Page 16 - The UnCaptive Agent

entrepreneurialism. Starting and owning an independent
insurance agency will be hard work and will take time,
but with that comes freedom and building income and
value for yourself and your family. At SIAA, we have
countless stories of agency owners building on their
dreams, putting their children through college, perpet-
uating their business, and realizing financial freedom.
Building your own agency also brings the tools to help
others, providing them choice, advice, and advocacy in
protecting (first) their loved ones, and (second) their
most cherished possessions. You are important to your
clients, and you are important to your community as an
insurance agent, but also as a community leader.
Tony Caldwell (and these pages) is a great teacher.
How better to learn to grow than learning from others,
especially those who have been there? Successful busi-
ness owners learn from their own experiences, but they
also learn what to do, and sometimes what not to do,
from others who have walked in their shoes. While a
big part of learning comes from making mistakes—and
for adolescent education it’s easy to learn from those
mistakes—for you and your new business, any mistake
will cost money and time, two limited resources for the
next few years.
Before you even turn these pages, there are two les-
sons we have learned:

• Never make the same mistake twice; take chances,
but learn from failure and press on.
• Never make someone else’s mistakes; they have
paved the way for you.

In the following pages, Tony Caldwell offers you
the insight of a successful thirty-year entrepreneur,
and the shared experiences of hundreds of insurance