RHS 187 - Unlocking the Future of Insurance: Insurtech Collaboration, Adaptability, and the Power of AI with Brian Falchuk

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Terms and conditions apply. In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home hello everyone and welcome back to the show today we have a tremendous episode for you a conversation with brian falchuk the author of the future of insurance this is the third, but not edition like he's rewritten it three times, edition like there's been three separate versions of The Future of Insurance, each building upon each other.
You can get them on Amazon. We'll have links in the show notes.
And Brian's just a great thinker in our industry, really dialed in. I think he has an even keel but very future-minded perspective, has played the game for a long time, and I just love our conversations.
They're deep. They're rich.
We talk about all different kinds of topics and really dive into what is happening in our space and what we should be thinking about as insurance professionals. Before we get there, guys, if you love this podcast, you're going to love Finding Peak.
So much of what we do is technical and tactical and all those things are fun and interesting. But the deeper I get into this business, the longer I'm a founder and a CEO and a leader and a manager, it's the emotional and psychological perspective, the leadership qualities, how we deal with stress, how we interact with employees, our communication.
It's the soft skill internal stuff that we have to deal with every day. The battles that we face with ourselves that really defines who the winners and losers are, and that's what we talk about at Finding Peak.
So if you're into that kind of thing, if you're looking to up your game,

if you're looking for 10x ideas to find the freedom in your life that you need to be the

best version of yourself, then go to findingpeak.com. That's findingpeak, like findingpeakperformance.com.

Subscribe. It's free.
You'll love it. I promise.
Also, big shout out to SIA. Guys, if you want to

maximize the revenue in your book, if you want to join a community of professionals that is pushing forward, if you want to be part of the future of insurance, and like I said, you're doing all this work. You're putting premium on the books.
Why not get the most value for that premium? Go to SIA.com. Check out SIA.
Wonderful organization. I'm happy to be proud of them and represent them and be part of the executive leadership team.
We were rogue risk. My agency was purchased by them, acquired April 1st of 2022.
We couldn't be happier that it happened and we've grown exponentially ever since. Guys, this show is so important to me.
Putting these podcasts out is so important because I love helping you.

I love putting these thought leaders in front of you.

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Thank you for listening to this show.

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It means so much to me.

I hope that you continue to find value and I hope you have an absolutely wonderful day.

And with that, let's get on to Brian Falchuk.

I'm going to Shaboos!

What's up, man?

How are you doing?

I'm good.

Just living the dream over here, you know? George Mike Lennon up. Yeah.
Yeah, it's funny. I, yeah, people used to say, I've heard, yeah, I've heard that one a couple times, but people haven't compared me to any celebrities in a long time.
Hopefully that's a good thing. But like when I was younger, I used to get Jim Carrey a lot, which is a weird one.

I never saw that ever.

Like in high school and stuff, people would be like, oh, you look like Jim Carrey.

I'm like, I never understood that one at all.

You know, I think I look like basically every other white dude with dark hair.

You know what I mean?

And just kind of standard vanilla white dude with dark hair.

You know, so if there's people who look that way, that probably look all of them um but so what's going on with you what's up it's been good um and then i got a new book coming out called the future of insurance because they're all called the future

of insurance but it's the third one in the series that's why i reached out was to see if uh i get

some help in spreading the spreading the word about it yeah so what's the future of insurance

Thank you. That's why I reached out was to see if I get some help in spreading the word about it.
Yeah. So what's the future of insurance? It's bleak.
So this one, this one's all about like traditional carriers and some insure tech solution provider, how they collaborated. And it's not about the solution.
It's about, I mean, like I mentioned that, but it's know the lessons and how to make this collaborations better smarter faster i mean actually some of it kind of hits at what you were talking about when you were a guest on my show about like carriers being willing to try things and pushing on it and not just sort of like sitting on the side like when you talk about the state auto acquisition by liberty is like well you know that takes off the market someone who was willing to give stuff a try and be weird yeah you're going to get more variability but at least it pushes things and um you're not going to see that now so it's sort of like well how do we how do we move faster how do we actually get what we talked about and not just gloss it over to conference but actually deliver it um because everyone's conference story is perfect it's like oh what great you know everyone loves it's like no it's a shit show and like it took eight years and should have taken two and you still ended up with a lot less than what you expected to have in two years even though you took four times as long yeah so i'm gonna say something that is gonna be you know so i been, I've been traveling for the last three weeks, had a couple of speaking gigs and a couple of conferences and was all over. And when I travel, I try to use that time for reflection, you know, airplane time.
I try to use it for reflection and, and mapping out, you know, kind of where I'm at and taking stock of my opinion on things, et cetera. And, um, you know, I basically have come to the conclusion that technology is the opioid of like the average and underachieving agent that we, you know, talk about tech so that some shitty agent in the middle of nowhere who hasn't grown in a long time has something to think may help them.
And it's all so terrible and so bad. And there is no one doing anything innovative or really even that different that is actually implementable in the marketplace that anyone outside of the top 100 can actually use.
And for that purpose, I think that, you know, and again, I've chased the shiny object. So I'm, I'm recovering addict here.
This is not, this is not me talking from a place of superiority. But rather as the result of my 12 step process.
But I honestly just think that it's a joke. Like our tech is so bad in this industry.
It's a joke. So, so, okay.
So that's the reality. We can ensure tech's got the absolute crap beat out of them, right? They just did.
They came in in 2015, 2016. We've talked a bunch of times obliterated just, just nothing.
I mean, the number of D bags who stood on stages and told us that we were terrible and they were going to fix everything who now are probably account associates at Salesforce making $45,000 a year. Um, you know, it, it just, to me, it's crazy.
So, okay. So now we're left with legacy tech, right.
And you look at legacy tech and we're like, oh, applied isn't terrible anymore. This is like a big revelation, you know, and good.
Thank God for Taylor Rhodes and what they're doing and they're trying to be better. And I get all that.
And I'm happy for that. I'm happy for that.
That's not a negative. I'm just saying, if we're being honest, what we hold up as the bastions of tech in this industry is terrible.
And I'm invested in some of these companies and I watch them and I look at how slow it is. And I look at just what's happening and there are good people trying to solve good problems, but none of it is going to move the needle.
None of it. That's the reality.
So, okay. to end this little diatribe.
Yeah. It's people, process, and premium.

