GO INDEPENDENT AND YOU’LL BE THERE FOR LIFE

In 2002, a woman and her five children emigrated from Afghanistan to the United States. One of those children, Cyrus Jaffery, was 14 years old and “didn’t speak English very well,” he says in perfect English, proving that his early years learning the language and learning about his adopted country were well spent. Part of this time also was spent helping his mother clean houses, the job she took on to support her family.  

What Cyrus brought with him from Afghanistan was a willingness to work hard, a desire to help people, a love for learning, and a personality that his brother Ahmad describes as “very personable. He’s great at meeting people and becoming their friend in that first meeting.” This ability to create a trusted relationship after an initial meeting led to Cyrus getting a job with a direct writer and becoming one of its top agents.

However, Cyrus quickly found out that the captive relationship “comes with a ceiling. I used to wake up disappointed. I wanted to have a job where I could really make a difference in people’s lives and, about five years ago, I decided to start my own independent agency. We opened our doors in May 2019, with my brother Bobby coming along. He had been part of my team at the direct writer.”

“Actually, I left a month earlier,” Bobby remembers, “in order to get our new sales team up to speed once we opened our doors. I joined Cyrus at the direct writer when I was a senior in high school, focusing on sales, and continued that focus at our new start-up, helping to establish the metrics that sales agents would need to meet.”

When he became vice president of sales several months ago, Bobby increased his focus on helping the salespeople grow and meet their accountability goals as well as opening new opportunities by establishing additional relationships with real estate companies, mortgage brokers, and other centers of influence.

“Our new start-up also included easy-to-use technology that allowed us to get a quote within 60 seconds from a number of companies,” says Cyrus, who serves Jaffery Insurance & Financial Services as founder and CEO. “We also featured a way of answering the phone that immediately differentiated us from the competition: ‘We’re having a great day at Jaffery Insurance. How can I help you have a great experience?’

“This is followed by a focus on determining not just the insurance needs of clients and potential clients, but how they want to communicate with us and how often,” Cyrus continues. “We built our technology so we can incorporate that. Most of the time, the consumer just wants to be treated right and pay a reasonable price for coverage.

“Of course, defining reasonable price involves informing the consumer about exactly what he or she is paying for,” he explains. “We move them away from price alone immediately by educating them about the various coverage options that are available and finding out just what their unique coverage needs might be. Then, because we are independent, we offer them a variety of choices to help them determine which company best fulfills their needs.

“Since most of [our remote salespeople] are ex-captive agents, they have experience and good understanding of the industry … .”

—Bobby Jaffery

Vice President of Sales

“Because we speak four languages in our agency, we also have been able to reach communities where English is not the primary language. … It’s very important to us because it provides us an opportunity to explain insurance to communities that don’t understand the need.”

—Ahmad Jaffery

President of Operations

“It’s the old adage that says the way you get your business is the way you keep it or lose it,” Cyrus explains. “By keeping our customers focused on what they are buying and why, we create a relationship that is based on service, communication, and choice.

“That just wasn’t something we could do at a direct writer,” he says, declaring proudly that “once you go independent, you’ll never go back. Freedom is the biggest thing.”

Cyrus in a soundproof booth

that he and others use to make calls

or work in a totally noise-free and distraction-free environment.

Start with homeowners

“We are predominately a personal lines agency,” Cyrus points out, noting that personal lines accounts for more than 90% of the agency’s business. “We started out by establishing relationships with real estate professionals to essentially serve as the insurance agent for their customers. So, in reality, our first sales were to those professionals.

“We needed to show them that we would enhance their relationship with their clients by treating those clients in a professional manner and providing them with the best coverage options,” he adds.

“Once we’ve cemented our relationship with clients as their homeowners insurance expert, we work diligently on becoming their agent for all their personal lines coverages,” Cyrus continues. “We don’t want single-policy customers. In fact, one of the important metrics we look at every day is now many policies each customer has. That has a direct correlation with our retention ratio, another important metric that we focus on.

Maggie Ortega, Operations

Manager and Insurance Advisor.

“Because we have agents all over the country, we meet with our salespeople every four hours for a quick fifteen-minute Circle of Trust meeting to keep them accountable by going over the metrics and ending with a positive success story that helps motivate them as well as provide an idea that might result in new sales opportunities.” Cyrus adds humbly that “I borrowed this idea from my workout group. Everything I do comes from something I’ve heard or seen.”

It should be noted that, in addition to the salespeople operating out of the Omaha office, Jaffery Insurance has a number of 1099 agents across the country for which they serve as an aggregator. As part of his job, Bobby serves as the support team for these agents “whenever they need me.”

He adds, “Since most of them are ex-captive agents, they have experience and good understanding of the industry, so they rarely contact me except when faced with a need for a new coverage or a problem that will later become a learning experience at our sales meeting every Monday.”

Cyrus notes that these 1099 relationships have grown because, once again, he learned from someone else. “When we started out as a new agency, company appointments were not always easy to obtain, although that problem disappeared rather quickly when we showed an ability to reach and exceed sales goals well ahead of deadline, and we initially had to work with some aggregators.

“Using their contracts as a model, we produced our own contract as an aggregator with better terms, including the freedom for those 1099 agents to walk away with their business,” he adds.

Impact

“My ultimate goal in life is to have a positive impact on at least one million people,” Cyrus points out. “As an agency, we’ve been able to provide jobs to people and opportunities for agents struggling to establish themselves.

Whenever one of these people leaves us, I consider that a job well done because they have been able to obtain company contracts and start providing jobs for other people. Both internally and externally, I see our primary job as giving people opportunities to grow and to live better lives.”

The aforementioned brother, Ahmad, joined the agency six months after it started, providing the marketing muscle that it needed. Ahmad says he was heavily influenced in his youth by the beatnik 

Twice each day—at 9 am and 1 pm—team members from around the country meet for 15 minutes to share wins and losses from the prior four hours. All meetings end with an uplifting message from a team member. As Cyrus puts it, “The idea is to get everyone together and on the same page and inspire them with positivity!”