RHS 035 - How Silicon Valley Rockstar David Davis is Leveling Up a Family Insurance Agency

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Speaker 5 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Ryan Hamley Show.

Speaker 6 Today, we have a fun episode because we get to talk to someone who is very recently an outsider of our industry, and that is David Davis.

Speaker 6 And here's a former Silicon Valley rock star flying around the world solving technology problems who makes a big transition to working for his father-in-law and his brother-in-law at Fudge Insurance, which is an incredible insurance agency down in Florida, and is now taking his filters, his technology filters, and passing our industry through them and coming up with solutions.

Speaker 6 And it's not necessarily the sexy um, new business, some newfangled way to throw policies on the books, ideas that I think you'd expect from someone from Silicon Valley.

Speaker 6 And it's refreshing, and it's exciting, and in general, uh, Dave's just a super good guy, and I got to meet him at IAOA, and it was incredible to have him on the show.

Speaker 6 You're going to take a lot from this episode, and I think you're going to have a good time too.

Speaker 6 Uh, before we get there, though, we got to talk about our sponsor for today's episode, and that is Avisor Evolved. That's Advisor Evolved.
Chris Langell and his team are creating the best websites

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Now, the thing is...

Speaker 6 An Advisor Evolved website isn't just a website. It's a tool.
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Speaker 6 There's so much more to a website that you get from Advisor Evolved than just what you see on the interwebs. There are all kinds of

Speaker 6 processes, procedures, and tools behind the scenes, things like quote vids and

Speaker 6 other tools that I use at Rogue Risk. If you go check out RogueRisk.com, you can see the work that Chris and his team does.

Speaker 6 And some of the best agents in the entire country are using Advisory Evolved as their digital storefront. And I think you should give them a look too if you are considering a new website.

Speaker 6 They are my first recommendation when people ask me where to go. go, and I am happy to do so.

Speaker 6 And as a user of their tool as well, I think I can say wholeheartedly that I'm incredibly happy with the product that I got, the service I get from Chris and his team, and I think you will be too.

Speaker 6 So with that, let's get on to David Davis.

Speaker 7 You know, it's hard for me to complain. I feel like I've taken a process that normally is like three to six months and bumped it up to like, it's been nine weeks since like the company was formed.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 7 That's a testament to just the network that I have, the quality of the people, you know what I mean? Absolutely.

Speaker 7 Sure. Willing to share and very blessed in that standpoint.
So again, just pushing hard. And

Speaker 7 I got a pretty clear vision of what I want to do.

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 what's been interesting, I say, what, I'll tell you what's interesting, most interesting thing to me is that as an outsider to the agency ownership space,

Speaker 7 you know, I see agency owners do things and I'm like, man, why do they do that? Why do they chase that rabbit? Or why do they, you know, get caught up in that thing? Yeah.

Speaker 7 And I have found myself making all those things.

Speaker 7 You know, like

Speaker 7 the technology, you know, the technology game.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 7 You know, chasing every carrier appointment.

Speaker 7 You know, most recently it was like

Speaker 7 trying to, you know,

Speaker 7 working on

Speaker 7 low, low value lead funnel systems because

Speaker 9 and part of it is boredom i you know and i don't mean that because i say i say that let me you know i say that because uh not boredom but like i can't i don't have a direct appointment yet right well and i think it's also like you know i mean if you're like we are i think we end up so like big things are cooking but in between we want to be working so we're like well let me just spend some time on this this little thing which then becomes a bigger thing and you're like what am i doing why am i working on this

Speaker 7 yeah i find myself like an hour later i've built out a funnel for a tight business that I don't even want to write like I don't even want to write I just was like I didn't have anything to do for an hour so you know

Speaker 7 and it's a hundred percent I'm downloading it's just

Speaker 7 just copywriting ebooks I'm like what am I doing I mean

Speaker 9 I feel you I think sometimes that's when like you know, I was telling you that it's been a crazy week for us. Like, I'm just, I'm incredibly busy, like startup busy, but it's so fun.

Speaker 9 And the thing, the cool thing about it is I don't have, I literally have zero minutes for those kind of distractions, right?

Speaker 9 Which is nice because everything I'm working on is always like value add, value add, value, add, value, add. And it feels really good.
So I love those times.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 I'm with you, man. Like, I said to my wife the other day, she's like, how's it going? And,

Speaker 7 and she's been good. She's been awesome about being slightly hands off.
Like, she's obviously interested. But, you know, I'm a non-revenue producing spouse right now.
So sure, yeah, sure.

Speaker 7 you know, that's a stressful time for anyone, but she's been very good about not, you know, about giving me a little bit of space because no one wants to be hounded when they're in growth mode.

Speaker 7 But she said,

Speaker 7 she said, how's it going? And I said, you know,

Speaker 7 part of me would love to have like a partner in this, you know, like, because there's this.

Speaker 7 like someone just to kind of say like don't do that thing like don't spend your time on that um that's not where you want to be Because it is easy left to your own devices, especially when you're a tinkerer to get on these time-wasting paths.

Speaker 7 And I have to.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 I feel like I'm getting better at pulling myself back out, but man, you know,

Speaker 9 I think, I think highly productive people tend to do that, right? Because we idle hands aren't natural.

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 9 You know what I mean? And so you end up like. well, you know what? I have, I have an hour or two hours here before this next big thing.
Like, I bet you I could do this real quick.

Speaker 9 And, and, and you end up with all those threads. It's hard to control that, right? I mean, I feel you on that, yeah.

Speaker 7 The other side of it is, is I love to know how things work, like, even stupid things that I shouldn't really care about, I like to know how they work. Like, I've never been interested in

Speaker 7 how a car works. Like, I understand a basic combustion engine system, sure.
I don't never care to like break down my Ford and put it back together.

Speaker 7 In today's version, I couldn't even do that. But, like, yeah, um,

Speaker 7 but when it comes to business,

Speaker 7 I'm pretty much intrigued by almost every aspect of it outside of maybe like accounting. But,

Speaker 7 you know, so, so all these different systems and processes, like, I know I should be outsourcing them, but at the same time,

Speaker 9 I don't know if I agree with that. Like, I get, look, I know there is an economy of scale in outsourcing them.
Yeah. But actually, my, my heart is closer to your heart in this, in that,

Speaker 9 first, I want to know about them, but you know, second, honestly, sometimes, and you call this

Speaker 9 selfish or controlling or whatever, but I want to have those in-house sometimes, dude.

Speaker 9 Like, I don't know, outsourcing is great economically, and there are some places and some functions I think it makes like enormous sense. Like, if you're not doing it, it's dumb.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 sorry, someone just slacked me and I lost my train of thought. But, you know, there are functions that I like to keep in-house because I have them there.

Speaker 9 I can touch them, I can see them, I can watch them.

Speaker 9 That's just my thing.

Speaker 7 I also feel like,

Speaker 7 so, so yes, so I don't outsource a lot. I, I also, one of my key things is that I, uh, I only outstore outsource stuff that I know how to do.