That's reality. So, okay.
To end this little diatribe. Yeah.
It's people process and premium. That's it.
That's the business, right? I literally just did this talk for my leadership team meeting about an hour ago. And I literally titled it.
The main thing is the main thing, which I stole from somebody. That's somebody's thing.
I don't know who I read a whole bunch of books the last three weeks. I have no idea who I took that from, wrote it down.
Whoever smart person who wrote bestselling book that I took that from, I'm sorry. But because I can't remember who it was.
But I literally said to them, guys, premium is the thing. I get that all the purists and they, oh, you can't spend premium.
Yes, you can. Because premium turns into revenue and all carriers care about is premium.
They don't care about revenue. So you can talk about revenue all you want, but carriers care about premium.
Carriers run the industry. Why are we fighting that? Agents don't run the industry.
Carriers run the industry. So versus fighting them versus getting up on stage and talking about why they won't do apis in the state auto being acquired they could care less about us they honestly don't care carriers don't care about us i don't care if you're super regional and you know everyone by for if they could toss you out and replace you they would you know that's the truth so what do we do we have to find great people who we can trust and are going to work our process.
We have to document that process. And we have to hold ourselves accountable to that process.
And then we have to focus on writing as much premium and keeping as much premium as possible. And whatever tools, be they analog, digital, I don't care if you're taking cash still, whatever gets you max premium on the books that stays on the books is the answer.
That's it. That's the job to think that the job is anything else is where I think everybody gets lost.
And I could be wrong. And I'm super interested in hearing your perspective, right? Because I've been kind of, this is the first time I've said this on the podcast, but like, I honestly believe that it's people, process, and premium.
That's it. Screw technology, screw carrier relationships.
Really, nothing else matters. It's all those things are derivatives, derivatives of people, process, and premium.
That's it. What do you think? So, you said something a minute ago that I want to hit on, and I'm going to drop like a C to that but then i want to i want to get to this point yeah yeah so i want to come back to robbing banks okay and that like and because i i think that's how to frame up the whole like the technology i wrote it down we'll come back to it i won't let you forget and and in private i actually talk about it as murder but that's that's over the edge with too many people so we'll're robbing banks and you'll see why in a minute.
But I, I actually, I agree with you. And this is why some of the flack I take on my books is like, well, you didn't tell us which thing we should buy or which tech it, or like, is it Azure or is it Google? I'm like, I don't care which one it is.
And neither should you, unless you do the exercise to figure out which if you have to move to the cloud, which one of the three or four or whatever you're looking at, like, there's an answer out there for you. Hopefully you make the right one.
Often we don't, but why, like, I can't tell you that answer in the book. I can't tell you like, well, if it's claims, you have to invest in this and you need that one.
Like, you got to go do that part yourself. And none of that will be for anything if you don't do the first bit.
And that's more where I focus is like, like you said, people, it's culture, it's values, it's how you engage. It's the way you bring yourself to the table.
And the single biggest thing that I keep seeing get in the way is ego. Like, what do I look for in a leader? I look for someone who's humble, right? Someone who's like, you know what? Like, I don't know what the answer is.
Or I screwed that up. Or like, even if you didn't screw it up, you took responsibility for it because it's your organization.
Because guess what? You did screw it up in the end because it's all on you. And so when I see someone who like, so my book's all right, carriers and an insure tech partner they worked with.
And it's like on you. And so when I see someone who like, so my book's all right carriers and an insurtech partner they worked with.
And it's like, you have to be willing to say who you are. And I interview you firsthand, like it's all real.
And the ups and the downs, like in my second book, Ken laid off a huge proportion of their staff and that's in there. They were like, Oh, it's all perfect.
And like all the fundraising was great. And revenue is, you know, straight hockey stick, like, like like like yeah until it fell off a cliff and we almost won out of business like you have to be willing to tell that story so i had a carrier who um refused to say their name in the book and they're like well we'll be in there but you just have to refer to us as a top 10 pnc carrier i'm like first of all have you ever read something that instead of the name of the company just keep saying top 10 p 10 PNC carrier? And then like an employee at top 10 PNC carrier, like that's going to be the most cumbersome thing to read.
Also, everyone immediately discounts all the findings of that thing because they don't know who it is. A hundred percent.
And you look terrible because you're not being honest. And I get some characters like, well, we don't want people to know who we work with and we don't do press release.
I'm like, fine. But then that means you're not in the book.
Yeah. Like it's as simple as that.
Like either you're honest and open about it. And I need to not ever have to question whether what you're saying is real.
Like this went really well. Did it really go really well? Or are you saying that? Yeah.
Or is it? And this is the real problem they have is it's back to that like ego and hubris point is they pat themselves on the back a ton. And I watched them take like four years of back and forth and this committee and that to even agree to consider to potentially maybe possibly one day thinking about doing a pilot.
And I'm like, no startup has four years. They're not going to be around.
So like, that's great that you just made that decision. They went out of business two years ago.
So what good is that? So like, and this is to the bank robbery point. I think so much when you're saying like, you know, this thing that isn't terrible anymore, somehow that that's how we measure success.
We're an industry where like, and I've used this a bunch of times, but it's mine. So if you want to steal it, they do have to credit me with this.
Last year we robbed 12 banks and this year we robbed five or six. And we're like, we're look at the progress we've made.
We are excellent. Like we're only robbing six banks now.
That's great. You cut the number in half.
I'm really proud of you. You're actually not supposed to rob banks at all.
So rather than claiming victory, you need to change who you are. You can't be a bank robber.
And robbing fewer banks isn't somehow still okay. And this is why like substitute in murder and there's people like, whoa, we get the money from, I'm like, all right, well, let's call it murder.
And now there's really no way. And then some people will be like, well, but Dexter was a murderer.
I'm like, all right. Like you get the point, right? You were terrible before.
You aren't as terrible today is not the same thing as you're doing a great job. Yeah.
And that's where we need to get honest with ourselves. So this, so again, this is why I've started coming back to what I would like to, what I internally, doesn't mean that it's true, internally I'm thinking through as like a rational solution.
The carriers don't mean to be terrible. There are just about everybody working in every carrier is a really good human.
And actually, I think individually on an Island wants to make real progress. Yeah.
The problem is how are they incentivized? If you're the Eastern regional VP of whatever the fuck, and, and I come to you and I say, look, I got this great idea. We're going to make a shit ton of money.
The only thing that can happen is that person gets in trouble. That's it.
That person, the only thing that can happen is that person gets in trouble. If it works, it's a nice incremental increase in production.
They get a pat on the head, maybe a extra couple thousand in their bonus check. But if it doesn't work, they get fired.
Yeah. And they're, and now they have a, a, a black mark on the record when they go to get their next job.
Right. And they're seen as someone who's a loose cannon, or, you know, doesn't understand risk tolerance, or all these other things.
And I've had so many people inside of carriers explain this exact thing to me where, again, you get a couple, you get a couple scotches in them at the back of a restaurant at a conference and they open up about how they're truly incentivized. And the problem is they're large, look at it.
They're large bureaucracies. They're not built to innovate.
They're not even built to be good at this point in the evolution of most of the nationals. They are built to sustain, don't lose anything.
Well, but think about what their business is. Yeah.
So their business has nothing to do with good. Cause it's like, it's the, the mirror image of what a venture capitalist looks for insurers like underwriting is you're not looking for winners.
Cause like what's, what's winning losers. You're looking for not losers losers because a loser is a five million dollar or three million or whatever or a bottomless pit and a winner is 20k in premium minus expenses and commission so 15 grand yeah like so it's it's negative five million versus 15 it's not about picking winners it's about picking not losers whereas a venture capitalist is like yeah we're gonnaouts, some singles.
We just need one or two home runs. We're just trying to find a couple of those like grand slams that I don't care what the rest of it did.
They can all be losers. We put in 500 K or a million and we lost it.
That's as bad as it's going to get for a carrier. It's like, it just keeps going depending on the line of business.
It literally could just keep like, you can be funding someone's opioid addiction for the next 30 years. A hundred percent.
Like, so I have a client right now who literally for the rest of time will be paying $400 a month for someone's marijuana prescription because they now have anxiety because they fell off a ladder. Right.
So forever in perpetuity, as long as that person doesn't do something obscenely stupid and get fired, they will have a $400 a month marijuana prescription that the insurance carrier has to pay for as part of their workers' comp. Right.
Their weed habit is taken care of for life. All they have to do is not mess up too much.
Yeah. No, that's like, and that becomes a subconscious wiring for us.
So how could you expect someone who's taught, trained from day one, you know, and now they're 30 years on because they're at the senior level. So they've got like, you know, the gray hair behind their tenure.
And that's like been ingrained from the very start that you're not here for winners. You're just here to stay away from the losers.
Like if they were a stockbroker, we'd fire them, be like, that's great. I haven't lost a ton, but you've never done any, like I gave you a thousand dollars.
I have a thousand one dollars now. Like that's not good enough, but to ensure it's about maintaining.
And that's, that becomes like just a part of how you're bred. And I, I think again, like humility, you need to, to recognize, like someone asked me the other day, like, why haven't you started your own thing? I was like, Oh, I started like the advisory.
It's like, no, no, no. I think, again, like humility, you need to recognize.
Someone asked me the other day, like, why haven't you started your own thing? I was like, oh, I started the advisory. It's like, no, no, no.
I mean, like an insure tech. I was like, because I'm risk averse.
And that's not who I am. I can help people with that.
But I know myself well enough to know, like, I don't think I have what it takes to go out. And first of all, I don't have an idea.
but even if I did and to like assemble the engineering team and get the funding and that's just not who I am. Yeah.
And I'm willing to recognize that maybe I'm missing out on something, but I also know I'm not wired that way. So I don't think I'm the guy I'm happy to support the guy, you know? Yeah.
That's an incredible, it's an incredible point. And this is why I've kind of, my mentality is not, I don't, I don't think the carriers are wrong.
I want to be clear about that. These things that we're saying, I think they're doing exactly what they should do.
And they should be filled with bureaucrats and they should have multiple layers of, of, you know, they have to go through all these committees to make all these decisions. It should take 10 years because their job is to weed out all the losers.
That's what they need to do. They don't need winners.
So for everyone who's not trying to climb the social hierarchy of an insurance carrier, right, what do the rest of us do? Okay, and specifically the group of people that I care about the most. It doesn't mean I don't care about the entire industry I do, but the people that I try to help the most are independent agents or agents in general, captives too, but I don't really know their world.
So, okay. So if that's the reality and you're not going to change that reality, and frankly, they're actually not doing anything wrong.
This sounds very negative towards carriers. It's not.
I don't mean it to be at all. It's the reality of their situation and their business model.
Then we can't keep looking to them for solutions. You know, what happened? These agents, they sit back and they go, well, if only the carriers would connect via API, they're never going to do it.
Unless you are Gallagher and you can say, Hey, an API connection, all slam 10 million a month into your freaking, into your business.

