RHS 163 - Tanner Hackett On Scaling a Management Liability Company

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Speaker 4 In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

Speaker 3 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.

Speaker 5 Today, we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you. A conversation with Tanner Hackett, the CEO and founder of Counterpart, a insurtech management liability company, which is

Speaker 5 using

Speaker 5 AI and ML and third-party data sources to learn about what is ultimately a very specialized liability coverage and particularly focusing this product on small businesses.

Speaker 5 And we talk why small businesses, why management liability. We talk about Tanner's origin story.

Speaker 5 We talk about his strategy to go or to deliver counterpart as a product through wholesalers versus going out to a broader broader retail market. And we talk about entrepreneurship and leadership.

Speaker 5 And this is just a tremendous conversation. These are the kind of conversations when I'm meeting someone new and connecting with them.

Speaker 5 This is kind of why I do this podcast. Like I love these types of conversations.

Speaker 5 I mean, I love all the conversations I have on the show, but in particular, when I get to meet someone new and really get this deep on business and in particularly our industry, it's just an absolutely phenomenal experience.

Speaker 5 And I think you're going to love this conversation. Before we get there, I want to give you, the listeners of this show, a huge shout out.
You continue to listen.

Speaker 5 You continue to be part of this community.

Speaker 5 It is always so special to me that you guys take time out of your day and consider this show because I know if you're listening to this podcast, then you're not listening to others or not focusing on other things.

Speaker 5 And that means we're continuing to deliver value, which is the goal of the show, right? I do this work

Speaker 5 to deliver value to you guys. And I just appreciate

Speaker 5 that it's connecting. And I appreciate that you listen and you you give me that mind space.
If you're looking to go deeper, I recently launched a new content community, Finding Peak.

Speaker 5 It's, you know, the tagline is the pursuit of peak performance in business life and insurance. I created this,

Speaker 5 I created this resource and you can go to findingpeak.com, subscribe. It's free.
Check it out.

Speaker 5 We do do some deeper dives and some kind of Q ⁇ A stuff and some very specific question and answer

Speaker 5 type material that is paid, but it's like $7 a month.

Speaker 5 And really the reason I do that is just to give you guys, as I want buy-in from the people who are going to be engaged, who are going to be asking questions.

Speaker 5 And that buy-in is really just a super small barrier that,

Speaker 5 you know, after the fees and stuff of the platform, I don't really make anything. It's mostly just I want to know who the committed people are and focus my attention there.
But it's free for anyone.

Speaker 5 75 plus percent of the content that comes out there is free. So if you want to check it out, go to findingpeak.com, pop your email in, subscribe.

Speaker 5 You know, the reason for that community is to help you guys better understand what's happening at Rogue Risk now, and what we've learned, what I've personally learned, what our team is constantly giving me feedback on what's happening day to day and building out this kind of digital, distributed,

Speaker 5 human-optimized agency that I would consider at least one prototype for the agency of the future.

Speaker 5 And the successes that we're having, the challenges that we're having, how we overcome that, how we think through things. That's what Finding Peak is all about.

Speaker 5 And as we touched a little bit in this conversation with Tanner, it's the emotional side of the equation that oftentimes we do not consider as leaders when often it's the emotional side of the business that creates the problems, that ultimately creates the fragility in our business.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 5 if you're interested in more beyond this podcast, go to findingpeak.com. I encourage you to do so.
I want to give a big shout out to Better Agency.

Speaker 5 Better Agency recently launched a Raider on their platform, a PL Raider. Big fan of Better Agency.
They are not a sponsor of this show, but I love the people over there. I love what they're doing.

Speaker 5 I love what they're trying to do. And whether you use Better Agency or not, I think you have to give Will and Nick and the entire team at Better Agency.

Speaker 5 props for continuing to push, continuing to innovate.

Speaker 5 And I think it's just fun to see men and women that I really like, that I really care about, doing great work and providing new products to our ecosystem.

Speaker 5 So big shout out to Will and Nick and the entire team over at Better Agency. Last but not least, huge shout out, of course, to my people, the parent company of Rogue Risk, SIAA.

Speaker 5 Guys, if you're looking to maximize your book of business, if you're looking to take the game to another level, if you're looking to connect with other professionals, other agencies, a network of insurance individuals who are doing tremendous things.

Speaker 5 And as I said, maximize the revenue out of your current book of business and potentially create growth opportunities in many places that you may not have seen before, I would consider SIA.

Speaker 5 I would start, you know, I would start

Speaker 5 the journey into what it means to become a member of SIA. And you can do that by going to sia.com.
All right, guys, if you love this content, please share, like, whatever you do.

Speaker 5 That's how we continue to grow the audience. I appreciate you all for listening.
Let's get on to Tanner.

Speaker 7 We don't produce the video, so you don't have to, I don't know if that matters to you. Don't worry about that.

Speaker 4 Oh, it's just the audio.

Speaker 7 Audio only. Yep.
I just use the video so that we can, you know, just,

Speaker 7 it's easier to talk to somebody when you can see their facial expression.

Speaker 4 I actually like that. Yeah, let's do that.
Okay. Yeah, cool.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I only produce the audio, but I use the video just for talking purposes.

Speaker 4 Okay, wonderful.

Speaker 7 Cool.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 I put on clothes for you, you know, so

Speaker 4 put on kind of a clothes.

Speaker 7 You do, uh, you look good.

Speaker 4 I mean,

Speaker 7 you look good. That's, that's, you know, so that's, that's a good thing.
Um,

Speaker 7 well, so, all right, man. Well, hey, I, uh, like I said, I appreciate you coming on the show, um, you know, looking through everything that you're doing.

Speaker 7 Um, I, I, I hadn't heard about you before your team reached out, but once I started digging into what you're doing, I was obviously very interested and

Speaker 7 would love to get, you know, what, what's the, what's the origin story for, for you? Let's start with you. What's what's the origin story?

Speaker 7 I know it's not every little boy and girl's dream to grow up to be an insurance professional, at least not most of us. However, we all fall into it somehow.
So I'm interested in kind of

Speaker 7 where you come from and how you got here. And we can start there and then dig in.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me. As I mentioned,

Speaker 4 I've been following your podcast for a bit. And, you know, this is a

Speaker 4 great recognition that we're doing something right to be here today talking to you.

Speaker 4 We've intentionally been pretty quiet about what we've been doing publicly.

Speaker 4 We operate through the broker channel.

Speaker 4 So, you know,

Speaker 4 we've been galvanizing that distribution channel about all the good things we're doing.

Speaker 4 So I wouldn't be surprised if you start to hear more and more about us as brokers tout our benefits to small businesses.

Speaker 4 For me personally, even that was a learning, just looking at distribution and how that works in insurance.

