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Transcript

Ben Markland: [00:00:00] All right. Thanks for joining us, everyone. I'm here with Emily Raspante, who is the recently promoted CEO of LeClair Group, and we've done a little bit of work with LeClair. We wanna do more work with LeClair. But Emily, start out, tell us a little bit about your background, and tell us what kinda got you to your current role at LeClair.

Emily Raspante: So when I started in the insurance industry I started out as a captive insurance agent. Like a lot of people, I stumbled my way into insurance, and I think that's pretty common. I think there's two paths. You either have family in the insurance industry and you come up that way, or you accidentally find yourself in there. So accidentally found myself in insurance had great mentorship and found that I really liked working with the other agents and worked my way into kind of a training role. And then from there found that I really liked more management and worked out of that captive agency. I think a captive [00:01:00] agency provides a lot of support when you're new. It can put some limitations on you. And then moved out of the state. I was in Massachusetts, moved to Minnesota, which is where I grew up. And then came over to LeClair. And I think- In distribution, one of the things I really love about it is that when you're an agent maybe you have 500, 1,000, 1,500 agents or members under you rather and you're able to touch that many people, but if you have, hundreds or thousands of agents under you, you have now extended your reach to that many more members.

So I've really loved, with each kind of progressing step in my career, having more agents working under me, either as a manager or then going from a sales manager to being in distribution, right? Each step has more and more folks underneath you and you're being able to touch that many more members. Before I stepped into the CEO role, I was the chief operating officer at LeClair. I feel that I'm naturally inclined to be [00:02:00] more analytical, kind of numbers-minded. I feel like the numbers never lie, so it's a nice way to find a source of truth. But still, having the member and the agent as, your guiding light.

Ben Markland: The more agents you work with, and like you said, the more people you touch, decisions you make and services you provide and products you offer, obviously the ripple effect of what you're doing affects a whole lot more people.

Emily Raspante: Yes.

Ben Markland: So when you talk about looking at numbers and data, that's the kind of stuff that gets you to make those decisions, right?

Emily Raspante: Absolutely.

Ben Markland: Okay. So in regards to the transition to the CEO role, can you tell me how that affected you professionally and maybe even personally? Tell us a little bit about what that looked like moving obviously, CEO, you're top of the food chain, right?

Emily Raspante: Yeah. Definitely a big transition. I'm extremely grateful. I was taking over for somebody who helped plan for this kind of over a long period of time. Obviously, maybe people didn't obviously know that from an exterior position, but it was a very gradual transition rather. Over a several month or nearly a [00:03:00] year-long transition the prior CEO had taken on less and less. I was taking on more, even though I was technically still in my previous role doing more and more. So by the time the official transition changed, it felt like my actual day-to-day hadn't changed. But you made a great point, which is the more, people you have under you, whether it's agents or members the bigger ripple effect your decisions have.

So there is a lot of weight on that, those shoulders, so sometimes it feels like there are kind of stressors. I have three kids, right? So there's a lot of balance that comes with that. I think plenty of working parents, moms, dads, anybody has to find that balance. I think it's important to continue to find that balance while also, again, feeling a little bit more pressure to make sure that the work part of the work-life balance is also getting lots of attention.

Ben Markland: Tell me something you're excited about that LeClair's doing. Or a direction you're going or a project you got or a partnership. Tell me something that, that fires you up a little bit.

Emily Raspante: Yeah. We've [00:04:00] got two very exciting things, I think. And one of 'em is developing our own proprietary AI. We call it like a LeClair brain with this fantastic development team, and they approached us. They specialize in basically succession planning, and what they started out doing was creating for companies that were operator owned would be, for these smaller companies, a lot of institutional knowledge was owned by the person who ran it, and so when somebody would sell their business the new proprietor would take over and so much of how the business was run was no longer there, right? You could have all these documents, all these SOPs but so much of that business was inside somebody's head. So they created this fantastic process whereby through interviews and scanning documents, they created, almost like a ChatGPT of one company from interviews with this person or several people [00:05:00] and a company's documents.

