In this, the 14th episode of the QuotersCast your host Renee (Wealth & Wellness Coach and Licensed Insurance Agent) talks to Fellow Insurance Agent, Notary, Critical Care Nurse and Former Pro Wrestler – MARK SIAS

 

 

If the above video doesn’t play please click the link below…

TRANSCRIPT OF MY INTERVIEW WITH – Fellow Insurance Agent, Notary, Critical Care Nurse and Former Pro Wrestler – MARK SIAS

Guest Mark Sias:

Because Google loves YouTube – Google is YouTube so it’s always going to Favor YouTube…

Guest Mark Sias:

Contact Renee for debit elimination, IRS shelters and funding your own fix and flips at: wikiquoters@gmail.com

 

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Interview With Rick Elmore – Former NFL Football Player and Founder of SIMPLYNOTED.COM

 

Your host of the QuotersCast and licensed insurance agent Renee talks to Rick Elmore who is the Founder of SimplyNoted.com.

Elmore is a former NFL football player turned medical device salesperson turned expert marketer and now industry changing tech mogul. Discover what this former linebacker is doing with his determination and grit now!

SimplyNoted writes and sends Real Handwritten Notes to your clients, customers and prospects to increase your sales and open rate exponentially. Discover what this innovative robotics technology is doing to help service based professionals increase their business today!

Check them out at: https://simplynoted.com

https://youtu.be/Z-mPRNpgFPw

 

 

 

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        TRANSCRIPT OF OUR INTERVIEW IS BELOW…

Interview With Rick Elmore – Founder of SIMPLYNOTED.COM – QuotersCast #8

 

RENEE HOST OF QUOTERSCAST:

Alright, my guest today is Rick Elmore, who is the CEO and founder of simply noted. He’s also a marketing expert, and you were a top salesperson at several medical equipment companies, and this is a big twist for a really life at 65. You spent three years in the NFL. Right, I think that’s awesome. You’re… That’s excellent, thank you.

Sure. Yeah, I’m looking forward to this because this… Your technology and the company that you’ve built directly affects someone like me, and I just think you’ve got such an interesting background experience, so can you give us a little bit… I mean, you’ve only been in business since… Was it 2017?

And you’re now already about 2 million annually, in revenue. That’s pretty amazing. Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. You give us a little bit of background on how you came to this. And we’ll go from there.

 

RICK ELMORE OF SIMPLYNOTED:

Great, well, thanks for holding me, like You send my backgrounds in athletes, football, the sport that I love with the University of Arizona, played for Mike’s tops in 2006, was really lucky and had a good career, there was drafted in genitalia, you got to spend a few years there in the belly, chopped am eventually like most, or you have to hang up the shoulder pads and cleans and get into the real world.

So I got into that corporate medical device sales and marketing, first years, Rocky the year, basically just take everything that was good as an athlete, Harper severance, great, get knocked down nine times, get up 10, and just applied it to my corporate career.

So the first year I was Rookie, next five years, I was either a top 1% or top five sales rep in my company, and again, it was just all efforts in 2017, I just could not Scratch, so I went back and did my MBA, I just… I knew there was something else out there for me, and in 2017, I had a full-time job, I had my first child that year, I did an Ironman, but even my program launch launched my first startup.

 

SIMPLYNOTED:

So yeah, 2017 was a wild year, but I was in the Marketing class and December, but here to my program, and at a marketing professor said that handwritten notes have a 99% open rate, and I just thought that was just an amazing statistic, since we live in a very digital, digital overload world, it’s just really hard to engage people.

 

So I thought if I can send some fliers with a 99% grade, and it has to make me more successful if I can get in front of my clients 99% of the time.

 

And the classmate of on myself, I got together, I worked with some technology at a China is just a pen plotter was a very bad technology and just tested it and tested it and tested it, we just had great results and partly rose in 2018, most simply noted.

Fast forward five years were the largest handwriting platform in the world, were the only cup in the role that’s truly better on handwriting, robotic mean by that we leverage no op to shelf solutions, everything that we build is custom to us. I never thought I’d do this, but we’re gonna have six patents on our technology, designed through utility, we have hundreds of thousands of users on our platform every single month, it’s grown tremendously about the same as easy, but it wasn’t…

SIMPLYNOTED:

It’s been a lot of less winters, I’ve gone into this, but I think the solution that we provide is solving a big problem in today’s digital and AI world, and that’s just the personal tangible touch where the mailbox is empty, where nobody is competing. And that handwritten note really stands up and that mailbox…

 

QuotersCast: 

Yeah, I totally agree. And being in the field that I’m in, I’ve written a lot of those myself, it takes a lot of time, and so I’d like to drill down a little bit on the actual technology, ’cause I really do think this is like what you’re doing, you’re taking like you say the human touch and you’re using technology to marry it. So number one, how much of the artificial intelligence play a role in this?

 

SIMPLYNOTED:

Well, I think that’s a very buzzword now since… What was it in November 22, when Open AI released chat spent the way that we’re leveraging it right now is just helping people kind of formulate and give them ideas on what they’re gonna say, so we’re actually launching that update on our website, but it’s been a week so you’re gonna belly go and say, Hey, help you it think you know to John or help me a congratulations, or selling your house or whatever.

So that’s the only way that we’re leveraging right now, what we’re trying to do is help businesses either automate it, so it becomes predictable, a part of their sales or marketing plan, or scale it, if you wanna send one or two… We can help you do that, but we actually consult and say, Hey, if you can send one or two by yourself do it yourself, but we’re trying to build a platform to help companies automated or scale it.

 

QuotersCast: Okay, so you tend to prefer to work with agencies then and larger companies.

 

SIMPLYNOTED:

So… Sure. We’re not trying to monopolize the handwritten note market by any means, we’re just… We’re trying to develop a tool that businesses can leverage within their marketing or MarTech stack where they can know at a handwritten solution, just like they have a calling solution, an email solution, a CRM, we’re trying to be the handwritten solution that they can put her to

 

QuotersCast:

Outright so I know it took a lot for you to invest in this financially, so what does it look like in terms of your team and the partners that you have to get this going off the ground side, you mentioned one partner, but you have a lot of investors have you used your own money… Is that

 

SIMPLYNOTED:

Zero? We’re completely customer-funded. Not no investors. Yeah, so when I started this company, I really wanted the proof, I wanna improve myself and when I could do it, but I don’t come from a background of money, I don’t ingroup with a silver spoon or go smoother, they call it.

My parents were very supportive, but we didn’t have tons of money growing up, so I really didn’t have a lot of options, so another way for me to do this was to self-funded and how we funded it was just dealing what I was good at, I would go out, identify opportunities, show the client what we can do for them, solve a problem for them, and then we close and reinvest the proceeds back in the business.

 

QuotersCast:

Okay, you’re a very fascinating character to me, because from your athletic background, a, you’ll give you this it up, I’ll tell you why, because you went from football into selling medical equipment and then now you help this handwritten is… There’s nothing like this out there. And so to start this up in the way that you did, and all the effort and time that went into it, there had to have been something in your thinking process that made you decide that this thing was gonna be the thing that you were gonna spend that much time and energy on, and I would love to hear what… What was the reasoning?

 

SimplyNoted:

Exactly, so I grew up in the generation without technology, I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was almost 17 years old, and it was one of those bricks too, when I was being recruited in high school, any coach… I think it was 29 or 30 division when football offers or scholarships, but the coaches that really set out to me with the ones that sent me hand-written up that show me that they invest some time into reaching out to me, I got tons of printed letters and postcards.

And that was easy to do it. So anybody who sent me a handwritten note that immediately set up when I left the 49ers in 2012, carbo set me a hand-written up and he’s a head football coach in the NFL, and now he’s back in college, but that guys a person of influence and that impacted me so much. It literally made me a… No.

 

<—— Tech Problems – The Zoom Froze —->

 

QuotersCast:

You were in the middle of telling us about your coach would send you the hand-written note, and I just wanted to make the point that you’re a tough guy and you come across really forthright, but clearly you have a huge heart, and that’s kind of what I wanted to highlight here and you live a great story.

SimplyNoted:

Alright, so yeah, a handwritten notes, Why did it mean so much? And why they have impacted in my life so much, so there was a good story. Back in 2012, when I was playing for the San Francisco 49ers, I left the team after that season, we went to the NSC championship game and lost write for the Super Bowl. So it was a pretty awesome year, but when I left the team, coach harbor, a very influential leader, head coach in the NFL, he’s now back in the college ranks. You sent me a handwritten note, and when I was like 23, 24 at the time, and when I got that three or four weeks later after I left, I just…

It impacted my life so much.

It meant so much to me that he would sit down and take the time to do it. It’s actually a keepsake, literally, I kept it, it’s in my office on my shelf and I’m gonna be able to share that with my kids some day, so that’s what we’re to do at scale for companies, I think people want to do it. And the problem that we’re solving is that they don’t have time to do it, so now we’re creating a platform that helps them to do it.

SIMPLYNOTED: 

Again, I’m not telling anybody You should send every single handwritten, you know that you ever do through our platform, but if you’re a business, if you like systems and processes, you have a CRM, you wanna stay consistent, you wanna make sure the grammar is right, you’re not having your assistant, and you don’t have to worry about the misspelling something or the grammar is not right, we’ve built the platform that helps you automated or scale it, so you…

An automated birthday card, an anniversary card, is not a holiday cards, or just send out a thank you card, which is a big part of our business is the law of reciprocity is just building those relationships. And we all know how important relationships are in business, I can develop this business if it wasn’t for my relationships, I know almost every business out there wouldn’t have their business if they didn’t have loyal relationships, so it’s all about the relationship and a good… Simple Banking Up is a way to solidify a strong relationship with our clients…

QuotersCast:

That’s great, and I know you have… You’re big on follow-up, so I’m assuming you might have a whole system and philosophy, that’s what I’m guessing.  

 

SIMPLYNOTED:

Do you mean for follow-up? it’s just based off of triggers, so say that you had somebody come and book a meeting with you, we can automate handwritten note to be sent out after that meeting is completed, or if somebody signed up for a quote, we can automate Hey, thank you for reaching out for a quote, we’re excited to work with you, we can automate sending that follow-up part, it’s really just based off of triggers that are happening within your company CRM or software, whatever you use, any time someone pays a bill.

We can automate sending your card. Hey, thanks for paying your bill, so I really set up systems that help you automate your personal touch, but it really… 

It’s just as easy as sending an email, if you have a spreadsheet in Excel sheet by send it to us. It’s just like Nalanda were pugin a variables high first name, every card is completely custom to that individual.

So it could be as easy as you want or as complicated as you want, we just have the software, the technology, the platform, the robots, all the milling equipment in-house, all the printers in-house, we’re a one-stop solution to make sending and scaling handwrite notes as easy as possible.

 

QuotersCast:

Wow, that’s amazing. So do you, as a great sales person that you are… I’m thinking about some of the big old insurance companies with thousands of agents and a lot of the independent agencies, it just sounds like this is perfect because they have Salesforce and Zapier and all that kind of stuff, this sounds like the perfect service to sort of integrate with that, have you approached them, and if so, how did that get…

 

SIMPLYNOTED:

You tried so many times. Oh really? We have… I think we saw Farmers, I’m not sure, I don’t know who our insurances or maybe they do one of our things that we have, but I get a really crappy 5 cent post card for my birthday every year from them, and I’m like literally like, Why are you sending me this, why… This literally shows me that you put zero time and effort into this, and it’s just like, This is not gonna do anything from my relationship with your company, and I’ve tried…

Literally, it’s all about dollars and cents.

It doesn’t matter about relationships, brand recognition, loyalty, referrals, reviews, I’m just like… I literally don’t even look at it, I get it now, I just do a straight in the trash, I says like, This is the least amount of effort your company in a possibly done we run or on printing press in our warehouse. I know how easy it is to print out these postcards, I could print 11000 of them an hour, so it’s like…

Anyways, we’ve tried…

And I think what happens eventually, or these companies will come around when they start seeing their competitors use it and they start seeing the success they have, but there’s usually the smaller agencies that we work with, the ones that really understand the value of a referral, the ones that really understand the value of the lifetime value of a client, or the ones that are running in anywhere from 700 to 3000 booklets a portfolio, so it’s the big mega conglomerate, they don’t even in…

SIMPLYNOTED:

Give you a second, I’m just like, Alright, it’s fine. I know

QuotersCast:

You’re right, there’s second 70 sea. One thing I notice when doing research on you, you mentioned I thought this was really important that you don’t like to overlook any small opportunity because you never know where it’s going to lead, and so that kind of every… So can you give us an example of a small… Look like a small opportunity on the surface that turned out to be something big.

 

SIMPLYNOTED:

So when I first started, I did every business networking event possible, I did the BIs, the Chamber of Commerce, the vestiges, the small, private… I did the, what do you call the speaking one, hematoma, Ter Toastmasters or…

I’ve done them all, and none of them are really a good fit, but I was a young entrepreneur, just trying to get out there, meet people, be around people that are doing something similar to me, and I remember I did Van in my first year and my largest I got a referral from someone at B and I to somebody two years after I left, like, Hey, you should talk to this guy.

And I spent year in the program and I really did nothing for my business, but I built relationships with in band I, and they connected me to somebody that ended up being a massive six-figure client for us, so you can’t discredit any effort whatsoever. You can’t leave any stone unturned, you can’t overlook any bad experience, you have to fix every experience, you can’t say though that guy is a bad customer, he’s not a good person, you have to obsess about that stuff, and that’s what I’ve done really well.

 

SIMPLYNOTED:

That’s simply not it. It’s like I just, I will go above and beyond, go a lot further than any of our… Now, that’s why I make Gonsalves incorporate in the corporate was willing to do a lot more than my competitors or the people that I worked with, and that’s what helped me set myself amongst the crowd, so we would do the same thing here.

It’s more tremendously well. It’s very exhausting that I don’t know if I can do it, and I started when I was 29. So we booked a… I don’t know if I would start it the same way, I’m a lot smarter than I was when I was 20 years old. Well, yeah, absolutely. At that 100 client, it can be just as valuable. Is that 5000 client is just… You can’t overlook anybody.

QuotersCast:

Wow, that’s a great attitude. So what is that? When you say you go above and beyond, can you give us examples of what it was

SIMPLYNOTED:

That… I think it’s pride. I think a lot of people get stuck and trying to make sure that they’re right or I’m right, versus the customer, I don’t care, I’ll step down my pride in it, even if they’re way wrong, I’m like, You know what, I totally understand. We’re so sorry and just move on because it’s not worth the drag dragged out an email battle, they go on and get their friends to write bad reviews, they write the bad reviews, it’s just people have to let go of their pride, they have to look other ego.

A lot of people getting a running their own business because they wanna be their own boss, but even though my own boss, I’m still more in sales, and I would say at the beckoning call more people now, I used to just be having to service my clients. Now I have to service my vendors, my employees, or clients, or engineers or developers. So I think if there’s a lot of independent insurance or business owners out there, just get with making sure that your clients are happy, even if you have to swallow your pride a little bit, believe me, it’s gonna pay off.

SIMPLYNOTED:

A year from now, two years from now, because they know they’re wrong and you tell them that they’re right, they’ll come back, I will refer somebody because they know you’re somebody that’s willing to be flexible and work with them. That’s great. Yeah, excellent.

QuotersCast:

So you are able to sell these notes and letters with him without envelopes, they’re very affordably, and after talking to you now for a few minutes, I’m assuming it’s gonna be on great paper and have a quality and blood stuff with the manufacturing and all equipment that you have… And the materials you need. How is that possible? Really to be that competitive.

SIMPLYNOTED:

So I mean, the first four years, it was really hard, it was really hard to not get too low on price because we needed the money that we got from selling… To reinvest back in the business, we’ve invested almost a million dollars now adjust into the development of our handwriting robots, and that’s all customer bondage.

So that comes from sales, that’s not to account for a run or a fourth version of our website, probably spent near another million dollars just in software development, not including capital equipment, all the mailing equipment, the printers, which is another probably 60 or 70000.

So at this point now where we’re at, now that we have all this stuff in-house and we can control our costs a lot better, we’re able to get a much better price on our service, so we’re still well below, it’s gonna cost for you to go to a store and buy a car and do it yourself, you go to the store and buying greeting cards to be four or five bucks, just the car plus postage, and a lot of our businesses that the volumes they’re doing it, they’re doing it for around a dollar a cart, plus post it or selling at…

 

SIMPLYNOTED:

Again, it’s real handwritten umbrella Rank card on a 120-pound car stock, which is thicker than a whole Mark card, and it’s automated at scale, you’re not gonna have Carpathians and you worries about an injury being delayed or stuff like that, and it really is a remarkable technology and that’s what we’re trying to do is get the word out there.

There’s nothing else like it.

Only came in the world that’s truly built in on handwriting robot, we built her handwriting engine, we can literally take your handwriting style, all the characteristics out of it, and truly is your hand writing to put words on paper to send to your clients.

And that’s like when people grasp that and they’re like, Holy crap, it’s as easy as sending an email and I can use my hand writing with my customization Ary, and it’s automated, that’s when a light bulb started exploding and they get excited and then we can’t… They get in contact with us and we help them get going.

QuotersCast:

Yeah. Wow, that is really remarkable. ’cause from watching the robot do its thing, I wouldn’t… It looks so real, but I had no idea that you… Nickerson is handwriting, so… Yeah, go ahead, please.

SIMPLYNOTED:

Yeah, when we mimic a person’s handwriting is not a simple hand write or a fun conversion, so I find when you’re creating a font online, so onshore created in the 90s for the internet, so they’re tiles or of files, truetype or open type on… We actually create something that’s completely different.

It’s a handwriting style, so we will pull out all the unique characteristics within your handwriting, the spacing, which is called carinthia URS, which is how your letters naturally connect to each other, so some people will connect their toes or connect or end to them together, or to age or what do to ease look like next to each other.

We program, I’ll pull out all that out, program in your handwriting style, and then we actually have an algorithm that takes your handwriting style and manipulate it as it writes it.

So it doesn’t matter if you wrote a 1000 as right next to each other on our robot, not one single, Hey, we’ll let the same… It rotates it, that stretches it, it makes a bigger, smaller… There’s way too much stock put into this week freer on pens, we literally… Our pen run out so much, we had to create our own pens, the type of an duties in a pen.

SIMPLYNOTED:

The Weta ability of the ink was thought about, it’s called viscosity, so it actually smear is really good when you like You dumb and try to smear it, so this way too much thought that goes into a simple one, two… Or the hand-written note.

But were… We believe so much in it, the problem that we’re solving, we believe that handwritten notes or handwrite Mall is gonna come back with mentioned, especially being in the digital world for the last 23 years, and now we’re going to the AI world, and we’re just a platform that’s ready to help people do it. Yeah, definitely. That’s what it sounds like.

R of QC: So you’re not worried about China copying you are you…

SIMPLYNOTED:

I don’t care. In the post office, there’s like 74 billion pieces of First Class Mail alone sent every year. I don’t even want 5% of that, but it would be a nightmare to manage. So we wanna work with clients that are good people that understand the value of the service, we’re not trying to monopolize anything, I’m happy just to get out there and work with great people and provide a great service.

QuotersCast:

Okay, so you haven’t really thought of other applications for this then, in what ways… Well, I don’t know. Just listening to it. It’s so complex. I don’t know, I haven’t…

SIMPLYNOTED:

Well, there’s definitely another application for individuals with writing disabilities, we’ve talked to non-profits to help them use our systems to write. But that’s just a completely different conversation.

QuotersCast:

I was just thinking even a book or a textbook to make it look like somebody had actually physically written it, and that might be something to get rid of e-books and maybe having an alternative, would that be cheaper than regular printing.

SIMPLYNOTED:

Alright, not it takes what are robot… About five minutes to write one hand-written note, and that’s about 100 words, so it writes as fast as a person… We can speak it up and they write it as fast as we want, since these are machines, but the faster you go, you suffer writing quality, so we wanna make sure it looks great, so the role just scale, we just have more Robots to the production line to help us turn orders faster versus turn the machines up in speed. Okay, alright.

QuotersCast:

And maybe lastly, I’m just curious, have you tried to infiltrate for the football organizations and with this technology and…

SIMPLYNOTED:

We worked with the NCAA a little bit in the early days. It’s not really our niche, we wanna work with the service-based industries, real estate, mortgage insurance, non-profit where relationships matter, where the value of saying thank you is gonna impact their business for years to come, ’cause we all bring a business… I’m trying to shut down my turn rate ’cause we all know it cost more to your client then keep your clients happy and get referrals, so we’d like to focus on those industries that value relationships. Alright.

QuotersCast:

Well, that’s great, I wish you much. Continued success. This has been an awesome interview. And you’re super impressive. Rick, thank you very much for being here.

SIMPLYNOTED: Thanks for having me. Have a great day, see you.        

Discover more about Rick Elmore and SimplyNoted.com…

 

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Contact Renee for debit elimination, IRS shelters and funding your own fix and flips at: 

wikiquoters@gmail.com

 

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Interview With Former Google Developer & Founder of ScreenSharing Platform – CRANKWHEEL.COM – JOI SIGURDSSON QuotersCast #9 {Audio & Video}

 

Your host of the QuotersCast and licensed insurance agent Renee talks to Joi Sigurdsson who has had a lengthy and fruitful 25 year career as a software developer.

Joi spent 10 years at Google working on projects like the Chrome browser.

Since 2015, he and his business partner (who is an insurance agent) have been running CrankWheel.com.

It’s a screen sharing platform that allows salespeople to instantly demonstrate a project through their phone to a client – without the need for clunky, time wasting apps like Zoom or conference calling.

The prospect or client never has to use their camera or download anything.

They just click a link and voila! Find Joi at these internet spaces:

CRANKWHEEL – https://crankwheel.com

Joi’s Old School Homepage – https://joisig.com/

Crankwheel’s YT channel:    / @crankwheel  

QUOTERSCAST #9

 

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TRANSCRIPT OF My Interview With Former Google Developer & Founder of ScreenSharing Platform 

CRANKWHEEL.COM – JOI SIGURDSSON

 

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

Alright, so welcome to the quarters cast, and my guest today is Joi Sigurdsson and he is the founder of crank wheel, which is a software program for screen sharing for sales professional professionals.

You’ve been in the business for almost 25 years as a software developer and pen in those years was spent at Google. You’ve been part of multiple startups as a co-founder and executive, and so it’s almost like your entire career has been building towards this project, which I’m really excited about…

And I’ve been going over for most of the morning now. And so I’d like to concentrate more on the usage aspect of the software instead of the technical part.

So many of our audience are insurance people and finance people, and so is your partner.

Who maybe you can tell us a little bit about, is an insurance agent. So can you give us some background on how you came together and created this…

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Absolutely, thank you, and I am really glad to be on the podcast with you. Thank you and thanks.

Yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity of spreading the word about Crankwheel. 

I’ll also be really happy to talk about things that we’ve learned through interacting with a lot of insurance agents. Such as how they’re able to sell better by using screen sharing tools on their phone and things like that, so yeah.

Yes, yeah, absolutely. I definitely have some tips around that…

Yeah, so the origin story, so my co-founder of kills. We started the company back in 2015, and killed had been selling insurance among other things. That was the latest thing he’d been selling, but related products like Real estate, banking products, those kind of things.

Mostly sold over the phone, sometimes in person. Sometimes a phone call and then driving to a person’s house to actually sign the papers, you know, that kind of thing.

And as you mentioned, my background had been at Google. I’ve been working on some technology in the kind of online meeting space there. And you’ll see, we were looking for a startup, do build together something in the sales space.

And I think we’ve kind of re-imagined every sale till there is out there. We discovered, of course, they all existed until I asked him quite innocently… When you’re on a phone call and you need to show your prospects on thing real quick, what do you use if you need to show them some documentation, or give them a presentation or anything like that.

