Episode #17 - Wearing the Hat to Solve the Problem w/ Cyrus Jaffery

In this episode Carey and Lindsay sit down with Cyrus Jaffery from Jaffery Insurance, Quotamation and CJ Insurance Group, to talk about what he's doing in his agency to prepare for the future, using his insurance hat to dive into the insurtech/indetech space, and how his leadership style supports these initiatives. 

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Transcript: 

Carey Wallace:

It is going well. I'm excited to be home for a whole two days in a row. I know that is unique and very different, but I'm super excited. Yeah, how are you doing, Lins? Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. We got sunny blue skies for a change on a weekend. I don't know how the heck that happens, but it is a unique thing. But I'm super excited. We've got someone really cool with us this week. Cyrus Jeffries is joining us. And I gotta tell you, it's the power of social media that brought us together, right?

Cyrus Jaffery:

Mm-hmm.

Carey Wallace:

So Cyrus has a network of agencies. He also plays... in the tech space, in the insurance industry. And I think that it is someone that everybody should know, but by his own admission, he has his head down, he's working hard and maybe some of you don't know. So I'm happy to introduce Cyrus and thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Hi Carey, hi Lindsay, thanks for having me. It's honestly an honor to be here.

Carey Wallace:

Yeah. So Cyrus, give me an idea of first, how you even entered into the space and what it is you do. Cause I think we spent probably a whole hour on that when we first,

Cyrus Jaffery:

Yeah.

Carey Wallace:

… got introduced, but I'd love for you to give us a little bit about you and what it is you do.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Yeah, good question. So as Lindsay said, she went into my LinkedIn and she's like, what the hell do you do? You got so many to list. So it's pretty easy for me. So we've got four verticals and all of our verticals kind of started because just kind of doing the right things and having the right partnerships in the industry and everything we do is intentional because I want to make a difference in this industry. This industry has given me a ton. I've been in this industry for about a decade and I want everything we do is like, okay, how do we give back to the industry that honestly it's a little bit behind on technology and different things, right? So I feel like there's a lot of, it's a good space to be in obviously because a lot of younger people coming in can kind of be more innovative and kind of change our industry's perspective and then take us to the next level. So I come from a captive industry. I was there for six years and I left about four years ago. to come on the independent channel, to just run an independent channel, just like a lot of captives, it's the right thing to do to own your own business and all of that stuff. So that's one of our, so I have four verticals, and that's one of my verticals is I own an organic insurance agency, and it's just driven on real estate and mortgage referrals. Ninety-five percent of our business comes from a realtor or a mortgage, and it's very high net worth driven. So if you don't have a house... or a house is about 500,000 is kind of our minimum. We really don't put you with our agency. So it's kind of a high net worth agency that we focus on. And we're very, very selective on who we have inside of our agency. So that's one of my verticals. It's been around for 10 years. It's called Jaffrey Insurance. And I'm the founder and CEO. And we've got a team of about eight people inside of it that run the day-to-day. Our second vertical, as I left the captive channel, I got all direct codes right away just because of our background and that's what kind of I wanted. And as I got the direct codes and the word got out that we left this captive company, it was a lot of people started calling me because we were 30th best agent in the country where we were that year, the year before. And they're like, what? This company, a lot of people don't leave four years ago. Now it's obviously people that are leaving and not as much. And I don't want to say the name, but this company is known to have keep their agents long term. because they keep them in a box obviously and they don't understand what else is there because I was in a box. I had no idea until I came here. I'm like, you could do this? This is insane. Like, how did I not know this? So they're very, very good at that. That's their model. So anyways, our second vertical started because a bunch of our friends called and said, hey, I'm with State Farm Allstate American Family Farm Bureau and you did this. I would really love to do it. How do I do it? I said, well, We did it, maybe we could just come on board with us and we'll just kind of teach you here and there, pay me a little bit of fee for accounting. And it basically became like an aggregator model for us. There's about 35 agencies, captive agencies, and we have a requirement. You have to be in the industry for five years, owning an agency to be on our side, just because we kind of want to work with people that we don't have to babysit, right? And we just want to work with those kinds of people. But they're willing to learn as well. Like we want to teach them value. We want to teach them how to use technology and how to grow. every year by a million dollars or 500,000, whatever their goals are. So those are the kind of agencies we focus on. So our second vertical is an aggregator model. That's CJ Insurance Group. Our third vertical, as I started doing some of these things, and I've had a lot of relationships in the mortgage and real estate world, a lot of mortgage and real estate brokerages that I was very close with that sent us a lot of referrals, was like, hey, is there an opportunity for a potential joint venture? sure, let's kind of learn the ropes and see how it goes. So four years ago, we started our first one right when I left. And now we've got about 10 of them and three other in the making. We go to big real estate corporations, corporations that have a thousand real estate agents and mortgage companies that do a lot of transactions. And we do a joint venture relationship with them and open up their insurance agencies for them. So we've got a ton of those in our books. We do that with concierge services as well. So. There's a company in St. Louis, they move people around from one state to another. They change all their utilities and ADTs. So anything home driven depends on how much volume they have. We have an opportunity to do a joint venture. We encourage on that side, that's kind of one of my goals is to encourage a lot of agents across the country that if you have these relationships with mortgage, real estate, concierge services, tech companies, car dealerships. Let's have you open up these things instead of like technology companies that are coming in and having direct integrations with all these big mortgage companies, big real estate companies. Like I believe in the agency model. I want the agents to have these relationships. And since we've done eight to 10 of these, we can guide these agents from start to finish as far as what are some rest of our compliance? What are some DOI compliance? And all those things that we have figured out and spent a lot of money, we can guide these agents. So my calling on that side is, Let's get all these agents to come on if they want to and if they are willing to. Um, it's a big undertaking cause there's got to, there's a lot of work out to see when you work with a thousand real estate agents. Um, and, um, but, but it's possible. And I want to get that across in this podcast is, Hey, those are the people we are looking forward to come on. I'll help you guide you with all of that stuff. So all three of these verticals, we go from a Jaffa insurance agency four years ago that was doing maybe 140 leads a month. Now we have to deal, because all these verticals, all these verticals, we're gonna be doing about 60,000 leads and these are all homeowners and

