Is Most of Your Business Coming From The Best Place?

It's certainly a tricky balance to survive that transition and still hold onto the core values the foundation was built on.

The secret is finding a way to reinforce that structure while remolding your flow of business.

If you do, you'll be able to build your agency to heights you never imagined.

Nancy Nicklow, President of Huff Insurance, talks about the journey they took to find a new, yet familiar personality.

Full Episode Transcript

Nancy Nicklow: I'm great, Joey, how are you?

Joey Giangola: Nancy, I'm doing all right. I'm doing all right. I kind of want to know this first, before we jump into anything, what's something that you're secretly proud of that maybe no one will ever see?

Nancy Nicklow: I don't know if no one will ever see it, but if you just met me today, you would not know that I lost 120 pounds. So that's something I'm pretty proud of.

Joey Giangola: Yeah, that's pretty impressive. At some point, somebody might see it as they maybe get to know you a little bit more, "Hey, wait a second. Those two people aren't the same." I was hoping you didn't go with your kids because that's an easy one for most people to go with their kids because sometimes you might never see them. But no, actually, we share that in common. I'm a fellow, a former heavy person as well around, around the hundred mark. You got me beat there by a couple of pounds, Nancy, but yeah. So I guess high fives around for us, I think.

Nancy Nicklow: That's right.

Joey Giangola:Where I wanted to go with that is... Being in the business as long as you've been in running the agency, there's probably a lot of things that you've done throughout your career that have made impact bigger or smaller, but what's something that you are secretly proud of that maybe doesn't show itself in the day to day operations of the agency.

Nancy Nicklow: I would say that I'm secretly proud that we kept the core values of our agency the same after my dad passed away.

Joey Giangola: That would lead me to believe then you had hesitation that wasn't going to happen, or what made you concerned that that might not be something you could do?

Nancy Nicklow: We needed to modernize the agency. Because when my dad passed away that would've been like 2007, there was still paper files and commercial lines, and there was still some very old ways that we did business. We needed to modernize those for efficiency. We needed to modernize those, to be able to be better able to serve our clients. And so in the process of doing that, making sure though that we didn't lose our core values was a big focus of mine and to make sure, and now whatever 13, 14 years later look back and say, "We were able to do that". Like we were able to monetize the agency, but that doesn't mean that you forget your purpose of being in business and what you want to stand for. And you can do both.

Joey Giangola: Was there something that you sort of put at the center of that and say, one, we need to do this first, but at the same time, this is how we're going to keep those values. Was there a piece of modernization that stood out that that was lacking, maybe that kind of kicked the whole thing off?

Nancy Nicklow: I mean, the biggest thing with modernization was stepping away from, even in the last 12 months, it's been stepping away from as many in-person meetings as we once were doing. And going out and handshaking to using more of technology and Teams and things like that to build those connections, and making sure that you're understanding the purpose is the relationship, and it doesn't really matter the means that you do it. It's a matter of keeping the relationship. So if we had to go to technology and use Teams, because people weren't in their office to be able to meet, and people didn't want you in their office to be able to meet for the last 12 months, we didn't want to just not communicate with people because we couldn't do it the way that we've always done it going out and handshaking, right. So remembering what your core values are and relationship management is being one of them and being a trusted advisor, then we had to find new technology to be able to continue doing what we believe it. Does that make sense?

Joey Giangola: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up the relationship because I mean, once upon a time, I can't remember how long ago this was. I can't remember if it was you or your better half Jerry, mentioned that you had brought somebody in the agency to sort of really just focus on that relationship piece. One, I don't know if that's still happening, but two, I guess the real question is how intentional were you about overcompensating for that lack of in-person relationship? What have you sort of dug into to sort of mimic that in a more distant world now, is there anything that you, any tricks that you sort of relied upon to, to simulate that?

Nancy Nicklow: I mean, they weren't really tricks, but we've definitely been using a lot more video, as doing meetings over video and doing meetings over zoom. The benefit of that is the fact that you don't have to have that travel time, right. So, whereas I would leave the office for to go 30 minutes to get to an appointment, to be there for 45 minutes or an hour, and then 30 minutes back. Now I can do two 45 minute appointments in that time period and never have left the office. So we found that we can meet more relationship oriented and more communicated in the pandemic than we were post pre pandemic, because we were always having all this travel time.

