RHS 078 - Miles Merwin

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In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello everyone and welcome back to the show.
We have a tremendous episode for you today with Miles Merwin, the founder and president of Advisors Insurance Agency down in South Carolina. And Miles is a pretty incredible guy in terms of how he operates his agency.
I definitely say that he is on the leading edge in terms of process and procedure and his utilization of virtual assistants and the way he just,

the way he thinks about his business and how hard he works to optimize his business outside

of just him banging away at cold calls, right?

Like I think, not that there's anything wrong with that, but you know, some people go, you

know, I'm going to be the best producer in the agency and that's how I'm going to lead. That's a perfectly fine way to go about it.
There are other people like Miles, which, you know, again, this show is all about just introducing you to guys to different mentalities, different mindsets, because some people are going to click immediately for you and other people won't. And some people you'll take this piece from their business and other people you take.
And what I love is that Miles gives you a different perspective on how he's trying to remove himself from the day to day and really be a business owner, a business leader, and then build the team underneath him to execute on his vision for what his agency should be. And he calls this moving from producer to principal.
It's a new program that he has out as well. We talk a lot about that.
And I think just in general, you're just going to love this episode. Before we get there, I want to give a shout out to today's sponsor, Agency VA.
So virtual assistants, there's Facebook groups dedicated to them almost on a daily basis. And IAOA, you see some posts somewhere about somebody asking about virtual assistants, who they're using, and there are all different perspectives on this topic.
I've read the just put something out in Indeed or put something on Upwork or whatever and go sort through people and find someone yourself, and I think that's a perfectly fine model. There are a bunch of vendors available in the market as well who offer VA services.
I have just found Agency VA to be the best. Now, one, if I'm being completely open and transparent, Wes Anderson and Ben, these guys are friends of mine.
I like them a lot. I've gotten to know them at different events and I really just enjoy them as people.
But I'm not just like, they're not just advertisers on the show. I'm also a client of theirs and I use essentially what is a managed VA service.
So I don't have any one individual full-time, but I have a part-time, we'll call operations VA. His name is Tom and he's handling and really has been, I just did his three-month performance review and he's doing a tremendous job taking on more of the service work.
I can give him more detailed, more nuanced processes. He does a lot of data management work, and we're in the process

of training him how to do introductory quotes as well. So I just can't speak highly enough about that process and working with Tom and the system and the feedback you get and the reliability and the quality of individual and the training that Tom had got before he had come to Rogue Risk.
and then I also have someone who's helping me manage my books better.

I am terrible at accounting. I'm just absolutely terrible at it.
I just don't want to think about it. The idea of slowing down and thinking about putting all my numbers together.
I just want to see the numbers. I just want to know where am I at? Am I making money? Am I not making money? Do I have to work on budget? Where are we? I don't want to have to do all that.
Agency VA provides me with a wonderful resource. Her name is Helen and she's just been absolutely tremendous.
It's just helping me be a better agency. It's helping me focus on what I do and it's allowing me to really take Rogue to the next level a lot faster than I probably could have otherwise.
So agencyVA, agencyva.com, go to agencyVA. It's hard for me to say, you know, like with Advisor Evolved, I say there's no other website vendor.
I know there are a couple other good virtual assistant vendors in the market, but agency VA is absolutely right there at the top. They are someone that if you're going to consider VAs, you have to call Wes.
You have to call their team. They need to be part of the discussion.
You need to interview them. They're that good.
I recommend them that highly that I've spent way too much time talking about them already. AgencyVA.com.

Go there today.

All right, let's get on to Miles. There he is.
Hello. All right.
Yeah, I just got a message from Zoom saying that my cloud recording space was at its capacity to send them more money. I was like, I wanted to record like two videos in the cloud, and they cut my limit.
limit yeah they um i uh that is so there are some aspects of zoom that i find to be very cost effective and then there's some other things that they do do that like versus the market i feel like their pricing is off and the cloud storage is one of them like one recorded zoom call is like a couple hundred megabits and that blows through your requirement. Like right there, like you're just, you immediately have to upgrade and then you're like, come on.
So I record everything to the hard drive. I I've also found that, and I found zoom to be pretty consistent, but when I do record to the cloud, that is when I have had some problems with the audio when i record to the hard drive um you know then i just have to be careful about putting too much crap on my hard drives it slows down but as long as i have good you know as long as i clean it regularly um i find the hard drive to be the best quality yeah yeah yeah i guess you can probably get some sort of external hard drive too, if you needed to.
Yeah. When you have the lightning connection with max, you could basically use the X there, the external hard drive.
Some of those external hard drives as actual hard drives. If you wanted, they're that fast.
I've actually rendered premier pro videos off of external hard drive stored stuff. The issue there is those things will fritz out on you and you have to be, you almost have to back up your backed up external hard drive stuff because I I've had them go before on me.
Um, I luckily was backing it up, but like when I was with agency nation, I used to put everything on one of these external hard drives and it was awesome. Except I was traveling and one of them just, I went to plug it in and poof, it was, it was gone.
Now I hadn't backed it up, so I was good. But, um, you know, if I hadn't, that would have been, I mean, I would have been, you know, everything gone all recorded all the stuff you know terrible but dude that's the mac is that what you use yeah yeah okay yeah i use i use a mac um i have to have a pc over here because of hanover and pl raider um travelers has gone to Chrome, which is excellent.
You know, Raider works with Chrome now. What?

