One of the most complicated parts to navigate when you own a property management company is the different types of multifamily insurance and risk management you have to know and have.
Property management growth expert, Jason Hull brought on Calvin Roberts of Falcon Insurance to discuss everything you should know about insurance and risk management as a property manager.
You’ll Learn…
[01:26] Introduction to Calvin and Falcon Insurance
[05:46] Risk Management and Property Management
[13:24] Holistic Risk Management Strategies
[17:57] The Types of Insurance Coverage
[25:25] Insurance Best Practices and Tips
[29:56] Tenant Legal Liability
Tweetables
“It’s the true risk management angle that I find to be sort of like chess. That’s why I think it’s interesting because one move counters another.”
“It’s just making your rights known in the lease agreement that will hopefully alleviate the vast majority of instances like this before it could ever find its way to a courtroom.”
“If you don’t feel like you’re progressing or moving forward in your business, you just might not have a big enough goal. So set your stake a little bit bigger, a little bit higher.”
“I think cyber’s a great idea for everyone. I carry cyber liability insurance on my own insurance policy for Falcon. It’s fairly cheap, and it does add a lot of value.”
Resources
Transcript
[00:00:00] [00:00:00] Calvin: If you haven’t gone through all of the building limits with your insurance broker over the last three years, and really over the last year, maybe two years, it’s probably significantly underinsured. I read the statistic recently that over 75% of buildings– commercial investment real estate– are underinsured by 40% or more
[00:00:25] Jason Hull: All right. Welcome Doorgrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you’re interested in growing in business and life, and you’re open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it. You think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder, and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let’s get into the show.
[00:01:26] So my guest today who I’m hanging out with is Calvin Roberts of Falcon Insurance Agency.
[00:01:34] So Calvin, welcome to the show.
[00:01:37] Calvin: Awesome. Thank you once again for having me today. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and super excited.
[00:01:44] Jason Hull: Yeah, glad to have you. So, Calvin, give people a little bit of backstory on you. How did you get into insurance and how did you get into business in general and then we can chat more about insurance.
[00:02:01] Calvin: So I started off in retail property and casualty insurance. Very young. I was 19 years old. I knew I wanted to take immediate action to, you know, more or less accomplish the goals I had set out on achieving. And I had some family members who had a very successful career for themself with insurance. They weren’t on the retail, sales insurance agency side of it. They were more working for the company directly, but I saw the effectiveness of insurance as a growth vehicle for, you know, achieving good, stable personal income and overall just view that as a very, a very fulfilling field if you’re one of the few people that find risk management genuinely fascinating. So I began an Allstate office in Mid, Michigan in 2016. I was there for about two years and quickly realized I needed to go independent. I didn’t like being locked down for just one company. So in 2018, after I, you know, got my feet wet and did a couple years there. I branched off and worked at indie agency and I was at that office for about two years further, and also quickly realized I needed to own my book of business, my contractual relationship with my clients. That’s where, you know, the real scalability and effectiveness and retail insurance as being a personal financial driver came into play. So I split off right as Covid was kicking off April, 2020. I figured if there’s any time to bite the bullet, restart from zero and you know, take it from the ground up once more, april, 2020 was not the worst time to go out for it, you know.
[00:03:53] So I, you know, split off then worked 1099. I had a friend that had started a insurance agency at their own couple months before and was like, “Hey, Cal, why don’t you come work for me?” And I said, sure, but I am going to eventually leave to form my own agency. So I pre-negotiated contractual ownership of my clients. That was something that was very important to me and worked under him to more or less build the foundation for eventually splitting off and forming Falcon. You know, it’s kind of a chicken-egg scenario with retail insurance where you want insurance companies on day one to work with you when you form an agency, but it’s hard to get them to work with you unless you have some type of existing clients and premium volume that you can bring to the table on day one.