They are never going to do it. It's never the number of conferences I have been to where people are like, if only we can get an API.
They're never going to do it. OK, so let's back up a little bit.
What can we control? We can control the people who work for our business. We can control the processes that we operate through.
Right. And put put put those you can put like a hat on those two.
That's like culture. You know what I mean? That's kind of a culture of your business.
And you can focus on every single thing you do is writing new premium and keeping the premium you have. That's what you can do.
That's all you can do. And to worry about all the rest of this stuff, to the extent that we have for the last decade, to me, looking back on it, incredible waste of time.
I think that, I think, you know, we needed to go through this process. I think we needed to learn the carriers are not going to move, right? We didn't know that before.
We all kind of thought, I mean, dude, 2014, 2015, 2016, we're all like, oh my gosh, what five years, we're going to be flying data around and writing policies. We've learned that's never going to happen, right? It's only going to happen for the elite.
And 95% of the people listening to this are not that. You're never going to have enough premium for them to care about you.
So don't do that. Focus on the things you can control.
And then by listening to people like you, by listening to others, figure out as a derivative of those things, the technology, the partners who are going to fit what you're trying to do instead of asking somebody for something that you're never going to get back. Yeah.
I think that. So I don't agree with the never, but I think like materially for all of us, it's going to feel like never because it may be another generation away, like at some point.
But but frankly, like at that point, that will have been the way it used to be. And we will be wishing for the next thing that they're never going to do.
Right. So, well, I see.
I think we're going to hear. And I'm interested in your take.
I don't mean to cut you off. I'm interested because that's a great point.
Um, I actually think what's going to happen if I'm, if I had to spitball it or, uh, get whatever, if I had to, if I had my tinfoil hat on and I'm making my, uh, uh, uh, prognostications, I think, unfortunately we're going to jump to AI we're, a lot of this shit is just going to be beyond us. I think there's going to, because, because I'll tell you what, right now, if I were, if, if Rogue was taken away from me today, just gone, right? You're starting from scratch.
I would create an agency with a very small amount of AI. I'm not talking about some big thing, very tiny bit of AI where I just pumped business directly into insurance carrier sales centers.
I would never touch it. I would never touch it.
I would have any, I could grow agencies at a ridiculous margin with a very small amount of operating costs. And I would just arbitrage leads into carrier sales centers and I would never touch it.
And you could run a massively, a massive new bit. Now, granted, there's some hiccups in there.
Not everything's perfect. AI isn't perfect.
I get it. I get all that.
Dude, the shit that I can do today with Rogue hacking together third-party tools that some 17-year-old in Bangladesh wrote, right? Like I can do a massive amount of work with AI today and I don't even know what I'm doing. Yeah.
We get three, four, five years from now with the pace of this and the ability to use, you know, I got buddies who are using bots to do shit that would blow people's minds. And they're dummy.
They're dumb bots. They're just algorithm programs running through.
They're not even learning anything. So to me, I feel like we're going to have this, this, there's going to be a, we're going to get a leap.
And I feel like that leap is going to leave people behind that. I don't think this is going to continue to be incremental.
I think it's going to be incremental, incremental, incremental, incremental, and then a big leap. And a lot of people are going to pop their head up and go, what the F just happened.
I don't know. What do you think? So, so I think that you're probably right.
I think it's the last piece is where as an industry, I think when we're like, how did that happen? That's a shame on us moment because it was all blatantly obvious, except everyone refused to see it or refused to accept it. And I mean, that's actually one of the upsides of the slowness of this industry is you get a hell of a lot of warning time, you know, like, cause you will have watched it happen in other industries for X number of years.
And then like, like progressive will do it or what, like someone will be an early mover, but the rest of the industry will think it's stupid and won't do it. And we'll dig in and then everyone will get like, you know, uh, the dongles in your car, like progressive started that stuff in 2008.
So like the first earliest, like, I think it was even before that. Yeah.
Yeah. What's up guys.
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Peace. Let's get back to the episode.
So that's been around forever. Yep.
No one else is doing it. And I remember one laughing at Progressive at how much money they were losing.
And I remember thinking like, yeah, they are, but it's Progressive. Yeah.
I would like, if anyone understands pricing in this industry, it's them. And maybe we shouldn't be.
And that's, that's what bothers me is again, it's the hubris thing is like the amount of times like all those idiots are like, no, that'll never happen. I mean, I was in a post office in 2006 and a guy was asking the clerk when he was like, it's an older guy.
He's like bringing all his letters like i think this email is a flash in the pan i was like all right dude first of all it's 2006 like the pan has flashed we're well beyond that yeah yeah but but there's still people who do that like i don't know about this uh usage bit well maybe not usage base yet but like the dongle thing people want their 20 off and they'll let you watch them for three months to get it and then they'll go back to driving too fast but like it's over half of new business from carriers who offer them as being taken up that way but it wasn't that long ago and yeah it kind of took the pandemic to push it's like well my car is sitting still so i might as well get my discount right now yeah but it did happen and so many other things i'm like yeah i I mean, you look'll get chat gpt thing failed the bar exam like six weeks later they really released the new one and it passed the bar in like 90 of state like it just the progress of these things is huge so for anyone who's sitting here saying oh but i didn't know like no you did know you're just like living with your head in the sands. So I think, I think you're right.
And I think no one really has the right to claim ignorance on this. Yeah.
They just have to open their eyes more. And, and like this stuff you're saying, people be like, okay, that's so beyond me.
I can't, I don't even know where to begin. That's okay.
You don't have to, but like go sign up for a chat GPT access or invite or whatever, or barred from Google, like, and just mess around with it. Like, okay, I know nothing about this stuff.
I'm not an expert on it. I mean, I don't know nothing, but a lot less than a lot of people talking about it.
So in my new book, guess who wrote the last chapter? Well, I did with some help from Bard and chat GPT. Cause I'm like, look, if I'm talking about where this is going, shame on me for not actually including part of where this is very well likely going.
So I threw them the same question. I did two different questions and I got their answers.
And I'm like, so here's what I think is going to happen in the industry. Here's what they think.
And let's talk about that. So like play around with it, you know, like get a picture of yourself that looks like George Michael, like whatever it is.
But actually like you have to start with that stuff. You know, that's why like grandparents doing FaceTime during the pandemic, like people, oh, this is just for the younger kids.
Now it's like everybody. Yeah.
Like 93 year olds on zoom. But you can have two of our clients in person to two of our clients in person.
And you have more than those two. So like, yeah, we have more than those.
You have no one else. So we have a large number more.
So it's like, so it's like, you know, I go to these conferences and I say that, and you should see the look on some of these people's faces are like, what? You know what I mean? Like their faces are like, like they can't, they can't even wrap their head around the idea that I could have an agency that last month did almost $800,000 in premium. Yeah.
And I've met two of my clients in person. They can't even wrap their head around that.
They think you're lying. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
