Scaling With Purpose: An Action Catalyst Panel

Adam Outland, Action Catalyst host and President of Southwestern Consulting, and David Stuart, President and Founder of Southwestern Insurance Group, break down how they’ve each re-examined the structure of their long-standing businesses, including a few key decisions on what NOT to do, taking a hard look at where true revenue comes from, reframing and calculating risk, following the data, the push-pull relationship with tradition, improving the client experience, bringing technology into the mix, and the superpower of curiosity.

About Adam:

Adam Outland is the President of Southwestern Consulting and has personally coached hundreds of professionals and executives across the country on communication skills and leadership development. His strategies have helped companies and teams increase their sales, reduce conflict, and align organizations around a common vision.

Having a passion for impacting youth, Adam also founded the Southwestern Student Coaching Division where they provide Executive life coaching for teens and young adults. Since its inception in 2020, Student Coaching has helped equip hundreds of students with the framework for casting vision, goal setting, decision-making, and emotional intelligence.

Adam is also host of The Action Catalyst, which serves the purpose of unpacking the principles that make individuals successful at their craft.

Adam and his family live in Houston, Texas where he has served on the board for Cornerstone Family Ministries and as a Trustee for the Houston Grand Opera.

About David:

Raised in Orlando, FL, David attended Florida State University before obtaining his master’s of business from the University of Miami. David is also a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity.

While a sophomore college, David began his entrepreneurial career with Southwestern Advantage building an educational sales business. Throughout his four years with SWA, he recruited and trained over 50 salespeople invaluable life and business skills.

In 2013 and 2015, David was recognized for recruiting the top sales production team in Southwestern Advantage while being a top salesman himself. After working as the first sales rep for Rescrub, a medical equipment-oriented startup, David returned to the Southwestern Family of Companies to found Southwestern Insurance Group.

David starts his mornings at the gym training for his next triathlon. On the weekends, you can find him at a Nashville Sounds baseball game, catching up with friends, or hiking. His favorite quote is from Jackie Robinson; “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Emcee
It’s one thing for a company to reach success, but once you’ve done that, you’ve got to know how to scale it. And our next two guests know a thing or two, because they’ve done exactly that, and they’re here to explain how today, David Stuart’s the founder and president of Southwestern Insurance Group, one of the fastest growing agencies in the nation. So let’s please welcome to the stage David Stuart. Adam Outland, is President of Southwestern Consulting, as well as the founder of their Student Coaching division and the president of Kindness for Kids, as well as a host of the Inside Great Minds and Action Catalyst podcasts. Welcome Adam Outland. All right, so two presidents on the stage at the same time. Do you guys have a designated survivor? Are they in a bunker somewhere, in case the worst happens here?

Adam Outland
Oh yeah, for sure. Okay, keeping them safe.

Emcee
So David, I’d like to start with you. Actually, often when you’re looking at how to structure a business for growth, sometimes it can be more about deciding what to eliminate or to offload than necessarily about what it is you’re bringing in. You identified some really key constraints in insurance group that were presenting a bit of a choke point for growth for you guys. How were you first able to identify what those were, and then how did you adapt to mitigate them?

