The All Aboard Newsletter

Hey everyone! July officially marks the 7 year anniversary for Peachy Insurance.

And its kind of crazy, because this is the longest that I’ve ever done anything (I have a tendency to get bored easily) so its kind of a weird feeling.

I was extra fortunate last month because I was able to travel with my Dad to Poland to visit the village that my great-grandfather immigrated from. It was an incredible experience and anytime I vacation, I’m reminded of how fortunate I am for the team around me who keeps everything rolling.

This edition will be a bit different.

I’ll give a quick update on the agency, and then dive into 7 reflections (or lessons) from my 7 years as an agent.

Let's dive in!

July Results

July was strong all around.

We were able to put up 699 items with 8 salespeople, and our customer experience team was a huge part of that covering 40% of their cost.

One of my main goals for the agency this year was to increase our brand presence, drive more inbound sales calls, and improve upon our ability to leverage customer relationships to write more new business.

That has largely happened.

And what makes that even better is that these teams are being led by new leaders who have had huge shoes to fill.

Peter Godley our Chief Revenue Officer has been leading Peachy’s sales efforts for seven years. I often call him the architect of the sales team and he has executed amazingly delivering us consistently high results since day 1. More importantly, he has done an impeccable job of developing managers. Throughout his time here, he has grown 7 people into sales leaders (and beyond). Now he’s passing the torch and working on higher level strategy and helping other agents develop their sales teams too. He still presides over sales, but has an amazing team now running the day to day operations.

Carissa McElligott our Chief of Staff has been the go-to person for operations, technology and data, but she’s also been the head of the Customer Experience department. Over the years, she has ebbed and flowed with the chaotic level of growth we’ve achieved and been the grease that made the machine run. She too has passed the torch on Customer Experience to focus on our initiative build out data analytics offerings for agents and help other agents achieve operational excellence. She will still be there keeping things rolling smoothly, but has exciting new leadership in place to take Customer Experience to new heights.

If you’re not following both of them on Linkedin and Facebook - you’re missing out.

One of the core values at Peachy Insurance is professional development. I have always valued education extremely highly. When we help the people we work with grow, its good for everyone. A true net positive.

When we promote people, it creates opportunity for others to grow and elevate too.

These two have been incredible models of that belief and value set in action.

As for numbers..

Two years ago, we were sitting at around 90% of our New Business coming from internet leads. Today, that number is 68%.

That doesn’t mean we don’t believe in internet leads (we do, and more than ever) but the truth is that lead costs are up 50%-60% this year and that has been putting a strain on cashflow.

So when we talked about a focus on profitability for 2025, we meant it.

The sales team has averaged over 60 items per person (a main goal of ours) every single month this year.

Our Customer Experience team has been selling items, cross-selling like crazy, and driving referrals covering 50%+ of their salary in most months this year. It was down last year, because we hired several new people who hadn’t started contributing yet.

And these two things, combined with our local branding and advertising efforts is helping to insulate our margins in spite of the commission cuts and headwinds coming from the carrier.

There is plenty of year left, and a lot can happen in 5 months.

Some people hit goals and back off.

Others make a year end push.

And a few might realize their goal is out of reach and focus on next year.

Personally - we’re going to stay the course. We’ll continue to focus on profitability and building our local presence. Our customer experience team will continue to get better and I’m confident they’ll be covering over 60% of their cost by year end.

But even more exciting for us are the opportunities in the states of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

The markets there have gotten incredibly hot, and while we’ve written some business there the last two years, we’ve largely held back given our massive goals in Georgia. But now, with uncertainty around where we’ll land in GA due to retention challenges, we’re going to make a choice to control our own destiny, rather than hope that the company bails us out. So unless something changes, we’ll be focused on some new geography.

Close rates are higher, competition is lower, and with more geography, we can focus on the absolute best prospects, instead of diluting our lead quality.

This year has been incredibly tough for so many agents.

And to be clear, that includes us. Its been a tough and tumultuous year for Peachy Insurance as we dealt with intense retention challenges. Key people being out to celebrate new additions to their families (6+ people on paternity leave this year!!!), and a transitioning strategy with innovation on how we do business.

In spite of all that, we managed to grow $5million this year, and thats in spite of selling $3.6million in premium 7 months ago.

We’re now just over $45million in premium and continuing to get better every day.

Its been a great 7 years, and year 8 is going to be the best yet.

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

Look the truth is, that every edition of All Aboard is sponsored by Next Call Club, but this week is a bit different.

We are helping agents all over the country (all carriers) grow in a profitable way.

