Insurance Agency SEO and AI with Brandy Henriquez and Tom Polowy

Brandy: I think I think for me it's still the same as just having the freedom to spend time with my family and watch my kids grow versus two ago I wanted to be the number one in my market and then start taking over other markets and just scale and scale and scale. And it's like you just end up chasing your own tail at some point and you don't live life.

Ben: and it dawned on me that the majority of insurance still comes from independent agents, And so that's why ⁓ I was like the best way to learn more about it is to you know, to talk to some of those folks and invite them to to podcast. let's let's smooth back in. So ⁓ just some context for you, Tom. Brandy and I spoke last week, ⁓ and then through I think he was looking something up to answer a question I had for a podcast that I've been recording. And the recording cut out from that point onwards. So I'm hoping it won't do it today. ⁓ but good to have you back, Brandy and ⁓ Tom, thanks for I'm I'm hearing you use SEO to grow the demand side. How do you think about the supply side?

Brandy: And then your kids are all grown by the time you want to slow down. They don't know you. You don't really know them. For me, that's the most important thing right now is just being in the moment with my kids, but being able to provide and and ⁓ and also being of service to our clients. I think that when you're on that scaling program and you're trying to get big, big, big, you lose sight of the client.

Tom: It's a struggle. And speaking of old school, a lot of old school carriers and wholesalers are are still st still stuck in the mentality of show us your numbers, which is all backward looking. They're never looking forward to what's going to happen and where the growth is. They're not looking at momentum or a trajectory of an agency. They're just looking at what do you currently have and we're either gonna give get you appointed or not.

Ben: Joining, do you wanna maybe kick us off by introducing yourself? Brownie already gave an introduction.

Tom: Sure, yeah, my name is Tom Pallova, founder of Insure Connecticut, ⁓ independent agency in Connecticut looking to change the way insurance brokerages do business.

Ben: Very cool. What's different about Inshore Connecticut to other agencies?

Tom: that is a huge that's been a huge limitation. I started my agency during COVID, which you could imagine, I mean that's that was during the PNC apocalypse. Nothing was moving, all the carriers were shutting down, and there was no carrier appointments to be had. What slim pickings I was able to get, I got. and only now are they opening up a little bit and more open to the conversations and appointments, but you still have to prove a track record of performance. But it's a check in an NDX thing. How are you supposed to place business if you don't have a

Brandy: En and the service ⁓ suffers.

Tom: It is not to put anybody else down, but I feel like the industry doesn't really operate a business, meaning in individual brokerages do not. They don't think of themselves in a business. And what I'm alluding to mostly is w w what you would think of the as the mom and pop shops on the corner of a street and a house that was built in eighteen ninety where the pipes don't work. They're probably made out of gal galvanized steel. And just there existing. They they built the agency in the eighties and nineties.

Ben: Tom, anything to add to that?

Tom: I have a lot to add, so how much time do you have? So to to to Brandy's point about that you try to scale and and then you lose focus of of the clients, part of the challenge of this industry and why people don't grow, and anecdotally I've noticed that agencies don't really grow past ten million of premiums. I think part of that is we're in a low margin industry. Because the more clients you have, the more CSRs you need in theory, CSRs you need, the more that costs.

Ben: let's start with ⁓ introduction on you. Like what's ⁓ who who's Brandy and how did he end up working in insurance?

Tom: place to place it and then how are you supposed to get the appointments if you don't have a place to place the appointments. So then you're stuck going to brokers and then a lot of the business that you place is is spread out so thin that's very difficult to get numbers to show to carriers that look what we're producing, give us an appointment because then you also have to produce loss runs and experience. And you can't do that from a broker. So that's that's a huge limitation. So it's

Brandy: Long story short, I come from the entertainment industry. I worked in radio for 20 years and I have my production company that I would do side gigs after my nine to five was over. And I just got to a point where I didn't feel any fulfillment anymore because I was just working ⁓ the corporate It was the same monotonous.