Carey Wallace:

Oh my lord.

Cyrus Jaffery:

more people that are well, well, I mean, our ideal client is a person that owns a home because they are educated, they have two cars, they're married, their ratings are really good, they understand insurance, they're not gonna shop you around. So that's our ideal client within our organization. And so our Ford vertical started because I didn't want to hire 50 to 75 insurance agents to be able to handle The quoting with 20 carriers now if you're an independent channel person you understand Your biggest headache right now is which is why you're going to the VA's is because you don't want to do the Quoting and all these carriers and putting it into a CRM system and all that stuff But it's very very important for a long-term strategy of having the right data to be able to sell, which Carey, you would know more about that, right? So having the right data plugged in, plugged out. So anyway, so that side of it, I was like, there's gotta be a technology that does these things. So a couple of years ago, we started looking. There's forms and stuff and different technologies that you can move stuff around, but I wanted a person goes in, plugs in Cyrus Jaffrey data birth address. I want all the MSV information to pop up from APIs. I want all the vehicle information to pop up, driver information to pop up, and you can get a quote in 60 seconds, but it has a direct integration with your CRM management system and then all the carriers have that info as well. So it takes my guys from, we've done the beta testing on this, we've got about 10 agencies on it now. It's saving every agent per quote about an hour and 45 minutes of time because… 

Carey Wallace:

Holy moly.

Cyrus Jaffery:

yeah.

Carey Wallace:

Yeah. You gotta be kidding me on that. Like, here's the deal, Cyrus. That's the name of the game. If you're in personal lines right now, if you're not creating efficiency in that process, we know there's great, great pressure on the commissions that exist in personal lines. I don't care. how high net worth you are, it is a volume game. And if you can't create that efficiency, it's really difficult to stay competitive in personal lines, correct? Yeah.

Cyrus Jaffery:

100% and we do part of that, that's all we do. Like everything I do, like so I learned this the hard way is that from my old captive channel. At a captive channel, you are the health insurance agent, you're a financial advisor, you're a life insurance agent, you're a personal lines, you're a service person. You can't do it well. So all we do is personalize. My podcast is driven on personal lines. Everything we do is driven on personal lines. We focus on one product, which is homeowners insurance. Auto obviously comes with it. And that's what we focus on. So everything we have created is using our product and ideal client and then changing the game in that channel for us. Hahaha Yeah. Yeah, great question. My leadership is stylist to to make more leaders, like empower others to make decisions. I, I come to the office and I kind of know what I want to focus on and which entity is bringing me money today and which entity needs the most help, if that makes sense. Because at the end of the day, I got to feed my family just like everybody else, right. So we're only three, four years in. So it's not like we're sitting on $100 million book that we're just You know, so like that's not the case or a five, six million dollar book that just all of it come into me. So we're in a different place. So my leadership style is honestly, so when I go do any of these joint ventures and every one of those, I go find a CEO for it. So like I wouldn't go into a relationship where I have to run the day to day because I am not going to. Like I just don't have the time. So anything we do is the first thing is okay, who is the right person that's gonna run this? And then who is this right person's right hand? Because you need two people for all these things to run correctly. So my leadership style is that. I go find the leaders in our organization and we go to captive channels a lot to get these guys because they know how to sell value. We have the price on the independent channel most of the time. It's like, if you know how to sell value, you're gonna be ahead of the game. So we go find a lot of agents in the captive channel, bring them on, they become my right hand person that runs the day to day. and then they have right hands people under them that kind of run. So all I do every day when I come in in our meetings is to say, okay, this is a problem we ran into. Hey, whose job is this? Which funnel does it fill in? Okay, this is this person's job. Okay, you go run this. And then one more thing I would share, we have a leadership meeting every two weeks. It's on a Tuesday morning. Every entity has a leader that's in that leadership meeting and that's my time and there's about 12 of us, I believe. That's my time where I know what's going on in all of our verticals inside of our organization. Everybody brings in stuff that happened in the last two weeks, what's broken, what's good, and we basically hash things out because I don't want to make those decisions. An average person cannot make more than one or two good decisions a day. So for everything to come to me to make a decision, it would be impossible. I would just be making decisions all day for these other organizations. that I'm not in the day to day. It's almost not even fair for that person that's running it. So nothing really comes towards me because I've found these people that empower them to make decisions. And if something hits the fan mentality, then come to me and then let me fix it. Because right now I'm fixing a tech problem and a lot of my time is spent on that. And my tech has three people that are heading it. And I just come in and say, okay, what are some things we need to do at this point and kind of move forward? To answer your question, my leadership style, simple. I empower others to make decisions and I empower those people to find other people to make decisions and empower them. And that roller coaster keeps going down and everybody is a good leader in my opinion at that.

Carey Wallace:

So I love that you have four verticals and honestly the first three are kind of intertwined if you will. So I wanna ask you about that first but then we're gonna move to tech because I find it fascinating what you've done with tech and I really wanna, I think in order to be an agent of today and tomorrow, if you are not embracing tech. thinking about your staffing differently, focusing on efficiencies, I think you will compete with those that are and it'll become harder and harder and harder to win. So that's where I'm gonna go next. But before we leave these four verticals that you talked about, talk to me about the captive agents that you bring on. Do they own their book completely? Are they part of a network? Can you describe that for me because there's a lot of groups within our... industry and I'd love to understand the structure because if someone's listening here, I want them to hear what your approach is and your structure is. There's over 150 networks, clusters, alliances in our industry and they're not all created equal. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Absolutely. I think one of the biggest things I would tell you, our network was not built to become a network. It was built on accident almost. So everything that we do in our network is, hey, what value do we bring into these agents? Because at the end of the day, the money that we make from the network goes to the people that are running the network to basically do it. So I don't really make any money on it. And it's honestly a way to give back. And what we do different is we put a max on it. There's no reason anybody should be paying any network more than like $1,000 a month because there's, because it's, I hear from a lot of people that are like, hey, they got to pay 15% of their commissions to this network, but this network is, this agency is now $10 million or tell me $1 million bringing you a million three. 15% of that is quite a bit of money that, so my suggestion to a lot of agencies, find an, find an aggregator that gives you value, that elevates your game. That's how I look at the network side. It's like, What are we doing every day to bring in more value because we want these agents to be? Because I know if an agent comes to me, I am in the day-to-day of like 12 different agencies. And these are agencies that are doing millions and millions and millions, right? In premium, personalized only. So we only focus on personalized agents inside of our network. So we have a niche and that's all we do. So if you're a driven personalized agency, you wanna go to a network, put in my own shoes, you wanna go to a network that has a weekly almost like meeting that's set up every week that basically gives value. This week it's hey, how did you win against American family? How did you win against State Farm? How did you win against Farm Bureau? Role playing on a weekly basis because that's what agents want. Agents want to know, and how do you maneuver around all these 20 carriers? Because that's a very, very tough thing for people to do is leave captive, come on this channel, where you have to go to five different places and log in and plug in stuff to get just a quote. Like it's a nightmare. So. As a network, we have decided to say, hey, build this tech, give this proprietary tech to our network first for a discounted price because we want them to succeed, give them value, teach them things that they don't know. So we take a hands-on approach in our network model is every week there's training, every week there's open communication. They walk into my office anytime you want or any of our people. They can come in. Our network people, there's three of them here right now hanging out with our sales guys because they just wanna see what people are doing that are successful. So those are the kind of people we wanna hang out with in our network because we want them to write more business and to write more business, you need efficiency, you need tech, you need understanding. I need to have some people that have your back. The biggest thing that I miss about my captive channel is the camaraderie of the people, of the agents. They did such a good job of like... We had 50 agents in our town or wherever, in Omaha, Nebraska. We were very close. There was always meetings. We hung out together. We learned from each other and across the country as well. That really was very strong. And I don't see that on this channel. So we want to provide that for the captive to feel comfortable leaving a place that they have been for 10 years and financially pretty happy. But long term, long term, it's cancer being there, as we all know.

