Page 151 - The UnCaptive Agent

124 THE UNCAPTIVE AGENT

clear: an independent insurance agency is a sales orga-
nization! Everything you do in your business is oriented
towards selling insurance. Service is a byproduct of that.
Sales are the most important thing. Without revenue,
you’re not in business.

The Sales Function

With that in mind, let’s talk about the sales function
in your new business. Almost all agency founders are
salespeople. And even if you aren’t the number one
salesperson in your business, you should strive to be.
You are the person with the passion and the purpose
to build the revenue of your organization. You are your
agency’s best advocate. You must always be involved in
selling. And so, you will be your agency’s first producer.
More than likely, selling will be the highest value you
bring to the agency for a really long time.
Of course, you will have other roles in the business,
but you should never allow any of those roles to eclipse
your role as the number-one producer. When you look
at the cost of replacing yourself in any other roles that
you perform, you will clearly see that the money you
make for the time spent will always be greatest in sales.
As your agency grows, you should seek to eliminate
from your daily work as many non-sales functions as
you can. What many inexperienced agency principals
do instead is the exact opposite.
As the agency begins to grow and the service burden
grows along with it, you will find that you have less and
less time to devote to selling. This will result in a lower
growth rate for income over time. The inexperienced
agency principal seeks to solve this problem by hiring
producers to continue to grow income while they spend
an increasing amount of their time on administrative