biases doesn't fix them. Part 2 of the Gleb Tsipursky conversation gets into the specific techniques that actually work — the pre-mortem, structured disagreement, and the information audit — applied directly to insurance agency decisions.
10/21/2021 · 6 min read
Part 2 of the conversation with behavioral scientist Gleb Tsipursky moves from diagnosis to prescription — the specific tools and habits that override the cognitive biases that lead to bad decisions in insurance agency leadership.
10/20/2021 · 5 min read
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky has spent his career studying how smart people make bad decisions — and the mechanisms behind those failures apply directly to the judgment calls insurance agency owners make every day. Part 1 covers the cognitive biases most likely to show up in your agency.
10/18/2021 · 5 min read
Every insurance agency owner operates in one of four modes at any given time: manifesting, thriving, surviving, or prevailing through adversity. Understanding which mode you're in and what it takes to shift changes how you approach every decision in your business.
10/08/2021 · 6 min read
Most insurance agency owners are working hard without a definite purpose. They know they want to grow, but they haven't done the harder work of getting crystal clear on exactly what they want — and that lack of clarity is costing them more than they realize.
10/08/2021 · 6 min read
Most agency owners are busy. Very few are purposeful. There's a difference, and that difference shows up in your production numbers, your team's energy, and whether you actually enjoy running your agency or just endure it.
10/04/2021 · 6 min read
OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — are the goal-setting framework behind some of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Here's how to apply them to your insurance agency in a way that actually drives results rather than creating more paperwork.
07/15/2021 · 6 min read
Parts 1 and 2 covered why niche works and how to build one. Part 3 tackles the hardest challenge of all: staying in your lane once you've built something worth protecting, when the very success of your specialization creates pressure to expand beyond what made it work.
07/14/2021 · 6 min read
Part 1 made the case for niche focus in insurance. Part 2 is where Josh Phanco gets into the mechanics: how you actually identify, build, and market a specialized practice in a market where being a generalist is the default and most people haven't noticed yet that it's a losing strategy.
07/13/2021 · 6 min read
The hardest discipline in insurance agency growth is saying no to business that doesn't fit your model. Josh Phanco has built his practice on a principle most agents intellectually agree with and practically ignore: staying in your lane produces better results than chasing everything.
07/12/2021 · 5 min read
The agency owners who are dominating their markets aren't the ones spending the least to acquire new clients. They're the ones who have done the math on what a client is actually worth over their lifetime — and then invested accordingly. Customer acquisition cost strategy is the game most agencies don't even know they're playing.
07/02/2021 · 5 min read
Every agency owner who wants to grow faces the same fork in the road eventually: do you build it from scratch through production and marketing, or do you buy a book that already exists? Both paths can work. Both paths can fail spectacularly. The one that's right for you depends on factors most people don't analyze carefully enough.
06/25/2021 · 5 min read
The insurance agents who are struggling right now aren't struggling because the market changed. They're struggling because they built their business assuming the market wouldn't. Change isn't a disruption to the insurance industry — it is the insurance industry. The question is whether your agency is built to ride it or fight it.
06/18/2021 · 5 min read
Every dollar you spend in your agency either buys you something today or builds something for tomorrow. Most agencies are spending almost everything on today — and then wondering why tomorrow looks exactly the same as this year.
05/10/2021 · 5 min read
Craig Pretzinger makes the case that most agents fail not from lack of effort but from lack of clarity — and that the disparity between where they are and where they want to be is almost always a clarity problem first.