Carey Wallace:

Yeah, so it's basically focused on captive and personal lines. Other than that, you're not the place for them because if you're not a captive going to independent or you're not personal, you're not built for those agents, right?

Cyrus Jaffery:

We are not, and you know, I think a lot of aggregators, a lot of aggregators just wanna do it all. And it's okay for them, that's completely fine. But for us, we're narrow-focused because I think we can get accomplished a lot more. And for me, my life mission has become to impact a million people. And I feel like this is how I can really impact a million people because these insurance people need help, and we wanna help them and solve a problem for them. And I think it helps, it works for us.

Carey Wallace:

And honestly, I kind of feel the same way. I feel like we all have gifts. And if you're able to share what you know, to help someone else be better, that is, that's a gift in and of itself. So I'm in an industry where the average person doesn't have a business background. They just don't. They've got coverage backgrounds. There's no one teaching them how to actually run their business like a business, and I feel like that's the thing that I give Lindsey has a gift in marketing, like she. has a different view of what marketing is than what my generation has, and she can help people see that differently, which is kind of cool. So I love that approach. All right, so I promised you we were going to tech because obviously,

Cyrus Jaffery:

Can I add one more thing on that before we go?

Carey Wallace:

Of course.

Cyrus Jaffery:

So when an agent comes in and says, they don't have no idea, they don't know how to do some of these things. So partnerships, for example, there's so many of our agents in our network that I encourage, I'm like, hey, listen, like Matic and some of these companies that are direct to consumer and they're doing all these partnerships with mortgage and real estate and car dealerships. I'm like, guys, this has to be you guys, because unless you want to lose your job in the next 10 years of technology companies coming in and taking your job, You gotta be ahead of the game. You gotta have these relationships with these mortgage and real estate and tech companies and concierge services. Because how many of your home loan companies, I got a call yesterday from my friend, he goes, hey, there's my home loan company calling, he said, I'm paying too much for insurance. Should I go with them? I was like, so everybody's trying to come get our job and it's your job as an insurance agent to not sit in your desk, be innovative, go have these partnerships because. You can and we will help you with that. So we're telling our team of 35 agents that are with us saying guys every day, go find these partnerships because we're on a mission to keep our jobs for a long time. Um, and I don't, and I don't, I don't want to lose our job for these tech companies cause they've made it really easy, which is why we build the tech, which is where we're going next, to help compete with those big players, but use agents to compete not just cause we understand agency model is what I believe in.

Carey Wallace:

Well, here's the thing, there's a lot of InsureTech. It's one of the biggest investments that I think, there's more people investing in InsureTech than probably any other segment. I understand this year with interest rates rising, the InsureTech investment looks different, but I looked at a chart recently and the US investment in InsureTech is about two times what the rest of the world is doing, it's insane. So Quotamation is the tech company that you have created. and it's really focused on building automation around the quoting process in order to create the efficiency in personal lines, correct? Tell us more about that. Tell us how, first of all, tell us the journey that it goes to, because I think everybody sees the end game of what happens and they don't really know. I don't know if you knew this, but my first career was with a tech startup. So I saw like, birth to IPO inside a tech startup. Tell me about your journey in creating this and what that looks like and then really what it does and what agents should know about.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Yeah, great, great questions. So obviously I'm not from tech, right? So when we looked at this two years ago, there was nothing that I saw that existed. I always think any decision I make, it's like, is this gonna help us five years from now? Like our service team comes in all the time and says, hey, we can implement this, like this would be awesome. I said, well, we can do that, but does this solve a problem five years from now? So always think of scaling, like as a company, Every decision we make today should be, okay, if our business 10x'd, can we do the same thing? Whether it's management systems, CRM, all those things, right? So, and a lot of people don't do that. They're in the present so much that they forget that things are going fast and you're going to get to a next level. So I encourage a lot of people to think that way. And that's how we were thinking two years ago was, okay, we want to build this because it really doesn't exist. And I wanted to solve a problem for myself. So I'm an insurance person. Solving an insurance problem. I'm not a tech person solving an insurance problem, right because

