Why You Need to Create the Job You Want in Your Agency

Joey Giangola: Mr. Craig Lyndall, how you doing today, sir?

Craig Lyndall: I'm doing great. It's good to be on your show, sir.

Joey Giangola: Craig, thank you for being here. It's a pleasure indeed. I want to know this before we get anything too serious and that is, have you ever had a friendly gesture or act go awry?

Craig Lyndall: Man, that's a tough question. I'm sure I have. I'm not sure about a friendly gesture, but I'm so straight-faced sarcastic that a lot of my jokes, people think I'm being serious. A lot of times spent in college on the East Coast, my Midwestern flatness came off as mean, and I think a lot of people just thought I was really cruel and mean, but we Midwesterners, we have just kind of a nasty sense of humor I think.

Joey Giangola: Yeah, I might be able to relate to that one, Craig, for sure. For me, an easy one is I don't like waving somebody at a stop sign to go and they wave me back. It feels like it takes away all of the goodwill that I have bestowed upon them and then I become-

Craig Lyndall: Oh, that's a really good one.

Joey Giangola: Yeah, it's just like, what are you doing? I did this first. You don't wave the waver, and I don't know what to do with it. You have to figure out a way to handle it because I feel insulted almost, like I could have just gone.

Craig Lyndall: It's the driving version of the "I'm holding the door for you and now you're kind of half jogging to get the door."

Joey Giangola: Yeah, you got to know your place. Craig, I want to move this over to the world of insurance, and I feel it relates, and I'm curious of what kind of maybe interactions you've had in your career of it feels like even just the sheer mention of insurance is a kind gesture, but a lot of times people are just necessarily not thinking of it that way. How have you handled those conversations and people and their reactions to talking about insurance when a lot of times it's coming from the best place?

Craig Lyndall: So honestly, we've done a lot to change this over the years by being more proactive and with our own actions. When I first started in the business, I joined a family agency with all these different 1099 producers who built the books however they felt like, and there wasn't a lot of top down culture, not a lot of top-down, "Hey, this is how we're going to do things. These are our standards." And as we've built that culture over time, we've kind of driven the conversation. And when you're doing that as a professional and you're driving it based on standards and coverage and you're talking coverage as opposed to only reacting to when people calling about their pain points on price, it kind of change the whole tenor and tone of conversations on a day-to-day basis. And of course we still get those calls from time to time, but we work every single month on refining our techniques of empathy and hearing people, but then continuing to drive home what's important and what our values are as a business.

Joey Giangola: That's definitely an easy one to, I guess, maybe overlook or not pay enough attention to. And it's another thing that you also probably hear people say, it's like easier said than done. So where did you maybe notice the first sort of tangible results happening? Where did you see sort of the sea change where people actually were starting to listen and take action on the stuff you guys were trying to put in place?

Craig Lyndall: Yeah, it's always anecdotes, the insurance businesses, it's hard to see that sea change. You look at reports that show you numbers and the clients and the number of policies, but that doesn't really tell the tale. The only way to get any actual data in the insurance business because it's a customer service business, it's a people to people, person to person business, is through the email communications and the phone calls and the anecdotes that I get from my CSRs, and that's part of what makes it so difficult to manage. The old adage, you measure what you manage and how do you measure the vibes, how do you measure the vibes of your customer service operation? All you can do is kind of pay attention to the anecdotes.

Joey Giangola: I guess. Well, have you picked up anything in those anecdotes that send off the little alarm bells like, oh, this is good, this is bad. What are some things that you maybe weigh more heavily than you would ever thought you would've?

Craig Lyndall: Yeah. Well the thing is when we started to do this and we started to really focus on feature selling and talking about underground service line coverage and EPLI on the commercial side and really feature sell, I was like, "I don't know if the customers even want to hear this. I don't know if they're going to take to it." But the more that we held firm in that belief, and the more that we did it, the more that it seemed that we were able to drive the conversation and that people were interested in those things once we explained them.

Craig Lyndall: Because the one thing I want to be sure to accentuate here is that it's not about sales. I mean, yes, obviously you want to sell, but we actually believe in the coverages that we have and that we're trying to give to people because we know when they do have a problem, that they're going to be really mad that they don't have them, even more angry than they are when they have a price increase on their monthly bill. And so over time, as we've been able to collect those claims and deal with those situations, I feel kind of vindicated in the approach. And I think the customer satisfaction, again, I don't have a measure for it other than Google reviews, but Google reviews are not a real great measure either, but I have a good sense for how we're doing.

