Previewing The Protege

What did you feel like insurance agents need to do in terms of branding themselves, their agencies, the carriers they represent? When you are marketing something you're not in control of, you're not in control. I mean there's so many technology tools out there now to help agents feel like a global shop even when they're not. We're talking to an agency the other day that reduced their top time on the phone by 70% using Gail. The very last thing I do, I get agreement from them and then I end the call with making damn sure whatever I say I'm going to do gets done. The reason that I love a sin is they are the only vendor focused on helping agents automate all of their manual finances in accounting practices which is really the boring stuff but that's really where the rubber meets the road in terms of profitability to your agency. Sadly, specializing in landlord insurance across long and short term rental properties in most U.S. states, you know I think the reason we started riding pretty good bit of business for you guys. You know, we're going to ride business with carriers that make it easy for us to ride business work. If the conditions have to be right for you to succeed, your success is conditional. It's not real success. Play like champions, man. Insurance agents from around the world welcome to the insurance guys podcast. My name is Scott Howard and fearless host and leader insurance agent insurance specialist for our protect insurance and financial services based out of Huntsville, Alabama. And before we get started in today's episode, please help me welcome. He has a six foot three sophomore from Mobile, Alabama parade first team all American rivals five star recruit. He is a fantastic insurance agent and a great American ladies and gentlemen. Please put your hands together and welcome the incomparable. Mr Bradley flyers. How are you Bradley? I'm great. What about you? Well, got a little problem. Looks as though I'm a man mobile for a few more days. I don't think that's your problem. I think that's my problem. So let down here in my vehicle, it was misfiring and sputtering and but you know, the show must go on. So I just kept driving and check engine light on. I get down here. I reckon you're parking lot because the girl was making the decals to go on the guys auto detail service truck out there. I hit the concrete barrier that's on one of the light poles. That's a whole different. And so just so happens for those of you that haven't listened to the podcast in a few weeks because this is an ongoing saga, Scott finds and Bradley's parking lot, a mobile automotive service guy just so happens to be here and ever seen him before. Bradley has no idea who he is. His name's Geo Geo takes my American Express card yesterday and he goes and buys three spark plugs and an alternator alternators $568 spark plugs are, I don't know, 20 bucks piece. He also quits his job. Oh, within 20 minutes, Scott giving him his American Express card. This guy quits his day job. He calls on the good side of dealership and mobile and quits his mechanics job. I don't even know. I don't even know there was an audit dealership here. So Bradley and I a few minutes ago come back from lunch, the hoods up on my vehicle. Geo and his girlfriend, who was the one painting in the parking lot yesterday that calls me to wreck. She has got her head down in the hood of my car. I walk over there, apparently my alternator is under an end between under the engine. He is out there right now, ladies and gentlemen, pulling the motor out of my vehicle. The entire engine engine coming out, got to get to the alternator. We really hope that the wheels off my car for some reason. He's up on blocks. I hope this isn't the first time he's ever done this. If you need somewhere to work this week, I've got an extra office. Good thing. I brought a laptop, folks. I'm out here to Friday. You know, it's going to be such a intrusion when Laurel wakes up at seven and goes, you know, barefoot goes down the stairs and Scott, like one of those black bears, refrigerated door open. Kelly hanging out on your own, drinking directly out of the milk carton out of the orange juice carton. But like what you did, what you did to strum say that time, ladies and gentlemen, I don't even need to give this guy an introduction. He's the guest on our podcast today, dear friend of mine, one of my very best friends in the world. I love him so much. He and his family. He's an author, by the way, just came out with a new book. We're going to talk about that today. He is the owner of Florida Risk Partners. He has got a program, commercial program, and my humble opinion, the best in the industry for producers and agency owners that want to get into commercial insurance, called killing commercial. He is a fantastic human being. He lives by the Scott Howell mantra of helping agents anyway he can. Ladies and gentlemen, my friend and 32 time guest on the IGP, Mr. David Carothers. How are you, David? It's got to be a record at this point, man. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate the opportunity every time I come on, I'm going to treat it like it's the first, but it's far from it at this point. We, but I can say as I appreciate you bringing me out of the bullpen so I don't have to sit silently, not able to offer a comment on the fact that I pictured exactly what you were going to look like, standing in Bradley's kitchen before you ever said it word for word. So, he left out that the hotel he's staying at is currently being renovated and they don't have water. Oh. So, David, right now I just want you to picture in this parking lot literally 75 steps from where I'm sitting. The only thing that's left on my car is the sunroof. Every thing else on my car is just laying in a pile of rubble. When's the last time we had visual on geo? 15 minutes ago, he's stuck in here now. It's a problem. It's a problem. He texted me last night about his, the construction going on at his hotel. You do it. It's, I'm not as well. I, I think I texted you last night and I said, I should have just put a tent up in your parking lot. He feels like he's sleeping in