The All Aboard Newsletter

Andddd we’re back folks.

Totally missed the March update due to all the travel, the subsequent jet lag and general laziness.

But, I’m back to deliver the results for the month of April and boy was it a great one!

With Sales goals pretty much set and the plan to get there in action, my sight shifted to our Customer Experience team (thats what we call customer service) and retention.

We’re in an extremely rate distressed state (GA) and it seems like the company’s goal “adjustments” aren’t going to make an impact, so its time to plan accordingly and get profitable as possible while maintaining steady growth.

Lets dive in!

April Results

April was by far our best month of the year.

We saw new 2025 highs in items, premium, and close rate! And thats not the only positive!

The craziest part about April is that even though we’ve talked about how we’re hiring and staffing up, we still only had 8 salespeople actively selling to achieve the goal!

To put that in perspective, outside of the items our customer service team wrote (22 items), those 718 other items came from the 8 salespeople leading from the front.

Thats a crazy average per person at 89 items per person! We had a couple people break 100 items and a couple others knock on its door (high 90s) with the lowest producer putting up 50 items.

Part of the big month is due to having 22 days in April. The two main drivers to the numbers though, are the same as they always are.

Quote went up and Close Went up.

When one of those things goes up, you get better results. When both of those things go up, you get wildly better results.

You don’t need to be a data whiz to see whats going on here.

Quotes improved steadily through March and continued an uptrend in April. That increased quote volume gave us a tailwind which pushed our production higher. Typically, when we increase quote volume, the close rate drops, but that didn’t happen.

Part of this is likely the market getting more competitive (just in time for another rate increase) but I attribute a lot of it to our managers Michelle and Paris along with the work of Ryan Hill who heads up all of our trainings.

They’ve been doing a ton of call scoring and finding opportunity areas for the sales team to get a little better each day. You’ll hear it from everyone that has success:

You gotta coach your people! Continuous training is extra important. People get stagnant, they fall into ruts, and it can be tough to get back on track. Call monitoring, scoring, and coaching can help a lot to keep them on track.

In the February issue, I talked about our two main goals for sales:

• 60 Items Per Person

• 15 Sales people contributing

We’ve got the first goal down (for now), but we gotta get moving on the salespeople. The good news is that we’re making progress.

At the end of April, you might notice that quotes spiked by 30-40 quotes per day. Thats because our new class of agents got on the phone and started quoting.

We have five new salespeople getting their feet under them as we speak. We’re seeing them build their pipelines, and get some early wins, which is exciting.

People often ask us: “What do you expect out of your new hires?!”

The answer kind of depends on the context. The first month or so is usually a wash, but we do work to get them live and on the phone and quoting in 10 business days or less.

Then, the first week of quoting is usually a bit touch-and-go. They’re getting the hang of the software, trying to juggle the talk-paths, and hopefully getting their first close.

We typically want to see a person’s first sale (from a non-referral) in the first 7 days or so and if someone takes longer than that, its usually a yellow flag that the person might not make it (not always true).

Then its 30 days of proving themselves on our “Old” leads. I put “old” in quotation marks because they’re any lead that is 12 days old or older. We expect them to write:

• 5 Bundled HH

• $20,000 in written premium

• At least 3 HO policies

Once they’ve done that, we’ll release them to new leads, and they’re off to the races with an expectation to hit their minimums ($55k annual premium and 35 items).

The items are starting to close from the newbies and we’re excited to see that production accelerate as we move deeper into May.

But even if they all make it (which would be unheard of), we’re still going to be two people short. So we gotta keep recruiting, interviewing, and hiring!

We recently lost our in-house recruiter as he looks to continue his career in consulting (Best of luck Luke!) and we’re in between recruiters right now so….. I’ve been in the recruiting chair (and loving it).

Recruiting is just another form of sales, and I absolutely love prospecting. So I’ve been messaging people on Indeed, Connecting with people on Linkedin, and emailing people from the list of licensed people in various jurisdictions.

Its working. In the last week or so, we’ve gotten about 15 more people teed up to interview in the next 2 weeks, so we can hopefully hire another 3-5 sales reps and get to our magic number of 15 people.

Ultimately, I won’t do it forever and I’m excited to bring our new recruiter in (part-time) to work with them to keep the balling rolling late into the year.

New CX Team Goals!

So, technically the new goals for our Customer Experience team rolled out in March, but you know.. I missed that edition so here they are.

We decided to revisit the goals after some discussion with the managers of the team and realistic evaluation of our goals.

As it pertains to our goals, what has been laid out for us to hit elite seems a bit ridiculous, especially as it pertains to retention. Our overall retention is down to 81% and our auto retention is down to 75%. Those are absolutely brutal numbers.

To put that into context, it means that on average, an auto customer is going to stay for only 4 years! Compare that to what our auto retention was about 18 months ago (87%), and they used to stick around about 8 years.