David Stuart
In all seriousness, I feel like that’s kind of my job every single day. And over the past seven years, that’s really a lot of what I’m looking for is, where are the friction points, and how can I make it easier for us to do business, and with that the highest value business possible. And so as I look for those things, naturally, I have, you know, we have, we have a team now. We have a sales team, a client care team, some leadership, and we’re all looking for those pieces where the friction is starting to build up and say, Okay, how can we alleviate the bottleneck and the constraint to move faster better serve our clients, and all of those fun things. And so one area that we’ve done that, just to give a nice example, is with a specific client profile that we had that early on in the business actually generated a lot of revenue for us, a lot of upfront revenue helping this specific type of client. And so it was a win for everybody. We were really excited. We’re like, cool. We found this niche. We’re helping all these people, and all this money’s coming in. So the sales team is excited. Lo and behold, after six months, a year or so, we started to notice some friction in different areas, for instance, retention or claims and service that we have to provide to these types of clients specifically, but the sales team themselves never would have really noticed that. They just saw it on a small scale, and as long as it didn’t have a massive impact on their commission, check just wasn’t something that they noticed until we saw the aggregated data on this client segment moving over to the client care team. They do a great job of reporting feedback, but naturally they were just a little bit we just felt a little bit behind all the time, and we couldn’t catch up. And so when we finally nailed down this client type, we were able to make some specific changes so we could work on higher value tasks for the client care team and sell higher value clients on the sales side of the business. So there’s a few things that we did to navigate that, to open the flow raise just the amount of revenue we could generate from our ideal clients. So one thing that we did was we slowed down our marketing, our incentives for that specific client profile, we slowed it down so we would naturally cut off that lead flow. We changed the incentives on the sales structure. And then we also taught our client care team how to better identify those clients, so when they realized they were in one of these specific situations, they were working with someone in the specific profile, how to better work with them faster and more effectively. And then we were able to add automation to basically take almost 90% of that off the client care teams plate. And so the goal is always to just raise the value of the work that everybody’s doing. And so we were able to hire people to fill those gaps in the lower value work. But naturally, if we have a salesperson who could be selling somebody that generates $500 in revenue that’s going to stay with us for 10 years. We want that, versus maybe $750 in revenue for six months. And so we were constantly looking for those things, and thankfully, we’ve made some significant changes in that area. So we’re seeing a massive improvement in retention, just by the virtue of selling different client types, and by allowing our sales team to really just focus all of their time and energy there, the sales team is also spending a lot of time servicing those clients, so we were able to offload that and then even offload it to automation. So that has really allowed us to just spend our time on the highest of value items.

Emcee
You touched on this a little bit, but you know, what were a couple of the early wins you’ve gotten from these changes so far? And you know, they have to be measurable. So what kind of metrics and KPIs are you using for benchmarks to what success looks like when you’ve reached it?

David Stuart
The lifetime value of the client is really important in our company, naturally, we’re in a reoccurring revenue model, and so if we can get somebody to stay with us. For 10 years. That’s worth way more than even just a higher revenue client for one year. And so we’re seeing higher retention also for us claims like so if we do home and auto insurance, if someone has a claim, we’re happy to service them and support them. Also that costs our partners, the insurance companies, money. So we’re seeing lower claim volumes, lower cost claims, because we have more ideal client types. So with that, we’ve really focused on referrals as well. And so lower cost for acquisition, we’re getting referrals from our ideal clients. So those are some big ones. Also, our team is just happier because they’re not dealing with those clients that tend to complain more, cause more drag, and are not providing the most value. So it’s kind of funny how that correlates the lower value client also tends to cause most of our problems. So by reducing that, everyone’s a little bit happier, honestly.

Emcee
Yeah, no. Great strategy. Adam, you were looking to move in one possible direction with Southwestern consulting, but in doing so, you kind of stumbled upon something more foundational that needed to be addressed, including kind of redefining what a southwestern coach has traditionally been, and what revenue really is, where it comes from, and it was the data that led you there. Can you tell us a little bit about how you kind of got to that point?

