The Insura-Preneur Podcast

Michael Jans
  • 4.5 (43)
  • Marketing
  • Updated Biweekly

For agency owners serious about the Insurance Trifecta—Faster Growth, Higher Margins, and Peak Valuation. Hosted by Michael Jans—founder of Agency Revolution and architect of the longest-running mastermind in the industry —The Insura-Preneur Podcast delivers the real-world systems, strategies, and shortcuts used by the most successful independent agencies and insurtechs across North America. Each episode arms you with practical tools and elite insights so you can: - Accelerate organic growth without confusion, chaos, or cold-calling - Increase margins through smarter marketing and streamlined operations - Engineer a peak valuation using models proven to boost your exit payday You’ll hear from the top thinkers, marketers, tech leaders, and M&A insiders in the industry—all focused on one thing: helping you build an agency that creates real wealth for you, your family, and your community. No fluff. No filler. Just what works. Don’t just grow your agency. Engineer its future.

  1. 5d ago

    Producerflow: Compliance at Scale for Carriers

    How Producerflow Keeps Agencies Licensed, Appointed, and Compliant Luis Pino built an internal tool to handle the grind of getting agencies onboarded and appointed: agreements, W-9s, license checks, renewals. Then carriers started asking to use it. He said no. By the fourth request, he asked what they'd pay. That tool became Producerflow. For agency owners, this episode covers two things worth your time. First, the appointment process from the inside. Luis has watched hundreds of agencies go through carrier onboarding, and he knows where the paperwork stalls and what slows an appointment down. If you're chasing new markets, that's useful to hear. Second, what happens to licensing as your team grows. Add producers, add states, and suddenly renewals, continuing education, and multi-state compliance become a job nobody owns. One lapsed license can freeze a producer's book. Luis explains how larger agencies are turning this into a system instead of a spreadsheet. There's also a quieter lesson in his story: the back-office process you built to survive might be worth more than you think. Luis was CoverWallet's first employee and founded Agentero. His advice after 11 years: insurance is a get-rich-slow business. Stay patient. Learn more at producerflow.com.

  2. Sep 16

    6,200 Policyholders. 3 Years. 7 Months. 2 Rules.

    Your carrier changes its model. Your agreement ends. What comes next matters more than what came before. Kurt Wicks spent decades building one of Allstate's largest agencies: six offices, 35,000 policyholders, about $43 million in premium, a 45% loss ratio, over 2,000 life policies. Then Allstate changed its distribution model and terminated his agreement. For Kurt, it was time to move on. His independent agency opened on January 1, 2023. Three years and seven months later: 6,200 policyholders, on pace for about 8,000 by year end. He projected $13 million by his fourth year; it looks like 15 million. A staff of 20 with 12 full-time salespeople. How? Two things: hire the best people and make the phone ring. "When you make the phone ring, you better have people that know how to sell." Direct mail today: 4,200 pieces a week. "It's more than paying for itself." At Allstate, his salespeople sold P & C and gave him three life insurance referrals a week or paid a $1,000 fine. He sold the life. His line: "Two ways to grow. Write more business, and keep what you got on the books." Michael's read: life insurance is one of the great overlooked policies in a P and C agency. The life conversation deepens relationships because it is about private things. Trust is built. The RAM cycle (relentless, automatic, merciless, cyclical) lets you project your income.  On AI: Kurt - a member of The AI Growth Academy - remembers doubting desktop computers in the 1980s. "Well, now, I'm a believer, you know?"  Kurt says Allstate is testing AI-driven virtual agents, and he thinks they are going to be good. He believes the better State Farm agents may go independent.

  3. Sep 11

    The Carriers Are Watching. The Car Is Different.

