We Make Our Own Licensed Agents

Since starting Foresight in 2015, we've taken seven people with no insurance license and made them licensed CSRs from scratch. Three of them are no longer with the agency. I'm not sure this is the right way to build a team. It's just the way we've done it, and after seven runs I have a decent picture of what it costs and what it returns. 

The model is simple. Hire someone unlicensed. They study, pass the exam, then the real training starts. 

My first three studied part-time while they worked. It took significantly longer. So I changed the approach: the next batch came into the office and studied full-time, exam scheduled three to four weeks out. My last four all passed within the first month, on their first try. The pro is a licensed person in thirty days. The con is a full month of salary before they can generate a dollar of productivity. 

Why not just hire licensed people? Two reasons. First, you truly cannot find them. I've tried job postings many times and come up empty. The other option is a recruiter charging 20 to 25 percent of the first year's salary, and I've been tempted in moments of desperation. If you've hired a licensed CSR lately, you know what I mean. Second, experienced hires come with habits, some of them bad, and some people simply won't follow your way of doing business. 

The real cost of the from-scratch path is time. It takes six months to a year before a new hire is mostly self-sufficient. You're paying full salary without full productivity, and your team is training and answering questions on top of their own work. 

Two things made each run better. First, our LMS: the SOPs in writing plus Loom videos of the task, so every hire trains the same way. Second, the new hires themselves. Every one of them found the spots where agent one does it this way and agent two does it that way. That's the moment you pull up the SOP, the source of truth, and either get the team back on it or update it. The trainee became the audit. 

The payoff is real. Our most recent CSR is doing account reviews in under two months of training, explaining coverages that I promise you plenty of CSRs in our industry couldn't, because most agencies don't train or role play. People just wing it. 

There's a productivity tax on every unlicensed hire, and the payback is measured in years. But hiring is how you scale, and the owners who run extremely lean stay small and burn out, because when someone leaves, the work lands back on the principal's desk. The agencies that build a real system for hiring and training will dominate long term. 

I've chosen to pay the tax in advance. I hope it keeps paying off.