Speaker 9 Sure. That way, sure.
That's actually really smart. Yep.

Speaker 7 Yep. Yep.

Speaker 7 So, like, uh, a good one for me is my marketing automation. So I'm using Infusionsoft and I'm working with Austin Moorhead from Lava Automation, who's a great guy, very smart.
I know

Speaker 7 85% of how automations work.

Speaker 7 But I hired Austin and his team because since I know how it works, I can talk to them as peers and then they can just execute in a way that it's time I don't have to spend doing it.

Speaker 7 But I know how it works. So it's not like, it's not like I'm talking to a Martian or they're talking.
Yeah, right, right. So in that scenario, I feel like that's a,

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 I don't, this is probably the wrong word, but like an acceptable outsource because

Speaker 7 what I'm doing is getting time back.

Speaker 9 100%. And it's the same,

Speaker 9 it's going to sound weird to say this, and maybe it's going to sound privileged to say this, but like it's kind of the same logic to where, yeah, it is going to sound privileged, but it's kind of the same, it's kind of the same logic to where you make that decision for the first time that you're not going to mow your own lawn anymore.

Speaker 9 You're going to pay a service to come mow your lawn for you. And you feel a little bit guilty because you're like, dude, I know how to mow a lawn.
I can mow a lawn. It's not that hard.

Speaker 9 It's good for me. I get to walk around.

Speaker 9 I get pride of ownership out of it, but you get your time back.

Speaker 7 Yes.

Speaker 9 And that's just that's your most precious commodity, yeah, right.

Speaker 7 This was a huge argument that my wife and I had um when we first started outsourcing our mowing, yes, because and she's like,

Speaker 7 everyone else mows the lawn, and I'm like, Well, first of all, no, that's not true. That's true, right? Like 90% of our community gets the lawn mowed.
I say,

Speaker 7 like, it takes me two and a half hours to mow our lawn, absolutely back, pick up shit, put everything in the way.

Speaker 7 So, would you rather have me around

Speaker 7 go going to baseball games and doing all the stuff that we do for two and a half hours or would you rather have me walking circles around the yard yeah because

Speaker 7 one of those things is actually productive and one is not especially when you consider how you know how much it actually costs to have someone to mow your lawn like it's not that expensive

Speaker 7 exactly yeah I love that your brain is working so fast that you um have all these things in your hands right now that probably

Speaker 7 so far he's had a deck of cards and

Speaker 7 a fidget spinner in his hand. I can tell his brain's like, I want to focus on three other things other than Ryan, but he's also.
Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 9 Sorry. I didn't know if we're doing recorded exposition or just exposition.
So we can,

Speaker 9 you know, I just was talking.

Speaker 7 That's what I'm doing. Yeah, well, that's good.
That's what it's about. So

Speaker 7 let's talk about

Speaker 7 just what I, I guess, not the only reason I wanted to have you on, but just I wanted to get to know you better. Sure.
And podcasts are a good excuse for that.

Speaker 7 But, um, and I know you're recently on the Atomics podcast, which is cool. I listened to that, which is awesome.
And awesome.

Speaker 7 But, you know, I'm I'm interested in a bunch of things. I think I'm going to start kind of high level just to get our audience there.
But just tell us a little bit more about, and

Speaker 7 everyone at home knows this. And so they're going to hear it and they've already heard it.
But I do a little

Speaker 7 who you are at the beginning before this.

Speaker 9 Sure, sure.

Speaker 7 So you've all heard that and I've just told him that because I just get right into the recording, but

Speaker 7 the

Speaker 7 insurance industry right so um so you're you're you're from silicon valley uh which is super cool to be able to tell people that

Speaker 7 um

Speaker 7 just immediately emasculates every other nerd around

Speaker 7 um and then you come into insurance so my first question is which one is nerdier

Speaker 9 um

Speaker 9 You know what? This actually may be surprising. So

Speaker 9 to caveat this answer, I've been in insurance for six months and I've been to,

Speaker 9 let's say, five or six insurance events.

Speaker 9 Nerdier.

Speaker 9 I think the people in Silicon Valley are nerdier in a pure nerd sense.

Speaker 9 But what may be surprising about the people in Silicon Valley is that they know how to party after they're done being nerdy for the day in a way that probably people don't imagine, right? So

Speaker 9 at the nerdy Silicon Valley conferences, the after parties,

Speaker 9 I mean,

Speaker 9 it's like entourage, right? And so

Speaker 9 the insurance people, I think, in the office here, much less nerdy, much, much cooler, much hipper. We have a young office.

Speaker 9 And so, you know, I feel it is not very nerdy at all here in comparison to Silicon Valley.

Speaker 9 But when I've gone to the insurance after parties, and maybe I'm getting invited to the right ones, guys, but when I've gone to the insurance after parties, they're pretty tame, man.

Speaker 7 Yeah, you're not going to the right party.

Speaker 7 Next time we hang out, just

Speaker 7 next. You got it.
We'll roll. Yeah, you're not the right one.

Speaker 7 I was going to say the opposite of like the thing about insurance that I found when I started going to events on a national stage I thought was so interesting is like, like, you know, when I was in college, I played on the baseball team as an infraterney.

Speaker 7 Like, you know, I've lived that life, you know? And then you kind of become a professional and air clothes and figure, whatever. And then I started going to these insurance events.

Speaker 7 And maybe it's just because I hang out with cast when I go to them, but like,

Speaker 7 like, insurance people know how to get down. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Definitely.

Speaker 9 I kind of feel like there's this hard worker,

Speaker 9 you know, hard, hard having fun person dichotomy that happens with people who are super driven. You know what I mean?

Speaker 7 Yeah. I don't see, and I've, and I've thought through that particular aspect of life a lot.

Speaker 7 And I keep coming back to like, I don't know that it is possible to be dialed in 24-7. Like you need to have a vent-a-weight event.

Speaker 9 And is yelling crazy, ball-busting jokes at each other at some bar, like the most productive way to do it i don't know i think it kind of is i do i actually do too i mean i i honestly i do think that i i think everybody's probably reached that point where you're so engrossed in what you're doing in a day you you you you reach that moment in the afternoon it's like 5 30 or whatever and you're like i should go home or i could order a pizza and keep working for another three hours because i've got that much stuff to do and i'm i'm that jazzed about it right um those are the moments where if i was with buddies we would say dude let's cut out let's just be done for the day let's cut out we'll start again early tomorrow but let's go get some beers and honestly some of some of my best ideas have come three or four beers in at a bar, right?

Speaker 7 Yeah. You know, so I, um,

Speaker 7 in a different life in the industry, I worked for a company called ANC Nation.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 we,

Speaker 7 so

Speaker 7 two, two, two of the guys that worked there in particular, Derek Hyde and Margardy Agatha and I, like after long days of conferencing or, or since we were a predominantly remote company, Marty actually moved to Minnesota, Derek lived in Milwaukee.

Speaker 7 I lived in Albany. When we would all be in the same place at the same time, we would hammer out a hard day's work.
We were very hard workers.

