How Can a New Podcast Studio and a Dumpster TV Rescue Inspire Your Insurance Agency?

Scott Howell (0:01)

What do you feel like insurance agents need to do in terms of branding themselves, their agencies, the carriers they represent?

SPEAKER_2 (0:08)

When you are marketing something you're not in control of, you're not in control.

Scott Howell (0:13)

The very last thing I do, I get agreement from them, and then I end the call with making damn sure whatever I say I'm going to do gets done.

Bradley Flowers (0:25)

How many hours did your team spend last week on policy reviews? Quote comparisons? Lost run extractions? Now multiply that by what your producers cost per hour. That's the number that out market eliminates. The reason that I love Ascend is they're the only vendor focused on helping agents automate all of their manual finances and accounting practices, which is really the boring stuff, but that's really where the rubber meets the road in terms of profitability to your agency.

Scott Howell (0:51)

You know, we're going to write business with carriers that make it easy for us to write business with.

Bradley Flowers (0:57)

If the conditions have to be right for you to succeed, your success is conditional. It's not real success.

Scott Howell (1:03)

Play like champions, man. Here we go.

Insurance agents from around the world, welcome to The Insurance Guys Podcast. My name is Scott Howell, your fearless host and leader, Insurance Agency owner and insurance evangelist for I Protect Insurance and Financial Services based out of Huntsville, Alabama. And before we get started on today's episode, please help me welcome, he is a 6'3 sophomore from Mobile, Alabama, Parade First Team All-American Rivals 5-Star Recruit. He is a fantastic insurance agent and a great American. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and welcome the incomparable Mr. Bradley Flowers. How are you, Bradley?

Bradley Flowers (1:48)

Other than the fact that I get to hang out with you after not seeing you for several months, I pretty much dread every podcast session.

Scott Howell (1:57)

What?

Bradley Flowers (1:58)

Today is the first one where I have been very excited. Awesome, man. I'm looking forward to it. Didn't get much sleep last night because I was ready to go this morning.

Scott Howell (2:09)

What makes you dread? Well, okay, go back up.

Bradley Flowers (2:12)

Not dread.

Scott Howell (2:13)

What made you excited about today's?

SPEAKER_2 (2:15)

Is it because we're in the new studio?

Bradley Flowers (2:17)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The dread part, I can actually have a good analogy. So I had a buddy that I used to play golf with growing up. That was a little better than me that went pro.

But golf is probably the easiest sport to go pro in, in that, like Scott, say you're a pro.

Scott Howell (2:34)

I'm a pro.

Bradley Flowers (2:35)

You're a pro now. That's all you have to do.

Scott Howell (2:37)

Oh, okay.

Bradley Flowers (2:38)

Like people think, being a pro football player pretty much means you're in the NFL, basketball. Golf is just like you declare you're a pro and you're a pro. So I'm not to say this guy was on the PGA Tour or anything, but he was a pro golfer and he was playing for money and playing some mini tour events and I remember we had a conversation and he was like, man, he was like, the moment you kind of declare yourself a pro and you start playing for a living, he's like something shifts. And now things that, you know, brought you joy, it's now a job, you know? And I think it's kind of like that with the podcast. You know, it's like it's just one of the things that and here lately, like the last two years, it's like we just had so much going on at the office, it's, you know, so, but not dread, but just I'm like, oh crap, I got a podcast today. And I think every other person listening to this that does any kind of media would probably agree. But today, because we're in our new studio, I was very excited. We're in a brand new studio, it's not quite ready, but we're ready enough that we can record.

Scott Howell (3:35)

I want to commend you on how beautiful it is. And it's just, I feel like I'm like live from KRT television and we're sitting here about to have like this talk on the local, like there's just cameras and lights everywhere.

Bradley Flowers (3:51)

So what we're going to do, and I'll say this, because the listeners, you guys should probably do this too. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have as much of this gear permanently mounted as I can. So Rand's going to help me. We're going to get the lights permanently mounted where it's flip of a switch, they come on. We're going to have over here is going to be, if you guys can watch on YouTube, but a faux brick wall, not the paper, but like there's a company that makes actual fake bricks that are plastic that go on this wall. So we got the brick here, got the curtains behind us. I'm going to put something else over here. And then where the TV is, eventually have the TV with no glare where you can do like the newscaster shot, the anchor shot. And so it's big enough, it's almost 400 square feet where we can make it functional. But what I'm going to do is I was telling Rand this, I was like, you know, I only use, this is a lot of space for me only to use it podcasting once every two months. Now, I will probably take some meetings in here. I will probably shoot some content here as I have it. But generally speaking, it's a waste of space. What we're going to do is we're going to do what Jag Insurance did and actually open it up to the business community eventually and say, hey, anybody who owns a business in Mobile that wants to shoot a podcast here, you can do it. I'm not going to do your editing, obviously, but it's a studio, multiple scenes you can come shoot at. And that was the original plan with the other space, but it was just too cramped, and they had to walk through my personal office to get to it. So it's just, it wasn't really conducive.