“It’s not what happens to you that creates your unique future, it’s how you react to it, as a VICTIM or with a PRAGMATIC POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE (PPMA).” — Al Diamond
As many readers know, I travel to insurance agencies —A LOT OF INSURANCE AGENCIES – and have for over four decades. I’ve found that I can find out more in a day talking to the owners and staff of an agency than I can in weeks of ZOOM meetings with reams of documentation. You can’t FEEL personalities on the phone or online. Want to test this?? Try building client relationships resulting in long-term customers online!!
I visited two agencies back-to-back recently and was struck by the difference in personalities of the agencies resulting from the very different personalities of the owners of each business.
The first agency owner (62 years old) was asking me to Value the agency for sale. The owner was at the end of his rope. The Pandemic accelerated his decision to retire. He felt he had no one in his agency to whom to perpetuate his agency. “The staff probably wasn’t interested and, anyway, none of them could afford to buy him out,” was his ready answer to my question about internal succession. He had several agents ask him about buying the agency and he didn’t trust them to offer him a fair price. At the same time that he touted how long the agency had been in place and how profitable it was for the carriers, he claimed that the economy was tanking. After all, he continued to lose customers every year and that could be the only answer. He was frightened about himself, his staff and his customers contracting and passing COVID in his agency (even though everyone was seated far apart and his history showed that few customers came into his building).
It didn’t take me more than fifteen minutes to realize that my client was a VICTIM. He blamed the staff, the customers, the fickle and uncaring carriers, the economy and the COVID bogyman for “forcing” him to sell and retire. In reality he had lost the HEART FOR THE GAME (if he ever had it) and was seeking relief from the accelerating downward spiral toward failure.
The loss of the HEART FOR THE GAME is the one of only two good reasons that the sale of an agency is warranted unless the owner has a different career in mind. The other reason is HEALTH ISSUES – God’s way of telling you to attend to the REAL priorities of life – family and friends – instead of any type of business. Otherwise, there are better ways of transitioning ownership in ways that benefit successors and perpetuators alike.
Once I realized that the owner had decided to take the “Pity Train”, I agreed and provided the valuation service and helped him select the best acquisition candidate that would provide the most financial security while caring for the agent’s staff and customers.
I left that agency and headed for my next client (in the same geographic area) who was 75 years old and hired me to help him develop a Succession Plan. The words “COVID” and “Pandemic” never came up. The agency continued to grow, although at a diminished rate during the last two years and was now coming back nicely.
This agent felt that his internal successors appeared quite ready to take ownership. He wanted confirmation of that and didn’t know how to transition the agency securely while satisfying his own long-term goals which included continuing to service his customers and write new business (at a diminished rate while he enjoyed more time off). His goal was to get rid of the troublesome ownership duties that consumed so much time and was progressively less satisfying after so many years. He wanted to continue to enjoy the “fun” part of the insurance business and hand off the management role to someone else.
I quickly recognized that this agent had a PRAGMATIC POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE. We will also Value the agency and will establish a long-term relationship to assure an easy and transparent transition of ownership and management of the agency.
A VICTIM is an attitude, not an injured party. Having a VICTIM mentality has physical attributes because most VICTIM mentalities are also physically compromised. If you feel like a victim, you are more likely to get sick. You are also more likely to have poor diet and exercise habits because you feel “like you will get ill anyway because you have been exposed…”. Moreover, the VICTIM mentality tends to look for bad luck and, even when good things happen, the victim then expects the next result to be negative. The VICTIM always points outward to blame anything that goes wrong on someone or some condition outside of his control. The VICTIM never blames himself. To the victim, anyone with a positive mental attitude is not to be trusted because they can’t see the victim’s definition of reality.
Stay away from VICTIMS. Once they are set in their ways it is extremely difficult to convert them to a PMA or to a PPMA.
Be careful, as well, of the “cock-eyed optimists,” the purveyors of a Positive Mental Attitude in everything they see. They will try to ignore the weeds and only see the flowers in the garden. That’s all well and good, except the weeds are more aggressive and will eventually overgrow the beautiful flowers. The Pragmatic Positive Mental Attitude” will acknowledge the beauty of the flowers and set to the task of weeding the garden to keep them healthy. They find the most likely solution to anything that gets in the way of success and constantly triggers ACTIONS that will turn the results in his direction.
The second client was a long-time proponent of PPMA (but didn’t realize it). The most prevalent difference between him and Client 1 was that he was HAPPY and satisfied with his life. He felt lucky to be in America where he could start by selling auto and homeowners’ policies at a kitchen table and become a millionaire earning a fine living, raising a great family, and having a successful business that he can transition to the next generation while supplementing his income for the rest of his life. While Client 1 bemoaned that he would only get XXX for his agency, the second client celebrated that he could earn the kind of money he continued to generate and still have XXX to sponsor his later years (generally the same dollar amount for each agency). IT’S NOT THE ACTIONS OR EVEN THE RESULTS THAT SPELL THE DIFFERENCE – ITS ATTITUDE.