As you can see below… we’ve lost a ton of items in the last month. And its only going to get worse because we have another rate increase that just hit this week.

It seems more and more that the company is devaluing retention.

They seem to care about growth, but continue to take rates all across the country. Tons of agents are seeing record defections, while selling more than ever.

I’m hearing the word “growing pains” a lot. I’m not sure thats what these are. We’ve been dealing with these “growing pains” for a couple of years now.

We’ve been doing literally everything proactive under the sun to stop the bleeding and it doesn’t seem to be working. I’ve chatted with some of the best agents in the country when it comes to retention, and we’re not seeing the results. We’ll keep going and keep working to outrun the losses, but my god! 640 items? And another rate?

I don’t think growth is in the cards….. therefore we shift gears to profitability!!

That leads us to the second reason that we adjust the goals of our customer experience team. People ultimately want to make more money from the customer service seat. Why wouldn’t they? They’ve been dealing with upset customers in GA since the summer of 2023.

They’re tired, and they’re burned out. So naturally they want to make more money (along with everything being more expensive than a few years ago).

So we’re shifting their goals to be much more production focused than before.

Here is what that looks like:

• We now how a tiered salary system for CX similar to sales (Ranges $45k to $60k base)

• Goal is to cover 50% of CX salary (minimum) with revenue generated directly by the customer experience team.

• We do not spend any marketing dollars on this team, and they are not allowed to take any paid marketing/leads that come in.

• They can write items, but not Variable Comp (Those get passed).

We’ve been working to get more of the CX salary covered for a bit, but our incentives were a bit too light, and our training was a bit too sparse.

In March when we rolled this out, people were naturally pretty nervous. But we started doing 2 trainings per week on various topics to help skill them up and improve their confidence. We had our sales team pop in as guest speakers to talk about follow-up, asking for referrals, and more.

In March, the team covered 29% of its salary, which was up from the 19% or so we averaged in Q4.

In April, the team covered 58% of its salary which is on target, and occurring quicker than I expected. To put that in real numbers, our monthly payroll for customer service is $480,000.

The Customer Experience team generated $23,000 of revenue all on its own!

Why does this matter?

Lets think about it this way. At the beginning of the year, I laid out how we were set to lose about $350,000 from the commission changes that the company implemented.

As always, we don’t try to find that money all in one place. I laid out a number of marketing and sales strategies to cover those gaps. One area I did not focus was the customer experience team.

In 2024, lets assume the payroll for the team was exactly the same and sat at $480,000. As stated above, the team covered 18% of their salary returning $86,000 in revenue.

That brought the effective cost of the team to $393,600.

Now lets assume we can hit 50% coverage for the next 12 months. That would mean with a $480,000 payroll, they’d generate approximately $240,000 in revenue.

That brings the effective cost of the team to $240,000, and gives us additional profitability to the tune of about $150,000.

Thats a good thing because we’re currently losing money after the commission changes went through in March (yay -_-).

Ultimately, as we continue to see this type of production, our team will earn raises and more bonuses, their production will support growth of the book (premium), and we will continue to hire more people on the customer experience side to help further bolster the team.

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have 9 Customer Service people right now. I’d have 15 people. But when you lose $30,000 a month from commission changes, you gotta run lean till they figure it out.

I guess these are the growing pains they’re talking about? Idk.

Anyways

We’re up against it here in GA, and it seems like retention is only going to get worse as more and more rates stack up.

So, we’ll control what we can control, but the truth is… we’re probably going to fall to pro.

It won’t be for a lack of trying.

If that happens, our strategy will change tremendously, and we’ll probably reduce investment quite a bit. What does that look like?

Maybe more of an old-school agency that writes significantly less new business, that focuses on giving good ole-fashioned customer service. Do enough to try and replace the premium thats leaving, shrink on items, and get more profitable?

I know that the goal of these agency segmentation programs is to incentivize growth.

It risks doing the exact opposite.

I’m no stranger to our sales and compensation programs being “one size fits all” and not working out for me (2023, Loss Ratio, $1.2mil bonus go poof!).

Keep your eyes on the prize, and remember.

9/1 is the date to watch!

This week’s edition of All Aboard is sponsored by Next Call Club

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Closing

We have the opportunity to improve every single month.

This year has been a year of efficiency for us. While we want to grow every month, our ultimate goal remains profitability.

The truth of the matter is that growth costs money. Like a lot of money.

When we feel confident in our future cashflows because our compensation programs are stable, or we’re not taking rate after rate, it gets a lot easier to invest.

If we know that a customer is going to stick around for 7-10 years, it can make sense to spend money and breakeven in 2-3 years.

When the customer life is 3 to 5 years?

That don’t work Romeo!

So make sure you know your numbers, and if you don’t, hit me up, I’ll help you!

Until next time, Cheers!

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