So imagine you could do that for Morgan White. You interview all of the most important people. You take all of your documents, and so if somebody leaves, that person's knowledge is already there. And so now, whether it's agents who work with Morgan White or your own internal staff- You don't have to go searching through the right files, know where to find things. You just chat in a box. How do I submit this for contracting? Where do I find this? And so it is a slow burn of a project, 'cause there's a lot of development that goes into it, a lot of information building. But we're working on that both for our internal staff, and they can get better at what they do as well as at some point it will be external facing for our agents, so they'll be able to do a little bit more self-service. I think people are they love the relationships they have with our sales relationship managers, but there's also a point where they wanna be able to go to our broker portal and ask very simple questions and know for sure they're getting the right answer. So very excited about [00:06:00] that and knowing that it's also not connected to other things on the internet. It's a closed system, right? Doing all the right things and leveraging AI for the right reasons, so.

Ben Markland: That's fantastic.

Emily Raspante: Yeah. That's a slow burn process, but we've been working on it for, gosh, nearly a year now. So hopefully that's coming out later this year. And we're also just doing some really targeted geographic growth, right? We've got agents writing business in all 50 states, but our bailiwick is the upper Midwest. But we've got some really specific targeted growth in a handful of states that we're really focused in that, it's so nice when you see growth popping in places that you didn't expect it, that you can really cultivate and grow, whether you're going down to Missouri or Nebraska or Iowa and know that you've really got kinda something special with the right carrier partners, the right product the right people. So we've got some really targeted things going on there as well. Ben Markland: Emily, I wanna talk a little bit more about your AI, 'cause that's been a topic that's actually come up in quite a few of our podcasts. I think it's inevitable. It's gonna affect our industry, because we do a lot of repetitive tasks, right?

Emily Raspante: Yes.

Ben Markland: When it comes [00:07:00] to, and I'm not even talking just about delivering insurance, but more so the back end as well. You've got billing, you've got renewals. Lots of places where there's a whole lot of data involved.

Emily Raspante: Yes.

Ben Markland: And today there's still a whole lot of people involved. But, I think what you guys are doing is fantastic, almost like a, what? An internal librarian for your company, right? Hey tell, somebody's gone. Tell me, what did you say the name of it was? LeClair Brain? Okay. I like that.

Emily Raspante: LeClair Brain. And that's obviously the sort of the internal working title or what we'd call it. We'll have something fancier. But and you made a fantastic point, which is there is so much data, and this is just the jumping-off point. Because when we talk to our, the developers who are building it right now there is so much more you can do with it, right? Once you build the infrastructure, the amount of data that any of us have with regards to our books of business, our brokers the commissions, the contracting, we have these huge data lakes [00:08:00] that we are sitting on that we could be doing so much more with for predictive analytics to help our brokers write better business, stickier business get ahead of trends, identify trends that we haven't seen necessarily. I think we can be doing a lot better on behalf of our agents that they just don't have the opportunity to do right now. We really emphasize the individual or independent broker. Even if they're working for an agency, we really focus on independent agencies throughout America. These are not, these big companies that have necessarily their own IT companies. Sometimes, of course, we're working on the big ones, but so we want to be able to provide them resources that maybe they wouldn't otherwise have access to. So if we can provide, again, predictive analytics in a way that they didn't have before I think that would be a huge win for, again, even the individual agent being able to compete with a big agency that they weren't able to do before.

Ben Markland: Do you think an independent agent fears AI right now, or fears, [00:09:00] not necessarily the results of AI but more so fears an AI agent?

Emily Raspante: I think some of them do. I think a lot of them are either misunderstanding, putting their heads in the sand. I think the phrase AI is just thrown out so much.

Ben Markland: Yeah, sure.

Emily Raspante: There that it's almost lost all meaning, right? It's AI this, AI that it's just become noise. Because- the sort of threat of AI is out there without really an articulation of what is that gonna look like? How is it gonna replace the agent? But I think we do see that members want interaction with a person in some form or another. And so every FMO, every agency looks different, but at least at LeClair every agent we work with has a dedicated sales relationship manager and I think that's what people really like about it, right? They have somebody whose name they know, who's they pick up the phone and they call Julie, they call Sarah, they call, somebody they know. But what the purpose of AI should be is taking the tedium away from those people.

Ben Markland: Exactly.

Emily Raspante: So [00:10:00] that their focus is the relationship building, the sales driving. And so it's supposed to take the minutiae away, so that they can focus on the things that can't be replicated by humans.

Ben Markland: Yeah. So it doesn't replace the agent, it replaces the repetitive tasks of an agent.

Emily Raspante: Yes.

Ben Markland: To let them, like you said, do what they're really out there to do, and that's.

Emily Raspante: Yes.

