SPEAKER_03 0:00

How did you end up in the insurance world? Junior year of college was at a point where I was like, eh, I probably need to start figuring out my life.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

How big is the market for weighted blankets?

SPEAKER_03 0:11

I came across selling on Amazon. We were selling weighted blankets on Amazon.

SPEAKER_02 0:16

With weighted blankets, aren't they useful for people with yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

People that talk too much, you could just throw it over them and hold them down.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

What are you seeing like going forward in the space? One of the things I've been working on that really excites me is using funnels to bring people to you. The agents that have the most success. What are some of their characteristics? What is the number one piece of advice do you give to any insurance agent that wants to kickstart this whole social media craze that all the kids are talking about?

SPEAKER_03 0:50

First thing is And understand that if you want to continue to compete for the next 10 years, you have to embrace it.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

And the second thing is, I entered.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

It really gets the mic, the mic's very hot when you scream it do it like that. I just saw that. It peaked.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

It peaked.

unknown 1:34

Peak.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

But but you know what piques my interest? What, Mr. Jason? Our guest today.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Who do we have, Mr. Craig? Oh, we've got some might call him JT, but we'll call him Justin Thomas. Welcome, Justin, to the insurance suits.

SPEAKER_03 1:49

Thank you. Thanks for having me guys. Excellent to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Yeah. And you got to see behind the scenes of how it takes us about a half hour to get set up.

SPEAKER_03 1:57

We'll give it to you guys, though. You guys know a little bit more about technology and you've got mics going on. Not a lot of other insurance agents needs to deal with that stuff. So at least you guys are charging headfirst through the problem, just diving right in.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

So not sure if you've listened to the show before, but we're going to run you through the gauntlet with everyone's favorite speedbreakers. Ooh. Speedbreaker. Speedbreaker, speedbreakers, speed breakers, speed breakers. Are you ready? I guess so, yeah. All right, here we go. Time on the clock. Ever had a mullet? No. First crush.

SPEAKER_03 2:37

Age or name or what?

SPEAKER_00 2:39

That's your call.

SPEAKER_03 2:42

First grade.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Most embarrassing thing your mom ever caught you doing.

SPEAKER_03 2:51

Are there any passes or skips?

SPEAKER_00 2:53

Yes. So you know what's interesting about that question is every time you see sweat start to start to come down, and then if they say something besides what the obvious answer is, then so good job passing.

SPEAKER_03 3:13

115.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Nice. That is respectable. Favorite cereal? It's Cheerios. How many kids? Have you made cry?

SPEAKER_03 3:24

Sorry, please wait for the probably too many to count.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Good. Count chocula or count Dracula?

SPEAKER_03 3:33

Count Dracula.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

I thought so. When you said uh Cheerios, I thought it would go to Dracula. Uh fastest Lyle.

SPEAKER_03 3:43

Uh six minutes.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Favorite flavor? Chocolate. Dogs or cats?

SPEAKER_03 3:51

Dogs for sure.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

We still haven't had to end an interview. Tacos or burritos? Burritos. Favorite video game.

SPEAKER_03 4:02

Right, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Ooh, very specific. And Trump or Biden? You don't have to answer that one. Oh, okay, good. So uh I think Jason has one last question for you.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

JT, take us back. What was the first concert you ever went to?

SPEAKER_03 4:22

Um, so I mill the answer to this, I don't remember it. It was Leanne Rhymes because my older brother was obsessed with her, but I was like three years old.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Oh. So you remember it. You remember that you went, but you don't remember it.

SPEAKER_03 4:42

Exactly, yeah. Like there's pictures and like you know, your parents tell you that you were there.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Yeah. You were holding a doobie, and you're only three, it's just phenomenal. They're like, look at this will be funny. Well, perfect. So so why don't you take us back to to that concert, which you don't remember, and and move forward from there. How did you end up in the insurance world, which is everybody's dream job?