Yeah, Raider. Travelers has gone to Chrome, which is excellent.
You know, Raider works with Chrome now. What? You know, Raider works with Chrome now.
Yeah, but the bridging is wacky. Some of the bridging is wacky.
So you can do the PL rating in Chrome, but then the bridging doesn't work as well. So, I mean.
What are you going to do? I know. I know.
And I know the changes are on the way and I don't mean to bang on Hanover. Hanover, you know, I love you.
I just can't understand how is for as good of an insurance product as you could have, you could have, you could still be on the least secure, slowest, clunkikiest worst browser that Microsoft doesn't even support anymore like how is that how did someone not go hey guys like back in 2014 someone said hey you know maybe we should get a whole ahead of this whole Internet Explorer thing maybe I mean 2014 is a great year Let's just stay here. Yeah.
But no, I got to stop.

I got to, I mean, I said 2014 is a great year. Let's just stay here.
Yeah. But no, I, I gotta stop.
I got it. I told my Hanover rep that I would stop banging on their technology in my podcast.
So I'm going to do that. So I take back everything I just said.
You can edit that out. No, I refuse.
I just strike it from the record. Yeah.
Now it's better. So, dude, we came on here to talk about your producer program.
Not producer program. Producers the Principles.
Producers the Principles, yes. Producers the Principles program, which in a private call, we talked a little bit about, which I thought was tremendous.
And, you know, start wherever you want to start. Just the name alone intrigues me.
So let's get into it. Cool.
I appreciate you asking about it and coming on here and creating this venue for me, this platform. I, you know, the original idea produces the principles was just out of having,

well, first of all, I wanted to open up my own agency at one point in time.

So, you know, a clear path to ownership is always beneficial because then you know how to do that.

If that's your goal, you're going to go do it if that's what you want to do.

Whatever, you know, you're not going to let someone get in your way to do that, but you've got to cut your teeth somewhere. You have to learn the business before you can go do it on your own.
And so I had team members who I was trying to recruit and they wanted to go open their own agencies. I was like, how do we do this? How do I recruit people and recruit sharp people like myself, but then cap them and hinder them? And they know that from the very beginning that they have nowhere to go if they really want to open their own agencies.
And so I created producers to principals as a clear path to ownership for team members, if that's what they want to do. They'll book a business, they can take it with them.
And I worked a back end deal with my aggregator that I would get paid on those basically for the next 15 years on the back end of their production after they leave. Win-win.
They open an agency, they are successful. I run an agency, I'm successful, we're friends, everything's great.
Talking with one of my business coaches, Brent Kelly, actually, to give him a shout out.

You know, he said, hey, Miles, you know, what is the benefit to you doing that?

And, you know, I don't understand why you're doing that.

And so I kind of updated the language of that as a clear path to ownership.

But I hope my culture is so strong you never want to leave.

Yeah.

You know, I hope you don't want to leave because it's better for all of us.

We love having you on our team. But if that's absolutely what your goal is this is a clear path to ownership over the last few months I was looking at my calendar looking at how much time I was spending just in and I'm really appreciative people who call me to ask for help and it's like uh it's a weakness of mine I just I want to help them and so I'm willing to spend all this time with them.
And my wife asked me, she's like, who are these people you're talking to? Why are you spending so much time with them? You could be spending that time with your own family. You could be spending that time in your own business to develop it further, but you choose to spend your time with random individuals you don't really know.
Why are you doing that? Why aren't you getting paid for it? That sounds like an oddly familiar conversation by a spouse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
And so, and then Brent Kelly was asking me in our monthly coaching calls, he was like, hey, what do you like to do? What do you like to spend your time on? What energizes you? And I was like, I like to do that, but it doesn't, I don't, I don't get paid to do that. That's just friendly.
He's like, well, okay. And so I jot down on those notes.
And so I was looking at my calendar, how much time I was spending. I was like, you know what, let me go back to the idea of producers, the principals.
And I recognize that most of the people were calling me were agency owners acting like producers still. And they were asking questions about what it meant to be a principal of your insurance agency.
What did that look like? How did you bridge the gap? How did you get yourself out of the production and into managing your business? And so I just kind of went back to that original name said produces the principles. What if we expand that and said, hey, helping agency owners to stop acting like producers and start acting like the principles their agencies desperately need.
I love it. This has been, so this concept, and I want to get into the nuts and bolts of it in a second, but this concept is actually something that Cass and I started talking about like eight or nine years ago when we were going and doing all these conversations on marketing, right? And I'm not going to say that this was an original idea.
I just, like, we're doing marketing. We're literally laying out how I had set up the Murray Group, you know, for all their SEO and inbound stuff, how Cass had done all this stuff with Facebook.
I mean, at that time, he was really doing well on Facebook and organic and posting. And we found over and over again that people would listen and literally do nothing.
And what we came to the idea was that our industry too often people either get caught or, or just don't simply know how to transition from insurance agent to business owner, right? Which are two completely different things. And you really can't be successful at both.
There are people who can sell and be business owners, but it's really difficult to be insurance agent and business owner at the same time. It's very, very difficult, especially if your mindset doesn't switch, if you're not giving the mind, right? So this idea to me, I think this is so important.
Like I feel like you've really dialed in even on the language. I mean, much better than what I had, but I feel like the language you've really dialed in on as well.
It's been fun to think about it. Actually, you know, when a lot of producers that I talked to in my team, they're super stoked and excited to close a big deal and land a new client.
And I'm like, yeah, that's great. But then when I talk to someone to help them, you know, come up with a new strategy or bridge the gap to a new season of their business, that they're able to go impact and maybe provide two or three more jobs or take their business from one step to the next.
I'm like, that energizes me. I'm like, that's like landing a big deal.
I'm like, a big account for me feels the same way. And so it's just been fun to think down that road.
And again, the wife conversation, she's like, well, you still can't let this consume you that you can't pay attention to your own business. So it's still as much as you know, it's fun.
It's still what you would call a side hustle, right? It's not the main thing.