Ben Markland: Kinda cultivate relationships and sell product.

Emily Raspante: Exactly.

Ben Markland: No I agree. We've had a lot of those conversations and at my company, we're kinda starting to dabble in AI a little bit ourselves, and I really think in our industry it's just going to be able to empower more people. I don't think it's eliminating anybody. I think just like any technology, the ultimate goal is efficiency and making things easier, and if we can do that, I just think you get the customer will get more out of you, right?

Emily Raspante: Yeah. And I think it's also gonna be at some point a necessity. I don't know- In the health space exactly what the number is, but across all fields of insurance, the prediction is in the next 10 years [00:11:00] 50% of insurance agents are going to retire, which if you think about the demography of the average insurance agent is somewhat believable. And so I don't know that there will be an equal number of people coming into the field, but I think with technology, I expect that people would be able to do the same amount of work, manage the same amount of, cases and members with fewer agents, and I think they're gonna have to, right? I think that's gonna be a challenge that I think AI can help with. And so I think people are gonna have to embrace it and not run from it.

Ben Markland: I think that falls in line with kinda what you said when you were telling us your journey, and a lot of people either insurance is in their blood or they stumble into it. There's not a whole lot of nine-year-olds running around saying, "I wanna be an insurance agent when I grow up," right? But I think the appeal can be from the tech side, too. There's, a lot of younger people that, they're focusing their education on technology and building things. And this is an industry that, let's be honest, we're behind on [00:12:00] technology. Probably a long way behind a lot of other industries, and I think there's going to be a huge shift in, coming from the old school suit and tie agent more to just, whiz kids building tech products that, I don't wanna say you'll never see them, but they're gonna be able to provide services and products and across the whole country without having to be there and play golf with somebody, right? When you say a lot of the kinda old guard is, retirement is creeping up on them, I think there could be some more energy kinda brought into this industry just because there's such a open door for people to build things technology-wise. And if you go to school and you learn technology, you don't necessarily have to choose what industry you're gonna apply it to, right? Day one, right? And if the door's open and the money's there, I think that's gonna come flooding into this industry.

Emily Raspante: And I think we've already seen it maybe on a smaller scale how much technology has improved enrollment and ease of use even in the last five, 10 years. Especially post-COVID when, all of the [00:13:00] seniors maybe and everybody else had to forcibly get with the program.

Ben Markland: That's right.

Emily Raspante: For especially the Medicare space, but everywhere else everybody started doing everything online and remotely. But Again, when we work with you, I think we've seen great success with having everything on one platform, right?

Ben Markland: Sure.

Emily Raspante: The platform is what makes a difference, and that is why we love working with Morgan White. Give you guys a little plug, but it's absolutely true because the platform is what makes a difference. When you have everything all in one place, it makes it easy to sell, it makes it easy to enroll. And smoothing the way with technology is what gonna make people wanna sell. And so whether it's through InsurTech or any other way I think it does make a big difference.

Ben Markland: No, I agree with you. So this is the Insurance Leadership Podcast. So let's pivot over to leadership a little bit. Tell me some if you don't mind sharing, so maybe some challenges that you've had in transitioning into your leadership role.

Emily Raspante: Yeah. I think a challenge I've had is figuring out how do you maintain culture while [00:14:00] also wanting it to make it feel like it's still your own. The organization that I'm running now at LeClaire is 94 years old. I am the first CEO who is not a family member. It's a challenge, right? That but you also want to honor the culture that's been built so that it feels consistent, right? And I think we have again, insurance is such a relationship, industry. That's what everything is built on. To be completely blunt, FMOs, we don't offer something that the shop across the town doesn't, right? In terms of contracts or whatever else. And I think we do have plenty of things that make us different but it's about who we are and our culture and what we offer from, again, relationships and service and so many other things. But how do you maintain what's already been built from a culture and relationship perspective while trying to put your own mark on it and make it feel like we're keeping things, fresh and innovative and pushing things forward into the [00:15:00] future because there's a fine balance between maintaining culture and constantly looking over your shoulder.

Ben Markland: Yeah, no, that's interesting. And, I know culture's a big buzzword now. And I think a lot of it's because of what you, I know you mentioned COVID. I think, a lot of companies sending people home, and they're not back. And I think it's challenging to maintain a culture with people that only see each other on a Zoom meeting. So I'm curious your thoughts on that. Actually, I don't even know if LeClair is remote or hybrid or how you guys.

