Try and Keep Them Out of Your Pockets and Stay Cool

I am not saying anything new or revolutionary here.  Management / Ownership may try and f_ck with your comp plan, don’t worry, it’s always for your betterment.  They may try and take deals that they’re excited about that are “above your level” too.  It’s going to be very frustrating.  Try and keep your cool.

Friends have moved from very good companies because of this.  I have lost “startup” relationships because of this.  You can move on, you can quit, but try and do whatever you’re going to do, or make whatever argument you’re going to make from a “locus of control.”  The worst thing you can do with any bully is let them know they’ve got you on tilt.

They may still change the comp plan, you may still have to give up some parts of a deal. Fight for it though! I am not the best at this.  I have been caught sending way too many texts, try and talk to people.  If you can’t get the convo to surface, it’s risky, but you may need to loop in a reasonable 3rd party to get the conversation to happen, but it’s usually best to handle these issues cooly and 1:1.

I have friends and my brothers that are much better at me at this.  This is not some Alpha bro telling you to punch people in the mouth.  Just know in the game of sales, people are going to try and take your cookies.  They may win, but make sure they at least think about it before coming through to take what’s yours again.

On the flip side of the coin, don’t be too sensitive, and sometimes there are bigger things and needs for the company or egos at play.  Try and “read” the situation and react accordingly, don’t bottle it up too long and “pop” unproductively.  Try and stay in control.

The Internal Game of Sales - Staying at The Table

There’s a lot of talk of sales tactics and strategy, cadences, AI, CRMs, and tracking, but besides “smile while you dial,” I haven’t heard too much talk of the internal game of sales since Dale Carnegie. The classics would talk about mindset, Napolean Hill, OG Mandango, but I feel like the more recent sales books would talk more about the internet, tools, etc. Maybe it’s a fad chase? Anyways, take care of yourself.

I am not sure if it was my Dad who I sold with for 6 years or Dale Carnegie, but “people like working with happy successful people” has always bounced around in my head. I am not saying you can have problems, but sort them out with friends and loved ones and get back in the game. Know which “sales” friends you can have fun and gab with about your personal life too.

Sales is innately hard and polar, you are going to be high and low, plus you may have to present a “false” personality at times, and that can be taxing emotionally. As best you can, try and stay as true to your character as you can for the long game. I do think salespeople are at their best when they approach it more like a blue-collar trade. Punch in move everything forward, even if it’s an inch, punch out, do the same. Next thing you know you’ve built the Hoover Damn. Nothing amazing happens overnight.

Also, figure out how to stay at the table. I saw this from a place of humility with a lot to learn about Finances. Still, try to live behind your means. A sales manager may be happy when you have a new car payment to cover, but you may be pushing deals that won’t play well in the long run, or you may under-bid a project. A few of those are fine, but the world’s often much smaller than we think, and industries are ran by a handful of people. Play the long game.

Sales Mindset - Lobbying and The Nature of The Beast

Sales is wild. I could write and talk about sales for days. I even help facilitate a sales “group therapy” community called Broker Brews.

I heard one-time middle children have no natural authority. They’re not the youngest, cutest, or the oldest strongest. This may be why I love making deals. I won’t bore you with the child lobbying or “jobs” my parents helped us get to earn cash. I will say helping run the Troy High School snack bar while my brother played and Dad ran the booster club was a lot of great money handling and people interacting at a young age.

I digress. Sales is also funny because oftentimes you have to keep us away from the rest of the staff. Sales “outposts” are common for a few reasons. If your Accounting people or department acted like your sales department you’d be concerned.

In sales you have to open doors, bring people along, get internal buy-in, external buy-in, and either lobby your cause or wait for it to be the right move for the company. The salesperson’s gotta keep an eye on compensation and lobby for what is fair too, it’s a wild world. And ownership wants to help the salesperson, but they also don’t want them to run off with the lifeblood of their kingdom, accounts and deal flow.

In sales, we’re often under-educated, potentially under-connected, underslept, and we’re on a bit of an island compared to most regular jobs, and that’s ok. We’re rewarded handsomely and probably wouldn’t fit with the rank and file. Please be nice to the salespeople in your life, they’re supporting their company, family, and hopefully a nice car lease because they’re a badass.

PS: Try and make SDR to Account Manager convo handoffs less weird. And is your LinkedIn bot working if you have to SPAM 1,000 people to get one convo? Know who you’re talking to and why, please.

Just Get Started

One call. One page. One post. You should do all of them before thinking too much, you’ll freeze yourself up. Just get in the game and iterate later. You’ll be far ahead of the crowd just for trying something. If you keep moving and thinking when there’s friction you’ll be on your own in a good way.

Don’t forget a lot of the world is bored too, we need fresh voices, faces, and influences on the greater conversation. Don’t worry about being “the” voice, start by being a voice, and try and be helpful.

EATING MY WORDS AROUND AI:

I need to eat my words a little. I was a little walled out / walls up on the AI talk.