They're like, those must be shitty clients. Yeah.
Okay. Your two clients were 400,000 each.
Yeah. It's like, you know, and, and it just, to me, I think, and I think that's fine.
You know, what's amazing about this industry is it's a choose-your-own-adventure industry. You can do this however way you want, which is why, again, I've come back to this idea for us of people, process, and premium is that we, I've realized over and over and over again that I simply don't know what the solution is.
I just don't. And going back to your humility part, right? Like, I like to talk a lot, but truthfully, if anyone ever saw behind the scenes on how I run the company, dude, I am 100% service leader.
I do not know the solution. I have a vision and I have a vector, but beyond that, I don't know what works and what doesn't work.
And we do not put anything up on an ideological pedestal. We do not outside of, we're going to take care of our customers, right? I mean, the, the, the, the human part of, I want to make sure these people are properly cared for properly insured, but like outside of that, you know, this tool that I'll, I'll cut a tool in a heartbeat.
I don't even care if I'm an investor in the tool. I don't care what it is.
I will, if it's not helping us, if it's not helping our customers, I, I, I do not care businesses that are meant to do a thing. And I think that thing at its core is if you take care of the people that you insure, regardless of what that product is, you need to make money.
Those are the two things. So when we get, I think we get so jammed up on, well, we're local, so we need to meet people in person.
Just because you're local doesn't mean all your customers want to come into your office or want you in their home or their business. Right.
So what that ideological pedestal is not necessarily helping you. Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but I feel like what we don't do enough.
And I'm not saying you, I actually think, you know, a lot of, we, we probably think about this a lot, but I think what too many people don't do, they get so hung up on what used to work that they, that they forget that out ahead of us is this whole new frontier that is constantly changing. And we are insulated enough that we've been able to get by, but man, I'm starting to feel, and again, I'm super interested in your perspective on this.
I'm starting to feel a lot of cracks in that, that, that, that insulated nature of our industry. I feel like not, not companies, but culture, like societal culture of, of buyer personas, buyer, buyer culture, starting to create a lot of cracks.
A hundred percent, a hundred percent. I mean, like this country is hyper divided.
And so as soon as you say like, well, I'm local. So my customers are your customers who want to be local are local.
And that's fine if that's who you want to serve. But if you want more than that, you have to understand there's a different population as well.
And like, we can't just go down like, well, this is what I know. This is what I like.
And this is how I'm going to i'm gonna work like if that's what you want good for you but just understand that means your pie is this big it's not the full picture and so if you like if you don't recognize that there are different people and different buyers or companies to work with or employees you could potentially be missing out on something and i do think it is a cracks thing because that division it's not just like, well, I like it this way. You like it that.
So be it. It's like, I like it this way and you're the enemy.
You like it that way. And so like, people won't allow you to not work the way they want to work.
Like employees will ghost you, customers will leave and they'll bash you in the process over something that you probably didn't even realize was a thing. Yeah.
And so like, you do have to figure out how to be more flexible. And I was talking to Margo Giles about this and she had a really interesting point was like, I was talking about selling into the agency space as a solution provider and how hard it is.
The sale itself might be easier than selling into a carrier, like faster, more flexible, because there's 10 of us like, yeah, we can adopt this thing that's not a hard thing for her to do and you know the principal can make the decision on the spot but it's like that one sale is not going to fund your company whereas like you sell the state farm you're golden for three years right yeah maybe um but like she was saying part of the problem is historically agents were all direct competitors of each other You go into a market and it's like, you're all vying for the same, you know, like the same food, but with COVID, like things getting more virtual and even like your customers are more virtual because suddenly they couldn't just sell locally or they go out of business that it allowed for more like a cohesion or like collaboration across agents. So there's, she's like, it's almost like agents unionized in the process.
Yeah. We didn't though, just in case any regular is listening, we have not, right.
We have not unionized. No, you're not collectively bargaining.
No, but there's a sense of like, we're in this together. And I like a more of a willingness to be on the same page of like, this is what our industry needs.
It's less of a combative nature between. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. It's not necessarily like you make one sales as one agent and you get 20 of them.
Yeah. Unless they're all, you know, under the same umbrella, but it was like to hear the needs didn't have to be like 75 separate conversations and like digest and develop for 75 needs.
It's like, we can, we can talk to this as more of a collective group, which I think is interesting. And that could be opening up the door for new kinds of solutions, including like AI ones, which would inherently have the flexibility to respond to those 75 unique needs without having to develop 75 different solutions.
So like, there's, there's interesting things brewing. I do think there will continue to be choke points.
Like, you know, as soon as you get to the carrier side, but I think there's also some tools that may be helpful in getting around that. And that's, I don't know that they're here yet or implemented yet or easy to put in place.
But I think as much as you talk about like the barriers, I think there are people who don't like barriers and will want to find ways around it. And then the question is like, how workable is that solution? Do the carriers do something else that blocks that solution from getting through? I don't know.
Yeah. Like there's a lot of, I don't know right now, but I do agree with you that like, like the ground's been shaking, you know, you can't, it can't be the way it's been.
Yeah. You know, there's like one solution is like insurance gig, you know, kind of single point connection.
I think insurance gigs are great idea. I think Michael is a tremendous guy.
I think he's one of the smartest guys I've ever met. Good dude really cares about what he's doing.
It's a huge lift, right? To be the, you know, I know he would describe it a little differently just so the audience and Michael's been on the show if you guys go back and listen to the episode, but, you know, more like a Zapier for insurance, right? Where you can connect one time into a thing and then have all these connections. I think that's one way to get around it.
There are other solutions. There's tools like Better Agency, which is trying to use actual Zapier and some baked-in integrations to help people with a flow and give, say, the startup agency or the slightly larger than startup agency a really really efficient, high quality tool.
You know, you see these things happening. But then, you know, the other problem is you get, you know, and I, and I don't want to use them by name, but there's a tool and a guy I really like, and we were a client of theirs very early and then they signed up Gallag, and then they AF'd us on pricing because they had Gallagher.
Now guess who's coming downstream with a downstream solution, right? And to be honest with you, I love the guy, and I think the tool is interesting. I will never can buy it because the classic play is as soon as I get one of the top 100, I'm going to AF all the small agents until I need them again.
And then I'm going to come back. And it's just like, I've seen this over and over.
And it's like, and my point in saying all this is look, is that a best business practice? Probably not. Do I, you know, well, I might have to do some Hail Marys for having those thoughts.
But, but the is, this is part of the problem. Part of the problem is that and I've heard this over and over and over again, independent agents in particular, and this goes way up.
We're not even talking just about small local guys. We're talking about regional, even super regional agencies.
The tech companies come in, they, they,

