Chris:
I have problems, you have problems, we all have problems. But as our guest will tell us today, you can have problems and still win.
Chris:
All right, welcome everyone back to the Get Overit podcast, I am your host, Dr. Christopher Fasano. We have another great guest today. Before we get to our guest and this episode, I just want to remind you guys to visit podcast.overit.com. You can find more information about this show, our producer, Adam Clairmont, over at studios, and all our previous shows. There are also links to the available podplayers where you can find the show. It’s a lot easier to listen to them on podcast players like Apple Podcast, Google Podcast. You can also subscribe to those to make it easy, the show will go right into your advice. You can also subscribe and watch the interviews on YouTube, so make sure you check that out, give a subscribe. Tell your friends and subscribe, leave a review, let us know how we’re doing. We always like the feedback and it also will help the show and it’s ranking.
Chris:
So today, our guest is Ryan Hanley. Ryan is a author, he is a keynote speaker, he is in the insurance game, has his own insurance agency, Rogue Risk. We’re going to talk to him about that, but we’re going to talk to him about his journey in the insurance game. He’s unique in that, he shook it up a little bit. I’ve known Ryan for a few years, we’ve worked together, and I really admire his passion. He’s someone like me who just leaves it all out there for you, and so it should be a really fun conversation. Ryan, good to see you man.
Ryan:
Dude, it’s great to see you. It’s been too long since we got to share space, so this is fun.
Chris:
I know. This is great, and I always enjoy having… I remember just when we were working together, we went to the city for something and we would just randomly converse about random topics.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And it’s always fun. So I have a lot I want to talk to you about, but you have a really interesting journey, and on the show we get into the journey and we find places where you had to get over things and get through things. So I want to go back. I believe, if I remember right, you were a math major. Is that right?
Ryan:
Yeah, University of Rochester.
Chris:
Okay, so you like me, I was a biochemistry and molecular biology major, you’re a math major, and I don’t think we fit those molds when people meet us, right? As the traditional, what a math major, someone might think of, or a biochemistry major. So I always ask where did that go? So you didn’t go into mathematics as a career.
Ryan:
No, so how this works is, I am a hick from the middle of nowhere in upstate New York, town of less than 1,000 people. The day that I said to my mom, my parents were divorced, I said to my mom, “I think I want to go to college,” her response was like, “Oh, that’s great.” That was it.
Chris:
Cool.
Ryan:
She was just like, “Oh okay. That’s the next thing, all right, fine.” She’s like, “Well what do you do? What does that take?” So I figured out how to get into school. I was a decent baseball player so I picked division three in two colleges within four hours and I just applied everywhere. And with my application…
Chris:
The written app… Well, you had a handwritten one [crosstalk 00:03:00] like me. People don’t know about that, those were handwritten applications back then.
Ryan:
Yes, you are filling out the FASA form my hand, right? So I’m sending in, and then I also wrote letters to the baseball coaches for all those schools.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
And I said, “Look, I’m applying to your school. I’m a power-hitting catcher,” or whatever. Just the whole… Like we all dust ourselves up like we’re better. And I said, “I’m basically going to go with whoever gives me the most money.” That was the whole note. The whole note was, “I’ll be good for your team, I get my [crosstalk 00:03:31] but I need you to help me get in.” Because I didn’t have any money, I was poor. So University of Rochester gave me the best plan, so that’s where I went to school. I would love to say that my vision, my dream was to be a Yellowjacket. I mean, and it ended up being a great school. It was a top 30 school at the time, I don’t know where it is today. I know they focus more on liberal arts, so who knows. I thought I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, that sounded like a career that you made money in.
Chris:
Sure, yep.
Ryan:
Coming from where I came from, I was like, “Oh, mechanical engineer, sounds like I can make some money.” Well, I learned somewhere around second semester of my sophomore year, I was rocking like a 1.3, hadn’t been to class in-
Chris:
That would be GPA, 1.3?
Ryan:
Yeah, GPA, yeah, GPA. I found that I basically had to make a decision. I could either playing baseball, drinking beers, and chasing women, or be a mechanical engineer. So I decided against mechanical engineering, and went to my guidance counselor or whatever and said, “Hi.”
Chris:
So, right.
Ryan:
Here’s the grades-
Chris:
Here’s where I’m at.
Ryan:
Here’s where am at. What can I graduate on time with? And she said, “Well, basically math’s the only one.”
Chris:
Math’s your opinion.
Ryan:
And then the reason was because I could take all these journalism and other classes.
Chris:
So it wasn’t like you were-
Ryan:
Passionate about math.
Chris:
[inaudible 00:04:50] integrals and derivatives with your game. You were just like, “I got to graduate.”
Ryan:
No. In 301 Math, one of these things was obviously not like the other. There were all these who were just… I mean, this is back in chalk, so chalkboard A plus B equals C, prove this. And I would look at it and be like, “What am I looking at? What am I even talking about?” And these kids would break down, they’re doing all this stuff, and I’m like, “Where do you even…”
Chris:
You’re like, “Yeah, that’s great.”
Ryan:
No idea. So I found, luckily a friend of mine’s girlfriend was very smart, and I just latched onto her and cheated off her for the last two semesters of my career, and ended up graduating.
Chris:
And graduated on time. So it all worked out for you in the end.
Ryan:
2001 baby.
Chris:
So where does it take… So now you achieve that, you get your way, you find your way through, now you’re coming out and now you’re… You’re not going to play professional baseball.
Ryan:
Not going to pay professional baseball.
Chris:
And you’re not going to be solving breaking code in mathematics.
Ryan:
Nope.
Chris:
So where do you end up? Where do you go now?
Ryan:
So at that time, it was I don’t want to be a professor, that’s obvious.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
I don’t want to be a school teacher. Nothing against them, I just…
Chris:
That’s not you.
Ryan:
That’s not me. I wouldn’t fit that career.
Chris:
I have be patient on my arm, what do need from me?
Ryan:
So the only other option was to go into corporate America, so that’s what I did. I worked for an accounting firm as a consultant for a few years, that was a fine job. I worked for American Express in New York City, that was a fine job.
Chris:
So in numbers though, or no? Your game, when you said you do consulting and accounting firm-
Ryan:
Yeah, because I could always do numbers.
Chris:
Right, okay, all right.
Ryan:
That’s how I got into the programs.
Chris:
All right.
Ryan:
I mean, maybe I’m slightly underselling myself.
Chris:
Well you’re not an idiot. I mean, that’s not… Right, okay.
Ryan:
I would like to believe I’m not an idiot.
Chris:
I know you’re not an idiot, okay.
Ryan:
It depends on who you talk to. So yeah, so I go into these corporate jobs and they’re perfectly fine. So fast forwarding to how I get to insurance, I just always assumed I would never come back to Albany. It’s not that I disliked this place…
Chris:
But you were out, kind of.
Ryan:
I just never thought I would come back here. I figured I’d be someplace warm, I love the ocean, I figure just someplace else. And I figured whatever female I ended up shacking up with, wherever she was from or wanted to go, that’s where I would go.
Chris:
That’s your new home.
Ryan:
And I ended up finding, who turns out to be the love of my life and I-
Chris:
Someone back in Albany?