Speaker 7 And then six, seven o'clock would come around and you'd go and you'd get dinner and then dinner would turn into drinks and then drinks would turn into after drinks and then after drinks would turn into what bar is still open so we can have one more but the the truth is like

Speaker 7 some of me would say to myself like ah that's pretty unhealthy behavior the other part of it was agency nation as a company was born out of derek hyde and i being hammered drunk at a bar at 1130 at night and the whole idea for Agency Nation in a nutshell came out of us just like talking to each other.

Speaker 7 I mean, obviously, we're probably yelling at this point, but yelling at each other about, about, you know, here we need to do this. And we're, you know, this is what we're missing and Bob and Bob.

Speaker 7 And like, and then he goes, well, I got this URL, Agency Nation. I was like,

Speaker 7 we got it. Yeah.
You know, and then we, you know, and then that was how it all started. And so I, I think, uh, I think you have to have both worlds.

Speaker 7 If you, if you're too constrained, you never let your mind wander into places that you don't like.

Speaker 7 I guess there's retreats you can go to that help you with this too.

Speaker 7 But I just found like a couple of good IPAs or a good scotch and a buddy who will let you yell at them for a while, like will really help you let your mind go hold.

Speaker 9 100%, man. 100%.

Speaker 9 Real quickly on that thing, you made me think like when we, when I first started working, you know, in the previous role, I was all over the, I was all over the world.

Speaker 9 We had customers in different countries, right? And

Speaker 9 one of the things we did is we would take these classes on how to work with, you know, different cultures. And the one on how to work with Japan was very interesting to me because

Speaker 9 there was something that I took stuck with me and said, you know, in Japan, you're going to go to the business meeting. It's going to last two hours.

Speaker 9 And then after the business meeting, you're going to go to dinner. And that's where the deal is going to get closed, right?

Speaker 9 It's not at the meeting.

Speaker 9 Even if yeses are said around the table at the meeting, doesn't matter because two, three beers and some sushi into the night is where the actual deal gets closed.

Speaker 9 And so I've always kind of kept that in my head to where, you know, our interactions as human beings, yeah, I mean, we've got our business side and we can sit here and be totally serious with each other and we can, you know, do it in a boardroom, but the relationship piece is what, is what cements it, man.

Speaker 9 And that's exactly what you're talking about, right?

Speaker 7 Yeah. You know, it's funny.

Speaker 7 I've bumped into different people.

Speaker 7 And I think this is

Speaker 7 part, and I don't like to be

Speaker 7 generalist. Yeah.
Yeah. If that makes sense.
does to me yeah but uh i do feel like people who i um professionals that i have run into that are

Speaker 7 say in their early 30s or younger this is a this is an idea i think that is lost on a lot of them

Speaker 7 i've just found that they believe that a quality product in their mind to a company that supposedly has a need that that deal should just get done just why isn't that getting done?

Speaker 7 Like, I built this thing, it solves the problem that I perceive you have, and you should just buy it. And, and, and, and

Speaker 7 that is, that is not where deals get done. Not at all.
Just not like, yeah, you just know it's you, it's almost like a ritual.

Speaker 7 It's like a, it's like a, you're, the meeting, the actual meeting at 11 o'clock in the boardroom.

Speaker 7 where you're sitting across from someone that's just like this formal presentation of the call absolutely absolutely shake hands and yeah okay and here's the kind of okay this looks good I'll have my people look at it okay we'll get back and then you you leave and you go get whatever you know afternoon drinks or you come back together for dinner and then that's where it's you're talking about families and hobbies and this and then there's this moment where you look at each other and you're like this is happening right yeah exactly okay good let's go get hammered and that's where you get your confidence from right not from the boardroom piece but from the over-the-table piece right yes that's where you find out if the other person is crazy

Speaker 7 exactly

Speaker 7 that's i think that's what what the younger generation is is missing or just people who don't understand this aspect of business is it's not about the drink because i've had people say to me ryan you know that's unfair because i'm not a big drinker no it's not about the drinking not at all drinking it's not about the eating right i've had people say well you know i'm i don't i'm vegan i don't like going to steakhouses and stuff it's not about the eating

Speaker 7 that's where because you can't in a boardroom where we all have our battle armor on we all have our unicorns on and our team flag is behind us and the fans are all watching and we need to present our arms the best way possible What the other side wants to know is is this a crazy

Speaker 7 or no like this person gonna stab me in the back or no?

Speaker 9 Yeah, and your intuition on that like our all our intuition is finely tuned to pick those people out right and and dither that in our head and when we all have our our battle colors on in that boardroom we're opaque in that way, right?

Speaker 9 We're much more opaque in that way.

Speaker 9 You get somebody out to dinner, you get somebody out to wherever, you start talking, like you said, about family, you start talking about how'd you get to this job, you hear how, you know, you hear their life a little bit.

Speaker 9 Okay, this person is legit, like we're going to work together.

Speaker 7 Yes, it's, and it's, it's very, very important. And that definitely, I think that transcends industries,

Speaker 7 at least it seems to. And it certainly is true in our industry, in the insurance industry.

Speaker 9 I think it's really interesting actually, you know, transcending industry. It's the there are certain skills that are very portable, which I've found in a surprising way between industries.

Speaker 9 And this sort of interpersonal people skill stuff that we're talking about right now is one of those skills that is absolutely portable. So if you've ever read,

Speaker 9 you know,

Speaker 9 How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is, in my opinion, the absolute best book ever written on how to do what we're talking about right now,

Speaker 9 that stuff is. completely portable from one industry to the next.
And it's it's just as important here in the insurance space as it is in Silicon Valley, honestly.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So you come from

Speaker 7 you come from the technology space. Yep.
You're traveling all over the world. And now you

Speaker 7 work at an independent insurance agency. Yeah.

Speaker 7 So,

Speaker 7 you know, I mean, first impressions. First, I mean, I know this is your brother-in-law, brother-in-law and father-in-law or brother-in-law and father-in-law.
Brother-in-law and father-in-law.

Speaker 7 So it's not like you were completely naive to the world. I mean, you had been around, you'd heard them talk and stuff, but you walk in the first day, you got the colors on, and,

Speaker 7 you know, what,

Speaker 7 what, are you like, this is amazing? Or like, holy shit, what did I do?

Speaker 9 I mean, it's probably somewhere in between those two things, right? So

Speaker 9 I'll tell you what, I was, I was, you know, I, from the moment I graduated college, I was in a big corporate job, right?

Speaker 9 And so I had never really experienced anything other than a massive sort of corporate engine, 100,000 person company, you know, full-fledged HR,

Speaker 9 full-fledged IT, everything you would imagine with a large corporation, you know, Fortune 50 type company. And so for me coming in here,

Speaker 9 I was immediately struck by sort of the scale, right? The difference in scale. But what surprised me in a good way was that

Speaker 9 actually the systems that were established here are like legit,

Speaker 9 at least in this agency, like legit business operational systems. Like, oh, okay, we have, you know,

Speaker 9 you get here, everything works, it's functional.