I have to make sure that I focus. And this is something that I'm putting in my planning of what I'm teaching is making sure that you don't get distracted from what created the success.
It's hard to be successful at success because once you have some, everyone wants to figure out how you did it and they want to take your time. so how do you keep yourself focused on what created the success in the first place and help at the same time yeah it uh that what you just defined there that idea that once you become successful everyone wants to know how you're successful and so many because we operate in a industry of sales oriented individuals they're completely willing to text email or call you or linkedin instagram twitter dm you hey how'd you do x thing and uh and and you know and because i think in one of the things i love about this industry so many of us are willing to help you you can, you know what I mean? You're like, hey, I figured this thing out.
I need to tell John Smith who lives in Utah, who I've never met before, exactly what I did word for word. Hey man, you got 10 hours today.
Let's do a workshop. You know, it's like, it's so easy to get sucked into it.
But so, okay. So let's, how do you do that? I mean, without giving away the rub to everything you're doing, how do we get into there? Or maybe here's a better question to start with.
How do you, I am stroking this peach fuzz of a beard I have, I think simply because I'm emasculated by your beard. So, so how do you recognize that, that you're maybe stuck in this producer mentality? But maybe, you know, maybe that's maybe the, where we should start.
How do you say to your, you know, you're operating, maybe you've hit a plateau or maybe you've had a down year or just, you can't seem to hit that sales goal you have or whatever you've recognized. How do you recognize I need to, something needs to happen here? There needs

to be a move. Yeah, that's a good question.
And a lot of my answers is coming back from my experience. That's a lot of where I'm coming from.
And I'm deciding who, you know, who I talk to, who I don't talk to is really, is my experience relatable to them? Because that's all I know is what my experience was. And through my experience, I ran into some areas where, well, I just recognized a couple of situations.
One was I was competing with my own sales team and I started to not be the top producer in my own agency, right? I started to not be the biggest, baddest sales guy in my own agency. And when I opened it by myself, of course, I was the biggest and the baddest and I hired someone and I was bigger and better than them because I was showing them how to do it.
But then sooner or later, they were selling more than I was. And then I had a couple of people that I'd hired that did terrible in sales.
And I got rid of that person, hired another person. And I, you know, at one point I hired one guy and he just blew it out of the water with all the same opportunity, all the same tools, all the same resources, the same brand, everything was the same, but he produced 50% more than the last person that I had to let go and would produce 50% more than I did.
Just highly efficient. I was like, wait a minute.
I don't have to be the top sales guy in my agency. I need to find and equip and encourage and keep accountable top salespeople.
I only have so much time every day to sell. If I want to grow my agency, I've got to invest in people and producers to let them go do their thing.
I can find people to do that part of my business better than me. And so realizing there are people out there better than me at production was very telling at that time.
And I remember at the very beginning of the business, reading the book by Robert E. Gerber, E-Myth.
I always come back to that, just writing out an organizational chart at the very beginning of my business and penciling each division in my business, initialing and penciling in my initial on every single, you know, every single position there was. And then I starred the ones that I really wanted to do.
And I, you know, highlighted the ones I wanted to get someone else to do. And as I could find people to do those, I just started penciling their initials and raising mine and let them go do that and empower them to do that.
Because I really believe that, you know, if you build your people, your people will build your business. And so at some point, if you find that you have not enough time to run your business, not enough time to develop your people, recruit, your business is stuck, you're not growing, you've built your business to a quarter million dollars in revenue, a half a million dollars in revenue, you haven't grown in years, then something has to happen.
Like you're stuck. And I got stuck at one point and I was trying to find a mentor to find like, who can help me understand how someone's already passed this barrier? What did we do? And I couldn't find any one local.
And so I reached out to Brent Kelly at Sickins and he gave me a network of people that owned agencies between three and 30 million in revenue and just started asking a lot of questions. And so the goal of producers, the principal is to find those people.
I'm not going after Brent Kelly's clients. I'm trying to find those people between a quarter million in revenue and a million dollars in revenue who've been taking them five, six, 10 years, and they're still there.
And they're asking the question, why? Why am I still here? What do I need to do to get to the next level? So really to answer your question is, if you just find yourself stuck, or I was talking about one of the rally cries in my agency, time relationships and financial security. If you're not creating more flexible time in your life, you're not developing deeper relationships, and you're not creating more financial security for yourself, your business, your clients, and your team members, then you're going in the opposite direction.
Yeah. You know, one of the things that I found, you know, even in my own business is, you know, I'm staring right here next to me.
And after this call, it's my next thing to do. I have about two hours of service work to do.
And there is nothing that drains my life force more than service work. And I don't mean that to knock service work, because it's very, very important.
I don't discount its importance. These are things that have to get done.
I can't wait. Like literally it, it, it, I can't wait to have someone to do this work because the things that I'm good at and the things that I know can grow the business, I'm struggling to find time to do.
And what's interesting is what it has taught me, the purpose of sharing this is what it has taught me is how easy it is to, to find yourself on a plateau, to get to a certain point and just find your, you literally just do not have the time to, or, and I think this one is equally important and less talked about is you don't have the brain cycles. You don't have the mental energy to grow your business because it's spent in so many different places.
And if you haven't read the book, Atomic Habits by James Clear, you need to, this is for everyone listening, not just you, Myles. But one of the core ideas that I took out of that is every time you change your focus, so you're thinking about a policy change, and now you're going to take an inbound phone call.
And then you're going to try to go call someone about something else that has to be done. And a carrier rep interrupts you.
And then, someone you know slacks you about a billing question or you know about a question that's every one of those mental jumps from task to task to task it you're not using equal energy you're taking massive energy burns to transition your brain from one task to another, especially if it's from problem solving

