RHS 095 - Aaron Steffey on Digitizing Surety Bonds for Independent Agents

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Speaker 6 In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

Speaker 7 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.

Speaker 8 Today, we have a tremendous guest, Aaron Steffi, the managing partner of Propeller Bonds.

Speaker 8 Now, Propeller Bonds is the kind of company that I think represents a major part of the future of the independent insurance agency channel because

Speaker 2 bonds are tough.

Speaker 8 One, there's not a lot of people that are bond experts. Surety is a very specific

Speaker 8 kind of niche expertise.

Speaker 8 It is something that people can make a career out of, but you really have to dedicate yourself to it.

Speaker 8 This is a personal opinion. It's not the most interesting topic that exists.
But there are some, you know, a lot of companies write bonds, but bonds tend to take a really long time.

Speaker 8 And I have like stamps and stickers and all kinds of stuff in my drawer over here. And what

Speaker 8 propeller bonds have done is created a platform that allows you to get rid of all that.

Speaker 8 Basically, you send your client to the platform, they fill out the forms, they can pay for the bond. They can get it digitally issued, which is now, as Aaron will describe, available in all 50 states.

Speaker 8 And, you know, we're talking everything from $100 notary bonds all the way up to $3 million plus performance bonds.

Speaker 8 And this is the kind of platform that just changes the game for agents because now you can add an additional service to your tool belt, be even more of a value-added resource to your clients without having to bog them down with the hassle that charity bonds tend to be.

Speaker 8 All right, but I don't, I want to save some of the juice for the actual conversation. Aaron's a tremendous dude.
We use propeller bonds here at Rogue, and, you know, it's a great tool.

Speaker 8 But before we get to our conversation with Aaron, I want to give a big shout out to one of the companies that makes this podcast possible, and that is Donna by Arius Analytics.

Speaker 8 Donna is taking over the game when it comes to breaking down the data and information in your agency and helping you put it to use by pulling out opportunities to cross-sell, pulling out clients who may be in distress or may be flight risks by using their proprietary sentiment score.

Speaker 8 And you know, this is in addition to net promoter score. You can use net promoter scores.
Nothing wrong with it. Rocket referrals does a great job with net promoter score.

Speaker 8 You should be looking at things like your Google reviews or Yelp reviews or Facebook reviews, wherever you're collecting reviews.

Speaker 8 But what the sentiment score is doing is taking the policies you have, the touch points that your people are having with your clients, both in text, email, and phone real time, and breaking those down and coming up with a sentiment score.

Speaker 8 How do they feel about your agency right now based on their most current communications? And what it allows you to do is get out ahead. ahead of problems, especially as a leader.

Speaker 8 And with an easy-to-use interface, they're integrating with more and more tools.

Speaker 8 I just think Donna is a big part of the future, considering it is a plug-and-play with many different systems

Speaker 8 and at a price point that you absolutely can integrate into your agency. It makes a lot of sense.
So just Google Donna for agents. Go to Donna4agents.com.
Check Donna out. And you're not going to be.

Speaker 8 I said this before. I was out ahead of Tarmica.
I told you guys about Tarmaka. Tarmica blew up and now it's the best commercial rating platform.
I think Donna is the same type of tool for agents.

Speaker 8 Get on it today. All right.

Speaker 2 Let's get to Aaron and learn about bonds.

Speaker 7 These are podcaster problems, not

Speaker 7 yeah, yeah. I uh

Speaker 6 this is only my I did the Vertifor podcast with Rick Fox, but other than that, I've never done one. So uh, bear with me if I'm not as um compelling as you'd like.

Speaker 7 Rick Fox, the bastard, got you first, huh?

Speaker 6 He's uh, he's he's awesome. He's so good to us.
Uh, yeah, he, uh,

Speaker 6 he, we talked to him like, I don't know, back in like August, September, something like that. And we're in, like I said before, we're integrating with Vertifor and whatnot.

Speaker 7 So, you know, yeah, that's great. That's great.
Rick's a great guy. Um, I've been friends with Rick for a long time.
I've been on his podcast a bunch.

Speaker 6 Um,

Speaker 7 and I think he does, uh, he does a tremendous job. So I'm a, I'm a big fan.
So, so, dude, I'm, I'm pumped that you,

Speaker 7 hold on, let's see. Yeah, baby, we're competitive on the auto here.
I love that. I just got the rate in.
I was finishing up a commercial auto quote when you came on. That makes me

Speaker 7 so

Speaker 7 that you're coming on in the show for a bunch of reasons.

Speaker 7 I'm excited because I think one, bonding and surety in general is a topic that most agents, and we kind of talked about this when we were looking at your platform,

Speaker 7 which I have started.

Speaker 7 If I'm being completely honest with you, I haven't completely baked into my, into my process yet, though I have looked all the way through it. I've done some practice stuff.
I really, really like it.

Speaker 7 But I think a lot of agents just disregard bonding and

Speaker 7 surety because

Speaker 7 it's... I've heard and I've kind of run your platform by a couple agents.
And I just said, hey, have you, have you heard about Propeller?

Speaker 7 And, you know, like some said they had heard of you, some said they hadn't. Um, we're gonna fix the they haven't heard of you part today.

Speaker 7 But, um,

Speaker 7 the thing that was interesting was all the bonding's complicated, or it's too much work, or then other people were like, ah, there's no money in it. And I was like,

Speaker 7 well, that's what I'm telling you is that this freaking platform solves all those problems. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Like, I'm like, that's the beauty of what we're talking about here is you don't need to have

Speaker 7 a rubber stamp and stickers and all this crap in your dresser drawer or in your drawer next to your desk because you just send people through and they do it themselves. And

Speaker 7 I think it's just a really interesting, I think it's a really, you know, in the world of tarmacas and

Speaker 7 all these platforms that are starting to

Speaker 7 streamline. processes that have been a pain in the in the butt.
I feel like what you're doing at Propeller is right in line with that, man.