Speaker 9 uh i'm i'm gonna do stupid stuff i'm mapping to network drives i'm mapping to printers i've got an extension all my email and my slack and everything is is going and it's all set up to go and i'm like wow i figured this would be much more hacky yeah because we're on such a smaller scale here but no it's not and i was again can you know pleasantly surprised when i started looking at the p ls because i'm like hey like this business is running well like these profits are are rad you know the the the revenue here is good um and uh the modeling is good and you know we're not on a thousand lines of credit and holy cow this company is running in a in a in a profitable way and I don't I don't think I mean I did my research before I joined I didn't want to join you know but I I was surprised to see how much diligence structure and goodness can be in the entrepreneurial space

Speaker 9 because I guess my impression having never been there before was that I was going to walk in and was going to be like the blind leading the blind it was going to be like a mess and it really wasn't like that at all

Speaker 9 so a lot of my first impression and first impressions were positive ones.

Speaker 9 But I can flip that around because on the other side of that coin, there is an utter lack of process in some regards. Okay.
So

Speaker 9 we've got people out here who are selling policies and they're doing an awesome job and they're kicking butt, but I don't think a single one of them uses our systems in the same way.

Speaker 9 They're effective, each in their own right.

Speaker 9 None of them are using our systems in the same way, which for me as a tech guy who's trying to do wonderful stuff with our technology and data is like a nightmare, right?

Speaker 9 Because getting down to the nitty-gritty of it, one person puts their reminder to do a task in a field called notes and the other one puts it in a field called tasks and another one puts it in a field called extra and nobody's doing the same thing.

Speaker 9 Nobody has a system. They're all closing.
They're all producing. They're all hidden numbers.
They're all doing it different ways, right?

Speaker 9 And coming from that big corporate space, I was a very big stickler on like process and procedure.

Speaker 9 Let's have a standard way to do things

Speaker 9 you know let's keep our let's keep our data in order let's keep our information in order

Speaker 9 if I had to take if I had to send a book in a spaceship with a colony of people who are going to Mars and when they got to Mars they could start an independent agency what would I put in that book and that's how I want my agency to run right

Speaker 9 so

Speaker 9 Those are sort of those were sort of my first impressions. There's a lot of good and sort of a lot of, oof, man, we could, we could do better in some of these places.

Speaker 7 Yeah. Just give me, just for the audience's contextual

Speaker 7 name of the agency, side of the years in business, just some like back of the baseball card stats, just so they. Sure.
Yeah. So the

Speaker 9 agency was started 14 years ago by

Speaker 9 our owner and president, now his father. And so it's perpetuated to

Speaker 9 Doug, who is our president and CEO. The agency is called Fudge Insurance, the last Doug Fudge, last name, so family name.
We get a lot of good comments from that one at trade shows.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 we have about 15 people on staff. Today, not all of those are sort of front of the house producing people.

Speaker 9 And then we have,

Speaker 9 I guess,

Speaker 9 trying to figure out some other stats I can give you. But

Speaker 9 we're mostly a personal shop. So most of our stuff is personal.
We're on a big push right now to grow the commercial side of our business.

Speaker 9 And we do a little life. So kind of the profile of the business.

Speaker 9 And you're hearing me, my voice get a little softer there because you're trading into the area where like as a technical guy, I'm still learning some of the insurance stuff and how to give you the baseball card stats.

Speaker 9 But that's that's us in a nutshell.

Speaker 7 No, I think it's good. I mean, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable job to make.

Speaker 7 I don't think you should give yourself a hard time for that.

Speaker 7 So you said that, and some of these questions are going to be all over, but you said that you're thinking about moving into the commercial line side. Like

Speaker 7 why, I guess, first? And what does that look like moving into the commercial line side?

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's a great, great question. So we, so I say why.

Speaker 9 So we've always done, we've always had commercial writers with us and we've always done some amount of commercial business, but we've actually had a lot of turnover in that space.

Speaker 9 And this is before my time, but we've had enough turnover in that space that that side of the business really hasn't

Speaker 9 taken off.

Speaker 9 And so

Speaker 9 there's revenue there and it's it's not anything that I would throw away, but it's it doesn't you know it's it's not super

Speaker 9 it's not a super representative piece of our revenue if i say it that way and so uh we recently were able to acquire uh you know uh some commercial agents uh who i think we all think are top notch right and so we we actually have the talent and so i think i listened to your podcast with um

Speaker 9 Billy Williams, right?

Speaker 9 And you guys talked a lot about, you know, do you pursue terriers? Do you pursue business and then pursue carriers? And it was sort of this chicken and egg.

Speaker 9 How do you define what you're going to go after? Right or wrong, in this case, I think what I'm telling you is that

Speaker 9 we have a book of business now.

Speaker 9 We think we have a lot of opportunities to cross-sell additional commercial business in addition to that book, but we just didn't have the staffing, the consistent staffing to be able to go execute on that stuff until now.

Speaker 9 And so, one of the things we've chosen as sort of a growth vector for this year is: hey, we've got this really competent staff who's now on board.

Speaker 9 Let's just give them carte blanche to go, you know, to go out and market, to go cross-sell, to go do good work. And we really think we have opportunity to grow there as a technology guy um

Speaker 7 what are your thoughts around the

Speaker 7 so i believe that insurance is still an incredibly human business right um

Speaker 7 and you come in from and i'm not saying that because you're technology focused you don't believe that but i think that would be someone's instinct right so uh actually I just saw someone shared something the other day.

Speaker 7 Andrea Strange from Andreessen Horowitz came out with this, had this video that kind of, I don't don't want to say went viral, but like in nerdy land, it went viral around insurance about talking about how insurance layered into other products and that it's a, it's a, you know, basically saying like this afterthought thing that does have a lot of revenue attached, like everyone should be finding ways to bake it into their product.

Speaker 7 And my comment on the video was like, if only insurance was that easy to sell.

Speaker 7 like and and and to keep and make profitable like yes i love the idea of everyone hates insurance so we just bake your homeowner's insurance into the next time you buy a dishwasher and you know, and it's all good.

Speaker 7 But,

Speaker 7 you know,

Speaker 7 the deeper I've gotten into this business over the last 15 years, the more I've come back to, I still don't see how you profitably, long-term profitability

Speaker 7 is separated from humans. I don't know how you do that yet.

Speaker 7 And I'm just interested, like you coming in, looking at that, what are your thoughts? Where do you stand? Yeah.

Speaker 9 Yeah. So

Speaker 9 in in short I agree with you a hundred percent and this is not because now I work at an independent agency and I'm sort of like attached to it in in any there's in any way right so I think

Speaker 9 if you look at

Speaker 9 you know I think there's a lot of doom and gloom in the IA space I think a lot of IA owners are resistant to

Speaker 9 you know, what we typically call maybe insurtech stuff or maybe carriers, you know, sort of continuing to develop their direct channels and disintermediating, you know, independent agents.

