RHS 037- Matt Naimoli Dispels the Myths of Selling Your Agency

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.
My name is Ryan Hanley. I am your host, and today I have a tremendous conversation with Matt Namoli, one of the co-founders of GNN Insurance.
And Matt came on the show to talk about a bunch of things. It takes me a while to get there.
But most importantly, he wanted to talk about what it means to sell your agency and dispel some myths around what that looks like, what your life looks like on the other side of a sale, and how you can sell your agency in a way that allows you to still be connected and motivated and inspired by the work going on there beyond the purchase, beyond transitioning out of being the owner of that agency. And this is just deep stuff that I think is going to open your eyes to a whole new world of potential for what it means to be an insurance professional.
And I'm just incredibly honored that he would come on the show and share that. Before we get there, I want to talk about my friends at Tarmica real quick.
My Tarmica portal is dropping this week. I'm going to be talking about that.
So you're going to see me probably posting some pictures and I'm going to be running a ton of traffic into that thing and really beating it up. And I think Tarmica gives independent insurance agents the competitive advantage that they've always needed, but never been able to have.
It is a one of a kind, best in class technology. And I am honored to be part of it at such an early stage.
And I think it's something you should give a look to as well. Go to Tarmica.com.
That's T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com to check it out, get a demo. It's worth knowing about this tool, even if it's not the right time for you right now, but it's worth knowing about this tool.
It's worth getting a demo. Go to T-A-R-M-I-K-A.com today.
All right, let's get to Matt. So what's going on, man? You know, we're hustling, trying to do our best to keep the team, you know, pretty jazzed up and unified and just connected as much as possible virtually.
Business is good. I mean, we are definitely busy right now.
I think we'll probably see a little bit of a lag in a few weeks but um right now things are kind of moving along uh but i feel for a lot of people a lot of our clients are calling up just asking about bill plan deferment and uh you know if they can reduce coverage stuff like that so you know yeah on a professional front you know it's it's you're doing as best we we can. And obviously there's benefits for being in the insurance space, but no one's immune to it.
And I think we're all just a little bit on edge, just kind of waiting to see the impact it has on a lot of people. Yeah, I think there are direct financial implications.
There are obviously health implications, lifestyle implications for sure. Implications in how we relate to one another, our relationships.
I don't know if you've been to the store. I mean, I'm not mixing with people, but obviously you still got to go to the store and get stuff.
And when you do that, there is a level of paranoia is not completely the right word. Scrutiny, skepticism.
I don't know that any of those are the exact right word I'm looking for, but people look at you like, are you sick? You know what I mean? Like that's the look, you know what I mean? That's the look that you're getting from people. You're like nervous to sneeze.
Yeah. And I think I'm worried about that because in general, I don't know that our culture is at its friendliest moment in history.
Not that it's as unfriendliest for sure, but certainly people feel isolated and have a general cynicism I think a lot of people face every single day. And this is not helping with that in any regard.
And when we come out of this, I think it's only going to be worse because, um, you know, one of our, one of our mutual buddies, Grant Botma had a really good, I I'm sure he posted other places, but I saw it on Twitter, um, a little stream of tweets talking about how once we're kind of let out of our homes, which has to happen in some regard, or, you know, the country just isn't going to exist anymore from an economic standpoint, like, like when we start engaging with each other, like, we have to be cognizant of each other's fears and that kind of stuff. And I thought that was a really interesting thought, because we just, I don't know that we've ever dealt with anything like this before.
Yeah, man, you bring up a really good point. I guess I think maybe it's just the optimist in me, but I almost feel the opposite.
I feel like, well, we both live in the Northeast, right? So I think this summer's to me, I love living in the Northeast and New England, because I think the summers to me are so much sweeter because of the winter. And, uh, I feel like we're in the winter right now in this type of environment.
And I think people will come out and appreciate connection and community a lot more because they've been without it. So I'm hopeful.
I'm hopeful that people look at, look at, you know, interconnectedness and just community and companionship in another light. So I am, I would like to say I'm hopeful as well for that.
And I am normally a tremendous optimist, but my gut is telling me that that's not what's going to happen without real leadership and cultivation of those activities. And I think that speaking to the audience that we're talking to today, in particular insurance agents, I think that we're in a unique position to be those community leaders.
It's not a role that I think many of us would ask for, but I do think that the sustainable nature of our business removes one primary stress, at least to a relative level. We have less financial stress than most industries right um there's no massive insurance carrier or agency layoffs like there are you know people who work in restaurants or construction workers or some of these other industries that are just literally can't pay the bills and these people are out on the streets um i think that that that creates a responsibility for us to help nurture people back into the world.
Because I don't think people are just going to come out of their house and be like, oh, let's all get together and kumbaya. I think people are still going to be scared shitless when they come out of their house.
And I think they're going to do it because they're so sick of being stuck in their house that they're going to make that move. But I'm very worried about what the temperature of our communities are going to be.
Um, when people aren't working and they're nervous as hell. I hear you.
I hear you. Um, well, time will tell.
I think, uh, you're right though. I think local leadership will take on another form it'll take on an

importance that it hasn't in the past I think that's kind of what I heard from you is like local leadership is really important and it's you're never you know never have too small of a company too small of an organization too small of a community to be an effective leader and I I think sometimes when there's a vacuum, you know, people fill that.

And I think sometimes when there's a vacuum, you know, people fill that. And I've seen a lot of, you know, I think I really like a lot of the governors, the state governors who have really stepped up some of the mayors that have been really pretty positive, transparent, extremely candid, honest with the community.
I think people really like that. They're consistent with the messaging.
They don't sugarcoat anything. And they're being very straightforward with the population.
We're going through some tough times. It might get worse.
But if we stick together and we continue to move forward, we take care of one another and we stay separate.

For now, we'll be able to come together in the future. So, yeah, I know it's been somewhat inspiring to see local leadership step up.
I would agree. I would agree with that point.
I would agree with that wholeheartedly. You know, I can't speak for other governors, but our governor here in New York, Andrew Cuomo, who I have not been a tremendous fan of because in general, he trends towards socialist tendencies, which is probably the number one no-no in Ryan's political book.
But his handling of this crisis, I would say, has been as good as he could, all things considered.