a tent because there's so much noise going on. I texted him last night as I do. You can come stay here. I'll let you be little spoon. I'll, I'll say this, when I walked out of my room to come to Bradley's office podcast today and why I didn't take a picture of this is beyond me. They have now cut out pretty much all the drywall and to get to the plumbing, which is why they're cutting the water off today. Yeah. I don't know what you do if you needed to be at the hotel all day. I know. That's something else. Next thing they're going to do is cut the pipe. I'll go, they're not because I got to stay down here tonight. There's no, there's no way he's going to finish this. He's got my entire car pulled apart like Legos. I would ask them to transfer you to a sister hotel tonight. I'm going to get there and they're going to have a sign on my, because they put these, these, these pieces of paper in my door that tell you all the stuff they're doing tonight. I bet you they cut the power off. That'll be rich. How would you like to be paying $200 or not to stay in a hotel with no water, no power? And just wait. Here comes the fire alarm. And you can't sleep in your car because this pulled apart the parking lot. Yeah, it's completely pulled apart the parking lot. Hey, David, I got something to show you. So a carrier gave this to me. It's one of the best carrier gifts I've ever gotten. And I was showing it to Scott and he said, this is the most David Carothers thing I've ever seen. So this is a custom blend of spices for cooking, like a barbecue rub type thing. Third coast blend, ensuring great flavor and on the side it tells the story of the insurance company. It's it's white label to their isn't that doesn't that sound like something David Carothers would do except you would make it. I'm honestly surprised to carrier would like put themselves out there for something you would eat and put in your body from a liability. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Cause some guy like Scott probably the one that made that. And he may or may not have been using gloves when he put that stuff in there. Well, it's a company that makes it, but yeah, it's kind of cool. I like that. It's cool. Well, I mean, the amount of crap that carriers drop off here that I should that I throw in the trash as soon as before they make it back to their car. And this is actually staying on my desk. So cause I want to try and do that do something like it's a good idea, a good idea hats off to him. It was a shoot. I don't know the name of the carrier. Gulf state's insurance shout out Gulf states David, we got so much to talk about today. And of course you and I always have that lens of trying to help agents. First thing I wanted to talk about and I have not ordered it yet and that's my fault. And I will. I usually when you come out with a new book, I try to order five copies at one time, but I want to talk to start with, like I said, we got so much talk about, but the sales book that you came out with with your son, let's talk a little bit about it. Tell me about it. Driven to close. Yeah. So when Grayson started working here and became travel challenged due to unfortunate circumstances behind the wheel, one way to put it, he rode to work with me every day and he was getting ramped up. Always had a million questions and I finally said, you know what, why don't we just like record? You asking me these questions and me answering them and that's where Carpool closer came from. And then I decided, you know, he'd ask me the question, I'd answer it in a minute or less. It would go up on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube shorts. And then I just came up with the idea, look, I'm not going to do this forever. Just kill it at 365 questions and we'll turn it into, we'll trans, trans, uh, scribe it and turn it into a daily sales reader for producers to where they can go in and every day they get up, they can read the question, they can get an expanded response to it. Maybe have three, two or three bullet points to challenge them on things to think about. Then of course, to make it official, you have to have an inspirational quote by somebody from some point in time that's on every page, right? So we did that, but we're actually taking that a step further and it's going to be a 365 episode daily podcast that starts on January 1st to 2026 where we're going to record probably five minutes, maybe 10 at the tops, but just dive in deeper into that. And it's originally when we did Carpool closer, what I was going to do was I was going to do half of them where he asked me the question and then the other half was going to be me asking him the question to answer it, but based on the vault, like we weren't getting through like five to seven each way to and from and it was easier just to make it be me answering the questions. Now I'm going to press him though. He's going to have to answer those questions and talk about how it's affected him or how he uses that stuff in his career as a personal lines producer, honestly, in the agency. He's crushed it, man. I mean, 1.2 million in premium in his first 14 months and we didn't even have any home carriers to write with. That's almost all umbrella auto and flood. So we've rounded out the home carrier offering at this point. So I'm expecting big things here coming in 2026. So when you guys do these questions, and I watch the TikTok videos, did you know the question before he asked it? No, never. And did he come up with all the questions his own? Yeah, well, you know, I think some of it was we went and looked at a bunch of things that I had put content out on before and also just generally like we use chat GPT to create some of the lists with questions producers are asking inside of that and everything. The most notice that I would get is to what the question was going to be was literally seconds before he hit record and actually asked me the question. I wanted to keep it authentic, man, I wanted to keep it off the top of my head and we did a good job of that because there are times where he asked me a question and my ADHD went a completely different direction and I answered a