Speaker 4 I come from

Speaker 4 more of an entrepreneurial tech background. I've started a few companies before,

Speaker 4 one in the e-commerce space in Southeast Asia, a large e-commerce company that was actually bought by Alibaba a few years ago,

Speaker 4 and also built a large marketing company out in New York, close to you.

Speaker 4 I was

Speaker 4 working

Speaker 4 in Manhattan. And so this journey into insurance, as you hinted out, you know,

Speaker 4 it wasn't what I aspired to uh at a young age it was actually something i fell into as

Speaker 4 um i i became acquainted with this one product that i kept purchasing uh as a as a business owner which was management liability um it's something that was required through uh the covenants in in raising venture money to to purchase dno and in new york state obviously having epli is super important

Speaker 4 um

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 so, but it was this roundabout way where I was

Speaker 4 counterpart, actually, you can tell from the name,

Speaker 4 it was actually begun as a HR tech company. So

Speaker 4 I had to move back to Los Angeles for some family reasons. And

Speaker 4 I had this idea in the back of my head, which was predicated on

Speaker 4 some success we had in my previous company, Button, the marketing company, where we really put people first um and we did so by investing in software systems

Speaker 4 uh compliance uh collaboration tools um

Speaker 4 that were just starting to come out you know this was uh early 2000 2013 14 15 hr software was starting to heat up you had tools like lattice and culturamp um you had peos that were beginning to to take off um we saw how these tools could be applied to

Speaker 4 help the employees with everything from

Speaker 4 finding the right employees, so hiring, onboarding employees,

Speaker 4 training, learning and development software, collaboration tools, Slack was really taking off.

Speaker 4 So we were looking at how this framework could be applied to create these workplaces where people were empowered to operate, where there was more collaboration across the team, and people stayed for a really long time.

Speaker 4 Like we just created this strong culture around this tooling. And

Speaker 4 so, yeah, I started this company, was very jazzed about bringing software tech, democratizing HR software to small businesses where I saw this need because at a certain size of company, you have compliance teams, you know, you have risk teams, you have heads of finance, you have heads of HR.

Speaker 4 If you're 10, 15 people, you don't have that infrastructure right like what are you going to who do you reach out to um

Speaker 4 and so i saw this as a tool which is a pretty lightweight way of um bringing bringing this infrastructure in um the challenge is that um even this is you know a second order priority for a small business you're thinking about you know how are you going to make payroll this month you're thinking about you know your your goals this quarter or just you know making the best pie you can make uh let alone thinking about compliance and your governance and collaboration so um we we struggled with this tool we there wasn't a lot of buy-in talking to all my entrepreneurial friends um it was the got a little bit of the heisman where it's you know come back to me next quarter in the next six months and the you know the red alerts go off in your brain when you hear this as an entrepreneur um i'm sure there's a lot of people listening to this podcast that can relate it's just you know when you hear that you got to pivot and in my case uh

Speaker 4 uh the the realization was this thing that I had been purchasing for a while, management liability, was actually had coverages for the externalities that occur when you're not doing these things, when you don't have a good hiring practice, when you don't have compliance,

Speaker 4 when you're not collaborating. This is when there's friction in the company.

Speaker 4 uh could lead for lead to wrongful terminations, could lead to harassment, could lead to discrimination, could lead to negligence, misrepresentations, the things that

Speaker 4 lead to directors and officers claims,

Speaker 4 lead to employment practices claims, fiduciary claims, crime claims.

Speaker 4 And yeah, seeing an uptick in these

Speaker 4 in 2015, 16, 17,

Speaker 4 yeah, it became very relevant or

Speaker 4 very evident that there was a need for somebody to think about these products holistically of how do you attack the risk management piece while at the same time

Speaker 4 think about this product and what the needs are for a small business. So here I am,

Speaker 4 this insurance geek now. I'm obsessed with insurance.
I think this product is so powerful. I think it's so important for our society.
But

Speaker 4 to be honest, you know, we have a long ways to go

Speaker 4 with the adoption of technology in the same way that I've seen it applied in my previous companies.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So there's a, I have a whole bunch of questions in there.

Speaker 7 You know, first,

Speaker 7 what was your initial kind of feelings when you, so you're, you're starting, you have this HR company that you're, you're working on and testing out in the market and talking about and you start to pivot into insurance.

Speaker 7 You know, what was the first

Speaker 7 kind of this? Because to me, you know, for a long time, I fought the idea. Let me reposition this question.
For a long time, I fought the idea that insurance was different, right?

Speaker 7 I always heard, we're different. This is different.
We're unique and all these kinds of things. And for a long time, I was like, eh,

Speaker 7 everybody loves to say they're different, but they're not really, right? It's the same set of problems passed through a different set of filters. Well, I have come.

Speaker 7 to really believe and really just in them. So I've been in the insurance industry for

Speaker 7 almost 17 years now. And

Speaker 7 it wasn't until these last three years that i launched rogue risk my own digital commercial agency and

Speaker 7 uh that i really started to to believe that insurance was different right there are the state regulatory matters the uh technology the information capture um the the the disparate nature of the of the providers right the the fact that you have all these different manufacturers in terms of insurance carriers that are distributing their product on all these different platforms in all these different ways right it's in most other industries,

Speaker 7 there's a universal connector between all the manufacturers and the distributors. And in insurance, there really isn't.

Speaker 7 So when you first started running up against some of these issues, what was the first one that kind of you went, oh, wow, okay, there's this is a little different than maybe building a marketing tech company or an e-commerce tech company?

Speaker 4 Man, there are so many.

Speaker 4 I love the way you put this. And by the way,

Speaker 4 you as an entrepreneur, I just want to celebrate that for you to launch your own company. And it is not easy.

Speaker 4 It is a humbling experience in so many different dimensions.

Speaker 4 And that is the backbone of our society. That is why we're focused on small businesses, because it is so hard.
And that bar is getting higher and higher every day to go and pursue your dream.

Speaker 4 So yeah, we are. dedicated to

Speaker 4 helping people understand what their exposures are, helping them grow. I think me personally, in this entrepreneurial experience,

Speaker 4 there's that old saying of

Speaker 4 history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Speaker 4 And you can apply that same lens to just about any entrepreneurial journey of it's kind of pattern matching of the things that are very, very similar.

Speaker 4 And those things, and then you try and figure out where there's asymmetry.

Speaker 4 And for me, that asymmetry happened in distribution, you know, and looking at my previous companies,

Speaker 4 you know, e-commerce

Speaker 4 and marketing, you have partnerships, you have direct,

Speaker 4 you have affiliate, you have performance,

Speaker 4 there's lots of different ways in which you can get your product to the market. And what's nuanced about insurance is this is a very complicated product

Speaker 4 and especially in the case of management liability, not many people know what what it is. And so

Speaker 4 there's a great rationale to have a broker involved in this process.

Speaker 4 And then there's this wholesale broker side too, which aggregates the risk for retail agents because retail agents have to understand this very broad expanse of products.