Speaker 9 And I think there's a lot of fear there. There's a lot of misunderstanding there.

Speaker 9 I also think there's a lack of empathy from the independent agency side for the carriers' situations. And

Speaker 9 you may think I'm sacrilegious for that,

Speaker 9 but there is a lack of empathy. I think honestly, if there was a little more trust between the primary entities in the ecosystem,

Speaker 9 we may be able to move faster. So let me explain what I mean.

Speaker 9 I don't think that the carriers are out here trying to,

Speaker 9 you know, undo the

Speaker 9 independent or captive agent channel because they just don't like us and they're, you know, hell-bent for profits or anything as nasty or awful as that. Like, these guys got to make a buck too.

Speaker 9 These guys are also, and I know people think, but carriers, man, they have tons of money. Yeah, they have tons of money to underwrite their business, right?

Speaker 9 They don't necessarily have, you know, so here's the deal. Let me answer your question real quick.

Speaker 9 There are probably some very low complexity, simple types of business that are ripe and fit for

Speaker 9 personless transactions, right? Some type of insurance policy objects or policies that can be done effectively on your phone quickly

Speaker 9 without human interaction and quickly and acceptably.

Speaker 7 And equipment breakdown insurance.

Speaker 7 Exactly.

Speaker 9 Exactly.

Speaker 7 Lines of business right there.

Speaker 9 It's something that, you know, there's a couple of them.

Speaker 9 Those are great examples that are natural fits for that. No problem, right? I don't want to pay a middleman to help me sell a policy that I can do on a phone, but here's the deal.

Speaker 9 For personal policies and particularly like complex commercial policies, no way, man.

Speaker 9 It is a people business. I think that you'll continue to see people push direct options for stuff that, you know, they'll try and see how they can do it.

Speaker 9 But I really don't think that we're going to see in the long run that those things that are sold direct without the intervention of humans are going to have the kind of loss ratios or

Speaker 9 other statistics that are going to make them long-term viable. That's just my

Speaker 9 prediction.

Speaker 7 So there's so much there that I want to

Speaker 7 love. I love, so we are of the same mind here.

Speaker 7 One of the things that's been interesting about my own career is Asian for eight years.

Speaker 7 Then I go into media, technology, consulting world for five years and I see and I get to spend a lot of time with carriers, a lot of time with carriers.

Speaker 7 The West Bends, the Acuities, the Westfields, the Centrals, the, you know, all these. And

Speaker 7 I have an affinity for,

Speaker 7 and this, for better or for worse, for super regional mutual companies. I just love the way that they operate.
I do. This is nothing against the big nationals.

Speaker 7 I've had incredible experiences with Safeco and with Liberty and with some of the others. So I'm not knocking anybody, but just my, I have this affinity for for this, for these type of models because,

Speaker 7 and I, and I do believe that when people bang on carriers, they look at travelers, right? Travelers has an identity crisis. That's their problem.

Speaker 7 They're looking at what they're looking at thin margins.

Speaker 7 You take top level and you're like, oh, they're Dow Jones Industrial Average. What the hell are you talking about? Don't do that.

Speaker 9 Don't do that.

Speaker 7 But when you actually look after underwriting, after reserves, after everything else that goes in, their margins are pretty thin.

Speaker 9 Absolutely, dude.

Speaker 7 And they're actually competing against, they've ascended to a level in size and in scope, both nationally and internationally, where they're now competing against these mega, mega companies. And

Speaker 7 what the problem is for a company like Travelers, because I think things travelers do radiate through the whole industry. So I'm using that.
This is not, again, a knock on Travelers.

Speaker 7 This is trying to talk through this topic, which is they have one foot squarely in the IA bucket. And as Matt Wood,

Speaker 7 who is

Speaker 7 an incredible agent who has become a buddy of mine, who lives in Columbia County, which is not far from me, he made a comment the other day about Travis has this new flat fee auto insurance policy coming out.

Speaker 7 I agree with the general community that this is a path we do not want to take as an industry.

Speaker 7 That being said, Matt's comment, I don't mean to be blowing him up, I just think he's very smart about these particular topics.

Speaker 7 Said, look, like, yes, this flaffy thing is scary as hell, but look at the way Travelers handles profit sharing and contingencies and bonuses.

Speaker 7 They have one of the best programs on that side of the house. So look at your total compensation versus just commission.
And

Speaker 7 my point in saying that is not, is Matt right? Is other people right? My point is that I feel like too often,

Speaker 7 just as you said,

Speaker 7 IAs, we take this stance of they're our enemy, right? They're out to rip from us.

Speaker 7 And that is just simply not the case. It's not the case.
There are no executives that deal with IAs for the most part. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Who are going, we just want to take them out of the equation. Like, yes, does all state and nationwide and travelers make some decisions that are not always in our best interest, progressive, maybe?

Speaker 7 Sure.

Speaker 9 But, well, and to your point, and I'm sorry to speak over you, but to your point, I was having a conversation with one of my buddies from Westfield a few weeks ago. And, you know,

Speaker 9 which may have been over some bourbon, but we were talking about

Speaker 9 if we're inside a carrier and we're doing our due diligence to understand how we're going to move our carrier forward profitably, we would be remiss not to be looking at direct options as part of that puzzle, right?

Speaker 7 I've been saying for years. Every carrier, every carrier should have some small direct channel just to understand what everyone else is going through, just for just for

Speaker 7 channel knowledge, just to say, hey, IA, I get that this is tough. We're doing a little bit of it here, and man, it's tough.

Speaker 7 And like, I was talking to a carrier one day, and I, because this is what I believe, again,

Speaker 7 perfect world, you know, you're sitting in a spot.

Speaker 7 I was like, I would love it if a carrier said, we're gonna to have channel knowledge in marketing and sales, we're gonna run direct to consumer, and then we're gonna write that business and then pass

Speaker 7 service off to the closest local agent who hits a certain quality standard. And now they're not competing.

Speaker 7 Essentially, it's getting free business in the door, but the carrier is getting channel knowledge and building brand value. And I'm like, this

Speaker 7 model.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's a great, that's a really interesting idea.

Speaker 7 But the problem is that the stick in the, there's too many sticks in the mud that are so old school that they see that as a gateway. yeah right yeah sure

Speaker 7 but that goes back to your original point and then i'll be quiet because i've been talking a lot this is no you're good hot button for me is it's a lack of trust empathy and understanding between agent and carrier they they believe that if they give the carriers an inch they will go all the way to cutting them out and i i could list a hundred carriers right now that have zero intention of ever doing that they trust their agent partners and love them to death and frankly have put up with a lot of bullshit from them yeah sure probably shouldn't have had to deal with yep yep yeah i i you know i'm i'm it's it's it's actually really good to hear

Speaker 9 you be passionate about this because a lot of times what i find is and again i'm i'm brand new here so when i say a lot of times i mean over the past six months as i've talked to to other you know agency owners what i find is that And part of this is understandable, so I'm not trying to knock anybody, but like people are concerned with their shop, okay, everything that's happening inside their agency and they're they're caring about their customers, they're taking care of their customers, they're selling policies, and they're doing a great job at that.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 9 they're in that agency bubble with almost with blinders on, and they don't have a lot of appreciation for how the ecosystem works beyond them.

