Focusing on six critical indicators, The Sitkins 100 Group
pushes successful agencies to new heights
"We decided to limit membership to 100 ... By working closely with owners and their team, we have the opportunity to profoundly impact their total culture."
--Roger Sitkins
Roger Sitkins, President of Sitkins Group, Inc., in Fort Myers, Florida, coaches agencies to be more selective in choosing prospective clients.
Rogers Sitkins, the creator of The Vertical Growth Experience™, developed his unique coaching program for successful insurance agencies by drawing wisdom from one of his life-long passions--football.
"Football taught me a lot about life and about business," Sitkins says. "While growing up in Michigan, I played all-star football in high school and four years of college ball. This experience taught me that there are three keys to success in any endeavor. One, you need to focus on basics and master them. Two, you need to have a great team made up of great players. And three, you need to practice, practice, practice."
During the past 20-plus years of coaching owners of independent insurance agencies, Sitkins has taken this gridiron philosophy and expanded it into, what he calls, The Ten Great Plays™. These are his strategies for guaranteed success and progress.
"When I played football, we had a small play book with only a handful of plays in it," Sitkins says. "But we practiced these plays over and over again until we mastered them. And we succeeded because we stuck to these plays during a game. After my playing days, this experience made me realize that business is a lot like football. If you identify 10 basic areas of your business and develop a great play, or strategy, for each of them, then you will greatly increase your chances of success."
Today, Sitkins' company helps owners of independent insurance agencies use these great plays to achieve vertical growth.
"There are four types of growth experienced by agencies and producers," Sitkins explains. "Negative growth, flat growth, horizontal growth, and vertical growth. Negative growth is self-explanatory. Flat growth is just holding on to what you've got. Most insurance agencies are stuck in horizontal growth, about 5% to 10% a year.
That's fine, but this growth is often undermined by rising costs; thus profit is not enhanced. That's why we aim to help our members achieve vertical growth. That's when your agency is growing by 15% to 25% or more per year in the critical indicators. That's why we call our program, The Vertical Growth Experience.
"We work at a high strategic level with the owners of the agency and assist the producers and staff on the practical application of these strategies. To track the results achieved from our program, we focus on six critical indicators: Closing Ratios, Revenue per Relationship, Revenue per Employee, Revenue per Producer, Retention, and Operating Profit. By monitoring these indicators, we can determine the changes required, and the progress achieved."
Sitkins contends that most agencies are mired in horizontal growth because they keep doing the same old thing. "They are not achieving great results and increasing the value of their agency because they don't have a great game plan. In most cases, they have three major problems: One, they don't have a set offense, which means they don't have a selling system. Two, they have no set defense, which means they don't have a service structure that provides high-level, concierge-type customer service. And three, they aren't scoring enough points because they aren't generating sufficient operating profit."
The Sitkins Group staff includes (from left) Chrissy Burson, Sandra Sammelian, Janey Cahill, Roger Sitkins, Janet Earls and Michelle DeLong.
One of the main strategies that Sitkins coaches his clients to adopt is the 80/20 Rule. "All agencies have large, medium, and small (A, B, C) clients, but 80% of their revenues usually comes from the top 20% of their clients. Yet they tend to miss this obvious point. They think of their small C clients as their 'bread-and-butter.' They tell their producers to pursue the medium B clients, and they think they get lucky when they find a few A clients. As such, we teach our members The Ultimate Marketing Strategy™: to round out, retain, and replicate their A and B clients. This simple, yet powerful strategy, properly fostered into the culture of the agency, can have a tremendous impact on their profitable growth."
Limited to 100 agencies, members in the Sitkins coaching community enjoy a unique experience due to the exclusive, non-competitive nature of the program. As a member of The Sitkins 100, each participating agency is able to share its concerns, experiences and knowledge with other members, confident that it is not giving vital information to a direct competitor.
"We decided to limit membership to 100 in order to maintain the open community atmosphere of the sessions," Sitkins stresses. "By working closely with owners and their team, we have the opportunity to profoundly impact their total culture."
To achieve vertical growth, Sitkins says agency owners usually need to change the culture of the agency, and the behaviors of their team members. He believes the number one challenge of management is to constantly reinforce desired habit changes until these habits become part and parcel of the agency's culture.