Carey Wallace:

Which is key, by the way, which is super, super key because when it's a tech person solving an insurance problem, that doesn't work, unfortunately. So I don't mean to interrupt you, but it's really, really key that insurance people solve insurance problems and learn the tech in order to make that happen.

Cyrus Jaffery:

100%

Carey Wallace:

Go ahead, but that was a soap box that had to be stepped upon, just so you know. So yeah.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Yeah, and as you can see, my hat is my insurance agency, my shirt is my coordination, right?

Cyrus Jaffery:

So I'm wearing an insurance agent's hat, right? Insurance company's hat, insurance agency's hat, and I'm wearing a tech shirt because you have to wear, we need people that wear these hats solve this problem, right? So I think that's what a lot of people, so we wanted to do that and we said, okay, Let's do it, right? And here's why a lot of people don't do it, because what we learn, it takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of money and a lot of time to build a tech company, right? Because tech people, first of all, cost a lot of money. And if you're not in tech, you gotta learn tech. And learning tech is not easy, right? So you have to go find the tech, find the people to partner with, give equity. You gotta learn about all these different things that you had no idea. And it's really scary. It's just like leaving a captive channel, coming on the independent channel. It takes a while for you to make that decision, especially if you're really, really successful. So it's a very, very hard thing to do. So it was the same thing. Lots of money that was spent on this. And here's what we did. We combined with a company out of Florida called, I don't wanna name them, I guess, but let's say we combined with this company out of Florida. We said, okay, you're our tech company. Build us, here's what our vision is. They go into work, eight months later, we spent about 150,000. The product was crap. Like it was just terrible. So we literally spend 150,000 and this is my third, second year in insurance. So like, I don't have a lot of money to spend on insurance, right? On tech. So we literally put it away completely, burnt it, started from scratch a year later with a different company out of Lincoln, Nebraska. And now our product is amazing. The best thing we did was do that. But it was a very, very good lesson. Like I've dealt with adversity like all my life. I'm originally from Afghanistan. My mom and dad are born in Afghanistan and I was there till I was 14 years old. Our house got bombed when we were in the house, like, because Taliban back in the early 90s invaded Kabul, Afghanistan. They bombed our house. My mom taught me how to get out of the house and took me out and we walked for two weeks to get to. Anyways, long story short, I've dealt with adversity like every part of my life. And a lot of people, when this happened, they'd be like, ah, it's not for me. I lost 150,000, move on, right? No, like you gotta keep going. You know, because a lot of people quit in the beginning, like an Elon quit, or all these people, if they would have quit in the beginning of all the mistakes they made, Amazon wouldn't be here, and all these great companies wouldn't be here. So we think of it that way. Like we think of it as, hey, we're just gonna keep going. So we got with the company CTO out of Lincoln, combined with them. So our product, what does our product do? It's at a place right now to where it's in 10 agencies now, internally that I own. We got all the beta testing out of the way. Basically, the gist of the product is that any question that you have to ask a client that they have to think, hey, what's your VIN number? Hey, what's your driver's license number? What's your wife's driver's license number? What carrier do you have? And all those things. Any question that you give an ability for another person to think gives them an ability to opt out, right? So we just said every data point that we have with Quotimation, it's easy things that a person will have to know. And if you don't know, you don't want this person as a client, because if Carrie Wallace doesn't know her date of birth, you probably don't want them as a client, and if they don't know your address that you're living in, that's tough, right? Because you need the address, the address polls, based on a company we picked up, address polls, all the VIN numbers, all the house score footage and everything for the house, address polls, all the vehicles, all the drivers, so all you're asking the client is, hey Carrie, what's your first name, last name, date of birth, perfect. Do you drive a 2016 Toyota versus before? Hey, what vehicle do you drive? Oh, I drive a 2016. Do you have the VIN number? I don't, who has their VIN numbers?