Tom: On walk-ins where where that doesn't work anymore. You gotta be fully digital and have a presence online and in person, and you gotta attack marketing from multiple angles. So that's what we're trying to do at Insure Connecticut. ⁓ we're trying to empower people through the power of insurance to have healthy and productive lives, whether it's our stakeholders, our ⁓ agents, service reps, prospects, clients, everybody. More clients you can't handle more like there is a there's a there's there's a ceiling. So for me, the part of the fun of it is solving the challenge of that ten million dollars in premium ceiling without sacrificing client relationships and experience, but actually enhancing it. ⁓ over the next three to five years, I am looking to continue to grow to a ⁓ point where we can scale.

Brandy: ⁓ Type of productions that we were doing. I mean it was fun, but I've been doing it for 20 years and I'm older now I don't want to work late nights that type of thing. So I started Looking around For a business that I could get into where I could build it in two to three years Have a solid team and I could step away and just kind of like oversee it but have a ⁓ manager run the business

Tom: It's just grinding and hitting hitting the pavement, ⁓ networking and and going to conferences and reaching out to carriers directly and trying try to be seen eventually get an appointment. ⁓ it's worked with a couple of carriers and we have great relationships with those carriers now. We've met all and exceeded all of our expectations. But again, it's how do you get more? So there's always there o ⁓ is always a balancing act. So it's that is a very the that's been very challenging. So we and we have a we have a different energy. ⁓ And we're we're very we're very passionate about being able to do that in an industry that is very old school ⁓ and not willing to change. I do feel that there's a lot of hope. There's a huge wave of young energy in the industry ⁓ as old ⁓ fogies die out and retire. my whole goal is to step away from the day to day so I can focus on the larger problems ⁓ and spend time with my family to Brandy's point, because that's extremely important. Because this this industry is very easy to burn out. But ⁓ i I I feel like we're getting close our goals of on the marketing side. And once we to put that in place, everything else is gonna take care of itself. 'Cause I don't I feel like n nobody is doing what we're trying to do in the industry.

Brandy: and I settled on either real estate or insurance. Those are two industries that I feel that in one way or another, they're not going to go away. had, I went to school with someone who well, I mean, we had the conversation with me not knowing that he was like in the top 3 % of agents for this captain.

Ben: Mm.

Tom: there is a there's a large group or contingent of people across the country who have that same kind of energy and are looking to grow and are looking to find unique ways of growing because what I see across the board, which great for us, everybody's still doing the same kind of marketing strategy of buying leads and that's pretty much all they do. ⁓ maybe they'll link up with realtors ⁓ or officers and buy leads. Nobody's really approaching this business from a marketing perspective. And that's really the perspective that we're coming from.

Ben: the the the part it cut cut out, Ranny, is when you wanted to walk me through the whole workflow, like how do you actually end up getting quotes? My understanding was that you've now grown with Intro Connecticut, you've grown to the point where you have folks internally who can help with some of those requests that come in. How how do you generally like get quotes from carriers? What's the number one way? Have you thought about AI o engine optim optimization? You know, like how do we

Tom: Course, every day. and we we I mean I could I could talk to by AI for several hours because so through Faster, I have a intimate knowledge ⁓ of the pros and cons of building something ⁓ on And we're talking the latest AI models. Like we're not talking about, you know, some rinkadig thing that somebody put together on the on top of an old Gemini model. I'm talking about the latest Claude, the latest Chat GPT. And no matter how far you get.

Brandy: But he was just a guy I went to college with. know, we were, we had a good friendship in college, kind of like drifted away after college. But I always trusted this person and I considered this person smart. So I said, Hey, can I have a conversation with you about insurance? And he was like, what do you want to know? And I said, is it a good time to get into insurance right now? And he said, it's always a good time to get into insurance. we had lunch. I met his number one ⁓

Tom: I was at a the Agents Broker's United conference a couple of weeks ago in Vegas and that's all I heard. It's all they do.

Brandy: Go ahead, so.

Ben: How do you guys acquire customers?