Ryan:
She was from Albany. So it was like so how the universe works. She grew up in Bethlehem and her dad owns an insurance agency here in town, [inaudible 00:07:09]. It was 2005 I think, 2006, we were living in New York City and we decided we wanted to move home. And kind of the writing was on the wall that we were probably going to get married, and he… This is like out of a mafia movie. We’re at a Christmas party, he taps me on the shoulder, he says, “I want to talk to you.”
Chris:
He sits you down, you need to sit down.
Ryan:
He pulls me into this office, this high-back leather chair. Like one of those offices you see where it looks pretty but it has no function at all.
Chris:
Exactly.
Ryan:
So we’re sitting in this room and he said, “Hey, Lauren told me you guys were thinking about coming home. What are you thinking about doing?” I said, “Well I don’t really know. I haven’t really enjoyed being a consultant and I was thinking about sales.” And he said, “Well what do you want to sell?” This is all going someplace. Finally he basically says, “Look, I want you to come work for the agency. I’ll teach you how to sell. It’s a good career. If nothing else, you’ll learn how to be a salesman and you’ll make some money.” I think basically he wanted to guarantee that his little girl wasn’t going to be married to a bum.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
I think that’s what he wanted.
Chris:
So he was installing something.
Ryan:
Yes.
Chris:
Was she working for the agency at the time or no?
Ryan:
She was actually working for Marsh and McLennan.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
Which is one of… For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s one of the largest insurance brokerages in the entire world.
Chris:
So she wasn’t in the business?
Ryan:
Not yet.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
But she does now.
Chris:
She does now, right.
Ryan:
She does now.
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
But at the time, no. It doesn’t matter-
Chris:
And you know nothing about the insurance game?
Ryan:
Nothing.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
Nothing other than I know it exists.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
I had bought car insurance.
Chris:
Right, you have insurance of some sort, yeah.
Ryan:
I’d had car insurance before, that’s all I knew. So I kind of boots on the ground producer, I put 50,000 miles on my car, selling policies at people’s kitchen tables at 7:00 and 9:00. I mean, today-
Chris:
So you’re out and about. You’re out and around.
Ryan:
Constantly, constantly. So for eight years I did that, and in the first two years I realized right away, I am a terrible salesperson. Like a traditional, cold call, knock on doors, hound you for stuff insurance salesman, I’m terrible.
Chris:
It’s not an easy game, right?
Ryan:
You have to have a certain disposition.
Chris:
Yeah, I know.
Ryan:
You have to be willing… And I think-
Chris:
You have to get over those barriers where you’re like, “I’m being intrusive and it’s annoying.”
Ryan:
Yes.
Chris:
You can’t think like that.
Ryan:
So now I know the basics of it, at the time I didn’t. My father-in-law, I probably got… I got a world class education in insurance. He is one of the best professionals, the way he handles people, the way he handles his customers, it was awesome. He wasn’t the best insurance sales coach.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
He’d just done it for a really long time.
Chris:
Right, right, right. It’s hard to teach sometimes.
Ryan:
Yes.
Chris:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ryan:
So by watching him, I picked up on a lot of stuff. But some of the emotional stuff, like now I know… To be a good salesman, the key is to disconnect yourself from the outcome. Don’t care about the outcome.
Chris:
Right. You just got to go for it.
Ryan:
You just got to keep going, keep talking, keep working. Someone says, “No, thank you, not the right time,” move on to the next person.
Chris:
Yeah.
Ryan:
If you can disconnect from the outcome, just that singular concept will change your entire career. Okay, I didn’t know that at the time. So what I did like to do was educate people, I like to talk. It’s probably obvious at this point. So I started, I’m just learning these coverages, and I had this epiphany one day, I had a woman ask me, I was writing home and auto for her, and she asked me about underinsured motorist coverage. And I kind of bullshitted my way through the answer, and I kind of… And I got back to the office and I was like man, I couldn’t give her a good solid answer. So I went and I had a book that I learned to take the test. I knew enough to take the test but I didn’t know how to explain it. Yes, it wasn’t on the tip of my tongue. So I read this page and I was like man, how do insurance consumers, how do regular people know this, if I’m selling it to them and I don’t even know-
Chris:
Right, you have no idea.
Ryan:
So I just, I don’t know why I started doing this, I just started posting stuff on LinkedIn. And this is 2008 LinkedIn.
Chris:
So this is early, way early.
Ryan:
This is way, way, early. You’re literally just putting something in a box and it’s going into a feed. There’s no…
Chris:
And these posts were about different products, about things in insurance.
Ryan:
What is underinsured motorist coverage?
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
And then I’d put like three or four sentences.
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
And it was getting minimal traffic but I got a couple people that would connect and, “Hey, thanks for this.” I mean, it was brand new, so everything was kind of new at the time, so maybe I was a little lucky in that there was nothing out there at all. And then I said, “Well this form isn’t really working, it’s too shortform.” There was a limit on the characters and it looked like crap. And WordPress was just starting to become a thing, so I… I don’t know why but I created a WordPress blog, ryanhanley.com, which is now my insurance podcast. So if you were to go, you wouldn’t find this stuff. But at the time, I dubbed myself the Albany Insurance Professional, and at ryanhanley.com, I just started writing blog posts about insurance coverages. So every time someone would ask me a question about a coverage that I didn’t know, I would go back, I would research that coverage, and I would write a blog post about it.
Chris:
See the beauty of that is, that you took something that on its face I think people look to be inherently boring.
Ryan:
Terribly boring.
Chris:
Right? And you’re not a boring person, so the two come together and you take a boring subject, make it interesting to the best of your ability.
Ryan:
Yep.
Chris:
And then I’m assuming as the content rolled into video and speaking, you were able to put your personality behind it and that’s kind of where it went, right?
Ryan:
Yeah, so what’s really interesting about this from a content perspective, and there’s a whole nother… Well, we’ll get to that I guess. So I’m doing this, this is probably 2009, I’m blogging, and for the first six months nothing happened. I felt like I was just shouting into the wind. There wasn’t a great way to share it really, Facebook was kind of around, LinkedIn was kind of around, Twitter was kind of around, RSS feeds were really big but who wants to subscribe to the-
Chris:
Yeah, that was blogging game was big then, that was when the blogs…
Ryan:
So you were trying to get people to connect to you. I won’t go into the nuances of that, that’s a whole nother thing. But it took about six months, and what I started to do was get bored, so I started injecting personal stuff. Like I’m a huge Buffalo Bills fan, so I started putting little jokes about, “You know you can trust me because I’m a Bills fan,” right? Like anyone who would take this much punishment in their life… Now Josh Allen, but at the time it was just the days of us getting pounded on. So you know that if I’m willing to put up with this much pain and suffering-
Chris:
You can trust what I’m saying.
Ryan:
You can trust what I’m saying.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And what’s funny is, people started to respond to that. People would make little comments, “Oh hey man, the Bills…,” or whatever.
Chris:
Because you humanized yourself, yep.