creativity to just straight like focus, logical execution. I mean, major, major burns and, and the, and the, your body naturally doesn't get to things like sales, like you, you, you're, you're, your like, like a lizard brain tells you don't do creativity.
Don't do high effort activities because we don't have a lot of energy left. And that's why everyone says like cold call and do that kind of stuff in the morning.
So, so it's, it's almost, it has shown me how easy it is for you to hit these numbers, whatever your number is, two 50, 500, and you just find yourself in this plateau and you just can't move forward. It just, I can see it.
I can see it as clear as day how it happens to so many people. And something you said reminded me of, you know, the going through the process of, of working through your agency from scratch, like you are.
And like I did, is there's a lot of agency owners that have never done that. And there's a lot of agency owners that have never actually had their hand in every piece and section of their business as it was created.
So that is a unique ability of you as an owner of your agency further on down the line because you have the ability to walk into any stage of your business or any section, any division and pick up and be useful

and that your team knows, hey, Ryan knows how to do this. He's not just telling me like he did it, he knows it.
And that's powerful. And I think that that even, you know, thinking about building a team and building people so they can build your business.
When your people on your team know your story and know that you sat in that seat and you did it, it's easier to create a culture around that and then they appreciate that and they'll listen. You've sat in that seat versus if you get a boss that has never done what you do and they come in and tell you the top 10 tips to make your day more efficient and better you're like what are you talking about you've never even done this yeah yeah you almost um and this this goes this goes for so much of life not just not just running an agency you know it goes for for everything I think um you know sports uh you know like people want to see the scars like they you you you, you, you, you know, if you're not beat up, if you, if you haven't been, been bruised and scrapped and you haven't scraped a little bit, at least if you haven't, you know, been in the fire, at least to a small extent, it's very hard to respect what you're hearing.
And I think, I think this is why traditionally, like middle management is, you know, is gets a lot of flack, both upwards and downwards, is I think people feel like they haven't, you know, been in the fire. And, you know, why we I think why we put entrepreneurs on such a pedestal is because they, you know, a lot of times we've seen them openly in public, different companies, different decisions.
They've, they've, they've taken this, this, this heat. And, you know, and if the, and if you come out the other side, it's very difficult not to have respect for them.
And, you know, I think that, I think that is important. I mean, I'm all for playing to your strengths and outsourcing your weaknesses, but if you don't have your hands in it a little bit, it's very difficult to drive forward.

Yeah. You know, there's so many conferences, Ryan, and there's so many resources out there for us to go use.