[00:04:47] Yeah. So during that period I worked to, you know, set my pieces up and build a impressive enough book of business to where I could attract insurance companies on my own. And then last January I left my friend’s agency and formed Falcon. We’re a national boutique commercial insurance brokerage. We are very forward thinking, licensed nationally, and we don’t ever really lose on price, but where we really sell on is having a unique, holistic risk management, value add strategy for our multi-family operators. We bring $0 best practices, you know, tips and tricks to the table that many of our competitors just don’t take the time to share with the operator. And that’s really how we differentiate ourself is taking a bold, big picture approach to managing risk for a multi-family operation.
[00:05:46] Jason Hull: Okay. So what about you makes you interested in risk management? This is not something that most people wake up and go, “man, I want to learn about that today.” Right?
[00:05:55] Calvin: So I know, you know, every little kid growing up wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I want to be a insurance broker when I grow up.”
[00:06:03] Jason Hull: It’s right up there with like firemen and working with animals like veterinarian.
[00:06:08] Calvin: I am one of those few insurance geeks that finds it legitimately fascinating. You know, it’s not very hard to write an insurance policy. Most people can probably do it for their home and auto, online, and realistically even most small businesses. Most people can probably put that together for themselves. It’s the true risk management angle that I find to be sort of like chess. That’s why I think it’s interesting because one move counters another, and it’s all about just proactively working a flank, whoever might be seeking to cause financial harm to your organization. So I’ll give an example. Most insurance policies exclude care, custody, and control liability. So that’s liability arising from your guardianship of property. So where that would come into play on a multi-family operation would be the vehicles kept in the parking lot of one of your buildings or complexes.
[00:07:08] Let’s say you have a resident, maybe they let their insurance policy lapse, you know, they forgot to pay it and it got canceled and maybe they had a brand new 2023 lease vehicle. You know, they pick up a new Ford truck. It gets stolen or maybe a tree branch falls on it. The bank is hounding them like, “Hey, why didn’t you have insurance?” They’re thinking to themselves, “I need to do something to get them made whole so I don’t get sued” and you know, maybe, you know, “I have to get to work. How do I do that without a vehicle?” Type of thing. They’re quite likely to attempt to sue the multi-family operator and or property management company due to this. So something that I recommend all of my clients implement into their tenant lease agreement is a stipulation that they are expressly not liable for care custody control of tenant vehicles parked on the premises. You know, it costs the operator nothing to add a one-paragraph section for their tenant lease agreement and the effectiveness of this, should it go to court, kind of varies on a state-by-state basis.
[00:08:23] You know, depending on how the courts have interpreted this and your jurisdiction. But simply by having something like this in your tenant lease agreement, it talks a big game and it’s pretty likely to, you know, hopefully dissuade 95% of people from even attempting to litigate. So it’s that element of, I don’t want to say bluffing, but just making your rights known in the lease agreement that will hopefully alleviate the vast majority of instances like this before it could ever find its way to a courtroom. Because you know the first thing that would happen. Should a loss like that occur is the resident would talk to their personal attorney and they’re going to immediately ask for a copy of that tenant lease agreement.
[00:09:14] Right. You know, they see a section like that and maybe they, you know, advise to maybe not attempt to litigate. They just aren’t sure if that might play out in the courts favorably for them and say it’s just not worth it.
[00:09:29] Jason Hull: Yeah. ‘An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure’. Right, exactly. So, I mean, they could get a really great lawyer, you know, to try and protect themselves. But you know, having a really good lease agreement in making sure that you have some of those things in place to protect you from potential issues surrounding insurance. Yeah. Sounds wise. So, yeah. Very cool. So, and you geek out on. This is fun for you.
[00:09:56] Calvin: I think it’s legitimately interesting to think about. I’m one of the few people that gets kicks out of it.
[00:10:03] Jason Hull: Which is cool. I mean, if you are going to be handling this stuff for your clients, hopefully you do enjoy it. Right. Thank you for sharing kind of your journey. What’s fascinating to me is that every single step that you had mentioned most insurance agents or people that kind of progress through that would probably drop off that first level. Maybe the second level. They just get stuck. They’re comfortable. So what is it about you that drove you to, in such a short time period, like get to the point where you are innovating, making changes to starting your own business?