Ryan:
100%. And nine months after I started, I got a call from a woman. Her name was Virginia, she’s from… I think she might even still be a client of The Murray Group, I don’t know. If you’re listening Virginia, thank you for being a client, you changed my life. She called me and she said, “Hey, I’m from Clifton Park, I’ve been reading your blog.” I had been posting twice a week.
Chris:
And also by the way, that must be like people are reading my blog. Because back then, you don’t have the advanced analytics and you don’t know what’s… You’re putting all this crap out there.
Ryan:
I’m vibrating [crosstalk 00:13:52]. Someone noticed what I’m doing. And I joke that she changed my life, she really did. She said, “Hi, I’ve been reading your blog. Thank you for doing it. I’m going to send you my stuff, I’d like you to tell me what I need and send it back to me.” I said, “Oh, you’re looking for a quote.” And she said, “No, I don’t want a quote. I want you to look at my stuff, tell me what I need, send it back to me, and I’ll send you a check.” She was already sold. She had spent enough, whatever her amount of time that she needed to spend, she had spent enough, and she was a management consultant so she needed home and auto in an umbrella, and then she needed some coverage for her management business.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
So it wasn’t a big account, but she basically was saying, “I’ve read enough to trust you to say that I don’t care what the price is, I know you’re going to take care of me.”
Chris:
She made a connection to you, right?
Ryan:
Yes.
Chris:
And associated the products to you.
Ryan:
And it was like if this were a cartoon, there would be just things going off over my head, it was like, “Oh my God.”
Chris:
So you don’t have to sell the product as so much as you have to make people believe in yourself as the person selling the product.
Ryan:
And trust that we have their best interest in mind.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And that changed my whole career. So then I started blogging three, four times a week, traffic started to go off-
Chris:
Because you saw the potential.
Ryan:
Yes. And then the real game changer was… So now I’m bringing all this traffic into a site I own, not the agency. So my father-in-law and my brother-in-law came to me, they worked there, came to me and said, “Hey, we see what you’re doing. Would you want to do that for our site?”
Chris:
So they gave you license, they didn’t care. I mean, at that point nothing was happening. But now, right, they say, “Ryan, go ahead and do this?”
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
So basically around this time, my brother-in-law and father-in-law, I had kind of tossed out the idea to them that I would prefer to do it on the agency’s website, because there was this barrier.
Chris:
You had two separate situations.
Ryan:
Yeah, they’re looking at ryanhanley.com. If he’s an agent for this agency, why isn’t he… It doesn’t matter. So I wanted to get past that hurdle, so I had kind of pitched them the idea, and then a few months later they came back and said, “Hey, we agreed let’s do it.” Now their website had done nothing ever, never more than like five pages. So I tore it down, rebuilt it in WordPress which sounds more difficult than it was at the time.
Ryan:
I said but I need to kick this thing off, I want to get this going. I had already done this blogging thing, I had been slowly moving the post over from… And anyone who’s a hardcore SEO is probably knifing themselves right now. But I’ve made a lot of SEO mistakes and learned lessons. But I was moving the post over, but I really wanted to get the website cranking. So what I did, I said I’m going to do something no one has ever done before. I am going to answer 100 client questions in 100 days in two minutes or less, and I’m going to post it to YouTube. Now today, everyone’s going, “Well duh. Haven’t you seen this YouTuber or that YouTuber?” YouTubing wasn’t a thing back then.
Chris:
Right, right.
Ryan:
I mean this is like… Especially in this space, I got to imagine who’s doing this? I was first one ever.
Chris:
I was going to say, first one ever in that, right.
Ryan:
So this is 2012, YouTube takes 20 minutes to upload a 30 second video. I mean, there’s no… HD cameras are like thousands of dollars at the point, you don’t just have one sitting in your pocket.
Chris:
Do you have these videos somewhere by the way?
Ryan:
Oh they’re still on YouTube.
Chris:
I was going to say because that’s the best, when you can go back and see the progression.
Ryan:
Some of them, they have like 50,000-60,000 views [crosstalk 00:17:16]
Chris:
You get those classic stories like, “I did it in basement,” and they see those old things.
Ryan:
Oh, if you were to see these things, they’re ridiculous.
Chris:
Yeah.
Ryan:
They look… Okay, well there’s a million things I could talk about on that, but just to get through this part, so what I did was, the month of December 2011, every client I bumped into I asked them, “If you could have one question about insurance answered, what would it be? No question is too simple, too big, there’s no stupid questions. Just what would you like to have answered?” And I got 147 questions. Some of them were a little crazy like, “How would you insure a spaceship?” Although that would be fun to answer, I wanted them to be more relevant. So I pared that down to 100, and then on January 2, 2012 and for the next 99 days, I answered a different question every day about insurance in two minutes or less, and then I posted it to YouTube, and then I take that YouTube video and I would embed it in a separate blog post on the website, put a little content around it, and put it out.
Chris:
So you put a post for each one.
Ryan:
So I was getting two pieces of content for every video.
Chris:
Nice, nice.
Ryan:
And changed my life, absolutely blew up. We were getting calls almost every day, and then I just kept doing more of it. From that point on, from 2012 on, I have been a content guy.
Chris:
So was they most local or what happened? Did you notice-
Ryan:
Now at the time, YouTube did not have the same algorithm, so it took them a little longer to realize we were in Albany, New York, not Albany, Georgia, or Albany, Oregon. But then once they dialed in on that, then we started really… It was a lot of people, a lot of New York City, Albany, and Syracuse East. We didn’t get a lot from Buffalo, but this part we just, anyone who was searching, there was no one… I mean again, I don’t want to get too nerdy about this topic, but Google’s sole purpose is to provide solutions to problems.
Chris:
Right, right.
Ryan:
If they don’t-
Chris:
And that’s the exact thing you were doing, in a space where there wasn’t a lot of resource like that. Right, right.
Ryan:
I mean, I’m answering questions-
Chris:
And it’s a lot, it’s constant.
Ryan:
Yes.
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
I’m answering questions that no one in history has ever answered and put onto Google, certainly not in video form, in a platform at that time they had bought, that they’re trying to promote and build, so I am just feeding the engine.
Chris:
So now you create this interesting situation where you’re now affiliated with the brand, right, the insurance company, the agency you’re at, but you’re growing as a person in the space.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So you have your own brand, if you will. You’re generating leads, you’re generating business, but you also now have a presence that you can capitalize on your own.
Ryan:
Yes.
Chris:
Which happens a lot in the game of content, but you have a… It’s a family business.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So how does that play out over time? Did it get to a point where… I know you started to travel, and you started to give talks and all these things, and that all helps the brand, but did it cause problems for you at some point? Did you find yourself thinking, “Should I go? Should I do this part?” Talk to us a little bit about that.