And if you don't, when you don't take the time to go, well, find them, research them, write them down. It's sometimes easy to go do those things and find the nuggets, find the breadcrumbs, find the nuggets, find the cannon shots versus the bullet shots.
Like, it's so easy to go find those. But then once it comes to implementing those things and then holding yourself accountable to make sure they get from finish to end is where the breakdown happens.
And I think I said this in a podcast with Jason Kacast, you know, I prefer, I prefer coaches over partners. They're a lot cheaper.
Yeah. Coaches are expensive.
I spend a lot on coaches for myself, but they're cheaper than partners. That's for sure.
A partner will take 50% of your revenue or your income from the business. A coach takes a, you know, you know how much that's going to cost.
And so what I've found is by having a coach, though, who's not a partner or a coach who's not your spouse or a coach who isn't a team member that you tend to and you're paying for their time is when you're paying them to ask you, hey, we talked about these three things. You said you're going to get these three things done.
Where's the results? It's like a personal trainer. not do you have any experience there, Ryan.
It's like a personal trainer. If you could work out on your own and get the results you needed to, you wouldn't hire a personal trainer.
You hire a personal trainer because they give you some accountability and some tips to get it done. Yeah.
I learned this the hard way. So I have taken up boxing for aerobics.
I'm not punching anybody in the face, nor do I want to be punched. But maybe if I was younger, I can see the draw.
Like I, I can see why people get into it. But at 40 years old, I, the last thing I want to do is take a shot to the, to the face.
But I do love the aerobic. I love aerobic.
I love the competition. I love the hand eye coordination parts of it.
I love all that stuff. And, uh, so I've been training on my own and, um, and I have some buddies that used to box and they gave me some pointers and, you know, get this move down.
And then once you do that, you didn't get this. Okay.
So then I, they said, Hey, come to our little gym that we have in the basement of one of their houses and come do the, the, the gloves, the pads on the hands. I thought I was going to vomit after about five minutes and I'm doing 10 foot three minute rounds on my own on a heavy bag and I'm working.
I mean, I'm drenched head to toe by the end, but that's me. Right.
So, you know, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And then I'll step away for a second.
Then I'll come back. Well, with the gloves, it's, you know, one, two, four, five, five, four, one, two, you know, bam, bam, bam, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
Oh, no, you're going to step back. Now I'm going to throw one at you.
You know, you got to duck. Okay.
I'm literally like, I thought I was going to heave. It was like two a day NFL practice.
And it reminds you that, you know, on your own, you can work incredibly hard. And yes, there are some of us cut from a different kind of mold where on our own, we just push ourselves to the nth degree.
But I think for many of us having that person to stand there and go, you made this commitment, you are not holding up to it. You know, this is what you got to do.
It just keeps you pushing forward. It does.
It's important. Why do you think more people don't have coaches or mentors? Like, I think the fact, every time you reference Brent Kelly as a coach, who I think the world of Brent Kelly, every time you do, I say to myself, that just feels like a really smart decision.
It just feels like a great, I have no idea what you guys talk about. You've mentioned it at a high level, but it just feels like a really good, but I think the vast, vast majority of people don't do that.
Why do you think that is? Well, I think for one thing, before I hired a coach, I had the thought of, well, I've gotten this far. Why do I need someone telling me what to do? The reason you open your own business because you didn't want someone telling you what to do.
And in the insurance business, you know, average is really excellent. And you're doing pretty good.
You're making, you're probably making really good money. And so you're comfortable.
And do you really want to work harder or work smarter? Do you want someone telling you what to do? Like you haven't had anybody keep you accountable for a very long time. And so it's uncomfortable to do that.
And you're paying for something that's not concrete. It's very abstract.
Although as insurance professionals, we should be very used to doing monetary transactions on abstract concepts. That's what we do all day long.
But it feels very foreign. I think it's just something, it's like your wife asking you if you want to do some marriage counseling.
Well, no, I'm a man. I'll take care of my own relationship, right? Like you don't want to go get marriage counseling.
It's the same thing for your business. I think I just found I was I was not happy with, um, I was not happy with standing still and not knowing direction.
And I

wasn't set. I think I just found I was not happy with standing still and not knowing direction.

And I wasn't satisfied with thinking that I was going to have to take three years to learn something I could probably do. I could probably learn from someone else in two or three months.
Yeah. And I think the other thing that helped when having a coach and and working is is allowing my team to get the same message from that coach as well so not only coach works with me but if I need them to they'll also work with my team so as I'm relaying information back and forth that's that's like you're teaching your kids how to do math and they go to school for like two weeks like, oh, yeah, I learned this math.
And you're like, I've been trying to teach you the same thing for three months. And then you went to school for two days and learned it.
Like when your team goes and hears it from a second voice, it just helps that buy-in. And so I think it just really, I had to kind of get outside my comfort zone and say, hey, I need someone to push me.
And it's not my own team members. I can't vomit my ideas and my team members.
My wife doesn't want to hear this stuff. Yeah.
You know, I found, I tend to be, when I do have a team, you know, so maybe going back to like my Agency Nation days, I tend to be a very transparent and open leader. Like good, bad, mistakes I'm making, things that aren't going well, you know, number transparency on whatever.
And, you know, what's interesting about that is who delivers those messages. Like I could say, I want my team to know everything.
There's a huge difference between me delivering them or someone else delivering them or a consultant coming in and delivering that information and not right or wrong, but, but who delivers the message is often just as important as the message being delivered. And I think this speaks to, you know, having a coach in that you as the leader of the agency is going, I've been telling Steve to say it this way for six months.
And then Miles comes in and geez, he's here for 10 minutes. And Steve's already, you know, got the script down pat.
How can I, and it's, and it really is just, you know, everyone, everyone kind of reacts differently to different people. And two, you know, I just say this all the time.
I've been hired to speak in 37 states, except for the state that I actually live in. And you know what I mean? It's always kind of, you know, the did the coach comes in out of left field and everyone's like, wow, you know, she knows everything.
Even though you're like, wait a minute, I've been saying the same stuff. So, so, okay.
Um, so, so my, my next question for, uh, producers to principals is, um, so you've, you've realized you've hit this plateau. Uh, you've, you're, you're looking around saying, geez, I've been stuck at $350,000 in

