Exclusivefocus Spring 2013 - National Association of Professional ...

away that it would not violate the agreement,
so now I had to make my decision.
In the end, my pragmatic side won. To
begin with, two years out of the job market
would make it harder to find employment.
And since it was unlikely I would
ever get another offer like the one from
State Farm, I decided to seize it. After
all, how much worse could it be than the
experiences I had with Allstate
Well, after the first week of training
at State Farm I knew it wasn’t for me.
In fact, I knew I didn’t want anything to
do with them. Sure, Allstate has its pros,
cons and quirks, but so does State Farm.
State Farm is like a cult, which is a little
scary. For one thing, they talked openly
about “drinking the Kool-Aid,” which
gave me a bad feeling. There was no way;
I was too old to be brainwashed. Despite
this, I stuck it out for a while because the
money was good.
There are some definite differences
between the two companies. Allstate
only cared if I had enough money on
hand to start a business; they could have
cared less about an ongoing business
plan. Sure they required one upfront,
but they rarely ever referred to it again in
the eight years I was there. In fact, when
I was hired, I was told to borrow my
buddy’s business plan and put my name
on it. The next thing I knew, I was an
Allstate agent with no knowledge of the
insurance business! Their training was
laughable; there was no preparation for
the real-life situations I would face in the
field. Basically, they hire you and throw
you to the wolves. I guess that’s because
they don’t really have a stake in your success.
Start a scratch agency or buy one, it
doesn’t cost them anything, so they have
nothing to lose.
It took me about two years before I felt
comfortable as an Allstate agent. While
I was an agent they encouraged agents to
buy other books and run multiple agencies,
now how dumb is that You’re no
longer an agent, you’re a CEO. In my experience,
people want to talk with their
agents. Mega agents don’t do that; their
LSPs do all the talking.
With State Farm, it was much different.
They were all about the business
plan. Managers wanted to see it every
other week. If they didn’t like what they
saw, they would tell you to change it,
even going as far as telling you what they
wanted it to say. I thought, “This isn’t my
business plan, it’s theirs.” That drove me
crazy because whenever I added something
in the plan that I wanted to do,
they would always shoot it down by saying,
“No, you need to change it to this
or that.”
As far as training though, they were
the complete opposite of Allstate. At
State Farm, you have to do a lot of roleplaying
and this was done with someone
sitting there watching your every move
and listening to every word you said and
the manner in which you said it. Afterwards,
they would critique you, instructing
you what to say and how you should
have said it. They want you to be perfect;
so perfect, in fact, that you might as well
be a robot.
Now what was strange about the State
Farm mentality was that they constantly
boasted about being number one and the
fact that they have 108 products to sell,
from auto and home policies to checking
and savings accounts to home and auto
loans. And as a new agent, you better sell
all of them or you face the risk of losing
your agency.
Allstate is certainly all about controlling
their agents, but they can’t hold a
candle to the amount of control at State
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or
Farm – they are incredibly controlling.
In my mind, you would have to be
young or really dumb, or both to put up
with the BS that the new agents have to
endure. It’s like being a fraternity pledge
forever. You have to be okay with being
told everything, from running your
agency to policy sales or turning on the
coffee pot. This is micro-management
to the extreme.
In total, I spent about three months
with State Farm. The normal one-year
training program was reduced for me
because of my previous experience and
the fact that I had all my licenses. Even
though I’d made it halfway through
the training, I had to get out because I
couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t know,
maybe after I had become a full-fledged
State Farm agent, it might have been
okay, but I seriously doubt it.
That is my experience with the two
largest P&C carriers in America. Now I
am an independent agent and truly believe
I have finally found a greener pasture.
Nobody tells me what to do and I
have no life quotas to meet in order to
keep my job. I get paid more commissions
and I am treated with respect by
the carriers I represent. This is the best
insurance experience ever and it is where
I belong. I should have done this a long
time ago… Ef
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Spring 2013 Exclusivefocus — 21