[00:10:38] Calvin: Really a few things. I’ve always wanted to be in the agency principal. That’s where it enables me to have the freedom to do the things I like to do. Yeah. You know, I don’t just want to pick up access to five insurance companies and then try to write as much business as I’m able to that agrees with the appetite of those five insurance companies. I target segments, you know, industries that I find fun to work with, interesting to work on.
[00:11:08] Overall fulfilling to be involved with, and I want to be as effective as possible constantly when going after and targeting those segments. So when you’re working for someone else, I mean, they can have great access to insurance companies or it could be not as great and fairly lacking. More often than not, it is fairly lacking. I found most of the agencies I had been with previously, they had done, like you said, they got comfortable and kind of stopped trying to push the needle, so to speak. And, you know, that’s fine. They were making, you know, excellent income for themselves and their family and it was working very well for them. But it just comes down to, I don’t like to lose when I’m going after something. Yeah. So I might. Be humbled the first 1, 2, 5, 10 times I go after a new segment, but eventually I will start winning and I want to have access to the insurance companies. I know we’ll win. I want to be active in the states where I would like to chase business, target accounts. Yeah, so it’s about having the freedom on my end to accomplish my goal.
[00:12:23] Jason Hull: So, I mean that plays into stuff I’ve talked about on the show previously. I mean, you’re an entrepreneur at heart. Like now entrepreneurs, they want more freedom and they want more fulfillment and you know, than the average person when most people want safety and certainty, which is good for insurance agents, right? So you had an outcome that in your mind you were like, I want to be agency principal. Like you knew what you wanted. And so this is take note, everybody listen. Because most of you’re business owners, if you don’t feel like you’re progressing or moving forward in your business, you just might not have a big enough goal. So set your stake a little bit bigger, a little bit higher. Like what do you really want? It probably isn’t, probably not satisfied or comfortable with what you have, but maybe you’re not clear the outcome that you want. So, so, now a lot of our listeners do residential and a lot of them, some have multi-family. Some have single-family properties they’re managing. What did you want to come share with us today and chat about?
[00:13:25] Calvin: So, I would love to talk about holistic risk management strategies. You know, things like my contractual risk transfer agreements that I think are advisable for all investment real estate operators, multi-family, and one the four family residential. Okay. Yeah. It doesn’t cost anything besides maybe a consultation with your attorney, and it adds a lot of value that is not a recurring cost. It’s a one time, you know, check to your attorney. Time and effort. So give an example. Let’s say you’re hiring a contractor, maybe an arborist to come trim the branches off of the tree on one of your properties. You’ll want them to provide you a certificate of insurance that names your organization as additional insured. And you want that because if, let’s say maybe when they’re cutting down a tree branch and it falls and takes out the roof of a neighboring property, I mean, that’s terribly plausible to happen.
[00:14:28] You would rather that not be a claim on your insurance policy. You want that to fall on the arborist policy you know? We’re in a what’s called hard market, which basically means, for lack of a better word, it’s a seller’s market with an insurance currently. It’s being driven by interest rate changes, inflation, and several other factors coming in to play. We don’t want that claim to be tied to us that. You know, be passed off to the responsible party, the contractor that we hired. So by asking for that certificate, it makes it less of a challenge to get their insurance to respond should that type of loss occur. And on top of that, I like to see in the insurance requirement section of our, you know, contractor agreement for employing them on a 1099, that we have a primary non-contributory clause. We want a hold harmless agreement, and we would like a waiver of subrogation. We do that for a few reasons. We don’t want to, you know, take the step of getting the contractor’s insurance and having it name us as additional insured only for their insurance company to say, “oh, well, you know, we think that you are partially negligent somehow. You know, maybe you should have had the tree branch trimmed a year ago, or five years ago, and you let it grow too long.” We don’t want them to get into a more or less a battle with us and our insurance company on how much of the loss they’re responsible for. We want them to take immediate responsibility and not attempt to, you know, wipe their hands of it, so to speak.
