How I Found Success Selling Insurance

OK. It's time to come clean. I sell insurance. There I said it. Well, that's the short story.

Here's how it really happened.....It seems like it was just yesterday.....(insert harp glissando here).

After leaving the University of Iowa in my junior year I went to work managing a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in West Des Moines IA. I was single and mobile so they transferred me around a lot. I spent time in Dallas, Chicago, Madison WI and Davenport IA. I realized quickly that although I would never starve to death working in a restaurant I wanted more.

After a few years with Chuck E. I decided to call upon my Dad who had forged a successful career for himself in the insurance business. I had always assumed that working for my father's insurance agency would be my destiny but I fought it for years. Although I've always had a pretty easy time making friends and I communicate well, I wasn't sure that I could feed myself (let alone a family) by selling insurance. I thought to myself selling insurance has to be the most 'unsexy' vocation that I could choose. Would I like it enough to be successful?

Anyway, one night in the summer of 1995 I invited my Dad over to the restaurant for a pizza and allowed him to give me the 'pitch'. Although, I was still unsure about how things would play out at the time, I shook his hand and we agreed that I would study for my license and start learning the insurance business.

I worked for my Dad's agency for eight years. I held licenses for personal lines (auto, home, etc), commercial lines (insurance for business) and life and health insurance. I had that benefit of working with some very good agents. However, I quickly realized that most of the older agents were using badly outdated workflows and were extremely resistant to change. It was out of necessity that my interest in automation and workflows began to consume me. I began writing a book that could be used to instruct new independent insurance agents on how to optimize their workflows to produce (sell) more policies in less time. At the time very few resources existed to help new 'independent agents' break into the business. This manual would become the basis of and business plan for what was about to happen next.

In April of 2003 I founded, INDEMNUS with my younger brother Ryan. INDEMNUS was to be a real-time approach to selling home, auto and life insurance. We were only focused on policies that could be quoted and sold in over the phone or via the web. That meant no business insurance. Just like GEICO or Progressive, we were able to deliver immediate solutions. Unlike GEICO and Progressive (at that time) we were a one stop shop for homeowners and life insurance too. We invested heavily in technology. We were a paperless agency from the beginning. We the first agency in the nation to offer 'e-signatures' for insurance applications. We employed an intricate call flow matrix that leveraged the service centers provided by our insurance carrier partners. This obligated the insurance companies to handle customer service issues such as billing questions & policy changes which allowed our office to focus primarily on sales.

My older peers in the industry thought that I was completely nuts, a dreamer. Almost no one shared my vision in the beginning. I was told that this type of agency would fail and that we would never be able to sustain ourselves. Well, one of my guilty pleasures in life is working as hard as it takes to prove someone wrong.

Within three short years INDEMNUS was the largest Progressive agency in my home state of Iowa. We were also one of the Top-30 largest Allied (Nationwide) agencies in an eight state region.

We had done it. We had built an agency for the new millennium. A lean operation leveraging all of the latest technology and automation. An agency that grew to a size in just three short years that would have taken a conventional agency an entire career to grow.

One thing that we've never done at INDEMNUS is spend too much time patting ourselves on the back. The year of 2006 had been a banner year for us. We had record earnings. There was much to celebrate. As I said though, celebrations don't last too long in our world.

So In the late fall of 2006 I sat at my desk wondering how we were going to push the envelop in 2007 and beyond. What could we do on a grander scale. Around that same time a childhood friend of mine who had had a successful career as a business consultant started spending time at our offices. Now I must confess that my growth plans for '07 at the time didn't involve serving the less fortunate and the poor. But fate has a strange way of taking you places that you never guessed you would go. Serving charities would be exactly where we would end up....

Next chapter: An Old Friend Breathes New Life Into INDEMNUS