Dive Into The Catalyit Success Journey – Part One

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Steve Anderson, Co-founder and CEO at Catalyit. And I’m going to spend a little bit of time with you going into a deeper dive about the Catalyit Success Journey. It is a core piece of what we do and how we help agencies like you be more successful with their technology journey.

Let me first start with a story. Jeff Bezos stood on stage in front of a couple of thousand Amazon employees at a regular all hands meeting, answering questions. He looked down at his note cards for the next question and chuckled a little bit. And said, I think I know the answer to this question.

The question was, Jeff, what does day two look like? Well, in his very first shareholder letter, Bezos wrote, This is day one for the internet. And for Amazon.com, If we execute well, He went on to write about that question. And added the comment, I’m more interested in what things and steps can be taken to help protect against a day two mindset. Help protect that Day One.

And he identified four things, customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making. Well, for my conversation today, I want to focus on this idea of eager adoption of external trends.

And in my research and thinking, I’ve realized, I think the biggest risk agencies face today is actually not taking enough risk. And so, what does it mean to eagerly adopt trends? Well, in my presentations and speaking over this last year, I’ve been talking a lot about industry trends, and what’s happening out there now.

And here on this slide, you can see some of them, certainly, commercial, quoting his commenting, been a long time waiting, and it’s here and certainly needs to be improved. And increased demand for all kinds of different videos, open platforms, also known as API’s and machine-to-machine communication and connection, certainly InsurTech’s, some of what you’re trying to replace you, some of which are trying to help you figuring out and the growth of different marketplaces, really new ways to buy insurance. And then machine learning, what I call the democratization of machine learning.

These are all external trends that are happening. So, technology is important. What got us here won’t necessarily get us there, meaning we used a lot of technology over the years. And we need to continue to adapt and adopt new technologies that are coming along. Technology infuses everything. It is continuing to grow rapidly. And that’s why you need to pay attention to it.

Investments in different startups are continuing to be made. And technology can transform an agency and position them to continue to thrive. And that’s where we spend our time helping you do.

Well, the Catalyit Success Journey is one of the tools I created to really help agencies think about technology as a journey and as a journey that can be successful. So, in that journey, we’ve created four different milestones. At the far left is Baseline. What do you need, at a minimum, in order to effectively run an agency? What we call building a strong foundation.

What’s the next, what’s Better? What can you add to it to improve as your resources get better? You sell more, you have more customers? Expectations are there.

So what does that mean? The third is Best, certainly alluding to the National Big I Best Practices study.  What do the top 25% of agencies use in their agencies in terms of technology, and then the fourth is Beyond. It is a bit futuristic, no question about it. But what are agencies using today that will become Best Practices in the future?

And so one of the ways we start this journey and start helping you with your journey, with creating your journey, is a tech assessment. That’s always where we want you to start. And you complete a series of questions in five different areas of agency operations. And then, we will generate a customized report based on how you answered the questions and help you begin thinking about creating your strategic plan for technology, and your success journey going forward.

So here are just some statistics about the assessments that have already been completed by agencies. Now, remember, I said five different areas. So agency operations, cybersecurity, technology, platforms, marketing, and sales, agency strategy are the five areas.

You can see their average scores, and we put them into a percentage, and the overall score at 51%. And then, on the right-hand side, you can see our numbers based on reported revenue and the number of employees, where we get one of the measures of agency productivity, which is revenue per employee. And again, as you can see, as the agency revenue gets larger, the revenue per employee gets higher, which could mean a couple of things. One, more resources are available to invest more in technology, and more people resources to help with that particular area.

So, here’s the overall assessment results, same thing as in that chart, a little maybe easier to look at and consume. But overall, the score of 51%, and again, that leaves a lot of room for improvement. And that’s what I want to talk about next. When I talk about that first stage or milestone called Baseline, what are the technologies that we include there, and why do we include that?

So, stay tuned for the next installment, where I’ll go into a deeper dive into that milestone of what we call Baseline.