Adam Outland
Yeah, and none of this ever happens in isolation, right? We have, we have a great person and client experience. We have an amazing marketing team, and we have now a relatively clean hub of data that we could pull from and have team members actually look at all these numbers. And in the modern era, it’s not about recording data, it’s about how you interpret it. And there’s about 18 million ways you can interpret a set of data, but when we looked at it and we started having conversations, some of the things that we came to the conclusion of is, as we tried to a few different models, is that we realized our sales team was a little constrained with their creative ability in different ways they could sell. And some of that constraint came from the fact that when we hired a salesperson, we also simultaneously hired them to coach. And when a salesperson and a coach did a great job, we simultaneously asked that person to then lead a team. And, you know, God forbid, they were actually great at leading a team, we then added some extra responsibility to them. And so then you wonder, you know, what is it that kind of maybe degrades the sales from some of these folks, and it might be a little bit of a capacity issue, something that our partners registered on a list about a year ago as one of their challenges. So when we looked at the capacity issue on the other side, we also looked at our retention problems. So something David just shared is, you know, it’s it’s a lot better if you can have a client for 10 years than maybe a high level client for one. And I think there’s a lot of value to that idea of longevity and retention in our relationships. So when we looked at our client retention, it wasn’t bad, but it definitely wasn’t great. We realized it wasn’t due to the coaching that we provided, but more due to the retention of our coaches themselves that could come in and come out. In a sales model, where you have a direct sales force, there’s always going to be some turnover. You want to reduce it. You want to make it as little as possible. There’s always going to be some turnover there. What you don’t want is turnover to be there in the delivery part and in the service part of your model. You want that to be as stable as possible. So with a stable delivery team, you have stable retention. There’s a very long winded way to say that a couple of realizations we made is that by bifurcating our sales and our coaching delivery team, we stood a better chance at having our coaches have a 23456, year retention, because we could actually be assigning our clients to our top tier coaches that already have great retention, and then allow our sales team to actually pursue sales and the creativity that comes with an enterprise sale, a local sale, and everything in between, and they could continue on to sales leadership. So that’s a little bit of the journey and the exploration we’re on right now.

Emcee
As you enter into this new phase, what are some of the ways of doing things that maybe you had to let go of while still keeping true to the core of the business? And how have you been, I guess, putting the why over the way, and that’s a question for both of you. We’ll start with you, Adam.

Adam Outland
Yeah, one of the biggest concerns was that with part of our identity was in this practitioners of what you preach, that our sales people as part of the advantage of our delivery team that they were still selling in the field. And so we had to look at that and say, you know, can you interpret that a little bit differently? Can you say, Okay, someone on the coaching delivery side can still be a practitioner in a variety of ways. They will still have a KPI associated with production. They will be farmers, much like David, smile and laugh and just like that’s exactly what we do. We have our delivery team, our farmers for the business. So we train them to look for new opportunities inside our existing accounts. We train them to look for another coaching clients, a training opportunity, a consulting opportunity, and we set a KPI around that, so they still get to be practitioners. And in some. Ways we actually get to hire even better practitioners, because there’s a lot of extraordinarily successful people out there who would love to parlay that experience of being an extraordinary coach. They just may not want to be a salesperson at the same time, because they’ve done that for 20 years already. So it opens up our inventory of who we can actually hire with a level of experience on the coaching side. So to answer your question, one of the biggest challenges was, how do we parlay something like this practitioner, your preach model and a new model where we’re actually splitting coaching and delivery, and can we maintain our identity and our DNA and do it at the same time? And we brought that concept to our partners, our team leaders, to bring them into the conversation, to make sure they felt the same way and philosophically. Where we are right now is there’s a general agreement among our leaders and our partners that we can keep that DNA and do business a little bit differently in order to grow.

David Stuart
It’s really exciting to hear how y’all are going about this, because ours, we’re facing similar opportunities in terms of how we can grow faster. And I think one of the things that comes to mind is focusing on what is right, not or what is right not who is right. And as we go through some of these transitions, although I might already know the answer, or what I believe is the answer for how to grow a little bit faster, also moving a little bit slower, to make sure that the whole team is on board and fully understands why we’re making the change. And so again, we’ve changed significantly each year. It feels like, I mean, every quarter feels feels like a year for us, sometimes feels like dog years, almost. And so making sure to bring the team along with all of those changes has been key. And so as we look for opportunities, I’m already building out models to say, hey, we’re going to change the way that we service some of our clients. We’re going to change some of the responsibilities of the sales team because they want to serve their clients the best they can. Also, in order for them to continue growing, for us to scale this company, they do need to drop some of those responsibilities and allow others to do it. And so transitioning that slowly, making sure they understand the why behind it, and showing them a model of, hey, when we make these changes, yes, in the short term, compensation might be adjusted a little bit, responsibilities. You might not have as much fun with this aspect of the job, but you’ll be able to seize opportunity over here. And in the long run, it’s going to make the job a lot more fun for them and actually scalable in the long run, I think, just focusing on what is right and bringing the whole team along and making sure that it’s transparent and honest in terms of why we’re making these decisions and changes.