Are your phone numbers flagging as SPAM? We can help

The leads you have not working or poor quality? We can help

Need internet leads because you can’t get volume? We can help

Love looking at data, but don’t know where to start? We can help

Have a Sales or Service manager that needs a coach? We can help

Need data analytics but can’t afford to hire an analyst? We can help

Need some telemarketing prowess to turn those leads into calls? We can help

Does your Sales Team need some extra help to overcome objections or close? We can help

Ok ok, I know - A bit cheesy but its all true.

We offer:

• Leads

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If you think any of these things can help you, shoot me a response to this email and we’ll set up some time to talk!

Or, you can book a time here: Click Me

7 Years - 7 Reflections

I wanted to do something a bit different for this newsletter and share some reflections.

Its a popular format at any type of milestone (and easy content device if you’re looking for ideas) but it tends to work well for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is that people tend to value learning from other people’s mistakes and failures.

I will try to help you learn from my own failures in the sections to follow.

Some of these things you may have heard me say before, but if I was giving advice to an agency owner, here is what I’d tell them:

1.) Don’t ignore one side of the house (Sales or Service)

For the first 5 years or so of Peachy’s life our Customer Service team was an afterthought to me. I was hyper focused on sales.

And that doesn’t mean that the the Customer Service team wasn’t important or I didn’t value them. That would simply be untrue.

What I mean is that MY focus was on sales, and when the leader is focused in one area, thats where resources tend to flow. In hindsight, I understand why that was the case.

We were on scratch incentive contracts, focused on scaling, and sometimes a laser focus is what is needed.

But now, as an older (and wiser 🥸) leader, I know that was just a strategically poor move. I think about how much bigger the agency would be today if we had retained more customers in the early days.

I think about how much more we could have sold if we had expected our Customer Experience team to drive sales as they do today.

I coach several agents who have just started their agencies on scratch contracts. They remind me a lot of myself in the early days (they’re hyper focused on sales).

But I tell them over and over again, your service team can help your sales team, and vice versa.

This is a team sport. So focus on the whole team. Thing long term, and think big picture.


2.) Build your community early.

When I first moved to Atlanta in 2018 and we started the agency, I didn’t know anyone.

And I didn’t really care because we thought we were hot shit.

In some ways we were. We wrote the most new business in the entire state of GA, and we did it in 6 months.

In other ways, we were young and dumb as hell. We made so many mistakes. For example, we were baffled by home inspections. Coming from Florida, home inspections happened before we bound the policy. We weren’t used to it coming after the bind.

So when we got cancellation after cancellation because of inspections, we couldn’t figure it out. So what did I do? I told the team to just focus on writing monoline auto…

And we pressed forward.

It wasn’t until a salesperson (now our Director of Training and Development) named Ryan Hill hunted down the person in charge of inspections. He fought with multiple people at corporate and spent days getting to the right person he could give appeals to, and figured out how to get past the issues.

But none of that would have been necessary if I just reached out to other agents around us and built relationships.

The agents in Georgia are some of the most amazing people I’ve met in my life, much less my career. And they could have been there helping me from the beginning, and I know that they would have because that is who they are.

Its easy to put yourself on an island because you’re shy, or you don’t think you need their help.

Don’t be dumb like me.

Reach out, and pour into the agent community around you. Because it will pour back into you 10-fold.

3.) Don’t wait to start building a personal brand.

Building your personal brand is like planting a tree.

The best time was years ago, and the second best time is right now.

Over the last 3 years, I’ve posted extensively on socials. I’ve put this newsletter out over 60 times. I’ve attended 30+ conferences and industry events.

And that effort has brought countless opportunities, introduced me to amazing people who I now call friends, and invited connections that helped build both Peachy Insurance and Next Call Club.

Now I want the whole team to build their audiences too.

Will it help the brands? Absolutely, but it will also help them in their career development too.

We recently hired a few talented people to join our team who are helping to take our social and digital presence to to next level.

They’ll be assisting in content creation, design, and posting logistics. And they’re going to build their personal brands too.

I can’t think of a single scenario where building an audience has been anything other than a positive for someone.

If you haven’t already started, I hope you’re inspired to get moving.

Don’t get left behind.

4.) Your team’s actions reflect on you as a leader.

When I went to Italy last year, I decided to pick up The Prince by Machiavelli.

And when I was reading through his most famous text, one quote really stood out to me:

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”

And basically what that says is if you want to know the quality of the leader, look at the people who work with them.

There is nothing that makes me more proud than when people come up to me at events and tell me how amazing the people are at Peachy Insurance or Next Call Club.

And selfishly, it makes me feel good as a leader, because great people want to work with other great people. A players want to work with other A players.

