PLATEAU OF PROGRESS

Rough Notes, Jan 2004 by Jans, Michael

Gain time and multiply your agency income

Have you ever hit a "plateau of progress"? That's where your income gets stuck in a certain range and you can't seem to break through it. Most agents have. And it might be easier to shatter this plateau than you think.

As an insurance marketing trainer, one of my biggest frustrations is to see an agent get turned on to the growth potential of marketing only to discover he or she is too busy to implement new ideas. Now, when we take on new clients, we require a thorough "time audit" to determine how they actually spend their work day.

At the end of a week, most of them are amazed to discover how much time they spend on lowleverage activities. Here's a laundry list of things our clients have done to free up their time and break through their "plateau of progress." It doesn't take long to make a major shift in your time commitments and, before you know it, you'll be executing new marketing campaigns to "jam your marketing funnel" with new leads and new clients.

1. All progress starts with telling the truth. Take a week and monitor what you actually do with your time. Be prepared for the bad news. Most agents discover they spend about 80% of their time on the "wrong things," like:

* Activities that don't make money for the agency

* Activities that could be delegated to someone else

* Putting out fires that would be prevented if better internal systems were in place

2. Decide if you really want to run a business...or want a "job." Most agencies rely on the agency principal for day-to-day operations. That's like having a job. A business owner's real "job" is to build systems that run the business and to hire good people to run those systems. We'll often find that agency principals are reluctant to turn the operation of their business over to other people. But to break through to the next level of growth, they must. Many agency principals need to:

* Break their "addiction" to the adrenaline of solving crises

* Drop the "hero" role of being able to fix or manage any problem

* Make a commitment to build a team so they can move on to their real work

Some agents are comfortable with their agency the way it is. That's fine. But if you want serious growth, you may have to sacrifice a little comfort.

3. Determine which activities make you the most money. Everyone has a "personal gift"-a major contribution that makes the most difference. The perfect "gift" combines three criteria:

* It's a "rainmaking" activity. It generates high revenue for the amount of work.

* You personally excel at it...or with enough practice and training you can become excellent.

* It excites you. Without the passion it lacks energy, and sooner or later you'll stop doing it.

The "money activities" are usually a short list. They generally have less to do with the technical aspects of insurance and more to do with sales and marketing. These are the activities you want to fill your new "free" time with.

4. Practice the discipline of delegation. This should be every entrepreneur/agent's nonoptional behavior. Don't have anyone to delegate something to? Let's put this in perspective. If you delegate or eliminate a mere 5% of what you do at the beginning of each month, you'll free up 46% of your work time by the end of the year! (And 60% if you keep working the same number of hours.) Keep that practice up for five years, and you'll find almost 95% "new" time. And that's time you can be filling with high-leverage activities, like marketing.

5. Immediately stop taking calls. This is an almost instant way to discover wasted time in your calendar. Many agents think they must be accessible to their clients. Wrong.

* Most agents have a harder time cutting the umbilical cord than the clients do. Clients want to be taken care of more than they want to be taken care of by you. If they insist on being tethered to the agency principal, they may be costing your agency more than they're contributing.

* Again, if your clients chain you to your agency, that's more of a job than a business. You must decide which you want.

* You can do a lot with an Agency Client Nurturing Calendar that will create strong emotional bonds between the agency and your client base so their only emotional connection isn't with you. (Client newsletters, consumer bulletins, special reports, automated e-mail marketing, agency events and so forth are "automatic" communication systems that reach a lot of people at little cost.)

Sure, you'll still take some calls from certain VIP clients. But start to draw the line somewhere. Remember, excessively easy access to you means you're not "special." No one ambled downhill to meet the guru. Clients will only put the same value on your time that you do.

6. Do at least one thing every day to promote your business. Many agents go days, weeks or months without really working on their businesses. They just work in them. Working on your business means:

* Building marketing systems that attract, convert and retain profitable clients.

* Building internal business systems that "run the business for you." These fall into five areas: business planning, team development, internal operations, carrier management and financial management.