How One Agent Escaped Insurance Captivity to Find Better Options

Joey Giangola: Mr. Ivan Hudson, how you doing today, sir?

Ivan Hudson: Doing well. How are you doing?

Joey Giangola: Ivan, I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I want to know this before we get into anything too serious.

Ivan Hudson: Okay.

Joey Giangola: What's something that has an unexpected amount of options that you never really think about?

Ivan Hudson: Something that has a lot of unexpected options that you don't really think about?

Joey Giangola: Yeah.

Ivan Hudson: Well, maybe breakfast.

Joey Giangola: All right.

Ivan Hudson: Yeah.

Joey Giangola: Fair enough. And I'm going to go with olives. I don't know if you ever thought about this last time you were at the grocery store, but you can buy olives in small, medium, large, and extra large and it's something we grow and we decide how big it's going to be. I have no idea why I've never thought about olives being something that I needed that many choices for. I don't know if you like olives. They're pretty-

Ivan Hudson: No, they've grown on me. I kind of like them on pizza these days, but in the raw, no, I can't do the olives.

Joey Giangola: All right. I want to move this over to the world of insurance and I think the interesting thing there is there's always a ton of choices and options in the world of insurance and sometimes people don't necessarily even realize what's available. What conversations have you had in those unexpected options conversations with your clients and talking about the things that they might not even think to consider or even realize something that should be important? Where do you maybe put the focus on some of those things?

Ivan Hudson: Yeah. So in the decade I've been in the industry, all on the agency side, I've noticed that folks usually kind of shop, if you will, around three areas, price, which try not to lead with that because if you gain a customer on price, you usually lose a customer on price. Convenience. Convenience is another component and convenience means different things to different people. I believe pre-COVID, location was a huge factor that some people still would consider. How close in proximity is an agency to my home or in my route to the office. But now with our virtual environment that we live in, that location isn't just that primal factor, but it could mean I have options in how I pay.

Ivan Hudson: So convenience means different things to different people. And then obviously product is what I like to lead with and like to really connect with clients around because there are so many options, whether it's options for different carriers and product lines, but each customer has a unique risk profile. As much as we have options to offer on this side, it's still very much a consumer driven marketplace. We want to let our customers know that they have options to purchase their insurance that align with their specific needs at the moment at the time of their purchase, which also means that it can change based on life events in the future.

Joey Giangola: Have you found any sort of special way to approach any one of those things? Is there something that you like to sort of attack? Again, with the options and coverage being abundant and overwhelming at times, is there a way that you maybe simplify that for people to help really understand it?

Ivan Hudson: Well I think it comes with setting expectations upfront, even when data is king, content is king. And so we try to collect as many significant data points upfront. Although we can't peel back the bail a bit that carrier your algorithm, we know some of those major factors that they're looking for. Even folks that have the means, have a little bit more disposable income. Nobody wants to pay more for insurance than they have to. Before we go dive right into getting dates of birth and a lot of personal identifying information, we like to tell our customers why we're asking.

Ivan Hudson: And so a lot of times that allows us to do our job a little bit more, which is find the best overall quotes, not the cheapest, but the best overall quote for the customer. When they're at ease and more forthcoming about giving us the information that we need to quote, the number of folks in the household, things like that, that sometimes just gets concealed 'cause the consumers don't really know why someone's asking questions that in their world doesn't pertain to the quote.

Joey Giangola: Was there a moment before you started maybe stepped out on your own that you thought that that process needed more attention? How did you get to the point where you said, "I needed to do this myself and-

Ivan Hudson: Yeah. So I got my start on the captor channel. Even though those kind of three factors of why people shop still existed, I was very limited in the product offering aspect because I just had the one particular carrier. They had a few other companies as a part of their exchange, but outside of that purview, I was not able to educate the customer on, "Hey, these are some trends that we're seeing in the marketplace as it relates to rate, as it relates to product." I was able to just talk about the company's history, how long they've been around. "Oh, by the way, we're asking more folks to retain a little bit more risk in the form of a higher deductible."

Ivan Hudson: That has a big impact on retention as well because when you find yourself in a hard market like we're in right now, you can't unequivocally say that you're doing the best thing for your customer when you just have one carrier that you're representing. And so I don't believe transitioning to the IA channel is the silver bullet for everyone, but it is definitely been transformational for my agency.

Joey Giangola: Where is your focus now? What are the things that you're thinking about now for the agency because every new day it's like, "Oh man, what can I do? What can I do?" I would imagine there's a list of things, but I'll take a handful of ones that come to the top.

Ivan Hudson: Since I am absolutely independent, I'm not a part of any type of groups or clusters or anything like that, meaning I don't have to ask for permission or take action independently and then maybe ask for forgiveness later. You think about start with the end in mind. Again, I've been in the industry for a decade. I foresee being part of the industry for the remainder of my career. And I do know that just having the opportunity to be on the IA channel, I've been able to just kind of peek over the fence just to see some other distribution channels, how other agencies are run, the broker side, the big brokers and things of that nature. So it does keep the wheels turning about what an exit could look like.