    Carriers are getting new eyes. AI dashboards that track what every agency does. Real-time monitoring. Marketing programs. Tool usage. They will know who is producing and how. The bar is rising. Keep your appointments or your commissions. Mica Cooper has over 30 years in insurance, building systems for Vertafore, Bass Pro Shops, Kraft Foods, and Hotels.com. He sells to Tier 5 carriers (under $100 million) and says what most will not: most AI claims at conferences are "going to be 50% lies." His point: it is not that vendors cannot do what they do. It is that they cannot do it to the degree they say. His predictions. Carriers use AI to watch agencies in real time and demand proof. ACORD, "perhaps" within 5 years, "completely almost disappearing." A sea-change moment coming. He says probably 24 months before we see it happen, when an open-source AMS or something similar triggers the shift. Direct distribution eats the low-hanging fruit first. What stays: "the policies that have warts," the complex risks that still need a real agent. "AI is not going to write these," he says. His advice: go to conferences, talk to vendors, be leery of vendor speak, weigh cost against benefit. Long term or succession: hire somebody younger, energetic, who understands insurance and technology. They pay for themselves. You cannot just buy tech and step away. "You can't just buy the car. You have to drive the car." Michael's read: he and Mica each have 30 years in this industry. They saw the internet arrive with warnings it would disintermediate the independent agent. AI brings the same warnings. Carrier relationships are going to be tested. The machine is actually going to be a different machine. Michael's answer: expertise, empathy, advocacy. Go deep. Be the obvious agent. Find Mica Cooper on LinkedIn.

  4. Sep 3

    Your Agency Has an AI Exposure. It's Not in Any Contract

    Every independent agency is using AI. Every agency has contracts with vendors, with carriers, with technology providers. Almost none of those contracts account for what the AI is actually doing. That is the gap this episode exists to name. Cal Durland, Executive Director of AUGIE (the Associations & User Groups Information Exchange) and holder of the CPCU, and Donna LaGoy, Chief Enterprise Platforms Officer at Highstreet Insurance Partners, sit down to talk about what AI means for independent agencies. Not the product demos. The exposures nobody put in a contract yet. Donna is the one who walks through the concrete risks. Her first warning: the agency that buys a consumer ChatGPT account, drops two client declarations pages into it, and asks it to compare coverage. Her words: "You're exposing your client's data out in the deep, dark web." The fix: buy at enterprise level so data stays inside your environment. Her second warning - and the one nobody thinks about - involves the carrier portal. If an AI agent acts on your behalf in a carrier system, does the carrier know? Is it contractually permitted? Her follow-up is the part that lands: "What's gonna happen to your appointment with that carrier if you violated and you didn't realize it?" She maps the build-versus-buy decision without picking a side: weigh budget, time, and how fast the technology is moving. Build and it may be obsolete next month. Buy and it costs more but someone else keeps it current. Vet several vendors. Take the free demo. Get referrals. Cal puts the fear in context. The industry heard the same warnings with download and with real-time. Her line: "We have a proven history of that." AUGIE - which anyone in the industry can join at augiegroup.org - is producing a checklist out of conversations like this one. For agents who are serious about protecting their clients AND their own E&O from AI exposure: visit AIBriefingRoom.com

  5. Aug 26

    18M Homes, 3 Questions: Plymouth Rock Goes Inside ChatGPT

    A three-question insurance application sounds like it cuts the agent out. If a carrier can quote 18 million homes from public data alone, what room is left for you? Bill Martin, President and CEO of Plymouth Rock Home Assurance Corporation, argues the opposite. "The tech is not a direct writer tool," he says. "It is actually better in the hands of an agent." Plymouth Rock Home Assurance pre-rated every address across six states from tax assessor records, online listings, community data and weather, then correlated it against every loss database they could find. Three-question application. Name, address, date of birth. Three coverage options. Good, better, best. Then a buy screen he calls "the binding moment." Plymouth Rock does not ask about trampolines, dogs or roof age. Every bind is followed by an inspection. The risk is judged as a whole.  Agents take a policy over through what he calls Home Policy Marketplace, then cross-sell, review and advise. Separately, the people who quote and do not buy become leads for agents. On the effort behind the simplicity, early in the conversation: "If you want to make your customer and agent's life easier, you have to work harder." And asked at the end what he would tell an agency principal about the AI economy: "Don't believe 99% of what you read" about AI failing or being evil, and "seize these tools and use them to get ahead." Plymouth Rock's ChatGPT plugin is reached through ChatGPT itself. There is no separate download.

