The 3 simple shifts that take women business owners from owner-operator to CEO of a business that runs without them.
(An insurance-specific masterclass is in the Agency Collective.)
Real strategy, real numbers, and real stories from the businesses I coach. New essays each week.
When someone in your local market thinks of your category of business, who comes to mind? For most categories, the answer is a list of about four names. Not ten. Not twenty. Four. The four local businesses that...
Keep reading →An agency owner will tell you they know the difference between a good lead and a tire-kicker. Then they will run eight quotes that week, close two, and discover six months later that both of the closed households...
Keep reading →You are good at what you do. You are not good at selling it. This is the most common self-assessment from small business owners who find themselves with capacity to take on more clients but cannot reliably fill...
Keep reading →Most agencies do not have a marketing plan. They have a handful of marketing activities that have accumulated over the years. A carrier co-op campaign here. A local sponsorship there. A newsletter that goes out irregularly. A social...
Keep reading →Most small businesses do not have a marketing plan. They have a list of marketing activities. A newsletter they sometimes send. A social media account someone posts on a few times a month. Maybe a referral program that...
Keep reading →Ask most personal lines agency owners about commercial and you will hear a version of the same response. It is complicated. The service burden is heavier. The sales cycle is longer. The relationships are harder to build. Most...
Keep reading →Most small business owners hear recurring revenue and think subscription software. Netflix. Spotify. The tech companies that sell access to a product on a monthly basis. This is a narrow read of what recurring revenue is. Recurring revenue...
Keep reading →A family leaves the agency this month. They had auto, home, and umbrella with you for seven years. What did that cost the agency? Most agency owners cannot answer this precisely. They know it is bad. They have...
Keep reading →How much does it cost your business when a client leaves? Most owners have never run this calculation. They know intuitively that losing clients is bad. They do not know how bad, which means they cannot make informed...
Keep reading →Every agency owner has told themselves the same story about referrals. We get them. They just come in organically. We do not really have a system. It kind of works. The story is usually almost true and completely...
Keep reading →Most small businesses want more referrals. Very few have a referral engine. The difference matters because hoping for referrals and running a referral engine produce completely different results. Hoping produces the occasional unpredictable referral, usually from a particularly...
Keep reading →The average independent agency has never charged a fee for advisory work. Not once. They give away coverage reviews, risk assessments, claims consultations, and renewal strategy sessions, all under the assumption that commission is the only acceptable way...
Keep reading →You started charging hourly because that is what everyone in your industry charges. An hourly rate felt honest. You were selling time. You put a number on the time. The client paid for the time used. It seemed...
Keep reading →Pull up your book. Find a household that has been with you for five years with only an auto policy. Look at their situation. No home coverage, no umbrella, no life. That client has probably bought a house,...
Keep reading →How many revenue streams does your business run on? For most small businesses, the honest answer is one. Maybe one and a half, if there is a small product line that supplements the main service. Everything else is...
Keep reading →Most independent agencies have one revenue stream: commission. It has been the default for the industry for decades, and for a long time, it was enough. The agencies that are growing fastest today have built on top of...
Keep reading →Your revenue is the same this year as last year. Maybe slightly up. Maybe slightly down. Either way, flat. The first instinct is usually to blame marketing. More leads. Better funnel. Bigger ad spend. More social media. The...
Keep reading →Most agencies grow flat. Five years in the same premium range. Ten years in a slow drift. Twenty years as a comfortable practice that never quite got past the owner's personal ceiling. The industry story about why this...
Keep reading →Your business has a rhythm. You just have not written it down. Every small business operates on cycles. Some are industry-standard. Some are client-driven. Some are seasonal. Some are tax-driven. All of them repeat. And yet most owners...
Keep reading →The same things happen every year in every agency. Renewals cluster in certain months. Carrier contingency discussions happen at specific times. Open enrollment affects group business on a predictable calendar. State licensing deadlines show up in the same...
Keep reading →Most small businesses have some version of an operations manual. It is usually a folder of Word documents, a Google Drive littered with PDFs, or a wiki someone started two years ago and no one has touched since....
Keep reading →Most agencies have an operations manual. It lives as a PDF in a shared drive. Nobody has opened it in eighteen months. The last person who updated it left the agency two years ago. Half the processes inside...
