Sniffing out Acquisitions with Joe Clevenger, Episode #56

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In this episode of The Power Producers Podcast, David Carothers and co-host Kyle Houck interview Joe Clevenger, the President of Clevenger Insurance Agency. Joe talks about his career in the insurance industry and the significance of having Virtual Assistants in his agency. He also shares his podcast called For Richer or Poorer.

Episode Highlights:

  • David introduces Joe Clevenger. (1:31)
  • Joe shares that his father started the Clevenger Insurance Agency in 1995, as an independent agency. (4:10)
  • Joe mentions that they’re about 30% commercial lines, 30% benefits, and the remaining is personal lines. (9:11)
  • Joe shares that they’re an Erie Agency, and it’s one of their biggest carriers. (10:03)
  • Joe explains that the way he does the meetings enables him to build relationships with clients in a way that they feel comfortable that their book of business is going to be handled. (10:15)
  • Joe shares one of the aspects that he’s looking for when it comes to carriers, and it’s how they had their book of business setup. (13:18)
  • Joe shares that Warren Buffet is trying to figure out how much free cash flow is in a business, and he can determine the amount of cash on hand. (14:19)
  • From Joe’s perspective, the difficult part is figuring out if you’re taking that time, from an EBITDA standpoint. (14:51)
  • Joe mentions that EBITDA means Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. (15:09)
  • Joe shares his Podcast called For Richer or Poorer, and their topics are specific to husband and wife owned businesses. (20:06)
  • Joe shares that when they moved to Applied Epic, they used their VA’s to gather all the information and transfer it to the new system. (28:15)
  • Joe mentions that they use Cover Desk and they have three VA’s working for them. (29:41)
  • Joe shares the only issue that he’s struggling with is trying to figure out a comp plan for some commercial producers that would fit well with their structure. (42:12) 

Tweetable Quotes:

  • “Financials are a huge part of it for me. I don’t know why I just have gotten into digging the financial side of books. You’ll hear a lot of people say, “Oh, yeah, two times revenue, or two and a half times revenue on that book of business.” – Joe Clevenger
  • “Because of Warren Buffett and his way of valuing businesses is more on the cash flow side. So, the last few months, I’ve been digging into how he’s valuing them from a cash flow standpoint and seeing if that’s a viable option in the future, and future acquisitions.” – Joe Clevenger
  • “I’m trying to build a little bit differently from a commercial standpoint, in hiring true hunters, producers that just purely hunt, call, hunt all day, bring back the deck pages and the information, put in there, what they want to be quoted, write up their summaries, send it to the VA, and they’re shopping everything out for them.” – Joe Clevenger
  • “The data that they’re going to be able to provide is just off the charts. Crazy, and once we get access to that, it’s going to change the way that we play it. We’re gonna be able to go to our carriers and say you’re behind time. So, we need to either catch up or figure out a different way to do business.” – Joe Clevenger

Resources Mentioned:

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