[00:16:14] We also don’t want the other insurance company to pay the claim, you know, settle the lawsuit only to attempt to come back and subrogate that loss from us, you know, the property owner or property management company. So that’s where that waiver of subrogation would come into play. That would be where they attempt to be made whole by, you know, attempting to recover from a third party, so sue us, for lack of a better word. You know, maybe they might say, oh, well, you know, you were negligent because you had the duty to trim this tree branch when it got over, you know, 14 feet long, or just whatever argument they choose to try to put together. And then we’re back at square one. We’re being sued.
[00:17:04] It’s a claim. Our insurance policy we don’t. So we ask for this as a requirement in our contractor employment agreement. It’s fairly boiler plate. I mean, if you look at the insurance requirements on subcontractors coming from general contractors, you know, residential and commercial developers and builders, these requirements are usually found in what they’re going to look for in their subcontractors, but I do commonly see it missing within property management companies. Despite property management companies being, you know, kind pseudo contracting type operations. It’s kind of like that hybrid between like the clerical office job and the on the job site, you know, residential builder type role.
[00:17:53] Jason Hull: Yeah, a lot of them kind of function as a general contractor to a bunch of contractors. So what what are the types of insurance coverage? Let’s go to the basis, what are the types of insurance coverage typically required for a residential property management company?
[00:18:08] Calvin: The residential property management company, you will want a general liability policy that would respond in the event that we cause bodily injury or property damage for which the company is liable. You want professional liability insurance. That’s in case there is ever a professional boo boo, so to speak that comes up. I had a pretty nasty law scenario I won’t get into too much detail on over the summer last year, which thankfully has not turned into a lawsuit. Let’s kind of crossing my fingers and, you know, a little nervous for the insured on this one. I work with their third party property owners, but the property management company is not itself a client yet. But the story on this is that someone was, you know, injured, let’s say in the apartment building via violent action from someone that may or may not have been a tenant. I’m not sure exactly on the circumstances. And the exterior facing door on this newer acquisition property had been purchased, you know, about four months before the loss event happened. That door had not been re-keyed by the property management company. So if a old tenant from five years ago still had their old key to get into the laundry room, they could, it was still the old locks.
[00:19:29] The property manager was unaware that there was a door entering into the basement area that was accessible from the outside. So they just never thought to rekey it, you know, happens. There was a bad event in the property and if that were to ever make its way to court, the property management company would almost certainly get tied up into that. And to be honest it’s kind of unclear if that might fall onto a professional liability or a general liability form. It’s kind of gray because it’s technically a bodily injury that occurred. It was bodily injury due to more of a lack of professional action than, you know– it’s not like they would hit someone with their car kind of thing.
[00:20:13] So we would probably file claims on both policies and just kinda let the insurance companies fight it out on who’s responsible to hear from there. So that would. A pretty good instance of where professional liability might come in into play. Okay. I also think that cyber liability insurance is a good idea. So cyber would come into play if, you know, let’s say one of our accountants, you know, maybe we have two or three staff accountants on board. They download a file and maybe it has a virus and their computer gets hacked. And as a result, the personal banking information for 1500 residents that we have on file might have been stolen by a nefarious third party actor. We would become liable for what happens with that data, and that’s where cyber would come into play.
[00:21:04] Jason Hull: Yeah, there was a one of the major property management software that our clients use, one of our clients were telling us was hacked, So, yeah, so now they’re having to deal with that mess.
[00:21:14] Calvin: It happens a lot within the small business and the lower mid-market, you know, operation world. In recent years, I would say the biggest segment that really needs to put emphasis on protecting themselves is that middle market operation. Because if you’re a nefarious third party actor, and maybe you’re doing ransomware attacks where you hack into their system, lock down all of the data and say, send us $500,000 worth of Bitcoin to this address, or we’re going to delete everything in three days. Yeah, I mean, it happens fairly often and they’re not going to go after that real small operation. It’ll be a operation. It’s big enough to have financial resources where they can whip out a half mill if they need to keep their business alive more or less. But they’re also not big enough to where, you know, they’re that Fortune 1000 who has a, not only a risk management team, but they also have the, you know, cyber risk management team and the IT team, and they’re able to much more effectively defend against that. So they target the businesses that are in between those two stages because they have the resources to pay out in a, you know, cyber extortion scenario. But they also do not yet have the resources to where they can adequately defend proactively against it. I think cyber’s a great idea for everyone. I carry cyber liability insurance on my own insurance policy for Falcon. It’s fairly cheap, and it does add a lot of value.
