Page 109 - The UnCaptive Agent

82 THE UNCAPTIVE AGENT

plan, and I think you now see the point. The pro forma
forecast, or budget, is derived from all of these other
things. It puts the income, expenses, profits, or losses
that you expect into numbers, month-by-month, for
one to three years.
If you’ve done a good job building your business plan,
retention plan, sales plan, and your marketing plan, the
pro forma will flow easily. Building the pro forma is
critical to your success: every single month that you’re
in business from now on, you need to be comparing
the results you expected for that month to the results
you achieved. This will allow you to make changes and
adjustments as you go, in order to prove and increase
your performance.
When you create the pro forma, it’s critically import-
ant to describe all the assumptions that you have made.
That way when things work out, or when things don’t
work out as well as you anticipated, you can go back
and look at your assumptions and see whether you
assumed that turned out to be wrong. If you did, note
the adjustment you made, learn, and get better. If you
don’t describe your assumptions in the pro forma, you
won’t remember. So, document how you came up with
the numbers when you start your agency.
You should compare your performance
month-by-month against what you thought it
would be. However, I wouldn’t get too excited about
month-to-month results one way or the other. I find
that there is enough month-to-month variability in the
agency business (especially after the first year, when
policy booking tends to move around a bit) that I really
recommend that you scrutinize your actual performance
against your projected performance quarterly. If you do
these every three months with discipline, you’ll speed
your progress towards your goals.