Joey Giangola: Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned it again, just thinking from the standpoint of if they didn't have this coverage then something happens, that's even a bigger problem for me than anything else. Have you found a way to massage that conversation? What are you guys doing to maybe flip it and provide that perspective to the clients? Like you said, they're starting to listen, they're starting to understand. Is there any little mental tricks that you've been able to employ that get them to come around maybe faster, I don't know?

Craig Lyndall: Yeah, so we've developed a lot of talking points. I never script anything for my people because I believe in the individuality of my employees and they all have their own style and tone, and I don't want to steal that humanity away from any of them, whether it's written or verbal, over the phone. But at the same time, we constantly, when we're talking about auto-liability coverage, we bring up scenarios involving accidents with motorcycles. "Do you really want only 100,000 per person in an accident with a motorcycle where it's your fault?" That's just one example. But we have anecdotes like that and everybody has their own style and way of folding that into conversation. And in some ways it's hard because sometimes it feels manipulative or negative or we're focusing, but we are telling the truth, these are important things when the proverbial rubber meets the road.

Craig Lyndall: It's funny though, the life cycle of an insurance agent, I think a lot of us come into this business not really even believing in what we're selling. It's what we're tasked to sell and it's the business that we're in. But over time, you become a real evangelist, you start to actually believe in the things that you're selling as you see it applied more and more to real world situations.

Joey Giangola: Well, I think that's the actual real world, because we see so much of it and the fact that these guys, the people you're talking to on the phone, they're not in it every day, they're not seeing every claim, they're not seeing every scenario and possibility and just painting that picture, I don't think you're necessarily doing them a disservice per se. It's just opening their eyes to what realistically could happen, and you can't tell if that's going to be in their lap or not.

Craig Lyndall: It's funny too because I always compare it to they come to you with a price, "And I'm paying this and my neighbor's paying this," and you try and explain, "Well, maybe your neighbor has a small pizza and maybe you want to buy a large one, or maybe they have a 40-inch TV and you want a 65-inch TV." It's much easier when you're buying goods and services and you can see the difference that day. But when you're buying insurance, unless you truly, truly dig in and understand, the way an agent does, you don't really know how big of a pizza you bought until you need to file that claim.

Joey Giangola: Yeah, you're not even sure how big it's going to be, to be honest with you. I guess I'm curious, is there a coverage that you have maybe gained a fascination with? Is there something the agency has maybe picked up on that you have maybe not traditionally been having a conversation with? What's new in the Lyndall Agency that maybe has your guys' attention?

Craig Lyndall: So when I first started in the business 15, 16 years ago, I kind of thought cyber was a bit of a gimmick, especially on the personal line side, because I felt, or identity theft too, I felt identity theft was just like a tax on homeowner's insurance policies and that anybody who bought it was just giving money away to the insurance company because I'd never seen a claim. And then sure enough, more than a decade later, no, that one's legit and it is now applicable. So I might have even been right in the moment, but the world changed and came around.

Craig Lyndall: The other one that I can't stop talking about, is underground service line coverage because nothing seems more unfair to my customers than when something breaks underground and they couldn't possibly have seen that it was broken, but now they're left with an excavation bill to replace a pipe that runs from their house to the sidewalk, and they're presented with horrible options to buy it from utility companies. So we not only have an alternative, it's better alternative. And so those are the kind of two, I'm a little bit more personal lines focused in our agency, my brother's a little bit more commercial lines focused, so I'm sure he's got a ton on the commercial lines side and I certainly know commercial but not as well as he does.

Joey Giangola: Well, that actually was going to be my next question, I know you guys do both and you have a heavy focus on both, how do you keep things straight? Because you often find a dominance one way or the other in an agency and it's just tendencies. Do you just need a brother or a sibling to manage the other side?

Craig Lyndall: Somehow you got to figure out how to divide and conquer, I think. At a certain point, if you want to keep growing your agency and getting bigger and bigger, you have to find some specialties. And if your agency can't find specialties, then you need to find people who specialize within the agency. My brother and I took over for my dad probably going on 10 years ago now, and one of the big things in his entire career was he always felt that health insurance was just a totally different business. And now lots of agency owners do all of the above, they do health, they do life, they do property and casualty. He never focused on health and life insurance.

