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Moderator:
Thanks for the note. All input is appreciated, even if it is from an opposing or critical viewpoint.
You are correct. Everywhere you go and everything you do for work has some part of it that downright sucks. Being a Farmers Agent is not the exception. The other thing that you said about admitting failure is something that is in my personal 10 commandments and that is:
"No matter what it was and how it happened, in the end it is your fault. Until this is realized you will never learn from your mistakes and you will keep repeating it over and over again with often the same result. Its important to walk away from each setback realizing what was done wrong and not to repeat it."
I as the original initiator of this site intended for this to be an educational resource so that others can learn from my mistake. After getting notes, emails and letters, I decided that it would be beneficial to this website to post the stories and comments of others.
I'm not sure how deeply you have read into the 100's of pages of articles and letters on here, but it isnt all gripe. There is actual information on here that is useful to people who are agents, thinking of becoming one and people in the industry in general. Much of it i'm sure comes off as sheer griping, but there is other information on here that details why being a Farmers Agent isnt your best choice, given all the other choices available with other companies. Being a businessperson yourself, think about when you first started. What if you had met someone that had already been through what you did to either succeed or fail and offered you advice on what to do and more importantly, what not to do? I'm sure that you would have appreciated that advice, am I not correct?
As for getting a salaried job. Personally, I've already been there and done that for a number of years and long ago decided that is not for me. I do however have 3 other business ventures aside from my current insurance business relationship. So yes, I personally take my own advice and admit that I made some grave errors.
The stats on new business ventures are fairly grim, I think I heard once that only 1 in 10 succeed. I dont really care much to look up what the real figure is if that isnt it, however I will like to say by observation that 1 in 10 Farmers Agents do quite well! The only catch to that is a Farmers Agent isnt really a Business Owner, they are more of a subcontractor employee of Farmers. Other companies have a better setup from that aspect. This site isnt here for the 1 in 10 agents that actually do well, because there is already plenty of stuff on the Farmers website for them and so they can feel good about themselves. This site is dedicated to the other 9 of 10 people.
The main point of this site is this. I personally invested and lost about $50,000 of my own capital trying to make a Farmers Agency work. I consider that a $50,000 degree in "Managing my own insurance agency". Rather than go back over all the things I spent that money on, I want to just summarize it by saying, yes i could have spent less on this and that, and yes I could have tried harder on this thing and so forth. The end result, is I should have quit after 3 months of training and moved on to be a sub-producer for an independent agency. After a year or two on that, open my own agency if I saw fit to do so. There is a lot to learn, even after you've already figured out what the product is about. Most of it is managing the business properly, and thats the easiest part to screw up in this game. Farmers pushes new agents to invest a lot of money, when they really should be more careful, knowing the failure rate is in excess of 80%. |
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