[00:22:54] Jason Hull: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting. Most small businesses are one bad password on their team, away from affecting all of their clients in having to e crow in front of all of them. And you also have no idea how the companies you’re using and most property managers are using a lot of different software tools including the one that has all the accounting stuff going on, you know, their property management software, back office and they have a whole team of people that one person can screw it up for everybody. So yeah. So we’ve got general liability, professional liability, cyber liability. What else?
[00:23:34] Calvin: You probably want worker’s comp, you know, if it’s just yourself, you can get away with not having it. But if you have any staff on board, even if they’re a 1099 employment relationship, you will want the worker’s compensation. And I say the 1099 rule, because that’s a common question I get asked. You know, “I don’t have any W2 employees. Do I need worker’s comp?” The answer is yes, unless the third party, you know, 1099 employee that you’re hiring provides you a certificate of workers’ compensation insurance. If they do that and you do not have any other W2, then no, that is not a hard requirement. You can use your discretion on that. But if you are hiring, you know, even 1099, you need the worker’s compensation insurance. It’s fairly inexpensive, all things considered, and most states, because it does kind of vary by locality, it’s a requirement and can create a whole host of hurt for not having it. It’s one of those things where I am terrified, you know, maybe not doing something that the government loves, so to speak, and that’s up there with things that ticks them off, you know?
[00:24:54] Jason Hull: Yeah. So another one that I hear about in the industry a lot is errors and omissions. Can you touch on that one or explain that one?
[00:25:02] Calvin: So the errors and emissions is that professional liability element.
[00:25:06] Jason Hull: Okay.
[00:25:07] Calvin: So they have kind of synonym names for that line of insurance.
[00:25:12] Jason Hull: Okay. Okay, cool. Yeah. So, perfect. Okay. because I hear like all the time they’re saying, getting E and O you need E and O stuff like that. So that’s kind of what they’re calling professional liability. So how can property managers better protect their owners through these insurance products?
[00:25:32] Calvin: Occasionally, the building owning entity itself may be tied up in a loss due to, you know, perhaps alleged property management negligence. So I’ll give an example. Let’s say, the property management company is assigned to hiring out snow and lawn maintenance services, you know, someone to come out and, you know, remove snow from the parking lot on a small apartment complex or a three-family rental property. And maybe they select a contractor who, they’re nice and they’re cheap, but they aren’t super consistent or dependable. So sometimes when it snows, they just don’t come by and snow and ice accumulates in the parking lot and perhaps a resident slips and falls on the way to their vehicle one day and they’re seriously injured. It’s one of those things where if the tenant sues, which they probably will, they’re going to sue the property management company and they’re going to sue the building company.
[00:26:34] We would want, if we’re going in the direction of, you know, looking out for our property owners and having that be kind of our unique selling proposition, we wouldn’t want their insurance to respond because they hire us to take care of those things essentially. That was our boo boo one could say. That’s where having our own general liability insurance would come into play, that coverage would trigger, and you know, it’s kind of the inverse of how I usually see this play out, because it’s generally the building owner’s policy that would respond and then they would have the property management company as an additional insured. But I mean, if our branding and selling point is that we, you know, put a special emphasis on always doing right by the owner and just not allowing situations like that to occur, that’s where we would want our insurance policy to respond primary.
[00:27:31] Jason Hull: So, I would imagine with covid happening and all the stuff that’s gone on recently in the increase in government control that’s constantly happening, if somebody hasn’t taken a look at their insurance, maybe in the last five years, what are some recent changes or things they should be paying attention to or they should be talking to somebody like you about?