And I think that's an exciting part of this is people are reengaging with their local governments. They're reengaging with some of these local leaders that often get overshadowed when everything is good.
So I, you know, I don't, I don't want to spend too much time on this particular topic. I think we've probably already spent too much, but I did think it was important here at the beginning of our conversation, just to address what's going on and share thoughts.
Cause it's, it's on, it's not one of those things that you can, I think you can just say, how we're not going to talk about that. Like, yeah, no, no, no, no.
Yeah. You can't ignore it.
Yeah. You can't ignore it.
I mean, we just, just with our teams, I mean, I mean, in our weekly meetings or our check-ins in the morning or our huddles or whatever, virtual huddles with our team, like, we're never going to just jump in and be like, okay, guys, we had 13 sales last week or 47, you know, service calls. Like, we're going to address the elephant.
How is everyone doing? How are we feeling? What struggles and challenges we're running into? You know, any fears, any uncertainties, concerns you guys want to address? Okay, cool. And then we can get into it.
But without doing that, it kind of like, I don't know, just lose the human touch. It feels like just kind of, yeah, not appropriate.
So I appreciate you bringing that up and chatting about a little bit. Yeah, cool.
So agents take a leadership role. You don't know how lucky you are.
If you, you probably do, but if you don't, we're all very lucky., take a leadership role. You don't know how lucky you are.
You probably do, but if you don't, we're all very lucky.

So take a leadership role.

I think that's our, maybe an unasked for responsibility,

but a responsibility that I do believe

we should take on if we can.

Obviously everyone's situation is different.

So dude, all right.

So let's get off the somber topics

and let's talk about some fun stuff.

It's funny because between you and I,

I think that's about probably as somber as I've been in three years and probably you have been five. And so you can find the two and people are, people are probably like, Whoa, yeah.
Yeah. This is what we signed up for when we, this is really inspiring me.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. We didn't know that's what we were going to get when we click play on the podcast but uh maybe that's where your your editing finesse comes in yeah no you know it's funny i um i uh i tend to just let things go the way they go out because yeah i don't know i i find that there tends to be there magic.
There's magic in things that I, and this is in general, this goes for all content, right? There tends to be magic moments that you will cut that others would capture. And I think that I always tend to edit less.
Yeah I love it. Because I never know you know it goes for videos that go out like I just I actually just today of recording this I put out this video I did last night it was snowing here in Albany right it was snowing like really bad.
So here it is the end of march we're stuck inside with coronavirus now we're getting gut punched with a six inches of heavy wet snow which you know you want to pretend is beautiful but really it just feels like you know it feels just there's nothing about it that i enjoy yeah and um but i'm walking the dog and i'm like and my wife wife always says jokingly, jokingly, you know, she's always like, Oh, bad things come in threes. So once we can weather that third thing, you know, we'll be fine.
We're good. You know what I mean? Like, you know, there's never going to be a fourth bad thing, right? It's only out of the way.
And so I did this video about how, um, about like cyber liability, cyber attacks, like don't let a cyber attack be the third bad thing was like the nature of the video and it's snowing and i got this hat on and i look like i'm like in alaska you know like it yeah you know it looks it looks crazy um and i did the video i just did it on a whim it was like a minute and 30 seconds and uh i got home and i watched it And I was like, was it, perfect like very far from perfect like very very far from yeah i mean i'm getting like snows in my face right right holding the cameras i'm walking the dog like this and i just said you know what like i think that i think maybe there's magic in here for somebody like maybe somebody watches this and buys a cyber liability policy either from me or from someone else and doesn't have some horrible dns attack be the third thing right like they can be yeah or or someone rips all their their eight their uh their data because they have some remote worker who doesn't know what they're doing and and and they get and they get, you know, this doesn't end their business. You know what I mean? You survive Corona, you survive the winter and then a cyber attack ends your business.
And, you know, so I just was like, I don't know. I don't think it's beautiful.
I don't even really think it's that good, but maybe there's some magic in there. So I'm just going to put it out.
Hey man, I think it's a, I think it's a great call. I think the more kind of rugged and real you can be, especially in those type of videos, the better because ultimately, people are going to trust you more if they feel like they're really not trying to be sold.
And if it's more rugged and real and unedited, they're just like this guy is walking his dog in the middle of a snowstorm. And he's filming in the middle of global pandemic like kudos to him and and i i'll listen to what he has to say and you know what this relates it it breaks down the barriers or any defense mechanisms when i watch a professionally done video that has a call to action i sometimes just avoid it i avoid it like a play because i'm like well this person's putting so much effort to get me to do that call to action.
I would rather it had just been like, you know, kind of a one take wonder and like appreciate the content. I'd probably be listening to it more.
So anyway. Yeah.
So what, uh, so outside of the craziness of the world that we're living in, it hasn't always been this way. It won't always be this way moving forward.
You know, what's, what's going on with you, man? I mean, you guys have had a really big last 12 months. You personally, you know, I know you're still very much involved in GNN, but I know you have other things going on and I'm just like, what's, what's blowing your skirt up right now? Like what's, what's got you excited? You know, like you obviously obviously have a have um new chapters that you're writing yeah uh and i'm just interested what that looks like yeah i feel like it's the first page of a new book in a lot of different in like a volume of harry potter books maybe a lot of them at the same time um and i think you know and you probably can relate this, but one of my biggest fears, actually probably my only real fear is never achieving or accomplishing what I can be, what I can become.
And that's for personal, professional, you know, as a companion, as a husband, as a father, as a professional, as a leader, as a mentor, et cetera. So for me, I feel, I feel fulfilled and excited and happiest when I've got a lot of different projects going on.
Now the challenge of that is you've got to see them all to the finish line and sometimes one or two can drop because you've got multiple things you're carrying. But I feel most alive when I've got a lot of different projects working both personal and professional.
So even though the last year was pretty tumultuous from a transitional period, I mean, I took 10 years and consolidated into one. You know, Sadie and I, you know, we got Belle, our dog, and she was a puppy in March of last year.
We moved in together. We got engaged.
We got pregnant. We had our first baby, Parker.
All while Zach and I launched BoboLon and traveled around the country to health agencies. We helped over 50 agencies implement the BoboLon system in person.
So we had probably 75 different flights last year. And in the behind the scenes, we were going through the process of determining if we ever wanted to sell our business.
And I put it that way because we didn't go into 2019 with any idea that we'd ever consider selling GNN and bringing on a partner and merging and kind of leveling up. We looked at it as we had plenty of advisors who said, you know, you guys should know what your worth is.
You should know what your value is. So you should go through the process and just figure out some market with yield.
And we really wanted to do that from an educational standpoint, understand a little bit more because we had never purchased an agency. So not to be too long-winded in it, but our process was really to try to – our goal was to try to figure out, like, what are we worth and what kind of deal structures are even out there? Because we really, we felt like such novices.
We felt like veterans in the insurance space, but novices when it came to M&A, whether we ever wanted to purchase or sell. And ultimately, you know, going through the process, and, you know, if you want to dive into it later, I'm happy to talk more about it because I learned so much from it that I think a lot of other agency owners could benefit from.
Whether they sell tomorrow or 70 years from now, they could benefit from it. But ultimately, at the end, we knocked down all the concerns and barriers that we had and realized that selling was not what we thought it was going to be.
And we realized that it was completely different than what our concerns and anticipation of what selling would look like. And so we decided that they were all positives, no negatives.
And we pulled the trigger in the final days of 2019. So it was a crazy year, a lot of transition, personally and professionally, and tons of fulfillment, tons of impact.
And we really enjoyed, you know, the mentorship and the guidance standpoint from Babylon, the challenging new process of M&A due diligence and figuring out, you know,

