Why Good Advice and Core Values Are All You Need

Joey Giangola: Christian Moore, how are you doing today, sir?

Christian Moore: Doing great, man. How are you?

Joey Giangola: Christian, I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I have to know this first, before we really do anything. And that is, is there a question that has an obvious answer to you and you often find yourself curious of what person would answer the opposite direction? What question just blows your mind that people even have to ask it?

Christian Moore: Is there a question that's obvious to me? I think it's, should we be using automation in our agency? Or maybe it's not a question. It's more like I'm talking to somebody, they're asking about our processes and how we do things. I'm like, "Okay, for example, when you send out automated text messages, what are you using?" And they're like, "We don't do that." And it's like, "Whoa, that's a non-sequitur. I don't even know how to move forward." It's like, "Okay, well we need to stop. Let's talk about how to implement automation in your agency before we can even talk about other things.

Joey Giangola: Christian, you went way too serious for me. Mine's a little bit more simple. For me, it's when they ask you, "Do you want to pick out your donuts," when you say you want a dozen donuts? Who doesn't want to pick out their donuts? I'm not quite sure the person that says just whatever you want. I'm not leaving it up to their choice. I understand they might be considered professionals, but I feel like there's some responsibility, and you like to know that somebody has their life together enough to pick out a dozen donuts. But that's just me.

Christian Moore: That's great.

Joey Giangola: On top of that, I think moving that even further into the insurance side of things outside of the business operations, there's probably conversations that you have with people that you're trying to talk to them about their insurance. And generally, what you would think that there's obvious answers in coverage needs and things like that. But yet, I would imagine that there are times where you are stunned by the fact that people have answered in a way that you maybe aren't expecting. What are some of those conversations that you have maybe with clients, where you ask a question about coverage or something like that, and they're just maybe not up to speed with or in alignment with what the agency is looking to provide them?

Christian Moore: On the personal line side, it has a lot more to do... On the auto insurance, everyone's going to say the same thing. I think it's the indoctrination of the large, major carriers, like your State Farms - in Kentucky, the Kentucky Farm Bureaus - where they get insurance advice from somebody and they're told, "Well, here's what your rate is." And they're given state minimum limits. And so oftentimes, we're constantly in our industry talking about is insurance a commodity? Is it not a commodity? Should it be treated that way? And of course, most of your agents are going to say it shouldn't be treated like a commodity, but the reality is our clients do treat it like a commodity, right? So when they come to us and they come to us with state minimum limits, it's just that overcoming that conversation of these big brands who spend a billion dollars a year saying that we're here for you, we're going to take care of you. And then they give you the worst possible advice, which is save money by transferring more risk to yourself.

So it's crazy how often it happens that we have to say, "Yes, we're saving you a lot of money, but we're also giving you five, six, seven, 10 times the coverage based off of the evaluation that we have when we have your conversation with you." So that's probably the biggest thing.

Joey Giangola: Well, that's interesting. The way that you said that, I don't know that I've ever heard it put that way of save money, but yet you're taking out more risk. And I don't know if we need some sort of independent agent tagline campaign that we go ahead and take over any of those national campaigns with that sort of tag. Is that something that you've maybe found yourself telling people?

Christian Moore: As far as the transfer of risk conversation?

Joey Giangola: Yeah. Have you said that to clients? And what's their reaction?

Christian Moore: Yeah. Yeah. So that rolled off my tongue because that's the conversation. So when someone calls in and they say, "My rates have gone up," we talk about the benefit of the independent agent being that we can shop your rates without transferring risk to you. So for example, you call State Farm and they say... And I was a State Farm agent, so this is real easy for me. Conversation goes like this. They called me and I would say, "Hey, yeah. Oh yeah, your rates are going up? Well, I'm your neighbor. You can call Jake anytime you want." But at the end of the day, if I want to lower your costs, I have to transfer risk to you in some way. I have to increase your deductible, which transfers risk to you. I have to lower your liability limits, which transfers risk to you. And at the end of the day, how can I be a good neighbor and how can I give you good advice if I am transferring risk to you just to save you a buck, when the reality is the best advice for you is to go somewhere else?