they bait and switch. They over promise.
They under deliver. They, they use all this funky technology.
They have been like the straight shooter tech company is very, very rare in the insurance industry. And maybe it's rare in other industries.
I just don't have a tremendous amount of experience with companies outside. But like the feeling, the level of skepticism of most agency owners and agency leadership way up the chain.
We're not just talking about small guys. Way up the chain is so high that, you know, I just, the idea of starting an insure tech to me, I would have to believe in the idea so deeply.
And I am have a risk tolerance. I don't give a shit.
I'll try. You know what I mean? But I just, I can't do it.
How could I come in and say, I'm different because of this, or I'm different for this way when they just have been messed with so often, so many times, because some MBA dick in Harvard Business School did a regression analysis and decided that insurance agencies were a good opportunity. And I'm going to teach, you know, and dude, it's, and you, you've seen it, it's just over and over and over again.
So now they sit back and they're like, yeah, no, we're good. We're good.
We'll just keep doing it the way we're doing it because that's time, effort, money, people. And I don't believe you that you're going to give me what you said.
And that's the truth. Yeah.
And if you're like, if you're going into one of those projects and it goes upside down and it's 50K over or six months behind or whatever, like that could be end of the agency yeah yeah like yeah to a big carrier like 50k no one likes spending 50k they didn't have to and it wouldn't be 50k for them it'd be millions but like they can like i i signed a claim the last claim i ever had to approve before leaving my my chief claims officer role was 19.7 million dollars and it was not like a happy time, but there was not a passing moment of like, are we going to go out of business? Yeah. You know, it was like, fast forward to the startup I went to, and it was like, you know, the dude who does our videos is looking at like getting a new iMac and like a microphone and headphone.
I'm like, well, do we have to get the headphones too? Could he use his own? Like, you know, cause that's like a $40 difference. You know, that you know that's like that's the mentality but it is like that'll destroy your business yeah um and i actually know an agency who um had this very thing happen they went all in on a piece of tech spent about a hundred thousand dollars didn't work the way they wanted had to punt and back out about a year later and what what he said was more than the hundred K, which isn't a lot of, which is a lot of money.
Yeah. I'm not even discounting the amount of money.
So more than that was the time we lost so much time to making this change, to implementing the second. I think that's one of the things that so often everybody forgets