Joey Giangola: I think you mentioned before, really got into everything on the record and I've heard from other agencies where they've actually increased business. They're doing more business than they have before. I mean, it sounds simple, but is it just simply maybe being able to have more time to have more conversations and some more policies?

Nancy Nicklow: Yes. I think it all goes back to, do you have more time to have a relationship, and have a deeper relationship? Because you don't feel like, "Oh my gosh, I don't want to go see this person because it's two hours away and that's half my day". And you're willing to be on video longer. And I think video is more relationship than a telephone or a letter or especially in email, right. And we're still doing all those things. I mean, we're still using email, we're still doing our drip marketing campaigns, we're still sending handwritten cards for various things. We're still doing all those things, but I just think video is just another way, so I can get in contact with you maybe once a year by in person, but then maybe I could check in with you quarterly, via Teams that we weren't doing before, because you know, we were thinking, "Oh my gosh, in order to do this, we've got to go out". And that's another two hour adventure.

Joey Giangola: Yeah I always thought it was a little upside down just in terms of the ratio of in-person to video, like to not in person communications now. It feels like you said, you only maybe need to really see somebody face to face one or two times a year to keep things at a healthy level.

Nancy Nicklow: Right, right. I mean, there's still times, especially on large commercial that you need to be out there because if you're not out there, you can't see the changes, and be able to help identify where there's a problem, where there hasn't been one before, and things like that. But you don't necessarily need to be out there quarterly, if you can be doing the other quarterly meetings via Teams. And if that's going to help you increase your communication because you have Teams or Zoom or whatever to do that with, then I think that's the benefit that came out of the pandemic. Other than that, we're all set up anyway to have remote, cause we already have an employee that moved from Maryland to Florida that is still working with us from Florida. So we were all set up to handle the pandemic and handle people working from home before it happened.

Joey Giangola: Good thing for that one employee, huh?

Nancy Nicklow: Yeah. Exactly.

Joey Giangola: I want to go back to, you mentioned sort of the... I can't not talk about marketing if there's an opportunity, you mentioned the sort of the drip campaigns. I want to say you called it your lost souls campaign at one point in time. Is that still a thing? Is that still working for you? Have you made improvements to it and, and how's it going?

Nancy Nicklow:We are always tweaking it. It seems like that and the unconverted leads, but it's still working. I mean, it's still probably 20% of our business is coming from unconverted leads and lost souls on the annual basis. The lady I was with before you came in was actually someone we had quoted in October. She didn't end up going with us then, and now something else has happened with the carrier that she's displeased with. So now she's looking again and because we kept in constant contact with her, we were one of the first people that she called when she wanted to get updated quotes because, it wasn't that it was a bad relationship or a bad feeling that she didn't take the insurance. It was just competitive or she felt that she had been with her current carrier for 20 years, you know, it wasn't enough savings to really leave.

But now she's had a bad taste in her mouth, so now she's looking to leave this time and would we have gotten a call, have we not been dripping on her every month for the last seven, eight months. Before we had the lost soul campaign, it was very rare that somebody would call us back that we quoted a year ago or two years ago and say, "Hey, I want you to requote me." Now that happens all the time.

Joey Giangola: I'm going to just speculate here, feel free to correct me, but I would imagine that it didn't take you all that long to at least initially set it up in terms of how long it has been able to run and the results that it has generated sort of year over year.

Nancy Nicklow: No, it's a very simple campaign. I mean, it has an email five months. It has an email 11 months. It has an email... It's basically an email, a postcard, and then a task for an account manager to call them. We even call in commercial that we know isn't going to renew again for another seven months. We're calling at that five month mark just to be able, especially if it's a commercial account that we really want, just to be able to stay in their presence. You know, "Hey, how are things going since you're renewed? How was your audit process? Is there anything that we could do to help you? We still want to earn your business what is that going to take?" And so that we're having that mid year conversation with the person instead of just, "Hey, it's 60 days prior to the renewal, let's have a conversation." They're getting this call out of the blue, which probably most other agents aren't doing.