revenue for a long time. And not that I'm necessarily unhappy, but man, I'd really love

to push this thing forward. What's the first step? What is the first thing that you need to do or the

first concept you need to wrap your head around? Or how do you get started? How do you get started

in this transition? And again, this is just based off my experience. When I saw, when I got stuck, what were the top things that we did to move our agency to the next level? And, you know, so the first thing, and I just brought on my first client that I'm working with one-on-one.
So not everything we're doing is one-on-one. Again, the time thing.
A lot of it's going to be group or material nuggets here and there, but I brought on my first client one-on-one. He asked me the first, that same question, what do we start with? And, you know, we start with the things, Hey, I want to know, what are you concerned about most? Let's find out what those things are.
And usually it's always, I want written processes. I want written down exactly what our unique process is.
And so to back up from that, usually it's, well, who are you? What do you stand for? What does your team think you stand for? What is your story? Is it written down? And so it just comes back to starting at writing out, which seems super backwards. And it's just writing out your story, writing out exactly who you are, why you open the agency, why you believe that you're like, why clients should choose you? Why should prospects find you? Why should people come to work for you? Why should they do that? What is it about your agency that makes you unique? And have that stuff written down and memorized.
And so when you're onboarding clients and you're working with prospects and you're writing out processes and you're trying to get buy-in from your team to change the way they do things, they're not doing

it anymore because you told them to do it. It's because they believe in the agency's message.

And prospects aren't deciding to insure with you because you had the best price. They're insuring

with you because they believe that you bring the most value, that it's a good fit ethically,

it's a good fit religiously for them. If you both are the same religion, it's a good fit in your community.
They see that you're very involved in your community versus their prior relationship. It's all those abstract things that you're writing down and cementing when you're onboarding clients and onboarding team members, that you have an onboarding message.
And from there, you can start writing out processes. Because if you know that, it helps you drive your process.
Yeah, I love that. One of the things that came to my mind while you were talking was the idea that you were saying all these different things.
Maybe the client buys from you based on religion or community or message or whatever. I think one of the things that, and I made this mistake early on, and part of me believes that this is natural, I hope, is that you start chasing things because you think it's the right way to be versus who you actually are.
And, you know, I find this because sometimes I get caught between wanting to be local, because I do enjoy the community I live in, and I enjoy the people and I have a lot of friends here and I've lived here for most of my life. And being digital, which I also believe in and love and think that they're, you know, I have, you know, I have clients all over the country.
I have clients all over the state. I have clients that find me, especially because of the work that I do in search engine optimization.
For some reason, I'm popping in Virginia right now. Like I got all these businesses calling me in from Virginia, like literally four in the last two weeks, just from Virginia.
I don't know why Virginia, but they're all from Virginia. And some of them I outsource and some of them I write through Indium and, and, and I get caught in, is that the right move for me? Or should I be focused on the capital district? You know, Saratoga, Albany, Troy, Schenectady, the area that I live, live in.
And, um, and my point in saying all this is, I think we go to things like IAOA and you hear David Crothers talk about middle market. And all of a sudden you're like, I want to be middle market.
And then you hear, you know, someone else talking about personal lines and you're like, I need to be personal lines guy. And then you hear someone else talking about, you know, charity, they do stuff with charities and you're like, I need to be like her.
She does all this charity stuff. And you start putting on a different, different clothes than when, who you actually are, You start taking start taking and that's a really difficult topic I think for a lot of people to grapple with yeah you have to first find yourself before you can start you know going out it's um I think it's easy to be dragged it's It's again, being successful at success.
Or it's being like, if you don't know who you are, you'll be dragged in every direction. If you dig a hole and you don't have a certain to put in it, it's just going to fill up with crap.
Like until you write out and define who you are, what you want to do, what you're all about, then you are just going to go in every direction. But once you write that stuff out and something comes across your table, you're somewhat prepared to say yes or no, because you can tell, hey, is middle market, is that what we could be good at? Well, let's look at our messaging.
Let's look at what we're strong at. Let's look at where we're at.
Could that fit into what we're currently doing? And I bid on David Carothers program. But I looked at it and said, hey, does this make sense? We have all the right carriers.
We have all the points of different, our points of differentiation actually make sense in middle market commercial. Who are our competitors in town? You know, do we have the right knowledge? Do we have the right team? Can we, can we effectively just, I told my team, we're going to