Speaker 6 We're good friends with

Speaker 6 Raghav and Chris at Tarmika. And

Speaker 6 I'm hoping that in the future we'll do more together. And

Speaker 6 so, yeah,

Speaker 6 it's cool. Like

Speaker 6 for us, as everyone tackles the streamlining the process of small commercial, they're forgetting the bond process and we can kind of be that bolt-on bond solution to anyone.

Speaker 6 So it's pretty, it's pretty interesting.

Speaker 7 Yeah, what I plan on doing, and we'll talk about the, we'll get to the platform in a second, but, you know, what we'll, what I plan on doing with it is building it into my post-sale.

Speaker 7 So I told you this a little bit, I lead with comp and sometimes I'll get the whole package with the comp. Sometimes I'll just write the comp for people.

Speaker 7 It's like my lead in and then work into the rest of the account. Well, you know, using my CRM, I can then drip out after the sale.
all kinds of messages.

Speaker 7 And one of them is going to be, hey, if you, if you have a bond need, like you don't need to go someplace else, like we can handle all this for you.

Speaker 7 If it's something small that you can do on your own, whack, here's a link. If it's more, email me or whatever.
And then probably I'll just end up sending them the link again anyways.

Speaker 7 But that kind of idea is, it's mindless. You know what I mean? Mindless from the standpoint of you don't have to be a surety expert.
You can,

Speaker 7 you know, you can, you can get this in front of them and provide extra value. And even if it's,

Speaker 7 I feel like this is a pitch, you know, just so everyone's listening. Aaron's not paying me for this.

Speaker 7 I just was so excited because this is something I love products that get someone to buy another thing from you, right?

Speaker 7 It's, it's in, in the, in the personal insurance space, you know, it's like, oh, I get 30% retention on an auto. If I get homeman auto, it's 60% retention.
But if I get that umbrella that I make $17

Speaker 7 on, all of a sudden the retention goes like 91%.

Speaker 7 So I feel like this is one of those things for commercial insurance.

Speaker 6 Yeah, no, it is. I think I said this to you and not to recycle something I mentioned to Rick, actually, but, you know,

Speaker 6 what happens oftentimes, there's a there's a pretty big ecosystem of direct like dot-com bomb bond writers. And it's because agents let this stuff flow out the back door.

Speaker 6 And so like you'll see that there's a ton of online dot-coms and those people are starting to.

Speaker 6 you know, get smart and just use the bond as the kind of like you do, they lead with the bond for work comp because they're solving a real real difficult problem for the customer and then they're like okay well we'll just write your gl since your agent you know won't help you on the bonds and because customers you know inherently do want to just go to one place they don't they don't want to um piecemeal everything all over and so i i always liken it to you know if you're a person a person alliance agency it's almost like not saying that you don't do umbrellas And

Speaker 6 then when the customer goes out and finds their umbrella somewhere, like like you think those people aren't going to try to sell them home in auto insurance.

Speaker 6 So it's just kind of this like tag along policy, or it's not even really, you know, truly an insurance policy, but it's this tag along three-party agreement that should be bolted onto any contractor's account or what have you.

Speaker 6 But it seems to kind of slide out the back door all the time.

Speaker 7 Yeah. So, okay.
So we've definitely not buried the lead here, but

Speaker 7 let's now do the loop back and talk a little bit about and don't worry about recycling any content. No one listens to Rick's show anyways.
So it's,

Speaker 7 I love you, Rick. But,

Speaker 7 you know, so let's, let's, let's go back to how the heck did you get one into bonds and surety and that?

Speaker 7 What brought you to this space?

Speaker 7 And then, and then I want to really talk about the platform itself, because I feel like I immediately got the sense and I told you this seeing, you know, I've seen a lot of things,

Speaker 7 you know, a lot of different tools in a lot of different spaces. And to me, I just, this immediately made sense to me.

Speaker 7 So, I want to kind of take our listeners, everyone listening, I want to take them through this journey.

Speaker 7 There's a lot of commercial agents that listen to this show, and I want to take them through the journey that at the end of this,

Speaker 7 maybe

Speaker 7 they decide to reach out to you, maybe they don't, but I want them to understand why

Speaker 7 how we got here, why it's important, and what we should be thinking about when making decisions about using a platform like Propeller.

Speaker 7 So, let's, let's, as far as you feel is necessary, let's kind of start at the beginning and we'll work our way through this.

Speaker 6 Yeah, um, so I kind of cut my teeth being just a retail insurance agent at a mom and pop retail agency.

Speaker 6 And we grew through a bit of organic sales and marketing efforts, as well as a little bit of MA activity I got involved in.

Speaker 6 Um, and at one point, several years ago, um, we decided that we were looking to potentially sell the agency.

Speaker 6 It's so funny looking back on it. At that point in time, everyone thought it had hit its peak as far as valuations go and everything.
And it just seems to keep climbing.

Speaker 6 So at that time,

Speaker 6 I went and so I'm in Philadelphia and I started doing an MBA program at Villanova. I think I was just a little insecure about like what the next step in my journey was going to be.

Speaker 6 Like my resume basically said I was just like worked at a mom and pop insurance agency. So I

Speaker 6 went and did that advanced degree. I think maybe just to kind of like

Speaker 6 bolster my credentials. But what happened during that time, I got to do a lot of soul searching and dealing with

Speaker 6 different people from different industries in the program.

Speaker 6 And I did decide at some point in time, I'm not sure exactly how, that I wanted to be involved in InsurTech.

Speaker 6 And I kind of, around the landscape to me, there was, at least at that time, I felt like there wasn't a lot of insurance people leading the charge in InsurTech.

Speaker 6 It was a lot of tech people that decided that there's an opportunity here.