SPEAKER_03 5:08

Yeah, absolutely. Well, uh there's there's a lot of years in there that don't really have to do with this answer, so I'll kind of skip forward. So uh just went like the kind of traditional route, graduated from high school, went to college, uh, junior year of college, was at a point where I was like, hey, I probably need to start figuring out my life. Um you know, most people probably don't do that, so they actually graduate college, but I was thinking about it a little bit sooner than maybe some other people do. Um and actually ended up getting an internship at uh Northwestern Mutual, and did I really enjoyed that. They have kind of more like the financial advising background, um and loved what you know, everybody seems to sell when it comes to the insurance world, the insurance industries that you can set your own schedule, you're a business owner, you're an entrepreneur, that type of thing. Um, and then uh just kind of went through their process, which is creating a list of people that you know, getting your warm market, all that type of stuff. And um I I liked, I actually liked it um probably more than other people do, or especially consumers do when they think of insurance. Uh, but just decided that at that point in my life, um probably I just didn't know that like digital marketing existed, which I really wish I would have known back then. And it but it definitely existed. I just didn't know what all you could do with it. So um decided to go get a corporate job and went into that as soon as I graduated. Did that for a year, and I'm just not the type of person that's meant to be an employee at all. I'm I'm the I'd be my worst employee right now. Like I wouldn't hire myself. Um, but as a as an entrepreneur, I'm pretty good at it. Um but yeah, spent all of my time in that full-time job trying to figure out how to make money online, and I came across selling on Amazon. Um in these next like several years, there's just a lot of trial and error when it comes to entrepreneurship, as I'm sure a lot of like you guys are probably familiar with it seems to be the case with most entrepreneurs. But um we were selling, me and my then girlfriend, now wife, we were selling uh weighted blankets on Amazon, and then those quickly became saturated on Amazon, so we had to learn how to build our own website. So we build our own website, and then it we learned that it's not a field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. We actually learned how to traffic to the website, so then from there learned Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Google ads, and started driving traffic website. Um, that business did okay, but it was nothing to where I could, you know, bank the rest of my life. I wasn't gonna become a multimillionaire from that business.

SPEAKER_00 8:03

So how big is the market for weighted blankets?

SPEAKER_03 8:07

Well, I mean, we were doing at one point, uh, the problem is that it's um it's seasonal. So like October, November, and December, we would do like 50, 60k per month in revenue. Wow. Yeah, but then the rest of the year, like nothing. It would go down to like two or three K per month. But I mean profit margins on that was like 30 to 40 percent. Um, and that's just with us too. So like if we really want to scale it up, hire people, most profits would go back down.

SPEAKER_02 8:39

So I mean it was good with weighted blankets, aren't they useful for people with um autism? Like processing, yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

Yeah, people that talk too much, you could just throw it over them and hold them down.

SPEAKER_03 8:57

Yeah, that's kind of like the hardware for it, and then it really started to get popular with uh kind of using it for benefits of just getting more higher quality sleep. Um, and that's kind of when a lot more started entering the market.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

I got one and it's 20 pounds, and I think that I went too heavy. Okay, like it is pretty dang heavy. Like it might be 25 pounds. Like it's I would, you know, like everything. I went to the max. I'm like, oh, what's the the most? And then I got that one. And it's like you took you, I mean, 20 pounds is a lot of weight. Like when you try to carry it around, I brought in the van and it was like, what is this?

SPEAKER_03 9:36

Yeah, yeah, 20 hounds is a lot. Uh we've got we've got uh 20, we've got a 15, and we've got a 12, and 15's like perfect for me. Yeah, 20 pounds, especially like yeah, when you try and like pick it up or like bring it around with you, it just it gets to be a little bit too much.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

I bet you didn't know you were gonna get a plug for your weighted blankets site, but what is that site? Because I want to get a 15 powder.

SPEAKER_03 10:01

So it's actually not up anymore because it became such a nightmare. Um, our our brand was just JM weighted blankets because I actually started with a business partner, so it was J for Justin and M for Matt. Real creative, we were beginning days. Um, it's not still up anymore. We don't we don't sell the name was on it. We actually just donated the last of them because we had uh we got to a point where I just I thought it was a good idea to order a ton of them, and so we ordered like a thousand of them, and uh there was uh a shipping error because we got them from China and they didn't package them correctly, so then we just got them all shipped to my house, and as the biggest nightmare in the world, I self-fulfilled them for a while, and I'm never dealing with physical products or e-conners ever again. So yeah, that's uh that's kind of the end to that business. Um, but in in between there, in and out, um decided that we wanted we had learned Facebook ads and YouTube ads and the advertising side of things, and I I really like that. And so my wife and I started uh a just a small, just the two of us, digital marketing agency and Omaha, I tried to get some clients, and we had uh a really a random assortment of clients. So we had dentists, we had aestheticians, we had gas stations, we had problem gyms. Um, but my most successful clients we had were the insurance agents that we worked with back when I was at Northwestern Mutual. And so we really dropped all of these other clients just because we decided we wanted to go and niche down. And then we got to a point where we had to decide do we want to continue to run ads for people? Do we want to really scale with this agency side of things where we're gonna have to hire people? Um, do we want to go that model or do we want to go and pivot and teach people? Because we had actually had some of the agents, they just wanted to learn how to do it themselves because they didn't want to continue to pay a thousand, two thousand dollars month over month for uh marketing agency. They were just like, let's you just teach me how to do it. And and so between those two decisions, teaching someone how to do it, seeing them get better results than we even did doing it for them, and not wanting to hire out tons of people and potentially give up a lot of a profit margin, we switched over to the consulting model of it. And we've been doing that for about uh three years now. So your initial question was how do I get into insurance? That was through college, and then since then, uh haven't really sold since college about five years ago. I've more been on the marketing side of things with insurance.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