Speaker 4 And it's tough to keep these all in their head, you know, to know what the difference in exposure is between

Speaker 4 uh product liability and uh employment practices liability.

Speaker 4 And so understanding the dimensions, the roles of these different participants in the distribution chain, where they fit, where we should fit as a specialty product, you know, because management liability isn't necessarily required by law.

Speaker 4 It's usually contractual or it's, you know, it's highly recommended, depending on the industry or state that you're in.

Speaker 7 uh we have

Speaker 7 seen as a luxury to a lot of to a lot of startups they see purchasing this product as a luxury as like you hit a certain level of success and then you get this coverage and i'm like, bad, to me, this is like day one kind of stuff, you know, you, you, you hire the wrong person in the wrong way and you're coming, your, your idea is over before you even get out the door for no reason that has to do with your product, you know, I mean, that's the kind of thing.

Speaker 4 I love the way you said that, too, because

Speaker 4 yeah, it's, it's existential, right?

Speaker 4 One of these things goes wrong. You're human.
We say things, things happen, we make a mistake.

Speaker 4 So, and that's game over for your company if you get hit with one of these claims or one of these lawsuits. And I think that that was the big learning.

Speaker 4 It's like, oh my gosh, this thing is so important.

Speaker 4 There's this distribution chain. There's the scale of knowledge about these products.
Where do we fit?

Speaker 4 How do we help to communicate our novelty in the market and the way that we're approaching this, the value that we bring? to the small business

Speaker 4 in the most efficient way. And we work with wholesale brokers.
So wholesale brokers are the experts in the space and they help to distribute to retail agents.

Speaker 4 And obviously the retail agents working directly with the small businesses.

Speaker 4 So we're trying to figure out ways to partner with our wholesale brokers to help educate the retail agents who are at the point of sale of small businesses

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 make sure that this message is delivered and why we're different from the 10 other markets that might be providing a competitive service.

Speaker 7 Why did you decide to go, and a lot of people do, so this isn't like a judgment, just interested.

Speaker 7 Why did you decide to go wholesale to retail versus just going right to bringing on retail brokers and working with retailers directly?

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's kind of the power law.

Speaker 4 You know, looking at having tens of thousands of agents

Speaker 4 and then looking at

Speaker 4 wholesale brokers who are already experts in this product line. You know, it was a pretty easy sell to show them

Speaker 4 how we thought about this differently, what our unique coverages were,

Speaker 4 how quickly we could get a product to them, our insured services, our claims management support. You know, it was kind of like you talk to a wholesale broker for three minutes and they get it.

Speaker 4 It was a much longer sales process for a retail agent to wrap their heads around, okay, got it, management liability, it should be in the toolkit of any small business,

Speaker 4 and here's where counterpart stands apart.

Speaker 4 So the wholesale agents have been fantastic from giving us leverage with this distribution channel. They're aggregators of this risk.
And we can go to work with one group.

Speaker 4 And we work with the largest wholesale brokers in the world. I think we have about 30, 35 wholesale brokerages that we work with today.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 yeah,

Speaker 4 they give us volume of submissions, but also our disseminators, you know, they're the shepherds of our product. They're galvanizing adoption with the retail agents and with small businesses.

Speaker 4 So it's been a it's a very strong partnership with our wholesale brokers.

Speaker 7 Have you found that they've been willing to take on the product and distribute it?

Speaker 7 Because obviously for them to push your product, they're not pushing say a relationship that they previously had with another with another, you know, I like to think of carriers as manufacturers so you know i mean they're they're they're you're obviously moving in on a space where they already had relationships for management liability product have you found um

Speaker 7 have you found that your value propositions which i'm which i'm really interested in i would like you to get to have you found that they see your value propositions as a competitive advantage and as a differentiator or you know have you has it been just you're another one in the mix that they're quoting or like what what has been your experience and i'm sure it's different with every single one but you know kind of in general, have you found that the uptick has been fast or has it been,

Speaker 7 you know, you have to really work for it?

Speaker 4 No, it's, it's been remarkably consistent. And as I mentioned, when we share with them

Speaker 4 not only the forms, but, you know, we share our service model as well, which is based on speed, which is based on using third-party data.

Speaker 4 to be smarter about a risk so we can get really aggressive in certain cases. In other cases, we're going to explain why we just were not comfortable with the exposures of the small business.

Speaker 4 But it's that quick turnaround time that brokers need to see in this small business space where they're being flooded with submissions.

Speaker 4 This is premium values that are pretty low, also pretty low risk. So this is a very transactional, these are very transactional accounts.

Speaker 4 where in large part, they just need somebody that's going to be there to respond quickly, to pick up the phone, to discuss options with them.

Speaker 4 And that's through combining technology, workflows, data with an unbelievable team of, we call them risk engineers, underwriters that are there to support our broker community. So yeah,

Speaker 4 it's been remarkable just

Speaker 4 how much support we've received from the wholesale broker channel and how quickly we've been able to grow

Speaker 4 with them.

Speaker 7 Yeah, this is. anecdotal, but do you find when you say like risk engineers, people look at you like you have three heads on your, like they're like, what the hell are you talking talking about?

Speaker 4 I do. And people like, not only do they look at me, they say to my face.
And

Speaker 4 I think it goes to kind of the point you mentioned before of like this, this

Speaker 4 industry has a certain philosophy and a certain inertia in moving forward. And I want to question certain things.
I think like there's too much around this, this idea of disrupt.

Speaker 4 That's not what I want to do. But I want to create transparency.
I want to question, you know, should an underwriter be doing underwriting jobs in today's environment where data is so accessible?

Speaker 4 And it can get you a large part of the way there. What is the point of an underwriter? An underwriter is actually, you know, to help

Speaker 4 a system learn, to train a system, to create the rating factors so that there's consistency in the system.

Speaker 4 And it's observing what are the externalities, how is the market shifting, and how does our rating model or coverage need to evolve?

Speaker 4 And then for unique risks to be able to jump in and support the broker and the small business, and then use this as a data point to retrain them all.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, I truly do see them as these engineers, more so than underwriters. Underwriters is, it doesn't capture all the value and all the contributions that they make to the system.

Speaker 4 You know, it's too account-based. And that's not our philosophy.
Our philosophy is about building a system.

Speaker 7 So, the reason I ask you that is we call our service team members client success.

Speaker 4 Um,

Speaker 7 I started out as client success advocates, was what the original when I wrote like my business plan and everything, because I wanted the philosophy to be, I want you as a service person to think of yourself as advocating in every way for our client.

Speaker 7 You don't work for the carrier, and I'd almost rather you pushed against me in the moments where you think our client needs something that maybe they're not getting. You are a client success advocate.

Speaker 7 Well, I will say,

Speaker 7 and I hope that you don't, this doesn't happen to you because, cause I love what you just said, because I, and I, and I agree with your philosophy.

