Hey everyone! We’re just gonna jump right in from part one. So continuing on from last week, when it comes to managing an insurance agency, you need to have skills in data analysis to get a pulse on the well-being and health of your agency and your business. You can do this by running data analysis for sales commissions leads, tracking the activity of your employees, and analyzing all of the different aspects. Being able to analyze data and see what is working and what’s not working is essential to efficiency and making efficient and strategic decisions that will help your agency perform at its best.
It’s important to know your numbers, like being good at math and forecasting and knowing like okay this month I’m going to make an extra ten, twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars in commission. What should I do with that money? How can I hire someone? Will I be able to afford that marketing expense or buy that new thing in the office? Those are also things to constantly be thinking about. So knowing your numbers is one of the best pieces of advice I got early on.
As far as networking goes, you’ve got to be good at networking. Building relationships and strategic partnerships for the business is extremely essential to growing and scaling. How you scale goes into what I just talked about with knowing your numbers but also having the risk assessment to say okay now is a good time to go aggressive and double down and pour more money into the business. The economy might be coming down, should I be putting more money into marketing? Is this a time to expand or is this a time to contract? Personally I believe in expansion, I believe in going aggressive and keep pushing even through economic hardships, but that’s a different topic, so I won’t jump into that too much. Scaling your agency is huge! It’s not just opening an agency, making calls, closing a couple deals, and making commission, there’s back-end customer service renewals, marketing, accounting, hiring, and firing.
Firing an employee is probably my least favorite thing out of anything I do in running this business. Letting people go, to me, that sucks the most. I hate that feeling of knowing that I made a mistake and this person just isn’t a right fit for my agency. Then I have to go and sit them down and basically say you know we have to let you go. That’s one of the worst things to have to do.
When you read about all of these things, if you find excitement in all those different little things (and that’s not all of them, that’s just pieces of the stuff that are involved in running an insurance agency) if anything gives you like a twinge of like “okay I feel excited about those things!” Then maybe it’s a good idea to start your own insurance agency.
Another thing there is massive ups and downs. There are months that are amazing and then there’s months where you’re like what the hell is going on. We literally can’t even make a sale in the last two weeks. You just think to yourself “This business is going down.” There’s days where you feel like you’re on top of the world and there will be days where you feel like you’re a complete piece of crap, and you should not be in business at all. Being able to recognize like that’s just part of the business and if that doesn’t sound like you can emotionally handle those kinds of things then don’t do it. High stress levels are part of it too, like feeling the stress of working on a big deal that could make your year and then not getting it and the weeks that build up to getting that deal and going to the pitch and then losing it or winning it. There’s a lot of stress involved too such as the uncertainty of your income, like you don’t always know what you’re going to be making you really hope to be in a position where you can predict because you’re good enough what you’re gonna make but there’s uncertainty of income there’s several years of low income for yourself and reinvestment into the business so be prepared to make very little money if you know if actually even possibly losing money in the first couple years if you’re starting from scratch. There’s just a ton of work with extremely delayed gratification. You don’t really see the rewards of your hard work until possibly months or years later.