What college?

SPEAKER_03 12:49

University of Nebraska.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Oh, cool. Corn Huskers.

SPEAKER_03 12:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

So I have a question for you about about uh the this space. Because iOS uh whatever the heck has just come out and it seems to have a pretty significant impact on this. Uh we see it on our ads, the big banner across the top. Hey, it's not gonna work anymore. The pixel, blah, blah, blah. So can you talk to us about that and and what how you've navigated around that issue? Yeah. So maybe even talk about what that is, because I bet you there's some folks on here that don't even know what the pixel is.

SPEAKER_03 13:27

Yeah, definitely. So Apple and Facebook are kind of at a war with each other. And with this newest iOS update, Apple has started releasing a mandate with all of their apps where they have to ask the customer if they want to be trapped. They don't specifically say Facebook, but it really is just targeting Facebook. So they're basically like, do you want your actions in this app to be tracked by third-party developers or marketers or whatever it is? And and most people, we actually don't know what's gonna happen, right? Because it's relatively new. It's like only been active for about a month, if not less than that. So the idea is that most people are going to choose that they don't want to be tracked, but truthfully, we don't know how that's gonna actually end up happening. Because if people don't get tracked, they're gonna start having a worse user experience on Facebook and uh Instagram because they're gonna start getting random ads. It's not gonna be actually tailored to what they want. So in the long run, people will probably end up coming back to opting in to being allowed to be tracked. Um, but the most people's guesses, as far as advertisers are thinking, is that most people are gonna say, no, I don't want to be tracked. So where that's really gonna affect you within Facebook is will the pixel so to describe what the pixel is, it's just a little piece of code that you can copy and paste into your website. So when people go from Facebook ad over to your website, they're no longer on the Facebook platform anymore. Facebook can still see some of the actions that they're doing in order to optimize some of the ads going on. So what the update will do if people opt out of tracking is it's really gonna affect optimization of ads, which is Facebook's like number one tool when it comes to like beating other competitors for ad platforms. Because Facebook does a really, really good job of just knowing who your right customers are, even if your targeting is not very good. And without the ability to actually track that anymore, that's gonna start coming down. Um, so your ad optimization as time goes on, typically in the past, your ads would get better as Facebook would watch who clicks on it, who opts in, who becomes a lead, who becomes an appointment, who buys. If you can tell Facebook all that stuff, your ads should get smarter. But now without being able to tell Facebook that, your ads will probably not get smarter. And then the other side of the coin is retargeting audiences, which is Facebook's like second most uh used tool in their belt. Um, most people, when it comes to Facebook, their goal is to just get enough data to then use a retarget or look-alike audience. Um, because what what a lookalike audience is, it just takes, say, you have a hundred customers, you give it to Facebook and you say, create a look-alike audience. Facebook will go find uh a percentage of the population in your area or your country that are most similar to those people. So helps with targeting. Um, but without the ability to track all of these things, Facebook's look-alike audiences are going to not perform as well either. So there's a couple things that you can do to combat this. Uh, the first thing is investing in understanding and getting really good at tracking. Um you could you could do all of that on your own, use UTMs to really track things yourself, or there's a couple different softwares out there that figure out how to track really well and they just track it a lot better, and then they feed that information back to Facebook for you. Um, and then the other thing is putting a lot more time and focus into your images and your ad copy and all of your creative because a lot of people have relied very heavily on audiences for the last three or four years and that Facebook's just gonna find the right customers. But now with that not being the case, you need to use ad copy in order to reach our customers and push away people that aren't customers and rely a lot heavier on the actual ad side we're producing.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

So you're saying if I opt out of it, I'm gonna get so I'm gonna start getting served like ladies' underwear, which would be different for me. Jason already is getting served ladies' underwear.