negotiating that and figuring that all out.

And then personally, just a ton of transitions are all really happy

and exciting for me after, you know, a couple of years of just, you know,

difficult times, you know.

So thanks for asking.

I know that wasn't really like a question,

but it was kind of just like an open-ended conversation, you know, open-ended dialogue. Well, yeah, no, that's, that's wonderful.
I mean, one, I'm, I'm very happy for all of your personal I'll call them successes. That's a tough word, tough way to think about it, but like, you know, navigating, finding a relationship that's fulfilling and makes you happy.
And, and you need that on the back end, having your first child, dog is like a child. I have my third child is sleeping upstairs on a couch right now.
She's been with us from before we had the two goons. And I think half the time, you know, my wife would trade her for me and the two goons just about any day.
So, you know. That's a cute goon.
Real cute goon. Yeah.
But no, I think you need that. You know, it's funny.
I had a birthday a few weeks ago. You know, you start to – you hit a certain point in your life that number is different for everybody and you start to like um this is so cliche but you start to really think about like what you start to think about the word legacy like what do you want your legacy to be especially when you have a child um you you you really start to think about that or at least I have.
And you mentioned like one of your biggest fears

or whatever is never achieving what you thought you could become. And I would say that that is a tension that I hold inside me almost every single day is this idea that I know, I know that I was blessed with certain gifts.
I'm relatively healthy. I was born in the United States.
I was born into a lower middle-class family, I guess, but, but, you know, I wasn't born into poverty. So I had opportunity to rise up.
I went to a decent enough public school. Um, and I see myself all the time.
Like if don't achieve something, and I'm not always positive what that something is, I think that's, that's a struggle. I'm interested in your take on how you figure out what that something is.
But if I don't achieve something, then I've wasted a lot. Like, there's a lot of people that do not have the gifts that I've been given that I'm aware of.
And I mean that in a, not in like a, like, look at me, how great I'm like, I understand that there's been certain things that I've been given. And if I don't execute and provide the world or my community or just my family with something in return for being given them, then what an asshole I am.
And I think the thing that I've struggled with for a long time, and this is where I'm really interested in your take is, how do you figure out what that something is? And I'm not asking for advice from me, I'm interested in your take, like, how do you figure out what that something is that you that you become? Well, it's a great question. I've been challenged with with this for many years but I think what I've narrowed it down to is there is no there is no end there's no goal there's no finish line and part of me is frustrated that that's the realization I've come to but part of me is also empowered and kind of relieved and I guess guess what I mean by that is, I think, because you and I are similar in this sense, where we are always sort of reaching to create more challenges for ourselves so that we can overcome a set of challenges to feel successful and impactful in this world, to create a better legacy, to create more impact and influence.
It's like, it kind of goes to the root of like, why are we here and the purpose that we have on this planet. But because we're like that, we're never going to feel completely fulfilled by an accomplishment or a goal that we achieve.
But if we can live with that and say, you know what, we're going to continue to do so anyways. We're going to continue to challenge ourselves every single year, every month,

every week, every day, different frequencies, different levels, magnitudes.

Ultimately, that's a life worth living because we know we're going to create

a lot of impact possibly.

For me, long-term, meaning like 10, 20 years,

I want to help as many freaking people as possible achieve their goals.