Speaker 7 I have been worn down by the, you mean account manager, right? Or you mean a CSR, right? And I'm like, oh, yes, yes, I mean a CSR. Yes, that's what, yes.

Speaker 7 But the idea is I want, I don't want them to think of themselves as just CSRs, which have this kind of almost like negative, almost has like a negative connotation.

Speaker 7 I want them to think of themselves as they are the most important person in our company to that client.

Speaker 7 You are their advocate in our company that's that's what i wanted the philosophy to be and how and it is how we still train them but i've just been bludgeoned by people going you mean account manager right like you're talking about an account manager right i'm like yes i'm talking about an account manager but that's you know and uh so like even though on their job descriptions they're still csas um

Speaker 7 we inevitably refer to them as like account managers and csrs sometimes too.

Speaker 7 And I, I kind of am hating myself after hearing how you've stuck to your your guns, but it is funny how people just don't want to change. They just can't, they like can't do it.

Speaker 4 That, that, that reversion to the mean is a very, very powerful force. And it's, it's gonna, it's gonna

Speaker 4 be,

Speaker 4 especially as you grow, you know, it becomes even more challenging. You know, you're fighting against, you know, it's like size and gravity.
You know, it becomes much more difficult to push against.

Speaker 4 And the, the only advice I would give to you is consistency

Speaker 4 and the way you message the team, you know, these constant reminders and having a cadence for how you speak about it. You know, so it's things like values in a company or nomenclature.

Speaker 4 And it's just repetition. So we go through our values every week as an organization.

Speaker 4 We speak about our values. And,

Speaker 4 you know, I think a lot of the team can recite these off the top of their head. And,

Speaker 4 you know, it creates stickiness, but old habits just die hard.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So, so in, and

Speaker 7 I completely agree with that. And I will say, and I agree with you, it's like you,

Speaker 7 to the, to the gravity piece, like,

Speaker 7 as you grow, you're fighting larger and larger battles, right? The battles become bigger and there become more of them. And like some of these, it is easy.

Speaker 7 And again, this is where, you know, I'm being transparent in my own failings as a leader. Like

Speaker 7 some of these battles that seemingly that feel smaller like this particular just naming of of of our service professionals like at a certain point you're like oh my god i am fighting this battle that is taking 90 of my brain cycles over here i don't have the brain cycles left yes account manager whatever like you know i'm trying to like you know take this mountain over here and i got this little thing happening over you know and it's just you just you just run out of brain cycles sometimes to fight these battles but if you can, I, I, I agree with you.

Speaker 7 And, and we do,

Speaker 7 I will say, uh, the other thing that happens too, and I think it, again, I'm, I think it's incredibly admirable and awesome that you are, you're talking about your values every week.

Speaker 7 I try very hard to do that, but it is easy to get lost in the, in the shuffle. And, you know, and I, and I have also found like at certain points in the company's evolution, um,

Speaker 7 you hit moments where

Speaker 7 there's more tumult or less.

Speaker 7 And when there's less, less you can kind of come back to things like here's why we're here here's what we believe here's our philosophical beliefs and then things get hectic and you're like

Speaker 7 i'm just trying to keep all 10 fingers and toes you know in holes in the in the dam you know what i mean like and you know those things can get lost and and i think the leaders that i admire the most are the ones that seemingly can stay consistent and push through that, even though those things are happening or not let it bother them as they push through it.

Speaker 7 So that's really good advice.

Speaker 4 I just appreciate the rawness that you're bringing to this conversation. It is so real.

Speaker 4 And as an entrepreneur, to be able to compartmentalize all this and still grow and meet your investor expectations, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

Speaker 4 And the reason I get out of bed every day is like, I want to support entrepreneurs like you that are challenging things, that are doing things different.

Speaker 4 I think there's, you know, you talk about culture and there's so much said about culture.

Speaker 4 And a culture is you know in large part you know planted by the founder and you know people rally around that and this idea of good culture and bad culture i don't believe in good culture or bad culture i believe that culture is a function of the business and you know the mindset of the company the vision the principles and um really where where the dissonance happens is if there is not alignment between the people working there and the values of the company.

Speaker 4 That is bad. But there's some companies that just want to work 80 hours a week and they're perfectly successful because they're hiring people that want to work 80 hours a week.

Speaker 4 And there's other companies that's creatives and they need the headspace and

Speaker 4 people can be perfectly successful working 20 hours a week.

Speaker 4 And so, yeah, I think it's, it's, I would,

Speaker 4 I love the way you're thinking about things.

Speaker 4 I think it's the right approach. I think it's, there's so much knowledge out there

Speaker 4 about how to run organizations. It sounds like you're well versed in this stuff too.
And yeah,

Speaker 4 we want to be advocates for small businesses, for leaders to provide that support. Obviously, it benefits us too when our policyholders are thinking about governance, business operations, compliance.

Speaker 4 It's something I've spent a lot of time thinking about. And

Speaker 4 the data also yields that

Speaker 4 companies obviously are less likely to have claims, but are going to have better outcomes financially when they start to think about culture as well. Yeah.

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Speaker 7 I um

Speaker 7 uh I saw a quote. Um,

Speaker 7 I was listening, who knows? You read so much, and I can't remember exactly what it was, but it basically was the gist of it was:

Speaker 7 whether the leader is focused, whether the leader is driving culture or not, they are. You know what I mean?

Speaker 7 It's like whether you are focused on growing culture or you're not focused on growing culture, you're growing, like you're impacting culture.

Speaker 7 Like it's what you do as a leader is it's you cannot get away from the fact that if you decided to take a leadership role, even if it's not the tippy top leadership role, even if it's, you know, the executive suite or a managerial role, you are impacting the culture of the company when you decide to, you know, when you decide to take that position, because people watch you and they feed off what you do.

Speaker 7 And I think that, particularly insurance, because insurance oftentimes uh the individuals who hold leadership roles in our industry tend to be great practitioners, not people who necessarily chose to be and focus on being great leaders.

Speaker 7 And that doesn't mean they aren't or can't be. It just means oftentimes the leadership roles tend to get given to great practitioners.
So they're not necessarily versed in or love learning about and

Speaker 7 practicing and cultivating things like culture, things like mission, right? They see those as, and again, and this isn't a knock. It's because they're great practitioners that they...

Speaker 7 they're just they haven't taken the time or nor do they value these concepts because their idea is all we need to do is sell more stuff. If we sell more stuff, we're good.
That's our goal.

Speaker 7 We sell stuff. I don't care if you hate working here, I send you a paycheck, be happy with it, right? Like, that's the kind of way that most people operate.

Speaker 7 And what we've really found at Rogue is one, I didn't name it the Hanley Insurance Agency because I didn't want the business to be about me.