I am now seeing that "AI" can solve a ton of uses in a variety of places. I would have this rule of thumb when engaging with startups, I didn't want "horses" too close that I am involved with. I put "AI" in one bucket. (I'll stop using quotes on"AI" for the rest of this post.)

Vibhanshu Abhishek and I connected two weekends on Twitter or LinkedIn? I forget. We ended up having lunch with my good buddy Trevor Hayes, CIC and talking about Alltius and AI for outbound sales that following Wednesday. It was an awesome lunch and conversation.

I hopped on a quick call with Lance J. Dowdell to talk about ReFocus AI, they have some awesome tooling around client retention monitoring. Last but certainly not least, I spoke with Zach Cole and Adam Rubenstein at Traq.ai, and their sales coaching and summaries were very impressive.

Lance was the one to break it down to me that these companies are complementary and solving different parts of the agency flow equation. You may get your walls up when you hear AI, I did, try and see what the AI is being used to solve and if there's need / value there.

If you're selling an AI-related tool, as Lance would nudge you to, talk about the outcome and uplift. Not the tech necessarily.

This proudly Boomer-trained elder millennial salesman is having fun checking out the steam-powered axes out there! Now I gotta get back to having some conversations and trying to sell. It's a brave new world!

Startup Insurance Needs Version 2.0

This is going to be a work in progress. But what I have below is my latest iteration of how to meet “Startup Insurance” needs. The most illuminating thing to me lately has been the fact that startups are starting digitally first. This may sound obvious, but when you’ve quoted hundreds of brick and mortar small businesses, switching over to “digital first” risk management approach took a moment register.

The other thing for an agent to keep in mind about startups is they often don’t want coverage until they’re required to have it for a contract, etc. This can put an agent in a tough spot. Some coverages can be harder to place than others, you can often get away with a 3-week quote and placement window, but if it’s an out of the box need, I’d at least plan on having at least that much lead time.

Some coverages are super straight forward, but tech e&o, anything where employees are being contracted out, etc., can get clunky to quote. Clients should be aware most quotes are good for 3 months too, so quoting early doesn’t necessarily mean you have to bind right away.

We are getting there but most agents aren’t totally tech enabled yet. You’re probably going to have to deal with some PDFs, and maybe multiple DocuSigns. In some cases, you might have to cut a check. There are more stripped-down approaches some platforms take, but you may unknowingly be paying a premium for the ease. There are always plusses and minus, and at the end of the day I believe selecting insurance should come down to the following three things:

1) Right coverage - There’s a lot that goes into this, but the client needs to be aware of what is and what is not intended to be covered.

2) Most competitive price - I did not say the cheapest. Just like you can probably find a $5 football helmet, people will sell you cheap insurance, but neither will protect you that well.

Go for the “gear” that’s reasonable for your level of risk and the occasion. Pewee football players don’t need NFL helmets, but they need more than a bucket with a chin-strap.

3) Ease of delivery - This is last for a reason. If the top two boxes look good, judge on this one, but price and coverage are the two most important things. You may end up with an antiquated looking carrier that does things by mail, but has great financials and coverage, that’s ok. It’s about the best policy for your price and need.

Substance over flash, and if there is substance, why not have a little flash. It is all about the meat of the policy, and working with the right agent can help you see what you need through the noise. Please reach out if I can help with any startup insurance needs, nationwide. And I hope you enjoy my second pass at breaking down startup insurance needs below:

STARTUP INSURANCE

So you have taken the plunge! Congrats. It’s going to be a wild ride, but we want to help make sure insurance isn’t something you worry too much about, we want to help you focus on the mission at hand! Changing the world and bringing your vision to life.

When it comes to startups and insurance, every startup is unique, but we do think there are some general best practices when it comes to startup tech companies. We’d want to make sure to talk through your specific needs, but please take the time to review a few thoughts below on what types of insurance may make sense for tech startups at different phases of their development.

Discovery (Pre-SEED) stage

Your company is self funded or have some friends and family money. You have no employees, you are searching for product market fit, and are in other companies systems and earning contracts. Tech startups are going to want to have the following policies in place.

1) Cyber Liability - Cyber-insurance is an insurance product used to protect businesses and individual users from Internet-based risks, and more generally from risks relating to information technology infrastructure and activities.

2) Errors and Omissions (E&O) - E&O is a type of professional liability insurance that protects companies, their workers, and other professionals against claims of inadequate work or negligent actions.

Small SEED round - You’re taken on some Professional money

You haven’t hired anyone yet, but you have Professional Money coming into your startup

3) Key Person Insurance - Key person insurance is simply life insurance on the key person in a business. In a small business, this is usually the owner, the founders or perhaps a key employee or two. These are the people who are crucial to a business--the ones whose absence would sink the company.

4) Directors and Officers Insurance (Maybe Employee Practices and Liabilities as well, it’s covered later too)

-Directors and officers liability Insurance (often called "D&O") is liability insurance payable to the directors and officers of a company, or to the organization(s) itself, as indemnification (reimbursement) for losses or advancement of defense costs in the event an insured suffers such a loss as a result of a legal action brought for alleged wrongful acts in their capacity as directors and officers.