Speaker 6 And so instead of, I kind of started looking at the different problems with thin insurance, surety bonds being one of many, you know, private flood, there's a couple things at the time.

Speaker 6 But I had a reverse flow business of, I would network with city officials at the city of Philadelphia.

Speaker 6 And when international companies were coming to the area to set up like a North American office, Philly's a popular spot because they can get between New York and DC on the Amtrak line, but it's not near as costly.

Speaker 6 So in doing that, I was referred to a company called Axe Group out of Australia. They've built software systems for Hanover Re, MetLife Australia.

Speaker 6 The Bank of New Zealand runs on some of their software. And my job was just to kind of court them, show them the city, sell them insurance ultimately.
And in doing so, over about a year's time,

Speaker 6 we made, we became fast friends, could no longer care less about selling those guys insurance, just loved when they would come into town and kind of, you know, spitballing ideas with them and whatnot.

Speaker 6 They showed me their tech capabilities and finally decided, you know, hey, instead of us just trying to land a client over here in the U.S.,

Speaker 6 why don't we do a joint venture? And

Speaker 6 I pulled in eventually Chris Colger, once we decided on surety. Chris is now our head of operations.
He was a VP of surety at Chubb, formerly in the Philadelphia office.

Speaker 6 And he would always complain to me on the carrier side of things, how tough it is, commercial surety specifically. And I kind of knew it from the agency perspective.
And then they brought the tech.

Speaker 6 So we kind of,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 we've always kind of said, like, if we ever go to raise money or anything, our pitch is going to kind of be like, what better team than us?

Speaker 6 You know, we, we really have looked at it from every different lens. So we launched the company.

Speaker 6 It sold our first bond, I guess, in July. And now we're working with somewhere, I don't know what the count is today, somewhere between 70 and 100 agencies.

Speaker 6 We have have about almost 4,000 bonds on the platform. We're adding about 500 bonds every two weeks, and we're just like really

Speaker 6 gaining some momentum. It's been pretty exciting.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think,

Speaker 7 and so everyone listening knows, you know, I just reiterate, like, I'm, I have no interest in the platform and Aaron's and Propeller are not a sponsor of the show. I just, how did we get hooked up?

Speaker 7 LinkedIn? How did that, did you reach out to me? I've always,

Speaker 6 well, to me, there's, there,

Speaker 6 until recently, recently,

Speaker 6 I think, I forget what company you were with, but I've always noticed your content on LinkedIn and just

Speaker 6 there wasn't, you know, in insurance for a while there. There wasn't a lot of like

Speaker 6 young people in insurance, at least from my perspective on the agency side. So, seeing like your content and whatnot was like a nice, fresh approach to be able.
So, I've always

Speaker 6 seen your content from afar. And then I thought it'd be a good idea just to reach out to you from a bonding perspective because you had launched your own agency, I had noticed and everything.

Speaker 6 And, you know, you seem like someone who's pretty forward-thinking about utilizing technology and processes. So I figured you'd be a perfect person to show this to.

Speaker 7 So all you all you guys out there that say LinkedIn is just junk mail, and this is another example of that not being the case.

Speaker 7 But and then, so then we hooked up, we did a Zoom and walked through the platform and did a demo. And, you know, what I was immediately taken.

Speaker 7 So a couple of things that I like in a third-party platform like this is one, one, there's some branding in terms of, you know, it, it, it, uh, it is, it's like Rogue Risk dot propeller dot whatever.

Speaker 7 So so there's some branding to the agency. It's not just like I'm sending them someplace.
It feels like an extension.

Speaker 7 There's my logo and then it's super easy to search and get to get to the type of bond. And it is everything from, and again, I want you to cut me off and

Speaker 7 kind of

Speaker 7 straighten me out where I'm off here. But like, you know, I did some practice searches at everything from tiny little municipal $150 bonds up to

Speaker 7 contract bonds that

Speaker 7 you would, you know, like a contractor would come in who's bidding on a job and trying to work through that kind of stuff. And, you know, that to me,

Speaker 7 I immediately was like, this is amazing. Now, granted, I have some big, huge surety need from someone.
I'm probably going to call Cincinnati. But if I, anything in the day-to-day,

Speaker 7 even, even beyond, I mean, I don't want to say that you guys are just doing small stuff, but like, like, you know, anything day to day, this is a no-brainer. I mean, it's an absolute no-brainer.

Speaker 7 I mean, I went in and I just punched in a couple of things and I just was like, oh my God. I mean, where my mind goes is all the content that I can create around this platform to drive people to it.

Speaker 7 And if they buy a bond and I get their contact information, hey. Saw you bought a bond, just wanted to introduce myself.
What else do you have going on? How can I help? You know what I mean?

Speaker 7 If now's not the time, when? And that's an easy conversation for a sales and marketing person to have after someone's already purchased something from you. And

Speaker 7 that's where, from a marketing perspective, I see it being so powerful. So, okay.
So now dipping back into your story. You've made these tremendous connections.
You have

Speaker 7 the chub guy. So you have a lot of

Speaker 7 industry experience from, as you said, all three points of the triangle. And

Speaker 7 now you're starting to think about what the platform is going to look like so so talk to me a little bit about um

Speaker 6 thought process behind like why not just go direct and say say screw agent partners why not just load up the ppc go get a ton of seed money and start blasting people into the thing yeah we considered that um i don't know our kind of like a bit a kind of part of our business philosophy is um you know watch what everyone else is doing and go the other way and um and so that's where a lot of things are going right now.

Speaker 6 And I think for agents, like you'd be surprised now that we've kind of been able to see behind the veil a little more how many carriers actually wholly own agencies and are going direct to consumer.

Speaker 6 And, you know, they're the agent's best friend on one day, but on another day, they actually own, you know, a dot-com that's selling direct.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 so I think that I just coming from an agent perspective, I always understood the value of the agent. I actually think that

Speaker 6 carriers and anyone else actually drastically underestimates the agency relationship with the customer. I think it's more powerful than people give it credit for a lot of times.