[00:27:54] Calvin: The first thing that I look for when reviewing a new policy for a new client, kind of getting eyes on the existing arrangement of coverage, just to make sure that everything is done correctly before I try to compete on price against that is to look at the building limit. If you haven’t gone through all of the building limits with your insurance broker over the last three years, and really over the last year, maybe two years, it’s probably significantly underinsured. I read the statistic recently that over 75% of buildings commercial investment real estate are underinsured by 40% or more, and the reason why that is not good isn’t just that in a claim scenario that burns to the ground, we’re only going to get a check for 60% of what it might cost to rebuild. because we’re thinking, hey, the home’s only worth 30% of what it might cost to rebuild. It’s not a bad deal still. It’s that the overwhelming majority of insurance policies, commercial property policies have what’s called a co-insurance clause. And coinsurance is where the insurance company wants you to have sufficient skin in the game. So you can insure a property for 80% of what it might actually cost to rebuild.
[00:29:14] So that million dollar to rebuild building, you can have a policy on it for 800,000 and that would be fine if you will like to carry 400,000. You know, maybe the market value of the property, that would not be acceptable and they would divide the amount of insurance that we have, 400,000 for this example, by the minimum amount of coverage that we should have had, 800,000.
[00:29:39] That leaves us with a 0.5 gut insurance penalty multiplier. So on a $200,000 fire, they’re going to subtract 50% and your deductible. So you get posed on that and are paying most of the loss out of pocket.
[00:29:55] Jason Hull: So are there any other unique or unusual coverage options that are related specifically to residential property management?
[00:30:06] Calvin: I’ve been putting a great deal of emphasis on the tenant legal liability product over the last two years. It started popping up pretty actively around three or four years ago. I mean, there are some operations that have been doing this for a decade. It became fairly popular around 2020- 21. And what the tenant legal liability insurance does is it provides a mechanism, one for monetizing the insurance vertical for the operator, and two, it enables the property owner to shield themselves from having small, you know, tenant negligence type losses pile up on their own insurance policy and therefore claims history. The most common cause of loss I see on residential investment real estate is you have a tenant come home one night. Maybe they just worked 11 hours and you know, tired after a long, busy day and they maybe get home, crack open a beer or two, start cooking something, throw a pizza in the oven. Going lay downs on the couch for 20 minutes. Well, that’s cooking. Watch some tv, and then they fall asleep and it causes a $75,000 kitchen fire. It happens all the time. It’s a high frequency, low to medium intensity type loss, or like we had in the upper Midwest over the holidays, maybe they are going out of town for the holiday. And they’re thinking to themselves, I’m going to turn my heat off during that time. It’ll save me $20 in electricity. Right? So they turn the heat off and they come back four or five days later and the walls have exploded. You know, the pipes have burst and $90,000 worth of damage has happened because about we don’t want that type of loss to be associated with our property policy.
[00:32:07] We’re probably going to get nonrenewed, and it’s going to negatively impact our pricing and cost for several years. It just is a bad scenario to be in. That’s what destroys the loss experience for investment residential real estate is that high frequency, low to medium severity type tenant negligence cause of loss. So what you do is you write into your lease, the tenant must provide a certificate of acceptable third party renter’s insurance. You know, State Farm, Allstate, Farmers, kind of whoever. And if they fail to do so, or if they let coverage lapse, you know, they stop paying for it, we as management reserve the right to place that coverage or a comparable coverage at their cost and for both of our benefit, more or less. And the reason why you do that is we want there to be that coverage in place. You know, I had just over the holidays, like probably five loss occurrences that would’ve otherwise gone on the property policy that were able to be pushed off onto this tenant legal liability master policy. So it kept their property policy clean. You know, we didn’t have to file a claim against any of my insureds because of it.
[00:33:27] Jason Hull: It’s like having insurance to protect your insurance.
[00:33:30] Calvin: Correct. It’s unbelievable that property insurance has become this level of convoluted, but it’s the game that we’re playing and what we have in front of us. This is one of the most effective tools and toolbox.
[00:33:44] Jason Hull: So it’s about having layers of protection.
[00:33:47] Calvin: Exactly. Got it. It doesn’t cost us anything. We pass the cost off onto the tenant. And then what we do is we add maybe $3-7 per door per month on top of what we might pay to the insurance provider. So maybe we pay nine, we charge the tenant 16 and pocket that $7 spread as an administrative fee.
