How to be an insurance agent.

Did you know that insurance dates back to 1700 BC?  Traders would implement different strategies to hedge against losing ships at sea due to piracy or sinking.

Wow, think about it, over 3700 years of insurance, give or take.

So a person could say that insurance is one of the earliest industries on record.  Why would a person care about the history of insurance, or what is behind us?  I think the primary reason would be to act as a gauge or measurement or longevity of an industry for the purposes of considering insurance for a career.

It is most likely that you are here on this website now because you have some type of interest in being either an insurance agent, or producer or even an agency owner. You are also probably considering insurance because you know a successful insurance agent, or at least know of a successful insurance agent that has a high degree of autonomy and freedom and money.

I’m also going to guess that someone you know has approached you about becoming an insurance agent, or maybe it’s because you would like to create some time, freedom, autonomy and money for yourself.

As a person that has had an insurance license for more than twenty years, I have learned a thing or two about the insurance industry.  I have learned much of it the hard way and by mistakes and pitfalls, but you don’t have to repeat my mistakes in order to learn which insurance path MAY be suitable for whatyou are trying to accomplish.

See, I think right now may be as good of time as any to look very closely at jumping into the insurance industry, because whether you are looking for a part-time opportunity to supplement your income, or whether you want to be a full time insurance producer, or whether you want to build an insurance business, now is the time to be a part of the action.

Why?  What makes today so different than last year or five or ten years ago?

Here are several reasons:

• The cost of starting an insurance sales and marketing organization or agency has always been prohibitively expensive.  Historically, in order to sell insurance, it was necessary to service the insurance as well.  Which meant, if you opened an insurance agency, it was required that you have an office front, or store location.  With modern communication, technology and the internet, the necessity for a brick and mortar locations is virtually obsolete.  There are organizations today, one in particular that comes to mind, that has essentially obliterated the high cost of starting an insurance business. (What if you could start your business from any location in the world?  The only requirements would be a telephone, a computer, an internet connection and an insurance license?)
•   In addition, it has been necessary to hire staff in order to service insurance policies.  An agent would have to hire a secretary, a receptionist and cover all of the overhead that went with maintaining an insurance office.  At minimum, you would need to hire a service person or obligate yourself to service your policies by chaining yourself to an office or telephone for at least 8 hours a day, which would defeat the purpose of becoming an agent in the first place. (What if you could outsource your agency’s service obligations to a proven service organization that has decades of experience?)
• Leverage.  Leverage is the key to successful insurance organizations.  The more successful the agency, the more you will discover that the successful agents do not do all of the heavy lifting themselves.  Just like the Pharaohs of Egypt didn’t build the great pyramids, so it is that agents don’t do all the work within an agency.  Truly successful agents specialize in something like sales, they become very effective and efficient at producing, and then they delegate the other tasks to people that specialize in their field.  They hire accountants to do book keeping, they purchase marketing from marketing experts and build systems.  There is a great book that every prospective insurance agent must read.  It is called the The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber.  Mr. Gerber details the use of great systems in business, and it will be worth its weight in gold to new insurance agents.

Renewals.  Look, if you don’t learn anything more about insurance, learn this; insurance agents make money by automating themselves. Every year a policy renews, an insurance ganet makes money. Does the insurance agent have to sell a policy every year in order to collect a commission? Absolutely not! Agents make money because they get hundreds and thousands of clients that have to have insurance. Sales occur on auto pilot. Now ask the same thing of other professions? Can a doctor or dentist make money on auto-pilot? No. If they are not doing the work, they are not getting paid.
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