Speaker 6 And so that was our path to entry. And then in doing so, we didn't want to create another login for an agent, another, you know, hey, come to our website instead of their website.

Speaker 6 So what we did was we, there's no login. So an agent can transact a bond on our system faster than they can probably even log into a carrier system.

Speaker 6 And so, you're clicking it as a bookmark on your web browser.

Speaker 6 It can also be customer-facing. So, it's very adaptable.
We put the agency's brand forward. When a customer buys a bond,

Speaker 6 the email comes from, you know, Rogue Risk, powered by propeller. We always tell our agents, you know, we try to be powered by propeller, not overpowered by propeller.
And

Speaker 6 so, we love to play second fiddle. And I would liken it a bit to the Shopify model of like, we build the highway, right? We just collect the toll on the way through.
And so our product is free.

Speaker 6 We kind of, that's another thing we had to decide early on is like, do you want to be a software as a service or or kind of do this freemium model where we give it away for free and we just click the ticket on the way through and and and that's how it works.

Speaker 6 So by cutting us in on you know five bucks a bond and in often cases, not even that. I mean, we're paying 30% on commercial, which is pretty standard.
You would never expect that from a wholesaler.

Speaker 6 No. And so um, and so we're able to do that because of the technology, right?

Speaker 7 Like, we don't have to, yeah, because that was actually a question that I asked you: was like, when you, when you, you're explaining your model to me, and then you explain the commission structure, and I was like, So, where's the catch?

Speaker 7 You know what I mean? Like, and I'm signing a piece of my agency over to you, or like, what, how do you make this work from an economics perspective? So, so, basically, what you're saying is the

Speaker 7 technology piece, the streamlined nature of the the technology allows you to run on margins that create, that actually create opportunity for agents.

Speaker 7 That we're not pushing through 5% or 10% commissions on bonds. We're actually getting legit.
I mean, 30% is market rate. I mean,

Speaker 7 you may do a little better than that if you have a direct surety appointment with somebody, but I mean, not much.

Speaker 7 And certainly, you know, again, you're hand stamping it and stickering it and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 6 Oh, and then if they need it directly, there's like FedExing overnight sometimes, which we've, we built in. I mean, one part of this was a bit of a stroke of luck, right?

Speaker 6 Like we, when we were going to launch, we were only going to launch in 20 states that were all accepting electronic signature, electronic seals, everything.

Speaker 6 But then COVID hit and overnight, all 50 states now accept it. And so we're the first to market with

Speaker 6 it. And the carriers are going to take quite a long time to be able to build all that in.

Speaker 6 And so we're really out in front of things as far as that goes as well. So

Speaker 6 that's like another part of it that's just, you know, you got to be a a little lucky along the way. And

Speaker 6 it's kind of crazy to think about COVID providing anyone any sort of, you know, favorable,

Speaker 6 I guess, besides the platform we're talking on now with Zoom and whatnot.

Speaker 6 But it really, it really helped like, I guess, exacerbate our business model.

Speaker 6 And when people were sent home without their seals and out their printers and their stamps, these large shirty departments, like they had no idea what to do. Yeah.
Get bonds out the door.

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Let's get back to the episode.

Speaker 7 You know, it's so interesting to me, your comment about COVID. It really feels like

Speaker 7 you were either a big winner or a big loser. And

Speaker 7 I don't mean that to be harsh to anyone who did feel negative ramifications for COVID. That's just simply an observation that there was, I haven't met too many people in the middle ground.

Speaker 7 They either, people either gained ground because either by luck or by tactical decision making, or they lost ground. And it's really interesting.

Speaker 7 And there's part of me that says, oh, you know, you know,

Speaker 7 I think it's very easy. to sit back and make excuses.
Well, you know, the way we've always done bonds, and you know, we're talking about bonds, right? But I think this applies to a lot of stuff.

Speaker 7 The way we've always done bonds is this. And geez, you know, I don't really know about this new thing.

Speaker 7 And I'm looking at it going, oh my gosh, I'm going to create so many fucking YouTube videos about bonds and link directly to my platform that in six months, when those bonds, when those videos start to get traction in Google search engine.

Speaker 7 It's going to be cash machine. I mean, David Cruthers calls it mailbox money.
It's a, you know what I mean? I mean, that's what it is.

Speaker 7 And then, and then with the systems in the back end using CRM, now you can go to town. And I look at this and guys,

Speaker 7 I'm doing a little pontificating here, partially because my kids are home and I'm going a little crazy, but partially because

Speaker 7 I really think we have to change the way, like I wanted to have Aaron on.

Speaker 7 and talk about propeller and what they're doing because this is one of those veins that we have to start to build into our business, right? It's this.

Speaker 7 It's maybe, it's maybe cyber through a pro writers or someone like that. It's there are platforms that are starting to develop that allow us to take coverages.

Speaker 7 and and i don't want to say remove us from the process but certainly make it more streamlined easy and and can become can become leaders because when someone has a bond problem they have a bond problem they're not like oh hey my bond renews in six months it's time for me to shop that i just don't think that's the way certainly many many standard

Speaker 7 companies think of their bonds. They're basically like, holy crap, we need a bond.
Let's go get one. And they need that problem solved immediately.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think to echo your point as far as like taking agents out of the process or not, what our product does and what a lot of newer products are going to do is make it adaptable to where you can take yourself out of the whole process if you want, or you can not market the link to anyone and keep it in-house and just have it help your staff process bonds faster.

Speaker 6 So it can be whatever you want it to be. And I think that adaptability and flexibility is really what's needed.
And

Speaker 6 even

Speaker 6 more so on the idea of earlier when you talked about getting a big bond request, like, you know, we work with, we're working now with like Marsh and Epic and RISC strategies.