And he says, You know what, on a kind of a cold outreach call, you’re never gonna do that.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Because the tools are too complicated. And that’s really where CrankWheel comes from.

Renee of QC:

Okay, well, this is a great entry point because I had not heard of this. I’m fairly new to the insurance base myself, but it sounds like a fantastic tool. But I wanna understand how you use it, ’cause I’m still a little fuzzy on that, so can you sort of, walk us through that.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Absolutely, absolutely. The fundamental thing to understand before we talk about some of the use cases is that you can be in a phone call with a prospect, and it can be. Your client could be very non-text-a, it could be.

Let’s just say a Baby Boomer got the first mobile or five years ago and he hardly knows what to do, it doesn’t matter. You can be in that phone call and then say something like, Hey, I just sent you a text message. Can you click the link?

And now I wanna show you something, you never have to explain what you’re doing. You just go straight to a screen share where you can show them live whatever you need. And if we talk about some common use cases in insurance…

The number one thing we recommend to agents that are using cranial is as soon as you’re talking with a client, open up your license for that particular states. Have that open on screen ready to go.

And then as soon as the call has progressed a little bit, just show them your license by sending them a text message or having them type in to send the link. That builds a little bit of trust.

If you want, you can put your webcam feed on top of the license so that you also get that kind of personal connection. Without having to request the webcam from your prospect, they might be in their pajamas.

But you present yourself a little bit better by showing yourself in the webcam. So that can build trust and definitely showing your license and build trust.

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

That’s kind of maybe the first step, other steps would be doing a side-by-side comparison visually of different plan options, that kind of thing, you could have a quote to already to go while you’re in the phone call, and instead of confusing your prospect with all the different options that are available.

If you have a quote to somewhere, are you using like the government-provided ones, it’s your job to simplify their decision for them is You could be screen sharing to them, showing them the quote tool.

But then you might wanna pause the screen share while you do something a little bit more complicated, before you bring up all the different available options. You might pause the screen share and just talk them through the options, the one you recommend and so on, chose that for the US screen share.

Keep going. Building up that form together…

 

Renee of QC:

Okay, so hang on a second, there’s a few… This is starting to sound in that software that you can… Hantesa or screen casemate for desktop and laptop, and it sounds like your software does something similar through the mobile phone, is that correct?

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Yeah, it does something similar, but life, while you were talking to your prospect on the phone, you can show them whatever is on your screen, you can show them your webcam feed if you want.

It’ll open up on their mobile phone without any software download or anything like that as I mentioned. You can even just send them a text message, they click on a link there and immediately they’re seeing your screen, and if you compare that to trying to use something like Zoom, which we’re using right now… Some is great, right?

But if you try to use it on a cold call, you’re very likely to lose your client, they’ll be… What is to more or they’ll be, Oh, I don’t have the zoom software on my phone. Do I need to install that?

And you might change a call that is going great into a call where all that client remembers is the frustration of you try to have them use some complicated tool. You know what I mean?

Okay, so what you can do is you can choose something like crankwheel instead. Where it’s just a text message link, they click the link from, your screen is up on their screen. And it’s similarly easy if they’re on their computer instead of a mobile.

 

Renee of QC: Okay, so why does… Nobody thought of this before.

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Well, we thought If I wait back in 2015, but it’s been a slow burn, we have a really great business, and over the last few years, it’s been really picking up with insurance agents, particularly Health, and we’re seeing life…

We were seeing lots of growth also in life right now, that actually brings me to another tip. In terms of use cases, sometimes you have to enter the social security number into a form. And you might be using screen sharing to help your client fill in that form. But it gives them what we’ve found, or what we covered from a life insurance agents in particular.

It’ll give your client a great deal of comfort if you turn control of the form over to them just for that last little bit when they’re filling in their social security number. So that’s a really great capability to have. You say, Oh, I’m gonna give you control now. You type in your social security number and they can do that from their phone or from their desktop. All without interrupting the phone call or stopping the session or anything like that.

Renee of QC:

Oh, that’s outstanding. Now, so it puzzles me now why you don’t seem to have any competition, and so I didn’t hear about this through insurance, I heard about it through a podcast, not interesting.

So yeah, and so it seems to be still a little bit mysterious or quite mysterious here.

And also, if you can maybe segue into talking about compliance, ’cause I think approaching a lot of these insurance companies. That would be a big deal collecting all that information through an app on the phone, so… Can you address that?

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Absolutely, we do have some larger insurance customers in the insurance vertical, by number, it’s by far are independent agents, and then after that, it’s smaller teams, maybe 100 to 2030 people. But we do have some considerably larger insurance customers, devotes one.

And in terms of compliance for the larger customers, we are able to sign a business associate agreement. So they need to be HIPAA compliant, we can fit right in with that. And we have done that in terms of compliance for the smaller players that I can show it like let’s say, independent agents.

Now that you have to save all recordings for 70 years, things like that. We don’t interfere with that because we don’t actually take over the phone call. So you use whatever system you’re already using for the phone call, you’re using crankwheel only for the visuals. Typically, you can use Frankie for audio, but usually you’re…

So we know that a lot of up-lines will make a requirement you use this or this voice, a variety system. Because we know that they aren’t gonna be compliant with the recording requirements of storing and all that, and…

We don’t interfere with that.

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

We think of that. It’s the best practice. Oh.

 

Renee of QC:

Okay, well, now that makes sense because your app is available in 11 languages. And I thought, Well, that’s overwhelming in terms of trying to meet all the different compliance issues with different countries, so… Yes, yes. Okay, so it’s just integrated into their system and all of that is taken care of on their end…

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Yeah, so if you already use a vitality system that does the call recordings for you and for a long term for you, then you’re covered and crank… Doesn’t interfere with that.

 

Renee of QC:

Okay. You also integrate with Zapier and Salesforce, is that correct?

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

That’s correct, yeah. And for our larger customers that are coming on board, we also tend to build, not necessarily custom integrations.

For example, there’s a customer that we are to in negotiations with right now. And they use Zoho CRM and they use a VOIP system that we don’t have an existing integration with. But we can turn those out pretty quickly for larger customers.

So that’s what we tend to do.

 

Renee of QC:

Okay, okay, great. So since your partner is an insurance agent, can you take us through some real specifics on how he uses this to gain more clients?

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Absolutely, I think the number one thing is, if you think about the difference between being able to finish the business on the phone. Being able to get someone on the phone, get them interested, show them your license, and then walk them through the documents.

You may have a legal obligation to show them some particular documents and then you can do that over the screen share without meeting them in person.

If you think about that case, you can imagine you could get through maybe even 10 clients a day, an impact, or maybe more…

In fact, some of them are the most active insurance agents. They will have 100 plus meetings with granted every month. And if you had to go in person after the call to show them documentation, that kind of thing.

Or if you had to chase them, sending the documentation through email, and then get a confirmation that they read them or whatever. If that actually is compliant, not depends on your location in the world, I guess, if you had to do that, you wouldn’t get through anywhere near that number in a day.

So it’s about volume in particular, we enable you to lose the deal on the first call. If you get the client interested, you’re able to do everything you have to do with them.

And at the end of the day, you can have them sign up essentially during the call. It’s health insurance or life insurance or weight, it might be damaged, casualty, whatever.

But it’s mostly a personal decision. So it’s usually either just them or maybe them and the spouse that are going to decide whether to buy, so why not try to not try to close on the first call.

 

Renee of QC:

You know I agree with you 100%.

Yeah, so yeah, we’re trained as insurance engines, whether you’re captive or independent on the call is to get a meeting. Then they probably won’t buy in that first meeting and you wanna get a second meeting and then some time down the road, weeks or months.

And times they’ll eventually buy from you, so it sounds to me like you’ve created something that really…

You really can have a one call close with insurance is like revolutionary woolly. Okay, so uses also looking for a video that could really. So I wanna be able to visualize it and see how it was used. I know you have a demo button on your website, is that the best way or do you have YouTube videos available for people to see.

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

We do have YouTube videos that show you how to use the system and walk through a number of use cases, we have a channel on YouTube that’s simply called Crankwheels. You’ll find it there pretty quickly, there is a completely free version of crank wheel that people can… Try out and use for as long as they want.

In fact, Crankwheel is free for life if you’re doing 15 meetings or last per month.

So you can do that forever without paying a sense, so that’s pretty easy to set up. Just go to Crankwheel and you can sign up there.

Okay. Yeah, but yeah, for sure, the YouTube channel has a ton of material times of up through some features and things like that.

 

Renee of QC: Okay, alright, you also mentioned that you…

 

Joi Sigdursson of CrankWheel:

In terms of the door…

 

Renee of QC:

No, I was just wondering, you mentioned that it’s good for the Alps.  So that you can call it, somebody from the Alps can call up the client and show what their advertisement would look like. How would you use it for that?

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

The funny thing is, way back in 2015, when we started the company, Gilead been working as an insurance agent. As we’ve talked about, and we’d be intended to product for insurance agents, that was like number one call.

Number one thing we designed for that was the person that we were thinking of or had in mind when we designed the product. But then our hirth actually came from other industries, and it’s more like the last four or five years that we’ve been seeing really strong growth and insurance.

Although we’ve actually had people selling insurance all the way since 2017, were still using the system today.

But yeah, yellow pages was one of those first industries where we saw growth, and they are essentially selling digital marketing services to small business.

So it’s like you said, show you what your ad is looking like or something like that. What they will actually do, and this is something that I think really echoes what’s done in the insurance space, is they will do a consultative selling approach.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

So instead of calling you and just blatantly trying to sell you to subscription to run a website for you or something like that, or an ad campaign with the most common use case that I hear about within his websites, they would call and say, Hey, Mr.Plumber or some small business owner, I noticed that you don’t have a website yet, and it just so happens that I’ve used a really quick one for you, and they have a semi-automated systems for that.

And they’ll say, Would you like to see it? And if the small business owner says, yes, then it’s like a corneal session and get them connected in 510 seconds, show them what you’ve built, and then it’s a consultative sale where it’s like, How do you like this? How do you like that? Do you wanna change the color here… What about the wording here, they might even give them control.

As I mentioned, so that the small business owner themselves can type in a title or change something, but mostly they’re showing them the website as it’s being built.

And so at the end of a 15 or 30-minute call, you have the small business owner who is now emotionally invested in the website that they’ve sort of helped to build for the duration of the call, and you ask them, Well, oh, by the way, if you like, we could make this life, the site live today, and the cost is only whatever, 20, and I don’t know what they charge, but the reasonable cost, and it’s a small business owners, so they can probably make that decision right there in the first call, so it’s a very interesting way to sell, and I think it ACES…

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

A lot of the ways you wanna sell in insurance, you want to become their trusted advisor, and I think you want to do that before you sober, you go asking for their business, you want to make sure that they feel that you…

Over the person that can help them with their insurance, regardless of whether they decide to purchase from you or not…

Right, so start building up that trust.

Adobe webcam functionality that we have, just being able to show your webcam without going into a full-blown or compressing to some more go-to meeting or teams, which just fails too much of the time if it’s been…

Especially if it’s a non-tax abuser, but still build that trust, make them feel comfortable with you before you go asking for their business.

 

Renee of QC:

Wow, that’s excellent. So it makes me think that there’s other applications in terms of expansion, like maybe like healthcare, a lot of doctors and patients now are doing things like this, I think it’s a little more secure than zoom, but it sounds like your comes for that or maybe life coaching. And have you started to branch out in that way…

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

We have a few other verticals that are doing really well, wealth wealth management, this one, ’cause then the person doing your wealth management for you, like a financial advisor, can easily be showing you visuals as they talk to you, so it could either be a new sale or it could be an ongoing sort of consultation.

So I use quite a lot for that, and solar is another one, so residential solar where they’re selling you Denning a four solar panels for your roof that’s gonna lower your energy bill and you rate a return on investment type of calculator live while you’re in the call. It just totally makes sense. You can show all the benefits of visually…

And again, it’s the kind of decision maker where it’s a home owner, so they can probably either make up their minds by themselves or with their spouse, so it’s not like you don’t have to duplicate a heavy enterprise kind of or a business to-business sales process where…

It might be multiple steps and multiple stakeholders and stuff like that. When it’s just one or two people who can decide together, just why not try to close on the first call if they’re interested enough, you can show them I…

 

Renee of QC:

Alright, that’s great. But that half hour went very quickly. So this is fascinating, and I’m looking forward to… To using it, I also wanted to ask you about the use of yellow and your branding, it’s just so rare that it’s usually the main color that a brand uses.

So why would you choose that?

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Yeah, the yellow or orange. It’s an action-oriented color, and it’s associated with innovation action, that kind of thing.

I will tell you the secret reason why the company is called Crank wheel, it’s because I enjoy cycling and a grand wheel is a lesser used term for the changing the part of your bike that you turn with your pedals, so that’s where the word came from initially, but the thing is, we wanted sort of… We wanted to invite…

Sorry, we wanted to evoke that it is a simple tool that…

It’s a simple, powerful tool, just like the caning on a bike is, it’s very simple, but it really helps give you power, and you can actually see the other side of the logo and it looks like a changing or something that could interact with the chain or a year, but yeah, the color, it’s so chosen because it’s sort of this action-oriented color, and that’s what we think sales people are and should be as action-oriented. 

 

Renee of QC:

Okay, so one last question. I know you’re over in Iceland, correct. I’ve heard how beautiful the country is, and I just think there’s a lot of people here in the US who have not visited and don’t know much about the culture, so I’m just wondering… Can you give us a little insight into Icleandic culture, if you don’t mind?

 

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

Sure, no problem. So I’ll tell you the truth, and then I’ll tell you the romanticized version. So we are Scandinavian essentially, but here on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, and because of some historical events around the Second World War where we were occupied by first the predation and then the Americans.

And also just because of our fascination with American culture, we are actually quite Americanized in terms of culture, food, a lot of different things, but our roots are Scandinavian, so we share a lot of values and things like that with the other Scandinavian countries, like Denmark, within Norway, Finland, and our neighbors.

Frogs and green lenders.

So that’s sort of how I see it. And I’ve lived a big part of my life abroad in Scotland and in Canada, and a little bit in California, so that’s how I see it sort of as an inside or quit one with maybe some perspective from living abroad.

The romanticized version is that we all believe in Elves, which we do.

So this actually happens, so it actually happens that they’ll be putting down the road somewhere and there is some giant rock in the way of the road, and somebody will point out that it’s believed that Elves hid the rock, and they will actually tethered around that.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel:

So I think that’s part of our apolitical attitude or culture, because we used to be at highly dependent on the climate, which is horrible, fishing, which was very dangerous back in the day, so we tend to be sort of fatalistic.

So we believe in some mythical creatures and we believe in things just sort of tending to go away most of the time. We have a saying called the faith is a very famous Islamic saying that, and I’d be translated, but it just means things will be sort of… Okay.

Renee of QC:

That’s great. That’s excellent, I love it. Well, thank you very much. I’ve enjoyed our talk. And so, I wish you much success. And so have a great day and maybe we’ll talk again soon.

Joi Sigurdsson of CrankWheel: Thank you very much for now, I’ve greatly enjoyed it. Have a great day and pass the success with everything, and I hope the podcast grows like crazy.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Thank you. I do too. Alright, thank you, Joi.

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Thanks for reading and listening. Have a prosperous day.

https://wikiquoters.podbean.com/ — The QuotersCast – “We make insurance cool!”

BYOB Blog – https://wikiquoters.com Contact us at: wikiquoters@gmail.com

 

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Contact Renee for debit elimination, IRS shelters and funding your own fix and flips at: 

wikiquoters@gmail.com

 

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Interview with Finance Pro & Ironman Athlete

What is BYOB?

In this – the 11th Episode of The QuotersCast – Renee (your host and licensed agent) talks to Bryan Kuderna, who is a 15 year financial professional, author and Ironman athlete.

(VIDEO AND PODCAST BELOW…)

Hear what Bryan has to say about our connection to China and how this instructs his dealings with clients. Bryan is big on examining the Macro world to discover and consider more about our Micro world.

I found Bryan’s viewpoint to be insightful and valuable. I suspect you will too.

Find Bryan at the internet spaces below….

Bryan Kuderna’s business site: https://kudernafinancial.com

Bryan’s personal site: https://bryankuderna.com

Bryan’s book “What Do I Do With My Money?” on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/What-Should-Do-My-Money/dp/1264857934 

Watch Our Interview…

Listen To Our Interview…

TRANSCRIPT OF OUR INTERVIEW

Renee Host of The QuotersCast: My guest today is a nationally recognized certified financial planner with a Masters in Science in financial services from the American College in 2021. He was named one of New Jersey’s top 10 financial professionals by NJ bins.

He’s the host of his own popular business and finance podcast, and he regularly contributes to mainstream platform such as CNBC, NewsMax, and AARP, with his first book published in 2016 entitled millennial millionaire. He became a nationally sought after speaker, and he’s here today with his second book entitled, What Should I Do With My Money? Economic Insights To Build Wealth, Amid Chaos.

He’s a husband and father of three, and he’s also a top level athlete who practices Brazilian Jujitsu, and he’s participated in an iron man and a marathon. So please help me welcome. Brian Kuderna, thank you. for being here.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Sure, so let’s jump in with your second book, ’cause I think you’ve got a really interesting concept, you seem to stress that it’s the overall group concept, how people live, how they work, how they play, that determines corporations and nations and how they make money and how they lose money, and so kind of like the macro world connects to the micro world, so… Can you explain that? Constantly, I think that’s excellent. Yeah, I’d love to hear what you… How do you connect that?

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yeah, so a couple of things. The way that I view wealth, and I define it in the book, which really kicks off the entire conversation is less from just a standpoint of pure money and the monetary decisions and consequences, and from this holistic approach of well-being. And so that’s where I look at wealth.

If you look at the etymology of the word, comes the word wheel, well, which actually means well-being, and so that’s where we get a lot of this holistic approach to making decisions that are not just purely mathematical, and then when you look at the micro-macro economies so many people feel like they’re just… They’re stuck in this gigantic system that they don’t know how we got here, and that it’s like, where does their decision, their investment, not at all to it all, but really billion people here, we all feed up to what make up these eco and micro economies become macro economies.

So that’s where I really connect those dots throughout the book, so that people really understand what their decision-making does for them.

Renee of the QuotersCast: Okay, alright, so on that point, I wanna put you as saying you must understand that money, your money rests at the heart of every major issue in the world, so we’ve seen exterior changes in the last two, three years, so I’d love to hear what you say about what’s been happening all around the world and how that affects us as individuals…

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Sure, and there’s so many examples that I could just pull from the right here and now, where you talk about here in the States, we’re dealing with hating our debt ceiling, and I saw a lot of people… Some people are freaking out about that. Others are like, Oh, we’ve done this plenty of times, it’s nothing new, and kind of the truth Canales somewhere in between there, but you know why are we hitting our death dealing…

Well, it’s all these different entitlements that we’re trying to keep solving, it’s your social security payment that you are gonna retire with, it’s your Medicaid that you’re depending on, can you pay your doctor bills with… It’s the defense that we’re trying to keep up with China and protect our country, so there’s all these things that are unique to us as individuals that we want to have these different safety nets or these different protections, macro economy…

Even if you just look at recent banking turmoil over the past couple of months, again, It’s individual’s decisions of, We’re digesting some data, where… Creating an interpretation of that data. Is the bank gonna stay solvent, we’re spreading this kind of minor rumor that can grow into something much more, and then one of us is acting on that saying.

Okay, with the click of a button, I’m going to withdraw my account, and then that one becomes many and then all of a sudden, we have an evolution of what’s going on to our bank system, so there’s just so many of these little whispers that they start out at that create the regulation and the systems that we live within, and then that ultimately dictates the kind of breadth of our economy.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: So I think that’s where we can start small and kind find our way all the way up to the top of the mountain, or we can start at the top of the mountain and work away all the back like that with whatever I’m investing in. Whatever I’m voting for and the like, and that’s where I think it’s really cool to see how all these little micro-economies fit together.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Okay, so now you have… You created Kuderna Financial, and so when people come to your company, how do you sort of integrate them, number one, how do they find you? And number two was sort of the intake process based on that philosophy… Yep.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yes. Firm is financial team. I’ve been a practicing advisor since 2008, so people can go right to Adana financial dot com, find out my more day-to-day job. Where do they come from? A lot of my clients at this stage come from word of mouth, where I initially generated all of my business was three doing seminar marketing, so that was a lot of going out to hospital located in Antlers, workshops. Insurance planning, retirement planning, etcetera.

And then where the book has just created a lot of buds from a PR standpoint, but it’s also practical in the sense that clients can read that and figure out from an economic standpoint how things work, like, Why do we even have these products? And how did they get to be that way?

So that when we prescribe a financial plan and they ask them, it’s the right move, should I do X, Y and Z, now they can understand the rationale behind Tate macro standpoint, and then funnel it down to their own init of that what we want is getting the conviction to say, Okay, now I get it, now I get one, and I’m gonna stick to the plan. Just like I would… My workout regimen, or my diet, and then I can benefit from the results.

Renee Host of The QuotersCast: Alright, so I wanna see what that looks like because there’s a lot of financial planners who cannot do that or they don’t do that very well, and it sounds to me like, Yeah, you’ve got this un-locked down, so really take us through if somebody… If I was coming to you right now, how would you start… What are the questions you would ask? And what’s your goal in your end to help me. Sure.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yeah, so in short… And I do have a process to that, and I say You gotta have a process, that’s what one guess work out. Number one, can come to me with our 22 years old and starting their career, where it’s a 70-year-year-old couple, Ultron neurology plan. The first thing I’m asking them is, How can I help you? If we work together over the next five, 10, 15 years, what do you want to accomplish? Alright, so that’s where we start with, tell me about you, tell me about what you wanna get out of this.

And then on the flip side… And ask him now, does anything keep you up at night? Do you guys have a worry that when the day is over, are you and your pentre gonna fix this, this is bothering us, whether that be a debt, helping a kid with college, figuring out their state plan, where they’re gonna retire to… Whatever it is, I wanna have those kind of open-ended dialogues, get to just know each other as people, that’s that one into the actual financial…

In going over all the gaps, the exposures, the insurance is and the like, then it’s focusing on liquidity, then step three is managing any deaths, particularly some of the toxic or the high interstates, and then the fourth one, once we have, again, protection, Ouidad debt in good order. Then we get into the growth component, which is much more of the investment portfolio management.

Renee of the QuotersCast: Now you must be nice from insurance to being a registered graph in your series 6 and 7, all that, so you can encompass all of it, so from growth to protection, can we drill down a little bit more on the actual products that you offer, what are some of your favorites that you often suggest for people…

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Sure, yep. So when I started out of college at… The first thing I did, I got life and health insurance licensed. Alright, so I think that’s a good starting point for a lot of folks. Specialist mantra that I believe. And then I believe it was in 2009, I got my Series 6, and then shortly there after the 63, 65 and then the 70.

So I got all those securities licenses, I got my insurance licenses… Not too long after that, I got my CFP to be a certified financial planner. That did two things that added obviously a lot to my knowledge, but I think it also gave me a lot of credibility, especially being so young at the time, 24, 25, trying to advise retirees on their life’s work, so that was kind of my credentialing as I was getting my training wheels taken off, if you will, and so within that vein, if we just look at my business right now, if this helps give context.

I would say it’s probably maybe 40% disability insurance. I have a niche that I work on with physicians around the country, very important to protect their skill set, so I do a lot of disability, maybe about 25% or so life insurance, and then the remaining 30% to 40%, any given years, wealth management practice, which is a combination of everything, money under management, passively managed mutual fund accounts and that of course, annuities, and so that’s kind of my product mix, if that helps.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Right. Yes, it does. So did you work at some large corporations first to get experience before you opened your own company?