  6. Aug 19

    The AI That Names Your Next Commercial Client

    Almost every AI vendor in the agency space works the back of the house: service, operations, automation. GridPull works the front. It is built for the producer asking the three questions that decide a commercial lines pipeline: who to call, when to call them, and what to say. Martin Mashalov, co-founder of GridPull, joins Michael to walk through how the tool answers them. It builds a targeted prospect list by territory and lines of business, then enriches it — pulling renewal dates and coverage signals from publicly available records. Its Super Enrich feature goes further: it names the actual decision-maker at the business - the person who decides whether to buy, not the switchboard - then hands the producer a ready-to-use sales script, a drafted outbound email, discovery questions, likely objections, and the detail on the business itself. Research that used to be drudgery, he says, is "just there for you in 30 seconds." The differentiator his users name: GridPull matches prospects to the agency's own appetite - the lines it quotes, the industries it serves, the carriers it has - rather than handing over a lead nobody at the agency can actually quote. And he talks about what is next: reading geography for exposure — weather and natural-disaster risk in a region as a reason to pitch property coverage — and for property developers, architectural detail on the specific building. A newer feature works the existing book: cross-sell gaps, under-serviced policies, lines the client does not have yet. Actively in development. Martin comes to insurance from applied math and an AR app for real estate, and he is based in New York City. Full disclosure from Michael on air: GridPull is a relatively new company, bootstrapping at this point. That honesty is part of the point. Links gridpull.com — a demo is available there martin@gridpull.com

  7. Jul 31

    AI Just Jumped the Shark. Inside a $70M Bet to Rebuild Agencies.

    AI has jumped the shark. It is not a future technology conversation anymore. It is an acting agent, making real decisions, sometimes decisions nobody authorized. Michael Jans lays out the evidence from Q3 2026 and what it means for your agency right now. Inside the episode: → A submissions vendor processing unstructured business at 87% accuracy → A Canadian insurer issuing real-time life insurance decisions up to $5M with no teleinterview and no medical evidence → An OpenAI containment incident where models took actions their own handlers never authorized → AGI Holdings' $70M raise to buy independent agencies and rebuild them on a native AI stack → 1Fort, Parametric MGA, and Vertafore's six-tool AI rollout → The NAIC AI Model Bulletin, now live in 20+ jurisdictions → The 3-Question Vendor Test: Threat, Default, Audit Michael also shares how one AI Growth Academy member added $125,000 in income from direct mail using the Sales Letter Studio. If you write commercial lines and you are not asking your vendors these three questions yet, this episode changes that today. Stay ahead of what is coming next: AIBriefingRoom.com

  8. Jul 22

    AI Bots Are in Your Carrier Portal. Here's the Fix.

    AI vendors are sending bots into carrier portals right now — using the same shared login credentials your team has always used to sign in. The carriers are the ones on the hook for whatever those bots touch, and it's already showing up as regulatory risk: New York alone has fined insurers millions of dollars over cybersecurity failures under its Part 500 rules. In this episode of AI for the IA, Michael sits down with Alvito Vaz, Executive Director of ID Federation and a 30-plus-year veteran of insurance technology, to unpack how the industry got here and what actually fixes it. Alvito's point is blunt: this isn't a new problem, it's an old one wearing a new face. Agencies have shared credentials with colleagues for years. Now those same credentials are being handed to a hundred bots at once — and carriers have no reliable way to tell a bot from a person, or a controlled bot from an unsupervised one. ID Federation's answer is SignOn Once, a standards-based trust framework that lets an agent authenticate once into their agency management system and pass a secure token on to carrier partners — no repeat logins, no repeat MFA prompts. It's already live with two of the industry's major AMS partners, Vertafore and Applied Systems. The piece still missing is carrier adoption — the third leg of what Alvito calls the channel's three-legged stool: carriers, agents, and technology providers. That's the ask of this episode: agents can go to idfederation.org and use the "Engage Your Carriers" action to push their own carrier partners toward adoption. It's a five-minute step that moves a real industry-wide fix forward.

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About

For agency owners serious about the Insurance Trifecta—Faster Growth, Higher Margins, and Peak Valuation. Hosted by Michael Jans—founder of Agency Revolution and architect of the longest-running mastermind in the industry —The Insura-Preneur Podcast delivers the real-world systems, strategies, and shortcuts used by the most successful independent agencies and insurtechs across North America. Each episode arms you with practical tools and elite insights so you can: - Accelerate organic growth without confusion, chaos, or cold-calling - Increase margins through smarter marketing and streamlined operations - Engineer a peak valuation using models proven to boost your exit payday You’ll hear from the top thinkers, marketers, tech leaders, and M&A insiders in the industry—all focused on one thing: helping you build an agency that creates real wealth for you, your family, and your community. No fluff. No filler. Just what works. Don’t just grow your agency. Engineer its future.

Information

  • Creator
    Michael Jans
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The Insura-Preneur Podcast

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