When you own an insurance agency, particularly one that carries your name, it can be difficult to see it as anything other than your own. Building a successful agency is a personal achievement. It will go down as a headline in your list of lifetime achievements. It is a personal achievement, but it would not have happened without teamwork.
Throughout your insurance career you will have experienced teamwork in many guises. That teamwork helped to mould you as a person and as an owner. Whether you knew it or not, teamwork had a huge influence on your personal achievement. You continue to experience and engage in teamwork all the way through to another personal achievement; the sale of your insurance agency.
The Newbie
When you started out in insurance, you knew very little about the business. You learned from senior agents. You developed the skills that have served you throughout your career, by watching and working with colleagues at the very beginning.
The Teammate
Once you established yourself as a part of the team, your interaction with the team changed. You became a mentor yourself, and through that experience you gained new skills. You learned how to help less experienced colleagues and how to lead by example.
The Leader
Those skills carried you all the way to the head of the team. At some point, probably before you were officially promoted, you became a leader. Working well with others, as so many resumes have claimed, is not just about being a team player. It’s also about leading a team. Leadership is also a teamwork skill. You could never have run a successful insurance agency if you hadn’t led a successful team first.
The Shareholder
The peak of your career as an insurance agent was your ascension to the role of owner or shareholder. This gave you a whole new team to deal with. You were still leading your employees, but you were also working with peers. That new team operated with no clear superior. This is the most delicate form of teamwork, the most difficult but most fruitful for the agency.
The Seller
When you and your peers decided to sell the agency, you became a part of a new team. You insurance agency sales team consisted of you, your partners and your financial advisers. The success of the sale relied on open information sharing and consultation within that team. The success of the sale relied on your ability to use the skills you learned all the way back before you became a leader.
The New Team
Now that the agency has been sold, you have moved into a new role. You will be operating within a larger entity and dealing with new peers, new subordinates and new superiors. The teamwork journey has come full circle and you are a newbie again. To succeed at your career’s last challenge, you will need to work effectively within this new team. Like so many things in life, you will end up right back where you began. Except this time, you already have the skills to succeed.
As a successful business owner you look for success in all aspects of your agency, including the sale/ perpetuation process. We have created a free whitepaper which looks at successful perpetuation situations and the ones doomed from the beginning. To avoid the latter, read here now.