Thank you. commercial? Who are our competitors in town? You know, do we have the right knowledge? Do we have the right team? Can we effectively just, I told my team, we're going to flip the script, right? Only problem with going after middle market at the right, this current moment, is our pipeline.
That's the only reason why we can't go after middle market at this time, is we don't have the pipeline for it. If we had the pipeline, can we work in this capacity? 100%.
We just need to flip the script on our pipeline. But if we had no processes, no procedures, no commercial account exec, no markets, and now we want to go flip the script and be middle market, well, that seems like more of a long-term goal.
Probably not. But we've worked ourselves up to a certain situation where different opportunities now make sense.
But again, if you don't have anything written down for where you're at, what you want, where you want to go, what the belief system is, then anything that comes at you seems like a great idea. Yeah.
You know, it's funny. Yeah, I think that's such an important part is, you know, and so I actually, I actually one of the accounts that came in from Virginia from an SEO call, I took the call.
And I talked to the guy, super nice guy, great, great kid starting this fitness business. And he's got four trainers and blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, and I was like, this, this is great. You know, this is, I love helping these people.
I love helping people who are starting out. I know a lot of agents are like, oh, this guy's probably going to cancel in

six months, blah, blah. I just like them.
I like helping them. And, um, and I just like, uh,

it's just something about, I feel like I'm getting started on the right foot. It's probably a good way to put it.
I feel like I'm, I'm setting them on a path for success versus just whatever. But at the same time, I was like, man, this kid really needs somebody in Virginia.
Like someone he needs, like there are certain accounts in other States that I'll take because, um, I feel like I can help them and be of value from here. And then there's other accounts where I'm like, you know, like I had a trucking account, anything trucking I outsource, but I had a commercial auto account in Texas.
And I just was like, I can't be of service to this guy. And even three or four months ago, I would have wasted days trying to find a commercial auto market somewhere for trucking in Texas or whatever.
And this is stupid. So I think it is a process.
I think it's part of just being disciplined, not just saying yes to everything. But man, is it important? You know, it's, it's, it feels trivial, but it's just not.
Yeah. And it's going back.
And once you run through that situation, a couple of times you get burned, it's going back. And I know this stuff is just, it's like, you know, scraping a chalkboard, but writing down your sales playbook, like what is it that you're willing to accept? Sandler sales training is one of the programs that we're involved in.
And the best day to lose a sales on the first day. And so if you can't find pain in the situation and what makes you different in what you do, it doesn't fit their needs and it doesn't meet your minimum account revenue size.
It doesn't fit your agency and your model. Then the best day to lose a sale is on the first day.
And so just part with them. And I use this term over and over and over again.
I learned this from Sandler sales training is maybe the best thing we can do today is artist friends. Yeah.
I like that. Otherwise, we're probably not going to like to work with each other.
I don't know if this makes sense to work together. Yeah.
And let them choose the ghost and waste. Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
Great. I like that.
So, okay. So, I want to be respectful of your time, but I do want to give everyone, so we've kind of talked about how do you know? We've talked about what the first step is, you know, writing down stuff.
I'm awful at that. Although I will say Loom helps me, you know, the writing part I would probably never do, but documenting stuff with Loom.
And if you buy the like $3 a month increase for the Teams one, you can create the team folder and categorize all the looms.

I've been starting to do that.

That actually is very valuable.

So, okay.

So where do you hope to get to?

So you've figured it out.

Boom.

You've taken, you know, we've talked a little bit about the first step and we're not trying to give away the secret sauce to this producer principal program.

But, you know, what is the, what is an

achievable result? They they've worked with you for six months. They've worked with you for a year, whatever it is.
Um, you know, what is, what, what is a, like, how do you, how do you determine maybe a better way to put it? How do you determine success or how should someone determine success from a program like this? You know, I think there's a couple things after six months where it says you've had success. One is I can just start, I can just ask a couple of questions.
Hey, what makes you different than the other agency down the street? And you know exactly what it is and all of your team members know exactly what it is. If that's all you get out of it, then that's a huge accomplishment right there.
The other one is that you know exactly what your target client is. Like if I ask you, who is your target client? What fits your agency? Who you're going after? If someone comes to your agency and says they want this, are you saying yes? Are you saying no? Defining that.
If I asked you, hey, what are you spending your time on as a principal every day? Tell me what you spent your time on. And you are getting closer and closer and closer to 80% of your time is being spent on strategy, training, teaching, writing out processes, recruiting.
80% of your time is on that work. It may be even networking to drive opportunities to your team.
80% of your time is on that. 20% of your time is fixing emergencies for your clients.
20 percent of the time is hopping on a call to do an insurance review still. Twenty percent of the time is someone was out that day and so you were the producer in the office that day.
Twenty percent of the time you're still telling your buddies at the country club that yeah you'll write their insurance and you personally continue to do it. That's happening 20% of the time,

80% of the time you're acting like the principal of your insurance agency.

And so if you started out at zero of your time was acting like a principal and after six months, 30% or 40% of your time,

you're acting like a principal.

I would say that's success because you're moving in the right direction to get

there.