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I began my career with an internship, the firm was called International planning alliance, and so they were a non-captive agency that could offer insurance products and such, but then also aligned with a broker DR and then… So I still related with that parent company of sorts, with that umbrella agency, and that it was, I wanna say in 2033, buyer doing business as a…

They’re in a financial team, so from the get-go, I was making my own book of business, my own practice, starting right out of college, and then from a branding standpoint, wanting to have some more own… That’s when I created my team.  

Renee of The QuotersCast: Alright, that’s great. So have you had an opportunity to travel a lot and actually see other economies and societies and how money is circulating in other countries?

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yes, and that’s a great question, ’cause I think for a lot of folks, the majority of people out there, it’s kind of… We’re just seeing what we see on the news and we’re trying to read the best journals we can and kind of think this on from a kind of like most arms like the way… And then make decisions based on that, which is fine.

That’s the way it is for most people. One advantage I had, and I did carry this with me throughout my career in my life, was when I was a senior at the College of New Jersey, I had the chance to study abroad at The University of economics in Prague.

So not only did I learn a lot there at the coolmore importantly, I was at a school with students from all over the globe, all the countries in Europe, from America, all these different states in America, from Asia and here with all these kids, 21, 22 years old, and you’re doing the same things, you have the same wishes, the same dreams, and you’re just living a world away, and so it’s just such a great opportunity and you see kind of what makes pick… And at the end of the day, we’re all the same, but we’re all a little bit different too, and so it’s just really such a rewarding experience to then I take with me throughout life.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Yeah, that’s great, I love that. You also mentioned how does the acronym mice, which means meetings, incentive, conferences and exhibitions, can you explain that and sort of incorporate that into your… Your philosophy. How does that work?

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: I’m laughing because you read, I guess as an acronym, I’ve never heard, ’cause if we’re a reference and that was really good, that it’s probably very applicable to what I do. So the mice that I use as kind of like a frame of reference for my entire book, when I was in college, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do yet, I read a book on the CIA, the Central Italian, it was a really cool book.

I’m drawing a blank on the name, but what they did is they talked about how they train their spies, so that when they’re moles, when they’re behind enemy lines, how do they embed themselves with the enemy and get those deepest, darkest secrets out of them. And one of the things that they were taught was to use mice, and what that meant was money, ideology compromised an ego, so a little bit of a different definition, but what that has…

That guides their decision making. And so now here I am writing this book on all the different domains of evacuate, how people from mom and dad at the kitchen table, up to leaders of nations negotiating. What are their motives? And how do they make decisions? And you think of it, the mice, the money, the ideology, compromising the… Play into all of that. And so that’s where with each of these kind of massive issues, iron title, and you stuck taking into context, mice.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Okay, so that sounds like that’s your personal acronym and that you took from that book, but… How do I put this? It’s interesting that you built that from a book on this CIA, because I do think that it’s… The CI is part of the dark under Valley that kind of stir things up in the society… I don’t wanna go down the rabbit hole too much, but certainly this talk about the Deep State, they have to have an influence, they just have to in our economy and elsewhere, so I just think it’s interesting that you merge into… And so what do you think of that?

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yeah, yeah. And there wasn’t any direct correlation, it was just something I remember way back when when I read that, that it stuck with me is like you always wonder how do the best of the best of this… That are Trump people’s heads. What’s the tool? What’s the mechanism they’re using? AlsoWhat’s the psychology there? And so that just simple acronym mice always stuck with me, and so then as I started to write this book and I was doing all of this research of why things are the way that they are, why do we…

You certainly negotiate with certain countries, why do we come up with certain tax law, why investments do better than was remembered, those motives, they’re just inherent to humanity, and so again, not a direct correlation, but that became kind of a part of my thought process, and it just became very apparent in my research, and so that… I wouldn’t say that the CIA… You really had anything to do with the book. It was just an acronym that happened to be there that then influenced some of my outlook.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Okay, so do you think the CIA has anything to do with manipulating the economy in any way, shape or form.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: They do to my book, but if we just take a step book and can say that’s just one weapon of sorts that our country has at its disposal, to gather data on the international community to gather intelligence and then make that couple for things which can be economic or otherwise, the tremendous effect.

That’s one of the messages I try and preach in my book, is that whether we like it or not, or whether we recognize it or not, economics finds its way into everything, so every decision that we make, usually it has an economic impetus, Do we wanna spend more or less money for dinner tonight, and then there’s an economic consequence, so even if we didn’t think about that, if it was just an emotional, I want X, Y or Z, that comes at a cost, whether it be financially or otherwise, because we gave up our time or our toil, to get that.

And that’s where we talk a lot about lost opportunity costs, an economic term that every time we decide to buy something or to do something else, not only did that cost what the sticker price was, but also there was the cost of where else that money could have gone… And so that just is like a whole another wormhole of decision-making, but that’s economics.

Renee of the QuotersCast: So how does economics play into your passion for exercise and running marathons and doing the Iron Man, how did that influence your career now? Yeah.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yeah, so from like I’m a surface value and economic connection that would be done… Again, there kind of is. So if we think about it, we have the passion for exercise, that’s just kind of my outlet to try and stay healthy and to be able to compete and to have a scratch that itch that’s always been there from playing sports.

And then I think as I do that, that just makes my mindset a little bit clear when I go into a business, whether it’s how I’m working with folks at the office, or what my mood is as I’m meeting with clients and everything. So I think everybody wants to be healthy and wealthy. It’s a common saying. And another one, we spend our life time chasing wealth at the expense of health, and then we could spend those later or years now trying to chase health that’s costing all of our… Well, more… Try and have both.

Let’s have our cake and eat it too. And a lot of people can do that, just going out for a walk or after the meeting, doing some push-ups or going to the gym, for me, I’ve always needed kind of a routine, I’ve been very goal-oriented, and I think that’s where having the marathon they are having the iron in there, having those marquee events just push me all the water, and it’s a very similar outlook to what I take with my business, that I have goals and I wanna accomplish… I have a book that I wanna write by X date, and it’s really no different than the track I try and take to physical fitness and sports.

Renee of the QuotersCast: Okay, excellent, so what country worries you the most in terms of being able to sort of upset the American economy or any outside force? What do you see as the biggest threat?

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Sure, yeah, I think… And we talk a lot about that in the book too. There is a chapter on war, which has been here since the beginning of mankind, but it’s certainly evolved and there’s economic warfare, and there’s traditional warfare, which… Do we get into both which country it’s… Of course, it’s China without question.

If you look at right now, on the macro economy, global economy, there’s two super powers, it’s the ASIN China, two biggest economies in the world, where we’re extremely interconnected, and I think that that actually is the silver lining in that we never wanna decouple our economies or it would be devastating to both of us outside of America… Our biggest customer is China, outside of China. Their biggest customer is the US, so it behooves us.

Even if we disagree on a lot of things, we have different outlooks, it’s a… People essentially keep us tied together to an extent, so I think that that’s kind of the silver lining there, however, their economy is growing or has been growing over the past 40 years, very rapidly. They were not a super power that long ago, whereas we were…

So one could say where we’re slowing down and they’re picking up speed, and there’s a whole lot we can get into with that, but I think from a national standpoint, China, they’re elephant room, and there’s a whole another kind of threat out there that is not just nation to nation, it can be the more of these loan Wolf, the hack or the crazy guy that maybe just has some knowledge or have some influence, and because of technology nowadays can find their way in and re-havoc from almost like a terroristic stand point where they can create terror on a micro economy, which can again, much into per economy. And I think that’s where… What all voices come. Loud voices.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Yeah, you make an excellent point. And so to that point, you say that we are interconnected with China as we are with all many things and many people, it seems like our politicians though seem to be about division and destruction, so how do you… You’ve got 15 years in studying this and helping people deal with their money, and so I can see that would be things to consider, the macro and the micro world, and so leaders… When our leaders have different views than say we do, because individuals are incentivized to have harmony, how do you balance that in your work?

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: It’s a great question. So I would say that there’s kind of a two-part answer there, number one, vote and study before you vote. I think that’s kind of the first thing, again, that’s something that people died for that right to be a tens of people around the globe that wish or say an Wein, a democracy. So I think that’s something that we need to treasure and we need to recognize the importance of that. That would be number one.

Number two, going back to the here and now, me and my family, my financial plan, and I turned on the night we need and I just see the Left and the Right screaming and yelling at each other like children… And it’s driving us nuts. I think you just can’t get too wrapped up in it, you need to say, Okay, I’ll pay attention to what’s going on, what the dialogue is, I’m going to based on my knowledge, make my assessment, and then I’m gonna go with my life.

Alright, and do so just as I would otherwise. And I think that’s the best course of attack, I think a lot of people get drawn in because the media now has such strong biases as well, they’re showing you probably the worst of the worst, and they’re showing it from their vantage point ’cause they want you to think a certain way, or they already have a prescribed audience that they need to satisfy, and so it’s like we’re not watching the news, it’s almost like we’re turning on a day show and we’re just watching that show because it’s entertaining us or it’s kind of firing us us up because we wanna get fired up and those things, there’s just no win in that, so I have her to turn it off and do something more productive.

Renee of the QuotersCast: Good idea. So one last question, Ryan, there was… Yeah, you had sent me a few list of questions, and I really appreciate that there was one on there that you said, maybe I should ask you about what your Rock Bottom lands… People like hearing about that. When I do a lot of these speaking gigs, everybody think there’s relatable.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: And I would say from a professional standpoint, it was really those early years of my career trying to build my own wealth management practice, my own insurance practice, where being independent, you’re essentially commission-based, it’s what you kill, I wasn’t tied in with a bank or with a wire house that said, Hey, here’s your 50000 salary, and then is on the way commissions and things, if I didn’t generate new business… If I didn’t go out and get a client, there was no production, there was lose your office and go home without a paycheck.

So I think in those early years of Is that tug of war of like, You know what, I am, who I am, and I wanna be really good at what I believe in. From a financial planning standpoint, now I need to help other people see it and help develop some confidence in me to be able to work together, so… Those are our years.

There were times, I think it was a second year in the business, so mind you, I’m only 23 years old at this point, but just my productivity put me in such a way that I wasn’t even able to collect the Draw for my contract, and so I was gonna go on suspension, which meant that literally, I was going into the office, I was working cold calling, pound the pavement, going to networking events and not being paid, I was literally working to try and develop a practice, but on the hopes that someday I would repay me and so I think that was kind of a point.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Being in a family that was all just normal salaried government employees, things like that, that when it came to coming home at night and saying, how did you do today? Or you make a money, and they just couldn’t… My parents or my brother couldn’t wrap their head around, you’re working your tail off, you’re putting in these long hours, you’re paying to study and to get these licenses, and then you’re not making any money. Like, what are you doing? But that’s the life of the entrepreneur in… I was able to stick with that vision.

So I think that was kind of the rock bottom where one, I knew it was tough and to the people around me were telling me, it’s tough. And you’re crazy. That you start to question like, Is this for me? And that’s why I think you really gotta go back to that vision, which I did, and it gets you through that time, and now here you are, thankfully, knock on wood, a decade later, and business is thriving, I’ve got the book, The podcast, all this exciting stuff. But people are very quick to forget how that was at the beginning, and so I think that that’s maybe a little rock bottom story.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Well, good for you, good for fighting through that because I’m fairly new with this too, and it seems like that’s actually pretty common, and I didn’t know what I was getting into, but the cold calling, all though, everything you said is just absolutely accurate. And I’m starting a lot later than you did, and just one last question, ’cause we are running out of time, but what would you say… I guess it’s kind of two-fold, ’cause you hire people into your agency and also if you could offer something to the listeners on how they can get through that initial stage and what you do for your employees when they come on to help them get through that stage up.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yeah, so I think what I try and tell a lot of folks that are starting it out in the career is that number verandas… So I think that’s where a lot of times when people get recruited into anything, whether it’s any position out there, the person that’s recruiting is selling them on the nice position, this nice career, this nice agency or office and welcome the board, things are gonna be great.

And then this wake-up call is like, Oh my gosh, I got out and no one’s sending it to me, so I am a bit of a realist in that point, but then I will know, I look at the light at the end of the tunnel, and then have faith that if you follow this process, that it’s all going to be okay, and then even if it’s not, it’s still gonna be okay, because then you figure out what you’re supposed to be doing.

So when I started in the career, I remember I heard from a gentleman said, You wanna scale seven points, you got 15 calls, a point for taking on a new client, and then a point for having a meeting with a perspective client, so I could control that. I could noise control how big of an insurance policy I sold or how big of a retirement plan I took over, but I could control getting to those seven points every day, and if I had a few meetings, alright, well, I need four points left, so that might be 60 phone calls, which back then 15 years ago, that’s really what we were doing.

So I think going back to just control on what you can control, knowing it’s gonna be tough, but embracing that and keep that vision on where you wanna be in 10 years, and if it’s worth it to you, then get after it, if… At some point, you find out it’s not, or you’re just not enjoying the journey, but do something else.

Renee of Th QuotersCast: Well, that’s excellent advice. Thank you very much, Brian, I appreciate you being here. I encourage everyone to look for out for your book, what should I do with my money? And visit your website or a financial dot-com. Where else would you like to send people?

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yep, yeah. So yeah, they can get, what should I do with my money? Anywhere books are sold. It’s available paperback, Kindle, and audiobook as well. And then you mentioned my business website, I also have a personal website, just Brian Kadena dot com, that’s Bryan with a y. They can go there, they can read my blog, I get find out about my pod mound-ings and things that I’m passionate about.

Renee of The QuotersCast: Alright, well, thank you very much and I wish you continued success Brian.

Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com: Yeah, my pleasure, thank you for having me.

Renee: I loved it. Thank you.

Bryan: Awesome, take care. 

Renee: You too.

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Thanks for being here… Have a prosperous day.

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Interview With Former Health Insurance Exec Turned Media Mogul & Patented Inventor – HURRICANE H

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT Of My Interview With

Former Health Insurance Exec Turned

Media Mogul & Patented Inventor – HURRICANE H

 

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

Okay, welcome to with the Cortes cast, and my guest today is her cane, and he is the President and Founder of The MBC TV Network, which is a collection of channels and it’s for podcasters, authors and content creators, which I’m looking forward to finding more about… And you’ve got more than 27 years experience in the health field, health insurance and manage care field as a sales executive and founder, and so your kind of knowledge, I think an expertise is hard to come by. You seem to be a real specialist in this area, and this is something I think a lot of people wanna know about, ’cause it’s a complex field, so if you can give us maybe a little bit of background, how you ended up where you are today, that would be great.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

That’s a lot. My… First of all, thank you, thank you so much for having me. And yeah, so I have a very diversified by ground that as you’ve alluded to it, the majority of the time of… Actually now it’s 29 years. Wow, time. Flutes managed care insurance. So managed care is really a concept of insurance for government programs, and so it’s really the insurance world, a managed care, it is water health care, it’s the payer side, but also I’m in the sales side of it and the business aspect of marketing and business development, so that’s like where I’ve been on my career path in one role, at least in one industry, if you wanna call that, that’s the healthcare or insurance, again, they are interchangeable for me. All the same.

Okay, I had other careers in parallel, I’ve been in real estate, I used to teach real estate law in New York, that…

Howard estate as well, that’s always been, I believe in side hustles or like… What do you call it? Never put your eggs in one basket, kind of concerns. I believe that in this world, you have to have something, and not only it’s an opportunity to learn more because you always learn and apply those additional earnings into whatever you’re doing, and some of the skills are literally workable in both aspects of whatever I did.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Right. So training is part of it. Pitching is a lot of it, you investing in doing stuff, it’s felt a part of sales and business, so you do it the same and three years ago, just before called it lay, there was a situation where I had an opportune… Well, I was challenged, I wanna call it this way, I was challenged to a concept and what it was, so I was the VP of Sales and Medicare sales specifically, and there was an opportunity for us to be on the radio show,

So there’s a story about the media, and so I had assigned someone to actually go into this particular radio show for an hour to talk about our benefits, and so I was challenged…

and the question was like, Well, he… Hesitate time, the hurricane. Why I’m gonna get to it right now is like What? You’re the VP, you’re supposed to be on the show. I’m like, No, I’m the VP, I’m not supposed to be in the show. The best person to be able to show someone actually that sales this on a day-to-day basis, and that’s my best rep, and it’s someone that can answer the question…

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Can I answer the question is probably I can’t end, but when you have a team, the team is better than you in what they do, ’cause that’s where they do, that’s their job, that’s what their expertise is, just ’cause I need… The team doesn’t mean that I cannot do it, or do doesn’t mean I’m the best fit. You have people that have organization, you have a spokesperson. Right, and when you have a representative, that’s what they do, so anyways, that was it.

So I got a little annoyed about that and I said, Are you questioning whether I can do their shows or the ability to just to make a decision?

Maybe you can do it? And that’s how I felt by was like, Oh no, you’re wrong about that. First of all, I’ve been on TV, I’ve been on radio, Spanish, English range over the years, even very Kevin, I was a kid. And so that’s not a problem for me. And if you’re talking about me being on a talk show, I think I can do that, so I just sat… I decide, You know what, I’m gonna prove this person wrong, and I started my own thing, and that was the actual idea now I needed…

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

That was just a barter theater, I would say. The motivation behind it, the idea was always lingering. That’s the other thing. So I had already suggested to start a YouTube for the company, and it was kind of like me with some sort of a like, Oh, it’s okay. We don’t need it. It’s not gonna work for us. Okay, because if you’re in a business, you wanna be a podcast, you wanna be… And stuff like this, right? But it seemed that they did not buy the concept like, Okay, that’s okay with me, so between that first element and the second one of the challenge.

I don’t back away from any challenge.

I will do anything, right, but need also a constant behind it. The concept was that I realized there is the weather channel, there’s a lot of news, there’s a lot of stuff. However, is there a health channel that people can watch and learn from? I have not heard of one, and so why not start… Someone’s gotta start it so much, it will be me, and this is… And so literally in December 2019, I started toting all the stuff in general trio, it’s eHealth radio, USA is IRD, the website is www Haredim.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

The Exchange was not available the other way, so I had to do the USA and also I wanted to highlight is based in the US. So that was it. And then as I started doing the first show, I’m like, What… I mean, you know, what am I doing? Just old you, I can also do visual… So now the I healthcare will be gone. So now I have the I at radio and the IHL channel, both of them come by and because what covid came on, so that’s just before two months before colitis Mathers show that I did literally like a field report…

It was on a cruise ship, and it was just there when the covid just begin, I did also another one in New York City, Times Square to see how the feelings were…

Then that was my first initial stuff, and then I started doing some sales talks because that’s my industry of sales techniques, perspective, all that stuff and insurance managed care broker. That was before even I started getting a guest. And in that time with covid, my wife actually did the… She’s in the fitness, I’m in the fishes, a fitness.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

That’s just my family hobby, I’ve been in March lots on my life, and I’ve been always trying to refer… I believe you have to have a healthy mind and body together in spirit, the three of them come by, and so when the gyms were hit the hardest, we converted our basement East portion of it for her classes to continue as she was doing classes. But you can do it because they were shut down, and since I already had the equipment for the pod for the shows, if you’re…

I didn’t call it podcast is really, to me, as a stakeholder, but I said, I can do this for you, or we can create this so you can broadcast to people, and we started doing that.

We had nothing… I mean, the basement was literally just… We move furniture around. We had a nice little TV set and all the stuff, and the team is still that actually, we use it now on mothership, but it was there, so we kind of convert stuff, move things around and we started immediately… I mean, before even people started doing virtual were already there, and then we create a own brand at that point, so it became the fit in the far…

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

And so, and I said, Well, the fin fab channel, this doesn’t have to be just for us, we can open it to other people, so now fitness, health, wellness, it’s all the same. So we started there, and then from that point on, every little event that happens, we created another channel that adds up with different themes and value, and they’re all interchangeable, as I said before, they all kinda tie in together, and that the idea of health and wellness, because everything affects us, I mean, you need your help is impacted by everything, so therefore your fitness, you want this…

You wanna make people feel good inside outside.

Now I recall it. That’s the concept, right? And so that was kind of like the story of hurricane age from the beginning to… Well, I did kinda talk about the overall experience in managed… Can I can go back to, and I’m sure we can do that. But that was like how we got into this concept and three and a half years for now, just about close to about 100000 downloads, if you 100 and bus and maybe combine about maybe 400000 unfollow or somewhere in that range.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV: And again, so now I evolved it into more with guests and things, and then I realized that there are directories for people where people can list their Podcasts, Spotify, these things I’m doing too, but I realize like, Well, but that’s all… You can just list, it doesn’t mean that nobody’s doing it if… So why not do something for people and actually, since I have the platform and to have the channels and have the viewers and have the audience is…

And I can feed to all the world tonight, so I am everywhere pretty much, and so my shows play everywhere.

So if you wanna catch a show somewhere, you will be able to see it visually or you can hear it all you’re somewhere on a podcast platform on radio, or you can watch it on our website, and we have a couple of them, and that’s it. So that’s the network. And in almaty, the way E-MBC is alanine broadcasting Corp, which is my last name. And I kind of run because I wanted something that… That’s like, We know ABC and BC, CVC, all those acronyms. So it came in nicely as the NBC network, so Amanda route network, and so that’s it. And drunk, and now we have an acronym for it too, so it’s the story behind everything that you’ve seen or heard.

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

Okay, yeah, that’s excellent. What I was researching you, I came across that and I was quite excited because it sounds to me like you’ve incorporated a lot of the problems that new podcasts as like, This is the quotes cost is getting attention, getting it out there, getting great guests and that kind of stuff, it seems like you offer so much more than just the directory.

So I’m actually looking forward to signing up and using it, ’cause you made it very affordable, you have a free option.

You keep it under 100 per month. And from what I can tell you offer an awful lot, and I have to say, I did the math, ’cause I bought all those services myself for my system, and I know how much it cost to have each one of those directories to get the premium stuff.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Right. And to be able to do all the big stuff, it costs a lot of money, so forth, for me, I know how much it cost me a couple of thousand a month, and so to me, I’m already doing the work. And the idea is, this is not about me, this is not about my channel, this is about bringing resources and opening up to the world all the information that’s available, you are a resource, people are doing work, but they’re not heard enough, they’re not seen in it, or they will be heard but not seen, the idea is just that we’re sharing to.

Well, as a matter of fact, the mission of my concept is very simple, educate, inspire and motivate, and the model takes some time to evolve.

so we need to evolve beyond the standard… I guess media has been around, this is the new media age, and it’s different because not about news and just entertainment, it’s about resources, and many people have businesses, again, JS, authors and these people are doing a work out there, some of them are making it through in different ways. One thing that I also experience you’re in a coma time, for example, Facebook, if you’re a DJ, you have a couple right issues you can’t even play your music.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Right, you gotta take time. So that was kinda like every time I looked at an opportunity, an area where this dilemma… I try to figure out a solution for it. And again, I just got handy, my latest edition right now is actually where the bargains channel, and it would just laugh dot a month and a half ago. And the paras Jenna is really like a QVC for the average business. ’cause I think about it, right?

There’s QVC, I love them in the grade, you can do your shopping and Dad is the home network.

Home Shopping Network, they’re huge, but not everybody that has a business can be on those things, and here you can scale at any level, and basically what it does is that you get your opportunity to feed into the network and your show is broadcasting across everything that I do and therefore, you will be able to reach people and talk about your project. I don’t even have to be there. This is not something where I have to be interact, you can send me a video by your presentation and you will play or you can be live and literally with people and your phone number and your connection.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

The good news is, this is not a daily activity, because if the show… Once the show is done, all your time is done, understood, you, you will be recorded and obviously it will be re-played and played and played and replayed evergreen, so you might get at least instantly you make it leads a month later, it might get lost a year later, ’cause as long as you’re at in business for business and into a business, you’re gonna get somebody…

So again, that’s another… Just to give you another concept that we as we’re starting with help, we went into fitness when the glamor and gaming son, dualism body on a night.