SPEAKER_03 17:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

So won't change for him. No. Are you sure it's ladies? I don't know. Are there genders?

SPEAKER_02 17:55

No, there's not.

SPEAKER_03 17:56

Continue. Uh yeah, but I mean, those are really the two ways that you can combat that with the iOS updates on that.

SPEAKER_02 18:07

Cool, man. Um, what what are you seeing like going forward in in the space? What gets you excited about marketing this year?

SPEAKER_03 18:17

Yeah, so uh well, I wanted to ask you guys, do you guys is your audience and do you guys focus more on PNC, or do you do much with like life, health, annuities, retirement, that type of stuff?

SPEAKER_00 18:30

I'd say we're I would say we're split. Yeah. Maybe a little bit more of PNC, but but we have a we do have life and health. Um, we've interviewed uh Cody Askins and and uh David DuFord have both been on it, and I'm sure you're on YouTube, so you've seen both of those gentlemen.

SPEAKER_03 18:50

Yeah. Yeah, I was I was kind of thinking that you guys were more PNC. So um, you know, really most of my clients that I work with are life and retirement, Medicare and health. And and this might be a good discussion to have with you guys, is because one of the things I've been working on that really excites me is using funnels to bring people to you rather than just creating like typical type leads that you then have to outbound work. You have to outbound call, you have to use like automation in order to get those people to work. So I like to use video and funnels to bring people to me, but what we're seeing is that cost per appointment is between like 40 all the way up to $140. So whenever I talk to a P and C agent, especially ones that only focus on like auto and maybe home, there's not enough margin for that type of advertising to work. What are you guys' thoughts on that? Does that sound accurate? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Well, I think it depends. At the it depends on what what that acquisition cost is at the end. If if that appointment is gonna result in 50% of the time being closed business, I mean I'd pay 80 bucks acquisition all day long. I will pay, you know, 250. But if uh if it you only close 5% of those appointments, then it's not gonna work, right? Then you have an $800 acquisition cost, too much.

SPEAKER_02 20:16

Too much. Well, I think it's also the type of policy it is, right? The the life and health is more of an emotional um kind of kind of policy, right? Where the P and C policy is more of a hey, I have to do this. There's not a it doesn't really fulfill that same kind of need. It's more of an argument. It's more of a chase. Yeah. So it's like more of like a commodity type type of beginning. Not so much down the funnel, but the the the the beginning is, where the the beginning of like life and health is is more of a pull at the heartstrings kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 20:59

Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. I think everybody enters that like you can't you can't start a PC funnel by telling them that you bring all this value and it's better to pay more, right? You have to meet them and just like, hey, I mean, look at every billboard. You know that all the big carriers have spent a lot of mar money on market research to determine that everybody thinks it's a commodity, right? Um, in fact, I think uh the lizard and the um and flow both have spent billions of dollars to tell everybody that it's a commodity, right? And so that's what um captive carriers and even independents who are selling multiple different uh for for different carriers ha have uh to combat, right? But you still have to get them in the funnel. So when you get them in, it's it's this hey, we're gonna save you some money and then you slow it down and and you have a different conversation as as a as you progress through.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Yeah, I don't think you can I I read some marketing books where they were saying where you can't really read desire, right? Desire is already there. So how do you tap into that? And really the desire of most of the PNC isn't a desire for more coverage. Because then you'd have to train them from square one. They're so far from knowing that part. That that converse to take a cold audience and get them to create the desire of more coverage. I mean, you you can't scale that. But the desire, usually at the beginning of that funnel, is a price-based conversation. So I think that's the only way that that is the desire at the beginning. That's what you have to tap into. That's a tough one.

SPEAKER_00 22:48

I think very rarely does that call start with hey, I was shopping around for um for higher policy limits. You know, like that just doesn't happen. It's it's I'm looking for a better deal. Like that's how 99.9% of the things they like, hey, I want higher policy limits in an umbrella. Is that something you can help me with? Like it just they don't know what an umbrella is, they don't know what their coverage limits are. They think they have full coverage and they have state minimum. Yeah, well, yeah, they know what the one that protects you from the rate is, but not the other one. Well, I mean, if they don't, then you're really in for it.