So we found out real quickly that I wasn't a good State Farm agent because I actually wanted to... Or maybe it's not fair to pick on State Farm. I wasn't a good captive agent because I wanted to give the best advice, which wasn't stay with one carrier. It was make sure you're ensuring yourself the best way possible, and that means going other places. So if someone say, "Hey, I'm going to save a thousand dollars by switching to Safeco or Auto Owners or someone like that," I'd go, "You should do that. That sounds great. Sorry, I'll see you next time. I'll call you in a year." So yeah, we absolutely have that conversation often in our agency.

Joey Giangola: Just the idea that those concepts aren't maybe simply communicated enough, maybe from our end of the spectrum to where... Once somebody gets that aspect of it, I think it makes our lives a little bit easier. And I think we're maybe afraid to maybe put that out there. I don't know if you've run across that to where there is a little lack of confidence sometimes of maybe giving it to the client that way.

Christian Moore: With my team in particular, I have some of the absolute best team members and they love our clients and they're motivated by doing the right thing. I think in the insurance space, when you find people, especially in the personal line side, they get a little squeamish in terms of giving the right type of advice because they're selling from their own pockets, right? They want to be liked. They want the person to know that they care. The narrative that I give them is that you have right on your side. You are motivated by the right things. Our agency has the right practices in place in order to take care of our clients, and people that they might hit that aren't our clients, in order to make sure that we're making the greatest impact in our community.

Our MO here is be real and do good, so be authentic and do good. So the Real Good Group exists to do good in our community. We can't do that unless we give good advice. And that has to start from having the right reasons and motives for doing things. And so at the end of the day, if you have right on your side, then you can have... I'm paying you to give good advice. And if that advice is to tell someone to stay where they're at or go somewhere else, then that's okay, because that's what's best for them. And we believe that will come back to us that way.

But by knowing that you have right on your side, it gives those team members who are maybe a little bit timid, it gives them the confidence they need to share that advice. And you really do have to back that up as an agency owner. You can't just say, "Do that," but then if they don't hit their numbers, when you go to them and say, "Well, why'd you only do $25,000 this month?" He's like, "Well, I gave good advice and told them to stay where they're at," you can't get mad at that either. Does that make sense?

Joey Giangola: It absolutely does make sense. And so I guess the thing that I'm always fascinated by every time I've talked to you, and we haven't had tons of conversations, but every time I've had a conversation with you, I've always walked away with saying, "Hey, there's always something a little bit different." It's very subtle, in the way you're trying to approach insurance. And just as you've started the agency, I guess what stands out to you in wanting to push and do things like you said, and maybe a different way that might not even seem all that unnatural to you though? But again, always something stands out to me.

Christian Moore: On the sake of being authentic, I'm a faith-driven guy, and I believe that there has to be a why behind what we're doing beyond making money. So at the end of the day, if I'm just here making money, if I'm just here helping my team members making money, and we're not investing in the lives of the people around us, and we're not making an impact in our community, then we're failing. When I started the agency, it was because I went to church and there's this guy, he's a farmer. And his kids, they can get into the work with him and they can take part in the work of his dad. And I just always admired that, but I am not a farmer. I am not a do it all guy.

I admire those men who are, and women who are, but I'm just not the kind of guy that can do that. And so I was like, "Man, I want to be able to build something. I want my children to be able to see me build something and maybe someday be able to participate in it." And so my original vision for the agency was that I would build something that would be able to create a legacy that would be able to impact our community in a valuable way, and something that maybe someday I could call my children into and say, "This is the work of the family." And so I just valued that. And so all of the decisions about how we created the Real Good Group really came from that in mind. So the end goal in mind was make a generational impact in our community, and that scales all the way back into how we spend money and why we market the way we do.

Joey Giangola: Insurance and family go way, way back. And the one thing I think that, again, stood out to me is that there's always been maybe a hyper focus on efficiency. I've always got that from you a little bit, but I can't leave this question un-asked, and that is going back to, again, the conversation, when the numbers maybe aren't hitting, and again, they're giving good advice, what do you find is an alternative to... Again, instead of a deterrent or a punishment, how do you then bring them back around and say, "Well, what can we do to continue to build the agency in the direction you want to go?"

Christian Moore: Well, it doesn't keep you from having hard conversations with people. I think one of the things that we as an insurance industry and probably most work industries are experiencing right now is an entitlement mindset with young people. And it's a question of, are they coachable or are they not coachable? I don't mind if somebody has a wrong way of thinking, and I don't mind if somebody makes a mistake or lacks the right motivation. I mind very much if they're not coachable. If it's, "Hey, yeah, you're saying this, but the data really shows that you only made 20 phone calls this week." You should be doing that either per hour or at the very minimum per day. So I guess it gets into the detective mode of, "Okay, Hey, you're not hitting your numbers, but are you really working hard? Do you feel like you deserve your salary just to show up and it's my job to take care of you further?"

