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As an agency, we are experiencing something we have not encountered at any time in our forty year history. Allow me to explain. Over the last four years we have raced from an agency averaging 10 million dollars a year in revenue, to a 25 million dollar a year agency. That growth has come from a growing group of agents learning how to make six figures selling life insurance exclusively. We do not aggressively recruit from the ranks of our competitors, but we don’t hide our success. Agents are finding SLS, and leaving other places.
As a result, we are noticing very specific and interesting “reviews” popping up all over the internet. The reviews are typically laced with bitterness, yet sprinkled with truth. In the interest of full disclosure, it is possible that some of these reviews could also have authentically originated from some disgruntled agent who failed within our system, but we are leaning towards my earlier theory, this is why.
Based on national averages most insurance agents fail. The ones that succeed define that success as making $30,000 a year or less. This happens because an agent gets an “GA” or “street level” contact (high contract), receives very little training and support, exhausts their warm market, starts buying expensive leads, gets a part time job so they can afford to buy the leads, has their lead and gasoline expenses exceed their profits, then just when they start to see light at the end of a tunnel, chargebacks deliver the final death blow to their career. So if you like “warnings”, there you go:) If you join SLS, we won’t allow you to fail.
From the minute you walk in our door, we let you know that you are an independent contractor, and are not required to do a single thing we say. We also tell you that we have a proven program, and everyone who follows it makes six figures plus. Herein lies the problem. A successful entrepreneur works their business “like a traditional job”, they create structure for themselves. So yes, if you volunteer for acceptance into the advanced sales program you will receive training every morning on how to succeed, and yes, you will receive help every Friday (Support is provided by Leadership for scheduling appts from 9am-9pm, but agents only attend for as long as they personally need to, until they have their week scheduled.) We don’t apologize for putting a system in place to answer questions, train, motivate, encourage, and help agents to overcome real world obstacles to their success.
Our leads are the best you can buy in the industry. We own our own lead company. We don’t sell leads to our agents or any others. That means we can’t make a profit unless we give high quality, free leads to our agents. The opening line of each lead card may vary, to generate consumer interest, but the body of text of every lead discusses some aspect of life insurance or final needs planning. This is another way that we support or agents, in addition to personal coaching, proprietary products, and numerous incentives.
In short, you can’t rebel against all the the structure and tools that help our agents to become the highest paid in the industry, then cry on the way out door about why you failed. And not to be petty, but the point about route optimization was just silly. We don’t “track” agents. A software company was offering some useful technology to independent agents for $99 a month, to help them save time and gas by identifying the most effecient routes to visit their clients. Our agency saw the benefits, and negotiated a group rate to provide a 90% monthly discount for our agents. The same software can be used in other environments to monitor commercial drivers, or estimate delivery time for a package. We did not invest in, nor do we utilize that level of functionality. If an agent chooses to stay home and not make money, we don’t need to track that, the zero on the sales report makes a lack of proficiency pretty obvious.
This final point is where we are offended. We hold ethics in the highest regard. We invite anyone to an open debate, no hiding behind anonymous aliases allowed, to prove that they reported ethics violations, and we turned a blind eye. In fact let me start the transparency. The author of this response is Henry Stewart, President of Sales & Marketihg, and Chief Visionary Officer. If you are truly a former agent, and have a legitimate complaint about our agency, sales practices, or ethics, please call me and I promise a fair and meaningful dialogue. If you are some competitor posting cowardly and misleading propaganda, you are wasting your time. We aren’t a “train wreck” we are a freight train on the way to 100 million a year, and our best advice to you is to get off the track.