Being a part of Next Call Club, me and the team have a lot of interactions with the leaders of people’s agencies.

You would not believe how many leaders talk to us in condescending ways and we would be lying to you if it didn’t make us stop and think about the agency owner’s leadership style.

We try not to judge y’all.

But some people are so freaking mean to their vendors 😂.

That doesn’t mean that a young or inexperienced leader can’t make mistakes. They can, and they will. Your experienced leaders will make mistakes. You will make mistakes. It happens.

But people tend to emulate the leader.

So if an agency leader is talking down to a vendor, what does the owner do to the staff? Who are these people emulating?

It goes the same for me.

When I find out someone on my team was rude, impolite, or unprofessional, it causes embarrassment and reflection in me.

Because somewhere along the way, I gave them the impression that it was ok to act like that and have failed to model the behavior I want them to emulate.

Pick the right people, and teach them how to treat people.

Because they reflect on you.

5.) The bigger you are, the faster you grow.

People will often ask me: “What is the sweet spot for size?!”

Its a fair question, especially with how stupidly convoluted and complicated compensation and bonus plans have gotten lately.

And if we’re optimizing for an agency segmentation, award, or year-end bonus the answer will vary from year to year, company to company, so on and so forth.

But I’m here to tell you that if you get big enough, none of that stuff really matters.

Because the bigger you are, the faster you grow.

It is better to take a 10% rate increase on a $40million agency than it is to take a 10% rate increase on a $4million agency.

We generally capture about 60% of the rate (because people leave).

So a 6% increase on $4million nets you $240k in premium growth, where 6% on $40million nets you $2.4million in premium growth.

That is growth you don’t need to spend marketing dollars on.

The bigger you get, the more robust you become.

Just don’t get bloated, and stay lean so you don’t need to “focus on profitability” like us.

This is one of the core messages I teach new agency owners. You can scale, but you don’t need to be reckless if you have the tools, the math, and the guidance.

6.) Letting go is hard, but important.

A lot of entrepreneurs say they want freedom and to not be chained to their business.

Most of those entrepreneurs will never get that freedom because they refuse to let go.

They refuse to let go of tasks and control.

They refuse to let go of goals that are set for them.

They refuse to mentally let go of the things out of their control.

And they refuse to let go emotionally, and not let the little things affect them.

I recently read a book called “Necessary Endings” and it put a lot of things in perspective for me.

Everything comes to an end at some point whether its a project, a business, a relationship, or a belief you’re holding on to.

We get to choose how we feel about something. But that doesn’t mean its easy.

Last year, like many agents, my commission was cut and I came very close to falling down a segment and losing an additional $500k a year.

This year, I told myself I would control what I would control. We’ve gotten even more profitable and I’m focusing our efforts where it makes the most sense ($).

If the company doesn’t change one of the qualifiers, I might drop a segment in GA, but if that happens, I know that we’ll pivot and put our efforts elsewhere. We’ll be fine.

Things will happen to us that are out of our control.

But we get to decide what we do about it.

Fight back, and plan well. But take action!

7.) Screw everyone else, compete with yourself.

This one can be incredibly hard for some people and incredibly easy for others.

Entrepreneurs tend to be scrappy and competitive people which means that we typically don’t like to lose.

Who we compete with though is often misguided. There are sales charts, scoreboards, contests, year end bonuses, and so much more.

Some people want nothing more than to be at the top. But there is always a bigger game, and there is always a bigger fish.

So run your race, focus on beating yourself.

Do the things that would make 10 year old you proud.

In Closing

The last 7 years have been nothing short of amazing.

Has everything been perfect? Absolutely not.

Arguably, this year is one of the toughest in my career 😅 but I’m still grateful for the opportunity to keep building and keep working with the incredible teams at Peachy Insurance and Next Call Club (which turns 3 next month 🎉🥳).

The grass is greener where you water it.

As always - Thanks for reading and if you find value in the content, please share this with every single agent you know so they can get value too.

Cheers.

Three ways I can help you:

1.) If you need leads, calls, or data analytics - We’d love the opportunity to show how Next Call Club can help you grow faster and more profitably than before.

2.) Curious about your own numbers how they relate to Lifetime Value (LTV), Year 1 Cashflows, and Segment analysis? I help agents with this in my 1:1 Consulting Program!

3.) Want to sponsor this newsletter? Lets talk about whether you’re a fit to reach 1,300+ agency owners every week!

As always - Thank you for the support! I’m looking forward to bringing you insights, ideas, and actionable strategies multiple times per month! If you enjoyed this newsletter or it gave you value, please consider sharing it with a friend!

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