When we were talking is was like, Well, why don’t you have your own channel?

You are a gamer, and so we created the gamers channel, so now he is his plane on the gaming stuff, and believe it or not, all these things link because business spot of life, money is bottom line, and everything we do affects your health… One way I do… And so that’s kind of like the concept. I try to get a nice full 360 or after. Think of something else that I’m missing. I will add another Cranford, that’s all.

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

That’s awesome. You’re incredibly ambitious. No, this is great. And let’s get into the meat of insurance specifically, can you have a lot of experience there, and you’re also clearly a great sales person, and I also know 92% of people who get their insurance license fall off within the first year, I mean, this industry is very difficult to be very successful, and for most people, it seems as from what I’ve experienced, so what kind of tips can you offer people, maybe some specific examples and your experience is so extensive, what would you tell somebody who’s starting out… Also

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

A few things just to… You’re right, I mean, I’ve been in the RNA space for the longest. Awaits, I enjoy it. And on the side note, I also have a brokerage agency, so make people for people that actually… We recruit people and we have agents, and so I can tell you how hard, how easy, how difficult, and what works and what doesn’t, and so it is a great opportunity. And insurance, obviously there’s more… We specialize in Medicare sales and like CA and all those types of things.

But in the insurance, if you have an insurance license and you have different types, P and C, you do life and health, and you can do just health on its own, accident and health, so we kind of focus on the accident and health. But we have products for life too.

And I’m not from morning here, the agency itself, I’m just talking about the concept. Right, and it is a great opportunity to make money, it is definitely something that’s needed, I mean, everybody is an insurance for their home, wanting these nitrate for their car, and what if you have a business unit insurance, if you’re a tenant, do you need insurance? And if you live, you need health insurers, at the end of day, you need some sort of insurance…

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Car insurance is a must. Health insurance is a must. So it just, depending on how it is, the license in itself is not difficult, as you know, I mean, people gotta get on a course, depending what course you mean, or multiple courses, if you’re gonna do multiple portfolios and different opportunities, like the P and C license, separate…

The accident, health and life, and accident and health are separate, and you can combine those and we now you can start basically becoming an agent or a broker, and you can work independently.

Now, there’s two ways, some of these folks that do the licensing, they can work for health plans, and by the word’s funny, I said help lines, my agency’s name is help lands, but I was referring to the help lands or the carriers is as opposed to with the sea, my companies were dosage play in the words, right?

And so the concept is very simple, if you want a salary benefit and you wanna get your feet wet into the industry, a good way probably to start is to get into a company, and not all the companies recur captive agents, but in some of the bigger cities, they do like New York City, it’s pretty common.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

All the help lens, they have a staff that is dedicated to selling in the field, these are captive agents, they get a salary and a commission, sometimes some bonuses and things like that, but they’re going to employees… And that’s one way to do it. The other way is the standard way, which is more nationally acceptable, you’re doing… You work somewhere, you get a license and start part time to do income value, another resource of income, another revenue, people do it as an income stream. Right.

Some people start part-time because you have to balance it until you get your feet wet and you get ready to get the knowledge skills you need.

There is a wrap-up time because you gotta build your momentum, you gotta know the business enough and to help specifically you need to understand what you’re doing and you’re working with corporations for business or employer groups and things like that, are you working for individuals like in the Medicare space, what is… Or who is your customer base and where you can meet them as… And so forward your network, your business development skills have to get there, some of the opportunities that you have, for example, we’re working with providers or working in the faith-based organizations, or you’re working with community organizations to an event, all these things are multiple places where you can actually diversify opportunities and Prospect, and eventually, I thrive.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Great news about insurance is if you’re not a captive agent and you are independent, it’s almost the same, and I’ll explain, because if you add the numbers do to dollar, if you are a captive, yes, you get a salary base and that’s guaranteed plus benefits, blah, blah, blah.

But if you were independent, six or seven apps qualified to that salary base anyway, so everything else, you’re basically dividing it…

If your goal is, let’s say 20 on the captive side, you do the same morning here, you’re probably gonna make the same money or more, but the Atari that because you’re the intra party independent now you have a residual income, see, that’s the part where people don’t realize that it’s not just a one-time deal, it’s a future income revenue, and then you tack on…

It’s really compound it year after year, and so after a couple of years in the business with a nice before you, you’re pretty much a good set because as long as US people are buying policies for our life, in the case of Medicare, you won’t get money from your previous sales, and you’re gonna maintain your members happy, if there is a change in the plan, you’re gonna move them from one product to the other, and that’s it, but you will do that, so you’re one is probably a most difficult one, year two gets a little harder or easier, other, I’d say.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

And then in time, it becomes a nice breeze and you basically have four or five years worth of income that is coming in guaranteed, whether you do stuff or not, you know you’re still gonna make money now, this is not an opportunity to just quit everything, ultimately, you don’t have to work for other places now because you have enough revenue, you’ve basically matched one of a current situation you have now or even exceeded it.

Let’s say you’re making 100000, now you’re making 200000.

You don’t need to worry about working for someone, you’re independent, there is an opportunity of growth, you can open your own agents and now have on the folks teach people how to do it the same way you did it, and now basically you’re giving them an opportunity to make money and you get override because they’ll sell on the side if you want it to, and you can still earn your money from the previous sales and you still get override for the sales of your agent. So there is a lot to do here, and it’s Laney of opportunity. I wanna stop there.

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

Okay, that’s good. Is a little overwhelming, but it makes me think that you have so much going on, like creating the network, the TV network and creating this brokerage, there must be infrastructure that you can already tap into, ’cause I can’t imagine that you could really coordinate and build all that really from scratch. So there must be larger companies that you’re working with make… All of this work is that, right?

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Yes, also depends on the media side, none is literally from scratch, obviously I’m using what the systems are in place and I can own system, but I’m using platform, Facebook, I mean social stuff that’s already out there, but in the insurance space, you are selling carriers, right. So you have to contract with carriers, so there’s ways to do this, but the easy way is to affiliate with a announcer, in my case, because of the expertise and stuff like that, we work with FM. FM is field market an organization, and basically it is an organization that is contracted with helpers nationally or locally, and basically their job is to recruit train and basic produced for these plans, and so that’s all they have to do now.

And FOS, the highest ranking, and between FM and agent, there’s a… All levels that you can be like a general agency, master a lot of acronyms, but they all do the same thing, and there’s overriding between…

And basically the more contract with a carrier is a simple contract where they are as an regulations and expectations, there’s a payment to the agency or the FM for the admin work, and then there is expectations in terms of compliance and so on and so forth, in exchange instead of the carrier looking to hire on people, they just contract with these agencies and they have the ones they bring in a couple of thousands of brokers that those products, they certify them, they go through the compliance process, whatever they need to do to comply, and then now they have agencies now, in my role, what I did is I create an agency under an O, and basically I’m almost like an M level, if you wanna call it this way.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

But here’s the difference, when you’re an Moore responsible for a lot more than if you’re an agency, meaning, I’m not responsive what the compliance besides be complaints being compliant. Right, but I’m not responsible to Monte operations behind it. I mean… So there are certain things that we don’t have to do, the foresters responsible, and we are responsible to the FSO, everybody’s Ocala, Billy, everybody’s kinda connected. Right, instead of me worrying about the operations and running all that, having a compliance office center, blah, blah, blah…

I don’t have to deal with that. All I have to do is recruit. Train sale, producer. Don’t complain, I could use it.

I’m gonna keep using the word compliant insurance word, where licensed agents or license, it’s a state license there, there’s a lot of stuff that goes behind it, it’s not an easy course or… Take the exam, if you wanna call it…

The exams are pretty difficult to a degree.

I mean, they’re up there with a series seven and six and all those, so out there. And so when you get them, you wanna maintain them, rule number one, they have to do your sever two years, and so that’s one, and you have to be complained because if you’re not compliant, you will not be able to work with carriers ’cause they’ll kick you Tani you can’t sell the product. You have no product to sell them, you have no business. Right, you can’t do this. So that’s it, so you have to maintain. Correctly. Was that good enough?

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

That’s excellent. I love it. So long, I know the TV network is fairly new. How long have you had the brokerage?

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Brokerage was 2017, and there’s a story behind it too, so I was… There’s always a story. I was a Chief Sales Marketing, obviously for a company, and then just again, I’m gonna share with you, it’s funny because when you work for companies… You never know what to expect. I was on vacation, I showed up Lilo in on Sunday night. Monday, I get called, were closing the company early… What was it called? Everybody who it was exactly same day, so Sunday, and I was like, You should have just done… I would have extended avocation and so that was the end of it.

But I had a team and the first thing I was like, Well, and we were close to the annual election period in the Medicare space.

Which is like contouring, this happened literally August, and there’s not enough room between most of the plans… By that time, they already have stuff in and everything lined up, so it’s difficult, so the idea was, let me create an agency so we all can make this AP worth it and we can still survive and make enough money and so and so forth. At the same time, what I did is promote the wraps and some of them got into a job, some of them then continue to do with the GEC. That was a story behind. Excellent. Okay, great. It was just for that.

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

Okay, we brought a little bit of time left, but I do… In my research on you, I noticed that in 2019, you filed the US patent for an inflatable scaffolding idea, how… I have no idea how that fits into everything else you’re doing, what… Can you tell us that story?

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

It’s an interesting story. So I happened to live in a home where I have cathedral, ceiling is high unit, and in 2018, I think it was a bad storm, and we had replaced our roof, but there were leaks into the actual house and the ceiling had those things, and I went to the Home Depot and everywhere to try to find a scaffolding to actually be able to go out there. I had somebody to do it, but they could not do it. And to really even lease one dose scaffold is to bring Him…

It’s a lot of heavy metal stuff and pieces, and to put them really is not as easy task.

and we even try to get the highest potential ladder that there is at least in a ladder, and we couldn’t find something that was high enough, so it was very difficult. And then I have… My mom lives with me, she’s an elderly and the less a second floor, and then at the time, an idea that I need to be able to do this, so I looked also at those… What do you call them? The collapsible scaffolds like they left, you see them as a sister one other cases or lift, so she does, but they’re heavy and they’re propaganda, you got bright in the house, you can’t even get in house, right.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Sole need something Borel. So an idea came as like, You know what, why don’t just go and inquire about this and make an invention, and that’s exactly what I did, so I did the research, I did all the discovery stuff, we look to see if there’s anything similar, nothing. And then we basically put it and put the plans together and submitted it to the patent office, and by two years later, I think we got proved as a utility payers and…

Yeah, and that was it. So this one was born, and it’s a very portable concept, I have yet to license it though.

I’ve been actually trying to market in and try to get people to get into the concept, maybe someone will hear about it and we’ll be interested in the concept because I can see a lot of use for it. Not just me, that’s why it’s left as a full… Then you can live it up pretty safe, carry stuff, you can go as close to the cell as you can… It is portable and inflatable, it uses inflatable stuff, so it’s light also, you can use a far out letter generator if you want, so it’s got all these things. And it’s good. So that was it.

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

Well, aren’t you something… That’s amazing. So if something wants to get a hold of you out, so many entry points into your work, so how can we… How would you like to tell people to get a hold of you?

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

Well, again, I’m all over the map, so like LinkedIn is not easy, why? And when bought profiles, you can get there. If you go to help plans, my help lines dot com. That’s my other thing. If you go to defeat channel, you’ll find me in the FIFA dot-com, you’ll find me. We also have a natural cosmetic company, so that’s organism, New York dot com, so that’s another one. So we’re doing different things, and these are all… I believe or not, those were all side things, I actually…

Recently, I was still working in the corporate world, so now, and this was all done part-time and my wife is doing some other work.

To work on the side, and that’s it. So it is not the easy way, like hurricane at my health radius dot com, that will be the email to get to me, like I said, if you can download the app and still connect with me, you can go to the website. I have few of them. As I said, the other one is We… CTV network dot com. And yeah, you can reach out to me anyway. Any time for insurance? For media, for podcasting, for the IS, if you hunt to take us there.

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

We open. Excellent, yeah, I will definitely checking out more of your work and probably using some of your services that Network TV network really is… Sounds very exciting. So thank you for all that you do. And thank you very much for speaking with me, hurricane. I appreciate it very much.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV:

My pleasure and thank you for making… Telling that it was difficult to make it happen or screws in, but we made it… That’s all… Yeah, yeah.

Renee Host of The QuotersCast:

That was great, thank you so much. Alright, have a great day.

Hurricane H of EMBCTV: Bye.

 

 

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Hurricane H has a lot on the go! He was a health insurance sale executive for nearly 30 years.

He’s also been in the world of media since he was a kid. It was a natural transition for him to create ihealthradiousa.com and the EMBC TV Network – A collection of channels for content creators to promote their work effectively and affordably.

And surprisingly, listen to Hurricane tell the story of how he created a new invention and filed a US patent on it in 2019!

Find Hurricane H at the following internet spaces: https://ihealthradiousa.com

His media empire – https://www.theembctvnetwork.com/#/

Hurricane H’s youtube channel – https://www.youtube.com/@UCqh-7sNnEOpdPWZFlWMko0A

Hurricane H’s podcast – https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-ihealthradio-83322572/

Find Hurricane on Social Media:

LINKEDIN _ https://www.linkedin.com/in/hicham-elanmati-54aaa016

TWITTER _ https://twitter.com/elanmatij/status/1233856743836393478

THE QUOTERSCAST #10

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Contact Renee for debit elimination, IRS shelters and funding your own fix and flips at: 

wikiquoters@gmail.com

 

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QuotersCast Host Renee: Today on the Quoterscast, I’m talking to Anmol Singh who is a stock market trader and investor. He’s based in New York. He’s been featured on Forbes, Fox and ABC News. Anmolthe author of the book, Prepping For Success, as well as the founder of LiveTraders at livetraders.com.

So I’m really looking forward to speaking with you Anmol and let’s start with livetraders. I’m curious about your background and how you came to found your platform.

Anmol Singh of LiveTraders:

“Yeah, definitely. So I started trading in my dorm room, I went to Brunel University in London. I studied for a business degree, and the way the university’s weren’t there is before you graduate. You have to do a year of internship or a job. I found myself in a situation where I apply everywhere, but couldn’t get a call back. I didn’t get a job, and I saw all my friends getting a great job.

So I really kinda dawned on me that it can’t rely on anybody to have to figure out something to do. So while I was just sitting there, and I was a little introvert kid in my dorm room researching on things that I could do from home.

What else can I start? ‘Cause I have a year that I have to do some sort of work, and that’s where the stock market really caught my eye, caught my attention, and I just started reading a lot of books, taking a lot of courses and really finding the mentors in that area, and while I was in my dorm, I just started trading the stock market and rest has been history, but you started right there in college, and I’ve been doing that ever since. Basically.

QC Host:

Alright. That’s an amazing success story. And I think a lot of people would love to be able to say the same thing. And why is it different for you because I think a lot of people are fascinated with the stock market and they’ve tried it, why did you get success when so many other people don’t?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Yeah, I think because as you said, a lot of people try it. I go all in, if I wanna learn something about a particular field, a particular endeavor, I devour myself and all the information that I can get my hands on, and that’s also because I think you’re curious about it. I think if you get in it just for the money or the stock market, let’s appealing, it’s not gonna get you through those tough times, ’cause the whole first year I didn’t make any money.

So most people would have already quit by then and say, Oh, this doesn’t work out for me, whereas I just kept going, I kept tracking my trades and maintaining spreadsheets of this type of a trade versus that type of trade, really collecting the different types of data and then finding the right mentors, even if I had to pay a big amount of money to find somebody who was a successful trader and just basically did everything that they told me to do, they took me under the wing as an older gentleman, and you basically talked me out of trade, and then he gave me a job at his trading company and kinda took me under the wing a little bit more, and then eventually we started our own company together, which is life traders today.

QC Host:

Oh, really? Wow, okay, so that’s interesting. So a mentorship as well as being a founder, so take us through how that developed again, it just seems… I appreciate your work ethic, it just seems like almost a little bit like a fairy tale, really the way you describe it, and I don’t wanna take away from your work ethic at all, it just seems like not everyone gets that opportunity, and the fact that your mentor is now a Co-Founder and took you under his wing. What did he see in you that was really special?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

I think in the beginning, I didn’t see anything in it, I had to actually outlay a lot of money to work with him, right, so I’d saved up a lot of money, and his program at that point used to be tens of thousands of dollars, which I say working through college, doing different jobs. I saved about 78,000 and I paid him for taking his programs and taking his courses. That’s kind of how I got there. And that’s how the relationship started. But one of the things that I did that most people don’t is that they would just learn from somebody and then that would be that.

Whereas I would constantly be emailing him, “Hey, what do you think about this trade.” “What do you think about that?” So he could see that I’m actually interested in my own learning and not just one of those people who just purchased a program and never follow through with it.

So, I kept asking them questions and I kept sharing with him… Not even expecting a reply. I would just email him every day, “Hey, here’s what I did today.” They just wanna give you an update. And he kinda liked that and he started giving me feedback back via email and we kept our relationship going.

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Eventually, we got on Skype calls. Back in the day when there was Skype, so we used to get on it. That’s how we did our calls, and that’s how it started. Then one day they were short on staff on their trading company that he was a part of, he’s like, “Hey, you’ve been doing really well with the program and stuff, I need your help, I need you to come on here for an hour.”

“I was like, Oh yeah, I’ll be there.”

And I was there, that’s kind of how I got my foot in the door. Then an internship. That little gig for an hour turned into an internship, then that turned into me working for the company, and then eventually… When that company got bought out, I called him up.

I said, “Hey, are you joining the new company that’s being bought out or… I think we should start our own thing, I’m a case study, right here, you have everything. And as part of the firm, I was splitting a percentage of everything I made from my trading and giving it to the firm, I said, We don’t need to give them a percentage anymore, so I could handle all the online stuff.”

AS of LiveTraders.com:

You can leave it up to me, the online marketing and whatever we need to do for the business. You focus on what you’ve done with me, just teaching others how to do it, and I kind of phrased it as a win-win situation, and that’s kind of how it led to… Livetraders. One thing led to another.”

QC Host: Well, that’s an excellent story to suggest to people, how you can make your own opportunities. To that point, I was taking a look at LiveTraders, and it seems to be a combination of a trading platform as well as a teaching platform, and I also know you’re big on trading psychology, and I think that seems to be a little different. Not a lot of platforms are incorporating all three of those, so can you speak to the uniqueness of your platform?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

So we basically use the same model that was used on me, because a lot of traders usually take about three years for people to really get it, but I was one of the traders in the firm who kind of got it about the year two.

I got it a bit quicker than other people, so I said, “Hey, let’s use the exact same model of people who go through the programs that they have to email us the feedback and do the exact same thing you did with me. And then that’ll be a case study to shorten people’s learning curve and get them the results that they want.

So we say, “Okay, how can we do that?” Well, we definitely need to provide them education, but then not only that, is there any way that they can virtually even sit next to us and watch us do it.

‘Cause it’s one thing to learn from a textbook or a course, but another thing to actually watch somebody do it live in front of you. So then we started the live platform where I meet my partner. We trade every single day, and people get to see it in real time win or lose.

AS of LiveTraders.com:

It’s happening in life. So there’s nothing that could be changed. And I think that also keeps us accountable ’cause what we’re teaching, we’re doing, but then also teaches the student too. Hey, how are they handling themselves when there is a lot of money on the line, or you’re making money then you’re losing money.

How is he emotionally handling it… I think that was important, the missing piece to that, so we just kept adding different tools and things that we can offer to help shorten their learning curve, ’cause that’s what it’s kinda all about right now.

QC Host: Okay, one thing also I noticed about Livetraders is that you seem to have a simpler method, you’ve sort of boiled it down to something that works well and you keep it simple. Please tell us more about that.

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Yeah, I think a lot of people when it comes to trading, they over complicated a lot of it, they wanna look at fundamentals; like let me look at the company and what the CEO is doing. What’s the balance sheet like?

Let’s look at the chart. Let’s look at the indicators. And what happens is you get stuck in the global analysis. Now you’re an analyst, you’re not a trader.

Traders needs to trade. So you get stuck in, well, one thing is telling me to buy, but then the company is not that great, I don’t know…

Don’t know if I should buy. And then you just keep doubting yourself. So, what we’ve done is we’ve created a simple system. Which is just based on price action, we’re not looking at anything else, and what we’ve done with the system as we back-tested it over the last 30, 40, 50 years.

To see that, Okay, this is something that works and that continuously will work in the future as well, so we got it down to something that could be teachable. That you learn that everybody can follow and in an online platform offer a lot of different opportunities for people to learn via live streams, we have educational courses and things of that nature.

QC Host:

Right. Okay, so what would be the best place for people to start if they wanted to or go to the website? And then what would you suggest? And you have the newsletter and you have several offerings, so…

AS of LiveTraders.com: I think the first thing people will need to do is to determine how deep they wanna get into it, like if you’re somebody who already has another job, you’re working on to five, you have another business that’s your main focus that day trading, which is trading in and out every single day. It’s probably not right for you. Right, but then there’s other styles of trading you can do, which is swing trading where you’re holding stocks for a few weeks, maybe sometimes a few days, so you’re not in and out all day like I am… I can do that ’cause that’s my job, I do it every single day, I have to do it. But if somebody is looking to get started, then how much time can you give into this is number one.

Then once you determine that, the next step for you is to go to LiveTraders.com, where it’s a free account, make an account… You get a free introductory course, you get the guides, there’s hours and hours of free lectures on our YouTube channel, a tons of blog posts, 90% of our stuff that we offer is completely for free, and then obviously, once you learn that and you determine, Okay, I can maybe do this, this is something I can get into, and then that’s the point where you might just email us, get in touch and see how we can help you go further.

QC Host:

Alright, excellent. So what about diversification? Are you into real estate? Do you do options? Anything like that, how does it spill over into other areas?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Yeah, no, I think that’s the beauty about trading, ’cause I started, as I said, in my dorm room and didn’t have any money to do real estate or any of that, so started with training and the training was a way for me to get the money, so once I generate cash, lower income from my trading, when I take a percentage of my trading profits that automatically gets invested either an index fund or a different stocks, but I’m not really touching, I’m just putting it and I’m keypad into it every month.

So that’s one thing that I do, and then a percentage of my income goes towards my investment fund, so let’s say 10 or 20, 20%. So once that as investment fund is accumulated to a decent investable amount, and at that point, I either look for opportunities that could be the real estate, so I do a lot of Airbnb stuff, not in the US, but internationally, so we have a few properties that we have on Airbnb. And then the other things that I might do is I also angel invest to have about 32 different startup companies that have an investment in, so we would get two to three deals every single day.

People offering their companies or this project and invest in that project, but I only invest in two or three per year, so I look at a lot of deals and I make my decision on which one I invest in, so that’ll be part of the angel investments.

QC Host:

Wow, you’re busy. You’ve been mentored. Do you mentor others? Do you take somebody directly under your wing.

AS of LiveTraders.com: At Livetraders, we do. So, we have a different coaching program, but primarily I’ve been sticking to group coaching just to make the best use of my time. But that’s kind of what I’ve been doing at the moment. There’s certain clients that I work with one-on-one, but they would only be if they’ve already seen a lot of success and maybe now they wanna start a hedge fund, so then I’ll help them with that process to get the ball rolling.