Speaker 7 I'm, I love the fact that I have this amazing team that every day is working to get me out of the business, out of working in the business, you know, so I can work on it essentially you know which is a great thing like they they're not like upset they're not they're not like fighting me they don't feel they're they're operating to get me out of day to day which is an amazing thing so i can work on things like culture well if i was a practitioner if i was still getting value from doing the thing i could never step out and focus on these things like culture which i think is is what you have to do um

Speaker 7 All that being said,

Speaker 7 I think the point that you just made around

Speaker 7 whatever you want your business to be, it should be that thing, whether if it's an 80-hour a week job, if it's a 30-hour a week job, if it's a only nights and week, you know, whatever your culture is going to be, but then you have to be hard and fast to marketing it that way and hiring that way.

Speaker 7 And, you know, we hire a lot of moms.

Speaker 7 We just do because a lot of insurance agencies, thankfully, are misogynistic and want people to work 8:30 to 4:30 on like a punch in punch out and if you're a mom and and there are dads too but they tend to be moms who are have kids that have get sick or have to go into school late or they need to do this or you know whatever

Speaker 7 their their their lives tend to need some flexibility right they're and and we as a company and i made this our mission from the very beginning we are completely willing because we're results-based to be flexible around those points right hey you need to take your kid to the doctor at 3 p.m no problem I trust because you're an adult and we're a results-based organization that you will either come in later or come in earlier or work doubly hard the next day to get your numbers and do the things you need to do for your actual job.

Speaker 7 And that's the way we work. Well, we made the mistake of hiring, again, sometimes you don't know, a couple individuals who were slightly on the misogynistic side.

Speaker 7 And they were just of the opinion that their experience, whatever, that

Speaker 7 you know, most of the females in our organization didn't know shit was kind of their general disposition, and that did not fly. And we punted those sons of bitches like really quick.

Speaker 7 Now, they were high performers, seemingly high performers, right?

Speaker 7 They were hitting their numbers and doing very good work, but you can't have that shit in your business if you're going to be successful if it doesn't match what you're trying to do.

Speaker 7 If we were like a locker room mentality company where it was we all just beat our chests and fight with each other and competitive, and that's who we were, like Boiler Room or Wolf of Wall street

Speaker 7 they would have been awesome in that environment it just wasn't what we were building and you have to get those people out and i think unfortunately

Speaker 7 i think unfortunately especially early in a company's genesis it's very difficult to let high performers go if they don't match culture because you're like oh my god who's going to sell this thing or who's going to execute this part and i i mean since they've been gone we haven't skipped a beat other people have stepped up and everyone is happier.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 I think that's a really, really important point that I wanted to come back to.

Speaker 4 I love it. And

Speaker 4 the thread here is consistency. And consistency is incredibly important, especially when you have strong vision, you know, and you're seeing repeated success.
It is so easy to get off that path.

Speaker 4 It is, there's so many terms. And, you know, it could be a partnership that seems all nice and fun and shiny.
Could be an employee.

Speaker 4 It could be an investor. And like

Speaker 4 you, you have to constantly, as a business leader, take a step back. And you also have to create an environment where you're open to that feedback from the team.

Speaker 4 One of the things we did, we had the entire company down in San Diego last week for a company on site. So we're completely remote.
We flew everybody in to San Diego.

Speaker 4 and we just had this open discussion.

Speaker 4 One of our values is speak boldly and honestly. and yeah there were moments where

Speaker 4 wow uh people spoke very boldly and honestly about our okayr so we use the okayr system objective key results um uh i highly advise anybody listening to take a look at this if they're they're looking for structure around uh uh goals on a quarterly basis measure what matters by john doar is it is the door john doar yeah door is the book that really breaks that concept down yeah it's it's not perfect there's no perfect solution.

Speaker 4 You know, I don't want to pretend that this is, you know, just read the book and go apply it. This is something, again, requires commitment or requires consistency.

Speaker 4 But yeah, the team gave me great feedback that it, you know, despite having all the structure, it still felt like we didn't have a clear focus.

Speaker 4 And so we walked out of that meeting, we cut our OKRs in half. And now we're focused on half the OKRs.
And

Speaker 4 so

Speaker 4 it's one, that consistency, but everyone, every now and then you just need a speed check and you need to invite people to be able to speak up and have trust. I think the other thing

Speaker 4 that have you heard of this Project Aristotle from Google?

Speaker 7 I have not, no.

Speaker 4 It's a really interesting study by Google, which of course is one of the most respected company of the century

Speaker 4 over the last hundred years. And

Speaker 4 they try to figure out what is the thing that really makes for really high performing teams. And, you know, off the top of my head, I'm like, of course, you know, it's talent, it's education.

Speaker 4 It's,

Speaker 4 you know, having certain people and certain groups. You bring a product person, engineer, and there's got to be a great formula.

Speaker 4 And they're like, they couldn't figure it out for the longest time until they started to look at more of the psychological elements of the team.

Speaker 4 And what they found, is that when there's psychological safety, trust in a team, those are the highest performing teams, irrespective of backgrounds, irrespective of the talent of the team, when there's trust,

Speaker 4 that is the team that's going to perform better on a more consistent basis.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, I challenge everybody to bring this into their organization, because what you're going to learn from somebody that's

Speaker 4 two levels down, what they're seeing in the field is probably going to shock you.

Speaker 4 And, you know, it probably doesn't bubble up to the top very much because people might be afraid of communicating this to you.

Speaker 4 You know, it's you as an entrepreneur having to deal with all these things, you know, naming conventions of certain people, but it's, it's, it's really enlightening.

Speaker 4 And you're not going to change everything. So, you know, we're not superhuman.
But I think creating that environment where at least people feel their opinions are valued, they're where they're heard.

Speaker 4 um it creates uh a very collaborative spirit and and people are also then more willing to take feedback themselves right yeah if they know the CEO is open to it, they're going to be like, Okay, yeah, you know, he can he can take a few punches about his philosophy, but yeah, maybe, maybe I can, you know, be better myself.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I um,

Speaker 7 I think, I think you're wholly right, especially about the last piece, just to just to put a pin in that.

Speaker 7 If you can't hold your employees to a standard that you're unwilling to live by by yourself, yourself, like that is that is like if I've you know, learned anything in the various leadership roles that that i've had throughout my career um

Speaker 7 if you are unwilling to do something or live by a standard or work to a standard you cannot hold your employees to that standard you just can't and and again this is why i'll tell you this is very selfishly why i have a flexible work environment like i'm a divorced single dad i have to do during the day that is personal like i just have to it's part of my sometimes my kids have this sometimes i have to do this i have to go over here sometimes because of the nature of my life I haven't been grocery shopping in weeks and I have to run out and grab something so I can eat because I work from home.

Speaker 7 And it's like,

Speaker 7 how can I then,

Speaker 7 if I want to, if I prefer as a leader to be held to a results-based philosophy with a flexible work schedule.

Speaker 7 How then can I tell my employees, you have to be in your seat 830 to 430 and punch this card?