about this carriers included carriers will come down with new programs, new implementations, new, Hey, just do this or our cyber tool that does this thing, you know, whatever. And you're like, yeah, but it's time.
You're not everything you ask me to do multiplied by every carrier and every vendor that I use is time. And that's the one thing that the agencies just simply do not have is time.
This is a labor intensive business. And I think even more than the money, it is often the time.
It's just how much time does it take to get this into market? And if it doesn't work, can I back out? And that, that is like a key selling point that so many people miss. Yeah.
Um, I don't think I ever told you this story. I've shared with other people.
I don't think you've heard this is, uh, you know, I used to, I used to do sales for this insure tech that had like a texting solution for claims. And I was a customer of theirs and that's how I got to see it.
So I knew like I wasn't selling snake oil. Like I watched it work.
You know, founders came in, like we did training in two hours, like including people eating bagels and it was good to go. So I was selling to one of the farm bureaus and like, you know, we made all the promises and the guys were like stoic Midwesterners.
So I didn't think much of it, but it's because they've been like lied to so many times. And you're just like, yeah, whatever guy, like we don't believe they're like all right well we'll do it pilot so like okay we're gonna like you know block half a day like half a day do you mean a full day for training like to deploy i'm like no it's like we'll be done in a few hours like all right well we're gonna block the day like okay fine we'll block the day they get like the training room they got 15 people come in for the pilot we do the training and we lose the group within about 20 minutes of the training because they start sending each other like poop emojis and stuff because they're like it's texting they know how to do that and it and it's like it works so they're like yeah we got it we're texting people so they and you just hear people laughing and so we stopped the training after like a half an hour and they went off and they started using it with customers.
And by the end of the day, they'd done like 200 claims, which we don't normally see for weeks. They'd already put that through like in the balance of the day.
And that lead guy who was so like stoic was like, honest to God, teary eyed when we were leaving. And I was like, this is kind of awkward.
And, and he's like, no one has ever been honest with us and actually delivered what they like over promise under delivery he's like you said what you do i didn't believe you and i you did it and my people are smiling and he was like emotionally moved yeah some text that you know what i mean it's like it was really beautiful and awesome and also really sad that this guy's moved to tears