QC Host: That sounds like a big deal, like a hedge fund, and I know in recent years it’s been… There’s a trend with combining a lot of different investments like forex and crypto into a hedge fund, and so can you speak to that? Beause it seems like a bit of a phenomenon now…

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Yeah, I think with the Internet, with technology, especially what recently happened in 2020, people are looking to see what else they can do, so launching a hedge fund has obviously been popularized in the last few years, but I think it’s a risky thing that’s going on ’cause a lot of people are. They’re looking at the funds, they’re good at raising money, they’re good at networking, but I don’t think it’s gonna end well, ’cause these type of firms shouldn’t really be formed in a fun format.

Where now I’m teaching people how to a fund with a traditional hedge fund that will be like a traditional hedge fund, you’re only doing investment in stock markets and you’re not doing everything. I don’t know about how this would play out, ’cause I’ve seen a lot of people who don’t really have the industry experience. However, they have a big network, they’re raising money, and from what I’ve seen lately, it hasn’t been going too well for a lot of people…

QC Host:

That’s interesting. Now, with the QuotersCast, we talk a lot about insurance, and so how does insurance play into what you do, or does it at all… Do you need to mitigate risk… In that way and need insurance.

AS of LiveTraders.com: Yeah, so in trading, we don’t really need insurance per se, but there’s different ways to protect the risk on your trades. Like Options. So if you have a stock, you can always sell an option against your stock, so that way your risk is protected. So those are the strategies that we might employ, but we don’t really have any play in the insurance space per se. Although my Airbnb properties and stuff they require a good amount of insurance…

QC Host: Right, okay, so let’s talk about your book Prepping for Success, and I know you’ve got 10 steps, and I want to go through them a bit and tell us why you wrote the book and what people can expect to get from it.

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Sure, so I initially, this book wasn’t really meant to be published as a book or for me to publish it, it was kind of part of my journal, so I was kinda embarking on a personal development journey when I moved to America and I was kind of finding myself, I was going through my own little journey of attending personal development workshops, seminars, books, courses, hiring trainers, hiring coaches, I’ve spent a lot of money, like six figures, as I’m just working on myself, and then obviously what I realize is that not everybody has that amount. Yet many want to try to learn it.

And there’s a lot of information out there. So initially, this was written as notes to myself, when I land in to America, I was like, Okay, these are things, 10 things I need to do in my own life. I need to operate and live my life by them. If I’m to get to where I wanna go to, which is what I call success…

So that’s what it’s called, Prepping for Success, ’cause I was preparing for success, and then one of my friends, he read the notes, he’s like, This is actually great, you should sell these notes! I’m like, No, these are my journal, I can’t give it to…

He’s like, You should publish it in a book format, and that’s kind of when I hired an editor, we kind of sat together and it turn into a book. So basically, I wrote a book that I wish somebody gave me 10 years ago would have made a life a whole lot easier when I intend to plan on doing the same for other people.

QC Host:

Alright, well, excellent. That’s great. What’s your favorite… Tip for success in on of the 10.

AS of LiveTraders.com: So one of those, this is actually a very simple one, but it’s also the hardest one and also the biggest needle moving one, whether you’re a man or a woman… Have integrity being a person of integrity.

Meaning, do what you said you’re gonna do and then do it. When you said you’re gonna do it, I just think about it, how much would our lives be different if we did every single thing we said we’re gonna do, and then we did it when we said we’re gonna do it, so just operating by that paradigm of, hey, paying a close attention to what’s coming out of my mouth, like really believing in my own words, ’cause that leads to self-esteem and self-confidence, ’cause if you don’t believe in your own word, if you say, I’m gonna do something that you don’t…

Slowly, our unconscious mind starts saying, Well, here she doesn’t believe it. They just keep saying, and they’re not gonna do it, and that leads into a low self-esteem, low confidence, and then that leads into a visual where you keep saying you’re gonna do it, but that you don’t… A lot of people find them so stuck in that loop and just short it…

AS of LiveTraders.com:

So I think that was one of the things to realize is that, hey, whatever I’m gonna say, Make sure I really mean it. Otherwise, I’m not gonna say it, ’cause if I don’t believe in my own word, how do I expect the world, how do you expect the universe to believe in me?

QC Host: Right, I think there’s excellent advice, and I wish more politicians would take it. So it sounds to me like you’ve had such a tremendous rise in your career, what’s been the most difficult part? And how did you handle it?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

How did I handle it? The most difficult part was I have a tendency to get really involved with my work, like my intensity, so to speak, so when I get to into it, then I sometimes can tend to ignore other areas, and that was one of the challenges that I had was like… I was very introverted, I was like, Alright, I’m gonna just sit down and I’m gonna get this done, it’s me and the computer, we’re gonna figure it out. And I had a very kind of not so humble mentality… it was like me against the world, I’ll figure it out.

It was very angry mindset, I had to get a lot of work to go on that, and maybe I don’t know where it was coming from, but it was one of those things that I wanted to improve something to the world, and that was kind of how it was going, but now I’m in a phase of my life where I don’t have to prove anything to anybody, just have to prove something to myself, which is go in to the next level to the hardest challenge was just balancing or trying to manage all of those different areas like social life and then manage your health and manager or finance manager, employees.

AS of LiveTraders.com:

So that could have got it been overwhelming at the beginning, but that’s also because I was in here, so now that I’ve been doing it for a while there, I realized that there’s no such thing as balance, you just try to harmonize everything, create harmony between all those areas.

QC Host:

That’s an interesting view point, ’cause you seem like a young guy… And I was gonna ask about your social life. You seem so busy that you don’t have time to date or find a wife, I don’t wanna pry too much, but how do you sort of harmonize all that…

AS of LiveTraders.com: Yeah, so the way I did it initially, was by not doing anything, it was just work, work, work, and then after that I realized, Okay, you got… What’s the use of the money if you’re not gonna build relationships or have a good family life, so at that point, I kinda made a conscious effort to start get in touch with my family, getting in touch with everybody and amending the relationships and same thing for social life hosting events, I started hosting my own events, inviting people to it, and that’s kind of how I made it happen.

‘Cause I realized that with the things that I’m doing, I wouldn’t have time to hang out with everybody one-on-one, but I can host an event and get everybody together, so that way I can only just do one big event a week or one a month and meet everybody in one go. So that’s kinda how I fix that situation.

QC Host:

Oh, that’s excellent. So where are you based and what kind of hobbies do you do?

AS of LiveTraders.com: I’m in New York City and work on Wall Street and as far as hobbies… That’s a really good question. I always get stumped on that specific question ’cause for me, it doesn’t feel like work for trading as a sport to me, ’cause just like a sports person goes through ups and downs forms, not struggling, then you’re doing well, and trading is more like that.

So a lot of my time is involved with the stock market, advising my clients and things of that nature, but I do love to put on my headphones, go by the water, take a nice little stroll, take a walk, that’s kind of my typical routine, and I host a lot of events, so once a month, we’ll do an event in New York City where we’ll invite everybody, it could be a brunch event, could be a dinner event, could be a big party, and that’s pretty much my… Has specific coffees, although working out, I guess, recently getting back in the habit… That’s one of the things as well.

QC Host: Great, so what do you think about the banking system and some of the things we’ve seen recently, and how have your clients approached you and your students approach you about that?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Yeah, so the banking situation, the ones I think that have had to fall have already been fallen, and that started with the whole crypto-currency situation, ’cause a lot of those banks had investments in venture capital and private equity and angel investments and crypto projects.

So this was the whole domino effect that started long ago, where FTC was when that fell and that resulted in an other stakeholders losing money, and then they had money store Silicon Valley Bank, and then they ended up losing, so it was like a whole domino effect that slowly trickled down. I do think that the worst is behind us, but there still might be one or two banks still in the news to go, which we’ll find out whether it’s gonna be.

As far as navigating it for me, my students and traders, it doesn’t affect too much ’cause we didn’t have any positions in any of those banks, so that we just mitigated that all together, we try to focus on trades that are not gonna be in the limelight, I call them hype phrase, Everybody in the world is talking about cryptocurrencies or GM or EMC or whatever, things of that nature, we’re always looking for the slow and boring movers that are predictable, that are statistically being tested to give us the return that we’re looking for, so we try to just mitigate all of those situations, the volatility…

AS of LiveTraders.com:

I will say though, it’s a very interesting time that we’re in overall duplicate and politically, but a very interesting turning point is a crossroad where our whole entire, I guess, humanity… Could go here or either you could go there, so we’re kind of right there right now in the next few years will really determine their direction we’re gonna head to…

QC Host: Yeah, I totally agree with you. So it almost sounds like you’re not a big fan of crypto, is that right? Not really.

AS of LiveTraders.com:

I’m not a fan of Bitcoin. I am a fan of crypto, and I’ve found certain projects, but just like any new thing, there’s a lot of bad actors that come into it, just like back in the dot com bubble, internet bubble, you would have seen every single internet stock which is going… It could be called literally. Well, when it was called ROCK.com, just a piece of rock, a billion dollars evaluation. I think that’s what’s happening in the cryptocurrencies. There’s some good solid projects like algorithm.

Those are some good, good projects, but then there’s a lot of noise, there’s a lot of hype… 

There’s a lot of projects that aren’t really gonna go anywhere, they’re just purely based on an influencer or DogeCoin or Chico, they have no utility… No use in the real world. But there still exists, so I think there needs to be one of those down trending crashes where… And after that, you’re gonna see a few cryptocurrencies go down and then 90% of them won’t exist a few years from now.

QC Host:

Okay, well, that’s an interesting forecast. One thing I do know about the insurance industry is that a lot of people predict that if something happens, we’ve just been talking about, it would be the last domino to fall for many reasons, and it’s… The fact is, many of these older well-established insurance companies weather the ups and downs and recessions, the dot com and real estate bubbles very well.

So how do you feel about the industry as a whole, and how does that fit in with your training… Is the insurance industry?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Yes, yeah. Yeah, I think Tesla, believe it or not, I believe is gonna be the biggest disruptor to the insurance industry, so that’s gonna be very interesting to see, ’cause Tesla is now getting into the share business, so they already offer insurance on their Tesla cars and you could buy insurance from Tesla, now they have a very specific advantage, which is they have all your cars data it… How fast… How much do you break…

Right.

Do you serve a lot, they have cameras inside your car heater, you didn’t wear your seatbelt or the car was jerking, you’re breaking… What was the speed? They have all that data, the traditional insurance companies don’t have, so I think a lot of people still think Tesla’s a car company, but I think that’s gonna be the biggest surprise people are gonna get a few years from now…

QC Host: Oh, that’s fascinating. I did not know that, and how… That must be very, very new, I had no idea that they had their own insurance company…

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Yeah, my friend sent me a screenshot of all the data, it says that there’s a test to insurance model on every test owner and their phone, they have an app and it tracks everything from your average speed when your speed was… How much did you break… Did you serve a lot, they put you a safety score, the e-sign you based on which your insurance was gonna be calculated, and every minutia detail which… Where do you drive?

How long do you stay where you part… They have cameras in there. Easel or not. They have all that data, I show me a screenshot, I was like…

And they’ve already started in offering a cartoon Tesla cars just on their own cars, but that’s where it’s headed eventually, when all cars do become Electric and they have that data, Tesla will be weigh in of everybody else, I think that’s where the insurance industry is ready for disruption, and I think Tesla’s gonna get it done

QC Host:

Really. Okay, well, only because I question electric cars, because we’ve seen a lot of footage where the batteries are dangerous, they’ll spontaneously combust, not only that, but people don’t see… We don’t seem to be talking about the fact that it takes fossil fuels to create electricity, and there’s a lot of problems with Tesla, it takes many hours to recharge and it doesn’t go that long.

So… I appreciate what you’re saying, and I know you’re an expert in this area, so I kind of always felt that eventually it would peter out once the money stopped being put into Tesla, it’d be gone. What do you think about that?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Yeah, so I think majority of… A lot of the subsidies have already ended and Tesla actually had their best quarter and sold more cars than ever before without the subsidies, so I think that that’s already shown that they can still keep that going, and then eventually it’s just…

It’s a friend that is just in my pain, technology is like a one-way street, so once you start something, it doesn’t go back in the bag, developers are not gonna go back in the bag, and you’re also seeing other car manufacturers also start going to leave you out because they realize it’s not even about the EV.

So, it’s about you giving a person the consumer and electric car, but now you have all the data.

It’s all about the data, and they have every little street, they can map out all the streets where you drove and where the pothole was, where it wasn’t, so it’s not really about the… Even in my opinion, it’s all about the electronics in the car that are capturing all that data, and another advantage, I guess, with Tesla is that their full service driving is way ahead of all the competitors, like the Mercedes doesn’t let you change the lane when it’s on for self-driving, so it’s not really self driving.

So Tesl is still way ahead of all of those competitors, and I think just like when cars were brand new, there was a lot of problems with engines and maintenance and all of that, so all of these battery issues all the issues you’re seeing, it’s just a matter of technology that in a year or two, they’re gonna be way better than what they are now, and all of those issues will be fixed, their chargers will be everywhere across the location, which is already happening.

AS of Livetraders.com:

So I think it’s about a two to three-year window where there’s gonna be acceleration and be adoption for that, as also as battery prices come down, car prices come down, and Tesla is already lowering their prices.

So, I think that’s one of the things to keep in mind. There’s always risks, but traditional auto manufacturers obviously haven’t grown at all, they’re seeing compression, and so that’s where the money is flowing into right now.

QC Host: Alright, yeah, that’s an excellent point about the data. So speaking to that, do you use a lot of artificial intelligence and some type of technology to gather data to make your decisions for trading?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Not so much for trading, I rely on like we have our systems as guidelines and then we still have an element of looking at it ourselves in the moment, although we do have softwares that I’ve built that helped me manage this trade now that I’m in IT, software can take control and I could do the exit for me, I just have to take the trade myself manually, and then I have my software I could program, I could set it up, it’ll do everything and I can go work out. Basically.

QC Host: Alright, that’s great. Alright, so we’ve come to the end of the time. I really appreciate this and all… Is there anything that you’d like to add before we leave it?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

I just would like to add that there’s obviously it’s one of the very pivotal environments, I think the decisions that people make about their careers professions, whatever it is in this next year or two, they’re gonna be pivotal for the rest of our life.

So I think really potential to which field you’re in, where that’s headed, where that’s doing…

How could you maybe capitalize on using AI thinking in terms of those things would really help people, and obviously there’s… They wanna get into trading or anything like that, feel for… Get in touch with me and I’ll be happy to help you out.

QC Host: That is actually a great point in telling people that the decision they make will have an affect in the next few years.

Just like what we talked about. Things are changing so fast. It makes me think of what do you see are the most advantageous careers and past ways people could go for the next few years?

AS of LiveTraders.com:

Yeah, I think there’s a few careers that I think are not going anywhere, if you’re in sales, it’s not going anywhere, you’re still gonna need it regardless of the field that you’re in, if you’re in marketing, that’s not gonna go anywhere as well, those…

Some feel a in stock market investing, it’s not going anywhere, stock market was here before we were born, it’s gonna be here long after we leave the earth, so there’s certain things like that, but if you’re in a smaller executive kind of role where… Let’s say you are responsible for writing the copy writing for our websites or emails, that’s already just…

ChatGPT already does it.

You can just tell it to write you in the email, write me a sales page for this thing, so those smaller jobs are right for disruption already, and on a bigger scale of things, is that insurance industry and crypto industry, the traditional…

The traditional finance is pretty much on its way out, I think three to five years timeline, but their traditional finances, it’s out of the way and the decentralized finance will take over. So some of the things people can look into his projects like Algerian by an MIT professor. That’s where I’m seeing at least all the academics and all the regulators kind of focus on as maybe the one that CDC could be formed upon…

QC Host: Right, right. Okay, wow. Well, you’ve given us a lot to think about. I really appreciate this, Anmol Really impressive, and I would encourage everyone to go to LiveTraders.com to check out your work.

AS of LiveTraders.com: Prepping for Success is on Amazon and on Barnes and Nobles and I think even Walmart.

QC Host: Excellent, thank you very much, and I wish you all the best and thanks for being here.

AS of LiveTraders.com: It was good chatting with you. Thanks for having me.

 

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“Bank For Yourself”: https://wikiquoters.com/byob-video/

Contact us at: wikiquoters@gmail.com

If this podcast has inspired you to learn more about insurance and what it can do for you then give us a call.

We’re happy to answer all your questions

WikiQuoters – Where A Licensed Agent Picks Up The First Time!

 

Experience other QuotersCast Guests…

Scientist, Simulation Theorist, Paranormal Experiencer – An Amazing Conversation with Dr. Simon Duan

35 Year AIM Investing & Options Expert – Jeff Weber at jjjiinvesting.com

Annuities & Insurance Marketing Expert Allan Khazak of VroomMediaGroup.com

ACA Expert & 15 Year Agent – Interview with Lorena Tomasini of MALM Insurance Agency

Interview With Noah Healy Of Coordisc.com – Commoditizing Markets & Buyer Intent?

Interview With 15 Year Financial Pro, Author & Ironman Athlete – Bryan Kuderna of KudernaFinancial.com

 

Your host of the QuotersCast and licensed insurance agent Renee talks to Eugene Shafronsky of thinktum – Changing The Face of Underwriting, Insurance Lead Gen & Beyond! with Artificial Intelligence.

Eugene is the Head of Strategy at thinktum which is a no code platform making it easier for insurance companies to do business.

If you’re in any area of the insurance industry, you know it’s complex. There are a lot of moving parts.

thinktum (with a lower case “t”) seeks to bring all of those moving parts into hyper-personalized alignment.

Eugene was a pleasure to speak with. What I really liked about his and the company’s approach was that they are willing to work with anyone in the insurance field.

From individual agents to large 100+ year old insurance companies, Eugene and thinktum are open to having a dialogue with anyone.

Check them out at: https://thinktum.ai            QUOTERSCAST #6 _________________________________________

WATCH, LISTEN & READ THE INTERVIEW BELOW……

Contact us at: wikiquoters@gmail.com   

———————————————-  

 

 

TRANSCRIPT OF OUR INTERVIEW

QuotersCaster Host:

Alright, so my guest today is Eugene Shafronsky. You’re located in Toronto, you founded, Thinktum in 2018, you’re the Head of Strategy there, and Thinktum is a no-code platform geared to the insurtech industry. So I’m really interested in this because I think you’re doing something cutting edge. Can you describe to us how and why you formed Thinktum and what it does.

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

Thank you so much for that. So first of all, I’m not a founder, I’m here as the Head of Strategy, but I’m working directly with the founder and the founding group.

So, I think Thinktum was created exactly for the reason I mentioned to be able to create a customer experience for applicants, for the insurance agents and advisors from those who offer life insurance as kind of their main job, and then also offering their customer experience.

I would say a better journey, user journey for those who create insurance and insurance lead gen products for those working back offices and work within insurance companies within different jobs all responsibilities.

To be able to make it better for everyone. You probably know insurance industry as a whole is a little bit outdated or struggling to be modern, so the technological advancement because of the concept of how risk can have on certainty, like trust and your name in, there’s probably a long list of different reasons.

We wanna be one of these companies within the industry helping to bring things forward. That’s pretty much the main purpose of our existence.

QC Host:

Yeah, you bring up a good point. A lot of the insurance companies have been around for 100 years or more, so how do you see your platform… It’s no code. How do you see the integration? What does that look like? That sounds very challenging.

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

So first of all, we can look at some of the recent experiences I had with a number of insurance companies. So for me, working with presenting them or consultations of my experience with them. The insurance industry is a like a whale so to speak. They will consider themselves as something very simple and just ask a few questions and then let’s see what happens after…

Right, but with a technological evolution and in the last 20 years, perhaps more than ever…

and because it’s more kind of exponential today, it’s only more than before you figure out at what has been done is not poetics. To not call no code is really a concept, it’s not a new concept overall.

Where it’s a newer concept within insurance, the technology allows using. Let’s say, assume as a graphic interface in which user who doesn’t have to be a programmer. It doesn’t have to be a technologically advanced person, but they can create any type of flow and rules and outcomes and personalization they want.

Because they can do it, now you can…

I look at much less stages which most of them are struggling with that.

Most insurance companies do not have enough technology resources, enough teams or large enough systems to deal with new ideas. The majority of their teams are really stuck with the legacy and fixing that and adjusting to other new things.

It’s typically something we struggle with, and let alone is now that creating something that also they need to maintain it more. It goes against what this company is a majority interest, just trying to create some exceptions, but let’s talk about it.

So no one uses business experts. You think of product people usually, so executives may be underwriters. It allows them to create and work with technology on their own, without involving product managers, project managers. All without involving QA, without involving designers, developers.

All those people, working with a finite amount of time.

To create something, to adjust something, even to fix a spelling error, right. You have a legacy application and have a spelling attack, you’re gonna go on to project management and you’re gonna create a task. Developer is gonna fix it. You’re gonna test it. It may take a long time.

What if you’re just gonna get yourself a handout, so you have it in front of you, just fix the error and it’s done. Right, this is kind of the easy way to give an example and I…

Some experiments that we are on, we’ve seen that if you do that, that way you save significant amount of money and time and another challenge with the industries, time is critical because you collect data and that gives you some outcomes, you can always take that much faster today.

So when you have specific evidence, facts about something not working right, the question is, how long are you willing to live if that’s not working right or not being right. We input your assumption. Which we instruct to color the business, which may impact your mortality, your risk assumptions, your profitability.

How long are you willing to be with it knowing it’s there?

Because nobody can shut it off, because you need to continue generating revenue. So what if you could, as a business person, make those adjustments on the fly based on the evidence, what if you could have gone to your insured and present them those data, facts and evidence, and that again, from my experience, would be more open to discuss it, to negotiate, to make changes versus emotions when you say,

Well, I think it’s not good, or I don’t like how they… It’s not good enough, but you want more clear evidence. They’re gonna get so much farther.

QC Host:

Yes, so let’s see this, there’s a number of huge old insurance companies that dominate the industry. So what would a meeting with executives and you explaining to them how they take their system, which is kind of all chopped up.

There’s some parts that are really secure for the application, the medical information, and then there’s the CRM, which is a little more open, and all of these moving parts for the agents, for the clients, for the underwriters, and admin… what does the meeting with you and the executives of a company like that look like trying to explain how that’s gonna work?

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

I can actually recall having the same meeting and they are differences in the companies but the challenges are not. They are not the same. So most engineers, companies will have a little bit different challenges or the difference is you’re also gonna be having decision makers in those meetings that may come from different disciplines, are coming from product, are coming from distribution of revenue, are you coming from the actuarial side of it?

Are you an entrepreneur? Maybe a small organization, we have someone who is more like a fine type of a person, right. So they will have different needs, but we always try to do is to understand what those needs are first, because as much as we want to revolutionize the entire industry and go from zero to 1000, we know it’s impossible.

We know this. I posted, one of the things with larger companies, one thing that is common is that neither of them is ready to make that move so fast, it has to be gradual and gradual, it has to be a tempo for the change has to be convenient for them culturally, or whatever are the reasons it may be, so for us it’s not so good to be disruptors we are trying to be collaborative.

So those meeting steppes gonna be look like we interview and then to fully understand where they really need help.

Or where they think they need help.

If we feel there’s something that you have sprouted as a command it, but that’s pretty much it…

Now, if you get more into more specifics, if you like, when it comes to specifics, but we find typically is that all of them would like to improve their moral of the people would like to generate more revenue to expose themselves to improve the customer experience than some of them, understand the impact of the quality of business, not all of them, but depending on side of the company and other things, right.

So for us, it is really what we can do to improve as soon as possible, as fast as possible… and for them, what they really need, and it may be maybe different things, some of them more instead into risk assessment, underwriting, some of them are going to be concerned more about what customer journey and advisors joined, right?

So how we can make our advisors feel comfortable when they go through this process and return to their clients so they will feel comfortable?

Some of them are struggling with legacies, how we can connect into a newer system, how we can retain previously collected data and analyze it better and how we can analyze that, they analyze data as a whole, what the data can do.