Adam Outland
And just one thing, I think, what we’ve been learning over the last probably collectively, not just our company, is that there’s parts of tradition that empower you and there’s parts of tradition that can really hold you back. And it’s being able to distinguish between the two, so you can keep your identity as a culture, but not let like the chains of doing things a certain way Hold you from a new, new revolution how you do things going forward, but, and there’s there’s something to that, but we also get to look at the rest of the workforce outside of our company, and say, Well, maybe if we’re the only one doing certain something a certain way, it’s not always a good thing that some of these other brilliant minds out there that have built big companies have figured something out that we can duplicate.

Emcee
When you do identify those things, how do you overcome the struggle of making those changes? Because I’m sure there is going to be pushback that, you know, this is the way we’ve always done it or and this is the way we’ve always done it with success. Not to say that there couldn’t be continued success, or more success doing it a different way, but if the way we’ve always done it has not been a failing model, it’s difficult to advocate for change. How do you do that?

Adam Outland
It’s something that I’ve thought a lot about is relating to the word risk. You know, so many of us in this room heralded ourselves as being like the most risk tolerant group of people in the whole galaxy, which you know, but something happens where we get comfortable with a certain way of doing things, and then you realize there’s no longer any risk, because you understand that model. And then we get what the new risk is doing something different. And there’s some of us here that sometimes struggle with risk. Even though we think we’re risk tolerant, we actually struggle taking new risks because we’ve gotten comfortable by doing things a certain way. And risk has a lot to do with how you perceive it. You know, one person’s perception of risky is another person’s perception of certainty. And so I think a lot of what I’ve been personally going through is understanding what truly is risky here, is it, is it risky to keep doing business the same way? It’s comfortable? We know what we’re doing, we know we can actually make a profit and float around the same amount of revenue, and maybe we can even push the boundaries and grow a little bit at a time. What’s far the perceived risk of doing something drastically different is much higher in our minds, but when you actually look at that risk, it actually may be a lot lower to try to do something different. It’s all about how you perceive change and and. And what you have to look at to do that. So the analogy I’d end with is this, like, it’s like driving a car over the last handful of years where one of the wheels is a little bit out of alignment. Have any of you guys have, like, an old car that had an alignment problem before? What happens to the car when the wheels out? It like vibrates, right? So we’re, you know, you just keep dealing with some of these changes. You keep going in and looking at a set of data and having a conversation, you still you feel the car vibrating, and it’s because three wheels are in alignment, but there’s like, one little wheel you got to click into place, and sometimes the vibration gets a little worse before it gets better. But that’s, that’s where we are right now.

David Stuart
I think, I definitely resonate with that. And I think that uniqueness that all of us probably have as leaders, to tolerate a lot of hard work creativity bring it all together and to grow something. I think making that scalable for dozens, if not hundreds of people is very different, at least it has been for us. And so I think early on. I mean, my entire team was working 12 hour days, still working 11 hour days, many of them, however, that might not get us to 50 salespeople or 100 salespeople. Not everyone has that skill set or that drive to work that hard. And so meanwhile, I have some team members who would happily raise their hand and say, I’m happy to keep doing it if we keep things the same, and I think it’s our job as the leaders to make the case, whether it’s their data, you know, charts, graphs, whatever, anecdotal feedback coaching mentors and say, Hey, I understand that. I appreciate that we can keep going this way and keep at our current growth rate, also, I can start to see a slowdown, I can see where we might lose momentum or we won’t be able to continue to grow at as high of a rate. And it’s my job to tell my team, hey, here’s what I see coming if we want to get to this next level. These are the changes that we get to make, and again, always open to feedback from them, but helping them see it clearly so they can get on board and get excited about it, because we’re here to grow this company for the next 50 years, the next 100 years, not just the next six months, not just the next year itself. And so I think that’s something that we all get to do. And oftentimes catch myself a little frustrated. I’m like, Ah, I got to figure out a way to explain this thing that is partly intuition and partly data, but that’s what I get to do.