I think that you can find that mentality throughout most organizations and most industries. And it's a question of how you're coaching people, so it comes back to core values, creating your core values and coaching around those. So for example, one of our core values is that we own. And what we mean by that is, if you ever read the book Extreme Ownership, they talk about Navy Seals. And they say that Seals say that they own everything around the operation, and even things that they can't foresee, they own it. It's not a good enough excuse that people weren't picking up the phone. Okay, well, get to that node faster and go find somebody who it does make sense to take care of and bring it to the agency.

It's a question of ownership. And if the person is doing everything they're supposed to do, and they're owning it with extreme sincerity, then it's like, "Okay, well, good job, keep going." And that's fine. I'm watching my voice here on the podcast. It ebbs and flows with how loud I get or how... If I were to yell really loud right now, it'd be one blip. But if you spread that out over time, it's just a little blip on the radar. But if you look at it really closely, it's one big issue, right? And I think that sometimes we have too small a view of our timeline without really saying, "Okay, well, what does this actually show us? And how can I coach around that?" And so we try and take more of a coaching mentality in our agency and less of a weekly review or quarterly review and tell you all the things that you did wrong. It's really more, we're going to coach you day in and day out. And can you receive that coaching? And if not, you probably need to go somewhere else.

Joey Giangola: Yeah. If I'm going to bring in a baseball analogy, the advanced analytics age that we are in, in terms of being able to dive deeper into the numbers and understand what truly a valuable player is, right? And how many bad decisions do you think have been made? How many people have been bounced out of the industry because we didn't take the time to maybe look at some of those things?

Christian Moore: Right, yeah. To your point, what does an all-star baseball player do, right? 300 is amazing, right? You're batting 0.3, you're getting three out of 10 at bats. Heck yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I played soccer. You might score one goal in a game, on 10-15% shots on goal, and that's fantastic. We have to have this same mentality for our team members, right? So it is a numbers game to a certain degree, but it also is making sure that they're... I think core values. I think it all comes down to core values. Are your core values things that are pretty, that you put on your website, or are they guiding values? Are they guiding principles? And can you make decisions around those things? And if so, then you can coach people up.

For example, to use your baseball analogy, if you say, "Hey, our game is small ball and our job is to get base hits and get people on the base. And we're going to move people around and score that way," and then your guys come out and they swing for the fences, then they haven't really bought into the vision of the manager. Maybe they hit some home runs, but they're going to strike out more than not. Well, same thing here, right? So if your agency is saying, "This is the way that we do things," and then you find team members not doing things, you're either going to allow yourself to be held hostage by your team members, or you're going to actually believe in your vision and make decisions around it. And that's a hard thing to do.

The reason I'm saying it maybe authoritatively in this conversation is because I've made that mistake, and I've looked to the person, I've cared more about the person than the mission, and what's happened is you end up investing in the cancer of the person and that spreads to the agency and you lose your mission, and you have to start all over. So I recommend very heartily defining the core values, making decisions around those. Those people are either bought into it or they're not. And if they're not, they need to go somewhere else.

Joey Giangola: Then I have to ask, what is the process to make sure that, by the end of it, they are getting bought into the core values? How do you set them up for success in that arena? How can you tell if you're on the right path with somebody? What do you do to make sure that, again, you're not wasting time or effort or leading yourself a stray down a path that, like you said, doesn't align with the agency?

Christian Moore: I think people make a lot of money giving these answers, right? I really like how EOS, if you've ever read Traction or you're familiar with that book by Gino Wickman, EOS, it's an entrepreneurial operating system. One of the things they talk about there is that you have to say it regularly and communicate it regularly to your team members. If you're doing that, then they should know it. But I think oftentimes as leaders, we say, "Here's our core values," and then we don't explain it enough, talk about it enough. We don't coach around them, and we don't make it a priority ourselves. Well, if we don't make it a priority, how can we expect our team members to? So in your weekly meetings, you should be having those. You should talk about core values. In your monthly, all hands meeting, which you should be having, you should be going over the core values. And then when you coach your team members, you should bring your core value into the conversation.