Tom: so yeah, we do have a workflow. We go through a pipeline, ⁓ we have our steps ⁓ we do have some back end help to be able to to quote. And because we don't have s have a lot of direct carriers, we have to create the accord forms, data gather, and then send out send and send those out to ⁓ our So we do yeah, so we do have some back end help with the data gathering ⁓ and ⁓ filling, and we use some fantastic AI tools, mainly ⁓ Cara to give them a shout out, Kara.ai. ⁓ It's all SEO right now. ⁓ we have a roadmap for what we're going to be doing for the rest of the year and moving forward in terms of generating content, creating content, and getting on social media. But right now it is currently all SEO. We're averaging eighty to a hundred leads a month. most that's mostly through SEO. The rest of it is through through referral partnerships. And feel like we don't even know what we're doing quite yet. And once do. There's going to be issues because AI is inherently limited being able to like it the further you go out of the original question that you ask AI or the original task, it will falter. The better models, you could go further out from sure, but you're still it's still gonna falter. So for AI to actually work, you have to learn that you have to give it per very tight parameters.

Brandy: He brought him to lunch and I just picked his brain, picked both of their brains and he sold me on it. Basically said, listen, ⁓ captive has a great program. If you give me three years, I'm to get you your own agency. Commit to me for three years and then you'll get your own agency. And if it wasn't for the pandemic, it would have been like two and a half years between when I got licensed.

Ben: Yeah.

Tom: They've been instrumental in helping us make our process a lot more efficient. we're, I mean, I think that we are on the forefront of what's available in technology in the insurance, independent insurance space. So we handle more business, complex business faster than a traditional brokerage can. I mean, we'll n you never do, right? The journey never ends, it only continues. But we're only gonna get keep getting better at what we're doing we're gonna be start generating some buzz about around our success.

Brandy: Yeah.

Tom: with which it could only think o it could only think think within those parameters. It can't go outside of those parameters. So other companies building technology on AI, they're limited by the same rules. They're limited by the same laws. So in order in in terms of what's possible, everyone's limited to the same thing. Agents bring a new layer to it, but you're also now introducing a lot of lot more security issues and things that could go wrong.

Brandy: to when I got my own ⁓ agency, but pandemic slowed things down. I got out of it for a year. Then I came back I went through ⁓ program to just to basically like, it was like six months of schooling. Before I had to do ⁓ two three interviews. had to pass aptitude tests and all kinds of stuff. But I selected.

Ben: if you could waive a magic wand to take any of your process and fully automate it, what part of your process would you want to automate?

Tom: That's a loaded question because nobody's solved for that yet. I've talked to a lot of startups over the last several years and everybody talks about it, especially at ITC last year. Everybody was talking about could build your workflow. What w what problem do you have or what what can we solve for you? Nobody actually had an idea of how to create the workflow, or ⁓ to automate it, and nobody's built it yet. I I I I I have spoken several

Brandy: Got selected for an opportunity, opened my captive May 1st of 2022.

Tom: I've seen people in under in other industries glow about, we've I've built this agent, 60% of my company's being run on it. Several days later, I saw I a post on f on Facebook. Well, everyone's email ⁓ websites got deleted except for one. So ⁓ thankfully I had a back up. ⁓ so there's only so much that you could do with AI currently. You can't eliminate humans at all. but with the help of AI

Brandy: ⁓ farm, yes.

Ben: What's the captive for? Is it stay farm?

Tom: Vendors are working on similar types of things, but there is no way of if I I was to wave a magic wand to automate the process, I would be able to ⁓ in portal essentially have a domino speaker pizza tracker that goes from funnel entry to quote proposal in an automated way that talks to all the rest of my systems. And that's part of the problem in insurance ⁓ in the independent space specifically.

Ben: Yeah.

Brandy: Great company, I love it. It got hard for me with the market to stick to one company. at the end of the day, I want to serve my customers the best way that I can. And it just got to a point where I felt that I couldn't offer that being under a captive. Not necessarily to reflect that the company was bad. It was just that that business model did not work for me.

Tom: We're we're able to see a lot more productivity per person.

Ben: I I guess my my question was also around you you focus a lot on SEO. And of course there's the new, you know, the new horizon of SEO, which is how do you ensure that when you search in Chat GPT for something, it brings up in Shore C T as one of the solutions, right?

Tom: There's so many damn systems, they all claim to have integrations, but they're all shitty. And nothing works, and you're still going to multiple places to re-enter data. a lot of times it's it's the software's being built by by programmers or insurance people. It's never really a combination of engineers and and insurance people. So they make assumptions about what we need and they just fall out.