Craig Lyndall: And so now we've brought somebody in to specialize in those things so that we are doing it, we will be able to do everything for everybody, but not in my brain and not in my brother's brain because I really do think that the key to growth is finding people to specialize in those things and kind of diversify the number of brains in your business, if that makes sense. People always think about factories and the number of hands assembling parts, but more than that it's brain power solving problems and customer service issues.

Joey Giangola: Well, the other thing too is there's always talk about finding a niche and focusing on things and becoming an expert, but at the same time, there's also the idea of longevity. And at some point you, I don't want to say outgrow it, but like you said, over time you can start to stack the blocks. Is that something that you guys feel like every so often you need to maybe bring something else in that you feel like you're capable, you're ready, you've got to handle on the other things now, that it's your time, I guess?

Craig Lyndall: Yeah, it's been interesting because we've done that a number of times over the last five years. Our growth strategy has included a lot of acquisitions, and so every time we've analyzed an opportunity to acquire an agency, whether the agent was retiring or whether they were going to stay on with us for a number of years, we had to analyze somebody else's lifelong business plan and figure out, well, how much of it fits directly with what we're doing? How much of it is new or unrelated diversification to supplement what we do? And so it's made us think deeply, not only about those opportunities and those people and the businesses that they have done, but our own, to see what we are and who we are and where we fit. And some situations, it hasn't made sense and we've kind of walked away and others, it fit 90 to 95%, whether it's carriers or clientele and even geography.

Craig Lyndall: But there are new challenges with every scenario like that. It's very different to take on a client that you didn't write from the minute they walked through the front door. They have this history and you're inheriting it now and you're kind of playing catch up. And it works out pretty well especially, but it's a different skillset because you're doing a lot of listening and they're doing a lot of repeating of history and you're just trying to piece all the things together so that you can help them as best as you can. The fortunate thing for us is whenever we've made an acquisition, we've acquired an agency that had fewer people and fewer carriers, so we've always been able to expand the amount of service and the number of options.

Joey Giangola: Well, I was going to ask, over the years have you developed, and for the agencies that are maybe just starting to look at maybe bringing somebody else in, their first acquisition or maybe they've done one or two and it maybe hasn't gone the way that they would hope, have you developed a quick sort of cheat sheet as to things that you look for in an agency or what you have found to be important criteria when deciding?

Craig Lyndall: Yeah, it's culture above all. It's culture above all. So we once had an opportunity to buy a non-standard agency and we didn't buy that, and that's the extreme example. If it's an owner, whether they're staying on or exiting, and it's the kind of person that you could absolutely imagine yourself working with on a day-to-day basis, even if you're not going to, that's kind of the litmus test. Yes, you have to make sure there's a carrier matchup, you have to make sure that there's a geographical matchup, you have to make sure that you're going to be able to take care of those clients, all the nuts and bolts of making an acquisition. But I think the keys to success are always going to be the softer things, the kind of things that you would put into an essay instead of a spreadsheet.

Joey Giangola: That's interesting.

Craig Lyndall: I don't know, do you think that makes sense or do you think I'm just making it up?

Joey Giangola: It actually makes a lot of sense. That's why I actually hesitated because I wanted to ask something along the lines of, it seems more, like you said, it's not something that can just be easily put into a singular box and it's more nuanced and based on the fabric of the agency, versus what one would look at the numbers. And I find that actually interesting because you would assume that it would lean a little bit more strongly the other way.

Craig Lyndall: I was a finance major, and so I feel like I can always make the numbers work. If somebody wants a certain amount of money, unless it's wildly, wildly out of bounds with what I think something is worth, time heals all in the insurance business, if they're willing to take some owner financing, you can spread those payments out. So you can always make the money work as long as it's within the realm of reality. The other stuff, the stuff is a lot harder. The culture shock for an employee who's now going to join an agency that feels like an alien planet, those are the types of things that are harder to overcome.

Joey Giangola: Yeah, absolutely. And if you had to maybe boil it down, coming in, like you said, sort of taking over the family agency, working within your family, is there anything that stands out to you of somebody in a similar position, that you feel like it's almost your responsibility to let them know what's ahead or maybe how to do it better?