Thank you. For me, long term, meaning like 10, 20 years, I want to help as many freaking people as possible achieve their goals.
I think that's where I've transitioned from in the last 12 years. I think early on, it was very self-centered.
I was very much, it was kind of rooted in a little bit of fear because I was coming out of college, like I had a sales job and no experience, no money. I just needed to prove myself and like create enough money to cover my expenses and then some.
So it's very like self-centered in that sense. But, you know, as we've gone on and created company and growth, grow the company and then just kind of, you know, coached a ton and been coached a ton and read a ton realizing that for me, at this stage, if I can help a lot of people achieve their goals through mentorship, through coaching, through support, through being a founding board, just through inspiration and motivation, and they win, I feel best.
I feel best about that. And I think it goes back to just knowing that it's a leveraged level of impact, leveraged impact that really matters.
So a long-winded way of answering that question, but for me it's much more about continuing to try to impact as many people as positively as possible. And I think that as I continue to create more resources and freedom for myself, I'll be able to even do that more and more, if that makes sense.
No, it does. And I think that you've gone about it the right way.
You know, in many regards, I am envious of the way that you guys took control of your lives. And I know that you had many struggles and it wasn't an easy path.
That's not what I'm trying to say. But you took control of your lives early on so that you could focus on helping people in this next iteration of your life.
I find by far the most joy fulfillment in my life, helping other people, not helping myself. I do.
Um, the speaking, I don't love consulting because people just don't do the shit you tell them to do. And it drives me nuts, but I definitely like helping.
I love, I love, uh, inspiring people, connecting people. I love being a connector.
Right. So I, so we share that source of fulfillment.
Um, and it is definitely outside of probably my family and their health and happiness, my number one source of fulfillment. Um, but what I would say, and this is where I think you guys have gotten it right, you've gotten it right.
I don't mean to keep saying you guys, I think you've got it right, is that you've put yourself in a position where you can be of service to them now. If you haven't taken care of your home front, then you can't be of service.
And that was really what I found in my career. And one of the reasons why I started Rogue was that I needed to have, you need to have a solid foundation in order to be able to help others.
If you're trying to help others with a wobbly foundation, it just doesn't work. You can't create real impact.
And that is, I think that's a really important thing. I think, especially as people are in transition and flux, insurance is going to become much harder to sell.
I've been trying to sell for a month now. I can't get anyone to answer the phone.
I can't get people, people aren't interested, traffic's way down. I mean, I'm efforting 10 hours a day plus on Rogue, and I'm just got a trickle of business coming in.
It's difficult. And I know a lot of people are facing that, even established, even established agencies.
And I guess my point in this little diatribe is to say, stay true to the mission that you're on today. Because if that foundation isn't solid,

like don't go looking for other places.

Like if you're not getting Facebook likes on your local business posts,

but you're getting them from agents,

don't go rushing towards being that consulting person,

that thought leader person.

That's not a path you wanna go on until you're ready.

Yeah, I think that's really good advice, Ryan. I think it's really good advice.
I think, you know, one of the things that I didn't really take into account when we were in transaction of a business was, you know, obviously, you know, there's a part of you that said, you know, I can finally take some chips off the table from building a company for 10 years. And really the fruits of your labor are finally, you know, are finally met.
And that provides some security for the family, for your future family, your generations, et cetera. But for me, what I really like day one after that, you know, after we transacted, what I was really excited about is I finally had resources to help other, you know, budding entrepreneurs achieve their vision.
And I never really saw, I didn't think that that would come. I didn't know that that would be such an exciting component of the next phase.
And I'm not saying I'm going to invest in every possible thing out there, but just the ability to have some resources to invest in really exciting entrepreneurs and what their visions are is a byproduct of the sale that I didn't really seek out, but came to me afterwards. So when you're looking at a business, so when you're looking at a, at a investment opportunity, you're looking, you're, you see a startup, someone comes to you, they, to you they they like what are you looking for like what are some of the things that get you excited is it the product is it the person you know i've we've all read these articles on entrepreneur.com or whatever but like what yeah for you personally what what what gets you going yeah i there's really three filters um i've spoke to probably, I don't know, seven to ten different startups, entrepreneurs, startups meaning just starting or within the first year or two, looked at pitch decks, all different types of companies, different industries.
What really my three filters have been is one, I've got to understand it. Like at this stage, maybe in 10 years from now, if I'm investing a lot more and I have more experience, I can be investing in other industries.
But for me, I have to kind of understand the world that they're in for me to feel comfortable. Because the financials can look great.
The modeling can look great. Forecasting can look great.
But if I don't really understand it, I don't think it should be something I'm investing in. So I've turned down anything that's been outside the industry.
Two, the leader. Is the leader someone who I walk away from a conversation jazzed up and inspired about? And, and, not or, but and, do they have a work ethic that can rival mine or better? And if I can answer yes to both of those things, that passes the second filter test.
The third is, is the company truly removing pain that is existing currently? Because there's a lot of companies that are doing things that are opportunistic where their product or service is, oh, wow, that's cool. I like that.
I can see how that can create value. But I really think the companies that I'm most interested in are those that are saying there's already existing pain right now, and our solution removes that pain immediately.
I think those are the companies that are going to see traction much faster and weather any type of storms like we're in right now you know what starting rogue has has been uh um a game changer from my perspective in many ways right i i um you know what i've i probably would have my perspective let me let me position it this way. My perspective on the organizations, the tools, the ideas that actually add value to the flow, particularly of an independent insurance agent, but I think of the customer journey as well, the customer experience has, I'll say it's a dramatic course correction.
I won't say it's like 180 degrees, but you know, I look at how agencies operate and I'm looking at building rogue and I'm saying to myself, there are cool pieces of technology that I wrote down on a piece of paper that said, geez, this seems like something I'm going to need that. Once I got to this point, I'm like, man, you know, it's cool.
Don't get me wrong. It's flashy.
It's shiny. I like it.
I like, I like what I'm reading on the homepage. I like the guy running the company or I like the, who's running the company.
Right. But I just don't, it just doesn't add enough into my flow that it makes it worth the deal.
And I think, you know, for, for everyone listening, you know, this is where we get nickel and dimed on the 50 and 50 to $200 a month tool. And, uh, and, and, you know, we just have to be careful about that kind of stuff.
Cause there are, I think game changing technologies. I think there are companies that are really working in the best industry or best interest, particularly of independent agents.
But I don't know that, there's people doing really cool things that just aren't that valuable to the everyday flow of an agency. And I think it's very easy to get cited.
Yeah, I think I wrote about this two weeks ago, but just in general, it's like if the technology that you are adopting reduces or removes something you're already doing, it could be really helpful. If it's adding something that you weren't doing before, it's not essential.
And, yes, if you're a tenured, experienced agency or company that want to level up and you see opportunity in that, great. But most people aren't in that position.
Most people are still in a position of like running into a ton of challenges and roadblocks and needing to kind of like overcome them and adopting things to get you more reviews, for example, or, you know, sends out, you know, something to your clients that are like kind of a cool thing and like, but doesn't it give you the feedback and data that really need and it's not something you were doing beforehand kind of like just adding more chaos and commotion and another variable that's going to create you know potential anxiety or bandwidth reduction when when you really should be focused on just removing stuff that you're already doing uh but yeah anyway so is are you at liberty to talk about any of the companies that you've invested in or maybe just talk about some of the ideas that have you excited for insurance agents if you're not able to talk about any particular companies? Yeah, I think in general, I'm just really – I want to stay away from just kind of naming specific companies because I don't want to feel like I'm leading. I wouldn't be doing my job as an interviewer if I didn't ask.
No, I love you, man. I love you.
I think in general companies that are, that have established, again, going back to what I said, they figured out, hey, this is something that agencies, principals or salespeople or service reps or processors are doing right now that really it shouldn't be doing. And we can, we can remove that from them.
I think those are the companies are going to win big time because there's going to be, there's low barriers to entry. It's really easy to present your value to the buyer and the returns quite, it's a lot easier to justify.
You can look at it and say, you know, this is going to easily save me quantifiably like 20 hours a week, 10 hours a week, 50 hours a week. And then you can relate that to the payroll associated with that time and say, wow, this is like a 10X return or a 20X return.
Why would I not do this tomorrow? Yeah. In general, those are the companies I think are going to win in our space.
And there's a lot that out there, and there's going to be more and more, hopefully. So let me ask you a couple questions that I've always had about – I want to ask you a particular question about GNN.
Why did you guys consider, and why or why not, ever make like a major move into commercial? Yeah, I mean, we definitely did consider it a number of times.