question that wasn't even asked. But we left it the way that it was intact that way so that we could show people that it wasn't like some choreographed thing. It was legitimately him asking me a raw question one after the other on the way to. And it looked that way. I was just morbidly curious because I know that you're a good actor. Yeah, no, it was legit, man, it was legit and I didn't even use one of the seven languages I fluently speak. David, I have, I have religiously watched those. Sometimes I'll like them. I have a bunch of those saved to my phone where I download them and save them to my phone for possible answers to questions to producers later on down the line. I really like that series a lot, but I had a question that I meant to put in one of the comments and then I started to put it in the comment for him to ask you, for gracing to ask you. And I thought, I'm sure David will be on a podcast because he comes on about every four weeks. And I'll just ask him live on the podcast for these agents to hear and it's something that I've experienced lately because I'm trying to get back into sales and doing a lot of prospect in and marketing drops and the question I had that I was wanting to ask you was a lot of times when I go into businesses to do a marketing drop, the person that I meet with that maybe is the owner or the person in charge of insurance or whatever. They quickly tell me that they are owned by a larger, you know, they're part of a bigger company that's maybe out of, like, say North Carolina. I'm just throwing that state out there and they take care of all the insurance. What's my rebuttal or what should I say there? And I'm only asking this right now, I think I know what your answer is going to be, but I'm trying to help these agents that are listening to this. You walk in and it's a pretty big business and you meet with a person that handles insurance and they say, well, Scott, you know, I'd love to talk with you a little bit more, but our insurance has handled that in North Carolina. What would you say to that? It's on the size of the opportunity, honestly. I mean, it's kind of a loaded question because there's not enough demographics for me to really give you a definitive answer, right? And I'm not dodging it. I'm going to give you the answer on several, several different demographics. The first one is, let's say, yeah, this is a regional account. It's handled out in North Carolina. That's not out of the ordinary. You're in the southeast still. They may have a location in Charlotte, a location in Atlanta, a location in Birmingham, and a location in, you know, Columbia, South Carolina. They've got, you know, but everything's handled out of corporate. You know, I would probably still pursue that opportunity and just say, great, who should I be reaching out to in North Carolina, then that fits right inside the footprint of where we operate. And it actually sounds like you may be a better fit for what we do on the risk management side than if you were just a single location, so you just made my day, something along those lines to keep the ball rolling where I think people mess up is number one, they either automatically exclude themselves because they think, oh, this is something way too big that I'm not going to be able to go after. Or sometimes if it is really big, they don't exclude themselves quick enough, right? They want to go chase this thing and they're going to waste their time on this massive pipe dream. Now, I have to be completely transparent, man. I have a being in Florida. I have a bias for people who want to be non-residents that write in other states because we're such a unique marketplace. And there's other states that are like that, but you see a lot of agents that are attracted to Florida because of the premium and I see this all the time. So here's your million dollar nugget for everybody out there that wants to stick your toe in the water in Florida, but really hasn't ever done it before. If you are going to write excess and surplus lines policies in Florida, specifically property insurance, you better know every form and endorsement that's on that policy because the number one mistake that I see people making and it gets by a lot of people is they go to a premium finance company. They have a property policy in Florida, financed and they have no clue that that policy if it's an effect for a single day during hurricane season is 100% earned. And you have to disclose that to the finance company on the front end. They don't even know it exists. So they haven't. So they go, they go probably pop in 25% minimum earned because that's what's on the quote. If you don't click to read the endorsement and the next thing you know, you got this agency out there that's on the hook for the whole thing. And the whole reason that endorsement exists is to keep people from canceling their policy after hurricane season. So you get somebody that's a little bit shifty. The agent never explains it to the to client because they don't know it's there. They go stop paying on the policy or whatever else. The agency's on the hook for that money, man. It could be substantial. Yeah. Wow. I don't know. I don't know that I knew that we have a few personalized carriers that do that. Yeah. It's crazy, man. But it's an issue with the premium financing too because there's really nothing for there's no way that they can change that wording. So you have to have a really good relationship with whoever the finance company is. And in many cases, they're literally going in and financially underwriting the company in a way they typically don't for premium financing. Usually you go in key, the information in spits out your quote and everything. No, they're literally going in looking at done in Brad Street payment history. And you can typically get it done, but it's going to be not as favorable in terms as what it otherwise would be. So to get around that, that's what I tell you, like that's my big pet peeve about agents not staying in their lane and going into other states. I think every one of us has an issue where we've got, you know, incidental business where I've got an account. I've got an account that's domiciled in Tampa that has like eight locations across the country on different air force bases. It's different, right? But if you're going in and actually prospecting and for somebody like Bradley, it's not that big of a deal. Like he's right on the border. It's like the agents in Jacksonville are likely writing in both Georgia and Florida. You have to know that. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the people who see the premiums, you know, they've got one off that they've got an opportunity and all of a sudden, you know, they're asking in all the internet forums. Where do I get an appointment for this? Where do I get an appointment for that? It's like, dude, like do you even know what you're getting yourself into? It's the Florida version of the person that gets appointed with progressive, knows nothing about trucking. But because you got a progressive appointment, you have access to the trucking product. You see a big premium come across your table and you take a shot at it because you're distracted by the premium and 100 out of 100 times that policy, something's going to be written incorrectly. Oh, yeah. Guarantee. So David, is the workaround there? If you're from Wisconsin and you want to ride a policy, property policy in Florida, well, that being 100% earned, is the workaround, you better get that sunbitch paid and full on the front end to keep from being on the back. Or have a relationship with a finance company that will financially underwrite them just like a bank would. Yeah. But in a lot of cases, man, you know, that's one of the other things too. I don't think a lot of agents really try and put themselves into the clients shoes as much as they should. So here's another one, you know, you can't go and finance a direct bill policy from an admitted carrier. They won't let you do it. Right. But what you can do is you can go look and know as a producer what the average interest rates are for a line of credit at the local credit union and if you've got a client that's going to get, let's just say we have carriers that if the paid and full discount could be 12 to 15%. Well, if you can go get a line of credit for six, why wouldn't you just go get the line of credit if you don't have the cash or don't want to deplete your cash, you're saving more than you're spending on the interest and then you can realize that paid in full credit but still break it up into payments, you know, there's a lot of intricacies on the financial end of how these deals get set up that I just feel like a lot of producers skim past and then there's not checks and balances at the agency level for people to come behind them and say, well, did you offer this? Did you offer this because people just are moving so quick, they don't pay attention to the little stuff anymore, man, and I mean, we're in a situation where I think we're going to see a lot of ENO issues down the road that have happened because of the low barrier rent, a barrier to entry into the industry and the market starting to turn a little bit, carriers are a little bit more open to appoint people than what they were. We have had zero trouble getting home appointments, like I don't know why I was that worried about it. I mean, probably because we didn't really have any volume, but they took the business plan, I did a video business plan to walk them through and showed them what we're doing inside of our CRM, how we're tracking everything and most of them are like, holy crap, no other agencies ever actually walked us through their marketing plan and showed us what it looks like on the back end, but we're doing some pretty cool stuff, man. So I think the market's turning and I think the answer to your question, honestly, if you're writing in Florida or California or some of these states where the litigations a little bit, not left to center from where you would normally be, you're better off having a referral relationship with an agency in the state, even if there's revenue sharing involved. Let them handle it. Let them take it on their ENO. Let them take the cat loss on their loss runs, man. I mean, especially if you do get admitted capacity, why would I want to be in Columbus, Ohio and then have a subset of property on my profit sharing that's coastal in Florida somewhere because I got some non-resident capacity. That's the whole reason I argue that you should place your cyber through brokers instead of doing it through your admitted market. Why do I want to take a policy that gives me 300 or 3000 in premium, but could have over a million, easily over a million in losses and blow up my contingency commissions with my admitted market when most of the time the wholesaler is going to give you the same 15% on cyber these days and you let them eat the loss ratio on their side. You don't lose in that situation. Right. Hey, guys. It's Bradley. Want to take a couple minutes talk to you about steadily. Did you know that landlord insurance is a booming niche valued at over $38 billion in growing? If you guys are like me, you can't get on TikTok without seeing some influence or talk about real estate investing. It's only going to get larger. If you're working with real estate investors or looking to start, you've got to check out steadily. They're a modern tech-driven insurer that only writes rental properties. We're talking long-term rentals, short-term rentals, condo units, and renovation policies. They know this space inside out and they pay high commissions, offer super fast-quoting, customizable coverage, dwelling, loss of use, everything you need for landlords, and they partner with some of the biggest voices in real estate, so they have social proof already with a lot of landlords, like bigger pockets. They were just named one of Inc's fastest growing companies in the Midwest. If you want an easy win for your clients and your agency, get appointed today at steadily.com/podcast. Hey, David, I've got to ask a question. Tell me why, what was your rationale and reasoning behind getting into the personal line's home market down there? You've always been known as the commercial guy, commercial, commercial, commercial. I