Speaker 7 And that's how I'm going to judge your performance, even though I can run out and hit the gym at noon real quick and come back because then I know I'll log in at 8 p.m.

Speaker 7 and get work done from 8 to 10 or whatever. Like I then can tell, I can't tell my employees that they can do that stuff, you know what I mean?

Speaker 7 Or that there isn't that bit of flexibility in their lives. Like to me,

Speaker 7 that disconnect is like, is the number one way to completely trash your culture is like, is like, and you see this a lot, right? You're, you're the, you're the producer.

Speaker 7 You've been there for three or four years. You're sitting in an agency and you see the agency principal log out at 11 a.m.
and go play golf every Friday for the entire summer.

Speaker 7 You know, and the standard philosophy is, well, that individual invested time, money, resources, built this business, built, they've earned that right. Okay,

Speaker 7 I can buy that certain levels of seniority and certain levels of risk taking

Speaker 7 do then provide you with certain levels of flexibility. But it can't be you live this way.
I live this way, right?

Speaker 7 Maybe it's you get one Friday a month that you can go play golf or go out on your boat or have a half day on Friday if you want during the summertime.

Speaker 7 Summers are a big deal up here because we, they're so small, right? So that's why I'm focusing on summer. Other parts of the country every day is summer, so it's different.

Speaker 7 But like, you know, up here, that's like a big thing, right? Your summer in the north is very, very important to you.

Speaker 7 And I know people that have literally quit jobs because they've watched the owner or the owners have all this flexibility to enjoy their summers and they get zero.

Speaker 7 You know, I don't think that people expect, I think people intrinsically understand the difference between someone who has taken the risk, who has earned the right to have maybe the max benefit of a culture, but to give someone no benefit or to create a completely separate set of rules or guidelines or performance triggers for everyone else versus leadership, that just destroys trust, destroys all the things that you just talked about that make a healthy environment.

Speaker 7 And it just, you know, you're holding yourself to a different standard. How can you expect people to want to live up to it? It just doesn't work that way.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And you bring in the insurance lens, which I've only been in this industry for about three years.

Speaker 4 I think there's that element to it, which is just consistent across every company. But then also there's this big challenge with insurance, which we're going from a

Speaker 4 digital 1.0

Speaker 4 world to a 2.0 world.

Speaker 4 And you look at a lot of the leadership across some of the big insurance institutions, and you use this word practitioners. I love this word practitioners.

Speaker 4 In today's environment, you need to be a strategist. You need to be technologist.
You need to,

Speaker 4 it's like you just need to be questioning everything because the way business has been conducted over the past 10, 20, 30 years clearly is not what it's going to look like 10, 20, 30 years from now.

Speaker 4 I think there's been

Speaker 4 in insurance,

Speaker 4 even this

Speaker 4 general attitude of like,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 let's wait and see. Let's wait and see what happens.
It's a fast follower

Speaker 7 mentality.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 4 Fast follower, which frankly, it's one of the last bastions of, you know, still that the email processing and, you know, these workflows and the administrative work in this industry is kind of of mind-boggling uh when i when i come from other industries and i i think it's safe to say it's going to change pretty quickly and and there's there's some folks that are leaning into this but as i i also see this like general hesitation to be the first there's no there's no incentive in a large insurance carrier to adopt these new practices because you're not rewarded for doing so you know it's like

Speaker 4 nobody's going and and

Speaker 4 patting John or Jane on the back and saying, oh, great job with this new digital platform. Because most of the time, people are irritated from having to change their behaviors.
Like

Speaker 4 you're actually, you know, people get their pitchforks out when you come and move their keys.

Speaker 4 And so.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I find it interesting.

Speaker 4 It's really tough to be a leader these days in insurance space and move the industry forward because people are so entrenched in their current workflows, current processes.

Speaker 4 You know, I spoke at this conference, the dig in conference, and they really prodded me. They really prodded me for what I would do if I was in a big insurance carrier.
And

Speaker 4 I tried to caveat as much as possible, but

Speaker 4 I really challenged some folks. I was like, what is your value? Like, just come back to the core principles.

Speaker 4 How do you contribute value to the company?

Speaker 4 How is it today? What do you think it should be?

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 I saw people, like people were shaking their heads. It's like, oh, yeah, well, oof, this is a bit uncomfortable.
You'd see people, you know, shaking it, shaking their shoulders, looking around.

Speaker 4 It's like, oh, man, like,

Speaker 4 and it's just a testament to, I think people want to, like, there's brilliant people in this industry. People want to change.

Speaker 4 you know we're shining the spotlight on the fact that maybe there's other ways you can contribute value that you should push the needle. We're not saying, like, you know, we need to go

Speaker 4 off the rails here. Like,

Speaker 4 there's much more good than there is bad, but let's have an honest conversation about how we contribute value to these small businesses that need a better product, that need it faster, that, you know, that need more transparency, that it needs to be more consumable.

Speaker 4 You're just getting, you know, a lot of times a PDF document as a policy form. What are they supposed to do with this?

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 So I have so many thoughts on this particular topic um i'm going to start by saying about three weeks ago i did a just off the cuff video for linkedin i was walking i was on a walk i just got done with a couple carrier calls two consecutive carrier calls um where i questioned the ux of the carrier they were they were peppering me for why aren't we writing more business with them and i said because your ux is terrible It's incredibly difficult to do business with you.

Speaker 7 You, I said, you know, and what I said to them, and then they would push push back, that's not what we're hearing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 7 And I'd say, okay, well, I do a straight behavioral experiment every day where I send a shit toad on leads to my producers and they choose where the business goes. My producers do.

Speaker 7 Do you think they choose because they dislike you? Do they just, they just don't like you? They hate your brand. They hate your logo and your colors.
Do you think that's why they choose it?

Speaker 7 Or do they choose it because some variation of your product, your pricing, and your user experience does not match up with what makes their job easy because we're all super selfish, we all want to do what's easiest.

Speaker 7 So, a producer 99 out of 100 times with a bar of quality coverage, right? I'm not going to say anyone is doing anything, you know, in proprietary or whatever, with a bar of quality coverage.

Speaker 7 After you hit that bar of quality coverage, the next most important trigger for where the business goes is who's the easiest to do business with?

Speaker 7 Not price, not schmooggies, not, you know, cyber reports has nothing to do with any of that crap. It's how easy is it to do business with you? That is literally the next one.

Speaker 7 And I've watched this over hundreds and hundreds at this point, thousands of opportunities coming into Rogue, watching where the producers put them.

Speaker 7 And in this case, what I said to them was, the vast majority of our small business goes to the Hartford.

Speaker 7 And the reason for that is because the Hartford is really, really, really, really, really, really easy to do business with, considering they also have things like, because people go, well, what about companies like Coterie?

Speaker 7 Coterie is a great company, except Coterie does not have a contingency or bonus program.