Ivan Hudson: Even though I don't plan on exiting anytime soon, I do know that my options are increased for an exit, whether it's from a legacy standpoint. I do have a daughter. She's got a little while to go, but assuming that my agency is at a position for some type of legacy transition, I want to work on the valuation and maximize the valuation if I want to exit out in the open market. There's opportunities to get on the M&A side of things as well. Right now we're growing by policy, but we know that the industry is aging, agency owners are aging out, they're looking for options. And as I continue to pull levers within my agency and work on systems and workflows and things like that, I can foresee in the next 36 to 60 months where we're in position to do our first acquisition possibly. And so we're not just organically growing by policies, but we can even leverage other smaller agencies.

Joey Giangola: Yeah. And thinking about your entire journey to get to this point, if you had to maybe give, I don't want to say a word of encouragement, but your best piece of advice to somebody that is maybe where you were at that captive thinking, "Boy, am I ever going to be able to do this?" What is it that you can say having made it to the other side, not that it's like an insurance prison, but maybe. What would you maybe say to them to say, "Listen. These are the practical steps to take to get here."

Ivan Hudson: Well, it may not be prison, but definitely some shackles are involved there. I would just say our industry is inherently wrought with risk. And every day that we wake up and we go after our respective businesses and clients and prospects, there's even risk involved with that. I believe the older we get, every day we wake up we're a day older, we're talking life insurance and we're a day closer to mortality. A lot of times as we get older, we get settled in our ways, we maybe start family, we have bills, and those risks that we were willing to take are becoming less and less. We're becoming more adverse to those risks, but I just would encourage anyone who knows in their spirit that there's something out there better to still consider taking that risk, but more of a calculated risk. It's okay to still look at risk, but maybe more calculated.

Ivan Hudson: What it looked like for me is instead of me making that leap immediately based on the emotion that I was feeling of me continuing turning prospects away for lack of option, for whatever the reason may be, I took that time to really dive into the reasons that folks were being turned away. What part of the town or the state that they lived in, what zip codes were associated with that. And so when I began to interview carriers on the IA side, I could look and see which carrier would fill the void for the highest propensity of business that I was turning away. And so it really turned into an incubator, if you will, or almost like a science experiment, to have that time period to know in my head and in my heart that there was something different, but not making that impulse decision, but really take the time to strategically make that transition so that when I restarted the business on the IA side, 'cause I sold the captive book of business and literally started another scratch agency, that I could actually launch.

Ivan Hudson: I believe you can start something or you can launch into something and with the proper preparation, you can launch into the IA channel.

Joey Giangola: All right, Ivan. I've got three more questions for you, sir.

Ivan Hudson: Okay.

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

Ivan Hudson: One thing I hope I never forget is just the basics, the mundane, if you will. Yes, we're very, very much in a technologically driven marketplace. There's a lot of levers we can pull to make things a little bit more efficient for us, but one thing about insurance and the type of customers that I like to attract and retain over time, it's still hands-on contact sport if you will. There's no technology that can replace meaningful connections with customers. And so I just hope I never forget that, even with all the technology that's out there, we still need to pick up the phone. We still need to have conversations with folks many times, even uncomfortable conversation, but necessary conversations as opposed to trying to communicate in other less disconnected ways if you will.

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

Ivan Hudson: Well, I'm going to keep hitting home on this technology piece because I don't have it all figured out and we create these workflows and sometimes you get lost in trying to create everything, have everything communicating with each other and talking with each other. When you're dealing with technology, you can project and plan for some type of glitch or some type of breakdown that's going to require some type of troubleshooting and that takes time away from the revenue generating activity as well. And I can't be all things to all people, even within the agency and producers and things like that, but I do really want to get our tech stack down really, really good and be able to harness the power of technology and maximize that.

Joey Giangola: All right, Ivan. Last question to you, sir. 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? Where is it going and what's it doing?

Ivan Hudson: Wow. Magic wand. So I think the industry does an incredible job, or has done an incredible job, on educating consumers on how insurance should work, if you will. We have whatever hobby you like or whatever you like watching on television, when the commercial comes on, nine times out of 10 there are going to be a series of insurance commercials. And when you pull back the layers of hilarious banter or whatever it might be, the jingles, things like that, there's usually at least one little takeaway from a consumer education standpoint. And so what that looks like now is when a customer calls for personal lines, quotes, we have a practice to definitely we want the bundle, but we usually don't have to ask for it because the consumer marketplace is much more educated than it was even a decade ago, let alone 30, 40 years ago.

Ivan Hudson: And so at this moment right now, just beyond teaching and educating consumers that they have options or how to ask for additional discounts, I think there's an incredible opportunity, since we do have such an educated consumer base, to really try to make insurance a little sexy instead of encouraging it for if you have trouble sleeping at night, read your coverage, your insurance policy. So I just think who could wave that magic wand and show the different verticals within the industry for example. There's so much more to insurance than just selling it. All the big carriers have campuses with marketing departments, IT departments, underwriting departments. So I think if we wave that magic wand, we could attract more talent, attract even more diverse talent. And so I think there's a huge opportunity with intentionality there.

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

Ivan Hudson: All right. Thank you.