know on our group chat, and you and I haven't really gotten into this at all. What was your rationale there? What happened? Well, it's been the same thing for years, commercial lines clients ask you, can you place it for them? Really, my issue has been mental, right? I lack the mental capacity to be talking to the CFO of a company that pays the agency 50 grand a year in commissions, only for my next call to be Monpaw Kettle, whose homeowners went up 10 bucks a month and wanted me to shop every market I've got. I would just tell them to go get a part-time job if they can't afford their insurance, but I can't do that. That's not, that's just mentally I'm not there. Grayson is far more patient than I am. He actually relates very well to the people that we're dealing with on the personal line side, and the other thing is we actually had been quietly growing that side of the business over the last year without really being too loud about it, but leading with Umbrella because of the amount of solar that's installed down here. Really, going into home was just the next iteration because we're already writing Umbrella Auto and Flood. We just didn't have the markets and things were a little bit weird because the storms and all of that, the market didn't dictate that I needed to get in or try and get appointments. As it started to soften and carriers opened up, it just made sense because we're not writing the biggest leg of the table. You know, I mean, if we're writing the Umbrella and the Auto, we're doing okay, but typically the home's going to be the largest premium down here. So I looked at it as we can immediately double, at least double the revenue of the book. If we can write the home on the other stuff that we're writing and I also think it makes the business stickier if you have processes in place to keep everything in one spot. So, you know, it's been a learning experience, man. I had to learn the tech that we needed. I had to learn the sales process and then invest and then the other thing is, you know, when you build your, your automations and your marketing out, you got to open the flood gates and let it come in and see where the stress test leads you, you know, it wasn't like we just turned it on one day and all of a sudden, boom, here we are, we're crushing it. You know, we had automations in HubSpot. We had to go fix. We needed to make sure that we added in text. I couldn't believe how much more people are willing to communicate over text message on personal lines than they are on anything else. And that's, that was a huge difference because for us, when it comes in, we're, I mean, we're crushing it on inbound paid ad. In the last 30 days between what we get organic plus what I've done in paid, I've spent just under 2500 bucks and we've had about 500 leads come in. So we're not talking about, you know, 10 or 20 deals here. We're talking about significant volume coming in, which means you got to weed the crap out of the top of the funnel as quick as you can. You have to automate as much as you can so that you're not wasting your manpower trying to chase people down on the phone. And so when people come in, you know, they get into the funnel and they hit submit, very next thing they do is go to a thank you page where there were on video telling them, you know, encouraging them to get to canopy connect specifically so that they can go in and get their deck pages to us because my thing is, we're not moving forward until we have the stuff we need. If you, you know, you can stay in that first column in the pipeline, but you really need to give us the underwriting information. And so we get that that integrates with risk advisor, we ask those questions, that integrates with quote rush and then quote rush sends its quote bots out and, you know, ultimately we have very limited human involvement until we get that first iteration of quotes back. Then we firm those up, do the video proposal, send that out via both email and text. And then we've got follow ups along the way. But I mean, it took us a month just to get all that dialed in man. First week was brutal, second week, less, third week, even less, and then last week about perfect. Tell you to a nice sized personal lines book that you onboarded everybody the correct way. You filtered out the bad apples and you made sure you have the right customers, the right underwriting details, or the right carrier. In my opinion is very, very sticky and I was actually talking last year, I was talking to the CEO of a top 100 agency, this agency bought I think 200 agencies in a year and a half. And we had this very philosophical discussion about M&A and types of business and he said, man, I'll tell you right now, he said, when we look at say a $2 million revenue shop, if it's all personal lines, I'm much less concerned than if it was all commercial, especially large commercial. Because with personal lines, there's really two scenarios you can lose that customer one. You didn't handle it the right way. They got to better rate somewhere else or they sold the house. With commercial, there's about 12 things that can go wrong to cause you to lose that account. And that's not to say that $2 million dollar personal lines agency is valued more than a commercial because that's just, I'm sure there's another shop out there just like these people that would say the opposite, but it's definitely something to be said for and I love selling half a million dollar commercial accounts and then filling the gaps with a ton of personal lines. Yeah. 100 percent, man. I mean, that's, that's it right there. Like I've been on record telling people, you know, the middle market is gotten way too volatile. You know, they're going through the same thing with service contractors that we see in the insurance world, aggregation, venture capital is buying them up. I lost a quarter million in commission out of my own book on three accounts two years ago that I lost because they got acquired by VCs and I couldn't do anything at all to keep it. And that's a key situation. I mean, because you didn't do anything wrong, you know, it's like, we lost a large landscaper from an agency we