Recruiting & Building
After being with Senior Life Insurance Company for three years, Dan H. continues to grow and build his business every day. However, before joining Senior Life, Dan H. worked as a broker. He says, “I was a broker, and I had a huge team with agents spread out all over the country, but I actually got out of it because I was so frustrated and disgusted. They like to say, Brokers are ‘Capital B for Broke.’ That’s exactly where I was.” Dan H. shares that he also spent a lot of time doing consultant work before final expense life insurance. “Drew W. worked for me as an intern in college when we were building our brokerage business, and I was pretty much out of the business. I had given up my insurance license. I had gone back to consulting, and I was doing some other things that Drew was working with me on. And Drew said, ‘Dan, we really need to get back into final expense.’ So, I told him, ‘I’ll tell you what, we need to find a good company that’s going to take care of us and take care of you.’ Because we can’t be a broker with all our energy spread out. And I told him it’s not about the contract, it’s about honorability, people that are going to respect you, and where rolling business is not tolerated.” Dan H. goes on to talk about his introduction to Josh R. “Drew did some research and found that Josh R. had the rights to Massachusetts, so he said ‘Dan, I found out about this company called Senior Life, would you come up and meet with Josh to see what your opinion is of it?’ Well, about 20 minutes after sitting with Josh, my juices started flowing again. Josh was like ‘why don’t you get licensed and come back in?’ So, I said, ‘here’s what I’ll do: I’ll help you, Josh, and I’ll help Drew, and I’ll be a consultant.” He expressed that when he first started, he wasn’t reaching his full potential. For my first 18 months at Senior Life, I worked in the background and Drew was the number two agency in 2018. I was the guy helping push Drew up the ladder. Robert Shiver said to me, ‘Dan, come on. Get licensed and stop being the guy behind the curtain. We want you to be fully engaged.’ At that point I was hooked. I helped Drew, and we recruited about 30–40 agents a month for that first year, and it was awesome.”
“One of the things that has helped me is to understand that failure is a part of success. No matter what you do in life, you’re always going to have something to overcome. I like to be someone that helps people through those failures. Sometimes failure can get you so down that it blinds your accomplishments. I love it when Ron Powell says, ‘stop talking about the leads you didn’t sell and talk about the ones you did!’”
Dan H. has a passion for helping people, and says that this is the reason he’s so successful in recruiting. “One of the things I truly believe in, is I love being a sales manager, because I love helping people. I was 6 months from being ordained a catholic priest many moons ago, and I grew up with a passion to help people, I just chose not to be a priest. Instead, I got into business and I’ve always found along the way that I love helping build things. The reason I got into insurance was because you have to have a passion for service. If you’re not there to serve your people, or if you think you’re going to be a boss or a tyrant, get out of here. My belief is, the core fundamental principle of everything, we’re trying to do is help agents’ cash flow. Senior Life has an amazing system: Leads + activity = income. When I’m recruiting, I say to an agent, ‘What do you need to survive and pay your bills every week?’ I work with each person to find out what they want. My job is to hold you accountable for the goals you’ve set.”
Dan H. explains how important it is to take advantage of all the resources made available to agents. He says, “We’ve figured out how to build remotely. And what amazes me in this pandemic, is that our volume is at the highest that it’s ever been. We’ve recruited 50 people this month. One of the things we’ve been able to do in the recruiting process is work with the home office and marketing department to build a series of training videos for ride-alongs. It’s important to take advantage of all the resources that we have. We use the recruiting department. We let the marketing department help us with marketing and flyers. And when I look at Senior Life, I’m so happy that if I have an idea, I can pick up the phone and call Thomas Roach, Kent Mallett, or Robert Shiver. I don’t have to go through 20 layers of command, and that’s why I like to say we’re still on the ground floor of what we can accomplish.” Dan H. shares the importance of trusting the system put in place for agents. “No other company out there, that I’ve found, gives you those components for recruiting. That if you paint that picture to an entrepreneur, whether you’re a mechanic, a lawyer, or a doctor, or a waitress working the diner, you can show them this picture and if you have a passion for service, you can recruit. If you like helping people, this is easy. If you want to grow your business, it’s really simple. Here we have the turnkey platform to give you a process to generate recruits each and every month. There’s a system to implement the good to great 90-day Senior Life program which is absolutely an integral part of my recruiting, that if you follow this, you will be successful. All the agents that fail here, failed to follow that system. The sad part is that you bring in so many and so few take the opportunity for what it’s worth. I believe that as we move into my what is my third year here, my mission is to paint the full picture. To be that artist with the vision to see what that texture is going to look like when its finished and help my managers and empower them so that they see the vision.”