So it’s gonna be a bit different from one to another, what the concept is really all of it give towards one point is the bottom line.

QCHost:

So now what are we looking at in terms of cost? Because that sounds almost overwhelming really to try and integrate it.

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

Depends on the company. Every company will have their own costing for us, but we’re trying to adjust.

So I think the cost for different company to company, and obviously the volumes and what they wanted to do also goes into the difference for us. Cost-wise, it’s a modular thing as a whole today.

There’s different models and not on about in particular, but we see model to include what the implementation fee and the licensing, and then either revenue sharing or transactional fees and so on.

So I know a majority of technology companies trying to structure some type of a winning scenario for the client or the insurance company they’re working with. And so we have the same approach. We have a general idea of implementation of a transactional course, but we typically do a lot of due diligence to understand what is that the best for that specific client, for that specific company, to make sure that it’s…

It’s right for them, you hope for someone not to pay on, ability to modernize themselves, will be able to provide a better experience for the advisors and clients just because they could afford something that would be good deal for everyone.

So for us, it’s always having this communications, understand how they see, what is it in their mind, and then try to make sure that we can deliver the program to what they were thinking of.

QC Host:

Okay, great, excellent. So now the no code, the no-code platform is based on artificial intelligence, and so can you explain more how that works and data collection, and I know there are a lot of fears out there about artificial intelligence taking over and such.Can you speak to that, please?

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

Yeah, so it’s interesting because I think artificial intelligence, the main reason for that publicity was because there are several all sectors and even within insurance industry that we’re a little bit in the right time to launch something.

And they did not put in thought and effort to test it on, and it did not check all the other groups, because AI is not an iRobot or terminator, it’s merely a software program that soon gives someone who gives it specific functions rules that it reads, and follows and what it may say I can’t do some rules can become more complex.

So that makes it a comfort, it also leaves a room for human being to make a mistake when they create those levers, and sometimes when the mistake is happening you may realize it a little bit later.

You think of that being decided for itself, but it seemed with that true perhaps was not ever tested.

And now on the first time you see it, you think, Oh, I didn’t anticipate it. Yes, but it’s there. So that’s Thinktum.

So I think AI is itself, it’s not a scary thing, it’s just a complex programming environment, which sometimes human tend to make a mistake or don’t test in at before deploy, and it’s easy to blame it, so it doesn’t fully understand what AI…

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

Now, AI also can be divided or separate in two different concepts, so you have a symbolic AI, which is more simplistic or more complex programming, if you like.

And then you have a traditionally, which in be more of machine learning and deep learning and natural language processing and computer image recognition, and so all those components create a 3 with no cold calling itself, majority of it is built in more of a symbolic is so it’s more kind of a decision tree, so more simplistic, some more complex…

There’s lots of facility in it, we all say The harmonic approach, which we think they’re reflexivity to the next level of making sure that it’s not just a list of questions and then they open or not open depending on what you answer, but the entire flow is integrated into correlated to low posed to be very personalized.

So if you answer the questions or if you apply for something or you go to the flow, you would never feel it, it wasn’t for you. Everything is there, areas designed just for you.

They are very personalized, and it’s not the new consult, if you go to another place…

I hear you’re new to Apple to those places we have here on a con, when you go in, they already know what you want, anything you’re profiled. An HIC profile, they have your previous experiences.

They try to make sure if you’re comfortable, it is for you, and that’s the idea behind it, it’s not about business, it’s about how we feel when we go through a process of doing something. So based on that split is building to not cop, there’s some more complex, like a national language processing in some other elements that are building if those are being triggered. And then another part of isometry is machine learning, and so on.

That applies to data. So the litany from the process, both disclosed data and data that there’s behavioral data, how user was comparing it, design for us to any health organizations to understand where this quarter is not, is lacking basically, and where a disclosure may be included, some type of behavioral full-behavior may be fraud.

Maybe miss the things you want to eliminate because that will help you as you option in claims.

It’s also designed to optimize the environment. know how many questions want someone answered on average, how long it takes some plants questions where their staff when they don’t understand, when they stop and don’t continue anymore percentage twice, right?

So you can really quickly analyze, this is good, this is bad, I need to make some changes here and to reverse this flow, so the thing is gonna allow you to continuously optimizing that, and machine learning can provide a much faster outcome because it can provide you the supervise announcer provides machine learning.

So basically you can go either allow it to look for specific items or change, looking for an outlier, or you can just ask you to look for itself and it.

You should be able to tell you, Oh, this is abnormal, or this is normal, or whatever. So you can implement both and you can look for what we want and then we can find something for you to to…

Now, you mentioned securities, so one of the things, or the AI reputation, let’s go it this way, insurance in as a whole, and that’s why we do think when it comes to,

Hey, it based on traditional components of underwriting manuals or risk manuals, and those risk manuals are pretty much traditionally were the only component or the only Bible that our decisions are made.

So AI would not be making decisions based on things that are not elites.

Iit’s not gonna be making its own estates or program or will not be able to make their own decisions. About something, maybe collecting data for general statistics and behaviors and so on, it may be, but you would not find the discrimination as much because it’s really made… And we connect to data and just analyzing it.

I think it’s combination comes decisions. I’ve seen some companies have discrepancy in the basis or ran some other components, but in majority of insurance industry is far, far away from it.

And again, those risk manuals are typically done or provided by insurers on some larger companies are prostrate and how they design and they’re only looking for risks, not less to discriminate them on the risk.

And we consider discrimination too, because we do discriminate based on risk, but it’s really a component that allows you to price properly and be able to see the proper category of a specific insurance solution to a specific applicant that fee down the

QC Host:

OK, I wanna address too how technology, where all that data gets stored, because we’ve heard a lot about quantum computing and how pretty much all these big companies collect our data and then it gets funneled into a huge database. It’s all sort of a little bit Big Brother-ish and frankly… And the powers that be do know an awful lot about us. So how does your software fit into that and where does it go? Basically, well.

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

Without getting into too many technical definitions, today, most of the data stored is in different servers and cloud, so the parent company, if any, how they do it, every company today put in a lot of effort into making sure that is secure, so both internally and externally.

It only allows proper access, and I can tell you from our perspective, the way we do it is, it’s also start in cloud, but even internally, we have filters, are not anonymize the data.

So even our data, intimate look at the data, they don’t see nothing personal to see as a block of how many people from specific carrier is leave what they did, so there’s no really personal data access, all the code really locked in.

You have the PCI compliance for credit cards, it’s working from…

It’s not just insurers from banking, it’s every retail online retailer in the internet, obviously, we have people that manage to break through and manage to get through and it scares people, or maybe we get access to some data, but I know every single company respects the safe way.

Or significant effort and significant financial effort to make sure that all the data storage, it can be done in different clouds, it can be separate different ways from the cloud and some on different servers that are more physical and so on.

So it allows you to make sure that they don’t hold all the eggs in one basket and say, something happens, it doesn’t happen to the entire data, but it’s really the big hope of computer companies as a technology provider.

And I know not only as most of the companies to make sure that what they provide is a secure, responsible.

We have a security department or other companies that do the two, and there’s constant updates, constant studying of the market or the industry or how data is working with credible providers today and you have the Microsoft and the Amazons and so on.

Some others don’t advertise them, but we now know who they are, and they used to work to those who beat security and give it a support to make sure that things are done more secure.

QC Host:

Okay, so I know from doing the research for this interview, I was wondering what other uses does this have and how, I guess it will fit into our society in the future. How do you see that going?

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

We talk a lot about insurance, and as I mentioned before, to me, majority combines on is the customer Gerstner experience, they really look at a customer… I think we should look at it. Is there any kind of person whoever can tactically…

So they all have to have the experience. We should never choose just one person or one specific donation, for us, it’s always been to understand how we can help the entire spectrum of those who’s gonna be either directly in direct without…

So to me, a technology itself really need to make a step ahead and to be more inclusive to different roles and not just for customers.

Because I know many companies, the outside to look very technologically invest, but then if you look behind the scenes, it’s not the other case, it… And so what they can hide, they don’t like hiding, because now what I can see…

But then again, you are not optimizing your ability to really perform route, and not everything can really estimate it or budget properly, but you have to understand what’s the longer term in pots, I have to…

Short and not just today. And then eventually, I think that people don’t discount advisors and talk a lot about direct to consumer, and I think if you look at the last, I would say only 10 years, they’re at the Consumer existent, but direct-to-consumers are at least an insurance industry is not progressing enough.

So if you think the consumer can go and buy insurance along, it’s happening very, very rarely. So what bathing I happen is that advisor, same as other professions within the back off of some choice companies, they’re also gonna get to water some augmentation, so advisors that…

And it’s happening…

And today, we’ve seen more and more advisors that they’re in now relying on technology in protecting yourself, change a lot to… So what I believe is gonna happen is the technology and allow advisors to get access to more volumes, the network in terms of things, and that’s to fathers to go of them as leads, if you like.

But the swallows will allow… Allow them to spend less time and prospecting and maybe be more effective as prospect, but be able to spend more time on generating business for themselves and really helping a our environment involved in…

And I think this is what we’re going to see is gonna be an automation of the whole generation or online presence, because we open online today and we would see not all invoices are gonna be able to go to this transition, but if I can do the profession a generational change.

So we will see that it’s a group of advisors and the next generation of advisors, they’re gonna be more open to work with the online presence, and they will be able to connect with their virtual crowd much faster, and then technology not only can connect you…

Technology can also refine it for technology…

I can speak to that you need to connect or can choose, does have a high probability that they’re more serious about it versus song maybe just shopping around and not to say one is more important than others, but you can prioritize the recording.

So basically what you’re gonna see then, in my opinion, shift of the technology, gonna make a shift of advisors becoming almost like a call center advisor, but difference in remote work environment.

QC Host:

That’s actually very much what WikiQuoters was created for because I’m a licensed insurance agent and my partner in this is a digital marketer, and we realized that prospects are treated like data receptacles to so many people, it’s crazy, and so with us you get a licensed agent the first time. So for us, your technology sounds phenomenal, so we have a website set up, if we started using your service, how would that look different for us as agents that are looking for leads.

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

We’ve done recently, late last year, we’ve done one of those deployments, actually organization that, that’s where similar stuff that… Same to you.

So this organization gonna leave a fine, and so they’ve worked with a public sector health platforms to various hospitals and so on.

Different there in partaking about many thousands of employees, and those employees have an ability to access that help part of financial health portal and go through a series of questions that will determine their needs and what exactly they’re looking for, and from there, they either can keep them all into direct to consumer channel, but they can attempt a lion their own, they don’t have to.

They don’t want to, and it provides a summary of the journey to an advisor and then system, and also what it doesn’t prioritize accordingly, depending on what they need, because keep in mind, in the space that the specific time operates…

They have with some of the clients or some of these prospects, they have a limited time to get the specific solution, so systems would recognize limited time because if they were a third day Asian is no longer available, so you have to be very timely with it and there’s some other concept, it does an initial screen for investments.

And it does screen for forsake, a disability and lean Benefits and Critical and some other products.

So all of this happened.

Now, how it’s done typically, so we need to understand the prospecting in…

So basically, you have some type of or be able to generate leads from somewhere, and they come in your way, if any social media presence or it can be maybe specific websites, other portals and what the Ignite…

Make someone else helping you. Never mind, it’s coming from some of the moment prospects, we call the prospects, but their labs, but the woman prospect police clicks on that specific baton or get into the portal, you Rita begin the interview, if that’s always the process, so you asking the questions in the way you generate leads, you always have to get the point you ask in the questions.

Yes, so those questions, you know you really want to because you know, every question you answer, you create a draw, so there’s always a percentage of those proxies gonna drop, they’re not gonna be interested in, they just try the…

So that it is for you to make sure the first group of questions gonna collect enough information for you, so our recommendation is environments, all their contact information or the most important….

So as soon as you can gather the better is because that is short and that becomes a lead and lead you can allocate to someone and the completion of the way it can be defender.

The garment process and process, again, if process, personalized study show that they don’t stay longer.

So, if you can make it really personal to them, If system is not gonna be a blank question, I give it to all of your clients, but it’s gonna personalize itself as that specific prospect answering the questions.

You’re gonna keep them longer. You’re gonna make it more complete, so give you an example with some of the pilot is-related, you actually end up having…

So before that, we’re just gonna say that the conversion ratio was something around 3 to 5% depending on channel, and when you personalize them, you get less leads, but you’re gonna improve your completions, so basically you create more efficient environment.

So for example, in the group, when we have five advisors, their revenue or this is was improved significantly.

Because they were wasting less time with a lower quality prospects. So they actually managed to get an environment when more of their calls and one of their contacts first all they did faster. Because now the priority allows them to connect with someone faster versus you have 50 people and you need to connect to.

To have 20 gives you a different time, these spend more time or quality time with those people, which you improve their conversion and they’re built to close, and they were happier, they were in no money and they were not leaving, they were not living after a few months because they feel they’re failing again.

As I mentioned to you, to ask, it’s kind of a 360 degrees approach, it’s not just a specific person, it’s on just a prospect, on just a customer, not just a advisor, it’s not just the order of the fear or co…

The film, it’s everyone.

And when you want to tailor your system to everyone and make everyone happy, that’s the most effective approach.

QC Host:

This has been excellent. Thank you so much, I really appreciate this. So if somebody wants to get a hold of you, because you do work with individual agents as well as large companies… Correct. So they just go to your website and inquire and they can start the process and they can

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

They can go to thinktum.ai 

We actually just launched a newly branded version of our website just last week or so, so they can go to thinktum.ai and they can ask for someone to connect with them.

You also information of the key people who putting myself, they can reach out to us directly we’re gonna be always happy to chat with anyone for us, so obviously business and revenue is one side of it, and we all need it.

Unite all edit but I think the best way together is to have conversations.

we never shy away of talking with anyone about anything, we’ll learn from each other every day. So it’s important for us to keep those conversations together and making sure that we’re helping on each other to understand how we can make the world better.

QCHost:

Well, that’s excellent, I think that’s a good note to end on. Thank you, thank you very much, Eugene. And I look forward to following up and learning more about your company and watching it grow.

Eugene from thinktum – insurance lead gen:

As much for that, we appreciate that and feel free to connect if you need any help, you wanna have anymore outside of the boxes, but just overall, feel free to direct, I will be very happy to do connect and you have more.

QC Host:

Oh, absolutely, that’s great. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

 

END OF INTERVIEW

 

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https://wikiquoters.podbean.com/ — The QuotersCast – “We make insurance cool!”

Visit WikiQuoters here: https://wikiquoters.org/ – “Where an insurance agent picks up the FIRST time .”

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WikiQuoters – Where A Licensed Agent Picks Up The First Time!

This was a fascinating interview with Dr. Simon Duan! 

As a scientist, simulation theorist and paranormal believer hear what Simon says about the future of insurance. Could we determine how much insurance we need in the future before we buy it?  Find out! 

Dr. Duan at:  www.metacomputics.com

Dr. Duan’s YT Channel: www.youtube.com/@MrSimonduan 

 

 

Below Is A Transcript of The Interview…

QuotersCast Host: So my guest today is Dr. Simon Dan, and he is the founder and CEO of Metacomputics Labs, which studies meta-consciousness and individual consciousness and simulation hypothesis. You hold a PhD in Material Science from Cambridge University, and you were born in China and moved to the UK in the 1980s. And this is my favorite part, is that you have a very strong interest in the paranormal, and used to be the vice president of the Chinese Parapsychology Association.

Dr. Simon Duan: And that’s correct.

QC Host: So this is all very interesting. So give us a little background and how it led up to you doing the work you’re doing today.

Dr. D: Well, I’m supposed to the materialist, I did my PhD in Material Science, but I happened to encounter some paranormal phenomena and which triggered my curiosity, so I spent a lot of my spirit and study paranormal power psychologists and which puzzled me a lot, I encountered so many phenomenon I couldn’t explain with material science, trying to…

QC Host: Tell us what that experience was…

Dr. D: Oh… Yeah, I experienced a lot including physical chemical, biological, phenomenological, energetic information, though also lots of phenomena. And in the last 20 years, I spent a fair amount of time in China, and so I got involved in the paranormal research circle. So we have conferences and we discuss those phenomenon and… Yeah, he asked what I have encountered. I actually started, I encounter a kind of witch doctor, which took my wisdom teeth out with no efforts. And one time I was visiting China on business, my tooth start to play up, and then a friend of mine recommended I see this doctor and the tooth came out with no anesthetic, no injection. And he just took them out. With tweezers.

QC Host: Did you… Did you feel pain?

Dr. D: I felt some discomfort, but nothing major, it was not much pain. Then we went to lunch together and I asked, “Well, what did you do to me?” And he said, “I have an incantation. Like a mantra, like a five syllable mantra in meditation, and that gave me the power to take the tooth with no effort.” So, yeah, it’s kind of a witch doctor, I suppose.

QC Host: Well, that’s amazing that now, how does that play into the work that you do with Metacomputics Labs or is there a connection?

Dr. D: Yeah, this piqued my interest, like my curiosity. And I spent a lot of time to encounter looking for those where the phenomenon actually were the people, and I encountered all sorts of things.

QC Host: Tell us about some experiences… Wow.

Dr. D: I encountered people who can actually manifest herbal medicine from thin air. Yeah, really appears in her hands.

QC Host: What happened that?

Dr. D: Yeah, I saw those people, a lady. We can actually abort herbal Madison for

QC Host: How did that happen? Take us through how you met her and what you said and how it appeared… How did that go?

Dr D: Oh, well, because I got involved in the paranormal research circle, we have gatherings, we invite those people, psychic people, to the Cornette on striations of various phenomena, and this lady, she had seeds in her hands, so you have a… For example, they have peanut seeds, she put her hands together and within 10 minutes, you have a small shoots coming out.

QC Host: So what did she do? Does she cover her hands or…

Dr. D: Yeah, she could cover her hands.

QC Host: So were you afraid that it might be a hoax or some type of trick…

Dr D: Well, there’s always a possibility that, but we have studied her extensively in the lab… In the lab condition. So she actually could manage to teach other people, teachers, especially children, and so on somehow brought my daughter… She was teaching some kids and my daughter managed to manifest a small herb in her hand.

QC Host: So how old was her daughter and how long ago was it?

DR D: She was 16 at the time. But with younger children, it’s even easier. So I don’t think my daughter is trying to cheat me… Okay, okay. You can do all sort of things. You can do photography. She can project the image of her mind into the camera. So you have photos in your camera, while not opening the shutter. This kind of thing is called the high strangeness, but people refuse to believe them… A really good example that I saw personally is also teleportation. One gentleman could manifest money. He can tell you.

QC Host: Wow, where can I sign up?

Dr D: He he. This one time we actually locked him up in the lab and we stripped out completely. Well, even without underwear, we lock him up.

QC Host: Really? And so where does he send the money…

Dr D: Actually he can get money from somewhere…

QC Host: Where did it end up in? After you stripped him? Where did it end up?

Dr D: Oh, he can get money from somewhere, but he couldn’t spend it, he said he couldn’t spend it. So in a few days, the money will disappear again…

QC Host: Okay, let me get this straight. You strip somebody naked and lock him in a room, he manifests some money, he manifested it and then couldn’t spend it and then it disappeared. That’s right?

Dr D: Yeah, but within a few days, he’s not allowed to spend it.

QC Host: Well, that’s kind of like a hologram. A little bit.

Dr D: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s one of the explanations. So all those phenomena made me wonder… What’s going on? How can this happen? Yeah, yeah. So.

QC Host: Yes. Wow, this is really interesting. So how did this lead into metacomputics lab, because you talk about the meta consciousness and you talk about it connecting with the individual consciousness and also the simulation hypothesis, which is really building these days. Yeah, let’s do that then I have another question.

Dr D: That’s it. Yeah, the simulation hypothesis. Will we… I can explain those phenomena, because if the universe, if the cosmos is a simulation, and then if you can get into the program, then you can change the program, alter a program, and then switch everything in the universe, it can change. So you can actually like hack into the system, you can actually change it and… So that’s why we… I explain it.

The simulation hypothesis is not new. This has been proposed since 1969. Yes, yeah, and the reason, especially since the movie Matrix, many people actually take this as a major interest and more and more people getting into this hypothesis.

So the idea of a simulation is not new.

What’s new is that the hypothesis that this computer is not physical, it’s transcendental. It’s beyond the physical. So normally, when people talk about simulation of hypotheses, they think it’s a computer made by the future generations, future advance the civilizations they want to simulate than their ancestors, that’s how they end up with this reality, this reality they’re supposed to be simulated by our advancements… But I don’t think that’s feasible hypothesis.

Dr D: I think if you want to simulate this universe, the computer has to be outside the universe, so it has to be a transcendental computer. If it’s a transient, then it’s actually located in the platonic realm. You’re not platonic, then there is a platonic real realm of forms, which is now physical, which is a transient. So my hypothesis is that this computer is transcendental and it’s in the platonic real… And this computer, because it’s not material, it cannot be made by silicon, like what computer laws, it’s actually made by consciousness. Alright, so the internets actually digitalized itself into binary, and you’re in a binary, you can be the long physical transient computer, and that computer renders the universe.

QC Host: So are you saying we’re basically living in a video game or something like that?

Dr D: Little bit. Yeah, it’s actually… A simulation, is the best explanation of the reality. Wow. Yeah, and the physical reality appear to be physical because it’s programmed to be physical, it is a physical engine, physics engine to render this reality, and that’s why it becomes a behavior, a store’s a physical matter… And other realities like dreams, psychedelic situation, and the reality is as real as this physical reality, but because they are not physical, we don’t think they are real, but they are the same… Both or virtual reality? Rendered by this computer.

QC Host: Okay, so how do you explain when you get cut, it hurts. There’s the pain, and if we’re just a hologram or energy… How do you explain that?

Dr D: Well, the pain is another program, and then the cuts… Another program. Yeah, so all those programs. One trigger another… Yeah, so yeah, the cutting is a one program… Now, this cutting trigger another program, which make your experience of pain. Yeah, it’s all program.

QC Host: Okay, so when you say hack into it, is that a little bit like the law of attraction? That kind of thing. Not

Dr D: The exact law of attraction is… I think it’s still phenomenological, it’s kind of superficial. Yeah, it’s still operating at the material level, I think, but the fundamental reality is what’s behind this physical reality cheating, which renders this reality… So the engine and associate the program is basic reality, whereas others are just rendered virtual reality, including your body, including the cut… Including the pain you feel. Yeah, it’s all rendered.

QC Host: Okay, so this almost sounds like you’re getting into the realm of trans-humanism a little bit…

Dr D: Yes, yeah, because in this reality, we actually exist in multi levels. This of course is not only this physical reality, there’s many levels. Realities, yes. So in a multi-universe or a multiverse, then there’s many levels which are not physical, as I just mentioned in dreams, a meditation, some people can manipulate the real, and some people experience another reality when they experience near death, some people die and they come back and they experience another reality.

Those are parallel realities.

And we actually existing in all levels, like a Russian doll, like nesting Russian dolls, we only experience this physical reality, but the other levels, we keep them dormant. They are not activated. So you’re talking about the trans-humanism is actually a weakening or activation of other levels human, so you become a multi-level human species, when that happens, you have ability to kind of interact with the computer, which… I do.

QC Host: Okay, alright. This is a little mind-blowing. When we initially spoke through messaging, you mentioned that this would have huge implications on the insurance industry, and so can you speak to that because this does sound really, the trans-humanism part, and a lot of what we see in society and our technology and getting hooked up to it, how do you see it going for insurance?

Dr D: Well, if the reality, including ourselves, is rendered by this engine, which is in a platonic realm, and then her life actually can be simulated as because the database already contains everything about us, what we have been doing throughout the life, what we will be doing in the future.

