I’ve been thing a lot lately about the concept RFM and how it applies to the insurance industry. If you’re not familiar with RFM it stands for:   Recency – When was the last interaction with your customer? Frequency – How many policies do they have with you? Monetary Value – What is the value of that customer?   RFM is a way to analyze and segment your customer base for the purposes of marketing to them to increase your business.   I’m going to ADD one more term that I think is also important, “potential”. In scientific terms, potential energy is energy that is stored up. For the independent insurance agent, potential can be described Read more [...]

  Every once in a while I miss my chemistry background. I had some free time this weekend so I decided to pull out my quantum chemistry textbook and start reading. It’s been about 15 years since I studied the subject and I like to keep my mind sharp.   The opening chapter talked about blackbody radiation. If you’ve ever cooked on an electric stove you’ve experienced it. As the metal coil heats up, it turns a bright orange color. In the early 1900s scientists were trying to explain this behavior with Newtonian physics. Unfortunately, whatever formula they came up with didn’t agree with the experimental results.   Max Planck was finally able to solve the problem. Read more [...]

Last Saturday was my son's last lacrosse game of the season. It was a new experience for both of us. I agreed to coach the 1/2 team, a group of about twelve 7 and 8 year olds. I really didn't know what I was doing. I hadn't played lacrosse since college (over 15 years ago).   I decided to do it mainly because I thought it would be a great way to spend time with my son Grey. I didn't realize how much I would learn.   As we drove home from the game, I had one of those heart to heart talks with Grey. I asked him if he gave 100%. We began talking about life and the fact that nothing is really "easy". You have to put effort into getting better. You have to force yourself to do things sometimes. Read more [...]

I love patterns. They allow me to recognize something I’ve seen before and give me confidence in dealing with “new” situations. It seems each week I’m confronted with a new “theme” or pattern. This week’s theme involved various areas of our business that were in transition. I noticed a commonality between situations where our company was transitioning from one thing to another. A case in point is our digital marketing tools. If you’ve ever been involved in software development you know that there is a need to maintain and improve a current version with updates and bugs patches. At the same time you must dedicate resources to creating your next version. Read more [...]

What does your brand, either personal or organizational demonstrate or communicate? Mark Sanborn’s book, The Encore Effect gives us a list: •1. Commitment •2. Professionalism •3. Skills •4. Values •5. Character Let’s take values for example. According to Sanborn, values are “those beliefs that person holds most dear”. What you hold most dear will eventually come to the surface and you will be known for those values. You can't hide it. I suggest evaluating both your personal brand and company brand using these five criteria. What does your personal commitment look like? What skills do you have? What are your company's values? Taking an honest Read more [...]

I watched an extremely interesting program on the science channel this weekend. The program was called “Connected: The Power of Six Degrees”. It explained how seemingly unconnected components of a complex network are connected. The scientists used the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game to confirm their theory. That is, every actor in Hollywood can be connected to every other actor in no more than 6 steps. What was even more interesting was the fact that this phenomenon could be described using fairly simple math equations. The researchers confirmed their equations with many other organically growing networks like the spread of disease, the World Wide Web and neural networks. This Read more [...]