Carey Wallace:

Nobody has their VIN numbers

Cyrus Jaffery:

So one, absolutely no one, yeah, half of the people don't even know their driver's license numbers, right? Or they don't have it in front of them. So everything we have built is things we ran into, hiccups we ran into in our organization to where a client says, I'll call you back, and then we never heard from them. We called them 10 times. We wasted so much of our time. So now you go into coordination plugin, Carey Wallace data birth address. It pulls the house information. Mr. Klein, you have 3,000 square feet, right? Basement's finished, two bedrooms, three bedrooms, blah, blah, blah, with the roof was replaced in 2019. Correct, yep, move on to the next one. Hey, just to confirm, your wife, Carey lives there, right? Perfect, does your daughter, Lindsay, live there too? I have her pulled up here. No, she left, you can remove her. Next page, just to confirm, 2016, 2012, yes, cool. Boom, you got a quote with 10 different carriers. And those 10 different carriers, now, it's automatically in your EZLinks, or any AMS 360, or anybody you use. And it's with all the carriers automatically as well, because we hit an API through our CRM system that basically pulled all the carriers. So now, that's your conversation is more like, do you have this, do you don't have this? Hey, here are my three options. So in about 10 to 15 minutes, you can get a client from start to finish done. By using coordination and you can get the quote in 45 seconds

Carey Wallace:

So let me put my agent head on just for a minute. So when you say you have APIs and you, which I love, because I Yep. Tell you the average agent says APIs, don't even know what that is, don't know how that solves my problem, whatever. 

Cyrus Jaffery:

Absolutely.

Carey Wallace:

When you say you have APIs with carriers, how many carriers are we talking about? Like who does this apply to?

Cyrus Jaffery:

Every carrier that's in your management system, rating system, every carrier that you can think of, because this coordination is directly built behind an EasyLinks to where anything that's in your management system, and we picked EasyLinks and we can integrate with every management system. We picked EasyLinks because Personal Lines is heavy driven on EasyLinks. EasyLinks, a lot of big aggregators use EasyLinks. A lot of Personal Lines people use EasyLinks. So we picked Easy Links because 60, 70%. We have a direct partnership with Easy Links. So anything that pulls up on Easy Links, you can get a quote from Easy Links. You can directly get a quote from Quotimation as well. Every carrier.

Carey Wallace:

It's huge. I mean, if you've listened to anything that I talk about is now I would take that and say, how much time and energy did you save? And what

Cyrus Jaffery:

Yeah.

Carey Wallace:

does that mean to now you can move that person's time to either prospecting more, account rounding more, whatever it is, servicing your clients more. So your retention goes up, your new business goes up because the time isn't the back and forth in order to do these things, which as soon as you create time or space, it turns into increased value of your agency, period. Like that is how my brain works. So as you're doing that, I'm like, okay, you saved 30 minutes on every single quote at times X number of quotes. What does that translate to? New business retention, whatever. That is, that's the name of the game. It truly is, yeah.

Cyrus Jaffery:

100%. 100%,

Carey Wallace:

And...

Cyrus Jaffery:

I would add on the back end, like honestly, people gotta re-quote. The beautiful part about this is like, listen, your renewal process, there's an agency in Nebraska, it's the biggest agency. They have 11 people on payroll, it's a big bank. They have 11 people on payroll that all they do is the people that want to be shopped around. Now guys, if you have coordination, like it's already picking up the data. Like everything is already there. Your renewal process is literally the client can do it themselves or you could do it for them within 10 minutes. So you just saved 11 people's payroll if you're a huge agency by integrating coordination. So go ahead. I cut you there for a second.

Carey Wallace:

No, no, it's just, it's a massive impact. And I think when you compound it, listen, there's not a one size thing that solves everything inside an agency, but you've taken a large time challenge inside agencies, especially in the hard market we're in today. I can imagine it in some marketplaces where this is all they're doing is re-quoting. So, you know, you've got to really think about the impact it can have. Do you wanna share like what the cost, what the implementation looks like for Quotamation? Because listen, everything's not a silver bullet. There's all kinds of things that go with using technology. And I'd love to at least talk about that.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Yeah.

Carey Wallace:

And this might be a fit for some of our listeners. It might not be a fit for some of

Cyrus Jaffery:

Absolutely.