SPEAKER_03 23:26

Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Well, that's good to know because I mean, as far as like those appointments, they close so much more. They're my clients tell me that they're they like them better than referrals. But what you said makes a lot of sense though, right? Because in in in life and health and retirement, like we put them through a 10 to 15 minute video before they book an appointment. That's because we we want to talk, we want to talk about emotion, we want to get them emotionally invested, we want to talk about some benefits and things like that. Rarely ever are we talking about price. But with P and C, I don't even know if they want to sit through a 10 to 15 minute video, at least not at the beginning. And so that's uh it's it's definitely interesting for you.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

That's interesting. On the life side, do they like if if okay, you get the lead, they come through, you're talking to them, or whoever is talking to them, right? To start a conversation, do the exploration, create the rapport, all that stuff, and then they do the presentation. Is a common objection. Well, okay, I'm gonna go talk to a few more life agents and then I'll then I'll make a decision. Like, is that something that comes up or is that pretty rare?

SPEAKER_03 24:37

Pretty rare because most of what I teach is to try and like find a hook that doesn't revolve around life insurance, right? So most people that go through these type of funnels, like we don't even pull them from, we don't use Google search ads as a as a traffic source because those people are too hot, they're too problem aware. They don't want to sit through a 10 to 15 minute video either. So uh if somebody's like literally looking for life insurance for life insurance sake, then then they might have that objection. But most of the time, like when we're bringing people in, it's uh we're trying to find a hook, we're trying to find a pain that they haven't thought of, right? So it's using like cash value life insurance as a retirement vehicle, or it's using like um non-ACA health insurance for people that are healthy or made too much money to get subsidies for health insurance. So it's it's finding these different ways, and it's also focusing. I teach all of my people I work with, and my philosophy is just really niching down. And and I I believe in niching down uh in a way that most insurance agents aren't familiar with. Um most insurance agents, when they think of niching, they think of product, right? They're gonna niche by final expense or Medicare or P and C. But at the end of the day, even inside of those product niches, there's so many different levels of people, right? And so somebody that's been making like a million dollars a year for the last 40 years compared to somebody making like 30k per year for the last 40 years, those people are gonna respond vastly different to different advertisements. And so what I like to do is I like to focus on creating your own, you know, blue ocean, coming up with your own way to niche people together, clusters of people that have similar pain points based on the insurance that you want to sell them or the financial product you want to sell them, and then become the expert with those types of people. Then you can sell multiple different policies too, which gives you longer lifetime value.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Love that.

SPEAKER_03 26:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:44

What are they seeing on the uh as a close ratio on those? Because they're obviously pretty teed up.

SPEAKER_03 26:50

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, um it's tough to give like a number because there's they they vary so differently between agent with their sales ability, but like uh, you know, one of my best guys, he closes like 60 to 70 percent, but he was also doing like 50 percent with appointments that he had as appointment setter bringing in, so he's just a really good closer. Um, I would say like an ad more average number is like 25 to 30 close close rate. No, especially like when you consider a lot of these people come from having to call 50 weeds and get a hold of five of them, and then maybe or get a hold of town, you know, close rates are a lot lower on those, but then you also have to call through so many of them. So the technology to do that work for them you got to, it's 2021.

unknown 27:48

Right.

SPEAKER_03 27:49

True, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

It is yeah, it's crazy.

SPEAKER_03 27:54

The amount of people that are still out there using a spreadsheet and knocking on doors and they have never made a video, and yeah, so much stuff they're missing out on.

SPEAKER_02 28:05

So, what would you the the the agents that are have the most success, what are some of their characteristics that that stand out to you?

SPEAKER_03 28:15

Yeah, that's a really good question. Um so as far as characteristics, I would say outgoing, um, being open, they don't have to be great on camera, they don't have to be great on on audio coming in, but they need to be willing to learn and understand that like people don't want to just watch dull boringness, like they want your personality into it. Um, and it doesn't have to be like a specific personality, you just have to be excited about what you're talking about. So, someone that's like not afraid to learn those things, and then ultimately, I think like the number there's two really characteristics that um are very important to success. First one is discipline, so someone that can actually sit down to work and get some stuff done and do it over and over and over again, and then somebody that won't give up because as an entrepreneur, the only thing that's guaranteed is you're gonna have problems, and so your ability to persevere and push through them is is absolutely necessary if you're gonna be an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_00 29:24

So true, you have to be ready for constant, constant problems, and I think it once something goes really well, it's like okay, it's coming, right? Because it is just a cycle up and down. Yeah, and I I love what you said about enthusiasm too, because nobody connects with just dull, especially with a subject that the vast majority of the public finds extremely boring. So you do have to sexy it up with some some really good tonality and uh you know fast tempo, or not fast tempo, but you know, upbeat. You have to be upbeat. Um, we train like we train our teams that way. We train all the teledudes, uh uh tele uh telemarketers. Like it's like it is just nonstop. The focus is on how excited you've got to be excited because ain't no way the person on the other end of the phone is gonna get excited about this insurance if if you aren't bringing the heat, then and you just have to be fired up. Love it.