I'm not going to expect you're going to be at 80% because you've got a lot of habits to overcome and you have a lot of team members to train and build up. And a lot, you know, you've got a long ways to go.
It can take a year and a half to two years, you know, to really get through a lot of those things. So you're getting your, your, your percentage of your time where it's being spent is moving closer and closer, closer to 80% of your time acting like the principal of your insurance.
Yeah, I love that. I love that.
I mean, you, you've described my promised land that, you know, that I'm, I'm probably at this, I'm at the zero right now. But, but, but no, I think that's tremendous.
And I think another thing that you hinted at, but is important to at least bring up is the idea that this is all of this takes time. And I have to coach, I literally have like, affirmations that I do about like, patience, like everything takes time, you're not going to write 100 homeowners insurance accounts tomorrow, like you're just not there yet.
Like not enough people even know that you exist yet. Like you, you know, have realistic expectations, like these kinds of things.
Cause, cause that, the, the, the, the negative voice in your head is telling you, you know, miles right in a hundred counts a week. What's wrong with you? You're just smart as miles.
You know, you got, and you make all these bad decisions and, you know, I started. I think on that as well, as you see how other agencies are doing and you want to be like them you want to do what they're doing but a they're either further along not either in just they've been open longer or they're further along in their strategy and their ability to be the principal of their agency or they just empowered a team to do it so it's not miles writing 100 policies I've written you know five policies in the 12 months, and it was probably a mistake.
You know, it's my team wrote 100 policies. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. So, all right, man.
So, where people listen to this, they're like, I just want to learn more. I would love to work with Miles.
You know, I want to get a bunch of free consulting from him. Like, where can people learn more about the program, connect with you, hit them with the deets? Yeah, so in the next couple of weeks, I should have a really simple website coming out.
Every great business starts with a website, right? And so I'll have a website out in the next couple of weeks that I'll be putting out that people can go to. I hope to develop that into providing actual member area resources that you can go to and grab nuggets from there.
I'll have a link on there that basically says, hey, 15 minutes, let's do a discovery call and just, you know, let's talk for 15 minutes. I'll have a link on there just one time that you, I love Calendly.
Oh man, it's amazing that you can click on Calendly and schedule time. And at the end, this feels so awkward, Ryan, at the end, before you can schedule, it's going to ask you for payments for an hour meeting.
It's just going to ask you if you want to schedule a time, here it is. And then I'm looking to do some sort of like monthly thing where I can put out information, whether that's bomb bomb videos of nuggets, the things that I'm learning along the way.
Again, a lot of what I'm doing is just what I've experienced and what I am experiencing through my journey going from this point of revenue to this point and where, what we do to get there. You know, a $10 million revenue agency is probably not going to want to listen to me.
They're way past me. So that quarter million to $1 million revenue agency is probably where I'm going to be most effective for them.
If you're a two, three, $4 million revenue agency, then go hire the Brent Kellys of the world. Like that's who I hire, but I didn't hire them until I was at one and a half, 2 million in revenue going forward.
So it's like seed, I'm like seed capital. Hey, that's a great spot to be.
I mean, I think, and there are, and this is the last thing I'll say is this is an exciting time. A lot of new agencies, a lot of new agency owners, a lot of people going out on their own and, and they need, I literally just talked to a guy today who was thinking about joining Indium.
And, you know, he needs programs like what, you know, he might be a little early, but, but once he gets going, it's programs like what you're discussing. It's these kinds of thought processes that, that, you know, I think a lot of times that the agency size that you just described gets left behind because of the agency size.
And I, and I love that you're picking it up. I love, I love the name of the program and I'm just super excited that you, that you're, you're sharing what you've learned, man.
So I appreciate you coming on the show. I highly encourage everyone listening, check it out.
What's going to be the URL for the website? You know what I've even, it's like a page off of my insurance agency right now, advisors, insurance agency.com. So you can look me up there.
You can link, you can look can look me up on LinkedIn Miles Merlin just search for Miles Merlin in South Carolina and you'll find me my phone number is everywhere you can get in touch with me awesome in Facebook Messenger all the above you can get yeah slide into Miles's DMs yeah last thing and then I've got a I've got a roll. The point of this is, fortunately, the insurance industry has done me very well financially.
I don't need another dollar from someone. I need, need no.
I don't need anything. The goal is to make this attainable, like to just help people.
I've got to pay for my time, but I'm not looking to put a boat

in the driveway. I'm not looking to make my living off of this.
This is where I see a need.

I want to make it so that it's accessible, I think is the word I'm looking for is accessible.

It's awesome.

But pay for people's time to be respectful. That's really what I'm looking to do.

Yeah. You're the man, brother.
I appreciate you. appreciate you all right my friend thank you for your time be good Take it! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Take it! Yeah! Take it! Yeah! Take it! Take it! Yeah! Take it! Yeah! Take it! Yeah! Take it! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! God, man! That's really hard! You go fuck yourself with your fat fucking ass.
Take it easy, baby. Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint bubbles?

Yes.

Yes. Thank you.
Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint bottles?

Yes. Do you want to have a few drinks and smoke a joint, fellas? Yeah.
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