Carey Wallace:

our listeners, but they should at least be aware that something like this is out there.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Yeah, absolutely. So cost was something that we determined by beta testing inside of our agency. Like how much time did it save every agent inside of our organization? So on average, it was about an hour and a half or whatever I said earlier is what it saved every agent per quote. So if you do three quotes a day, I literally gave you four and a half hours of your time back. And the other thing I would add is What do insurance agents hate the most, right? The grunt work, the things that they don't wanna do. They love selling. So if you just tell somebody, all you gotta do now is sell. You're gonna keep your employees for a very long time, especially insurance sales agents, because they just love being there, but they don't like doing all this little work and the quoting and 20 carriers and problem solving and all that stuff. So I want... to make sure you understand, and our price is honestly, it's $2.99 for two users. Like there's $2.99 a month for two users, there's literally no contract, nothing. Hey, use it, if it helps you, be my guest, keep using it. If it doesn't help you, it's okay, it's not for everybody, right? So, but we would love to just kind of get this out to the community because at first it was like, I'm gonna keep it to myself. And then I'm like, man, does it really impact people? Are we really changing the industry? And we said, no, no, no. Let's give it this white label it so our team has been working on the white labeling piece of it so it would be your agency logos, your logins, everything is yours. It's going to look like it's your tech company, honestly, because the client won't know any better. It's just powered by Quotamation, any agency that you have. So it's going to have all of this stuff of your own and implementation is super easy. 2.99, two users and every additional user would be $99 for you to be able to use Quotamation. So I feel like... $2.99 if you think about it in one day you can make that money back by the time that you saved if you think about it So I don't see it being a huge issue at now right now now now we are talking to some really big players one of them I really love you connected me with them as Weston Labs 101 and they are if they have contacted us two or three times. They really want to work with us We really want to work with them. We've got a couple of other VCs that we want more money because as we get more money We can go to a Canopy Connect integration right away to where people can log in to Canopy Connect. So you get a side-by-side comparison of their insurance versus your insurance. We

Carey Wallace:

Yeah.

Cyrus Jaffery:

added the life insurance implementation in there. We want to fine tune the renewals. And it's not that we want more money for us to make more money. We want more money to be able to make this a product that's honestly somebody that can't live without and it can do all of it in one. And then obviously I love the Westin 101 labs because they want to work with insurance agents. They want to solve this insurance problem with us. So we're going to partner with with Abhi Knight and Pat Klein and them over there. We've had conversations with them to kind of take this to the next level and help us kind of guide us there. So we're really looking forward to that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, if somebody told me today, like after all this, like, let's say we get a billion dollar valuation of every one of our entity into one, like that's kind of what we just throw out there all the time. I would say that's not even, that's not even the goal. Like the goal is honestly, if my daughter Sophia and my son Jonah and my son Matteo are good human beings, like I've done my job, right? I've, like all the work stuff I truly enjoy. But like at the end of the day. people don't realize where else you can make impact. And the biggest impact, the best thing you can do is raise good human beings to be able to basically get them to go into the world that's, it's a crazy world right now. So like, honestly, parents today have the most important job because this next generation that comes that are gonna be my kids' generation, it's honestly almost like a scary to think, like what are some things happening? So like, I just take that seriously, honestly. So like I'm one of those guys that intentional timing and all that stuff with my kids, like I, if I don't spend four to five hours with my kids a day, like I'm at, so I'll go back to one thing. My wife taught me all this, by the way. It's so like my, one of the biggest lessons my wife taught me was when I left my captive channel, now listen, we were 30 best in the country. We were rocking and rolling like financially we would have been set for life if we would have stayed there. But I. It just didn't fulfill me every day doing what I was doing. So I told my wife, I said, I'm doing this. My wife's dad is that captive agency for 30 years. So my wife

Carey Wallace:

Wow.

Cyrus Jaffery:

has grown up in this captive agency, went all over the world and done things that a lot of people cannot do. And she said, and I begged her for months to go do it. And she said, okay, you can go do it if you're home at 4.30 every day. Okay, so that was our only speculation and that was our only stipulation that you could go do it if you could be home at 430 every day and Saturday and Sunday you will not do any work. And there's not one day in my life that I've worked past 430 and have worked on a Saturday or Sunday since I've left in May of 2019 because like I said at the end of the day there's all this stuff is great, the things we're doing but none of it compares to being a parent and raising good human beings.

