Autumnal Truths

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from Ithaca, New York. We spent the weekend here, and we spent a lot of time outside. The fall leaves are spectacular, the air is crisp, and it just feels like a change. And it got me thinking about how in nature there is a natural cycle of things. Very few things last forever. Absolutely, mountains. There are certain things that last forever, but even they change. And I wonder sometimes if we have to sort of think about our agencies in that way. Could this be, as we enter into the final couple months of the fourth quarter? Is this time for us to think about how we should evolve, how we should change? Are there things that are in the fall season of their life cycle in our agency? Maybe it's how we work, maybe it's where we work. Maybe it's the kind of clients we serve. Maybe it's an employee or two who have been amazing, but maybe it's their autumn season and we need to help them sort of figure out how to have a good last chapter through the winter of their career. Maybe it is the way we do billing, maybe it's the way we do new business. But I want you to challenge yourself as agency owners.

It's so easy because there's so much chaos going around us at all times. We want some stability, I get it. We want something that stays the same. But I think sometimes we cling to the past or we cling to things that we feel are evergreen, and maybe they're really not. Maybe it – maybe it is us getting in the way of them sort of cycling through to an end. So I want to challenge you this week to get with your leadership team and talk about, hey, what, what about our operations, our process, our people, our clients, all of the aspects of our business? What what do we hold sacred that we treat as though it will never change? That maybe if we gave it a fresh look, maybe it's actually in it's autumnal season and it's time for us to let it evolve out. And by the first quarter of next year, kind of have a spring awakening of a new way of doing fill in the blank.

I suspect you will find a few things that that you've been clinging on to that really could be woken up, evolved, changed, shifted. And I also think that is one of the things that gives you energy is newness, something exciting, trying something new, pilot programs, experimenting. So this is also an opportunity to infuse yourself and your leadership team with a new sense of energy as you reinvent aspects of the business and get the old ways out of the way so new things can spring up in 2025.

All right? Give it some thought. I'll see you next week.