It was hard to turn down. Like, we had $100,000, $200,000 account.
It's hard early on, and we tried to go after those, and we closed a few, but, you know, it wasn't in our wheelhouse. We didn't have a ton of experience, but it was hard to kind of not want to run after that.
A lot of guidance and coaches and consultants that we had hired early on advised to stay in our lane, saying that, you know, the more and more you kind of scatter and go elsewhere, the less of an expert you're going to be in one thing. And in a time when you have to compete with billions of dollars

of advertising, you need to be an expert at one thing. And so, you know, we always kind of stay within our lane.
And, you know, I think we would have been successful in commercial. But, you know, the last four or five years, we've insured between five and 7% of all homes purchased in Massachusetts.
and we would have never gotten there if we had kind of gone lateral.

We just went vertical for 10 years. And that's a huge market share of people who are just ideal clients.
Granted, we have to sell a hundred policies in a week to cover what some people do in one sale. But if you can kind of do that every single week, it really does.
It's a nice hedge against disruption. It's a nice hedge against major changes like we're having right now.
But you're also known as the expert. You're also known as the one that everyone should go to because your entire business is built around what they need and not just an agency that can service XYZ.
That answers your question no it does it definitely does i mean i think you know i think a lot of people probably see what you guys have built and they ask themselves geez if they can create such an amazing system for for home in particular and then cross selling it to some of the other lines personal why not small commercial or i you know or life or whatever like just i think i it's a great answer. I think it's the right answer.
I'm just interested in some of the decision-making process, you know? Yeah. When we talked about it, I think ultimately we came to the point where we said, well, if we're going to ever do this, it has to be a separate company.
Yeah. You know, because then that company, we could brand around that.
We could build process and teams and systems and experience around that. But you know, you know, if you have 20, 30 people and they're all experts at one thing, and then you're bringing in a different type of risk, different type of sales process, different type of service and renewal and midterm process, it's pretty disruptive for the team.
Yeah. More so than it would be for us or more so than it would be for the, for the frontline salesperson.
Yeah. no, that's, I think that's a great way to think about it.
I think that, um, a concept that has really helped me and it actually, um, it actually plays, it played a fairly large role in how I've set up Rogue is, um, oh shit, now I'm going to forget it. It was in James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, about the loss of cognitive ability that

you have when you switch topics in your brain. So if you're thinking about home insurance related

topics all day, you can go from account to account to account to account to account and you keep

your cognitive functionality at a top level. But if you're thinking home insurance, and now all of a sudden you're thinking life insurance, as much as it, they both have insurance in the name, we're talking two totally different products.
Now that person has to stop what they're thinking about, you know, essentially, you know, pivot the focus of their brain, and now try to pull up all the knowledge that they have around a completely separate topic, different questions, different indicators, you know, and there's a hangover in that switch. When your brain switches topics of focus, there's a hangover.
And I think that the generalist agency customer service representative deals with that all day long and it drastically reduces their overall output it's it's one of the reasons why service center why my business is a hundred percent service center um because i can just send people to the expert all day long at the carrier um yep but i think that's something that a lot of a lot of agency agency owners miss is that, you know, it's just, just because Sally falls in the A's doesn't mean that she should be taking, you know, every single business and, and personal lines and life insurance account and health insurance account that comes in that starts with that. Like it just doesn't, it shouldn't work that way.
It's, it's, it's why we've, you know, we've really made a huge effort to push all new business and enroll a lot of business to service centers. But it's also why we've tried to pare down some of our carriers.
I think the first five years, we thought it was a huge advantage to have 20 companies and to quote 20 companies. It was one of our pitches like, hey, we can quote and sell 20 different companies.
And we thought that that was a huge value proposition. They made for one or two people there, but most people don't care about that.
They just said, can you get me a great solution that helps serve my needs? Okay, awesome. Can you make it really easy and quick? Okay, cool.
Can you be pretty friendly about it and educate me? All right, awesome. That's enough.
So for us, you know, we had the privilege and honor to really coach a ton of different agencies and actually a lot of nationwide agencies,

probably a dozen nationwide agencies in the last year as they're

approaching this transition going independent.

And one of our big asks of them is like,

be cautious with the number of carriers you bring on right away.

Like you're going to go independent from running one company for 20,

30 years.

You're going to go independent.

Now you're going to access to a ton.

