Stop Following the Script: Build the Employee Benefits Agency You Actually Want

The straight-talk summary

Owning an employee benefits agency doesn’t automatically make you an entrepreneur. It comes down to mindset and how you run the business. Franchise-style owners stick to the carrier’s playbook, while true entrepreneurs take control, take risks, and intentionally design every part of their business. Moving from franchisee to entrepreneur requires vision, hard decisions, and often, a strong team and community like Goose to help carry the load.

Are benefits and insurance agency owners entrepreneurs?  

Kevin and I have discussed and debated this idea extensively over the years. Technically speaking, by definition, yes: Most everyone who owns a business is an entrepreneur. 

My answer? I think it depends on the definition and the individuals.  

According to the Cambridge Dictionary:  

Someone who starts their own business, especially when this involves seeing a new opportunity.  

And to Dictionary.com 

A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so. 

However, when you dig into the nuances of it, there are different categories of people who own businesses. Investopedia expands on the idea, saying:  

The business idea usually encompasses a new product or service rather than an existing business model. 

"Many entrepreneurs want to create positive disruption—calling a bluff on the status quo," says Jessica Sublett, President and CEO of Bounce Innovation Hub in Akron, Ohio. 

Entrepreneurial ventures target high returns with an equally high level of uncertainty. The entrepreneur is willing to risk their financial security and career, spending time as well as capital on an uncertain venture. They arrange for the necessary capital, raw materials, manufacturing locations, and skilled employees. Marketing, sales, and distribution are other important aspects that are controlled by the entrepreneur. 

The risk is still carried by the entrepreneur even if some of these functions are outsourced. This makes entrepreneurship different from inheriting and/or running an existing business, working for a startup or entrepreneur for a salary, being a commissioned agent, or selling already available goods or services as a franchisee or dealership. 

What is a franchise-model owner? 

Some people are more owners who follow the rules. We’ve often referred to these as “franchise model” agencies, similar to what Investopedia defines above. These owners rely heavily on the carriers for their products, business model, and back-office support. 

When we started coaching agencies in 2009, there was a strong contingency of franchise-model agencies across the industry. Though people called themselves entrepreneurs, we didn't buy it because they were completely beholden to the carriers. They often operated based on the suggestions and operational support of the insurance companies.  

Whether working at a carrier or an agency, I saw the franchise model alive and well. The carriers would pull lists of businesses they wanted to write and give them to the agencies, expecting the agency salespeople to do the prospecting and place the business with them. They provided carrier-branded materials that the producers used in their sales calls. If the new business didn’t come in fast enough, they’d send reps out to door-knock and go on meetings with the agency producers.  

🤔 It’s hard to be independent when working at the behest of a single carrier.  

So much has changed in a short amount of time. Many agencies have sold, and many of those were franchise-model businesses. When things get tough, someone offers money, and they take it.

What kinds of owners take risks? 

However, there’s also a different group of owners out there: The ones who are more spirited and risk-taking, preferring to break whatever rules are in their way and not relying on any one organization as their model or income source.  The “gotta-do-things-my-way" folks have a different attitude.  

For them, it's incentivizing to dig deeper into their businesses when the offers come through. They know if they add another one, two, five, or ten million, their offer becomes a generational-level buyout instead of a retirement plan. Why give 65 cents of every dollar away year after year when you can keep it yourself? It may seem daunting to keep going when the buyout is an easy out, but that’s not what drives this group. They want to make a difference and do it their own way.  

The thing about buyout offers is that they’re always going to come in. Your aggregators, roll-ups, and PE-fueled firms want well-run agencies with good clients on their books. It’s no secret: They’re salespeople selling you on selling your business.  

Here’s my full disclosure moment 

I get so frustrated watching agencies sell when they have a perfectly good business.  

But I get it.  

Running a business is really hard, and not everyone is ready for or interested in doing all that thinking, designing, and executing. Some of us are fueled by it, and some are overwhelmed. Being an entrepreneur is not for everyone.  

In fact, it’s not for most people.  

We watch people who come into our Goose community as "franchise-type" businesses, not necessarily by choice, but by circumstance. For those who have the entrepreneurial inkling, we watch them transform into full-blown “my-way-or-the-highway" business owners, and it’s so cool to watch! 

We also see a strongly dedicated group of entrepreneurs among the folks who held their agencies through the great sell-off. And also, those outside their earn-out agreements who are now returning to do it over again.  

They’re committed and want to do things differently. They may not know what that means in the moment, but they feel it and want to find the way. 

THIS is what gets me excited and jazzed up to work with people. 

How do you shift from franchisee to entrepreneur? 

When you shift from selling products and acting on someone else's behalf, you need to examine every. single. aspect. of your business. (Please note that this is not a distinction between fully insured and self-funded; it's a mindset, attitude, and culture.) 

As you realize that you have control over everything that happens in the organization, you have to take control and decide how you want it to operate. You must intentionally grow and operate the business rather than letting it happen randomly.  

It takes dedication to envisioning, deciding, documenting, executing, and enforcing. That's why I always say that running a business and being an entrepreneur is HARD. Phoning it in is relatively easy and doable. Making all these minute decisions is a whole other game.  

And that, my friends, is why we started Q4i and launched our Goose community.  

Because doing it all on your own is not only hard, but frankly, it's a waste of time and energy. When you're in a community like Goose, you get ideas ready to go, templates, advice, and a peer group to talk about the ideas and help you flesh them out and get them ready for go-time.  

I absolutely love this transition we're seeing in agency ownership. The biggest challenge we see now is the distinction between pouring your “extra” time into the content end of your business vs. the business end of the business.  

If you spend all your time focused on the content (the products you sell), you will not have time to work on the culture, values, team development, processes, etc.  

This is the big rub of the entrepreneur. How do you have enough time in the day and brain power to make it all happen?  

You must split duties to grow and scale 

I talked with Chelsea Ryckis of Ethos Benefits about this, and we dissected how they’re doing it. She is able to focus her time and attention on sales, marketing, and internal operations. Her partner and husband, Donovan, and the team can focus their time on developing client plans, contracts, and client service. This is not to say these are done at the exclusion of the other; they're not.  

When you have two people in your company, you can, and should, split the duties, and then you can get it all done. When you’re trying to go the whole roadshow on your own, it eventually becomes impossible to keep up with everything, and something has to give. 

Does this mean you need your spouse to join you in business? Absolutely not. But you need to have people on your team you trust, and bit by bit, you can entrust them with more responsibilities of running the business.  

Maybe running the culture end of the business is not your jam. There’s probably someone there who desperately wants to spice things up and take charge of building a team culture. Give it a go! Stay intimately involved but let them run with it.  

Or maybe you’ve always been a fully insured shop, and you have someone on your team who wants to move in the self-funded direction. Instead of resisting that shift and running them out of the agency, create a plan to help them get the education they need to do it the right way and create a more robust practice that can weather industry ups and downs.  

Your business is personal 

Owning and running a business is a deeply personal endeavor. How you choose to show up for that business makes it what it is.

Think about what you value most and prioritize your efforts.

The result may lead you to dig deeper into your business, whether with your current team or adding someone new to help you run the show. If that’s the case, we want to talk to you. The Goose platform and community are a phenomenal support system for employee benefits agencies that want to scale their businesses.

Having people to help you lift the load is invaluable.