Ryan:
So there were some different things. So I got really into the marketing side, and I’ve never been overly enamored or motivated by getting someone to wet sign an application.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
To me, if you’ve gotten someone to trust you, and you’ve done right by them with the product, getting them to sign is…
Chris:
Right, that’s the… Right. It’s just formality, formality-
Ryan:
Yeah, it’s formality. It’s a formality. So I was more interested, how do we educate people, how do we help them trust us, how do we share our way of doing business so they know once they get in, what they’re going to get. And The Murray Group is an amazing… I mean, this is like a marketers dream from the standpoint of I knew that our agency would deliver on everything that I was saying. There was no question of that. So that part, it was really nice. So I started to drift a little in that I wanted to do marketing. They were very traditional, they liked to cold call and they were very referral based, and there was always a little bit of a grind there. I just kind of hit a point where I was 32 years old, this is 2014, and I just… I wanted to stretch my legs a little bit. It was never going to be my business.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And I would have had to be okay with that. And truthfully, if i had stayed there and worked through it, could I be doing even different or more amazing things? Who knows.
Chris:
Who knows.
Ryan:
But at that time, I just… I was kind of coming into my own. I was feeling very confident in what I was doing. I had done a couple hundred keynote presentations, I had traveled around the entire country. At this point, I’ve done keynotes in like 30 some odd states. It just… I was really trying to stretch my legs, and I got the offer to be the chief marketing officer for a national insurance technology company called Trusted Choice. There I built a national brand called the Agency Nation, where we became the third largest insurance publication in the United States. So I built it in four years from nothing to 500,000 visitors in four years. It was an incredible experience. I put on two different conferences, which-
Chris:
What was that conversation like when you went to your father-in-law? It was your wife at that point, right?
Ryan:
It was harder to tell my wife.
Chris:
I was going to say that must have been… Because there’s a layer there, obviously, this is your family.
Ryan:
I enjoyed working with her a lot. We’re very different people but we fit very nicely together in terms of our personalities. She is driven, and detail oriented, and committed to doing things the right way, and I am more…
Chris:
You’re like an explosion?
Ryan:
Yes, I’m more like a can of paint just blows up all over the wall, and then I’m like, “That’s awesome.”
Chris:
That’s awesome, yeah.
Ryan:
Where she’s like, “Now we need to clean the paint up.”
Chris:
Right, exactly.
Ryan:
But it works really well. And I say that like… There could be a lot of friction, and in like all relationships there are, but we do work really well together. It was really hard to leave that. I think my father-in-law and brother-in-law saw the writing on the wall.
Chris:
Right, right.
Ryan:
They kind of knew that I kind of need to stretch, and go, and see what was out there. I did that for four years, it was awesome. I learned… I became the number two at that company, it was basically the CEO then me. And I had a team, I had 20 direct reports. I was running all of marketing, all of sales, the conference, all our communities, all our content. It was really an awesome position.
Chris:
Yeah, talk about some of the challenges. That’s a big difference from the role you went to.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So did you…
Ryan:
It felt natural.
Chris:
To manage, to do all that, you liked it?
Ryan:
Loved every part of it.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
To be honest with you, I don’t… If I’m blessed with anything in life, it’s that I don’t give a shit what people thing.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
So I just try to do what’s right by people.
Chris:
Yeah.
Ryan:
And I don’t mean that like I don’t care, but I don’t let people’s negativity or questioning, I don’t let it… It doesn’t impact my self-worth. So I just…There started to hit a point where I was overshadowing the CEO, because I was big and I ran the conference. And by big I just mean I had a podcast, and I was writing, I was speaking.
Chris:
You do what you do.
Ryan:
I was doing what I do. Maybe I kind of lived that story again in the future, but…
Chris:
I feel like I lived those stories too, we have similar qualities in our veins.
Ryan:
My personality just got to the point where… And I never wanted his job. It was a perfect relationship in my opinion because-
Chris:
Right, but that’s who you are. It’s hard to put it in a box.
Ryan:
What am I going to do? I’m going to slow down, I’m going to be quiet?
Chris:
No.
Ryan:
That’s not going to happen.
Chris:
That’s not going to work.
Ryan:
So we hit a point where we had the second… So I started this conference in 2017, it was called the Elevate, I had 320 insurance professionals there. I had Marcus Sheridan there, if you know that name.
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
I had a bunch of them, I had just a bunch of really awesome speakers, a bunch of industry people, it was awesome. People were… I mean, this thing was amazing. The next year I did 820 people.
Chris:
Geeze.
Ryan:
So leading up to the second year, 2018, the CEO stopped talking to me for three months before that conference. I didn’t have a word… The first time I spoke to him in three months was the day I showed up in Cleveland for the conference. And from his perspective, I was trying to take his job, and he fired me two weeks later after this conference. I put on an 820 person conference that absolutely blew the doors off the industry. I mean, it was like… We had 600 of those 800 people sign up at that conference for the next year’s conference. We were going to do 1,500 or 1,600 people the next year. He fired me two weeks later.
Chris:
I never… We’ve had a similar conversation about this. I never understand that, because in my mind, if I’m in that role, and I got someone like you or someone doing that, it makes my job easier-
Ryan:
It’s ego. It’s all ego.
Chris:
That’s all it is, right?
Ryan:
That’s all, yeah.
Chris:
Because it makes my job easier, I’m going to make more money, things are going to be there. But you just can’t shake that, it’s all in that ego, man.
Ryan:
And I get it. To be honest with you, I understand it. If I was in his position and there was someone like me who was… I was about eight years younger than him.
Chris:
People coming up to you, right?
Ryan:
People are thanking me for things and he’s going, “Wait a minute, I’m the CEO and they’re thanking him.” And I probably could have been a little… Now today, I would have understood that dynamic and I would have probably repositioned some things and done some things to prop him up so that he knew-
Chris:
Right, so he felt like… Right, right, right.
Ryan:
Where he was. But at the time, dude, I’m… This is the first time I’ve ever experienced this. I am fully basking in the glory that was holy shit, this thing’s working.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
These ideas are happening, we’re driving people, this is working, this is working. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And I mean I was being… I don’t think I was being egotistical, I just wasn’t considering the way that he would feel in that situation.
Chris:
So now you’re out.
Ryan:
I’m out.
Chris:
So now what? So you’re like, “Great. What’s up?”
Ryan:
Well the good news was, I had so much brand energy at that time, I parlayed it into I took the chief marketing officer role for an even larger insurance-
Chris:
So you just moved on to the-
Ryan:
Yeah, what are you going to do?
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
That was a good job. I had that job for nine months, it was fun. It wasn’t a great fit for me but it was an awesome learning experience. And then unfortunately a family member got terminally ill and I had to move home.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
And this is where our story started-
Chris:
You were traveling though, right?
Ryan:
Like almost every week.
Chris:
Okay. I remember that, when we crossed paths you were all over the place.
Ryan:
So the headquarters for that company was in Columbus, Ohio, and then my main role as chief marketing officer, even though technically it wasn’t really a content position, it was much more of like an enterprise BD position.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
Because they didn’t really have a strong content focus, which was kind of the disconnect. They sold me on, “We want you to build what you built over there, here.”
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
“For our constituents.”
Chris:
And you’re like, “Yeah, I can do that.”
Ryan:
So it’s fun. Hey, I got the model, I know the people. And then when I got there, they’re like, “Yeah, we really don’t want you to do that. We want you to take all the connections that you built over there and get you into those places.” Which…
Chris:
And you had young kids at the time, right?
Ryan:
Young kids, I’m traveling, did my thing. Geeze, how old are they now? They’re seven and five, so this would be two and a half years ago, so they were five and three.