Emcee
David, sticking with you as you approached this structuring process, part of it, part of some of the choices you made as part of that process actually came out as a result of both yourself and other members of your team taking advantage of southwestern coaching. Tell us a little bit about how that coaching element played a role.

David Stuart
That’s been a fun experience, honestly. And I think when we’re growing as fast as we can, and I’ve got a lot of young leaders, being able to work with Southwestern coaching has helped them grow tremendously. So I so they have a third party that they can speak with, openly, objectively, get coaching on different topics, people that have insights into different companies as well. So it’s been invaluable for us all to get that feedback from outside parties, get coaching for how we can improve what we’re building here, because I only know what I know. My team only knows what they know, and we’ve got to extend that reach and that knowledge base to continually improve. And so I think they certainly appreciated my team members appreciated investing in themselves, and to the degree that we invested in them, you know, saw that as a major benefit to being with us, and it gave them a lot of additional resources that I might not have been able to provide otherwise. So I think, I think they really enjoyed that process, and are continuing to, actually, those that are still working with coaches. And so I think it’s just allowed us to grow faster and get more insights into how to do something better and more collaboration. I mean, all around It’s just helpful. It’s immensely helpful to have a coach and mentor.

Adam Outland
You know, insatiable curiosity is a superpower, and David has that one, and that it really is. And one of the reasons I think insatiable curiosity is a superpower is because it’s in that impact on risk. And when you think about how old you were when the first time you stepped onto an airplane, right? Many of you might have been a teenager, maybe even younger. Some of you guys, maybe it was college. Some of you guys may not have been on one yet. And I came across a lady that was in that situation. She was about 65 years old, and she’d never stepped foot, and she was getting on airplane for the first time, and she was like grilled or she was sweating bullets. And you know, we’re sitting here going like this has been going on for a long time. More risk of getting struck by lightning than anything happened on this flight. It’s going to be just fine. But again, it is a perception of risk and curiosity helps you change your relationship with risk in general, because the more curious you are, the more you learn, the more you learn and understand about the world, generally, the less you feel most actions have innate risk in them, right? That what one person considers to be just terrifying. The reality is that the failure rate is not near what you think it might be by coaching people in all these different industries. It’s just, it’s an amazing opportunity to learn from them and what the how the world works. So insatiable curiosity, I think, has been a big thing to tolerate risk and to help through some of this change, and that’s about learning from your peers.

Emcee
Question for both of you, is there a Phase Two for this? Are there? Are there next steps? Next potential steps, a year, two years, even longer up the road to continue to expand on these frameworks that you’re only just now beginning to put into place.

Adam Outland
Next potential steps, yeah, there’s like 18 million Yeah. Next potential steps, I think it’s, but seriously, it’s, it’s a game of prioritization, because there’s always 8 million things coming at you at any given time of what should be the most important and urgent thing to correct. And I still don’t have all the answers. I don’t know that it’s my job to always have all the answers. I think what’s really nice is having people in the room where we sit down. One of them says, actually, if you do that, this is going to break. And you know, if we go too fast, this is going to happen, and if we go too slow, so it’s having a great committee of people around you that help you check yourself and your ideas, that you can bounce ideas and discuss to make sure your prioritization is the right one. And we’re going to screw this up. Like I know, in the next 30 steps of what we’re going to take, we’re going to break a lot of things in the process. The goal is to minimize some of the things that we break, but part of it is just knowing that we’re going to we’re going to screw some stuff up, but we don’t want to slow down so much to avoid the missteps that it takes us another 20 years to get where we want to go. We’ll learn from the failures and the mistakes, and we’ll try and prevent as many as we can by bringing things to our partner group or Senior Partner Group, and using their brilliant minds to help process some of these things as we go forward. That didn’t necessarily line out the steps, but….

