You Don't Own Your Agency. It Owns You.

Before insurance, Tyler Nagle was a jack of all trades: Waiting tables, Uber, landscaping. Six months into the insurance business, he decided he had to own something.Five years later, his personal book is just under $6 million and his agency is just over $8 million. He has written $200,000 a month in sales four months in a row. And he says he has never asked anyone for business.It got so busy that he had to ask one of his top mortgage brokers to stop referring him. Now that he is building a team, his answer is different: Grow, grow, grow.What you'll discover in this episode:"Put your freaking hand away": The advice that shaped how he approaches referral partnersThe 2,000-calls-a-month start, and the snowball of introductions that followedWhy he treats every referral like the last one he will ever getWhy busy agents don't hire, and why a BMW payment feels better than an Indeed adWhat he tells an owner who is afraid to hire after a bad hireWhy he wants to be CC'd on at least 300 closings before he hands a referral partner to a new producerThe Sultans of the Springs: The culture inside the 10-agent office he runs in Bonita SpringsPete Poggi grew a P&C insurance agency from $3 million to $180 million in 84 months. Personal lines only. No cold calls. He now works with independent P&C insurance agency owners who are stuck between $2 million and $5 million in premium and cannot scale past themselves, teaching the systems, hiring standards and referral relationships that turn a top producer into an agency owner who actually owns their agency.If this one helped, follow the show so you don't miss the next episode, and send it to an agency owner who is still the only one writing the business.Learn more at www.PetePoggi.com

Gerry Rivas opened a captive insurance agency in September 2019. Then COVID hit, the agency did not grow, and he had to sell it.He walked into his interview at John Galt Insurance and said it straight: "I'm just like an epic failure right now." He told Pete and Kyle he was not there to reinvent the wheel. He just wanted to follow a system that works.Today he and his wife Kimberly run a $5 million book that has grown about 30% year over year since they started. And when Gerry went back into his own agency, he made a choice most owners will not make: He stopped producing, and put that time into his team and his referral partners.What you'll discover in this episode:How one referral partner turns into three more introductions, and why that "stacking" is what got him to a million dollars in productionTransactional versus relational: The test that tells you which one you areHow he hires producers on commission, and what he says to the candidate who walks in asking for a $100,000 salaryWhy he interviews people all year long, even when he is not hiringThe question that changed how he manages: Would you like working for you?Why he signs two to three new referral partners every month now that he is not producingPete Poggi grew a P&C insurance agency from $3 million to $180 million in 84 months. Personal lines only. No cold calls. He now works with independent P&C insurance agency owners who are stuck between $2 million and $5 million in premium and cannot scale past themselves, teaching the systems, hiring standards and referral relationships that turn a top producer into an agency owner who actually owns their agency.If this one helped, follow the show so you don't miss the next episode, and send it to an agency owner who is afraid to hire.Learn more at www.PetePoggi.com

Caleb Harris is 24 years old. He started in door-to-door life insurance, lasted about three months, and then took a job as a captive agent with Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance.His plan there was simple: Find the top agent and copy whatever he does. That agent took him to a car dealership in Ohio and showed him how it's done. A year and a half later, Caleb left to start his own independent agency, Ora Insurance.Today he writes about 50 new households a week through car dealerships, and his agency brings in $40,000 to $50,000 a month in revenue. His record is 82 in one week.So why did he DM Pete on LinkedIn? Because, in his words, if people go with you over $5, they'll leave you over $5.What you'll discover in this episode:The one question he asks at every new dealership: "Does insurance ever come up in the sales or finance process for you guys?"Why speed, and doing what you say you'll do, beats every other agent who walks in the doorAuto retention vs. home retention, and why Pete told him to replicate his model on the homeowner sideHis biggest mistake: Not hiring his two virtual assistants sooner ($5 an hour, found on Fiverr)How he turned dealership salespeople into his marketing repsThe first hire that didn't work out, and why Caleb says it was his fault, not the hire'sHis five-year goal: An agency that runs on its own, doing $10 million a year in revenuePete Poggi grew a P&C insurance agency from $3 million to $180 million in 84 months. Personal lines only. No cold calls. He now works with independent P&C insurance agency owners who are stuck between $2 million and $5 million in premium and cannot scale past themselves, teaching the systems, hiring standards and referral relationships that turn a top producer into an agency owner who actually owns their agency.If this one helped, follow the show so you don't miss the next episode, and send it to an agent who is making good money and still doing everything themselves.Learn more at www.PetePoggi.com

Chris Cole built a $30 million P&C agency and was the number one agent in his company for a few years. Two and a half to three years into owning that agency, he was broke and foreclosing on his house.His words: "One day I woke up broke, the only way out was for me to start selling $100,000 a week in premium."Chris came to insurance from pharmaceuticals, through State Farm's training program, where a new agent takes over an existing book and manages it. So when he opened his own agency, he managed it. Performance was bad, because nobody was setting the pace. He let his salespeople go, put two or three support people around himself, and sold $300,000 to $400,000 a month on his own for about six months. Then he brought salespeople back in, and scaled.Pete and Chris go back to 2009. Today Chris runs a virtual assistant company, and he is open about where VAs fit in an agency.What you'll discover in this episode:The one-call close, and the "extended time" idea behind itWhy his team treated renewing clients exactly like new business, and got retention closer to 92 to 93%Why the owner has to become the pace setter before stepping backThe bar he set for new producers when he was selling $80,000 to $100,000 a weekWhy adding more salespeople can leave every salesperson worse offPete Poggi grew a P&C insurance agency from $3 million to $180 million in 84 months. Personal lines only. No cold calls. He now works with independent P&C insurance agency owners who are stuck between $2 million and $5 million in premium and cannot scale past themselves, teaching the systems, hiring standards and referral relationships that turn a top producer into an agency owner who actually owns their agency.If this one helped, follow the show so you don't miss the next episode, and send it to an agency owner who is stuck managing instead of selling.Learn more at www.PetePoggi.com

One of Pete Poggi's top P&C producers was waiting tables, bartending and driving Uber on weekends when Pete hired him. Today that producer writes almost $1.5 million a year in premium, and his book is approaching $10 million.Pete has interviewed well over a thousand people and hired hundreds of agents across 20 plus years, and he made just about every hiring mistake there is on the way. What finally fixed it was not a better resume filter. It was learning to tell an entrepreneur from a wantrepreneur.The entrepreneur is planning their day. The wantrepreneur is planning their lunch.In this solo episode Pete lays out how he tells them apart before he hires, and how he tells them apart after.Here's what you'll discover:The one line Pete's dad used on him growing up that now explains every bad hire he ever madeWhat an entrepreneur says in an interview, and the very different thing a wantrepreneur saysThe question Pete asks when four people have the identical resume, and why he goes silent the second he finishes asking itThe difference between a producer who is struggling and one who is resisting, and why only one of them is worth coachingWhy Pete hires Rocky Balboa over Apollo Creed every single timeAbout Pete: Pete Poggi grew a personal lines P&C insurance agency from $3 million to over $180 million in 84 months. No commercial. No cold calls. He created the Agency Elevation System and works with independent P&C insurance agency owners stuck between $2M and $5M in annual premium who are ready to stop being the bottleneck and start building a real book.Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. And if you have ever hired someone who talked a great game and then never did the work, send this one to another agency owner. Every one of us has paid that stupid tax.Learn more at www.PetePoggi.com