Craig Lyndall: So the ultimate key to our success so far is a very simple one. It's hard to do and it takes time and effort, but it's very simple. We brought in a management consultant that worked with us and helped us analyze where we were, helped us analyze where we wanted to be, taught us a whole lot about creating job descriptions, not only for every employee in the agency, but also for ourselves, so that we were very deliberate about building the company and the jobs that we wanted. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you expand and you grow and you buy and you do all these different things, and you end up with a job that you don't like in a company that you don't recognize and you also don't like anymore.

Craig Lyndall: And how many times have we seen that over the years on the insurance agency owners Facebook pages, and, "I'm this number of years in and I've grown like crazy over the last four years. Somebody buy me out. I'm so tired of this and I can't overcome this problem, I can't overcome that problem," and they run themselves ragged and they don't have any place else to go. We worked with what I think is a great consultant, but the fact is that we figured out, we actually made a plan, we were very deliberate. And the other question that I think is really, really important, and one that my brother and I ask ourselves all the time is, are we big enough yet?

Craig Lyndall: Because there's a certain point, you read all these stories in Silicon Valley and people idolize Amazon and Apple and all these companies that are worth all of the money, all of the money and all of the size, and nobody's really going to build an insurance agency like that, I don't think. And I don't know what the number is, but I think there's a number of clients and a number of employees and a number of carriers that is just big enough for my brother and me. I don't see this as a never ending growth cycle. I think there will be a point where we're kind of in a stable pattern with just organic levels of growth, instead of trying to conquer the universe, which I think is a lot of what the hustle culture and a lot of the podcasts we listen to is just focused on.

Craig Lyndall: Big enough is a conversation that I don't think we have enough, and I think it's something that's really common in the insurance industry. We've seen it a million times where somebody's been kind of retired in place for seven years now or eight years now, and they got big enough and they have enough money and they play enough golf or whatever it is, whatever it is for their thing. I say golf because the insurance industry is full of golfers, even though I'm pretty bad and I don't play very much.

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

Craig Lyndall: All right.

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

Craig Lyndall: There's probably a million things I hope I never forget. I guess I hope I never forget that it truly is a people business and I'm kind of a geek and a computer guy, and I'm always looking for the next kind of technological innovation. And so far I've been pretty disciplined at only adding technologies where it makes us better at serving people and better interactions with people. But the whole idea of clients not feeling like a number in a spreadsheet or an entry in a database, I think that's the most important thing. I don't think I'll ever forget it, but that's probably number one of the things that I don't ever want to forget.

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

Craig Lyndall: I've yet to learn probably that question of how big and how much we want we want to do. I'm in my mid 40s now. 44 is mid, right?

Joey Giangola: Certainly, right around there.

Craig Lyndall: And so I keep telling all my friends, even outside of the insurance business, that we have just the right amount of gray hair. We've got all the experience and plenty of runway. And so that's just kind of how I feel about it right now. These should be and can be the most productive years of my career, but yeah, I want to know what the finish line looks like or not the finish line, you know what I mean, what is good. I used to work for a company that would ask the question, what does good look like, and I want to know what good enough looks like.

Joey Giangola: All right, Craig, last question to you, sir. If I were to hand you a magic wand of sorts, to reshape, change, alter, speed up any part of insurance, what's that thing, where is it going and what's it doing?

Craig Lyndall: Okay, I would probably wave a magic wand and somehow standardize and normalize underwriting on the commercial side. That's a part of this industry that I think we've seen wild turnover in the last five years. It's one of the most disruptive places to have turnover in this industry, because it is the friction between customers, agents, and the sales cycle. One of the most frustrating things about an agent is to have the meeting with the carrier and have all this pressure to grow, grow, grow, grow, and then you meet the underwriters and you present them with risk that should be great, great, great, great, great, and they just say, "No." Or they invent a new proposition like the round table, which is just a fancy way for everybody to get together to find a new way to say no.

Craig Lyndall: And as an agent, you know for a fact that one of your carriers is going to write this, some agent is going to write it. And when a carrier won't put a price on it, maybe you don't want to do it, but there's a price for every risk. And that's what I guess I wish everybody would remember in the entire industry, there's a price for every risk.

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

Craig Lyndall: Thanks so much. This has been fun.