One of the things that we've done lately is we actually have, like the Dundee award from The Office, we actually give one to a team member who exemplifies a core value, so then it's that team member's responsibility to identify another core value and then a team member that month. And then at our monthly meeting, they say, "Hey, this person has exemplified this core value, and I would like to give them the award for the next month." And so they can take ownership of that, and they're also looking for it in others.

Joey Giangola: If you had to maybe, let's say, somebody that's looking to start and get into the game, or maybe somebody that's a little bit established and they feel like they didn't maybe set up a good enough core in the agency. Is there something that... Again, I think maybe you would consider it an advantage having, being able to start from scratch and sort of set it, or was there a point maybe that you felt like you didn't have this foundation set? And how do you maybe go about making adjustments to get there?

Christian Moore: That's really good. I'm lucky enough to have started this way. I think to your point, the people who are have the hardest time with this, maybe you've bought an agency, maybe you're the leader of a large organization listening to this, and you're trying to figure out how can you do that now? And at the end of the day, the answer is to do it. And it's painful and it's hard, and you have to be willing to set the time aside and realize that the stronger your core values are, the stronger your communication of those are, the better your narrative is, the better you're going to take care of clients. But more importantly, you're going to take care of your team members in a better way. And happier team members will produce at a higher level. I think the answer is... Well, I told you about this before.

My friend and I are starting a podcast called The Refinery Podcast. And basically, the entire conversation is this conversation, this portion of it. He was a branding guy and we were going to start selling custom websites. And we still do that through Agent Refined. But what we found is that everyone needs a good website, yes, but there are agency owners out there, even small one, making two, three, $400,000 a year and their branding sucks. It's awful. And then you talk to them and they say, "Man, why do I need to drop $5-10,000 on a website when I'm making all this money?" And it's a really fair question. But the reality is that they just happen to be good people. They don't happen to sell insurance. And if happen to sell insurance, you're always going to have a stronger narrative, so we exist to do good in our community.

We do that by taking a portion of everything we make and investing it in the community around us. We happen to sell insurance, right? So the reason that the Real Good Group exists is because we were created to exist to give, of our time, of ourselves, of our money. And we happen to sell insurance. So there are companies that give more than us, that do a better job with generosity than we do. But because they happen to give, their narrative is never as strong as ours. And so if you can create a narrative that inspires people to action, then when you come up against a company like mine, you can actually retain your clients. But if I talk to your clients and I tell them why we exist, and we have the same amount of money, guess what? They switch to us every time, because people want to be inspired by something. And if it's just making money, that's not enough. It's not enough.

Joey Giangola: Christian, I've got three more questions for you, sir.

Christian Moore: Okay.

Joey Giangola: And the first one is, what is one thing you hope you never forget?

Christian Moore: One thing I hope I'd never forget is how many things I've said I would never do that I end up finding myself doing. It has humbled me in a really, really significant way. I think as you age and you start to get around the age of 40, you find yourself being humbled by life. And I have truly been humbled in many ways. And there's so many things that I've said I would never do that circumstances, or just a heart or mindset change, has led me into those things. And so I hope that my "nevers" get fewer and fewer.

Joey Giangola: Now, on the other side of that, what is one thing you still have yet to learn?

Christian Moore: That I can't do everything. I think I'm getting there. I think I'm getting there. I think as agency owners, I think this applies to everybody in our space or at least innovative guys like me. I'll see something and I'll say, "You know what? I can do it better than that." And then I go outside the box, I start creating it. And what I find myself doing is spending a lot of time, money, effort, energy, when I should have just paid for the dang thing that wasn't perfect and spent my time being happier. So I think I've given myself a lot of heartache and heartburn by trying to perfect things instead of just staying in my lane.

Joey Giangola: All right, Christian. Last question. If I were to hand you a magic wand of sorts to reshape, change, alter, speed up really any part of insurance, what's that thing? What's it doing? Where is it going?

Christian Moore: I think that I would completely disable IVANS. We have one funnel of information that happens in the insurance space, going through one place. In order for an independent agent to get their information, it has to go through one place, and that's owned by another raider, Applied Systems. So whether I'm a part of Applied or not, they have access to all of my data. And so if I were going to do it, I would open up the space, everybody would have resting APIs, and they'd be able to directly integrate into insurance agencies.

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

Christian Moore: All right, man.