Speaker 7 So you're only ever getting their standard commission level, which if I could go, if I can get standard commission from Coterie, standard commission and contingencies with Hartford, well, I make more money there.

Speaker 7 So that's where I go, right? So that's kind of the thought process. So,

Speaker 7 you know, there.

Speaker 7 And my point

Speaker 5 in what I said in the video, just to kind of wrap this part up is, is

Speaker 7 Hartford seems to, from the people I talk to and the changes they make to their platform, seemingly is

Speaker 7 incrementally building efficiencies into where the puck is going, right?

Speaker 7 Versus other carriers who I know call their biggest broker, who's probably 67 years old, who hasn't logged into the system in 20 years, who has Sally or Tammy or Jimmy or Johnny in the office who does it, who places the business there because they feel like that's what the owner wants.

Speaker 7 And they don't give a shit because they're only placing a couple pieces of business a week anyways. And

Speaker 7 the owner comes back and goes, yeah, you're fine. I don't get any complaints.
And they go, okay, great, check.

Speaker 7 We're doing awesome because they're, they're playing to where the puck is today, the way the business is done today. And my point was,

Speaker 7 if someone asked me on stage that same question they asked you, it would be like, I would make every decision would be, where is the puck going?

Speaker 7 We would iterate to where the puck is going, not monumental, tear down rebuild changes because the insurance industry isn't broken that's the big secret that the disruptors of 2015 and 2016 didn't get um

Speaker 7 you know they went and they went to silicon valley they did some sort of mba dick regression analysis and said insurance is an opportunity these people are all idiots we're going to change it right what they didn't understand is it wasn't broken insurance is not broken if your building burns down if you get into a car accident if you do something stupid your insurance company shows up and they hand you you a check and they say, Here, as much as we can financially, based on what the policy you bought,

Speaker 7 here's your reimbursement. And that is how the business is supposed to work.
Your account is not rallying to put your house back up if it burns down in a fire.

Speaker 7 They're just going to yell at you because you have a shitty, smoldering building and now it's making their home value go down, right?

Speaker 7 So, like, the only entity that's going to rebuild that home for you, in this case, personal lines being is going to be insurance company. So, it's not broken.
That being said,

Speaker 7 I think the vast difference between the carriers that I see today succeeding and the carriers that I see stagnating has to do with the singular idea of iterations to where the puck is going versus where it is.

Speaker 7 And I think that startups like you, like Codery, I love the people at Coterie. It's not a knock on them.
They're new and growing. I feel like.

Speaker 7 I feel like starting their own internal agency and going D to C, I'm completely fine telling them I think that was a mistake from a brand perspective because everyone knows and it kind of keeps agents who don't like to compete against carriers down, although we compete against all our carriers, we kind of know that.

Speaker 7 But,

Speaker 7 but they just need a contingency program, and Codery will be fine. But, like, you know, I see Codery, I see Pi, I see Cover Whale and Transportation.
Like,

Speaker 7 I see you guys, you group of this next generation, not disruptors, innovators pushing the carriers that are thinking the right way to match that.

Speaker 7 Now, the hard part about that is now you're competing against juggernauts.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 7 I think it's worthy work. And I know

Speaker 7 I know many of you are going to end up getting, are going to reap the benefit personally, but also from a purpose and meaning standpoint, do really important work and really change things, which I think is incredible.

Speaker 7 I want you to comment on that if you have a thought. And then I have one more question.
I want to be respectful of your time. I have one more question I want to get into around.

Speaker 7 um you know your your product is marketed to a certain extent on being built on ai which no one knows what that means at all.

Speaker 7 So I would love to, any comments you have on what I just said, and then move that into what is AI and how are you using it and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 4 Yeah. So it's a quick response to what you're saying.

Speaker 4 Again, brilliantly said.

Speaker 4 I would say that moving to where the puck is going to be, I can tell you where the puck is going to be. Think about this Amazon philosophy.

Speaker 4 of people want better pricing, they want it faster, and they want more options. Just put that in your head.
Like that, everybody should be thinking about this.

Speaker 4 What the Internet of Things is doing is it's creating more transparent. See, people are realizing, oh my gosh, I have more options.
I have more agents I can work with.

Speaker 4 I have more wholesalers I can work with. I have more carriers I can work with.
Options are becoming more evident to them. So you need to be thinking about, okay, how can I elevate?

Speaker 4 How can I provide better service? you know, better pricing, how can I be smarter about how I underwrite? How can I just create more value? Like, that's really what it comes down to.

Speaker 4 And it happens at every layer of that stack, every layer of the distribution stack. And as it relates to what we're doing specifically for this,

Speaker 4 so

Speaker 4 being a tech entrepreneur several times before,

Speaker 4 really most technologies is grounded in data. It's how you apply data to solve problems to be faster, to provide more options, better service.

Speaker 4 And in our case, it was understanding what are the exposures of small businesses. So you think of a small business, and I'm here in Los Angeles, California.

Speaker 4 There's like, you know, 10 restaurants around me within a mile radius here.

Speaker 4 If I was to get a submission, these restaurants probably look all the same. You know, roughly the same number of employees,

Speaker 4 you know, same zip code,

Speaker 4 probably a lot of the same practices around the wage an hour and employment train, et cetera, that would come up on a PDF application. But there's lots of nuance between these actual

Speaker 4 small businesses that you can pick up from knowing where to look. And this is looking at lawsuit information.

Speaker 4 Maybe it's not a claim against the company for management liability, but we want to know if this company has been operating compliantly within, you know, maybe it's

Speaker 4 the state regulation around

Speaker 4 accessibilities,

Speaker 4 things that wouldn't pop on a PDF application, but it just shows the governance, the compliance of this business. Or, you know, what are employees' customers think about this company?

Speaker 4 What's the other financial variables that we can pick up about the business? So, this is through public-private APIs that were pinging information, which

Speaker 4 like

Speaker 4 you, as an entrepreneur, I'm sure you've spoken to a lot of tech companies.

Speaker 4 They talk about AI.

Speaker 4 Even to be able to talk about AI, which I'll get to in a bit, there is so much data engineering complexity to be able to

Speaker 4 find this data, to be able to pull this data into your system, structure it in such a way. So then you can build the AI models.

Speaker 4 The AI models are the application layer on top of massive data infrastructure that needs to be built. And so the AI layer is really understanding, okay,

Speaker 4 if this company is compared against similar companies, how does this, what's the risk profile of this business on a relative basis?

Speaker 4 Because if you think of what an underwriter does in a traditional company,

Speaker 4 if it's a, you know, and this is an account that's sizable, where it's even worth their time to go search for this, you know, maybe they're going to go to Google and say, oh, I'm going to query in lawsuits against the Hyatts in Venice Beach.

Speaker 4 And they're going to be like, oh, great, nothing there. Fantastic.

Speaker 4 I've done my job.