Carey Wallace:

Well, amen to that. I would be remiss if I didn't say raising a good human being is number one on my list as well. And getting to do some work with that good human being is even more important. And so what you don't know is I took 12 years off to raise good human beings and came back. And honestly, part of my stipulation of getting back in the workforce is I wouldn't miss a horse show. I wouldn't miss a tennis match. I wouldn't miss anything. And I stayed pretty true to that, which is difficult thing to do, but it's just a matter of prioritization. There's no two ways around that. And you know what? You can build all kinds of things. It's just a matter of being intentional. Now. Now, I'll tell you, I travel all over the world, but at the time I didn't. I was there and I got to see and be present. I think being present is a really important thing. And I think that's why we don't see you all over the place. You're very present, you're very present, but you're not gonna be at every conference, you're not gonna be on social media all over the place. You're working hard and you're raising your family, which is awesome. So hats off to you, yeah.

Cyrus Jaffery:

yeah, I think it's just that kind of a lifetime for me. Like it's just timing is extremely. So if somebody came today and said, hey, I'm gonna give you this, this and this, and I need you to travel and do this thing. And like there's so many opportunities that come to me all the time. And I'm like, you know what? Like that sounds like a great, I'm really honored that I'm invited to this or doing this, but I just can't do it, man. I just can't do it today in my life. So I don't take on. I've lost a lot of opportunities, I've lost a lot of friendships sometimes, and I've lost a lot of knowledge, right? Not being at some of these places, but if it's meant to be, I truly believe that at one point it will happen. I think the more you force it, the more you get away from what's really important. And like Carey said, like this is my 12 years. Like I will, the time will come, I've got 11 more years where my daughter is out of the house. Like I've got 11, I don't even have 12 years, I've got 11 years left now. So like. All that stuff will come, but today it's extremely important to me to do this. And then when the time comes to where on top of a mountain with a billion dollar valuation, I want to make sure I'm holding those kids' hands and my wife's hands and my team's hands, not there by myself because I worked my A off in the 11 years that I shouldn't have.

Carey Wallace:

That's right.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Yeah, man, I love this nonprofit thing. So like, I think there's so many people that have helped me throughout my life, like from Afghanistan to Pakistan to being as a refugee with no English in 2002, moving to Colorado and playing soccer and people giving me rides. I know the value of time today. There's a gentleman, Brian Robinson and his dad that would literally spend three hours driving me around, come and picking me up and take in and I just can't like, so it's a way for me to give back to people that would never have that opportunity. And it's a way for me to, I'm in a position now to where Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban came back and invaded Afghanistan. I started a nonprofit to be able to help those people that are in the US now and don't know English. I was that guy getting them clothing and grocery store and cars and teaching them about things and So all that stuff is really important to me. And Ava's army came to me because Ava's a six-year-old that had cancer and my daughter is a six-year-old. And I met her and I just couldn't imagine like anybody going through cancer at that early age. Petri had cancer and she fought through it. She's nine or 10 years old and her mission is to change people's life. And because what you go through, when you go through cancer at that early age is the things they put into your body. are the same things that they put into a 60 year old and your body at six year old, five year old does completely things opposite than a 60 year old. So it just messes up with their life for the rest of their life. So Ava's army, his mission is to empower people that are younger and find a different cure for cancer. So we raise money every day to, so anyways, it started because I got to know Ava and I fell in love with her and now my goal is to, I'm a lot more and I'm spreading the the mission to different places and liberty mutual safe. Go just give me 10 grand for Ava's army and other places. So like I'm just so honored to be involved in that because I have three kids. I couldn't imagine my kids going through it and I don't want other kids to feel that they're alone when they're going through that. So, yeah, so you can, Cyrus Jaffrey, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram, I'm Cyrus Jaff. We are on LinkedIn as well, as Cyrus Jaffrey. Quotamation, if you just go to quotamation.com, Q-U-O-T-A-M-A-T-I-O-N, quotamation. If you go to quotamation.com, you can learn a little bit more about it. And then, and also, yeah, honestly, my email is Cyrus at TeamCyrus.com. If an agent wants to learn more about the... the real estate relationships, mortgage or coordination, or honestly just so many agents call me and say, hey, I've got young kids, I see what you're doing, can you talk to me a little bit about what that looks like? Because I've gotten a guy away from it. I literally am on a mission to help agents and other people just kind of work life balance. But at the same time, work life balance does not mean your work is secondary, right? Like where it is, but you can be exceptional at what you do on all ends of things if you know how to manage your time correctly.

Carey Wallace:

Well, Cyrus, it's been a pleasure. I am so glad you reached out and we had a chance to meet with you and I'm sure this will not be our last conversation.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Yes.

Carey Wallace:

Thank you so very much for joining us today.

Cyrus Jaffery:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, guys. Thanks, Lindsay.