Plan in five year increments

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from the deep woods outside Seward, Alaska. We just spent a week in Alaska with a peer group, and one of the conversations that came up was around this idea of sort of looking forward. And several of the agency owners in the peer group are you know, in their late 40s, early 50s, late 50s and they're starting to think about next steps. And for many of them, the truth is their options are limited because they haven't thought about it for long enough. So what I want to suggest to you today is regardless of where you are at in your career as an agency owner. So let's say you just started the agency and you're 30. Let's say you've owned the agency for a decade and you're 42. Let's say you've owned the agency for 30 years and you're 61. The world moves so quickly today, and agency valuations, and agency sort of life cycles evolve quickly. And so one of the things I want to recommend to you is that you have a 10 year plan. And the 10 year plan might be I just started this baby, I am on my way to growth, and I want to scale, and I want to be double in size in 10 years. The next one might, or you might be in the middle of your career and you might be saying, "you know what, I want to stabilize because I know in 10 to 15 years, I'm going to want to sell this agency, and I want to make sure that there are systems and processes in place so that I can hand it over to the new owners whether they be internal or external." And if you're in the tail end of owning your agency, you've got to have an exit plan. And the exit plan as we've talked about before can be anything from I'm just going to lock the door on the last day and call it a day to I'm going to sell it internally or externally, but all of those, all of those cycles require five to 10 years of planning, decision making that is very different depending on what the plan is, and just time to put the things in place to get you to that next step.

So I want you to think of kind of these cobblestones that are in five year increments and I want you to think about okay, I'm standing on this cobblestone today, I want to take a leap five years forward, what is that cobblestone that I want to land on? And then figuring out what you have to do between the two cobblestones to successfully navigate getting to the cobblestone that you want. And what we're finding is that a lot of agency owners have not taken the time, because you're so busy just getting it done, I get it. But you've got to take some time to think about where you want to go next. Now might it change? Absolutely. But you have a much better shot at getting to the cobblestone you want to be on if you have an idea of what it is. Because honestly once you know what it is and you start building the plan to get there, you'll know somewhere along the way, "Whoops, I don't want to be there anymore." Or something has changed personally or professionally, or in the industry, or whatever it may be and I want to shift cobblestones. But if you stand in place and you just assume you're going to leap to the next cobblestone, we know how quickly five years goes, it's a blink. And so you really do need to have a plan. I'd say a five year plan and a 10 year plan, knowing where you want to land in five, and where you want to land in 10 and what you need to do to successfully get there.

All right, take some time to think about it, reflect, talk to your family, this is an opportunity for you to dream and envision what you want the business to be, what you want your role in the business to be, don't leave it up to chance. Take your time, think about it, and then make a plan to get there.

All right, I'll see you next week.