SPEAKER_03 30:21

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you can't you can't expect them to be more excited than you, like that would never happen. So you have to be up here if you want them to be here, and then the other thing I like that you said that like upbeat tone, because I think a lot of the people, especially with Medicare agents or people who their demographic is older, they have this tendency to just slow down and talk to them like three-year-olds, and especially in video, they hate that. Like they don't want to sit through you just like super slowly going through the words, and maybe some of them might have hearing issues, but still like they appreciate upbeat and excitement. So a lot of people just don't know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

Love it. Love it. So um where well, first off, where can people go to learn more about what you do before we yeah, thanks.

SPEAKER_03 31:19

Um, I mean, my website's probably gonna be the easiest place. It's insurance advertisingmasters.com. And then uh I've been a little bad about it this year putting out YouTube videos, but uh if you type in Justin Thomas, it's insurance on YouTube, uh, I'll come up on there. And I'm I'm planning to put a lot more content out. Um, so I I really enjoy putting out YouTube videos. It's just easy to get caught up in the business side of things, as I'm sure you guys realize. Uh, and so making content a commitment is something I need to work on.

SPEAKER_00 31:55

But yeah, you gotta you gotta put that on the calendar and make it happen because what we I mean, it's so easy to get caught up on all the other stuff, you know, and it's the most fun, and that's the best part.

SPEAKER_02 32:06

Exactly. That's why we made a virtual Craig, and that's what you see here. It's yeah, this is not actually Craig.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

No, it's a robot. Yeah, it's amazing. CGI with AI. So, well, great, man. Thank you so much for coming on on the podcast. Uh awesome to have you. Some great knowledge nuggets, and uh folks can uh oh Jason's show. I got one last question. Oh, well, fire away, buddy.

SPEAKER_02 32:37

I would have to ask if what is the number one piece of advice you give to any insurance agent either coming into the industry or somebody who's been in the industry that wants to kick start this whole social media craze that all the kids are talking about.

SPEAKER_03 32:59

Yeah, great.

SPEAKER_00 32:59

Kids talking about it?

SPEAKER_03 33:03

It should be. Uh, first thing is don't don't be afraid of social media and understand that if you want to continue to compete for the next 10 years, you have to embrace it. Uh, and the second thing is understand traffic and your goal needs to be with everything, getting all of these different mediums of traffic into a place where you own it, right? Because if you just have a huge following on one platform, or even it doesn't even have to be huge, regardless. If you have a following on one platform, if you start to get views and things like that, you don't necessarily own that traffic, it could disappear any day with an algorithm change. So understanding things that are true assets, like an email list, um, figuring out a way to convert these views into actual emails that you own. Um, and then also some other good assets that I see right now are having a podcast, having a YouTube channel, or a Facebook group, because these are all things that you have a lot more control of that, you know, rather than just posting to social media, because those are very, very heavily regulated and controlled by the algorithms, whereas these other things, they tend to have a longer shelf life. So focusing on the things that are truly going to help you in the long term of your business and ignoring the other shiny stuff a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 34:27

That's great stuff. That is good stuff. No, it's true to look at it that way because you I I do see this is that people get in that mode of, hey, I'm just gonna post videos and and uh just whatever, right? Just like pictures and this and that, and it only goes out to like a small fraction of their friends, and it's not even going out to anybody else, and it's like what a waste of I mean, you you would you do need to leverage the tools that those uh social media platforms have given us to to uh to to build our own audiences. I love that.

SPEAKER_03 35:04

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 35:05

Cool, man. JT went the distance, especially after all the technical difficulties and craziness. Maybe a chance of COVID. That's true. That's true. There's there's a chance. There is so thank you, JT. That was awesome.

SPEAKER_00 35:20

Yeah, thank you. Pleasure to have you. Great to meet you. You're an officer and a gentleman.

SPEAKER_03 35:26

Thanks, guys. It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

Yeah, we'll see you down the road.

SPEAKER_03 35:30

Sounds good.