Try to just bring on two or three, like just get really good at two or three to fill different niches or different segments. Know that you can close most of the business with those two or three.
And long-term, you're going to thank yourself so much for not bringing on eight or nine at the same time. Because the team needs to know eight or nine different quotes, eight or nine different endorsements, eight or nine different billing requirements, eight or nine different underwriting guides, you know, just on and on and on.
Eight or nine different underwriters

to build relationships with, you know.

So it's eight or nine different usernames

and passwords to log in.

It compounds in ads and ads and ads and ads

and people don't recognize how much time

and effort and payroll goes into those hours

spent on diverging.

Yeah.

And just for everyone listening, I'm going to give

a shout out to my peeps at Indium, which is a market access company that I use here at rogue this is an unpaid shout out I just think that these guys are the best and if you're looking for market access and you don't want to have to worry about taking on direct appointments give my peeps at indium a shout again that's a I'm not getting paid for that I just like them think they have a, an agent friendly contract, which is what I think all of our vendor partners in every regard should be considering moving forward. Not, not some of these.
Is now the time for me to say that I'm getting paid by them for you saying that? If you are, I'm going to, I got to give Chad a call because up man wouldn't that be great though we like we just do podcasts every week where we interview each other and the other person throws shout out and say yeah unpaid unpaid actually we shouldn't have said that live that is a great strategy that's a great idea i know so um all right man been, we've been a bunch of different places. I, you know, I'm super interested in, I've always been interested in, in the way that you think about business in general, because you are very introspective.
You take time. You're, it doesn't ever seem, although maybe to you, it does.
It doesn't ever seem from the outside, like you're just shooting from the hip. It seems like you think about things quite a bit, which is wonderful.
So, so, so give me a little like prognostication. So here you are, you're, you're angel investor, entrepreneur extraordinaire, like, you know, sitting on top of the mountain.
Like, what do you, what do you see coming down the pipe? Do you see market consolidation? Do you see rate increases? Do you see new product lines, new technology? There's no right or wrong answer here. I'm just interested.
You have a little bit of time. You've gone through some experiences that others have not, especially at a relatively young age.
I mean, most people don't sell until they're way older. So looking at this next episode of your, of your life and of your career, like, what do you see coming? Like, you know, whether it happens or not, like, what are you, what, what kind of trends are you seeing? Yeah.
Well, Hey, one thing you mentioned and remind me to come back to this afterwards, because I probably had a dozen or so agencies reach out and ask like, hey, like, why did you sell? Like what, you know, tell me a little bit more about that. It doesn't seem like you would ever want to do that at your stage.
I think answering that question, so many people have asked that. I'll come on to come back to that and talk about that because I don't want there to be a misconception, but I also think that there's an educational moment there for people.
But to answer your question, I think that there's going to be, and this has been something that people have been talking about for a long time, but I think even though I think there's been 4,000 M&A transactions in the last X number of years, I want to say five, 10 years or something, there's been a ton of transactions and recently a lot of large transactions. I think that that's going to continue because for a variety of reasons.
I think one, technology improvements is going to really help the agencies that are able to adopt that technology. Someone like yourself, you're going to benefit from that for sure.
And there's a lot of people that are going to benefit from that. There's a lot of people that will never even hear about it,

know how to implement it, and certainly not adopt it.

And I think those companies are going to feel like they're falling behind quickly.

And the best way to get out of that is to sell.

But more from a retirement standpoint,

I think there's a lot of people that are entering in their age of retirement

in the next three years.

So you're going to have a lot more people saying, like,

I don't have a succession plan.

I don't have kids that want to take this over, nor do I want to really give it.

It's not a legacy business for me.

So you're going to have a lot more people saying like, I don't have a succession plan. I don't have kids that want to take this over, nor do I want to really give it.
It's not a legacy business for me. So you're going to see a lot of those people sell.
And I do think that the landscape we live in right now is going to cause people to second, or it's a question thing. So some people might say, I'm so glad I'm in this business because I feel, you know, like somewhat recession proof and they might not want to exit.
But then there's going to be some, I think, who look at it and say, you know, I really do think I need to take chips off the table at this stage of my life and look into it, be more educated about what it could look like, and then potentially move forward. So I think that on one end, I think there's going to be a lot more M&A.
I don't think that's going to slow down. I do think multiples in the next five years are going to shift.
They have to. They have to come down slightly in the next five years.
On the technology side, I do want to come back to what we talked about earlier and just say that companies that are going to help agencies like yours get better and quicker and faster will win. So there's going to be a lot more of those companies that kind of succeed in the short term.

But I don't know if there's going to be

as much private equity on the sidelines

available to invest in a ton of different companies.

I don't think, I think the last 10 years

has been so easy to start a company and get funding.

I think that's going to be more and more challenging.

It's going to be interesting

who the actual entrants are in the space if they've had prior success versus just some random person trying to get in. Market consolidation, I don't think in five years there will be any direct writers in the sense of like the age-old direct writer.
You look at any of them, they're all making moves. You know, I think Nationwide's move is the clearest and obvious.
They a traditional long-term, you know, captive market, they're going completely independent. Liberty Mutual and all their sales agents are now able to sell multiple lines, multiple products, multiple carriers, albeit, you know, short, a smaller commission.
They're able to just access a lot of different markets. So I think that the direct carriers are realizing that either their future is

limited if they don't expand and offer through a different channel. And B, it might just not be – it might be opportunistic as well, saying like, wow, like all this has happened, and yet there's still a lot of market share in the independent channel.
We need to go ahead and capture that. We need to go ahead and grab that.
So I do think there's going to be a shift even more so.

And I don't know if, you know, Allstate obviously has taken that span

for the last five to ten years.

And I don't know if someone like State Farm Geico would ever do that.

But I wouldn't be surprised about anything now moving forward.

Yeah.