Speaker 6 And to them, they, they look at this as like, yeah, okay, maybe this just automates our commercial surety and anything above a certain threshold we want to take on ourselves.

Speaker 6 But to another agency, we're working with one in Birmingham that a decent sized agency, but doesn't have a bonding department, doesn't really have markets for it, doesn't have the expertise.

Speaker 6 To them, we're announced, they're a complete outsourced bonding department. And so, and we have underwriters and we have the carriers and the expertise.

Speaker 6 And, and, you know, we fulfilled like a three million dollar bond for someone recently. And so, and it's like 100-something thousand premium or whatever it was.
And,

Speaker 6 and I guess, like, just to double down on the idea of adaptability, right? Like, we can be as forward-facing or not, or we can be utilized in any different manner.

Speaker 6 And that's that's not just to tell us, but I think like a lot of new tech products are going to be able to offer that, where it's like an agent can hands-on use it or they can just capitalize on their existing uh network and their existing customer base and market it so you can be a paid marketer or or a an actual agent with it you know what i mean yeah so okay so if i'm sitting here and i'm and i'm a skeptical agent and i'm saying wow this this sounds cool but uh hanley hypes up a lot of stuff um obviously only stuff that i believe in but um but you know this must be written on some

Speaker 7 bullshit paper with companies that don't know what they're doing. Or, you know, this is a startup.
So we can't have any, he can't have any good carrier relationships.

Speaker 7 You know, so who are you working with?

Speaker 7 What are we, if someone writes a bond, where's it coming from?

Speaker 6 It's going to be on one of five papers. We have appointments with Crum and Forrester, Travelers,

Speaker 6 Arch, Markel, and UCS.

Speaker 6 The bulk of our bonds are going going to be on Travelers or Arch just for the time being. So what we do is we're not a comparative rater.
It's not really needed on bonds.

Speaker 6 You'll see that the pricing on this stuff is so narrow. Like $100 minimum premium is $100 minimum premium.
You know, it's going to be that way. So we're not trying to be priceline.com for bonds.

Speaker 6 We're trying to be speed of use. And that's the biggest thing is like.
Carriers have tried to throw money at this, right? 25%, 30%, 35% commission. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 6 Like you're still losing money on it if you're spending two hours doing it.

Speaker 6 We need it done in one minute, five minutes, you know?

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 whoever

Speaker 6 our carriers, we usually assign one per class code.

Speaker 6 So if a carrier wants to get on our platform and say they want to take over, you know, another carrier on contract or license bonds, well, then they got to come with like.

Speaker 6 a larger capacity, a larger instant issue threshold, a lower credit criteria to make it streamlined and easier for agents.

Speaker 6 So in a lot of ways, by aggregating premium from agents we can really um negotiate with the carriers on behalf of all of them to try to get wow i love that idea

Speaker 7 so you're essentially instead of making them compete customer facing them you're making them compete platform to the for the platform for the access so they essentially have to almost like bid you know, both in scale and

Speaker 7 volume of opportunities and volume of bonds and geographic and then price.

Speaker 7 Wow. I love that.
That is really, that, that is, see, cause I, I'm, I'm with you on the comparative rating stuff.

Speaker 7 I, I, I, cause, cause one, um, there's, there's, there's two issues with comparative rating. One, no one's ever been able to make it profitable ever.
It's never been profitable.

Speaker 7 Compare.com, never profitable. The zebra had to turn into an agency to make it profitable, right? Like no one's been able to make this work.
And there's a, there's psychological reasons for that.

Speaker 7 And that once you present more than, what is it, three options, the, the, the, the, the fact that the chance that someone will click a button drops by like 70%.

Speaker 7 And then if you just present one option, no carrier likes that because they feel like they're not getting showed, blah, blah, blah. But by making them compete on the back end,

Speaker 7 you're actually leveraging way more power.

Speaker 7 Man, that's a really interesting concept.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And so they, what's cool is,

Speaker 6 you know, there's not like a laundry list of coverages and bonds. It's a one, three part, it's kind of like a one payroll thing almost.
It's a three-party agreement. So

Speaker 6 it would be counter-intuitive to offer a customer, say, a $110 bond from Travelers and $100 bond from Arch. And then they're going to ask, well, what's the difference? Well, there is none.

Speaker 6 They're both top 20 sureties. They're awesome companies.
They're A-rated.

Speaker 6 Why

Speaker 6 it doesn't matter at all. Just who's going to get it out the door quickest.

Speaker 6 And so, yeah, we look at things from that. And our carriers have been awesome in understanding our mode of, I mean, we really portfolio underwrite this stuff.

Speaker 6 So we underwrite by class code, not by account, which is how traditionally sureties do it. They underwrite based on the business.
We underwrite based on the class of the bonds.

Speaker 6 So for like contractor license bonds, where a lot of times you would maybe have to ask special permission to write them, 95% of those on our platform, it's an issue. No credits check, no anything.

Speaker 6 We'll just write them all day long. And so

Speaker 6 it took a little bit of convincing, right? We have to produce a use case and they have to monitor our results and everything, but the carriers are really,

Speaker 6 I can't say enough about that part of it. Because going into this, you know, I was a former agent and there's always kind of this like

Speaker 6 carrier agent tension of, you know,

Speaker 6 you're submitting things and there's this force field in between you, it feels like. And so I was a little apprehensive about that.

Speaker 6 But honestly, like our the carriers we're working with, and this isn't just like sales speak, they've been awesome. They've been really incredible of

Speaker 6 helping us develop the product, giving us insights and information where we didn't have it. You know, we don't have all the answers.
So, but, and they have all this data to go off of.