QC Host: Okay, so how do you see the under writing going on a life insurance policy then?

Dr D: There’s a database, yeah, containing all of the real data about each person, it’s not the lack of the superficial data which you get, but the insurance companies or as the company, we don’t have some data about you to not actually… Not data about, they are still superficial data, there’s another layer for data which are more accurate, if you can access the computer which actually render us, then you can use that data to make simulations about your future, not only a past, but also future. And this isn’t new. Actually, I mean, astrology does some of this… Yeah, not merely accurate.

Does this also… Yes, yeah, so you actually get a binary, you have a Taro containing being in the young and they are binaries, basically the out put of a computer, because computers operate in a binary, and now for this, that’s already accurate way of accessing in this computer, but what we are doing is actually to make a process control more accurate for divination, so make the astrology I-Ching divination become a scientific technology, so you’ll access this database, you do the simulation and you have a process control by each steps.

Dr D: Therefore, the result is to be accurate and depends how well you carry out this practice definition, you will have that idea about whether you’re going to have a critical unit… Yeah, how origin lives. Oh, okay. So yeah, what major events or accidents going to happen to you and those kind of information is very important for your clients, if you’re working for customers, and if they know they’re going to have… Or extent. Yeah.

QC Host: So the implication can be immense, so how near in our future do you see this starting to take over and really taking all of our lives?

Dr D: I don’t think this happens very quickly, because we are dominated by material list realities. Okay, there are people, there are few people who actually believe anything about this, right, that is… And we are educated by material size, so all those are treated as a superstition , but most people take it as a joke. They just play with it and they have a reading. And it may be laughed at , but yeah, it’s a farce… They don’t really have the connection with the computer to have an accurate output, you need to have a good interaction, good connection with this rendering it… People actually… Now, for the result is not accurate anyway. They just take it as a joke, but there are people who can connect really well with the computer in out of the state of consciousness, and therefore those kind of people can simulate people’s future very accurately.

QC Host: Okay, so what is your Metacomputics labs? What does it do? Is it a service? Do you have a product, what do you hope to gain and what do you have to offer people with it?

Dr D: Well, mainly we do theoretical research, and we try to model this universe with matter computing model to what end modulated… Well, we want to explain about the universe. Everything about the universe, we want to explain everything, including how the consciousness is manifested because science cannot really materially, the size cannot really explain consciousness. So our task is really to explain how consciousness is working and how consciousness is manifested into this material reality, but while this series is established, there are going to be many applications. So divination focusing is one of those applications, alternated, where alternative medication, alternate healthcare, because illness is also a manifestation is also rendered, if you can look after yourself, you are not just a material body, you can be better, you can fix some bugs in a program of physical body will be healthy.

QC Host: Okay, so I’ve been meditating for a long time, and I understand a lot of what you say, and I think there are quite a few people who appreciate what you’re saying, why are not more of us doing it better, manifesting better? Because I think a lot of people do appreciate the understanding that everything starts in energy, and that there is a process to manifesting. Why don’t more of us do it better?

Dr D: I think we are here actually to experience ignorance. People interested in knowing the reality, and the main purpose is actually experienced what ignores is like, that this planet is full, we are here to experience suffering from ignorance, hardship, disobedient, wars and more conflict.

That’s what we’re here for now, for very few people actually, maybe you are one of those exceptions, you actually meditate, you want to find the truth, but not many people, even those who are so-called spiritual journey, they are not very clear what’s going on with this world…

We actually can put a road map and we can be very clear who we are actually, we are not just this physical body, we are multi-level species, like I said, we are like a Russian doll. At the end, we are the meta-consciousness.

QC Host: Yes. So does that mean you believe God.

Dr D: We ourselves are God. Okay, each one of us. Eventually, yeah. At the top, we are one consciousness.

QC Host: And so how does that work if there is an actual computer running all this?

Dr D: The computer is the tool God uses to create this universe, so with this program, it’s no longer a mystery, is no longer a mystery, it’s actually a science. So the consciousness digitalizes itself into binary, build a computer and the computer, your program, they generate multi-levels of reality, and this physical reality is only one of the levels of reality, and this reality, we are here to experience all sorts of different things, some happiness, some bitterness seeing some economies, and this makes the creation colorful…

QC Host: Well done. Unfortunately, we’re coming to the end of our time here. But this has been really fascinating. I wish you well. Where can we send people when they see this and they wanna check out more of your work, where is the best place to get you.

Dr D: Yeah, my website, Metacomputicslabs.com. Right, so from there, well, we have some information and some applications that’s also… Yeah, including the website is my YouTube channel, a lot of lectures and… And get into that. And also, if they are interested in consultation about divination before they decide whether they want have an… For example, so some people over insured, some under insured, if they have a better idea of what’s going to happen to them, you can make a much better decision.

QC Host: And they can come to you to find that out… Yes, they can. Wow, okay, that’s awesome. Well, thank you. You’ve been a wonderful surprise and keep up the great work.

Dr. D: Thank you, thank you for having me.

QC Host: My pleasure, thank you. Good night.

End of The Interview

Your host of the QuotersCast and licensed insurance agent Renee talks to JEFF WEBER, an expert on the AIM investing strategy.

Find Jeff at: https://jjjinvesting.com

Jeff gives the best and most thorough explanation of options I’ve ever heard.

There are reasons why most financial advisors do not and will not ever suggest their clients get into options…. it’s because they don’t understand options themselves.

However, Jeff has put his twist on a decades old options technique called AIM… Automated Investing Management.

Listen to the QuotersCast and discover this extremely powerful investment technique.

Find Jeff Weber at: https://jjjinvesting.com 

_________________________________________

Thanks for listening. Have a prosperous day.

https://wikiquoters.podbean.com/ — The QuotersCast – “We make insurance cool!”

Visit our sister site… WikiQuoters here: https://wikiquoters.org/ – “Where a Licensed Agent Picks Up the First Time”

Contact us at: wikiquoters@gmail.com

 

 

 

Transcript of my Interview with AIM Investing & Options Expert Jeff Weber – (QC #4) Below….

Host Renee of the QuotersCast: So Jeff, I appreciate you being here, and I’ve got a little intro that I’d like to read because I find this, quite fascinating. So I’m speaking to Jeff Webber of JJJinvesting.com. You’ve written four books, one of which called AIM For Millions With Stock Options. A friend of mine actually just started trading options, so, I’m curious to see what you have to say here because you’re also an expert in the AIM investing.

Jeff Weber AIM Investing & Options Expert and Founder of jjjinvesting.com:

Which is a contrary investing method invented by a wonderful gentleman named Robert Lichello in the 1970s. Now, back then, he used it with stocks because you didn’t have long-term options, which is what I use for it now. I’ll explain a little later how that works, but, as I tell my investor friends, the only way to invest is to be a contrary investor, because otherwise how can you buy low and sell high if you don’t buy low to start with?

QCHost: Well, I think a lot of people would agree with you. I think what stops a lot of people though, is that they don’t understand how to do that, so what have you figured out the rest of us haven’t?

JW: Here’s what I figured out, okay.

The enemy of all investors is emotion. So you need logic.

Well, Mr. Lichello has a method on a simple 8 by 11 piece of paper with 11 columns which shows you exactly when to buy, when to sell and how much to buy yourself, so it completely takes emotion out of it and… just a quick explanation of what I do. Let’s say you bought an option for $10, or you have to buy a contract, which is a 100 options… Well, I recommend you start with 15 contracts.

Let’s say you set up the spreadsheet and you initially buy 10 for the option.

I figure out at the bottom of the option when your next by should be and for how many more contracts and when your next sell should be, and in essence, think of Goldilocks in the middle, you don’t want a price that’s too high a price or too low, you want prices that are just right.

So if you buy it at $10, I have found from years of experience, a great place to buy is about 25% lower than your original price. If you bought a $10, I’m gonna tell you your next by is going to be maybe three or four contracts at $7.50 cents.

Then it’s the same thing with the sell, if you bought a 10, you wanna sell price is 25%, 30% higher.

So, let’s say we set up a sell price at $13, so you look at the bottom of your spreadsheet, you’d see, I have a bye for four contracts at $7.50 can hopefully, if the price goes up, I have a sell at $13, I’m making a 30% profit. If I sell at $13, well, then all you have to do every day, you check, I recommend you check at the end of the trading session when the market closes, and you see it hit one of those crisis now, to make sure you never miss it by yourself, I advise all my clients to use limit buy and sell prices.

What does that mean?

That means the stock broker has your buy and sell in their computer and they will automatically be executed if you get one of those two prices, the advantage of that is that, like I told you, you put in a sell at $7.50 with a limit buy.

Two things can happen, both of which, you’re good, you’re gonna… The buy you wanted at $7.50, you’d never contain more, but the bury of the limit by is if the stock is having a bad day and the price goes below $7.50, you might wind of buying it at $7.25 cents or $7.00, so you get it at an even lower price, right? The same with the sell.

JW – AIM Investing & Options Expert:

You might get to sell at $13, but you might get it in $13.25 or $13.50, and limit orders stay open an average of two or three months, depending on the broker. So, I always advise people, make sure you keep a calendar when they’re gonna expire, so you make sure you renew them if you’re not… But the beauty of it is, now you know, by is four contracts at $7.50 and my sell $13 for say, four contracts. So you’re taking all the trouble out of investing of knowing when to the buy and when should I sell.

I taught a class on AIM investing many years ago at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

I love helping airmen and soldiers, I worked for the army for 35 years, so I got to live overseas 17 years, and I really enjoyed trying to instruct and help the young soldiers and airmen Get Started financially investing, because while in military may be a great career, it’s not a great way to make a lot of money that you’re gonna be able to…

The life you want with…

So I used to start my class by always asking people, does anybody here own any stocks, and a few hands would go up, and I’d say, Well, if you can’t tell me when you should buy, when you should sell, or when you should do nothing, then you don’t have any business owning those stocks, because you don’t have any sort of an investing method that I will make you a consistent profits.

Even when I was young, I would haut used book stores, and that was actually very helpful I found Mr. Lichello’s book, and I thought it was such a good way to invest that not only would I wanna use it for myself, but I wanna share it with as many people as possible, and other quick thought is, okay, right now we’re in the middle of a pretty bad bear market, people would say the prices are way down.

JW: Not totally true, ’cause the NASDAQ is way down, the Dow Jones stocks are not as way down, but when I came up with the beauty of aim is that It invests in long-term options…

Okay, well, long-term, often simple leaps is just simply a way of describing options that expire the third Friday in a January and have more than one year before they expire. So right now, I have all my clients in January 2025 options. Okay, let’s go have roughly two years before they expire…

QCHost: Yes. Can we back up just a little bit, Jeff? Because I think some people may not be fully cognizant of what AIM is.

JW AIM Investing & Options Expert: So it’s an acronym for Automatic Investment Management. And here’s the way AIM basically works. You start with, let’s say you started with $20,000 and you’re gonna buy one option or leap.

You start by taking half of your money, $10,000, and you’re going to buy the option, the other $10,000 is in a column that’s called Cash, very simply.

So you’re starting with $10,000 cash, $10,000 leaps, you always want to have money to buy, if the price goes down this way, you’ve taken care of it. The key to AIM is this, so you started with $10,000 worth of options.

JW: You started with what is called the portfolio control number.

That number is equal to your starting leaps a mouth, so if you start with $10,000 worth of leaps or options, the control number is 10000.

And then all you ever do daily, weekly, monthly, preferably daily, you compare those two numbers…

So here’s a way to think of it…

Okay, if you started at 10000 and you brought your option to 10, well, let’s say your option went to 15 and that can happen.

Well, then when you look and see the value of your options had gone from 10000 to 15000, it’s gone up, you’re comparing the two numbers and you say, Which number is higher? 15000 for leaps or 10000 for portfolio control. Well, obviously, the leap number is higher, so you put the leap number on top and you’d go 15000 minus 10000 portfolio control AIM wants you to sell 50000 worth of options because they are now profitable.

Now, the Lichello came up with a great idea, and what he does in the column next to the value of your leaps, is a column called Safe. Safe is always 10% of the value of your leaps. So in the previous example, you would subtract the 15,000 leaps value from the 10,000 portfolio control number, and AIM would give you a sell price of 5000.

JW AIM Investing & Options Expert:

Okay, well, then what you do, which is very clever, is you take the Safe amount, which is 1500 or 10% of the 15000 and you subtract it from the 5000, so you go 5000 minus 3500 of minus 1500, and AIM gives you a market sell order for 3500 worth of options. Why do you wanna do that? Why do you wanna hold some back? Very simply, because trends tend to continue.

So I’ve had many times when somebody held back the 1500 because from the sell when the option went to 15, every time we have a buy or sell, so we come up with a new buy and sell at the bottom of the spreadsheet, and then a week later, the option goes to 20 or 25, and we sell at the higher price. So the 1500 we held back and didn’t sell at 15, we’re selling later, weak or two later for 20 or 25, so we’re making even more profits.

QCHost:

Right. So why do you think this technique, which clearly has been very successful for you, why do you think it’s not better known?

JW: Simply, there is a vast prejudice against options in general, if you do a study, you’ll find only 10% of investors only even own an individual stock the rest mutual funds, etfs, whatever. And when you get to the option portion, less than 1% of all people own an option, no professional financial advisor will ever recommend buying options to a client and to give you an idea of how prejudice the industries is against this… Edward Jones, the big nation wide investment company, they refuse to sell options to anybody.

QCHost: Is that a lack of understanding? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Jeff, do you think it’s mostly a misunderstanding just because they don’t understand. That it’s a misunderstanding.

JW AIM Investing & Options Expert:

Because there’s a widely circulated rumor that well… all options expire worthless. Okay, well, the reason for that is because the vast majority of options are sold that expire in a week or a month, and they’re bought by people from covered call sellers. I don’t know if you know what covered call sellers are. Let’s say you own a thousand shares of the stock, you could sell 10 contracts for a month, say it was worth $25, you sell it in$ 27.

Some speculator will buy those contracts and hope the price goes way up in a month and you’ll make money.

Well, those expire worthless about 90%-95% of the time, so it’s like an income for the person who’s selling the stock… What I teach you has nothing to do with that. I am selling you long-term options, you never have to worry about them expiring because what I do with AIM is this… Right now, I have everybody in 2025 type options. That means to expire January 17th, 2025, and guess what? Come September of this year, the 2026 options come out for AIM.

So what do I do?

I tell people and they come out in September, I tell them in October, November, we’re gonna roll over to the 26 options.

You never have to worry about your option expiring because you’re rolling it over with more than a year before it’s gonna expire, so you don’t have to worry about the evil enemy of options, which is called time decay, because all options has become worthless if you hold them to the day they expire.

We’re rolling them over to the other options, my sooner, and we never have to worry about time decay. So right now, like I said, I just… I’m still in the process of rolling people over from 24 to 25 options, and the beauty of it is, like I said, to me, an option like a good stock, is as safe as the stock itself.

Do you think Apple options are not gonna be safe and an Apple stock is going to be safe? Of course not.

Then both safe as ever, and why do you wanna do options instead of stocks?

I’ll give you the perfect example. Like my other book called Here Are The Customers Yachts is based or using AIM with the Dogs of the Dow. All the Dogs of the Dow are are the 10 Dow Jones stocks out of 30 that pay the highest dividends.

Okay, that’s been a tried and true method of making money for years using the Dogs of the Dow, and guess what? All the Dogs of the Dow have leaps. So I was curious, I said, I want a contrast, how AIM would do with stocks compared to how it would do with leaps to show people why you should be doing it with options and not stocks.

Well, in eight years, the Dogs of the Dow stock portfolio using AIM, it’s up 15% in eight years, so it’s averaging maybe the 11% a year, most people would be very happy with 11% returns in over eight years.

Well, contrast that with how aim is doing with the Dogs of the Dow leaps, that portfolio in eight years is up 550%.

So would you rather be at 100% or 550% when the risk level is the same? So it’s a no-brainer to me. You wanna do options because they’re five or six times is volatile as the stock, and why wouldn’t you… I’ve had many people are starting, oh my God, I’m in my 50s, I need to do to something for retirement. This is the perfect way to catch up for all those years you didn’t have any investments out there.

QCHost: That’s an excellent point.

JW: They can explode, I had one guy in 2020, and he had to have a colonoscopy. He had terrible problems, he had colon cancer , but I won’t go into it, but he started with $550,000 in January of 2020. At the end of December of 2020, that 550000 had grown to $1,750,000.

So, he made 1.25 million in 2020.

That’s the year of covid, massive layoffs, factory shut downs and massive unemployment.

So you basically have to ignore the economy in the world around you when you’re investing, and that’s why I tell people, you always wanna be in… I’ll give you another quick example, I had one guy who got into what I call the AIM Hall of Fame, because I love to use sports analogies, and so I came up with the term the AIM hat trick. Whenever somebody has three straight sells on their leaps without being interrupted by a buy, and to do that the leap has to at least double. Well, I had one guy, he’s in the Hall of Fame. Because he pulled off the AIM hat trick in one day.

He had three sells in one day on his American Express leap in the morning.

He told me in the morning, Hey, my leap, I have to sell. So luckily, he caught me at a good moment, I immediately updated his spreadsheet, which only takes five minutes, and once you learn how to do it, it’s just repetition, never mess with Greeks or anything sophisticated. If you can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division…You can do AIM.

Jeff Weber AIM Investing & Options Expert Continuing…

So I updated this spreadsheet. Then he sent me an email around lunch time, I had a second sell. I said, Oh great, and I kind of forgot about it. Well, at the end of the day, when the market closed, he sent me another email and said, Hey, Jeff, I had a third sell, I did the third sell myself in one day. His American Express leap went from $3.50 to $12.50 in one day because of a quarterly earning statement.

So you see the volatility, and that’s what you’re taking advantage of. Now, when you have a bear market like we’re having now, I have sophisticated adjustments to buys to make sure you will never run out of cash.

I’ll give you a quick example.

Say you bought that option to $10… Okay, you had your first buy at $7. Okay, I refigured your spreadsheet, and the next one I would probably tell you you’re second buy is to $5 as your original price. You make that fit.

Okay, well, now the cash has maybe gone from $10,000 to $6000 well ’cause that’s where the money came from, to buy. Once you made that second buy at $5, I’m gonna invoke my bear buy strategy. What’s the difference?

Well, your third buy is gonna be half of your previous buy, so you bought at $5, your next by is gonna be at $2.50 where you load, and you’re only gonna use one third if you’re remaining cash.

So, 1/3 of $6000 is $2000.

You make that buy… Okay, let’s say that buy happens now you’re down to $4000 cash, you own a lot more contracts, you’ve greatly lowered, your break-even point is nowhere near $10 is probably near $5 or $6 right now. Okay, so if you made that buy at $2.50, I’m gonna probably invoke my Super Bear Buy strategy. What’s the difference? Okay, well, half of $2.50 is $1.25.

Well, I’m gonna tell you, don’t buy it at $1.25, we’ll lower it to one dollar.

Now you’re gonna use one third of your $4000, which is roughly $1333, so you’re gonna buy another 13 contracts, so you can see… you originally bought 15 at $10, now you’re buying 13 at $1, can you see how that greatly lower your break-even point? And the perfect example, and here’s the only way somebody can fail it AIM…

Jeff Weber AIM Investing & Options Expert Continuing…

I had a guy from New York investing his IBM. His leaps went from 20 down to 2. Okay, that can happen. But we were managing it and doing fine. So I told him you have a buy for 20 contracts at $2. He ignored me. Bad mistake. Okay, it’s dropped even further to a $1.60. I wrote him again and said, Hey, because it went down to a $1.60, you can buy 25 tracks on 20… Ignored me again.

Well, that was a big mistake on his part.

Because three months later, IBM was up to $4.50. If he had made the $1.60, he would have been profitable at $4.50 even though his original investment was a lot higher. Right? So I’ll give you another sad tale of woe about how powerful options can be. I have this guy who’s supposedly a smart man, ’cause he had a PhD in psychology and he’s a therapist, well, he was helping his girlfriend managed her money, well.

Jeff Weber AIM Investing & Options Expert:

She started with $67,000 in Facebook leaps. Meta now. Well, her leap went from $13 down to $2… I sent her an urgent buy… Well, he decided on his own without consulting me, ’cause he is too emotional, can handle investing… He sold everything from himself and his girlfriend, so her $67,000 resulted in a loss of $50,000 cause she only got back $17,000.

Well, I save all the old spreadsheets for people in my file system, and I happened to stumble upon that spreadsheet about a year later.

I noticed the leaf was still active, it hadn’t expired, and I was just curious.

So, I wondered how her Facebook leap had done in the year since she sold it. Well, that leap had gone from $2 to $73. I figured if she had done nothing and just forgot about it… her $67,000 would be worth $273,000. And so I see this over and over, and I try and pass these lessons on to my investors who don’t have the 35 years of experience that I do with the options, and AIM investing and show them that, don’t worry about what it’s doing today, next week next, whereas that option, you gonna be five or 10 years from now…

QCHost:

Right, okay, this is great, this is excellent. We only have a few minutes left, Jeff, and this has probably been about the best explanation I’ve heard about options ever, and I think you can… Yeah, this has been really excellent. So if people wanna get into your program, if they wanna learn more about your system, where is the best place to go from here?

JW: They can go to my website, JJJinvesting.com, and you can get a copy of my Free first book I’ve written, like I said, four books, I give the first one away for free, other ones I sell at modest prices, you can find information on buying any of my books at my website. I love to help people, I’ll give anybody is even welcome to phone me. I’ll give you my phone number up.

It’s 2-1-0-4-7-8-0-6-5-5. <—- AIM Investing & Options Expert Jeff Weber’s Cell # – Call Him!

I would be happy to talk with you about it. I’ve got many articles I can send you, and like I was saying earlier, the beauty of AIM and using options is you can make money in both bull and bear markets. How do I know that? Because I remember one of my model portfolios went down a tremendous amount in September last September, and it was with calls…

Well, calls make you profits when the stocks go up, but there’s a way to make a profit when stocks go down, and that is by owning puts instead of calls. I back tested my model portfolio that fell, like 500%. Because in 16 years, it was up 2500% and it fell to 1900% at the end of September was still up more than 100% a year, not bad. 

Jeff Weber AIM Investing & Options Expert Continuing…

And so I tested it by putting puts in, ’cause there’s a way to look up how a put or an option has done on Yahoo Finance and so what my back testing is from October of 21 to October of 22, using puts, the AIM portfolio gave 91%.

So there’s a way to do it in the bull or bear markets. And just one quick note, the last thing there, with the market was the financial meltdown in 2008 and 9. Okay, to give you an idea. The Dow Jones fell from 13000 to 6500 in 2008 and 9.

Right now, even despite the current fair market, it’s at 34000, which I view as bullish going from 6500 to 34000 in 13 years.

Plus I looked up… I was begging people to buy stocks and leaps back in 2009. To give you an idea of how prices can change, American Express was $11 a share in 2009, 10 years later it was $91 a year. Boeing was $32 in 2009, 10 years later, it was $360.

QCHost: Wow.

JW: Everything at the average stock I was recommending In Marmara 9 went up an average of 700 to 800% in the next 10 years. And based on historical experience, their markets average for 13 months, the current one is going on for 13 months, it’s due to end soon. On average, it takes 27 months of total for stock prices to return to where they were before the start of a bear market.

So we don’t have that much longer to wait it, and historically, about 55% or 60% of the time, the stock market is bullish, the other 40% of the time, and we’re either bearish or going sideways.

So long time, you always wanna be in Polish or in call, but short term, I could see you getting puts and I work with… With all my experience, I can help people decide. I’ve got people with split portfolios, they have two calls, two puts. But let me warn you on certain options, they can really go down… But miracles can happen.