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
And I’m on the road almost every week.
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
It’s wearing my wife down, it’s wearing me down.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
I don’t particularly love… Even though I do enjoy enterprise business development, I didn’t want it to be my full-time role. I have no one reporting to me, and I haven’t done… I mean, you know, if you’ve spent any time in leadership and then all of a sudden you go back to everyday tasks, it’s like I’d rather just take a knife to the eye. So I’m doing everything myself in this role, and it’s just… It wasn’t a great fit, doesn’t matter. So I probably wouldn’t have left at the time that I did, but I had a family member get terminally ill, I had to move home.
Chris:
Right, you had to be home.
Ryan:
Had to be home, couldn’t be on the road anymore.
Chris:
And then you took a local opportunity and that’s where we crossed paths. We don’t have to talk about that too much because I think we would suck up way too much time.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And then you end up-
Ryan:
So I basically relived Trusted Choice again here.
Chris:
And so then you decide to get back into your own… Now you’re in your own game. So did you say… After the experience of our previous, where we crossed paths, you’re out and you have a choice. You can go work for someone else again or you can do it on your own. Before that, did you consider going back to Murray at all at that point or no, were you done with it at that point?
Ryan:
I did consider it.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
But I had… So to answer your question and then I’ll answer that one, at 8:36 AM on October 6, 2019, I’m walking through the parking lot to my truck after being summarily canned again, and I said, “I’m probably not a great employee.” This is the universe telling me…
Chris:
Right, exactly.
Ryan:
I’m not a great employee. I did feel like I had leadership qualities. And what I had been able to accumulate over my insurance career was 50,000 conversations with people from every aspect of the value chain. I had been on the 42nd floor of Travelers, and Hartford, and Chubb. I’d been in Boston at all of those insurance… I’d been in technology companies and agencies of every size and scope, corporate, single-person, family-owned. I had been in associations. I had this network and wealth of… I’d just been privy, I’m just blessed.
Chris:
You’ve accumulated all this stuff over time.
Ryan:
And I had derived what I felt was an agency of the future, what I didn’t think was in the market currently and what I thought I had the potential to build to fill that gap. And it had always been in the back of my mind, but… I don’t want to be offensive. Maybe I didn’t have the guts, we’ll say, to take that on. When I got that termination letter passed across the table to me, I was just like, “This is the time.”
Chris:
Yeah, this is it.
Ryan:
This is the universe saying-
Chris:
Right, I don’t want to do this again.
Ryan:
I don’t want to ever have some guy, or woman, or anyone, however you self-identify, push a letter across a table telling me that I’m not good enough in the company.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
Like screw that.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
Especially when I know that that’s not the case.
Chris:
Which is the hardest part.
Ryan:
Which is the hardest part.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
When you honestly can look in the mirror and feel like… And this is not just the most recent one, but pretty much all of them, I only give 100%.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
Right? I don’t know how to do anything else. It doesn’t mean I’m always right, it just means I feel like I get-
Chris:
Plus there’s stuff behind you to show for it. It’s not like it’s just you thinking that. There’s clearly stuff you leave behind.
Ryan:
Yeah, so that all… Yes. So I’m walking to the parking lot, called my wife, I said, “You’re never going to believe it, this just happened.” She’s screaming in the phone like, “Are you kidding me?” Whatever. I just said, “I’m going to start the agency.” And she said, “Are you sure?” We kind of talked for a second and I said, “Well I want to talk to your dad,” and I did, and he was great about it. But what he wanted and what they want to be, which is amazing, and if you’re looking for home and auto insurance and you live in the Albany area, there’s no one better than The Murray Group Insurance Services, I’d say that all day long. My vision was different, it’s much more… I wanted to… The right word is I wanted to have a… I call it a human optimize agency. I wanted to take the best pieces of technology and marry them to the best pieces of humans, and come up with something that had never existed before.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
And I had this vision, and it wasn’t local necessarily. Not that it wasn’t local per se, but it wasn’t just, “Hey, I’m going to write insurance 50 miles from my house,” I wanted it to be bigger.
Chris:
You wanted it to be… Yep.
Ryan:
And everything about it was, this is an idea that if we can make it work, one, is going to be incredibly valuable, two, is going to help a ton of people, three, could change the course of what our industry believes is possible for serving customers. Because there’s a major grind between what insurance consumers want and what they’re currently getting in most cases. I feel like what I’m trying to build is bridging that gap, is showing that you can have something that’s easy to do business with and know that there’s a human that you can call who’s going to help you if you need that. You can have both those things.
Chris:
Which really does matter, right?
Ryan:
I think it does.
Chris:
I think it does too.
Ryan:
I think it does. So I kind of ran my idea past him, it was immediately obvious, though I love my father-in-law to death and he’s an amazing guy, and one of these days I’m going to beat him at golf even though he’s like 30 years older than me, it was just obvious that wasn’t the right fit.
Chris:
Right, right.
Ryan:
And Rogue Risk was born.
Chris:
So that was it. So you started that, when was this now?
Ryan:
March 9, 2020, seven days before the zombie apocalypse hit upstate New York, otherwise known as COVID.
Chris:
Oh my God. So that’s a whole nother game. I mean, did that… I mean, you’re starting this, you don’t have an office, you don’t have an infrastructure yet, right?
Ryan:
We use the Troy Innovation Garage, the coworking space, as our physical location.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
So if someone wants to meet us in person, that’s where we would meet them. It’s professional, it’s great. I love Tom, I love the team down there, Leah Rutherford and everybody, but we don’t have an office.
Chris:
Right so now you have… You were just telling me you have how many people now?
Ryan:
So we have four people.
Chris:
Okay.
Ryan:
One lives here in the Albany area, then I have one outside of Chicago, one down in Florida, and one in the Philippines.
Chris:
So I want to really… As we get through, now we’re at your journey, we’re at your current, I want to understand a little bit. You’re a guy that has… You have and have had tremendous success, but you’ve also had those tremendous drops, right?
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And like-
Ryan:
Kind of like Bitcoin. I’m like the Bitcoin of careers.
Chris:
Exactly. That’s exactly right. But that is life, man.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
That is life. I know you talked about someone in your family had a terminal illness, that is another something that I’m sure pulled you and your family way down. This is what I always say in the life, this is a perpetual hailstorm. You’re just looking for a break and a little bit of sun, and when you get that sun you got to go for it. So when people are listening to this, they hear it in your voice, they hear the things. You can go to ryanhanley.com. It’s still out there, right? That’s where your show is.
Ryan:
Yep.
Chris:
You can go check it out, you can hear it in your voice. But you were not immune to failure and to drops. So I want you to talk a little bit about how you got through those parts where it was dark or down. Did you allow yourself to go there?
Ryan:
Oh shit yeah.
Chris:
Tell us a little bit-
Ryan:
I hope I’m allowed to swear on the podcast [crosstalk 00:35:46].
Chris:
Adam will yell at me or he’ll-
Ryan:
Just put a kaplow over my face, like in Batman.
Chris:
Beep. But how you got over those things, talk to us a little bit about that.