Keep reading →The tools were supposed to make the business easier. For a while, they did. Then a new tool came out that was better. You added it. Then another. You added that too. Then a team member recommended a...
Keep reading →Pull up last month's credit card statement. Count the software subscriptions. Now count the ones your team actively uses every week. For most agencies, those two numbers are not close. The first number is usually between ten and...
Keep reading →Most small business owners do not have a weekly routine. They have a calendar, which is not the same thing. A calendar is where meetings happen. A routine is a deliberate design of what the owner's week looks...
Keep reading →Ask ten agency owners what their weekly routine looks like, and nine of them will describe reactive chaos with a few standing meetings thrown in. The tenth one is probably running a well-run agency, and the reason they...
Keep reading →Small businesses lose people for three reasons, in roughly this order: they stopped being heard, they stopped growing, or they got a better offer somewhere else. The third one you cannot always prevent. The first two you can....
Keep reading →Every agency wants to retain more. Almost every agency has the same mediocre retention, somewhere between eighty and eighty-five percent, and nobody is quite sure how to move the number. The industry default answer is to care more...
Keep reading →You have tried to delegate. It has not stuck. And you have quietly concluded either that your team is not strong enough, or that you cannot let go, or both. Neither conclusion is usually right. The honest answer...
Keep reading →Most agency owners try to delegate the same way, and it produces the same predictable problem. They hand over a task. They say let me know if you have questions. The team member does the task somewhat differently...
Keep reading →The standard small business onboarding is not an onboarding. It is an apology. The new hire shows up on Monday. The owner is sorry they do not have a proper plan. The new hire shadows someone for a...
Keep reading →Most new producers are onboarded like this. They show up on day one. They shadow someone for a few days. They make a list of carriers to get appointed with. They start trying to write business while also...
Keep reading →Most small business first hires fall into one of two categories. A friend or family member who starts helping out part-time. Or a stranger hired into a vague assistant role with no clear definition. Both patterns produce the...
Keep reading →The first hire in an independent agency is almost always rough. Not because the person is wrong. Because the hiring process was wrong, and the hire was set up to fail before they started. Most agency owners hire...
Keep reading →Here is a test. Take the client workflow you have in your head or in your existing documentation. Hand it to the newest person on your team. Ask them to run it on a real client, start to...
Keep reading →If you sold your agency tomorrow, how much of the carrier relationship value would transfer with it? For most independent agencies, the honest answer is: some of it. The carrier appointments transfer. The contracts transfer. But the relationship...
Keep reading →You have been meaning to document your processes for three years. You are still meaning to. The reason is simple and it is not about discipline. Documentation, done the traditional way, takes hours of uninterrupted writing, and uninterrupted...
Keep reading →Most service workflows in most agencies were designed by the owner, in their head, over a decade. They never got written down. They never got stress-tested. And when the owner finally sits down to document them, the result...
Keep reading →You are going to build six SOPs this year. They are going to live in a shared folder your team already uses. They are going to be short, practical, and genuinely useful. And the order you build them...
Keep reading →If you build one SOP this year, which one? This is a better question than how many SOPs should I have. The right answer for most agencies is not zero and it is not fifty. It is six,...
Keep reading →When a small business owner hears the word process, they usually hear bureaucracy. Red tape. Corporate overhead. Something that belongs at a company with ten thousand employees, not a company with seven. This misreading is why most small...
Keep reading →Most agency owners have been told they need SOPs for the past decade. Most have not built them. The guilt has been accumulating the whole time. Here is the good news. The version of SOPs you have been...
Keep reading →When most small business owners think about operations, they think about something that big companies do. Enterprise software, org charts, process engineers, SOC 2 compliance, training departments. None of that applies to a business with seven people and...
Keep reading →Every agency that has ever scaled past the owner has installed the same basic operating architecture. The logos are different, the states are different, the commercial-to-personal mix is different. The architecture is almost identical. Four systems. In this...
Keep reading →Every business owner knows the question by heart. How do I grow faster? It is the default lens. The default podcasts. The default advice. The default shape of any conversation with a peer at any conference. Almost no...
Keep reading →Ask an agency owner to describe themselves and watch what happens in the first sentence. Nine times out of ten, it goes something like this. I have a three-million-dollar book in the Midwest, focused on small commercial and...