Speaker 9 And, you know, maybe this is not something that everybody needs to have, but I am willing to bet you that the most successful independent agencies are the ones who understand the ecosystem and the channel and how those different things.

Speaker 9 And we all read, maybe we read some statistics from AMBEST or whatever, and we're figuring out how much is direct and how much is independent and how much is captive.

Speaker 9 And we all look at these statistics and we know the numbers and things.

Speaker 9 To understand, one of the first things I wanted to do when I got into this job is I want to visualize what the sales channel looks like.

Speaker 9 I want to understand who the retail people are, who the consumers are, who the middle people are,

Speaker 9 what are the carriers doing back to reinsurance. And so what does this channel look like visually? How do people communicate? Who relies on whom for what?

Speaker 9 You know, where are the pain points between the different players in the ecosystem?

Speaker 9 And I'm not saying, again, everybody needs to have that knowledge, but I bet you that the most successful agencies do have that knowledge.

Speaker 7 One of the things that was very difficult for me when I first got on the national scene,

Speaker 7 I have a hard time not being

Speaker 7 110% in and passionate about whatever I'm involved with. I can't help it.
Like even my last job, which wasn't in the insurance industry, I had very little passion for the space.

Speaker 7 But once I was there, I couldn't be anything but bought in.

Speaker 7 So when I got on the national scene, it was very difficult for me to, I couldn't understand why everyone wasn't looking at these global issues as big things.

Speaker 7 And it took me a long time to say to myself, you know what?

Speaker 7 This guy just wants to run a business and coach his kids' little league team and go to church and have a good relationship with his spouse and maybe do some fun vacations and that's all he wants yep he doesn't and and and and there's nothing wrong with that absolutely not yep right but that's sometimes for for maybe for people like me and you who i i don't know that i can't help but think i can't

Speaker 9 stop my brain from going there sometimes i have to rein it in and be like that goes back to what you said earlier you said you like to know how things work well guess what you want to know how your business works right even outside the scope of your walls yeah um and again, to that guy who wants to, you know, go to church, coach his kids, little league team, and do his business.

Speaker 9 Like, I say, you know, more power to you, dude. That's awesome.
And I bet you that guy's going to be mad, successful doing his work.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 I'm not picking on that model at all. In fact, maybe

Speaker 9 I should have a little more of that model, but it's just not.

Speaker 7 I think that person's kind of figured out.

Speaker 9 Maybe we're doing it. We were screwing up here, man.

Speaker 7 I'll go see. There have been days where I life choices.

Speaker 7 My wife said this to me the other other day, she goes, why can't you just like do the thing? Why do you always have to be involved? And I'm like, ah, if I had an answer for that, I don't know.

Speaker 7 I don't know.

Speaker 7 So, okay, so let's shift gears a little bit out of this high-level stuff. I'm like, so

Speaker 7 I'm interested in like, what, what's got you excited?

Speaker 7 Like, you, you come into this space, you dig in, you realize, like, oh, shit, like, I can get on the network and the internet works, and the phones work. Okay.
So the basics are there.

Speaker 7 Now you start digging in and you're going, um you know i we've i think a lot of people have beat up the things that maybe don't work as well as we like but like

Speaker 7 where you come in you're like oh man i can fill this gap and there's a we can really push here like what's got you kind of jacked up yeah so uh a lot of that's a good question a lot of what i did

Speaker 9 um Okay, so one of the things that I think I'm proudest of that we did at the old job when I was working at Intel is that, you know, we were responsible for enabling and support during the design phase for large data center installations.

Speaker 9 So, to put that in sort of more understandable terms, perhaps, this is working with the Googles, the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Apples,

Speaker 9 the Twitters of the world who are installing large, large, large, large-scale data centers.

Speaker 9 And we would help them build the machines that would go into those data centers, test those machines, deploy those machines. And then, if those machines caught on fire, we would go help

Speaker 9 put them out.

Speaker 9 And so, we had to develop a system that would allow us to support the customers, right? And it would allow us to track the customers' issues. It would allow us to,

Speaker 9 I mean, it's the same kind of human interaction stuff we've been talking about earlier, right?

Speaker 9 We've got a lot of customers with a lot of really big problems, and we want to make sure that we're taking care of them and keeping them satisfied, and we're solving issues and we're moving the whole thing forward.

Speaker 9 And so we worked a lot on a system that would allow, you know, the 650 people that were doing this work to

Speaker 9 be in touch with the customers, to track their work, to follow up on their work, to do the general things that you would think of that make a good, in this case, it wasn't sales, right?

Speaker 9 But it was essentially support and service, right? And so to

Speaker 9 be able to do those things in the best way possible, given the fact that we were doing it for a large bunch of people with a lot of complexity, right?

Speaker 9 And we developed a system. When I say a system, I mean a piece of software that would allow us to do that kind of thing, right?

Speaker 9 And you can think of it as a mix between sort of like a CRM and a ticketing system.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 once we had that in place, we were able to gather all kinds of cool statistics to tweak our business and do better.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 9 And when I came in here, I watched sort of how the agency runs their business day to day. And we have a system as well, as do most people in this business, in the IA space, has a system.

Speaker 9 I'll be honest with you.

Speaker 7 There are no systems here.

Speaker 9 Okay, well, there perhaps will be a a system one day, even if it's just, you know, a Rolodex, but I bet you one day there will be a system.

Speaker 9 And,

Speaker 9 you know,

Speaker 9 again, this is not, I'm not trying to be negative here because we're profitable and whatever system cobbled together we have that we're working,

Speaker 9 it's working, right? But I think we're successful in spite of our technology is a lot of what, you know, I like to say that a lot. And I think that

Speaker 9 it's not about, I mean, it is in part about getting a better system. That's one piece of it.

Speaker 9 But it's what you get to in terms of insights once you've got better systems and processes that is the really important piece because it can really allow you to do things as simple as like load balance your work, you know, your work effort.

Speaker 9 It can allow you to optimize the levels of care for particularly needy situations, times of year,

Speaker 9 accounts,

Speaker 9 things that we sort of do intuitively.

Speaker 9 We do this juggling thing, but as human beings, once it gets to be beyond a certain amount of balls in the air, we're really not doing as good a job as we could.

Speaker 9 And you need some help to help you categorize visualize

Speaker 9 share the load potentially

Speaker 9 and as nerdy as that sounds brian that's the kind of thing that actually i'm excited about coming into this agency and helping do because these guys are out here kicking butt already i think that if we could we could have a little more insight not me as a manager looking down on other people but together collectively insight into the workload and where we're successful um i i mean i just i think we could unlock all kinds of extra extra good stuff talk to me a little bit about the idea of load balancing, because I think I understand what you're saying.