acquired and it was because they got acquired and it's like, there's nothing you can do. And it almost, I'd almost rather of us have dropped the ball somewhere that way we have a chance to get it back because if they're acquired by a large P firm that there's really nothing you can do, it's interesting. But I'll tell you one thing we've started doing when I do, and I'm about to do it now, when I do my budget for at the end of the year with Carey for the next year, every account that's over a certain revenue amount, I don't even include it in the budget. And I got that from focusing on the, on the middle. Yeah. I got that from Aaron Gordon. Aaron Gordon's dad always said the small accounts pay the bills, the big accounts pay for the vacations. So and we budget because we budget every spending category as a percentage of revenue. I'm budgeting it on everything that's less than a certain amount. That way if one of these accounts doesn't renew, it doesn't hurt me if it does renew. It's just that much better. Yeah. No. I mean, I think honestly, Scott, I just needed to be more well-rounded. We were too top-heavy and that became real evident when you lose a couple of accounts and it stinks quite a bit. Hey, David. Two questions. Number one for you and Bradley, so we just had risk advisor David Watson on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. What is quote rush? I've never heard heard of that before. That's our, that's our raider. Oh, you like Florida risk partners own raider? Well, no, no, no, no. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a. It's a Florida. Oh, Florida raider. Okay. I don't know if it's outside of Florida or not, but I mean, we rate, we can rate home, auto, flood, all of it on there. And that's the other nice part. Yeah. That's the fact in there and bring back quotes for everything. Fun fact, I was the first agency in Alabama on quote rush. Cool. Lasted about a week. Oh, it's just so, so, so, so, so Florida focused. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't know. I'm not knocking on quote rush, but I don't have, they improved this, the UI at all. I don't, you know, honestly, I've not been in it, man. Grayson doesn't complain, but that also doesn't mean anything because he doesn't know any different. It was very 1994 when we were on it. But what, what quote rush does this interesting is they can set up virtual computers in your office that are running the quotes for you in the background, right? So you can run multiple quote, yeah, it's really interesting and everything's done. Some sort of version of RPA, right? It's, it's some kind of RPA, I believe. Yeah, no, that's, I mean, you can sit and watch it on the screen, go to the county website to pull property information or whatever else. If you wanted to sit there, but to Bradley's point, it works when you're not. You can be on doing, once you get it set up, you can be doing something else, which we're running really lean on personal lines, staffing right now just because I don't have any need, but rapidly adding business, we're going to need some service people. But for him to get through the quoting process is nothing like it legitimately, I'll be honest with you, man, like what I really want is I want one of these AI phone companies to be able to have me dial out and get the last few questions of risk advisor answered so that a human doesn't have to be involved in any of the process until the quotes come in. And if I could get that piece answered and put in, we could go from canopy connect to the AI phone agent with risk advisor to quote, rush to quotes. And all we're doing is field in the quotes when they come in, clean in them up and then presenting them to people, you know, that's ultimately the factory I want to build. Even with a human, you know, if I was thinking about this yesterday, I don't remember who we were talking to, if we could have, so when you're doing it, when we're doing a personal lines quote, we're going in risk advisor as well. We're asking the same questions in the same order every single time. Why can't one of these phone companies transcribe the phone in real time and have AI fill the form like I'm just asking the question and it's filling it as so we're not even having to do data entry at all. And then you take that a step further, if you could ever get the customers okay with it and have a bot do it as well. Yeah. In my opinion, that's where things are headed. I mean, it's only a matter of time till somebody figures it out. Hey, David, these agents listening to this podcast right now are watching it on YouTube. Go to YouTube and subscribe, please, regularly hand some face. You mentioned 500 leads. I believe you said 500 a month or a week or something. First 30 days we were running ads, yep. What were you just to help them out? What were you doing? I mean, broad strokes here. I know you don't want to get down in the weeds because we'd probably hit a three o'clock this afternoon. Now I can make it real easy, man. I hired somebody to do it. I don't need to get in the weeds outside of what that's outside of what I do. So I just, you know, I use Chris Langel from local traffic marketing and he reached out to me and said, you need to, I've got, I'm making it rain right now, specifically on meta and their new optimization with AI has really gotten the audience dialed in. And he said, here's what I'd recommend you throw at it for budget. Yeah. I just did what I was told, man, I'm like, Forest Gump taking the rifle apart and putting it back together again. I love it. All right. So let me close this podcast out talking about something that's near and dear to my heart that I love that you do. We are getting ready to crank up the next iteration of the protege. Yeah, man. Talk to our audience about it. I know you're excited about it. So let's hear it. Let's hear what's going on with it. Well, you know what? In the words of Frank Kastans, I got a lot of problems with you people as he goes into festivists. But I do. I've got a general problem with the industry that I want to get off my chest first and foremost. Sure. And that is if you are a female or you are a minority and you