What I Learned From Studying With the Best Marketing Minds (And the Best Clients) In the World

For almost five years, I signed my full-page ads in the trade mags, “Michael Jans, The Bad Boy of the Insurance Agency.”

Not so much anymore. I’m too many years away from being a boy. And, candidly, much of the maverick and unabashed approach to growth I taught in my early years has been adopted by the industry.

After 25 years, I’m more of an elder, perhaps.

Brian Appleton, founder of The Insurance Agent Summit once introduced me to his audience as “The Godfather of Insurance Marketing.”

So, I’m not bragging. Just reporting the news. Wink, wink. 😉

That said, I have had a weird job for the last 25 years.

I guess nobody else wanted it. When the call went out, “Who wants to spend the balance of their career understanding, advising, and facilitating organic growth for insurance agents?” my hand went up.

Somehow, I missed the fine print: this is a new position.

Admittedly, a lot of what I taught was not passed down by whoever did this before me. There was no manual.

My job, it seemed, was to discover “what works” outside the industry…

…then, find ways to synthesize and package it to fit the independent agency channel.

Some of it had an in-between step: test it. In blunter terms, find a client willing to put it in the marketplace. Measure it. Make sure it works.

That proved to be a killer process. Only the best of the best made it to the public domain. So what I know to work emerges from what I learned from the best marketing minds in the world - and the clients who trusted me to help them grow.

After 25+ years of doing just that, I’ve drawn a few conclusions.

I can give you the briefest summary of a few of them here.

Choosing what to add and what to leave out challenged me. My criteria were:

Universality - things that apply to almost every situation and kind of agency. Personal lines, commercial lines, benefits, mixed; urban, rural, suburban. I’ve had clients in five continents, so I’ve seen a breadth of applications.

Leverage - strategies and behaviors that lend to high leverage growth, where the output is dwarfed by the input. I’m particularly interested in helping agencies SCALE—at a rate they choose. Incremental is for someone else. (My definition of scale is 25.89% annual growth. The number you need to 10X in 10 years.)

Strategic - perhaps the space confines me to big statements. Ironically, the more tactical the behavior, the more space it takes to explain it. How to write a headline, for example, could easily require ten pages. Or a book. Strategy is the locomotive of a great big change, so let’s start there.