Keep reading →Your revenue was down twelve percent last month. How did you feel? If the honest answer is something like I felt like I was failing, personally, as a human being, you have an identity problem that will, eventually,...
Keep reading →Go look at your agency's values right now. The ones on the website. The ones in the employee handbook. The ones that were the output of a retreat two years ago and got printed on a nice poster....
Keep reading →Think about the life you are actually living, not the one on Instagram and not the one you are trying to get to. The kids you have. The spouse or partner or solitude you have. The body you...
Keep reading →At the end of every month, most agency owners do one of three things. They close out the commission report, look at the premium number, and move on. Or they think about doing a review, decide they are...
Keep reading →Every January, you write down a new set of goals. Every December, you look at the list and realize you hit maybe one or two of them, and you are not sure what happened to the rest. Most...
Keep reading →You have been tired for a long time. Not sleepy tired. Bone tired. The kind where a weekend off does not actually restore anything, because by Sunday night the weight is already sitting on your chest for Monday....
Keep reading →You are at your desk at seven. Your first team member arrives at eight-thirty. You are still there at six, finishing things up. They left at five. This has been the pattern for years, and you have told...
Keep reading →You sit down at your desk at eight. By eight-seventeen, you have been pulled into three things that were not on your plan for the day. A CSR needs an answer about an endorsement. A carrier rep wants...
Keep reading →At the end of a twelve-hour day, you have two options for how to feel about it. Option one: you were busy all day. Back to back. Never stopped. Your calendar was full, your inbox was moving, you...
Keep reading →Ask ten agency owners how their agency is doing, and nine of them will answer with a premium number. Five million. Three million. Up twelve percent year over year. Down a little, honestly. Premium is what we track...
Keep reading →The honest reason most small business owners skip quarterly planning is not that they do not believe in it. It is that quarterly planning feels like something you do when your life is already in order, and theirs...
Keep reading →When was the last time you took two uninterrupted hours to think about the agency instead of run it? For most owners, the honest answer is some version of never, or some version of last January, with the...
Keep reading →Walk through your office on a Wednesday afternoon and count the number of things that are paused waiting for a decision from you. Not big things. Small ones. An email that needs an approval. A vendor invoice that...
Keep reading →Your team calls you the closer. They say it like a compliment. You are the one who saves the accounts that are about to leave. You are the one who handles the hard carrier conversation. You are the...
Keep reading →Close your eyes and describe last Tuesday. Most small business owners can give you the broad strokes. A meeting at ten. Client work in the afternoon. Email throughout. Something on the phone around three that took longer than...
Keep reading →You feel like you are working all the time. You are also not sure what you actually did this week. That combination is the most reliable sign that an agency owner is due for a time audit. Not...
Keep reading →Why does your business exist? If the first answer in your head is "to make money," that is fine. It is true, and it should be true, because a business that does not make money is a hobby....
Keep reading →Ask the average agency owner what the agency's vision is, and the answer is usually a number. Five million in premium. Double the book. Ten thousand households. Break into commercial. Those are goals. Those are not vision. The...
Keep reading →When someone asks where your business will be in two years, what happens in your body? For most small business owners, the honest answer is a low-grade shrug. You know it will be bigger. You hope it will...
Keep reading →You get a referral from a long-time client. A friend of theirs. Good risk, good premium, and a relationship that would be easy to close. You could hand it to your producer. You know you should hand it...
Keep reading →The word CEO gets thrown around a lot by small business owners. It is on LinkedIn. It is on the website. It is on the business card. The honest question is whether the work behind the title actually...
Keep reading →Look at last month's commissions. Whose name is at the top of the report? If it is yours, and it has been yours for three or more years running, you have a growth problem that has nothing to...
Keep reading →It took Laura six years to notice. A successful bookkeeping practice. Eighteen clients. Two part-time helpers. Consistent five-figure months. On paper, a business. In reality, a job with extra steps. The moment she noticed was a Tuesday in...
Keep reading →It is Tuesday morning. Your CSR just sent a text because the carrier pulled a quote. There are ten emails, three voicemails, and a renewal that needs a decision before eleven. A carrier rep wants a call back...
Keep reading →One useful idea. One honest behind-the-scenes story. One tool I actually use. Every Tuesday.