Ryan:
Yeah, so I launched the agency on March 9, 2020. March 16th, the honorable Governor Cuomo decided that we should shut our state down, and did. I didn’t sell an insurance policy for three months. So here again, launching a business.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
How we make money is selling insurance.
Chris:
Right, and you got nothing.
Ryan:
And I can’t a sell a policy, because we’re all scared. I mean, I’m being facetious about my tone, but we’re all scared, we’re all in our houses, we don’t know what’s going on, and no one is going to take a call from an insurance agent-
Chris:
Right, exactly. Hey, how’s it going?
Ryan:
Are you wanting to save some money on your business insurance?
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
At first I’m like, “Oh, we’ll get through this boom, and I’m going to do this stuff that needs to get done while this crazy time is going on,” and then that kind of turned into well geeze, it’s been three weeks, and it’s been four weeks, and now the stress is starting to stack up a little bit. I mean, because even though we don’t have an office, it still costs money to run an insurance agency.
Chris:
Sure, yep.
Ryan:
You got to have licenses and all kind… There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it that is technology driven, and licensing driven, and all this stuff. So I’m spending money, and now no money’s coming in. It’s not even like there’s a pipeline, there’s just no hope. It’s just my pipeline and my CRM is just empty. It was brutal. And then you go oh, I’ll have a beer at the end of the night to relax, and then I’ll have two beers, and then I’ll just get drunk on a Tuesday because I’m really stressed.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And then you stop working out, and you start eating.
Chris:
Which is so many people during this time.
Ryan:
Yes, and everyone… I’m not alone in this.
Chris:
Of course.
Ryan:
But I let myself… And what was weird was, I still was working out but I was just in a very dark place. It just was tough to be optimistic, it was tough to be energized because it’s like I have this vision and I feel like there’s an anchor-
Chris:
Right, it’s just holding you down.
Ryan:
And I can’t get to the air. It’s like my mouth is constantLy… Each new wave is putting water… I just can’t get above the surface. And then maybe I’d sell one policy and then it would go a week without selling another one, and you’re like oh my God. People may not realize this, but you don’t make a lot of money selling insurance. You have to sell a lot of insurance to make money. You don’t get rich on one policy, so like okay, I made a couple hundred bucks, great.
Chris:
Great, I got to keep going.
Ryan:
I got to sell like 1,000 more.
Chris:
But did that give you anything, those couple, or no?
Ryan:
No, it was tough. Summer started to help, right? The sun comes out, started to go outside. That started to help, and then life started to come back, I mean, naturally July, August, but it wasn’t until really August or September that we started to kind of hit our stride. Also, I am alone.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And I’m self-funding.
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
So it’s just my bank account going down, I’m all by myself, I have no one to call. Everyone’s kind of dealing with the same thing, so it’s not like everyone can give you great advice. Yeah, it was some pretty dark times. I mean, again, the reason that my wife and I think make such good partners is that, as much as at the moment I may not appreciate it, she is able to give me that candid feedback of, “Pull yourself together.”
Chris:
Yeah.
Ryan:
And really, you said life’s a hailstorm and you’re looking for the sun and you need to take it, I kind of think that… The way I view it, and maybe philosophically I have an issue with just in general the way our culture is currently moving, but life always sucks. There’s always something that can suck, and there’s always something that can be awesome, and you have the choice to choose which one you have, right? So I feel like right now there’s this general disposition that we can just make excuses because things are hard. Things have always been hard.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
When has it ever not been hard? I don’t know that I’ve lived a day where I was like, “This is frigging easy.”
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
That wasn’t the case, that’s never been the case. So maybe there are a few humans in life where things have been easy, but I don’t even know that that’s the case, I think it just looks like it is from Instagram or whatever. But you get to choose. You either get to choose that you’re going to look at this and you’re going to let it beat you or not. So my kid is playing travel baseball now, which is awesome, I love baseball.
Chris:
That’s awesome.
Ryan:
I played baseball.
Chris:
Coming from a baseball player.
Ryan:
It’s an enormous commitment which was I not mentally prepared-
Chris:
Are you nuts on the sidelines yet or no?
Ryan:
No, I-
Chris:
I can see you just sitting there freaking out.
Ryan:
So I’m coaching, which is nice. I love it, I love coaching, I love the kids, I love being part of it. I can definitely see how people get a little bonkers though. I would love to believe that because I unfortunately think the people that get really crazy never actually played, which is the problem.
Chris:
Right, right, right.
Ryan:
When you see people-
Chris:
Right, those super guys.
Ryan:
The guys who I know who played, they’re more measured, they just get it, they get what’s going on.
Chris:
They understand the process, right.
Ryan:
Being a freaking idiot doesn’t… You didn’t get to the next level in any of these sports by being an idiot. So when you see those people you’re like that person’s doing that because they never really got there and don’t know what it’s like. That’s a whole… Maybe that is a microcosm for life. But like I said to my kid, we started in January with practices and we’ve been practicing every since January. And in January, he was terrible, he’s seven years old. He couldn’t catch, he couldn’t barely throw, he couldn’t barely hit, right? But he committed himself to it. And maybe it was like a month or so ago, he had a regression. Now again, he’s seven, so the fact that he is functioning on the baseball field is amazing. But he had a regression and I could tell he was getting really frustrated, and he’s saying, “Dad, that, and this.” And I said, “Look man…” Because I treat my son like an adult even though he’s seven.
Chris:
Right. We do that too, to a fault sometimes I feel like.
Ryan:
Well, we listen to hardcore gangster rap, we just got into… I’m kind of layering him through, we’re in the dirty south right now.
Chris:
It’s funny too because it’s really… I don’t want to digress but my kid got this thing and it was like name your favorite musicians in class. He was like, “Dad, so we were talking about it and I’m just like Jay-Z and whatever, and everyone’s like, ‘Who’s Jay-Z?'” I’m like, “That’s my boy right there.”
Ryan:
They know like the kid pop version of whatever.
Chris:
That’s my boy right there.
Ryan:
They got to choose walkout songs and Duke chose Regulate by Warren G, and I was like, “Yes dude, yes.” Just because to go… That was such a good era for rap. But it doesn’t matter.
Chris:
So you were saying that you talk to him like-
Ryan:
Yeah, so I said to him, I go, “Look dude, you can let this beat you and define you, or you can step the fuck up and go do it.” And I literally said that to him, I said those words to him. I said, “This is your choice. If you want to… However you want to be, I’m your dad, I’m here. I’ll coach you. You want to go to the park every day and have me hit grounders at you, I will go to the park. If you want to go two times a week, I’ll go two times a week. It is your choice, you can be as good as you want to be. You have to choose it through. And there are going to be days that you can’t catch a ground ball for whatever reason. It’s hitting your arms, it’s hitting your legs, and you’re frustrated, and the field is wet, and blah, blah, blah. And those days are going to happen, and we just get those days and we show up again.”
Chris:
Right, but he has you to go to if he feels in that place.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
You have provided a space, and you said, “Look man, do this,” but he knows he can go to you if he’s feeling… If he gets into a rut. Hopefully he now knows he can go to you. Sometimes as an adult, like you were saying you had a beer, then it was two, then it was whatever, who do you turn to?
Ryan:
You have to have friends. It has to be friends.