did not apply shame on you because we need you. We need you to be visible in the industry to show that there is opportunity for people out there. And I can tell you I was really disappointed that we did not have a more sizable application pool of females and minorities. And I didn't really realize it, which speaks to some of what the underlying issues are in the industry until I looked at some of the graphics we put up and it's a bunch of middle-aged white dudes all across the graphics. And so I've had this up in Porciarra standing there in the background by herself sticking out like a sore thumb. But you know, I tried my best and I feel like the first season, it was the second season we had a ton about half of the people that we had on Porciarra's the first year though. Really bad coaches. Yeah. But you know, it's wild, man. I took two years off, three years off, whatever it was. And I wasn't sure if I was ever going to do it again. And I started seeing people online that were new producers. They're asking questions that they obviously should be able to get answered in their agency. And you know, not everybody's going to be willing to go out and invest in a training program. I get that, you know, there's a lot of people out there that probably charge for things they shouldn't because they don't even know what they're doing themselves. Sorry. You have to vet, you know, you have to vet that stuff and I get it, I automatically get lumped into it. That's why I do it. So if you watched the protege, you're a new producer and you went in and just started watching even just season one and that's all you watched. You will go out and write middle market business as a result of that. We don't pull punches, man. Everything that we do in real life is displayed there. We did the same thing in season two and here we come into season three, rocking and rolling. But I mean, there is a ton of buzz around the show this time. I think it may have been accidentally one of the best things I could have done was take a couple of years off so that people like forgot about it and then realized, oh, because there's a whole new crop of people that never even heard of seasons one or two that want to do this. And so, you know, I enjoy doing it. You know, I think that probably people always wonder like what's in it for me. So I like to hit that head on. It gets more exposure to my YouTube channel and killing commercial. People can go learn about that stuff if they want to, but the reality is I don't have any direct monetization of the show whatsoever, you know, in fact, it's probably missed monetization opportunity to some degree, but I feel like it keeps it pure if I'm not getting paid to do it. Number one, and it also helps me elevate people who help me with the mission, which is to teach people both actively through participating in the show. And also passively by watching the show as it comes out, you know, we got people like Charles spec'd coming on most people would think Charles and I are direct competitors with a vendetta for each other. I don't have any issues at all with Charles. How many Italian restaurants are there in the country? Everybody's got a different recipe for their sauce. Some people like is better than they like mine. I'm okay with that, but I like what Charles stands for and I like what he teaches. So if I can give him more exposure on my platform, I have no problem doing that, right? So what do I do in exchange? Hey, Charles, you know, come on, give me an hour of your time. We're going to edit together some highlights from you being on there. We're going to create a commercial. We're going to run a commercial for your next permission producer school in that episode. And that makes people short-circuit, man, because they don't they don't have an abundance mentality. And I mean, it's crazy to me. There are actually people that I gave the opportunity to come on that didn't take it because they were probably concerned that, you know, scarcity mindset, really more than anything else. But we've done some cool stuff, man. We've got a lot of the coaches are good this season. We've got Justin and T's in Aaron Levine, Dustin Boss and oh, geez, who's Dustin Patrick, Patrick McBride and Dustin Boss and then Mike Fusco and Zach Mefford are the team coaches. And I only took nine people because that's three-part team. That's a lot of work on my end. I'm not saying that to complain, but, you know, if I've got 12 people on submitting challenges, that's 12 challenges I watch every single time. And I usually watch them more than once. I make notes. Then I have to record what my comments are based on what the submissions. And I mean, you're looking at a lot of time every week invested into that. And I wanted to keep a cap on some of that stuff because, you know, the one thing I promise everybody who comes on the show is I'll never make you look bad publicly. Like, I don't think there's ever been a time where I've had to cut somebody or whatever else that I've gone on and just absolutely dog them. But what I do behind the scenes is give them very direct feedback. Like what you see is the edited version. I treat them like they're one of my producers when I give them my feedback. So the people who come through are getting really, in my opinion, they're getting solid coaching advice because it's exactly what I would tell you in the real world. And, you know, the one thing that I've encouraged them to do is regardless of when you get the boot, you know, there's eight of you are going to lose. Like, you know, that's just the way that it is. Eight of you are not going to make it to win, but stick around. You know, we've got a dozen mentors, you know, that are subject matter experts and things that we've brought in that I'm doing an extra one hour call every Friday at three o'clock so that they can get inside those people's head and it'll make their games stronger as they go into the challenge rounds and everything. And then I've got three, like just mega star heavy hitter people that I haven't even announced yet. Nobody's going to, they'll hear about it on here first, probably still not going to say who it is. But