Emcee
David, would YOU like to answer my question?

David Stuart
I might not do I don’t think I’ll do much better than that. In all seriousness. I mean, we have so many ideas, it really is difficult to lay them out and say what to do next and and to mitigate the risk of trying something new. And so what’s, what’s exciting is knowing, hey, we have infinite ways to grow and scale this company. What is but what is step one, what is step two and three? And how do we, you know, test it in a safe way that we’re not betting. You know, betting the house, betting the whole company, on it. How do we test it incrementally? Make sure it works. Find something that works. Build systems around it so others can replicate it. Once those systems work. Let’s try another five to 10% adjustment. And then there are some changes that are more like 20, 30% adjustments that can feel a little more risky, but as long as you know, hey, we have a fallback plan, we have contingencies, and really taking the time to think those through can at least gives me confidence to say, hey, we can go forward with this step, and worst case scenario will still be okay over here. And so continually coming up with the next piece, stabilizing it, making sure it works. Actually collecting data on it is huge. So we rigorously use our KPIs and get feedback from our team on how one are the KPIs worthwhile? Are they improving? And are we using our systems? Are we actually using them? Everybody says they’re using them, but then you got to double check, trust but verify everything. And because if it’s up to people’s gut feeling, well, just doing something new is scary, and a lot of times they’d rather turn back sooner than later. You know, one process I do have with doing new things, even just for the small ones, at least with this works extremely well with my team, is simply coming up with incentives, minor incentives, to say, Hey, give this a try. Give this a try for the month. Let’s, let’s see how it works. You know, shout out the success stories. Promote the heck out of it. This is what’s working. And then the next month, it’s Hey. In order for these incentives to be in place, this is now the minimum amount. This is how this is the new minimum based on the data from the previous month. And then eventually it just becomes a standard. And so we’ve, been able to affect a lot of change incrementally and make a lot of tests simply by putting out the right incentive structures to allow people to test, to play with it, to watch others succeed, and then implement it, and then eventually it just becomes the norm, slowly, adding incentives and then making a standard of this is what we expect. This is what the job is doing in a fair and reasonable way. But now we have a standard. So those have been some ways to incrementally affect change without shocking anybody.

Adam Outland
So I’ll just bullet point a few things. One, the integration of artificial intelligence. I mean, you know, in the news, that term is going to get beaten with a stick, you know, continually for another probably five years. So we’re, we’ve, we’re integrating AI, but the distinction is that artificial intelligence, I think, from what I’m learning about right now, and I’m in the infancy, is that it has this amazing ability to take recorded data that you have and help you interpret it the right way, quickly, because. It takes an army to look at all the information that we have and then to figure out what it is. And so part of what we’re doing is taking all of our coaching calls and distilling lessons from them and saying, Here’s where they’re paying attention, here’s where they’re not. This is what’s hitting home based on their responses. These are the topics that are less interesting. And at 50,000 minutes of recording, it’ll be able to tell us things like, hey, you know, when you hit these topics, it correlates heavily with the people that leave coaching at a year, whereas if you cover this and this, it stays longer. So, you know, that’s something that is great to have artificial intelligence do, and we’re really hopeful that it will do that, not just for coaching, but also for our sales. It has that sales outcome where, similarly, it can read our sales conversations and say, here’s the correlation to success with these concepts. This correlates without so it basically replaces 1000 auditors, auditing calls and scribbling notes and helping you interpret it. So we are finding ways to incorporate AI to help us make better decisions as a company. The other thing is, with AI is that it becomes, the more technology, the more AI, the more we’re in our screens and our computers, the more relevant what becomes? What’s the answer with technology? What becomes? What becomes the most scarce interactions with other people, relationships? It becomes a scarce commodity. And I’ve talked about it before, but this book that had such a transformational impact on me was a book called tribe, where they talked about driving together and people and lot of little, little lessons in this book by a best selling journalist. But one of the things he pointed out from research is he said, Never in history has it been so common to live in the most populated area in the entire world, and yet so feel so utterly alone. And so I challenged myself and all of us to look at our respective businesses and figure out ways that we can build community around them, because it’s going to become more and more scarce of a commodity. And wherever it’s scarce, there’s a there’s a business proposition, but there’s also a lot of value to be added. Ways we can parlay that into tightening those communities of in person interaction, because there’s going to be a real joy for that. And I think there’s just a lot of ways we can leverage in person community help build our company.