[00:34:11] And that’s a, but you might see this on P 12 s occasionally when you’re underwriting a property on market or otherwise looking. Investment real estate is, you’ll see insurance listed under the profit side of the equation. That’s where this is coming into play.
[00:34:28] Jason Hull: Okay. So it can be a profit center.
[00:34:30] Calvin: Exactly.
[00:34:31] Jason Hull: Got it. Okay. So, how often should a property management business owner be assessing their insurance?
[00:34:41] Calvin: Once a year. I would think about it very actively as you come up to renewal and then, you know, depending on what best practice implementations we’re hoping to, you know, add to what we’re doing over that next year, it’s good to think about the key points frequently, but we should put special emphasis on it once a year as you come up to renewal. You know, just kind of see. What, if any improvements might be recommendable and how the market has shifted over that last year, but you don’t need to think about it every second of every day, but it is good to have it in the back of your head often because it kind of forces that extra level of diligence to being front and center.
[00:35:32] Jason Hull: They just need somebody like you to think about it every day.
[00:35:35] Calvin: Exactly.
[00:35:36] Jason Hull: So I think a question that every business owner has is, “how do I balance the getting the best deal on insurance versus doing too much, get enough coverage, not spend an arm and a leg…” like, you know, in finding this balance and then trusting an insurance agent to do what’s in my interest instead of just their interests?
[00:35:58] Calvin: So I’m a big believer in transparency with my clients. So something that we always provide with every account, new and old, is a market report. So let’s say I, you know, I go to 11 different insurance companies for a new property that you’re looking at. I provide a breakdown of where each company is coming in at with their pricing, with comparable coverages between them. You know, we can’t set the pricing on the retail side. We’re just kind of at times the middlemen of bad news, so to speak.
[00:36:32] Jason Hull: The messenger.
[00:36:33] Calvin: Exactly.
[00:36:34] Jason Hull: But don’t kill the messenger.
[00:36:35] Calvin: By having that market report, it demonstrates that we’re bringing our due diligence to the table and not just going to one company and saying, here you go. Here’s our price. This is what we can do. I think that’s, just a low-effort, less ambitious approach. I mean, sure you can move a lot faster by hitting one company, but you can deliver the best results by going to every company that makes sense to approach. And letting them fight it out. Maybe company one is hotter than company two and a given zip code, but that competitiveness flip flops, depending on just the details of the case that you’re working on.
[00:37:21] So by approaching every insurance company where it makes sense to approach them, it’s within their appetite, you let them fight it out and you see where the cards land. You know, sometimes the price comes in a lot lower than we were expecting to see. Other times, it’s not within the range that we were hoping it would be, but by hitting every company possible and then showing your cards as to where they land, you know, that’s really all we can do. And it demonstrates that we put, you know, our due diligence into marketing the account.
[00:37:55] Jason Hull: Yeah. So you said that what a lot of insurance agents might do might be low effort or less ambitious. And so I think this is important to point out, this ties it back to the beginning, and this will be maybe good, you know, wrap up for us, but I think, you know, property management business owners listening to the show, my recommendation is you want to leverage and use vendors and use people as a support system in your business that are not low effort and less ambitious people that are running their businesses. There’s a lot of accountants and insurance agents and people that really, they’re basically like an employee with clients in their own mind. And then there’s accountants like, you know, my Profit First Coach, an accountant and others that we leverage in our business. They think like entrepreneurs. They are always trained to improve themselves and improve their business, and they see things through a similar lens. So I can trust their advice and I can trust that they’re wanting to that, that they know how an entrepreneur thinks and they’re kind of eating their own dog food as an entrepreneur, and these are very different. Not all accountants are entrepreneurial, even though they have their own business. Not all insurance agents are entrepreneurial, even though they might have their own business. They’re like just some State Farm agent that has their thing and they’re set.
[00:39:20] Right. So, so I think that’s important to point out. I recommend that you find vendors and people to work with that see things through the lens of entrepreneurism because it’s a very different lens. There’s a very strong different focus that they prioritize fulfillment and freedom instead of just the safety and certainty. They understand that aspect. And in your line of work, you need to pay attention to safety and certainty, but you’re somebody that I’m sure can understand the goal that these entrepreneurs have of having more freedom and more fulfillment. And to you, I would imagine safety and certainty and providing insurance is a way of helping them create more of that.