Brandy: Mm-hmm.

Tom: The rules aren't much different. it's I'm not gonna give away all the trade secrets.

Ben: What did you do d during that time if if you didn't have an insurance product to serve the customer's needs? ⁓

Tom: But but the rules are are not different. If you know, you know. And I mean we've started getting a very regular stream of referrals from AI models. It's become a regular thing.

Brandy: I have a great referral network. I would refer them out to somebody that I trust that I know they're going to take care of them like I would take care of them. And then through that service, I started learning about the options and basically the flexibility of independent and how much it's changed from when I was first looking into insurance to now. It's a lot easier to get appointed.

Tom: flat in their face when it comes to execution. And that's why nobody's been able to do that yet. I'm hopeful I see some cool things happening around AI, but AI itself also has a lot of limitations. So that magic wand is not coming anytime soon. So at a certain point you just gotta grind to work through the workflow. Listen, the the first time it happened, it blew my mind. I didn't believe it. I didn't. I was like, why? Why are we there? And again, I go back to we we don't know what we're doing yet. but that is the frontier. And a lot more things that we could do to enhance our ability to show up in AI, but there's challenges to that and roadblocks to that. So those it's all fun stuff to to try to overcome. But there's a lot of work for us to to do in order for us to dominate where we are and across the country.

Ben: Of course. I I think one of the troubles for building new tech in this space also is the complexity. And I think when you try and create a new tool, right, you always have to think, do I go broad or do I go go deep first? And so I I would I would put that question to you actually. If if I could if I could say I'll wave a magic one for you and you can get every line of business with your top two carriers, or I'll wave a magic one for you and you can get homeowners with 30 carriers, right? And

Brandy: It's a lot easier to get multiple licenses in different states. And I actually ended up while I was being captive, partnering ⁓ with an independent in a content business for professionals.

Ben: Really cool. Guys, Brandy Tom, thank you so much for joining the podcast.

Tom: Thank you for having us.

Brandy: ⁓ man, thank you. Thank you for your time, man. So we have a studio now where we have, right now we have one podcast room dedicated to podcasts. We have one smaller room where a person could just sit and record just like you're doing. Soundproof, all the equipment, all the cameras, internet, all that stuff. They just gotta come, sit down, press record, do their thing. that went very well. So once I started looking for options about where to go,

Tom: Yeah, this was great. ⁓

Ben: there something else that you guys wanted to to cover? In either direction it will be fully automated. Would you rather have, you know, the breadth with two carriers or the depth for one line of business?

Tom: Brandy? That would depend on the brokerage's preference, right? For us for ⁓

Ben: Yeah.

Brandy: For for other professionals, because I'm assuming other people in the insurance is are the people that are listening to your podcast and watching it. forget that a lead ⁓ a person with a problem.

Ben: What what would be in Shaw Connecticut's business preference?

Tom: For us, hate the answer I'm gonna give you because it's the wrong answer, but I want it all.

Brandy: I had a serious conversation with him, so me and him partnered and he wanted to focus on wealth management. So it worked out. So now I'm overseeing the personal and commercial ⁓ insurance policies and he could concentrate on the wealth management.

Ben: Tell me. Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Brandy: sometimes we get caught up in I gotta I gotta follow up on these leads, I gotta follow up on these leads and close and close and close. But at the end of the day, we're both just two humans trying to do something. I'm trying to do my job so I can feed my family. And then the the client needs this insurance for their business or what have you so they can feed their family. You know? And it's like ⁓ to them.

Tom: I'm not gonna stop. We are gonna be and building towards being a full service brokerage that can handle it all in an efficient way with all the systems talking to each other, where every team member and stakeholder is involved in the process for a seam seamless process for a client. That's a huge undertaking and it's gonna take a lot of work, but also I'm not going anywhere until I die. So until that happens, that's what we're working towards.

Ben: Yeah. Is this in show C T?

Brandy: Yes, yes, so I am, we're based in West Hartford. That's where our office is. But we cover all Connecticut and we're licensed as 17 Eastern states

Ben: Yeah.

Tom: No.

Ben: So you're doing

Brandy: growing.