there are three heavy, heavy hitters that when people see they're like, holy crap, carothers got them to come on and do this. That's crazy, which I wanted to do. But I mean, it's all about educational value, man, period. For the contestants and for the people who are watching it and what motivates me to fire the gas in my engine, whatever you want to call it, are the emails and the texts and the DMs that I get years later from people who said, I just found season one of the protege on your YouTube channel. I binge watched it last week and I went out and started prospecting and I've already gotten appointments following some of this stuff that you taught these people. Wow. So who are the contestants? We need to keep an eye on everybody asks me the same thing, man. Everybody asks me the same thing and this is my response. I never knew what it was like to be a judge in a court until I had to do this because I have to remain completely unbiased, right? And it's the best thing I can equate it to is if I had nine kids, you love all your kids individually, you love them the same that each have their own idiosyncrasies. That being said, what I've learned from the first two seasons is production quality of the submission video does not equal winning in the end. Yeah. Okay. So if I go back and I'm not throwing them under the bus, but if I go back to season one and you asked me early on, who did I think was going to win, I would have said Brady Neil because he had the coolest submission video right through the axe into the tree, all the editing and everything was perfect and I would have told you Derek Hayden was middle of the road. He did a good job, but it wasn't like this massively impressive thing. What I know is this, the people who listened to me and took me seriously when we had our kickoff meeting last week and they make the deposits in their social now, that's who you need to watch in the end. The more visible you see people making themselves the better the chance they have of actually winning, should they stay in the competition because it's not just about how well you do the challenges. It's how well do you build your base? So ultimately you win the vote. You get to the vote by doing well in the challenges, yeah, ultimately producing, but if you don't build the base and I did that intentionally, man, because that's how it works in the real world. Yeah. You've got to build the foundation to sustain you for the long term and the wins are going to come as they, as they may. So my two are Sam Lorenz and Joe Haulier, those are the two that I think everybody thinks is going to do it out. I would tell you that every single person that I picked to be because we had over 150 people apply of the people I picked, every single one of them, there's there because of something they said that caught my attention and I honestly believe depending on how they show up every week, every one of them has an equal chance of winning it. Yeah. So for the videos, those two guys had the best video submissions. Yeah. So when, when's the first in closing here, when's the first episode dropping and we're shortly after the first of the year. And where do they go? Yeah. What are the commercial YouTube? Killing you go to youtube.com forward slash killing commercial insurance or the protege dot show and that'll get you to the library of the past seasons and then connect you to the current. Before we let you go, there is a ancient artifact on the table behind you. There's an adding machine there. You know what that's for. I have not seen one of those since I was about 12 years old in my dad's office. Well, so I'll tell you what, man, twofold number one, if you've closed a grocery office as many times as I have, then you don't use cell phone calculators. I can 10 key faster than most people you, you can see even, even today. That's why when I buy a new laptop, I have to have the number pad off to the side so I can do that. But the other thing is anytime and agents, if you want a hack, listen to what I'm about ready to tell you because this works. If there's a carrier that's given you push back and says that they don't want to appoint you what you need to do, and this is exactly what I did. I'm not naming the carrier's name, but I had a carrier who said they weren't ready to appoint me. And I just started sending the marketing rep submissions for stuff that I knew was in their appetite. And then he'd write back to me and say, well, why are you sending these to me? And I said, because I'd like for you to see the opportunities you're missing out on by not appointing us. And then to close that loop when I would write that account with one of their competitors, I would take the deck page and that's why I still have the tape and the ribbon in this machine. And I would give them an adding machine tape scan on the front of the deck page with the running total of how much premium they missed by not appointing Florida risk. So sometimes you got to get creative with how you go after these people, but I don't want to tell them. I want to show them. So that's why I have it. David, thank you for coming on today, brother. We love you so much. I'm going to shut this thing down guys. Rewards come from action, not discussion. Get your ass out from behind that desk today. Go out into the big bad world, become the mayor of your village. David Carotter said it best, man, you got to be known. You got to get yourself known out there, become your own television station. You want to be the insurance guy or girl in your community. Go out today, make money for your family, for your wife, for your husband, for your kids college fund and for your parents and in laws like mine that are struggling out there. You'll make money for them, write good business for the agencies that you represent and write good business for the carriers that you represent. Bradley Flowers. Thanks, man. Thanks, David. I love you, David. See you. See you guys. All right. Take care. Bye-bye. Thank you so much for listening to our show and being a part of our family and we look forward to seeing you again next week on the next episode of the Insurance Guys Podcast. Take care.