Speaker 4 or or or maybe they're going to yelp and it's like oh uh hyatts um i'm going to scroll through and see if anybody says anything bad about this company well in our case um we're looking at multitude of different factors i think we have like 18 different sources for data that we're going to and we're able to ingest this information and get a relative score Because, you know, maybe, yeah, you do find something on Google about this company, but it's such a massive company.

Speaker 4 Is this normal behavior where you get a few lawsuits for a hotel of that size? Or is this something I should worry about and I need to modify the account for?

Speaker 4 So AI is able to ingest this information in such a way that it normalizes it.

Speaker 4 It normalizes the behavior and response of an individual that's trying to interpret this and tells them how meaningful the signal is.

Speaker 4 and how they should change their behavior, the underwriting of this company.

Speaker 4 And then it also allows for this human in the loop to provide a signal back to the model of, okay, you showed me what was important.

Speaker 4 You kicked this thing out for referral. Me as a human, I can interpret this information.

Speaker 4 And then I can tell you whether it's the next time this thing comes up, whether the model should kick it out on a similar basis.

Speaker 4 So you're training the model as much as the model is telling somebody where to look. is identifying the signals.
And this is how you get what I call bionic underwriting.

Speaker 4 It's the system does most of the work, but you still have a human there to interpret the asymmetries of the risk and be able to say, oh, ooh, this is a great account.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, our system is pricing here. But yeah, I see that we can probably do much better because I know that manufacturing in Ohio,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 we've built a really strong book here. And again, this reinforces the book.
Hey, we should continue to

Speaker 4 mod to

Speaker 4 change our underwriting for manufacturers in Ohio. Similarly, California,

Speaker 4 we know that the exposures are just increasing here. If you underwrite just historically,

Speaker 4 maybe it looks okay, but with the litigation trends in California,

Speaker 4 we need to be continuously modifying the accounts up. So that's one piece of it, which you think about on the underwriting side.
But then think about this account during the policy term.

Speaker 4 Now we've written this account. Now we're we're on the policy.
And I want to get back to risk mitigation because this is really why I started the company.

Speaker 4 You spoke about these employees that you hired and there was controversy around these employees where it wasn't a good culture fit.

Speaker 4 Well, probably what happened was like you had people that were leaving the business maybe, you know, there's a little bit of turnover. Probably people were a bit disgruntled.

Speaker 4 Maybe it impacted your financials. We're monitoring these signals throughout the term of the policy and saying, hey,

Speaker 4 you know, are there things that we should be thinking about from a risk mitigation standpoint that we can propose to the company and say, hey, talk to our HR experts. We have HR experts on call.

Speaker 4 And if you, in the case of these two employees that you needed to fire, not many people know how to fire well.

Speaker 4 There's a very clear process depending upon the state of how you terminate an employee and do it

Speaker 4 without them suing you for wrongful termination. A very, very fine line that I advise everybody getting counsel about before they do this.
We are saying, hey, before you fire them, come talk to us.

Speaker 4 We'll give you the playbook to how to run this so you don't have a claim.

Speaker 4 Or somebody says, oh,

Speaker 4 somebody said this really uncomfortable thing to me

Speaker 4 that could be construed as harassment. Somebody reported this.

Speaker 4 come talk to us come talk to us and and we'll share guidance on how to communicate to the the employee how to communicate to the company about this event.

Speaker 4 So you're not, you know, putting this, you're burying this. And that's where things go wrong.
It's not the events because humans say things that might be misinterpreted.

Speaker 4 It's how the company responds, how leadership responds in these events that lead to the adverse outcomes, the claims, et cetera. So yeah, we want to be partners to these small businesses.

Speaker 4 We have a handbook builder for companies. We have harassment discrimination training.
We have tons of data on these new legislation.

Speaker 4 I think there's 60 new pieces of legislation coming out for small businesses just in 2023. On

Speaker 4 January 1, 2023, 60 new pieces of legislation that I certainly

Speaker 4 reading up on my municipal and state legislation about how this impacts me and wage and hour laws. So yeah, we want to be advocates for these small businesses.

Speaker 4 We want to take this off their plate because we talked about how hard it is to be a small business already and be educating these businesses about what their exposures are, how their risks are changing, and how our product responds to those risks.

Speaker 4 Because yeah, it's just,

Speaker 4 things happen in a small business and we want to be able to respond with great claims management when they do.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 I want to be respectful of your time. So we'll wrap this up, but I just, just to finish off that idea, I think I love that.
I mean, to me, the advantage of data is not just marketing.

Speaker 7 I think a lot of people immediately just think marketing and sales, data, you know what I mean?

Speaker 7 Or maybe they think pricing of products with data, but so much of it can be the communications, the comms, the proactive outreach.

Speaker 7 You see, you know, you, you can, you know, you're subscribed to certain databases. You can see increases in payroll, increases in revenue within days of when they happen and send out messages.

Speaker 7 Hey, your payroll just increased by $100,000. That means you're hiring people.

Speaker 7 Are you, you know, what practices are you put in place what's going on do you do we do you need to tell us something you know as as your insurance provider these are all moments that i think are are

Speaker 7 you know the the the disparate nature of how insurance is distributed creates a lot of user experience issues a lot of

Speaker 7 we'll just say bland user experience you know a very bland user experience that um

Speaker 7 i think can be rapidly improved upon as we start to connect. And

Speaker 7 I love where you're taking it, man. I'm super excited for you.
I'm going to be following along in the journey. I'm glad that we had a chance to meet.

Speaker 7 I'm a huge fan now of what you're doing. And,

Speaker 7 you know, so let's take this last moment before we finish here. Just where can people learn more? I know you said that agents that are listening can get to your products through various wholesalers.

Speaker 7 I'm sure maybe if they go to your website, they can find those wholesalers and know who to talk to and whatever. But if they just want to follow you or check people out, where should they go?

Speaker 7 Where should they learn more about you and what you're doing?

Speaker 4 Yeah, our website's yourcounterpart.com.

Speaker 4 Come check out the websites.

Speaker 4 Come

Speaker 4 to our LinkedIn page, to our Twitter page.

Speaker 4 Yeah, we're here to educate the market about the potential for management liability. Again, it's not where it is today.

Speaker 4 but what it should be for them in terms of the service that we can provide and the quality of product we can provide for the small business owners. Like,

Speaker 4 and we need to do this through partnerships.

Speaker 4 I think that was one point that I failed to mention that is, yeah, all these insured techs are doing cool stuff, but we're standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Speaker 4 Like we're standing upon the shoulders of our great wholesale partners, these retail agents, these carriers that are leaning into the future. And, you know,

Speaker 4 we're helping to nudge them along and show them what's possible.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I love it, man. Well, I'm super glad that we had a chance to connect.
I'm glad we had a chance to share your story and your expertise with the audience. And

Speaker 7 wish you nothing but the best. Thanks for having me, Ryan.
This is really fun.

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