“I RECRUIT PARTNERS. I THINK THAT’S IMPORTANT IN THE RECRUITING PROCESS. IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR BUILDERS TO BUILD AN EMPIRE, THEN YOU WANT TO FIND PARTNERS.”
Dan H. advises that It’s important to be smart and consider who you recruit while building your team. He says, “My father used to always tell me, ‘You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. Don’t be afraid to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you.’ And I took that to heart, so as I build my team and recruit, I’m not afraid of powerful people. Gary N. on my team is a phenomenal manager. Drew W, you know he’s a young buck, trust me he’ll walk in and we’ll battle it out sometimes. I love it because I want people that can help us build this business and maybe add something to what we have. But in the same token, you want them to understand that what they want to do has to be within the confines of what makes Senior Life great, and I think that’s the key to recruiting and why you can build an empire here.” Dan also understands that it doesn’t matter where you come from in this business. He shares that anyone can be successful if they work hard. “I recruit partners. I think that’s important in the recruiting process. If you’re looking for builders to build an empire, then you want to find partners. It’s not ‘I’m your boss.’ Our job as a recruiter is to get likeminded people working together as partners. It’s such a simple business and we complicate it. I really believe in recruiting we overthink it. If we simplify it, we can convince the waitress at the diner to join us. We have a dentist on our team, and he’s making more here than he did as a dentist! We don’t care about what your background is or where you came from, or where you were born. Anybody can come here and do this job and never be discriminated against.” He goes on to talk about how competition is good to have among your peers, because it pushes you to set higher goals for yourself. Dan says, “I remember sitting with Lewis B. in 2018 at one of our national meetings and I think it was December, and we were very close in numbers (Drew’s team and his team at that time). And what he has done has helped me raise my bar. There’s a friendly competition amongst us all, trust me we all are competitive. We all want to move up that ladder in the Scoop every month, and we’re always waiting for it to be published to see where we land.”
Dan H. shares that the way to build Senior Life to be the number one company is by bringing new people into this industry and not just focusing on recycled life insurance agents. “A big chunk of what we have to do is bring in new people and share the vision that you can make it here. That you’re not cold calling, that we have warm leads. You explain to them that no, you’re not going to sell your friends and family, you don’t have to give me a list of 200 people. Every prospect is a good prospect. It may just be that they’re not a good prospect today. You have to get people to understand in the recruiting process that we have to really look at expanding our vision and get more people to join us. I like to say: I can’t talk to a non-licensed person the same way I talk to a licensed person. You start talking contracts and renewals, and they’re looking at you like you’re crazy. You have to talk about opportunity, changing your life, and freedoms that you get from being in our business. You’re there just to help them understand the process.” He also expresses that failure is inevitable, but that it doesn’t measure your success. Dan H. says, “One of the things that has helped me is to understand that failure is a part of success. No matter what you do in life, you’re always going to have something to overcome. I like to be someone that helps people through those failures. Sometimes failure can get you so down that it blinds your accomplishments. I love it when Ron Powell says, ‘stop talking about the leads you didn’t sell and talk about the ones you did!’
Constantly setting new goals and pushing himself to grow more is something that Dan H. strives to do. He says, “You have to think about, what is the goal and how do you keep shooting for the goal? Drew likes to say, ‘I’m not shooting for the moon, I’m shooting for Pluto.’ That’s what you have to do here and set the goal far beyond what you will accept so that you will get to the goal you want to achieve.” Another big motivation in Dan’s life is his family. “I don’t have to be the richest man in the world, but I want to be able to provide some comfort for my children and grandchildren. That’s what motivates me. I wake up, and I look at those pictures of my grandchildren and my kids. Each day, I work for them, and I work for my wife. If you’re not setting goals in service of others, it’s harder to get those goals. My goal isn’t my personal goal, it’s my goal in service of my family and my church. That’s what recruiting should be about.” He also shares how much he appreciates the support he gets from his family. “I can’t tell you how special it is to have somebody that allows me to do what I do every day, and to take those calls at 7:00am. Having a family that supports that, is what makes it all possible, to have someone who empowers me to be me.” He is also extremely thankful for his support from his peers. Dan H. says, “For me, Josh is the number one person and reason that I’m at Senior Life. There’s nobody more honorable, more supporting, more forgiving when I go off on a tangent. And really has been a partner in helping me build this business and become personal friends, our wives are friends. He is all about my success and why we can do what we do in our group because I have unconditional support from him and he always has my back. I couldn’t do what I do without the support of my family and peers.”