Speaker 7 Sure. Also, think that from other conversations anecdotally, I think that this is one of the more important concepts in our space today.
And I guess your take.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so I'm using, I guess,

Speaker 9 a sort of a networker computer term, right? So

Speaker 9 in any big old data center, when you have a bunch of traffic going through one particular node or one particular

Speaker 9 processor, there's always these schemes that are software-based that allow you to balance that load across multiple resources so you're actually not bottlenecked by a particular given resource.

Speaker 9 So we can apply the same thinking to human beings, right? And we can say,

Speaker 9 if

Speaker 9 Agent Mary or CSR Mary has, you know, an outstanding queue of work that's, you know, deeper than the average time per piece of work is going to give her an eight-hour day to do, we have then overloaded or congested on that particular CSR.

Speaker 9 And can we be smart about how we load balance that work onto other CSRs or other places in the agency so that we can, you know,

Speaker 9 we don't end up backlogged through a particular resource. And it can also be instructive, I think, in hiring decisions, right?

Speaker 9 And so, if we consistently find ourselves backlogged, let's say, through our single commercial agent, which is a great problem to have, perhaps it's time that we need to go out and seek, you know, an additional commercial agent to help us with the work.

Speaker 9 And so, what I really would like to do, and the way we saw it in the previous industry, is we would have a number of outstanding issues and we would have dashboards and statistics that we collectively could look at not a manager thing but an everybody thing and you could go in and you could reassign work and of course there's there's nuances to reassigning work you know sometimes there's a personal aspect to it that doesn't necessarily lend itself to to switching midstream but when there are when there is work that's easily compartmentalized and shuffleable within different sort of facilities in the in the in the agency That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about getting a benefit from.

Speaker 9 I'll give you a real example. I mean, it sounds,

Speaker 9 you can talk big, you know, You can say big words and stuff, but the real example is like

Speaker 9 we had

Speaker 9 all but, I think, two of our personal agents out for various reasons,

Speaker 9 you know, a couple weeks ago, and we found ourselves stuck because there was a bunch of stuff that needed to get done that hadn't got done before they had to take off.

Speaker 9 Not their fault, just couldn't have gotten done. And there was a bunch of new stuff coming in, and the other agents that were in the office already had their own workload.

Speaker 7 So all of a sudden, there's more work than there is people to do the work, right?

Speaker 9 And if we would have been able to perhaps anticipate the week before the fact that we would have been down to two staff the next week, we could have perhaps load balanced that a little bit better and got it kicked out so that we wouldn't pinch ourselves in the coming week.

Speaker 9 And so it sounds very tactical, but it's real, right? And it allows us to keep up with our customers.

Speaker 7 No, this is so most agents, a common practice among you're calling them agents or CSRs or whatever

Speaker 7 is the alphabet method. Hey, Tammy, you have A through F and you have G through, you know, and what happens is is there is no science to that at all.

Speaker 7 Chopping the alphabet up into thirds and distributing among your three CSRs does not mean, I mean, Tammy Sue could be there till 10 o'clock at night. Absolutely.

Speaker 7 John could could have an hour's worth of work.

Speaker 9 Absolutely.

Speaker 7 And this is one of the things, this is a big, a big mission of mine in terms of just the messaging that I want to put out into the world is around the idea of expectation. And I think that

Speaker 7 there is this false concept that if they don't talk to Tammy Sue every time they call, that that person is going to be upset because they have a relationship with Tammy Sue.

Speaker 7 I actually think that that is horse, horse crap. I do not think it's,

Speaker 7 I think if you set the expectation that Tammy Sue is your personal servant and she is going to answer every one of your phone calls and drop everything at a dime and do what that client says,

Speaker 7 yes, that's true. But

Speaker 7 if you say to her, we have a team of people, Tammy Sue's your primary, but if it's not Tammy Sue, it'll be John or maybe it'll be maybe it'll be kevin or whoever else but she's your primary that's cool to say but then like we have a team of people that can help you yeah absolutely that this methodology that that that the only the only thing that determines personal touch or good service is this this like

Speaker 9 old world relationship where i i just to me it is holding us back so much i agree but here's the deal if you're not consistent and i don't mean consistently good, but if you're not consistent on how you're handling folks, then it makes it much more difficult to be,

Speaker 9 to have fungible resources like that. So if their Tammy Sue experience is always per their expectations, but their experience with Jane is maybe it's per their expectations, but it's different.

Speaker 9 Right. It's just a different stylistic approach.
They're going to call the one they're most comfortable with.

Speaker 9 But if you've got some processes and procedures and standards that you have and the experience is pretty uniform across your people, then it won't be a big deal to transfer between people.

Speaker 9 Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 7 I do. Dude, this is why I'm going full service center.
That's why I realized full service center is because

Speaker 7 my business is going to be commercial and basically preferred slash high net worth personal. That's it.
But predominantly, I'm a commercial lines agency. Got it.
And if I write a package with whoever

Speaker 7 their team back at where at that headquarters or wherever the call centers, they are the best people. And the other thing is, set expectations up front.
Here's exactly why I'm doing it.

Speaker 7 And I'm, and, and, and what I want, I know that if Cindy Hurlis at Central Insurance is managing her team of 35 customer care individuals, that I trust her to make sure that that experience is uniform and high quality.

Speaker 7 I trust her a lot more than I trust myself with load balance CSRs behind me, you know?

Speaker 9 I hear you. I hear you.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 And I think that,

Speaker 7 and again, not everyone has to go service center, but I guess my but that's actually a really good point though, right?

Speaker 9 I mean,

Speaker 9 that is, that is actually a very good, and it's something that you just made me sort of think twice about because that's a big benefit, though, that you can get by doing the model that you're doing, right?

Speaker 9 Instead of having to invent and or instill that in staff. So yeah, I like that actually.

Speaker 7 That's a well, it goes back to your point of trust and empathy. I have decided, and again, this has been strategic and I feel, I've said this a thousand times, I feel blessed that I've been able to

Speaker 7 filter and build constructs and ideas from having a thousand conversations like the one we're having now, right? I've had thousands of these with all people.

Speaker 7 And I take, I have notebooks, crazy ass notebooks. I'm literally writing

Speaker 7 or articles off of things that you're saying over here. I have all these crazy ass notebooks with notes filled with all these ideas.

Speaker 7 One of the things that I believe

Speaker 7 is that there are certain carriers in particular that I just trust. I just trust that they're trying to do the best thing.
Like I just got my handover appointment in today. Sweet.

Speaker 7 I'm a handover appointed insurance agent.

Speaker 9 Congrats, man. That's fantastic.

Speaker 7 And you want to know why?

Speaker 7 Because I trust particularly Dick Levy, but then Steve Sebelli, who's my local guy, and every other person that I've met there, I trust that they have the best interest of my clients in mind.

Speaker 7 So when I chose to pursue them as a direct appointment, it was for that reason. And look, I don't, I also am not going into this relationship assuming that they're going to be perfect.

Speaker 7 Because if I had Kevin behind me, the CSR, Kevin wouldn't be perfect either.

Speaker 9 Right, exactly.