Speaker 6 And I don't know, they've been, they've been really cool. It's really like

Speaker 6 opened my eyes a lot to just like, um, there's, you know, there's some pretty, there's some pretty awesome people working at the carrier side of things.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So, what, um,

Speaker 7 yeah, we, we only, we don't do a lot of carrier bashing on this show, only when they deserve it, mostly around their lack of, lack of, their terrible technology. But, uh, in general, um,

Speaker 7 in general, I, you know, it's funny. I tweeted something out the other day.
And I say that like

Speaker 7 people should be watching my Twitter. That's not what I'm trying to say.
Sometimes it's like a vent. You know how, like,

Speaker 7 you know, my wife gets sick of me talking to her about insurance, right? She's an insurance. I'm an insurance.
So, you know, just sometimes she just doesn't want to hear it. And I'm, she's not a nerd.

Speaker 7 She, she isn't. She isn't.
She is, but at 4:30, she wants to turn her insurance brain off. And she does, I could go down into the the, the deep hollows of insurance.

Speaker 7 Right. And, um,

Speaker 7 and, uh,

Speaker 7 I, I just, um, I, she doesn't want to go there. So sometimes I'll just tweet stuff to just like get it out of my brain.

Speaker 7 And I, and I tweeted the other day, like, I'm starting to realize who, which, which carriers are partners and which are not. And I said it some way.
And I got all these crazy responses.

Speaker 7 It was interesting. I crazy in an interesting way.
You know, oh, you're just learning that and da, da, da, da. And I can't believe that it took you this long to realize.
And, and it's true.

Speaker 7 Um, but I, I think

Speaker 7 I have found just in this first year, you know, it'll be, it'll be one year of rogue risk on March 9th. That's our one-year anniversary.
And

Speaker 7 I really have realized that the carriers that are your partners, that that are interested, man, they will do a lot for you. They really will.

Speaker 7 I have, um,

Speaker 7 you know, I have a, I have a great relationship with,

Speaker 7 a few of my carriers and a couple I'm trying to build a better relationship with. But man,

Speaker 7 they actually will do a lot. I don't like to trash them.
I do wish most of them would get better at technology, but they're actually humans and what they're trying to do.

Speaker 7 So

Speaker 7 it's cool to see so many carriers get involved with a young platform like yours so quickly. Now, what one, what do you attribute that to?

Speaker 7 And then I'd like you to talk to me a little bit about, are you looking for more? Do you have any that you can talk about who may be coming in? Like that kind of thing.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 As far as what you can attribute it to, I think is

Speaker 6 the really difficult part of surety is how like archaic and paper intensive it was and distribution.

Speaker 6 Because this is, you're talking about small dollar items a lot of times. So this is a it's a volume game, you know, it really is.

Speaker 6 And so I think the fact that we offer distribution and technology is just like, is a really attractive thing for them

Speaker 6 because we're able to go out and appoint, you know, hundreds of agencies essentially for them. So, you know, they look at this as like, we're basically like commission-only salespeople, right?

Speaker 6 They would have to hire field offices of people to go get agents interested in putting it on their paper. And then once you are in an agency, you have to say like, well, log into my.

Speaker 6 platform instead of you know travelers or cna or whatever and it's i'll bring you more donuts and uh and so what we've done is kind of like help circumvent that. So that's great.

Speaker 6 We

Speaker 6 actually have had a lot of interest now from the majority of the major surety carriers

Speaker 6 who have approached us about getting on the platform. But again, they'd have to really, you know, do something to supplant what we have currently.

Speaker 6 And we have a really good relationship currently with the carriers I mentioned before.

Speaker 6 We are looking to backfill some things because there's some kind of oddball lines of surety that some carriers just knock out of the park, like crime bonds or resident trust bonds.

Speaker 6 Or, you know, Crumb and Forrester, the relationship with them was spawned out of cannabis bonds.

Speaker 6 Because all of these, kind of the same way of like liquor distributors in a lot of states, states where cannabis is legal, require bonds for

Speaker 6 essentially like head shops or growers or what have you. So

Speaker 6 they it's highly regulated and they're going to require bonds. And a lot of carriers don't do that, but Crumb and Forrester does.

Speaker 6 So we're looking to always backfill the hard to play stuff, but it's tough because no carrier only wants to be on the tough stuff, right? They want a portion of the low loss ratio stuff as well.

Speaker 6 So we're trying to navigate those waters. But

Speaker 6 yeah, we had conversations with most carriers. Most of them go well.
Some of them are rough, like

Speaker 6 where it's, I felt several times where it's like, well, we basically are already, we can invent this tomorrow if we wanted to.

Speaker 6 And so I just, just, on those calls, I try to bail as quickly as possible.

Speaker 6 But it happens, but most people we've talked to have been great. So.

Speaker 7 Yeah. I had a really interesting, one of my carriers was onboarding with them.
And

Speaker 7 part of the onboarding process, they wanted to talk to me, wanted me to talk to the surety team. So I was like, okay, you know, awesome.
And I had the mid and small.

Speaker 7 surety guy. And then there was a woman who was like the large surety, you know, larger surety cases.
And,

Speaker 7 you know, we're talking and, you know, my brain always goes to marketing. It's just the way that I'm wired.
Right. So I immediately start thinking, how can I position content?

Speaker 7 How can, you know, what ads can I run? What, who can I reach out to as lead sources for this kind of thing? So

Speaker 7 I'm talking about it and talking about workflow. You know, I, and

Speaker 7 I have to, sometimes I forget that like,

Speaker 7 people's jobs are based on the fact that it's paper and that it takes time and that they can take the stamp and pound it into the ink and then slam it on that paper.

Speaker 7 Like, that's that's actually where their value comes from. So, I'm talking about da da da.
And she goes, Whoa, I got to stop you. No one goes online and looks for surety.

Speaker 7 And I'm like, No one, really.