What I think is interesting is the carriers starting their own insurance agencies. Like you look at Progressive, they have their own commercial insurance agency.
Geico's sending out emails to agents about starting local Geico offices. And, you know, I do think, I do think what has been incredible and, you know, this was a drum that I was banging back in the very early agency nation days was like, you just can't beat a human.
You can't beat the human. You know, you can, there are different iterations of having a human involved that I think are more advantageous than others.
but having a human involved is the only way to date to keep your retention at a level that you

can consistently be profitable and um and i think that finding ways to keep your retention at a level that you can consistently be profitable. And I think that finding ways to optimize your agencies is a necessity.
If this pandemic does not teach you anything about working inside of and with systems that allow you flexibility and allow you to adaptability, then it almost is if you deserve to experience the pain that you're feeling. You know what I mean? Like if you allow this to happen again, like this has to be the warning bell that, that siloed systems, rack servers and offices, that these types of tools are no longer, like they're no longer viable.
Like, you know, the fact that people are down to 20% productivity working from home, to me, I feel bad that they're going through that. However, there is this dark part of me that says, we've been telling you for years that you have to be able to do this.
And you just laughed you didn't need to so like I feel bad like obviously you don't want a pandemic or something awful like this to cause people to feel this amount of pain I'm talking specifically about agents having to work from home and outside their systems but at the same time this is not the first time I mean we've been talking about I mean Rick Morgan was talking about this back in the eighties in his mailed newsletter that he used to have. Like this isn't, you know, in Steve Anderson, like this isn't a new message.
So I, but my hope is we finally learn and move forward. Otherwise, you know, you're going to get mowed down.
Yeah, no, I think in general, people want to be, to work people. I think, you know, there's going to be a subset of the population who just say, you know, what certain types of products and services, I just want to purchase and service to, you know, without anyone, any human.
But most people want that connection, because there's a level of accountability. And especially with something like insurance, they kind of want that accountability.
There's another human that's accountable for what I need and what I'm looking for. Where I do think, sorry, I know a phone call just came in.
Where I do think technology needs to be adopted by people but does not replace people is on the lead gen side. I do think that, you know, and this is coming from someone who built a referral-based business for 10 years.
You know, like I, I fully believe in referrals and we just, on our, on our podcast recently, we interviewed the number one loan officer in the country, Sean Benozian, who is going to do over a billion, did 980 million in funding last year. He's going to do over a billion this year, over 2000 loans.
And most of it's purchased and all of it is referral. All of his referral.
He's not a digital master. So although there's still tons of room to succeed and that's just straight person to personal relationship world, I do think that technology has made it an option to grow through leads and acquisition of clients in the front end.
Even though it might be a little more costly, it has opened up that opportunity. And then in the client experience journey, it is making it easier to connect with people on a more consistent basis, compared to what it used to be.
But if it comes off as a technology connection, people get turned off. So it needs to be really something that, you know, makes people feel more like they're connecting with people.
So, all right, man. So you, you, you roll into 2019 and, you know, we talked a little bit beforehand.
There's no way that you're going to sell, right? There's no way you're going to sell rolling in 2019. And then you, you hit 2019 and everything changes.
Talk, talk, talk me through that process. I think it's probably the number one question going through people's mind especially agencies who operate in a similar ecosystem they're looking at you guys going what the hell changed and I think you know walk me through that process yeah I mean I've had so many conversations in the last few months about that because I think some people are kind of like well is this something that I should consider other people are saying I can't believe you did this I just want to talk to you about it like why would you do this but they might look at it the same way we did going into 2019 there was a 0% chance we were gonna sell there was a 0% chance main reason was Zach and I both felt that selling our business would literally be stopping, would be retiring, would be hanging up the boots and just being a cog in a wheel and retiring.
We thought, I always looked at the image of like throwing a bag of money, a duffel bag of money over my shoulder and walking off into the sunset on a