SEED round - You’re starting to hire and build a company

You have employees, you’re accumulating assets, maybe getting office space, and starting to build a company.

5) General Liability (GL) and Business Personal Property (BPP) - BPP Covers your assets, GL covers liabilities like slip and fall accidents, you’ll also want to include, hired and unowned auto, water back-up and some BPP off-premise.(Maybe Workers Comp, depending upon if you have made hires yet.)

6) Workers Comp - Workers' compensation is a form of insurance providing wage replacement and medical benefits to employees injured in the course of employment in exchange for mandatory relinquishment of the employee's right to sue his or her employer for the tort of negligence.

Scaling Is On (Series A + Rounds Are Happening) and You’re Building a Company

Scaling is on, you have an HR department, you’re making a ton of hires, and have several rounds of funding on the horizon you’re going to want to add the following coverage:

(GL, BPP, E&O, Cyber, D&O, Key Man) +

7) Employment Practices and Liabilities (EPLI) - Employment practices liability is an area of United States labor law that deals with wrongful termination, sexual harassment, discrimination, invasion of privacy, false imprisonment, breach of contract, emotional distress, and wage and hour law violations. It may be categorized as a form of professional liability.

8) Excess liability insurance and Commercial umbrella insurance - Excess Liability Coverage will extend the underlying policies, whereas Commercial Umbrella Insurance will do the same, and have some broader coverage in place for your business.

Bonus Section - Employee Benefits - Regulations change state to state. And a lot of small startups have joining without Benefits as a badge of honor, but they shouldn’t scare your company as much as they probably do. Offering Benefits can be great for retention. Not everyone will ask to be covered, you can choose how you want dependents coverage to work, and you get to use pretax business monies that will save about 30% of the cost if employees are buying Benefits on their own. You get access to better networks through buying Benefits as a company too.

Miscellanies insurance needs that may come up

Business Auto - If your company owns any vehicles, Commercial Auto insurance is rated and covered differently than Personal Auto. All drivers will have to be named on the policy.

Inland Marine - If you have high-value assists beyond your business Personal Property, say a collection of Wine that’s going up in value, it wouldn’t be covered property under traditional business replacement cost coverage. It could cover fine art or Medical Equipment for instance as well.

Event Insurance - If you’re hosting company events that provide alcohol and have outsiders, you’re going to want to have Event Insurance in-place. It is relatively inexpensive, and can save you from a non-work event derailing all that your company’s worked for.

Thank you for taking the time to review these recommendations. Again, these are general recommendations for tech companies. If you’re building a product you’d want to have Product Liability for instance, example of other additional policies are Business Auto, Umbrella, IP, Fiduciary, Crime, or International Policies.

Please reach-out below to discuss your unique needs and situation:

All the best,

-Broker Brett

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Brett Fulmer

Newport Beach Insurance Center

Office: (949) 358-7990

brett@npbic.com

CA LAH + P&C Ins LIC. # 0I83384

Licensed in all 50 states

3rd Insurance License Renewal Reflections:

When I first got licensed in 2014 it was to create leads for an office moving sales job I had, I had grown up around the company, and I thought it'd be a clever way to bring in leads.

It actually kind of backfired, I think we my leads sources thought I was distracted, and they dried up a bit.

On my first renewal (2016) I was doubling down on this Insurance thing being interesting, and seeing the upside of renewals and having a lot of paperwork, but no crews to handle.

On my last renewal (2018) I had worked a year in personal lines, sold leads for a bit, and was about to have my last fulltime job selling supplemental benefits and HR resources. The last two jobs were a little rough, as sales jobs can be, and I decided to see what I could do on my own.

Stepping out and building my own agency allowed me the flexibility to work with Finaeo Inc. It gave me the ability to work with Blake Maxwell and Maxwell Agency Insurance Services to learn commercial P&C too.

Sometimes you just have to "go." You just have to start. The road won't be clear, but certain muscles will develop that you haven't used before. You'll become a different animal. Often I think people are as strong as they have to be. Don't be scared to ask yourself to be strong.

A Few Quick (Humble) Thoughts on Sales:

The picture at the bottom of this post is of a screenshot I took during a back and forth with my Insurance Nerds friend Bobbie Shrivastav, MBA, PMP discussing sales on Twitter.

(PS: #InsurTechTwitter is pretty great!)

You don't owe anybody anything if you think you're interacting with a bot. If somebody's putting an ask on you without you initiating interest, don't feel too bad about letting it go.

Sales at it's finest is problem-solving, and lazy sales is spamming. In my humble opinion, good salespeople listen, provide value, and don't try and sell ketchup popsicles to people wearing white gloves. They do the hard work of finding people who like ketchup popsicles.

(They should've researched if there was a ketchup popsicle market first, but that's another rant.)

The best salespeople I know chase the right opportunities, listen, dive deep, find a pain point, and help resolve it. Then they provide additional value to seal the deal. I am leaning in this field every day, it's a never-ending craft to develop.