David Stuart
Yeah, I’d add some. Made me think of AI for just a moment, and it made me think of one of the changes that we made recently that really could have led to some real challenges. And basically, one of the things that we have a lot of inbound calls. We’ve got about 150 to 200 people a day that call us, and so naturally, we have a client care team to support that. However, they cannot answer 200 calls a day. It’s very difficult, right? We’re missing calls. We have frustrated clients, and we’re missing opportunities. And so through some of these masterminds that I’m a part of, I heard about a AI receptionist tool, and I said, Okay, let me do as quick of homework as I can to solve this, because this is an absolute bottleneck and constraint on our business. It is, it is a major challenge for us at that time. And the options are, hire enough people to hopefully answer these calls, get them trained, hopefully they do a good job, or look at this AI tool. And so did our homework. I talked to other people who had used it, spent some time with the company itself, and spent maybe a week or so building it out, getting it to about 70 to 80% of what we think it is today. And it was one of the things that we just had to pull the trigger on and find out Is this thing working or not. And we pulled the trigger with it, and we were able to actually do it relatively incrementally. We started with off hours, so the hours that were not working, we turned it on. We said, Hey, let’s see how it does. We still had some frustrated clients. They don’t like the AI automation, but hey, we’ll refine it. You’re also just going to have challenges with anything. And so then we started to increase the amount of hours that it would answer calls. And now I believe it answers the calls going to the sales team full time. So if a call is going to our sales team, who is meant to be outbound selling, it answers all of those calls. And so we have it handling a couple other functions, and it’s worked extremely well, but it also was a big risk, because, well, I mean, 200 people a day call and they want, they want to talk to us, but we can’t get to everybody, and we didn’t want to frustrate people. We certainly lost a few clients because the AI didn’t work well, the phone systems didn’t talk to each other well enough. We went through those challenges, but now we have something that’s going to help us scale in the long run. And so that was definitely a bit of a scary transfer of responsibilities, but it’s worked out really well, and we’re learning every day from this tool. The tool is also improving every day, and so by stepping into it, we now have opportunities to add even more value to our clients. Get back to them faster. But that was a recent one that we integrated that maybe three months ago, four months ago at this point, and it was an all hands on deck moment to see if it would work. But it’s thankfully working.

Emcee
Well, David, you mentioned earlier about getting feedback from the team. We have a question from the audience, what feedback mechanisms do you employ within your respective teams? To identify areas of opportunity or growth, what mechanisms are in place to get that feedback and create an atmosphere conducive to getting honest feedback.