horse or something. That's really the picture I had of when I sell my business.
But as I said before, we were advised over and over again, if you guys don't know your worth, you're not worth anything. You've got to know what the market would pay for you to have a real business because you guys have invested 10 years in this and you know it's valuable.
You know it's unique. You know people would really want to have you as part of them, but you don't know what your value is.
So all you've done is just delay gratification to a point where you don't know what that gratification can look like. You don't know what chips actually would look like to take off the table.
So it's okay, go through the process of just the due diligence, which I explained earlier. We talked to a lot of different entities.
We hired investment bankers to help us kind of navigate because we quickly realized that we were way, it was way over our head. I mean, you know, the M&A world is complicated and every single potential buyer and acquirer wants you for different reasons, are looking for different things and will pay different multiples, but also they'll set up the deal structure completely different.
And so we went into it just saying, this is going to be an awesome education. Neither one of us felt pressured at all, but we both said at the end of this, we're going to know what we're worth.
And maybe in five or 10 years, we'll act on it. So we go through the process.
We met with 13 or 14 different, every one of them you'd wrote, you'd know the name, but 13 or 14 different buyers. And we sat down, and we had really five major concerns.
And all those, even if we agreed that even if we still had one of those five concerns at the end of this due diligence process, we would not sell. Don't care what the value would be.
If one of those concerns were not removed, if all of those concerns were removed we would not move forward then the first one was culture people process like we're not the best in the world but we have invested so much in our culture our people and our process and we know that it's damn good and if you're going to acquire GNN and you're going to ask us to change any of that you're going to remove people or change people you're going to change salaries you're going to change our process you're going to acquire GNN and you're going to ask us to change any of that, you're going to remove people or change people. You're going to change salaries.
You're going to change our process. You're going to come in and change our brand and our culture, et cetera.
We're not interested. And immediately those 13 to 14 became seven or eight.
Those 13 or 14 buyers became seven or eight, but seven or eight, we realized, okay, these companies don't want to touch us. They want to say, do what you do.
You're independent. You're, you're exciting.
What you're doing is great. We don't want to stop or get in the way.
Okay, cool. The second piece, the second concern was we didn't want to be, uh, just be employees.
Not that there's anything wrong with it, but we are both entrepreneurs at heart. We want to feel aligned long-term with the business that we're involved in.
And so any of the buyers who were offering all cash offers, although it was exciting, was not interesting because I wasn't looking to exit. I was looking to level up and grow GMN bigger and make it stronger and make it more exciting to be part of.
And so the companies that would just offer all stock and all cash was less exciting for me because there was almost like a misalignment of sorts where long term, I wasn't as interested in their growth and success as I would be if there was stock. So for me, a big piece of it needed to be in stock of the company that was acquiring us.
So that seven or eight companies then became four or five. The next piece and a major concern I think a lot of people in our tenure, like my tenure, I had 10 years in the business, a growth trajectory that's much faster than most, call it anywhere between, I don't know, 8% growth year over year to 40% growth year over year.
That's going to exceed a lot of the standard agencies out there, right? A big concern I had and one that I was having a hard time coming over with, was why wouldn't we just hold out for three more years? Like, why wouldn't we just hold out for three more years? We did the forecasting and projections, and we realized that in three or four years, we're going to probably be double in size. So even if multiples came down from all-time highs in three or four years, slightly, we're still going to be much bigger.
So why don't we just wait? And when we realize that all these, most of the acquirers have a structure in their deal that allows for an earn out period that essentially allows you to sell your business twice, one upfront and an agreed upon EBITDA multiple and one in three or four or two or five years and agreed upon multiple, it removed that fear completely because you lock down all-time highs up front and you can lock down an all-time high in three or four years that allows you to realize the growth of your agency down the road. So they set a benchmark and they say, we expect you to achieve 4% EBITDA growth year over year.
In three years, you should be here. Every single dollar above that number, we're going to multiply by a big ass number and you can get paid again.
That removed that fear immediately because I was like, okay, not only we get to benefit up front, we get to benefit down the road for realized growth. Now, the fifth concern was getting the true value up front.
And I think a lot of people would feel this way because for us, we're growing fast. We're organic.
We're, you know, investing in marketing and branding and referral partners and our people. We have to have a ton of people because we're a personal lines agency and we're a lot of labor associated with new business, especially in personal lines and onboarding and servicing, et cetera.
And we're transitioning a lot of books to service centers. So we have a lot of internal costs associated with that.
So our value would never be captured up front. We're never going to get a buyer to say, yes, your EBITDA might be a million dollars, but we're going to pay you a multiple off of $2 million, for example.
I'm not going to give out real numbers, but you know, 1 million, we're going to pay you off of 2 million because that's what you're truly worth. It's hard to imagine that they would achieve that.
They'd be able to agree to that. But two or three of the buyers came to the table and said, we're going to account for that.
We recognize you're unique and you're growing fast and you need to staff and hire to account for that growth. So we are going to back out six, seven, eight of your people that are really in place to grow more down the road and build that into your EBITDA.
We are going to allow you to take a lot less income. And what that allowed us to do, I always looked at it as if we wanted to sell, we needed to prepare for two or three years to make us as profitable as possible.
I thought that that's what we needed to do. In reality, you need to agree of what your budget and what your framework is going to look like moving forward for the close.
And as long as you agree for the close, that EBITDA is magnified. It jumps up and skyrockets because you're agreeing at the close moving forward, we are going to be doing X, Y, and Z.
Zach and I take a lot less income. They accounted for a lot of backing out expenses for our team and our marketing, et cetera.
And so it just jacked up what our profitability was, even though on paper, we weren't that profitable. So long-winded kind of monologue right there, but those were our five major concerns.
And every single time one of those concerns were removed because one of the partners across the table were saying, no, don't worry about that. Here's our solution.
We got a little bit more comfortable with the concept. And by the end, it comes November of last year when we transacted, we realized that we were going to be part of someone who was 230 million, the HILB group was 230 million in revenue.
They want to be 2 billion and they need our help. We want to be part of that.
We didn't want to be part of a $2 billion company who already achieved and appreciated their stock and kind of gotten to where they wanted to be. We wanted to be part of a company that needed us to kind of fulfill that long-term vision of 10X growth.
And we knew we could help them so much because of what we have done internally with GNN and how we can expand that across the, across the nation. And we found that they removed all of our, all of our fears and concerns.
That's awesome, man. I mean, that, that really is a pretty tremendous story.
I think that, I think that, you know, I think, I think there are very few people who take the time and energy to work through the process, the way that you did. And what I, what I hope the takeaway is, is, isn't, uh, is, is obviously some of the lessons, but I think there's two major takeaways.
One, you have to, like all things, like my little rant about not preparing for something like working remotely, I think you need to prepare for selling, just like you did. I mean, that to me is an enormous lesson that you need to be thinking two, three, four, five years out.
And then once you do, you can't just go into it or it is less advantageous to go into it thinking to yourself, I just want to get the biggest number and more thinking about what are the things that are going to make me happy moving forward after this transaction. And I think that people miss that second part because they don't prepare in the first part.
And the preparation allows you

to move into the next stage in a way that you have some control over. And man, I think what

you guys are doing, what you did, the way you're talking about it, the work you continue to do with

Babylon is some of the most admirable and important work in our industry. And man, I'm just so glad

that we got to share some of it with the audience today. Well, thanks for letting me share,

very much. and important work in our industry.
And man, I'm just so glad that we got to share some of it with the audience today. Well, thanks for letting me share, man.
I really appreciate it. I'm only going to share things I'm passionate about and believe in and also have permission to be wrong down the road.
But I'm really excited for kind of where the moves we're making and the impact we're having. And I'm hopeful that other people will reach out and ask more questions,

frankly, because I think that that's helped me a lot, asking questions,

asking for help.

And I think that's one of the things that we all should do a little bit more of. So, yeah, if anyone has any, I mean, you know, this,

if anyone has any questions about, you know, more of that,

you know, diving in deeper and asking questions and sort of, Hey, my situation's X. And I wonder, I was wondering about why I'm very available.
Anyone wants to reach out anytime and talk about it. You know, I'm happy to.
Great. Well, thanks so much, man.
Everyone listening at home. Thank you for listening to the show today, spending time with Matt and I, and I wish you guys nothing but the best.
Be safe, be healthy, treat each other with kindness. These are difficult times, but we get through them together.

So thanks, brother.

I appreciate you.

Nothing but the best to you and your family.

Right back after, homie. Thank you.
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