Ben: where is your base? Like where are you mostly generating your ⁓ new client base from?

Brandy: And then you'll know what you have to do instead of just being on autopilot the whole time and thinking thinking that you know all the answers because you've done a thousand of these policies.

Tom: So to answer your question more directly, yeah, give me give me the breadth and I'll I'll figure out the rest.

Ben: Interesting. So the the breadth of your top two three markets, which I think Brandi and I spoke about a little bit.

Brandy: It's referral, right? So I kind of go

Ben: Yeah.

Tom: I the riches are in the niches, right? That is true. That is a fact. That's undeniable. But I also have

Brandy: networking events and try to meet people that I know constantly have a need for insurance. So I go to real estate investor networking events. I try to meet all the movers and shakers that are real estate agents, mortgage brokers, because a lot of people

Ben: Yeah.

Tom: wants ⁓ and goals of dominating everything. So we're gonna work on both. We're gonna burn both ends of the ⁓ b both ends of the candle and we are gonna achieve that.

Ben: Of course.

Tom: One one last thing about marketing, if if I have two seconds, is something when I when I speak with other business owners that networking we we talk and they ask me about marketing and things like that. The the question I ask them that perplexes them ⁓ anyone listen to this, I would encourage you to really meditate on this question. because most people again buy leads or or they they're waiting for people to find find them. But have you allowed people to find you?

Brandy: don't think about insurance until it's time to figure out the closing. And they're like, okay, you need a policy now. And honestly, we're the last step. But if you don't have a policy, you're not going to close on the house. And the way that the market is right now, especially in Connecticut with all the old houses and so many claims that we've had in the year before, it's a lot more complicated. It's more complicated the process. It's not so much of just calling somebody

Ben: how are you thinking of being able to achieve that for insure Connecticut? Are you do are you investing in your own technology? Course.

Tom: No, but we love working with startups and that's both true of of technology and insure techs or carriers. We work with a number of carriers that most people have never heard of. ⁓ and also insure techs that or or ⁓ technology companies that work in in the independent insurance space that a lot of people haven't heard of. So that allows us the ability to have direct impact on how the tools are being built. I was actually part of an insure tech for a little bit. ⁓ we were trying to build something And that's where if you if you shift your perspective from looking for them to allowing or giving permission to people to find you, it changes your paradigm about how you think about marketing art.

Brandy: and saying, hey, I need a policy because it's going to be like $5,000 unless that broker knows what they're doing and they know what they need to show the hey, this house is not in as bad as condition as you think. So most agents will be like, hey, it's going to cost this much. I'm going to say, hey, this house was built in the 1800s. Send me appraisal.

Tom: ⁓ specific to ⁓ worker scomp and I'm actually helping ⁓ Sonny to develop faster to build a platform for insurance agencies to have a full fledged website and marketing platform both ⁓ AI. So I guess to answer your question, ⁓ I'm not involved directly in building something, but I am also helping to build something specifically.

Brandy: send me your roof inspection. I'm gonna send that to all the carriers so they could use that when they're giving you a rate. Because if not, they're just gonna see a 200 year old house and they're gonna say, ⁓ no, this house, you're either not gonna be able to get insured or you're gonna get a crazy rate.

Ben: Quote it. So someone comes to you and says, Hey, I want this crazy house insured and you say, I'm gonna send it to all the carriers to get your rate, how many carriers are we talking? how many carriers are you appointed with?

Brandy: It depends on the specific house and where it's at because every carrier is different. And we have an AI that we feed all the carrier appetites to. And then we could it, hey, this is the type of property. This is how far from the coastline it is. It's not in a flood zone. Who can we ⁓ try to quote with? And it'll give us a general outline, a good starting point. And then from there, if we don't get good results with that, then we'll start using our relationships and just basically calling on the writers and saying, hey, I got this case. Is there anything that you could do for us? in we have about 20 carriers for home insurance, probably something like 12 for auto. And then we can broker it out to wholesale insurance. So basically, like I'll talk to the people, I'll get the information, I'll go to the AI, I'll start doing the quotes that I can. If there's no luck there, then we have, we have Alan, everybody should have an Alan. He's kind of like the MacGyver. So if you have a situation that you can't figure it out, He'll figure it out and say, okay, yeah, I know exactly who to call. he'll handle like the wholesale brokers or he'll have personal relationships because he's our guy that's on the phone 24 seven talking to underwriters.