Chris:
Right. It has to be like a support, right? It can’t be like… I talk this a lot to my people on this show, you can’t do it alone.
Ryan:
No.
Chris:
It’s impossible. I don’t care how much money you have, how big you are, there has to be something that you look for, for inspiration or otherwise you’ll just languish, there’s nothing there.
Ryan:
So to this point, to continue in the story, August-September we started writing some policies, things are starting to pick up. I took on… I did a small friends and family round, which is really to bring on a couple strategic partners, and I took on three individuals. They all came in in January, and I… If you were to ask me when my business really started, it was when they came in. When I added these three people who I… The money wasn’t what I really needed. What I needed was someone to call.
Chris:
Right, you needed like-
Ryan:
I needed to call someone and go, “I have this idea. Am I crazy?”
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
“Is this a crazy idea? Should I… I have this priority and this priority, which one… I’m thinking this one, what are you thinking? Let’s talk through it.” And all three of them have slightly different expertises, and viewpoints, and mentalities, and connections.
Chris:
Which is what you need.
Ryan:
And today we’re moving into our seed round, which is very exciting. It’s a huge step up for us where it’s time to go for escape velocity and start to really grow this business to where I want it to be. It would not be possible, not like oh maybe, like not possible, Rogue might not even exist if I hadn’t taken these guys on. Simply for the emotional part of it, to be able to call them and say, “Matt, Chris, or CJ…,” those are the three names. For whichever one I think has the insight, “This is going through my brain. What am I missing? What’s happening here? How does this work? What do you think about this?” And just to have them give me honest feedback, and to just sometimes be able to call and just bitch.
Chris:
Yeah, yeah.
Ryan:
Just [inaudible 00:45:25].
Chris:
And know you’re getting candid responses back.
Ryan:
Yes.
Chris:
I think you’re also, knowing where we worked together, you’re going to have a bunch of smart people in the room. If you’re not going to listen to those smart people in the room, you just have smart people in the room.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
That’s a mistake. You can’t surround yourself with really, really smart people and have them be a part of your team, or be a part of it and just have them there to never listen to them and to never engage with them. You have to be able to listen and learn, and listen to opposing opinions and be okay with that. And it seems like that’s where you’re going. So even in your world where you’re like, “Maybe I’m not a good employee and I got to do this by myself,” you still have to be open and are open to other people’s inputs.
Ryan:
You can’t by a Thoroughbred and not expect it to run.
Chris:
Right. Right, exactly. Yeah, that’s great. That’s a good… Yeah, yeah.
Ryan:
I feel like on two separate occasions I’ve been a vanity hire.
Chris:
You think so?
Ryan:
I think so. I think that… And this is going to sound egotistical, I don’t mean it to be, I think because of my online presence, because of the way I present myself to someone who maybe is… I think-
Chris:
Can’t do those things?
Ryan:
Looks and it and goes, “Wow, this would be great to have part of the team.”
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And then they get me in and they’re like, “Oh, but now he’s got opinions?”
Chris:
Right, now I got to control that.
Ryan:
Now I have to listen to this?
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
“I’m not interested in that.”
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
It’s like I’m all for being a team player, and I think that I can be. To be honest with you, I love being a team player. One of the mistakes about Rogue is, in a perfect world I would have had my wife or someone like her, like some detailed type A driver, as a business partner, who would have been… And in that world, I think we would be even farther along if I had taken a business partner, right, and formed this company together with them, because I think I can play in a team. But to your point, I personally do not have the personality, and I know a lot of people like this, they… If you’re going to ask me to be on the team, you’re going to get all of it.
Chris:
Right, you’re getting me.
Ryan:
You’re getting all of it. And not just me, there’s a lot of people like this where I think… I had a friend of mine, she’s one of the most creative, interesting people. She does triathlons, and she’s super creative. She was hired to be the chief marketing officer of a company, and then they didn’t want her to do video. I’m like she’s like the video… When she’s on video, she lights it up.
Chris:
You know what you’ve got there.
Ryan:
She’s like a female Casey Neistat. I mean, she’s just got the camera moves, and the tricks, and the lighting, and the… All this stuff, and great at the messaging. And I’m like, “But then you’re going to tell her not to do video?”
Chris:
It’s like Mariano Rivera, like don’t throw the cutter.
Ryan:
Hey, go play right field.
Chris:
“Hey, Mariano Rivera, go play right field and don’t complain about it.” I don’t understand.
Ryan:
So I think as a leader, it’s important to know… So there’s a bunch of lessons here, right? As an individual, if you’re going to join a team and you feel like that kind of person, you’re on that side of the whatever chart you’re on, understand… When you join, be very diligent in figuring out where your voice is going to fall, and how it works, and be comfortable. If you get a feel for look, we want to hear your voice but you’re not going to get a vote, at least today, you have to join and be comfortable with that.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And then maybe hey, you’ll work your way in, right?
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
Right? Okay. Or say, “Hey look, thank you so much for this opportunity but I really want to be part of the decision making team, that’s where I’m at in my career.” What you can’t do is go in knowing what you’re going to get and then complain about it.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
That’s where the problem is.
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
And I made that mistake a couple times, not properly vetting the opportunity to understand-
Chris:
Right, understanding the situation.
Ryan:
Understanding the situation.
Chris:
Right, right.
Ryan:
And then when I came in, I was like, “Okay, here I am.”
Chris:
“Here I am.”
Ryan:
And they were like, “Yeah, but we don’t really want that.”
Chris:
And they were like, “Well, we don’t really want that.”
Ryan:
Yeah, we don’t want that. And then as a leader, the other side of it is just as true. When you bring someone in, you have to let them know immediately and set a standard, and tell them up front where you’re at today, here’s where you fall, and here’s how much of your voice gets added to the conversation.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And then there’s either more upside or there’s not more upside.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And I recently had this with the very first person in the US. My very first hire was from the Philippines, he’s awesome, still with us. But then my second hire, she lives here locally and she came in as an account manager. It was clear to me in like two minutes that she was not an account manager. She’s going to, and she has, moved to our operations role. She’s just driver, detail oriented, has no qualms asking questions, has no qualms getting stuff done. I could have forced her to be an account manager, I could have done that, or just take this person and move them… Like right person, right seat.
Ryan:
Anyone who’s ever… I don’t know if anyone’s into EOS. We operate… The Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS system, from the book Traction in our office, which I absolutely love and would highly recommend. I’m happy to answer questions about that for anyone who’s… Afterwards, not here. They talk about their right person, right seat, right person, right seat. You can have the right person in the wrong seat and you can have the wrong person in the right seat, but you got to figure out what seats you need and then find the right person for that seat. The wrong person in the right seat is a bad fit.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And she was the right person in the wrong seat as an account manager.
Chris:
But that’s okay. It takes the leader to recognize that you have them in the wrong seat.
Ryan:
Yeah, it doesn’t mean if you do that, everything’s broken.
Chris:
Right, correct.
Ryan:
It just means you have to recalibrate.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And to force that person to stay there would only be a grind.
Chris:
Correct.
