Owlnotes.com

My job title is agent. I am an independent contractor agent. In our industry it's called a "captive agent," meaning that I only represent one company as opposed to being a broker, where I might represent many different companies.

We are in a beach community so the tone in our office is a little more relaxed. Agents who are downtown tend to wear suits and ties. Because our office is smaller, it tends to be more family oriented and relaxed. You try to fit in with the demographics of where you're at.

You get clients from all over. Your main client base comes from your immediate area. Then there are referrals that come from all over. You may be doing a good job for somebody who lives in one place, and they refer you to someone they know somewhere else.

My father also was an insurance agent. He started his business the month that I was born. So when I was young, I never thought of doing anything else. People would say, "I want to be a lawyer" or "I want to be a doctor," and I always said "I want to be an insurance agent." Then, in college, my curriculum was geared toward managing people because I felt my dad's shortcoming in his business was his ability to manage the people who worked for him. He was a much better salesman than I am, but his people-management skills were not as polished as mine were coming out of college.

My major was business with a specialty in management. I went to work for a retail company out of college to gain management experience, specifically to learn how to manage bigger groups of people. I didn't take any insurance classes in college, but once you get in the business, you are constantly taking insurance-related seminars and the like. You're constantly improving and staying in tune with what's going on because it changes that fast.

Well, naivety was how I started working toward becoming an agent. I didn't really understand that there was a different side to the business. You can also come into the insurance business starting on the corporate side, working with claims, operations or administration. Since my dad was an agent, that's what I knew, so I chose to go that path.

A typical day is where it isn't anything like any other day you've done. It's a very dynamic business. You start, you stop, you start, you stop, you start, you stop all day long. The term "multitasking" was developed in my business. One minute, you're talking on the phone trying to fix whatever the person called about and then someone is walking in the door at the same time hoping to pay their bill because they only have a minute to pay it. So you're paying their bill while you're talking to somebody on the phone, plus you have a pile of paper in the fax machine with other work coming in that needs to be looked at right now. You're constantly swirling a whole big list of things that have to be done right away. You're always being interrupted and always moving forward on several things at the same time.

It is really hard to say because so much of my business takes me out of the office. For example, we may need to get a picture of this house we just insured, so I have to kind of drop everything and go out to take the picture. People always ask when I'm in the office, and I say, "I'm in and out all day long," and that's really the truth. The office hours are 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, but we also work by appointment after hours. We try to encourage people to make appointments.

The difficulties of my job are both technical and emotional. They can be intertwined. When you have a business where relationships are important, you can't be successful and have bad relationships. Every business relationship all of us have, we try to make it better and try to make it personal. When a client is upset it's no different than your significant other being mad at you. It's that same feeling. You do whatever you can do to set the stage so that they don't get upset. For example, I warn clients about what will happen and what could happen should they get into a car accident. So when they call, you say, 'Yeah, remember we talked about that. I didn't think it would happen but it did, so this is how we're going to get out of it.' You can also try to anticipate the potential pitfalls and try to soothe the problem before it exists, kind of like taking a vitamin.

There is no set salary because we're on 100 percent commission. So what you get paid depends on the size of your business and what you sell. From that pay, you pay all of your overhead, you pay your team, you pay your office, you pay your electricity before you take away anything yourself. A typical person after five years who has successfully built an agency should clear, after expenses, in excess of $100,000.

Any sales organization always has additional rewards because salesmen or saleswomen are prize-oriented: "If I sell three of these, I get one of those. If I sell 20 of these, I get one of those." We're all goal-oriented. If you're not, to be on my side of the coin is not the place for you. To be on the other side of the coin, the corporate side is the place for you. The way somebody told me one time is if there is a pin, plaque or trophy to be won and you're interested, you're a salesman. If there's a pin, plaque or trophy to be won and you could care less, don't be in sales. The trips and things that we've earned over the years have been from successful hurdle-jumping on a yearlong sales promotion and along the way there are also little mini rewards to keep you going.

Early in your career, it's work, work, work. You work five or six days a week, basically whenever somebody wants to see you. It's like any business of any kind; if you want it to be successful that's what you do. The agents who are not successful tend to treat it like just a job. I kind of have a job, but really, I have a business, and that is very different. Once you understand that you have a business as opposed to a job, you treat it differently. How do you get a day off? I don't ask myself if I can take the day off; I ask, "Can I afford the time away?" And I have to think about the people who work for me. Do they need a break? Do they need time off? There's a lot more that goes into it than just taking the day off.

After you've been in the business awhile, part of the relationship building is being at the kids' sport events because then you're talking with the other parents. With that flexibility and that balance between work and life, it is a fabulous job.

The most frustrating thing is when customers or clients that feel like they know my business better than I do. They're so leery of being sold something that they refuse to listen to what you have to say. Or sometimes they just won't call you back, even when it's something simple but important, like, "Your bill isn't paid yet, and I want to make sure that you know that." They're hired me for my advice, that's what they're paying me for, and I'm trying to give them what they're paying me for, and they don't want it.

However, the relationships that you develop with your clients are just really cool. Those kind of relationships are just so hard to come by, where you can feel comfortable with a person. That's neat. One of the other really odd things that is gratifying, and it's kind of in a sad way, is, with my clients whose homes burned down in the 2003 Cedar Fires, I was there to keep the promises I made when they paid for their policies. When these approximately 300 houses burned up, we were able to be there for the clients, be there to answer questions, be there to kick the dirt with them, to be a shoulder to cry on, all of those things. I went to the people's homes in the Cedar Fire and dug through the debris with them and found things. That's the emotional side of our business, and it didn't have anything to do with selling anything. It had to do with those relationships that we build; it's really a different than just clocking in and clocking out.

Everything that happens affects our business in one way or another. A company like ours can't buy into every technological change immediately because of our size. We're leaps and bounds farther along than we were, but part of the challenge is that the average age of the agency force is 58 years old. The problem is how to get them to adapt to new technologies.

Also, with every mega-disaster, like with the fires we had here or Hurricane Katrina, you discover your vulnerabilities. That doesn't mean we're not going to take care of our customers who were affected, we totally do. But we realize, "OK, what could we have done better? Could we have looked at this better? Could we have seen that this house is more likely to burn than that one? How do we change? What have we learned?"

I counsel people considering going into my business as often as I can, and the thing that I try to share with them is to try to find a medium-sized community where there are no more than two other agents from your company and preferably no other agents from the same company, and go to that community. You're going to be way more successful a lot more quickly than you will be in a big city with more competition between agents. Premiums are lower per unit in cities, so you then have to sell more to make the same amount of money. The cost of living is higher in a more populated area like San Diego. You have to make way more to have the disposable income an agent in a smaller community would have.

You have to be outgoing and be willing to talk to anybody about anything, whether it's a client's personal life or digging into their financial records. You have to be someone who doesn't mind sharing your own personal life because that helps people open up, and you should be interested in their personal life as well. You also have to be self-motivated. If you have to be told to go to work, you probably won't.

Getting into insurance, you do not need a degree in anything specific. A big part of what we do in the insurance business is continually learning new things. There isn't a day that goes by that you aren't learning something new. I would recommend first getting a degree and then getting a job in some sales field. Basically, find whatever sales job you can to get experience, and then move to insurance. If you're not interested in sales, you could also start on the corporate side. You get to learn about the business in a safer environment with stable income and benefits. Then if the sales bug calls, you can transfer to that direction. It really is flexible that way.