Jeff Weber AIM Investing & Options Expert Continuing…

Had one guy bought JD and it went from $14 to .58 cents a book. Well, I told him, I said, It’s so low, but you had gone to owning 15 contracts, to owning 145 contracts. So I told them, I said, Our only hope is a miracle when you don’t even have enough money to roll it over to a 25, let’s just put into ridiculous sell price for all 145 and see if we get it. So he chose when it was 58 cents, he put in to sell at $3.50 for all 145 contracts.

Well, the Chinese government said some nice things about JD.

And within a week, we got that $3.50 cent price and he sold everything, made a quick $27000 profit and got back to even on that option. So it’s never hopeless with options, because they can move so quickly. I’ve had options go up a 1000% in a week, so… I tell people, that’s why you always wanna be in the game. All new options as like a mega millions ticket that never expires, you gotta hit the numbers one day.

QCHost:

That’s excellent, I love it. Well, thank you. I’m afraid we’re gonna get to cut off here, but this has been a very informative, Jeff, and I appreciate your time and your explanation, and I’ll let you know when this is out, and so thank you very much.

JW: I’m happy to send you my free book, and some of my sample newsletters.

QCHost: I would love that.

JW: And anybody who becomes a client of mine gets my newsletter for free, it’s 150-page year.

QCHost: You’re very generous.

JW: Just go to that website and tell me you want the book and it’s on its way…

QCHost: Alright, JJ investing dot com. Thank you. Thank you. Alright, thank you. Yeah, have a great day.

QCHost: Send me a link when you got this posted somewhere and I’ll tell my friends so much…

JW: That’d be great. Yes, I will. Thanks again, so much for that.

END OF INTERVIEW

If you liked what you read or heard or watched then give WikiQuoters a call Today – Why? – A Licensed Agent Picks Up the FIRST Time!

Find more great interviews here…

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https://youtu.be/7Ne0FU_p1qc

Today Renee is talking to Allan Khazak of Vroom Media Group.

He’s based in Canada and founded Vroom with the idea of helping insurance agents find prospects and convert them into clients. Khazak’s company specifically targets prospects for annuities.

As Allan says, “Energy is contagious.”

Which is so true of the insurance industry. Clients don’t just buy an insurance product they also buy YOU. The agent makes all the difference.

Find Allan at The Vroom Media Group  

Find Renee at Wiki Quoters

TRANSCRIPT

Host Renee: Let me do a little intro for you, Allan, you can see how well I did, and see if I got anything wrong and we’ll go from there. First, this is Allan Khazak and you are the founder of Vroom Media Group that you started in 2019. You were born to an immigrant family in Canada, and you are also a graduate of Schulich Business School at York University in Toronto. You’ve been interviewed all over the place, Allan, super impressive, Yahoo Finance and Thrive Global. So, in just a few short years, you have really made an impact, so tell me more about that and about your journey.

Guest Allan: Yeah, I mean… How far back should I go all the way to high school?

Host Renee: Let’s see, let’s start… You’ve got something interesting on your website.You started this because you were helping your uncle, and maybe you can start there, and how you worked your way into helping license insurance agents market and sell annuities, ’cause that’s really like… It’s hyper-niche and that’s what you do, and I think it’s fascinating, ’cause you’re helping a lot of people… I’m a licensed agent, so I know how difficult this is, and I’d like to use your service. So please tell us how you got on this Paleo.

Guest Allan:

I started… Initially in my career in public accounting, I got my life in CPA basically. I come from an Eastern European family, and they always wanted me to be a professional, they really believed in education, so I wanted to… In college, I thought I wanted to be one of these professional jobs, like an accountant or a lawyer, actually, those were the two career paths I was considering, and my father is actually an account, and so when I graduated from college, I worked really hard in college, I got good grades, I spent a lot of time networking, and I was very fortunate that got a job at one of the biggest accounting firms in the world, and fairly early on, I realized I didn’t like the corporate world, wasn’t where I work really…

Where I saw myself a long-term, I worked with great people, but I knew I was not gonna be there very long, and then after a couple of years, I moved on and I actually joined a local startup, and they basically sold tutoring services for kids in math English signs, those type of topics, and as I joined that company, I realized that if we wanted to grow, we really had to grow online, and I was the name of the game, right? And this was five years ago, and that was kind of my MBA or a boot camp in online advertising.

Guest Allan:

So kind when I joined the business, I took as much time as possible to observe as much information as possible, and then as we started testing new advertising channels, we started kind of dialing in and allocating more of our ad budget, and the business owner was re-investing really heavily back into the business, and that allowed us to grow it because once we knew our numbers, how much it cost us to acquire a…

How many customers we were able to acquire, we were just doubling down on that and the business grow really rapidly, so that really became like my MBA and online advertising. And then one thing led to another. After that experience, I did some freelance consulting work, my uncle works in the insurance business, did some consulting work for him, then I picked up more clients in the insurance industry, and one thing led to another, and I… I got it, anybody client, I saw how well they were doing, they’re really open, opened in my eyes.

Then I really realized that you really have to niche down because the person in this world who tries to be the master of everything is really the master… of Nothing. So for me, I realized I had to absolutely niche down, really niche down on annuities, and then we started bringing on more and more clients, and that was kind of the start really of my journey. Right, I hope that makes a lot of sense.

Host Renee: Yeah, that’s excellent. I love that you gave us sort of a lead up and so that people can see the step by step in the progression that you made, and it all sort of makes sense. And what I wanted to ask you, I remember many years ago, at least 20 or 30 years ago, I was briefly part of a company that was pushing buy term insurance and invest the difference in mutual funds, and that’s been the mantra for a while, right. And I do remember them saying that annuities were not a good investment, and even to this day, that philosophy seems to penetrate pretty deeply in the financial industry, so I’m curious… How do you handle that?

Guest Allan: Yeah, that’s an amazing question. And I talk about this a lot with current clients, even prospects, right. Unfortunately, annuities get a really bad reputation. There is a lot of negative publicity. It, there’s other finance celebrities like Dave Ramsey, who tends to trash do annuities, there’s also companies like Fisher investments, they also try to… Its there reality is the annuity products of 20 years ago are not the products of today, it’s like the parts of 20 years ago or not the cars of today… Now we have electric cars. They’re working on self-driving cars.

Everything changes, and as the market, as more sophisticated the products have to become more sophisticated in every single industry to keep up with the trends, there’s a lot more fixed index inequity products that are available, most of the marketing we do is actually for fixed index annuity products, I think a lot of times, the variable of notes of the… I don’t wanna say old days about of 20, 30 years ago of the past… That’s the better way of putting it. I no longer the products of today, and I think when it comes to marketing, in particular, a lot of people are brainwashed by the media, they read articles, they Google annuities. They get a really bad reputation.

It’s naturally gonna happen, but it’s very important for anyone, whether they’re actually talking to a potential client as an agent or they’re already exploring like marketing, it’s important to actually educate people on how the city products of today are very different than those of the past, ’cause that’s gonna help agents become a lot more successful, not just in providing value to their clients, but also in earning people’s business, because when you give people a lot of value, they naturally trust you a lot more and wanna work with you.

Host Renee:

Yeah, that’s an excellent point. And for those people, a lot of insurance products as well as annuities are fairly complex, and so for people who are not familiar with it or perhaps newer agents. Can you explain the difference between what would be an old annuity from 20 or 30 years ago and how it’s structured nowadays?

Guest Allan:

Yeah, the simple answer is, is the fixed index annuities, they limit peoples the downside, and they really give them the opportunity to participate in an overall market upside and different trends. So with what’s going on right now with the stock market volatility, the uncertainty, people wanna mitigate the risk, mitigate their exposure, right. And in persons or retirement portfolio, no matter how big or small, you wanna have a portion that’s allocated to save money, because you never know how the market is gonna perform, and the market average is out over time, with that being said in the last two, three years.

It was overall a very strong market until maybe six or 12 months ago, it overall, during the pandemic, the stock market did better than than ever before, and naturally when things are really good, there’s gonna be a correction. Right, and a lot of times when it even comes to these potential clients, people who are 63, 64, they can afford to lose 20% or 30% in their retirement portfolio because they just don’t have that runway, right. So a lot of these products, they give people that protection and that insulation, and I’m not saying they need to put all their money in an annuity because they might need to tie up that money for five or 10 years or whatever that time period is, but at the same time, the real benefit is that they’re actually gonna protect their money.

A lot of times if people have 35000-700000 set aside for retirement, they don’t need that money right now, they’re still working their job for another three, five years.

So a lot of times, those annuities and the big contrast is, Oh, I’m gonna tie up my money, but if you don’t need the money for another five years, ’cause you’re only gonna retire in five years, you’re way better off putting it there ’cause you’re gonna give protection you’re gonna get growth, you’re… May mitigate the downside. So I hope that really kind of gives you some perspective…

Host Renee: Yeah, that’s excellent. That’s great. Now, let’s get into exactly what you do with Room media, because you seem to have really nailed the pain points for insurance agents, the endless prospecting and trying to get people into that pipeline so that you have opportunities to continue to speak to someone, ’cause this is not an impulse buy, these type of products. So take us through the process. If somebody as an insurance agent gets into your pipeline, how does that work for them?

Guest Allan:

How does that work? If they choose to work with us. Yes, yes. Yeah, so what we do, we really focus on fixed index annuity marketing, like I kind of mentioned, I’m not a big fan personally of the variable of new any products, but with that being said, what we do is we do online advertising typically through paid social channels, for our clients… So what the reality is, right? Every agent needs More leads, they need more appointments, they need more conversations…

Right, ’cause at the end of the day… It’s just a numbers game, right? And some people may not want to look at it that way, but in any type of sales are all like it is an insurance, it’s really important to have a full pipe line, not only is it good for you mentally, it’s good for you emotionally and financially, because if you have one person in your pipeline and that person doesn’t do business with you, there are gonna be a lot more desperate and energy is very contagious.

Right, so what I’m a believer, and you need to build up a pipeline where you’re getting clients from as many channels as possible… Right, and a lot of agents actually struggle with the online side, a lot of times I talk to agents, they’re doing dinner workshops, they’re doing video shows, they’ve been published in a book, they’ve been published online in different publications, and these are all great channels and all marketing is is every marketing channel works in conjunction, so what we really do is niche and more online-based, so what we do.

A lot of times, I find that a lot of agents, they actually not only struggle in front of getting in front of new people, which is where we come in, but they also struggle to get in front of their existing customers and keep reminding them, because if you can really build a long-term relationship with your clients that they’re gonna send you more referrals, they’re gonna do more business with you, they’re gonna trust you more.

It’s only gonna create a win, win it, and at the end of the day…

So I think a lot of times they struggle with getting in front of their current customers, but they also struggle in sort of getting in front of new people who they’ve never spoken to before, and that’s really where we come in, we run ads targeting people who do not know like or trust these agents, we help them get in front of them, and like I mentioned, I’m a big believer in education when it comes to both annuity sales and the new Indy marketing, so that’s kind of an element that we wanna integrate into our marketing because at the end of the day, people don’t have misconceptions, they have cognitive biases about annuities, and we wanna make sure in our marketing… We’re addressing a lot of those points. I hope this is helpful.

Host Renee:

Yeah, that’s excellent. It sounds to me like you might help agents maybe create webinars and email lists… Newsletters, is that the kind of thing that you do.

Guest Allan: We don’t really do webinars. We’ve tried to have a list.. They haven’t been as effective. Well, what we do is just mostly paid ads, we take people through what we call as a funnel, which really unleashes of steps that you wanna take people through to get to their desired down come, so we wanna take them through a series of hoops and heroes, the reason being is the more hoops than her, those people go through naturally, the more qualified are receptive they are to a conversation.

A lot of times I’ll talk to agents and the marketing they do, they’re giving people a free guide, free report, promising key people, the moon naturally, that attracts a lot of tire takers, pre-shares all of that, so we wanna avoid all of that because we only wanna work, or health agents work with more serious folks, that’s why in our funnels, we wanna make sure they are robust enough to really weed out a big chunk of those people, because I’m sure you get it, no, marketing process is perfect, but at the end of the day, like time is the most valuable asset for a lot of agents, and we wanna make sure that they’re using their time wisely so that they can be as effective and as profitable as possible.

Host Renee: Well, that’s excellent. And I wanna dig down a little more on the specifics because a lot of what you mentioned, I mean that I’ve had my own websites for a while, although I’m a fairly new agent, and so I’m trying to sort of transition my digital skills into attracting clients for insurance, but it sounds to me like you might be doing something a little bit different and more cutting edge, and can you drive down a little bit more with that so we can… Because a lot of what you mentioned, people are thinking, Well, yeah, I do that. What else now? It’s not working. What else can I do online?

Guest Allan:

I mean, there’s a lot of people can do it. I’m a firm believer that if you look at marketing as one side that you’re looking at more marketing channels, you have the less dependent is your business on any one channel, and it’s only gonna help…

Right, in terms of what we do is very specific. In terms of running ads, getting in front of a new type of demographic, if a new agent or even an established agent is doing some type of advertising and it’s not working for them, I always tell people, what is the root cause of the problem…

Right, and there’s two things, they’re not getting enough appointments, and I always believe a good benchmark is If you’re not converting 20% of your initial first appointments in declines, there is probably some type of breakdown in the sales process, so if someone’s only getting five people on the calendar every month. And they can convert at 20%, which is an average rate that people should strive for, then they’re not actually getting enough at that because you should be doing…

For options that If I have appointments a day, I talk to agents that get 10 appointments a day all the time, so if they’re only getting five appointments a month and they wanna beat their head and say, this marketing channel isn’t working, you need to double down more on that channel, and if you can… you need to look at other channels. Right, and that’s why in any successful agents marketing arsenal, they do have multiple prospecting channels right now…

The other challenge that agents have is maybe they’re getting 50 appointments a month, which is a big, big sample size. It’s awesome, right? But they’re only converting two out of those 50, so in those instances, a lot of people need to set their ego aside, ’cause unfortunately a lot of people in this industry have really big egos and the egos are very toxic, they need set their ego aside and debug their sales process, whether that’s seeking help from a entire party, but at that point, getting in other 50 appointments to make force it, ’cause it’s not worth it, because even if they were converting their current people at 10%, they would already be getting five new clients a month, right.

And I also believe on top of that, a lot of people have very short-sighted time horizons, plenty of our clients are maybe getting someone for an annuity or maybe getting them in for other products, like is term insurance, building that trust, because I’m a firm believer that the more…

People buy from you because they know you, they like you and they trust you. And when it comes to annuities, their higher ticket items, naturally, the skepticism is gonna be high, and this is just across the board it, whether you like it or not, unless you’ve been featured on a number of radio shows and you have credentials that 99% of agents do not yet.

The reality is, is you need to really work hard to earn people’s trust, that’s why they’re gonna work with you, right, so the past way or in trust is do some smaller business with them, give them value, right. So sometimes if you’re one of our clients, he’s absolutely crushing it on the annuity front, but not only that, he’s been able to…

People get it to is get it to final expense term, all these products, because he’s able to uncover those opportunities by asking the right questions, so even if there is not an opportunity for annuities, a lot of agents are just looking for that one thing they’re looking for the quick buck. And they just wanna rent that business right away, but the more you can lengthen your time horizon, the more successful you will be because you’re really able to build relationships with people, you’re really able to give them value, you’re gonna get a lot more referrals down the road, ’cause people are enjoying the experience that they’re getting with you, so I think these are all things that I think agents we really need to look at, and a lot of them oversee… If that makes sense.

Host Renee:

That’s excellent. That’s a great explanation. And I notice on your website, and I think you’re doing something that most other sort of the gen type of sites for insurance are not doing, you have a button specifically that says claim your area, and that’s how in the insurance agents when they buy leads, they’re wondering how many times this has been, these names have been sold, and I think you’re doing something very clever, so can you would take us through that on how you sort of control that and keep… So that it doesn’t get flooded and agents get these watered down leads…

Guest Allan: Yeah, for sure. It’s a huge problem when it comes to this industry. A one problem is shared leads, right? Yeah, it’s one of the biggest problems, and I’ve now noticed this, because a lot of these companies, they’re gonna send the same lead to three, five, seven agents, and at that point when multiple people are competing for the same clients.

It’s a race to the bottom because they’re gonna go with the person who gives them the best sounding product, that’s actually the worst for them, and it’s the reality, because a lot of people, they think very short term, a lot of people want what sounds the best, and it’s actually usually the worst…

The only place you find free cheeses in the most traffic.  

So it’s just the reality. Right, and what a lot of these platforms companies do is they’ll have one way, say, when people submit an application on that website, they then send it to three or five people, so we actually set up custom funnels for every single one of our clients, so we’re running them, from completely different websites, completely different markets, in order to maintain exclusivity for our clients, which is what’s allowed our clients to actually do very well, and they do a lot of referrals even from our clients coming to us is because we’re actually…

We wanna provide that good experience by having custom funnels for everyone and marketing in different markets for everyone, maintaining that exclusivity, we’ve really been able to maintain that exclusivity for our clients.

Host Renee:

Well, that’s outstanding. That’s really excellent, I love that. So it sounds like you’ve got a very good system in place, and so now it makes me think This might be exceptionally pricey, so how does your pricing work for individual agents?

Guest Allan: Yeah, we typically work with only established agents, sometimes, occasionally, we will bring on a newer agent, but most of our clients understand… Annuities paid very handsomely. Our average clients are writing cases in the 10 to 500000 range, and the tip typical comp… I’m sure you know. It’s usually 5-8%, right?

I always look at my marketing as an investment, never an expense, and that’s what every intelligent business owner does as well, is in terms of our pricing, we don’t have plans where someone can only get two or three or five leads a month, we wanna work with people that are very serious about spearheading their growth, that are already consistently writing whether it’s 25, 10 million in annuity business a year, right.

So they’ve already got their sales processes style then in terms of pricing, we have different cares, Our pricing starts anywhere from 30500 a month, and it can go up all the way to over 10 grand, but just depends on the type of volume. We do tend to see a fairly large percentage of our clients actually wanna wanna upgrade their plans, just yesterday, I got reached out by a fairly new client already wanting to upgrade his tier. And I tell people, start small and then you can expand there, get your first couple of cases around your belt, get your feet wet, and the reality is with marketing, it only gets better over time because the more and more you do, the more practice you get, the more you’re able to hone in on your sales processes.

Make them better, and that’s actually another thing that we help agents with, so not only do we get them leads, we actually help them with weekly sales training calls, so that they’re getting a lot more value from working with us because they’re able to convert their leads at a higher rate, they’re way more profitable working with us if they’re actually putting in the work, and they’re able to utilize a lot of these tactics for some of the other marketing they’re doing as well, right.

Because it’s all the same, you should have a fairly consistent sales process…

Host Renee: Oh, that’s excellent. So do you ever work with smaller independent agencies and not just individual agents.

Guest Allan:

We have all kinds of clients, people with all sorts of marketing budgets… We do work with some agencies. We’ve worked with some clients. It really varies, right? So for us, it’s about bringing on the right type of clients, I think the people who do well with us have a good positive attitude. They understand it’s a process. They’re willing to put in the work.

The people I hate working with are people with big egos who think they know it, I’ll think the whole world revolves around them, so sometimes I hop on cost with potential clients, and they just… They think they know it all, they think they’re the best, they think the whole world revolves around them, and I’m really are working with those type of people, they are toxic. They usually don’t do well. Their ego gets in their way a lot, right.

And I’m sure they know who they are, but sometimes they don’t, but I think the ego can destroy people, and it’s very important to remain down to earth at the end of the day, for us, it’s about working with clients that we enjoy working with. For myself as well as my team. And we’re pretty stern in terms of not wanting to work with people who are assholes, who think that they’re the best and… Or not.

And some people come to me and they’re like, Oh, I’m the best closure and slide spread, and then I would work with them, and then these people were the ones that were actually struggling the most, and so it’s funny, but it’s just… The reality, I don’t hold back, I tell people everything as it is…

Host Renee: Well, yeah, that’s interesting, it makes me think, How does a call like that and when you realize you’re dealing with somebody with a big… How do you actually… How does it go from there? When you wanna say that, I don’t think so. How does that look for you?

Guest Allan: I make it clear to them. I tell them, I’m like, Look, I don’t think we should be working together. You’re not kind of seeing things in the way that we are, and it sounds like you know of it all…

You’re already doing this well, I don’t think you need more marketing, you should probably just double down on what’s already working for you, and a lot of times these people, they don’t even wanna admit that they’re not happy with what they’re doing, ’cause they have this really high ego, and they can’t, bother mentioning that, Oh, I’m not happy with what I’m doing right now, or I’m struggling here…

and it’s very clear that these people just have this big insecurity that’s kind of boosting their third pole, if that makes sense.

Host Renee:

Yeah, okay. Well, I only have so much time left here, Allan, but you mentioned earlier that energy is contagious and it’s part of the sales process, and clearly you have a ton of energy, and I agree with you, energy is everything without energy. Nothing gets done, so how do you keep your energy up and going and what does a day… Like with Allan, look like…

Guest Allan:

Yeah, I think your physical health is a reflection of your mind, of your energy, so basically in the last year, I went through a big transformation from a health perspective, like I’m down… Or just over 50 pounds. Since last year, I started going to the gym, usually in the evenings, I go to the gym for around or and a half, I think that’s one thing getting in physical activity, the next thing is your diet, which has actually really helped me lose weight is eating right.

And I know this is not a conversation about that, and Bono means a health expert, I just know a lot of times when you eat foods like carbs, foods with a lot of sauces, foods with a lot of sugar, they make you feel Drowsy tired and give you a bad energy. So I think it’s very, very important to have a really clean diet, eat good food, healthy food, a lot of protein, those type of things, because they really help, and like I said, a healthy mind, healthy boy is gonna lead to a healthy person, so these are very important.

Host Renee: Excellent. Okay, and just one last question. Where do you go to get your information? To stay on the cutting edge of all of this.

Guest Allan:

A lot of things are part of masterminds, I spend a lot of money going to different events, meeting different people, investing in different courses, education programs, like I’ve probably in the last two years, spent close to maybe 60 grand on different types of education. Learning masterminds. So there’s a lot of things, and I actually think a lot of agents, they’re scared to invest into growth, but that’s actually how you grow, that’s how you love all up, right? I’m investing into different types of masterminds, learning different things, and at the end of the day, is it something I’ve realized.

It’s really fascinating this, most sales people are doing the same job for 20, 30, 40 years, so they’re performing at the exact same level, if they can just get one or 2% better every single day, week or even month, that is only gonna compound. Right, so I think a lot of people need to really invest into their education, invest it into growth… Invest into different types of masterminds to surround themselves with people who are a lot better than that.

So my Masterminds have tremendously helped me. Masterminds education programs. All of that.

Host Renee:

Oh, that’s excellent. And just one last question. Who’s your favorite? Who is giving you the best tips?

Guest Allan: I don’t have a favorite, and it’s not the answer you want it… I think there’s different tips for everything, right, there’s different tips for sales, there’s different types for marketing, there’s different tips for building a business… For leading an organization, right.

And as we grow, I have to become a different person to lead a team right now we’re a team of eight, we’ll definitely grow a lot more by the end of this year, so it’s important and to level up in all these areas, how to manage a team, how to handle lead people, how to motivate people internally to work harder, etcetera. There’s a lot of dimensions. It’s not one side.

Host Renee: No, that’s great, that’s a great answer. Ansell, thank you. I’m gonna have to leave it here, but I would love to revisit this in the future, and I will probably be using your services at some point, you sound like you provide a lot of value to agents, so thank you for the work that you’re doing, and thank you so much for being here and spending time. Yeah.

Guest Allan: Thank you for your time, I really enjoyed it. So thank you so much. Alright, thanks a lot.

Find Allan at The Vroom Media Group  

Find Renee at Wiki Quoters