Speaker 7 Okay. Yeah.
I said, Well, I said, you know, and this is the way I work. I'm bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
I start hitting my keyboard. Well, Google says that

Speaker 7 in New York, 2,500 people just googled the term surety bond last month so how many of those did you get yeah and you know and and you know then she starts barking at me about how you don't understand and it's complex and this and that and uh and finally at the end i just said okay

Speaker 7 yeah okay all right you went i've hey I'm just the asshole trying to sell it, right? I mean, all I was asking for

Speaker 7 and how it started was, and this is just kind of to how archaic some people still think about these things and why I think and why I like to share with the listeners.

Speaker 7 I almost said loyal listeners like Cass for everyone listening. I didn't say it, but I almost did.

Speaker 7 For the listeners of the show is that, you know, this is that that is not, that's, that's not the future of where we're going. That's not how we serve these things.

Speaker 7 You know, and what I asked her was, um, so what are like some of the, what are some of the terms that drive sales? Like, what are some of the things that people ask, talk about?

Speaker 7 Because I'm, I've sold some bonds in a previous life, but I'm not in any regards a bonding guy. And

Speaker 7 she, and that's when she went to no, no one, nobody, yeah, no one, like, so pretty. And he's like, oh, well, you win then.
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Well, and then some, you know, and some people like, um, you could spend years trying to change their mind.
It's just best to cut bait and it's not worth it.

Speaker 6 If you're not willing to open your brain to new ideas. And that's where we, we just got like super lucky with the people that are our linchpins.

Speaker 6 Scott at Arch and Ken and Keith at Travelers, like they've been able to just really open their mind and kind of get things. And so that's been cool.
But yeah,

Speaker 6 we've run into a couple where it's like, well, well, we basically already invented this. And it's like, well, then why are you talking to us? You know,

Speaker 6 I don't know. I don't know where that comes from or why, or why it's like that.
But it's

Speaker 7 some, yeah, no, I get it. I think

Speaker 7 that's, I love like this time in our industry. I feel like 10 years from now, we'll look back.
Like we had like 2016, 2017 was like the quote unquote insuretech revolution.

Speaker 7 And I think a lot of, I think there were a tremendous number of really positive things that came out of that time. I think that, I think that.

Speaker 7 A lot of,

Speaker 7 I think the idea of disintermediation was dashed against the rocks and what came out of it was way more productive for our industry,

Speaker 7 which is the concepts that you're talking about, where you're taking these, where you're taking technology, streamlining,

Speaker 7 CX, UX, and mashing it into

Speaker 7 the human side of our business that really does still make us go.

Speaker 7 And that's why when I see things like what you're doing with Propeller, I'm like, this is exactly the type of thing that we need. Like,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 this is exactly the type of platform that moves us forward. And

Speaker 7 right now we're in, there's so much blue ocean, right? Like there's 70 friggin agents on your platform.

Speaker 7 If you have a decent marketing mind and you stop what you're doing when you hear this podcast and you go to propeller and you sign, you know, you get, and we're going to talk about how you get signed up and everything, you, you learn more, get a demo or whatever the process is.

Speaker 7 Like you have so much blue ocean to start pushing this platform out into the space and getting it to your clients and using as a using it as a value add for contractors. You know what I mean? I mean,

Speaker 7 I already started building the marketing material. Everyone, I'm probably giving away my secret sauce here, I guess.

Speaker 7 But like, I have this program, I told you a little bit about this called Roger's 365. And I'm just trying to give everyone a use case for this.

Speaker 7 The first iteration of it was working through comp issues and helping people with comp. The second part that I'm implementing is certificate management.

Speaker 7 And the third part that I'm now plugging in, I just haven't gotten to full implementation yet, is propeller for the bonding. So now you can go to a contractor and go, what does every other agent do?

Speaker 7 Hey, let me quote your shit. Okay.
So you get another quote from the same freaking carriers you get all the time.

Speaker 7 And, you know, what I'm saying, what I'm, and what I think platforms like Propeller can do is allow agents to come in and go, okay, I'm going to help you with marketing and placement for sure.

Speaker 7 But then you get this and you get this and you get one-click bonding.

Speaker 7 So you need to, you, on a, on a, on a saturday you forget that on monday you gotta be yeah you gotta be in latham town you need a bond for a project you're doing for the town of latham

Speaker 7 you know log into roadgrace.propeller.com and buy your latham municipal bond and you're walking into the job yeah

Speaker 6 the i was just saying like the urls obviously they're a little wordy but typically no one even types in urls anymore it's just a click so yeah we always tell you to make it a link to a button on your site or your email signature or whatever but yeah i would also piggyback on what you were saying by saying like another good use case is

Speaker 6 turning your clients into salespeople in a lot of ways. Like law firms is a great use case where

Speaker 6 every estate planning attorney, their customers need probate bonds.

Speaker 6 When someone passes away and they inherit the estate, they need a probate bond that says they're not going to steal the money out of the estate. And so lawyers can be your referral sources.

Speaker 6 And every time their customers need a probate bond, they just say, hey, fill out this link. And at Propeller, we'll even white label it for them if they want to use it internally.

Speaker 6 You could be the agent of record behind it, but we'll white label it for them or your GCs.

Speaker 6 If they need their subs bonded on a job, it's like, we'll just tell them to fill this application out real quick. So your GCs become your salespeople.
We do all the work.

Speaker 6 And then on the contract, you're getting paid 20% for not even touching it. And so there's a bunch of good use cases as far as like,

Speaker 6 you know, affinity programs and association work and stuff like that, yeah.

Speaker 7 And just and just think, guys, everyone who uses the platform is now your customer. You can reach back out to them, you can just send them a nice note.
You can, you know what I mean?

Speaker 7 You can introduce yourself. Like, this is where

Speaker 7 this is how you really become, in my opinion, a value provider is think is solving the immediate problem and backing into the you know the kind of meat and potatoes that that that that we do, but solve the immediate problem.

Speaker 7 You know, this is why I I used to pitch,

Speaker 7 I used to pitch

Speaker 7 short-term disability in New York State.

