Life Insurance Agent or Broker
A Quick Look At The Early Years

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As a new life insurance agent or broker. "you will be starting a new adventure in life. in doing so, you will need to learn to burn your bridges behind you”.

Why? Because you are now making a new commitment to a career.

Your first year in the business is your most critical time. The habits you set during this first year, pretty much stay with you through out your career.

Understand the contract difference between being a captive agent or an  Independent insurance broker.

As a life insurance agent or broker, you will now be dealing with several different time lines in your life, and during each of these time lines, you will do things a little different so as to become more efficient and effective. Lets review these time lines.

These time lines consist of:

• Your first 90 days:

             (get effective and don’t worry about being efficient)

• Your first year as an agent:

             (learn the basic selling skills)

• Your second through your fourth year:

             (start refining those skills, get efficient)

• Your fifth year:

            (use your knowledge to specialize in advanced markets)

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Creating a block of business

One of first things I would try to instill on any life insurance agent or broker coming into this business was the importance of developing at least 100 good clients as fast as you can. This may take 1 year to 2 years. But when you do, your life will change. That is because these 100 clients will take care of you for a long time. What do I mean by that?

The average person buys insurance about 7 times during their lifetime, plus the added benefit of providing you with referrals.

As an example:

• when they first get married,
• they start out with a simple family plan,
• then a mortgage insurance policy,
• then a policy on each child,
• then more insurance because of the new family additions,
• then more insurance to cover their ever increasing life style,
• Then there is college planning
• and retirement planning.

And so on...

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You will go through several stages in your insurance  career.

During your growing years as a life insurance agent or broker,

as mentioned above:

each stage requires different training techniques and different mind sets. We will discuss these different stages in another section.

However, when you do become a life insurance agent or broker, the habits you establish in your first 90 days will decide your faith. (This first 90 days in my opinion, is the most critical stage of your career) I can not emphasize the importance of establishing strong effective work habits during this time. It is a known factor that if you do something for 90 days, it becomes a habit.

When you are self employed, you have to be two people.

1. your own boss
2. and your employee.

The Boss has to sit down and lay out a action plan for Mr employee.

Lets review what a proven and successful daily action plan looks like.

I know this may be hard to relate to or understand when you first start selling insurance, but "You are going to be grossly underpaid for your time and efforts in your first few years. However, if you do make it you will be grossly overpaid for the rest of your life."

I have included an explanation on how a life insurance agents salary /commission works.

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This is not an 8 to 5 job

As a life insurance agent or broker, your working day is now going to be different. This is NOT an 8 to 5 job.

As a full time life insurance agent or broker you will go to the office during the day and work your action plan, and then run interviews in the evening.

In my case, I use to go home around 3 and do stuff with my kids and wife. But because my golden hours for selling was between 6 pm and 11 pm in the evenings I would eat supper and then head out on interviews at about 5:45.

However, as time went on and I grew in the business, I was able to develop more and more daytime selling activity. This goes back to the different agent stages I previously mentioned. It is part of your growing process.

Because of the nature of our business, we have to juggle our lifestyles to meet our family obligations, our company goals, our financial goals, our social activities and so on.

One agent I recruited many years ago loved to play softball in the evening. After several recruiting meetings, he decided not to come into the business because he did not want to give up playing softball. And that was fine, everything in life is timing anyhow.

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Takes commitment and hard work early on

Do not come into this career with the concept that you can stay home with the kids during the day and work it in the evening or visa versa. Believe me; the first two years as a life insurance agent or broker require more time, concentration and effort than any other time, in building your block of business.

Try to get as much information as you can to help you in your decision making process.

In the end, it is going to be your mind set that determines your decision on whether you want to become a life insurance agent or broker. If you do come into the business, then your work habits and work ethics will determine your success or failure.

Your career starts just like a small snowball rolling down a hill, but grows bigger and bigger and gets better and better. But you will have to want it. No one can give it to you.

For the right person, this is the greatest opportunity in the world, but for the wrong person wanting to become an life insurance agent or broker, and coming into the business for the wrong reasons, (more free time, being able to baby sit, stay home during the day while spouse works) just won’t work.

Learn and Earn

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