Joey Giangola: You mentioned that that maybe accounts around 20% of the business. What's the big, what's the big ticket item? What's the thing that you do the most that works the most?

Nancy Nicklow: SEO. It's still number one.

Joey Giangola: Which again is another one of those things that, it's not easy to set up, it takes a lot of time, but it's one of those things that agents talk about forever and ever. Let's go back, how long have you been at the game and how long did it take until it actually started to be on the radar? And then at what point did it make the jump to number one?

Nancy Nicklow: It's probably been something we've been working on since 2011, I would say, so 10 years now. Jerry will tell you that we failed miserably at the beginning. You know, we he had some costly learning mistakes, but at this point, Jerry works at it every day, I don't want to dismiss that, or take that lightly or anything like that. And if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't know how to do it. And we probably wouldn't be doing it as well that we do.

I mean, now he basically works on it less than an hour a day compared to what we were working at it at one point. Like even this week I already did a web... I'd usually write the content. Jerry usually makes it look pretty and SEOs it and all that kind of stuff. So I did two blogs for him week and I did a new page to add to the website because we realized that we didn't have a landlord page. Like we had apartment owners page and we had home sharing page, but we didn't have anything about landlords or renting property. So I did another page to add to the website and then we did, and I did two blogs for him.

We're constantly adding to it. It's not like one of those things that you can just set it and forget it and walk away and be like, "Oh, we did SEO. We're good." I don't know. He told me yesterday, Google's came out with a new algorithm or something and our web traffic is now down compared to what it was prior to that change. But our conversion ratio is up since that change. So he's like, I don't know if it's stopping a lot of bots and things from hitting the website because of what they changed, but our conversion is up. But our number of web traffic, people coming to the website is down. I mean, he's the one who's constantly monitoring that and he can give you the exact number on exact day of what it is. I just go, okay, that's great.

Joey Giangola: I mean, you're only getting people there so they actually convert and do business and all that good stuff. So the visitor numbers just the pretty face in the mirror, right. I think that the interesting thing too, and this is a bit of a nuance, right, is you probably wouldn't have gotten to the landlords thing. You can sort of just sort of tack on, right. You just brick by brick sort of thing, and as you sort of develop and notice these little gaps, you can sort of fill them in, even though you probably had a bunch of people already coming to you for landlords off of the apartment stuff and everything else, but going, Hey, let's pump it up a little bit. Let's go ahead and really go after that and address a little bit more specifically.

Nancy Nicklow: I mean, it's because our website is so large, as far as content goes, between the blogs and the web pages and things like that, because we don't have just a webpage for commercial insurance. And like some agencies go their website and there's a page for personal insurance there's page for commercial insurance there's page for life, and then a page for health insurance. And that's their products, right. You go to our contractors page and then our contractors page has got another page for electrical contractors and another page for plumbing, contractors, and another page for concrete contractors and home remodelers, and so just under contractors, there's like 30 page sub pages based on every kind of contractor out there, right. And most agencies websites aren't that in-depth, but that's why when somebody is looking for something, we're the ones that get found the fact that we have content specific to that page and the fact that we're constantly updating it so that Google keeps crawling our website because every week that they crawl it or day or whatever that they do, almost, they find new content out there.

Joey Giangola: You can never be too specific. I don't think I've ever asked this question, I'm kind kind of curious, whose idea was it to, to start this? Was it, was this something that Jerry brought to you and said, I think we should try this, or is this a joint effort that you were both on board with? Was there like a marital sort of barter that happened to like actually give this a shot?

Nancy Nicklow: So again, it goes back to, my dad passed away in 2007, Jerry coming a board in 2009 basically. Our agency model is different than most because we don't have commissioned producers that are out pounding the streets. We have account managers that service and sell, and we hire people that are very good at relationship management and very good at closing, but aren't very good hunters. And when my dad was alive, that was his role. He was the hunter, right? So he was the one that would go out on the street and meet people all day long and get people to know about the agency, call the agency. He did very well for himself for the forty-five years that he ran the agency, and that's not my personality, that's not my strong suit. I'm a good relationship person. I'm a good closer, but I'm not a good hunter.

