If You’re Not First, You’re Last with Steve Holley, Episode # 49

In this episode of The Power Producers Podcast, David Carothers and co-host Kyle Houck interview Steve Holley, CIC, Owner of Holley Insurance. Steve talks about how he got into the insurance industry and how he built his agency at a young age. He also shares his knowledge and expertise in the insurance industry and technology.

Episode Highlights:

• David Introduces Steve Holley. (1:31)
• Steve shares that he started his agency from scratch in 2000. They’re considered to be a generalist type of agency. (4:19)
• Steve mentions that he was only 24 years old when he started his agency. (4:58)
• Steve shares one of the latest actions that they did is they gave out some care packages to the police officers in their area. (8:30)
• Steve explains that understanding financial stability, the movement of the agencies, and being able to take a few key numbers, are vital. (12:14)
• Steve shares that the most recent book they bought was almost 100% personal lines agency, but they also found out that there were some bad risks in it. (15:30)
• Steve mentions one of the tasks that has helped them is doing a proactive annual review with every client. (16:55)
• Steve thinks that his biggest accomplishment was being able to focus on the market that they wanted being good at serving. They realized they were spending a lot of time with some accounts that weren’t profitable, and it has kept them from doing a better job for the other clients. (25:30)
• Steve mentions that they moved everything to Macintosh. They use an iPad as their notebooks and they use the program called GoodNotes, and they can easily import their notes on HubSpot. (39:41)
• Steve shares that their texting platform is also integrated with HubSpot and it has been a huge help for them because they don’t need to have many other technologies, and it has simplified a lot in their agency. (40:21)
• Steve mentions that he’s also starting to use Vidyard, and it helps him to communicate with his team and his carriers. It’s automatically integrated with HubSpot as well. (41:36)
• Steve mentions one of the good features of HubSpot that they’re using is the ticketing system on the service side. (50:09)
• Steve thinks that there’s an advantage to using HubSpot because it’s basically built on Salesforce. (56:12)

Tweetable Quotes:

• “We believe a lot in the community, we are not the guy that’s going go out and blitz the area with advertising, and we truly believe in the relationship stuff, it means a lot to us. We intentionally try to be neighborly and community-oriented, and we try to do it in our own way.” – Steve Holley
• “If somebody wants to just run the string out on their agency and continue to crank money into their checking account, they can. I think most agency owners, especially if they built the agency themselves, they’re probably a little too proud to do that.” – Steve Holley
• “We talk a whole lot about sales and systems and tools and all that kind of stuff. If you’re not thinking about that kind of stuff in your agency, you know that that’s the best way for you to add percentage points to your profit every year.” – Steve Holley

Resources Mentioned:

• David Carothers LinkedIn
• Kyle Houck LinkedIn
• Florida Risk Partners
• The Extra 2 Minutes
• Steve Holley LinkedIn
• Holley Insurance
• HubSpot
• GoodNotes
• Vidyard