over a texting thing, being able to do what, like we said it would do, but that's, that's the state

of things. Like you shouldn't be crying over that working while you're like, Oh my God, they're

pooping on each other. No, like, but that's what it was, you know? And that's the ridiculous thing

that we're in today because everything's a lie. Otherwise, dude, this is the thing.
Like, I'll give you an example. So we use Slack.

SA uses teams. Okay.
I literally said to them, I will physically, and I'm exact. I guess I'm

exact. I can't, I don't want them to get mad at me.
I'm like, but I did say this. I was like,

we will have a physical altercation. If you try to take Slack away from us.
I was like,

I don't care. I don't care if teams comes with gold coins that rain down from the sky and we can grab as many as we want them.
If we, I don't care what happens, right? I don't, I, you cannot pry Slack out of our cold dead hands. It runs the agency.
It runs the agency. Everything, our entire history from day one, from the time I got my first employee.
Well, so everything before my first employee. No.
The day I got my first employee, I got Slack.

As soon as you made the communicate, you had Slack. So that was it.

We, you, if you went into our email, you would, you wouldn't know what business we're in.

You would have no idea.

We don't communicate via email.

If someone sends me an email who's on the team, I'm like, what's wrong? Right? Like, what is, why is this happening? Everything happens in there. And we have all the funny stuff in the general channel where people do the gift, but then we have all the serious stuff that want to, but everything is there.
It works. It works.
And it's like, why would we, why would we ever switch? I don't care what your thing does. This works.
We're not leaving. Like you will blow us up.
If you take this away from us, it doesn't matter. Now, there are other things.
God, please take this piece of technology. But I we, we have to figure out the things that work.
We have to implement those things and then we hold onto them. And if we, if, if technologists, carriers, vendors, partners, you know, whoever come in, you can't, you can't hold up the independent, choose your own adventure nature of our industry as, as, as this positive, and then wonder why your solution doesn't work for everybody.
Those two things don't mix, they're oil and water. So I think that, like you said, hopefully AI or whatever can start to create easily customizable solutions.
Or the other side is, maybe we just continue to iterate and define and be our own little things. And some of us will be slower and smaller.
And some of us will grow faster and quicker and be technology driven. And some will be niches and some will be general.
And we will continue to be 35 to 40,000 independent journeys operating with a hodgepodge of tools that works for us, hopefully, you know, focused, uh, uh, wasting less and less time on technology and finding more and more solutions that we can piece together and work. And, and look, I saw my very first demo of Margo's tool.
Tell me the name of it again. What is the name of it? Iris? Yeah.
Iris. The other day, I think she's amazing.
I think the tool is great. I like what they're doing.
I think they have a heavy lift ahead of them. It's a big concept.
Unfortunately, as I shared, you know, she knew this, but I also shared it with her. There's been a few similar sounding tools that have come along before her that she's going to have to overcome and differentiate from.
But I think that her kind of, you know, she's kind of created something where you can plug this in and it doesn't matter what thing you plug in it, you know, that feels to me conceptually more the future than everybody's going to be on this tool. It just doesn't seem like that's ever going to be the case yeah no i agree with you and um like her her interview on my show dropped today oddly enough um which is why i'm able to like quote her and reference that because it's fresh so whenever you're listening to this go back and listen to brian's interview with margo she's tremendous she's she's super cool um She's also aware of that.
And like, I mean, she got into the whole, like the buzzwords work against you. Like if we say what it is, then people are like, I don't know, because I've heard those words before and they're meaningless and they're lies.
So you're kind of like, you're trapped. Like you can't tell people it's quick and easy or it's microservices or it's cloud or it's digital.

Like you can't say anything because that's those words have already been like co-opted by people who actually don't deliver on any of that.

Yeah. And so like the skepticism serves.
Yeah, it's true.

You need a VC to insurance agent translator.

Yeah. And this is one of the things that I try to talk to to the to the.