Ben: Okay, nice. Yeah. when you say you go to the carriers, do you do that yourself? Like will you log into portals yourself and type information in? Yeah.

Brandy: Yes. Yes. So that one thing to get used to ⁓ coming from captive and then going to independent captive has ⁓ what most them have like an all in one ⁓ software that log in and everything's there. You got to go to every carrier's ⁓ portal and got to learn their system and you got to learn like the tricks and and kind of like the back doors and the loopholes to get around certain stuff. Everything's different. Everybody's system is quirky. And then some carriers don't even have an online portal. You got to email ⁓ underwriter directly, or they have like a general email where you send a court forms and then they'll reach out to you with ⁓ quote or tell you if it's eligible or not.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah, that's that's kind of consistent across what I've heard that it varies a lot. How do you make sure that you that all the questions are answered by the insured before you go to the carrier portal? Do you maintain like a list of all the things that carriers could potentially be asking?

Brandy: Yeah, so we have, we have SOPs for every line. And it's basically a list of carriers and what they're, what they're best suited for. So we have it divided by commercial auto, builders risk, landlord insurance, personal home insurance, ⁓ personal auto, business policies. And then it's just a list of carriers that are best suited for those types of general risk that we kind of deal with most frequently. And then also for each of those risks, we have about 20 or so questions that is the basic information that we need. Every carrier is different. Every carrier is one and all certain stuff. So at the very least, we'll fill out the application. And then if there's something that we don't have, then we call back the person and get that info. Yeah. And then usually I want to say nine out of 10 ⁓ times, if it's a riskier thing, like a build this risk, the underwriter is going to call back or email with more questions. So we have to contact the customer again.

Ben: Yeah. Supplemental questions. ⁓ that makes sense. I'm really intrigued by the AI tool you said you you built and you use. Is it like how how does it work?

Brandy: called Cara. You can subscribe it. It's C-A-R-A. I believe it's for the insurance fill out a forms for you as well.

Ben: given you came from outside insurance, what is like the sort you surprise for you having now entered this ⁓ new world six, seven years ago?

Brandy: I had anxiety and I was very nervous investing all this time and all this money into something that it was just kind of like, I need to do something different. You know, it's not my passion. It's not. But deep down, my passion is helping people. And what you do in insurance, especially with my background in the Hispanic community. Insurance is kind of like a requirement to drive your car, know, a requirement to get a loan. We don't think of it as a tool. It's just, ⁓ know, like a light bulb.

Ben: Yeah.

Brandy: And growing up, I'm first generation born here. So I did all every phone call, every important phone call for my parents, because I was the first one to speak English. So I grew up with my dad's telling me, I got to renew insurance. So let's call, tell them I want the cheapest. So I grew up with that mentality. Like, yeah, I'm not going to pay more for insurance for what ⁓ just want to drive my car. And then. As I got older and I started having my own business and having my own car and stuff like that and got into my first accident, I realized that ⁓ is important. It really got me out of a jam. It replaced my car. It paid the damages for other person. I didn't have to come out of pocket except for the deductible. I would have had, luckily it under minimum coverage. that I had at the time. But if it was more, I would have had to come out of pocket. So that was a big, a big kind of like a ha moment for me that I learned very young. So coming into, into insurance from the entertainment industry, I realized that a business is a business. As long as you have your systems in place and you give it 110%, you're going to do okay. So once I got into the thick of it, I was hiring people, I in the office day to day, I was comfortable with all the policies and how quote and all that stuff. I was good. So that was really what surprised me the most. It was learning curve. I was expecting it to be a lot. Not that it was and not that it isn't hard, but that I was able to do it so quickly. I surprised myself.

Ben: when you say that insurance isn't all the and you don't just want to get the cheapest rate, have you noticed a quality, you know, in the different carriers and are you comfortable sort of sharing some carriers that you would always go to and you have good relationships with?

Brandy: Oh yeah, 100%. So my go-to right now, I like...