I started from scratch. The agent I had worked for before was kind enough to allow me to take a few of my family's policies out of his agency and in to mine, ... maybe fifteen policies or so. But the transfer would take some time to go through. On Day 1, I had zero policies in force. I was young and ambitious. And very naive about how difficult a road was in front of me.
You have to understand a little bit about the insurance industry to appreciate how difficult it is to start an agency from the ground up. Unlike high dollar sales like real estate, cars, or mortgages, ... insurance guys get paid very little up front. A new home policy might cost the client $650 or so. First year commission for me? $97.50. ... And then, I had expenses to pay. Phone bills, business cards, E&O Insurance, ... all that good stuff. Take a look at this. My first paycheck in all its glory. A full month of marketing and sales resulted in this.
At one point, I was connected with a really old school, hard core sales manager. This guy was such a character ... straight out of a comic book ... he was the type of guy who had three martinis at lunch, smoked like a chimney, and cussed like a sailor. He used a no holds barred method to tear us up emotionally trying to get us motivated to sell. My wife met him once after hearing some horror stories from me. She commented, "Thats so weird. He seems like the nicest guy. Like my grandpa or something." The thing was, he WAS a nice guy. As long as it wasn't during business hours. He genuinely wanted success for all of us new agents. Its just that he was from an older era. He had been trained under an iron fist, and he had succeeded training others that way in the past, and so thats how he continued training right up until the day he died.
My manager's over the top angry sales manager antics never really worked too well with me. We butted heads on more than one occasion over everything from marketing to sales methods to dress code. He ultimately won the dress code battle with me by giving me free rent in exchange for a promise to wear a tie and shave my goatee. A free place to hang my hat and build a business? Deal. But we couldn't agree on marketing and sales methods. He wanted me in early in the morning and late at night hammering the area with cold calls. And in my free time, knocking on doors. That just wasn't (and still isn't!) my style. He wanted me to bring out the big guns of Fear and Guilt to sell insurance policies. I didn't (and still don't!) feel comfortable doing that.
And so, I was left to find my own way for the most part. Various trainers helped me here and there, but the way I wanted to build my business was so different than what they envisioned, they really didn't have a whole lot of input or advice to share with me. They were all trained in the tried and true old school marketing method of 'cold calls and X-dating', which I had already decided were not going to be the building blocks of my business.
Somehow, ... I made it. And more than that, I built an agency that even my old sales manager would be impressed with.
In my next entry, I'll highlight the first of three major insurance industry phases that have occured over the past ten years that have influenced the bulding of my agency.
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