Speaker 7 There's like this weird thing with service centers that like if Safego, like everyone, everyone tries SafeGo's call center. And then some people end up going, oh, it's no good.

Speaker 7 And I'm like, okay, why is it no good? Well, someone called for a car change and the car change. didn't happen till the next day.

Speaker 7 And I'm like, okay, okay, I can understand that you're upset about that. How many friggin times does that happen with your own people? And do you on them and post in the IAOA group that somehow

Speaker 7 are you doing that just because they made a mistake? Like, they're not perfect.

Speaker 7 It doesn't mean you shouldn't address it. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't work through it and be cognizant of it.

Speaker 7 But somehow, we are holding carrier service centers to this, to this standard that we would never hold our own people to in a million years.

Speaker 9 Yep, I totally agree. Totally agree.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I don't know. But, okay, so you're so you're excited about load balancing, which I just like saying the word.

Speaker 7 So the other thing that sounds really terrible when you say I'm excited.

Speaker 9 That sounds like the worst thing I could possibly be excited about. I mean, I'm excited about spring training starting.
I'm excited about,

Speaker 9 you know, chicken wings on a Friday night. But I guess, sure, yeah, load balancing too.

Speaker 7 I was going to bring you, you had to know when you said load balancing.

Speaker 7 It's just too good.

Speaker 7 So with the, I want to be respectful of your time. We have a few, sure, sure.

Speaker 7 but I would be completely remiss and not doing my job as an interviewer if I did not bring up your

Speaker 7 relationship with neon and the neon project and be atomic and what's going on there.

Speaker 7 So, so tell us a little bit about uh many people have heard neon, some have an idea of what it is, some have no idea. Uh, like why are what what about it excites you? What about it interests you?

Speaker 7 What about it intrigues you, you know, all the good stuff?

Speaker 9 Sure.

Speaker 9 I'll start with the softball answer, which is, you know, we talked a lot on this interview about how important it is to connect with a person on a personal level and, you know, really feel like you could hang out with a person and you get along with them.

Speaker 9 And you did that sort of look in the eyes across the table. And you know, we're going to do this, right? Yeah, we're going to do this.

Speaker 9 So I had many of those moments with the crew over at the Neon Be Atomic, and a lot of that,

Speaker 9 there is motivation in and of itself just within those connections, okay, number one. But that's not necessarily why you would enter into a business relationship.

Speaker 9 The real meaty answer, aside from the softball answer, is that

Speaker 9 I believe in the vision.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 it fits right with the idea of

Speaker 9 what I explained earlier about the system that we worked so hard on back when I was in the other industry doing customer support and service.

Speaker 9 There is that similar vein of desire there to be able to sort of up-level, to upgrade the way that agencies are managing their customers, their, I'm sorry, I should actually say relationships, relationships with their customers, relationships with their carriers, relationships with other agencies.

Speaker 9 And so the vision there is very attractive to me. It is an audacious.

Speaker 9 It is an audacious,

Speaker 9 big-eyed

Speaker 9 vision that

Speaker 9 I not only wanted to be a part of because I wanted to reap the benefits of being a part of it, but I wanted to be a part of it because I actually think that we have something to bring to help build the best product to help deliver on the vision.

Speaker 9 And so,

Speaker 9 gosh, that doesn't sound like a very concrete answer for you,

Speaker 9 but I think that it is the system that we can move to, Ryan,

Speaker 9 that will help us unlock some of those efficiencies that I talked about earlier.

Speaker 9 You know, knowing things about how we're executing our business, having insights into the way we execute, the way our people are servicing our customers, the way we're interacting with carriers, and most importantly, insights that help us tweak our business to make it better for our customers, more profitable for us, more effective for our workers, all that good stuff.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 7 What I think is interesting,

Speaker 7 and even if people,

Speaker 7 you know, I think people get lost in the details of Neon.

Speaker 7 What continues to intrigue me about Neon and beyond what the first first thing you said, which is

Speaker 7 Seth and Sidney are two of the people.

Speaker 9 Yeah, you dig the people.

Speaker 7 Not just in insurance, but in the world.

Speaker 7 You know, they

Speaker 7 what intrigues me is that each new person

Speaker 7 who I have respect for, and I have respect for you and your opinion, who comes into it,

Speaker 7 their gut is telling them there's a there there. And that to me,

Speaker 7 it's not just homers trying to make a profit. It's not just crazy-eyed visionaries like Seth.
I mean, this is people from all different walks of life.

Speaker 7 And in this case, someone who's done real deal hardcore international technology work is walking in and their guts telling them there's a there.

Speaker 7 And that to me, I just, I don't, that's special. And I think, uh, I think it's why this project

Speaker 7 needs to continue to be nurtured. And not everyone's going to be a part of it, but that doesn't mean you can't support support it, even if you're not.

Speaker 9 Absolutely.

Speaker 9 Absolutely. And, you know, that's well, and let's be perfectly honest.
And, you know, and Seth, and if you're listening, right, this is not a dig, but, you know,

Speaker 9 a project of this

Speaker 9 visionary status, you know, when you launch it on day one, it's not going to be for everybody, right? It's just not. It's not going to work.
I mean,

Speaker 9 not everyone went out and bought the iPhone 1. because they realized on day one, it was going to be the next best thing and it was going to take over everything, right?

Speaker 9 And I'm not trying to make a comparison there. I'm just saying that when you launch a new startup technology, a new piece of cool technology, it takes a while.

Speaker 9 You know, you have to hit that tipping point. And there will be changes and growth, growing pains, and all kinds of stuff that go along with that.
But, like I said, the vision, the vision is solid.

Speaker 9 And based on my experience from other industries and watching what they've done as, let's say, they moved to cloud scale economy, they moved into data warehousing and data analysis.

Speaker 9 The vision is solid. I mean, I'm confident in that.

Speaker 7 Well, my man, this has been a tremendous hour of my life. Yeah, thank you.
Enjoyed this. I think

Speaker 7 it's so intriguing to me when I can meet someone who comes from, you know, we all come from very different places, but like your background, very different from mine.

Speaker 7 Somehow, we both found our way into this space. And yet,

Speaker 7 philosophically and kind of from a virtue perspective, we share a lot of things in common. And I'm just, I'm glad that we've had a chance to get to know each other a little better.

Speaker 7 I'm glad we could share some of your story.

Speaker 9 Absolutely. Yeah, me too, man.

Speaker 7 With the

Speaker 7 industry as a whole. and uh, man, I can't wait to see what you start to build.
I think

Speaker 7 really um cool things uh starting to drip out of fudge, and cool stuff is happening,

Speaker 9 drip out of fudge. I'm gonna, I'm gonna put that on a t cool thing starting to drip out of fudge.
I put it on a t-shirt, maybe.

Speaker 4 Uh, I like that, yeah.

Speaker 7 And uh, dude, I do think people are gonna be watching, so thank you so much for the time.

Speaker 9 Thanks, Ryan. I appreciate it, yeah.
All right, brother, take care.

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