"You can't just tell people to do something different," Sitkins says. "You have to keep reinforcing the desired behaviors until they become ingrained in the total culture of the organization. For example, most agencies are driven by activities, not results. They spend a lot of time quoting unqualified prospects. They think they are on the right track because they are producing lots of proposals. We call this Practice Quoting. To get better results, the organization has to become more selective and super qualify every prospect. But this habit requires discipline and constant reinforcement before it becomes accepted and normal in the agency."
Sitkins offers another example to illustrate the need for total cultural change in an agency: "Some agencies do not make it a habit to ask for referrals, or they don't do it very well. We believe referrals are critical to success, so we teach our members the art of the referrals and reinforce the regular solicitation of referrals by the company. Over time, asking for referrals becomes standard operating procedure in the agency."
To help insurance agencies adopt the positive cultural changes required to achieve vertical growth, Sitkins has developed a series of coaching programs, workshops, resources and capabilities tailored to the specific needs of people in every department of an agency.
Members of The Sitkins 100 are also given the right to use The Risk Reduction Approach™, a proprietary sales and marketing system exclusively packaged for members of the program.
"The Risk Reduction Approach is a unique process we created to help our members differentiate themselves in the marketplace and get more clients by providing a more sophisticated level of service and support. Our members use this process to help their clients in the development of a long-term risk reduction plan that results in a lowering of their total cost of risk while making their firms more attractive to the insurance marketplace. We also have a unique process for the sale of employee benefits known as The Total
Benefits Approach™."
Sitkins conducts some CSR training via online conferencing.
It isn't only agency owners who are taught the Vertical Growth Experience. Non-owner producers are schooled in vertical growth and given an opportunity to network with other producers at presentations developed specifically for them. CSRs find their niche in vertical growth through customer service. Some of these are delivered via online conferencing. Most are presented in person.
As a voracious reader and life-long learner, Sitkins has an unrelenting passion for coaching. "I love helping people improve themselves and go to the next level," Sitkins says. "I love developing new concepts and strategies--and teaching people about them."
Sitkins began his insurance-industry career during the 1970s while attending Eastern Michigan University, by selling insurance for his parents' firm, Sitkins Insurance Agency. Upon graduation in 1971, Roger started working full time for the family firm. During that time, Roger teamed up with Gary Holgate to consult with other insurance agencies.
"I visited more than 450 agencies one-on-one during the '80s and '90s and learned more than I could ever remember. I discovered that most insurance agencies need a coach to reach the next level. I saw that they were spending too much time on administration and service issues, and not enough time on sales and relationships. I saw that they were focusing on the wrong customers and the wrong indicators. I discovered that their systems and processes were disorganized and fragmented. These visits were the foundation of what I've created with The Sitkins 100.
"Over time, I developed group workshops, seminars, and training camps, which became extremely popular. However, they became too popular. People stopped sharing with each other because they didn't want to tell private things to their competitors across the table. But one of the main benefits of our program is the networking and sharing among the members. The large size of the groups was inhibiting this type of interaction. For a while there, I didn't know how to solve this problem. Then in May 2000, I had my 'Epiphany at Pebble Beach.'
"While strolling along the beach, I asked myself, 'What if I had only 100 clients?' What would be the benefit to them, and how would I be able to help them even more? I realized that it would enable us to work at a deeper level with our clients. We would get greater and greater participation from them in the workshops. And we would also have a much more profound impact on their total culture. And that's how The Sitkins 100 was born."
The Sitkins 100 gives members the right to refuse admission to other agencies they deem competitors, or unworthy of membership for other reasons. The coaching program appeals to a specific type of insurance agency owner.
"We are a catalyst, not a crutch," Sitkins stresses. "We help people who want to help themselves. To qualify for this program, they need to be willing to invest time, money and energy to make constant improvements in their business and their life. They have to be willing to share with others their knowledge and experience. They have to have an open mind and be willing to implement new ideas. They also have to have patience to work towards long-term goals."
Sitkins emphasizes that his clients are already extremely successful, but they want to go higher. "They are not the kind of people who are satisfied with horizontal growth," he says. "They want to be the leaders in their industry by striving for vertical growth. They know vertical growth will give them the personal, financial and creative freedom to do what they really want with their life. They are the kind of people who are always looking for the next mountain to climb." *
For more information
The Sitkins Group
Phone: (877) SIT-KINS
Web site: www.sitkins.com