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.
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 →One useful idea. One honest behind-the-scenes story. One tool I actually use. Every Tuesday.