Ryan:
And it’s not that she couldn’t do the job, but we wouldn’t be maxing her value. And now there’s limitless upside to where she could go. So I think… And again, I don’t know that I would have known that if I hadn’t experienced it on her side multiple times.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
Some of it’s just experience, man.
Chris:
It takes a little bit of empathy too. That’s the other part about being a human, you got to be able to recognize and go there, and understand, put yourself there and see what it was like.
Ryan:
I’m not the most empathetic human in the world, I know that about myself. But I do think that I care about people, but I struggle with… My wife, she accuses me of being a little… Not always the most empathetic, because I am more of the, “We all have shit, go figure it out. Figure it out, if it’s what you really want.”
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
I just don’t like complaining and excuse making.
Chris:
Right, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be empathetic, right? I guess it just-
Ryan:
I’m sure I’m capable of it.
Chris:
Maybe it’s your definition of what empathy is.
Ryan:
It could be.
Chris:
But again, I’m with you too, I think we reach a balance in life… And I know we’re coming to time so I want to make sure I get it closed. But I think we’re coming to a point in life where people are more allowed and capable to talk about their problems and their issues, and as someone who’s really into mental health, I love that. There’s a balance though. You should be able and have a forum to talk about how you’re feeling, that should be respected, and you should be able to follow that, get the help you need, and use that to guide you. But you can’t use it as a way to just withdraw yourself from the world, from competition, from society. I think there’s a balance we have to strike. It’s a tough conversation because it’s very politically charged and there’s a lot… You got to be PC about it.
Ryan:
But you don’t have to be.
Chris:
But you don’t have to be. You don’t have to be. But I think that there’s an interesting balance there, especially as our kids get older they’re going to be in this world where it’s going to be like, “You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.”
Ryan:
I want to touch on this point.
Chris:
You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.
Ryan:
I want to touch on this.
Chris:
And I don’t know if I agree with that, but we got to find a balance somewhere. It can’t be like, “Don’t talk about that, your problems, hold it all in, be a man.” I’m not there, but I’m also not, “Yeah, give up whenever you want,” I’m also not there. So there’s-
Ryan:
Have problems and win.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
Because we all have problems.
Chris:
Correct.
Ryan:
So this is where… Again, I said this to my son. I have two sons so I said this to both of them, they were in the car. I said, “You guys will someday realize the competitive advantage you have against all these other kids because I’m teaching you how to be competitive and win.”
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
Because I’ll tell you right now, competitive Alpha humans, not just men, and women, or again, whoever you choose to self-identify, competitive humans are going to be the exception not the rule in the foreseeable future, because of the way we’re raising them. Where, “Oh, I have an excuse.” “Okay, no problem, you’re good.” You could say oh, that everyone gets a trophy stuff, I see it every day. I see it on the baseball field, there is a clear delineation between the kids who can make excuses and get away with stuff at home and the kids that can’t.
Chris:
Yeah, I see it too.
Ryan:
And the kids that can’t, they are outpacing the kids that can… Everybody makes excuses, I make excuses. The difference is, I may make an excuse and then I still have to go do the thing.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And when you aren’t held to… “Oh man, I’m tired, I feel like crap.”
Chris:
You can’t just pack in it and be like, “You know what, I’m not going to work for the next couple weeks because I’m…” Yeah, no.
Ryan:
You have to go do the work. And I said to my… Again, I talk to my kids a lot. I basically work and talk to my kids, but I’m trying to raise young men who are going to be valuable to society and will live lives that are fulfilling to them. Because I’m a big Jordan Peterson fan, we’ve talked about him. I think your life has to have meaning, and I think a big issue today with a lot of people, and the reason they’re so unhappy, is their life lacks meaning, and I think part of the reason it lacks meaning is because we aren’t held to anything.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
No one’s holding us accountable. So if you’re not accountable to anything or anyone, and you can make any excuse in the world to not have to do something, your life doesn’t have meaning and then all it is, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Chris:
And people are so into what other people are doing.
Ryan:
Yes.
Chris:
And they’re trying to get meaning from other people’s being.
Ryan:
Yes.
Chris:
And that’s a terrible thing.
Ryan:
And it’s terrible.
Chris:
That’s a terrible thing.
Ryan:
And you can’t outsource your meaning. And your meaning could be your garden in your backyard, or it could be you really like to work out, or it could be you love to read, or you love to write, or it could be helping people. There are 10 bazillion different things that can give your life meaning, and they don’t have to be competitive, it just has to be a thing. But what bothers me today in general, and I think this is an enormous competitive advantage for those who can cultivate this in and of themselves, is find something that gives you meaning and then hold yourself accountable to it. You’re all going to have excuses, your back’s going to hurt, you don’t feel like working out. That’s all right, go figure something out. Show up, even if you just walk around the gym for a while, be there, do something.
Chris:
Yep.
Ryan:
This idea, this swipe right society, and I don’t mean to get political or whatever, I just think this is the competitive advantage of our day, because there’s access to information everything.
Chris:
Correct.
Ryan:
You can have… It’s basically free and it’s everywhere. There’s tremendous opportunity from a job perspective, and now that we can work from home, or remote, or overseas, I mean you can do pretty much whatever you want.
Chris:
How are you going to make… How are you going to…
Ryan:
How are you going to separate yourself, and I think that where competition has been somehow labeled as toxic masculinity, I’m like, “That’s fine, keep doing that.” You know what? The people who embrace competition… And I don’t mean competition like kick someone else down, I mean holding yourself to a standard.
Chris:
Right.
Ryan:
And that healthy regard to what competition is, you are separating yourself from everyone, you will be the exception. And those are going to be the people that lead our country. I just feel like we’re doing ourselves a disservice by making everything so easy. It’s not supposed to be easy.
Chris:
No, it’s not supposed to be easy.
Ryan:
It’s supposed to be hard.
Chris:
There’s a day where something is going to happen with this stuff where it’s like our social something, imagine it just goes away or something goes away, what do we have left?
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
We have a bunch of people that don’t know how to do anything.
Ryan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And that’s really scary. And again, I know we’re getting deep and real philosophical, but we are up to an hour so I want to make sure before we close… People are listening to this, they’re like, “Yo that guy Ryan, he’s a cool dude.” Where can I find you, show… Give us some info. Where can we learn about your business, where can we learn more about you, listen to some of your content?
Ryan:
So I have an insurance podcast if you’re interested in that, called ryanhanley.com, it’s called The Ryan Hanley Show. You can check Rogue Risk out at roguerisk.com if you’re interested in that. LinkedIn and Twitter, I try to… I don’t do that much on Facebook, or Instagram’s really just pictures of my kids and stuff for my mom and dad. But business stuff is Twitter and LinkedIn. If you search Ryan Hanley, you’ll find me on one of those two platforms. If anyone has any questions or whatever, happy to… If you just want to troll me because you disagree with my viewpoint, that’s fine too. You don’t be the first.
Chris:
Definitely troll Ryan, everybody out there. And just want to remind everybody that we’re going to have all the information that we just talked about and links for Ryan’s stuff in the show notes. Make sure you go there, subscribe, check us out, leave a review. Man, it was great Ryan, thanks so much for coming aboard man, appreciate you man.
Ryan:
Thank you.