As we were looking at the business. And we were looking at the fact that the majority of our clients were within 15 miles of the agency and the fact of how are we going to grow the agency? Like we were maintaining, we were sustaining, and we were growing at that average 3% a year or whatever. If we really were going to grow this so that this could be something that when we retire, we can say, look what we did. We took it from here and we brought it to here, right? And we want to double and triple and quadruple the size of the agency. How are we going to do that? And looking at my strengths and looking at the strengths of the team, we decided, the only way that we're going to do this is through SEO, because if we can draw more leads into the agency that then the girls have to close, our sales are going to go up.

And if we're catching people, when they are actually wanting to buy, "I want to buy insurance today," right? That our success rate was going to be higher. Jerry, I mean, originally was a finance guy, wanted to be in finance and, and that kind of stuff. And then fell in love with SEO and marketing and conversion rates and all this other stuff. And so we started doing it and we were doing it before anyone else, locally to us was doing it.

You know, now our average customer, when we look at the, you know, our average customer is probably within a hundred miles of the agency, not within 15. Our reach has expanded our states that we in has expanded. We've already more than doubled the size of the agency that we acquired in 2007. We've almost tripled it now. We're, we're reaching our goals, but we had to go to where my strength was, and where Jerry's strength was and say, okay, unless we're going to find somebody to hire, or if it's going to fit Ray's role, what are we going to do that's going to help the agency get to where it needs to be.

For the last five years, I would say that my dad was alive, he was comfortable, you know. He was made enough money. He had made a good living. He could go out and do what he wanted to do. And so there really wasn't that incentive to grow. I mean, Jerry and I are still in our forties, so we still have this incentive to... We've got another 20 years to work, we want to make something of this place, not just, "Look what I did in the past," and sit back.

That's how SEO started. And then we just went from there, and then Jerry has just become the genius on it, and I just take the phone calls. And I can always tell when he starts doing something different or running an ad, because all of a sudden I'll like walk into his office and I go, "Are you trying to kill me today? Because I've had 22 new business quotes come in this afternoon, offer commercial insurance and what are you trying to do to me?" And he's like, "Oh, did you figure out I ran an ad?" I was like, "Yeah, I figured it out".

Joey Giangola: I guess that's definitely a good problem to have with your spouse as opposed to the phone not ringing enough, right?

Nancy Nicklow: Right. Exactly.

Joey Giangola: All right, Nancy, take it three more questions for you. The first one is pretty simply, what's one thing you hope you never forget?

Nancy Nicklow: How important integrity is.

Joey Giangola: All right.

Nancy Nicklow: And to do what you say you're going to do.

Joey Giangola: Fair enough. Now, on the other side of that, what's one thing you still have yet to learn?

I have so much, so much to learn. The thing that I am working on trying to learn is better questioning skills.

All right Nancy, last question to you then. If I were to hand you a magic wand of sorts to reshape, change, alter, speed up really any part of insurance that you saw fit, what is that thing, where is it going, and what is it doing?

Nancy Nicklow:The thing that needs to change the most, the quickest is integration between the carriers and the agents systems. Like I should be able to enter in a change request in EPIC and not have to go to the carrier site and process that same information on the carrier site. That's just ridiculous to me, it's ridiculous to the young people that come in this, into the office, and into the agency world. Why don't these systems all talk to each other so that you can just do it once and be done with it? That's something that is going, makes us struggle with the young people when they try to come into this industry, is they just don't, they're like, "I don't understand why this, why everything's so antiquated, why the websites are so antiquated with the carriers." So if there was something I could change and change pretty quickly, it would be that, so that everything was seamless, everything. I mean, we talked about it in 1980, right? [inaudible] single entry, right, 1980. It's still 2021 and we're still talking about it, right. That's what I would fix.

Joey Giangola: Nancy, this has been fantastic. I'm going to leave it right there.

Nancy Nicklow: All right. Thank you, Joey.