Speaker 7 I don't know if you, now it's short-term disability and paid family medical leave as one policy, but this is a policy that the short-term disability part is unique to New York State. And

Speaker 7 it's a crappy little policy. It's $44 in premium per female, $19 in premium per male.
So you got to have a lot of employees for there to be any real me, unless you're in a really high-risk

Speaker 7 class. But for the most part, you're paying nothing, but no one knows what it is.
No one knows where to get it. Half the people that should have it don't have it.
And you know what I mean?

Speaker 7 And you can backdoor into these things. So, and then from there, you cross into the whole, into the hole.
And then obviously they use you over and over and over again. And so I just,

Speaker 7 I'm glad, I think. I'm so in line with the decisions that you've made about this platform and how you're going about it and the way you're building it.
And I just,

Speaker 7 I'm really glad we were able to take some time today and talk through it.

Speaker 7 Is there anything like, like if you were me and you were like, you know, man, I wish friggin Hanley asked me this.

Speaker 7 Is there anything else going on that you really, you really think people need to know about?

Speaker 6 No, I mean, I think the fact that we're scaling and adding bonds so much is really what the most impressive part is.

Speaker 6 We're going to have our bond library in and of itself could be a business that we lease out to people. I mean, it's just having all the bonds mapped is really big.

Speaker 6 The fact that the other big pain point unsurety that we didn't touch on is the billing.

Speaker 6 And we do credit card direct bill. We auto renew by credit card.

Speaker 6 You wouldn't believe how many agencies have their bonds on agency bill and they have to be, you know, dog the bounty hunter for a hundred dollar bill every year.

Speaker 6 And it's just, it's another loss leader. So

Speaker 6 that's that's really like the biggest thing. I mean, I think right now we're just

Speaker 6 kind of scaling up the business. Obviously, 70 agencies is not the goal.

Speaker 6 But that said, we're working with a lot of very large agencies.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 that was not by design, really. We were surprised by that.
But I think...

Speaker 6 the larger agencies just do enough of this stuff that they know how much of a pain in the ass it is and they it's deaf by a million pace paper cuts and they're they want to streamline this and focus on the bigger ticket items yeah um so that's

Speaker 6 that's the big next step is making it the agent adoption quicker,

Speaker 6 faster, easier.

Speaker 7 So that's a perfect segue. So if someone's listening to this show right now and they're like, oh my gosh, I need to get this into my agency right now.

Speaker 7 Where do they go? What do they do?

Speaker 6 Yeah. So right now, you would simply email probably myself, Aaron, A-A-R-O-N, at propellerbonds.com.
And you can schedule a demo if you'd like.

Speaker 6 We also have video demos we could just send out depending on how deep into the question and answer phase you want to go. And then

Speaker 6 it's kind of like a carrier appointment.

Speaker 6 I mean, a producer agreement, W-9, direct deposit form, copy of your license, copy of your email, and we can make your URL within like five minutes of receiving your paperwork.

Speaker 7 Which is true. You did that for me.
It took five minutes.

Speaker 6 Yeah, you can be up and running really quick. We pull the logo from your website.

Speaker 6 We set you up with whoever you want the accounting information to go to because you'll get a direct deposit and a commission statement each month.

Speaker 6 And then you can pick someone to be CC'd on all the bond purchases.

Speaker 6 So then it's really easy, like you said, to reply all and say thank you for your bond and make that conversation keep going from there.

Speaker 6 So yeah, we just right now we're doing it that way, but our dev team is working on self-onboarding where you go online on our website, put in your information and basically onboard yourself and do it at your speed.

Speaker 7 So A-A-R-O-N at propellerbonds.com. If they want to learn more in general, propellerbonds.com, right? And then can they reach out from the website? They can reach out at least.

Speaker 6 Yeah, reach out from the website. My number's on there, everything.

Speaker 6 Social media-wise, we're like strictly just all in with LinkedIn.

Speaker 6 So that's what we use. That's what we think is going to be best for us.
So on LinkedIn, we're very active. Our page is very active, all that good stuff.

Speaker 6 And then we have an email blast that goes out each month talking about different bond types that are being added and different new developments.

Speaker 6 And like we recently just added a chat feature and Google Analytics. So

Speaker 6 our dev team's working around the clock. Agency management system integrations is not too far out.
So we're doing some cool things there.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I'd like to talk to you about the agency management stuff and some CRM stuff because

Speaker 7 I think there could be some real opportunity there as well.

Speaker 7 We can talk about that offline. Guys,

Speaker 7 I want to reiterate this. Aaron is not an an advertiser.

Speaker 7 I know this has been just about the bonding thing, but I just think that what he's doing, I think this is a tool that you absolutely put in your tool belt. Um, you know, a little bit of marketing.

Speaker 7 And this is, you know, even just putting it in the favorites of all your staff.

Speaker 7 So when someone calls and making part of, you know, if you listen to, if you listen to Billy Williams and you have your, your coverage declination sheet, if one of the, if your commercial client declination sheet has surety on it and you're asking, you know, now they're getting in front of them.

Speaker 7 You're telling every one of your clients, hey, do you have surety needs? Well, once a year, just email us. We have a simple way to get it done for you now, you know, with direct bill.

Speaker 7 You don't have to, you don't have to send us a check anymore. You know what I mean? You don't have to, it's super easy.
And

Speaker 7 I hope that if you guys do have a bonding need or a surety, I keep saying bonding, a surety need that you will.

Speaker 7 that you'll give Propeller a shot because

Speaker 7 I do think that it's a game changer in terms of ease of use for both agencies and for customers.

Speaker 6 I appreciate it, man. It was great spending more time with you.
And thanks for inviting me.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I appreciate you, man. Hey, be good.
And all the best.

Speaker 7 All right.

Speaker 8 You're welcome.

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