So I have a few startup investments and then, you know, do some advising or whatever on the side. Cause I just, I love the space and trust me, I sound so negative.
I mean, I do love the space, but passionate about it. Yeah.
Yeah. I just, you know, I like to live in reality, you know, and I see these things and it's not reality, like what I believe it to be.
And literally I've been, had the shit kicked out of me and my friends have had the shit kicked out of them. And we've just learned, you know what I mean? And everyone talks to each other like we talked about before.
And I think that the key so much is, is you need you, you, you're the people who fund you. You have to say, buzzy click, you know, you have to use all the words, right? Cause they got to check those boxes to go to their boss and say, here, we need to write a $2 million check, right? So you got to say those things.
But then you have to translate that into insurance terms that your insurance agent people, because if you come in talking tech to independent agents, they're like, Matt, you're not one of us. Even if you are, right? So you have to, again, I don't know every industry, but to me, independent insurance agents and the people in that industry are particularly sensitive to are you one of us? It doesn't mean you have to have sold insurance.
It just means, are you one of us? Do you, have you lived in this space? Can you speak our language? Do you understand how we live? And, um, and, and look, I went through a lot of that even in my, in my trustedchoice.com days when I was building agency, even though I had sold insurance for eight years, when I talked about certain things, they'd be like, yeah, but what have you ever done? What have you ever done? You know what I mean? I'm like sold insurance for eight years and had a decent sized book of business. You know what I mean? Like it, you have to speak their language.
You have to translate those terms or, you know, AI, ML, you know what? It just means it's meaningless. They just go, nope, don't care.
Yeah. No, I totally agree.
I totally agree. Especially in the agent channel.
Yeah. More so than the carrier side, like it's helpful in the carrier side, but you can overcome it.
I think it's next to impossible or you shouldn't you you need to. If you haven't walked the walk, it's really hard to understand.
And I think kind of justifiably, it's really hard to genuinely understand what it's like to live in an agent's shoes if you haven't actually been there. yeah i um it's funny so i uh and i want to be cognizant of everyone's time so we'll wrap up

here in a second. But I was at, I was at an event last week in Utah.
And the first day of the event was in SureTech, Utah. And Utah is beautiful, by the way, it was my 42nd state that I've been to, which is cool.
I haven't checked off a new state in a long time. So that was great.
Utah is absolutely beautiful. I loved it.
I did not realize I forgot that it was the

desert and that how dry it was. I felt every morning, even though I hadn't really had much

to drink, I would wake up and it would sound like I had had about 30 beers and smoked a pack of

cigarettes. But, but yes, we're in Shurtuck, Utah, and there was great companies.
Margo was one of

them. And one of the, one of the guys came up and he was talking about a company and, you know,

Thank you. But, uh, but yeah, so we're in Shurtuck, Utah and there was great companies.
Margo was one of them. And, uh, one of the, one of the guys came up and he was talking about a company and, um, you know, and he's talking through it and, uh, and he was a VC who would become the CEO and, you know, whatever.
And the guy next to me, who's a buddy of mine leans over and goes, this guy's never sold insurance. Shut off.
Yeah. Right.
In his mind, shut off over conversation over. It doesn't matter what that tool did, what it you could, I could, you could smell it on him.
I mean, you could smell that he had never lived a life and you know, he'd only read about it in books and probably didn't even care. Frankly, he kept referring to agents as brokers and you know, there's just a weird thing, you know, where you could kind of, you just could smell it on him.
He had never lived a life and had no appreciation for it. And this, an unprompted, my buddy leans over and goes, he's never sold insurance and lean back over and start looking at his phone and game over for, for, for my buddy and me too.
But like that tool and the way he was talking about it, he could never sell that at scale to agent. He might get a couple, you know, people who kind of can see through it or whatever, but like, you just, you could smell it.
You could smell it on them. And if you, if you, if, if you sound like that, if you can't pull off the, I've been there, or I, or at least appreciate what you're going through and have spent time learning your life, you got no shot.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, so dude book when can they get the book where do they go give us the pitch give us the whole thing so depending when they're listening to this it's coming out june 8th so maybe it came out this will come out after june 8th so you'll be able to yeah you can just get it it's on amazon so that it's part of the future of insurance book series so if you search for the future of insurance on amazon it's like kindle print hardcover audible the whole nine or future dash of dash insurance.com which is cumbersome because the dashes but future of insurance is owned by like accenture or something and i don't have big enough pockets to buy it from them so that'd probably be a big price tag for that yeah the dashes were free so i went with that but with that. But yeah, and it's like, look, the whole point of it is your people point.
Like the whole book series is not about any one specific thing. It's about the lessons we personally need to start living to make the change where we can.
And maybe that is like at the organizational level, or maybe it's like, look, in my book of business, I can do that. you know, and I may not affect, like, save, like, global hunger or whatever, but, like, I can make that piece of this puzzle a little bit better and get to a place where, like, Margo says this perfectly, is, like, do your systems respect your staff? Like, your systems, your processes, back to the people thing, like, are you trying to get things to a place where it's, like, yeah, it's still tough, but I get it, and I understand why it is that way, and at least that makes my life a little bit better.
Like you add that up and you start to get somewhere. So like, where can we start to make progress? Yeah, guys.
And I, and I can attest to the fact that, um, one of the things I love about your work, Brian, is that like, it's not, you're not pushing solutions on anybody. It's, uh, filters, frameworks, ideas, concepts, um, that, that you then can use to make the decisions that work best for you.
It's what I love about your work in general. And is that, you know, you definitely you're giving people the tools to make decisions.
You're not forcing solutions or decisions on them. And I think it's tremendous.
I always enjoy our conversations. And as always, I wish you nothing but success, my man.

We will make sure everything's linked up in the show notes, but I'm sure you guys all know where amazon.com is

and can type the words future of insurance

into the little bar at the top of Amazon.

So just go there and buy it.

But if you, for some reason need,

I will also have links in the show notes here.

Thanks, man. Awesome, bud.
Take it easy. Cheers.
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