[00:40:02] Calvin: Exactly.
[00:40:03] Jason Hull: And that’s different than a lot of insurance people.
[00:40:07] Calvin: Yeah. I mean, I’ve definitely met some very ambitious colleagues within the field, but it’s one of those things where it’s not really that difficult in terms of chance of success or failure to make a very healthy living for yourself and for your family working in retail insurance, I mean, if you are in the gig for 10 years and you’re writing even a modest amount of business, 2, 3, 4, $500,000 quite easily. So it, I see how that can more or less, I view it be as a trap because you become quite comfortable and stop trying to push the needle.
[00:40:50] Yeah.
[00:40:51] Jason Hull: Comfort kills sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, that’s the case I think for all of us as business owners, we can get comfortable sometimes, and if we’re not willing to get a little bit uncomfortable, if our goals don’t sort of scare us a little bit, we don’t have that ambition then we kind of lose life. I think feel like that’s an important aspect for us to really find that fulfillment and enjoyment. Well, Calvin has been great having you here on the show. How can people get in touch with Falcon Insurance and get in touch with you?
[00:41:23] Calvin: My email or phone or Facebook or LinkedIn, whichever is most convenient for you. I am extremely available and glued to the grind. Close to 95 hours every week. So you can email. Give us a call, shoot me a message on Facebook or LinkedIn. We’ll rise to the challenge every time.
[00:41:43] Cool.
[00:41:43] Jason Hull: Share some of those things right now so the listeners can hear that.
[00:41:47] Calvin: Awesome. My email is Calvin– c-a-l-v-i-n @ falcon i n s agency.com and my direct line is 810-309-9475. You can find me on Facebook or LinkedIn under Calvin Roberts.
[00:42:07] Jason Hull: Perfect. All right, thanks, Calvin. Appreciate you being on the show.
[00:42:10] Calvin: No, thank you very much once again for having me. I appreciate that.
[00:42:13] Jason Hull: All right, so if you are wanting to improve your property management business, and struggling with figuring out how to scale your team, your operations, your systems, here at DoorGrow DoorGrow, we are rolling out a lot of really cool new tools that are game changers for the industry. We’ve got DoorGrow CRM, which is going to be a disruptor, we’ve got DoorGrow flow, which is a process software, which is going to be a disruptor, and we’ve got DoorGrow OS, which is far and way better than things like EOS or Traction. Really awesome way to manage and run your team and the real rocket field of getting your team to think as decision-makers and as if they’re business owners in the business to innovate and move the business forward.
[00:43:03] And we have DoorGrow hiring. This is a game changer. This is one of the most costly mistakes business owners make in their business. Team members are the most expensive resource usually in a business. Hiring can be incredibly costly. It often takes you one, two, maybe three months to realize you made a bad choice, and then they may have cost you a lot of opportunity, cost, and money in the meantime. These are all systems that we’re helping build. We call this the Super System, all of our different systems. It’s like the Voltron of systems or THUNDERCATS of systems or Power Rangers when they combine. I don’t know what age some of you are and when you grew up, but depending, this is like the ultimate combination of systems and it’s all of these are free and included in our high-level mastermind in which you get to connect with game changers in the industry. People that are growth-minded and grow your business even faster. And we give you a lot of really good coaches and systems. We have some of the best in the industry we brought in as coaches that are supporting our clients. It really is a game-changer. Nobody else can touch us because we run on DoorGrow OS. We leverage our own systems and do these things, and we move rapidly as a company.
[00:44:18] So DoorGrow is not the same company it was even 30 days ago, even 90 days ago, especially not a year ago, we have an amazing team and we would love to support you and help you scale your business and get you to that thousand doors or higher, whatever your goal is, and make your day-to-day in life easier and easier the more doors you add, which is the reverse of what we see most clients doing before they come to us.
[00:44:45] If this is interesting, reach out to us at doorgrow.com. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.
[00:44:52] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:45:19] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
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