David Stuart
So as you’re asking the question, I’m like, man, there’s probably a lot of ways we could do it even better. The main way, I mean, I spend a lot of time with my team. We’re all here in office, and so we made two remote people. So thankfully, I am able to interact with them daily, get their feedback, but I certainly make sure that at least on a monthly basis, we have 30 minutes dedicated to Hey, sales team. What are we doing really well, like with the whole team together? What are we doing really well? What are our issues? Because most of the issues, they just give me in real time, and I think we’ve built that relationship, at least to where they don’t have to feel like they’re going to frustrate me. They don’t have to feel like they’re complaining to let us know the issues. They can come and let us know what’s going on. I think the bigger thing is the things that they don’t know are issues. So the sales team themselves might not even know it’s an issue, because it’s just the way things have always been. And meanwhile, I’m working on another project, and I found a solution for that, but I didn’t know it was still an issue. I thought the issue was solved, or the client care team doesn’t know the sales team is dealing with an issue, or vice versa. And so sitting down and like really sitting with the sales team or the service team, and watching them do the job is incredibly helpful. Even these things that I’ve been doing for years that I assume are just being done right, spending some time and just watching them do the work for a little while, listening in on some of the calls that I assume are going well, and then you realize, okay, we need to get back to the script. We need to improve this over here. So I think spending time while the job is being done has been equally helpful to asking for feedback. Because I think so many people again, they’re just, they’re problem solvers too, they’re not complainers, right? We’re not complainers. We solve problems. We just do what we do. We don’t realize it can be done better. And so they’re not even going to raise their hand and say, Hey, this is an issue, because they just want to get the job done. And I’m like, I need to know this. I need to know this is a problem, if you don’t tell me I can’t fix it. So spending time with them has been really helpful for that.

Adam Outland
So, you know, we have a client experience department that actually, we’ve built in surveys to our clients. We’re upgrading those surveys. It’s led us to realize that we have an entire client journey, and there’s a breakage point at, like, month six, where it’s like, kind of the, not calling it the value Despair is a little extreme, but like, that’s where they’re like at their lowest emotional point in the journey, and then they’re back up again, and they have a great time at 12 months well, so we’re trying to figure out, like, using that information and that feedback mechanism from our surveys, from direct conversations, human to human with our coaches, to figure out, okay, what can we do in that that middle ground of our coaching relationship to elevate that part of the journey instead of letting it sit. So I think the surveys we have that we’ve created that go direct to clients, I think the touch points with coaches is a mechanism we set up just a general idea box where coaches that notice problems can filter in a proposal, we made it not super complex, but complex enough that it was like it had to be an idea worth sharing for them to go through the process. But those are just a handful of ways that I think we deal with inputs.

David Stuart
One other thing that we do well is work with our vendor partners. So we work with a lot of insurance companies. I mean, we sell insurance. We’ve got 20 different partners, and so every time I have the chance to interact with them, I always ask, what’s coming around the corner that I don’t see. These are multi billion dollar companies that are heavily invested in everything you can think of related to our field. And, for instance, our territory representatives. Well, they work with 1000s of agencies. They’re inside these agencies seeing things that they do well every single day. So I asked them, Hey, what are our competitors doing? What do you see that people are doing? Well, what things could we take advantage of? Here’s some of the problems that here’s some of the challenges that I’m seeing. What have you seen? What are they doing to solve this? With that, we have a lot of data on all of our clients, so you mentioned the client life cycle. So we were able to look at the data from 1000s of clients with these insurance companies and seeing at what point are they canceling their policies? And we noticed that certain companies clients would cancel after 60 days. Well, maybe they didn’t finish their onboarding documents. So now we need to create a process to help them get their documents done. Simple fix. We just didn’t even know it was a problem or towards month 10, well, that’s when their renewal comes out. They get a document saying, my premiums going up. We need to get in front of that. So can we add some text messages, some emails and then some phone calls to make sure that we get ahead of those steps and alleviate any stress or frustration from our client, help them, help remind them why they work with us and implement processes there. So our our carriers, are our partners in this business, and they have so much data, it’s insane, actually, and but being able to find some key points that are easy to implement has been helpful.

Emcee
David, Adam, this has been an extremely insightful and informative discussion. Thank you both.