Emily Raspante: We are in office, actually.

Ben Markland: Okay.

Emily Raspante: We actually, this is interesting, went the opposite way, if that makes sense. So everybody, of course, was home during COVID. And our natural reaction was, "Oh, mandates have been lifted let's all come back to the office." This is where we work. This is where we're together." But I will say, so everybody was back in the office five days a week as soon as we could be. We did notice, though, that most people trickled back into the office or didn't come back into the office at all. And that actually was a challenge for us from an HR perspective, is that when hiring, people would like a hybrid [00:16:00] perspective. So we actually almost in some ways walked it back and said, so we started offering, like literally one or two work days from home to our staff members, and I know some people listening may say "Oh my gosh that's barely anything. That sounds awful." But we have plenty of people who don't even take their work from home days. They would much rather be in the office. And again, we're in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. Everybody is quite local, so it's not like we've got people trekking long distances. But it is so much easier to be able to look across the aisle and say, "Hey, Ben, I've got this question. I've got this agent who is looking for XYZ. Have you experienced this?" Rather than sending somebody an email or shooting them a Teams message and hoping they see it. It's easier to build and maintain culture. It's easier to learn from each other, especially if you're onboarding somebody new. We're very much an in-person team. We have started bringing on some kind of satellite folks in different states out of necessity and that's something that we are learning. How do you integrate out-of-state team members and still make them [00:17:00] feel like they're part of the team- when everybody else is at your core office? And that's been a little bit of trial and error, I'll be completely honest. I think we've got some fantastic team members who are, in Wisconsin but, we want to make sure they're feeling looped in. We make sure we bring them in for the holiday Christmas party for what we all want to do now.

Ben Markland: Yeah, you don't want to Zoom meeting into the Christmas party, right?

Emily Raspante: We make sure they come in. Even if it's once a month. We bring them in. We're working on figuring out what does that look like? But short answer is we're just in-office people.

Ben Markland: Yeah. No, that's you're, if you have a company that's 90-plus-years old. Culture is pretty ingrained. It's not you're not faking it, I guess is what I'm saying. You got see some of these newer companies and once again, I'll go back to tech. Tech is getting bigger and bigger in what we do, and some of these people they've never met each other ever- and it's some tech company that's spun off with some VC money, and they're trying to figure out what culture even is. And, I think it's you gotta start somewhere, right? But I think it's it's important for your employees not obviously just to be there for a paycheck, you like your job. It's not a J-O-B, right? It's because if they're there just for a paycheck, somebody's [00:18:00] got a bigger one somewhere at some point, and if all you gotta do is just switch which Zoom meeting you log into, there's not really a whole lot that you're part of the company, but do you I don't know. I'm trying to think of a good way to articulate it. I think it's important that they believe in the greater good. Hey, you have a product or you have a service, and this is what you do and this is why I come, and I'm helping people, and I like doing it.

So Emily, you've- climbed the ladder and shared your story with us. What advice would you give to an emerging leader or somebody kind of looking to do that climb on, how to get there, or are there anything that you did or like just a goal you set or a road you built to get from, here's where I start, but here's where I want to finish?

Emily Raspante: Find good mentors. I think that was absolutely huge. When I came into the industry, I came in and worked in an agency where both of my managers were these two fantastic women who were the most supportive. And I'm a [00:19:00] naturally competitive person. I know this is some people's nightmare, but as an agent, like we always had like our numbers like written up on the whiteboard, and I always wanted to see where I was compared to other people, right? That's how I'm motivated. And I know that's not how a lot of people are motivated, right? Some people, that's horrible for them. But I like to see that. So I'm one of those people who wants to see, like where do I track, and if I'm below somebody else, like that's awful for me. But I want to see it and I want everybody else to see it. I know that doesn't work for everybody. But I think part of it's finding what motivates you, but also finding other people who will help you stay accountable. But in finding mentors who are in the industry, and even sometimes finding mentors who are either not in the industry or don't know the same people you know. I have some fantastic mentors who I can talk to and they know the same people, and so they know what I'm going through. But then I find myself couching what I wanna say because I don't want to overstep, or I'm feeling like I'm not completely blunt because I don't want [00:20:00] to make it sound like I'm criticizing somebody who we both know. But so finding a sounding board where you can say, here's the situation that I'm working through," regardless of who it's with or what the situation is objectively and needing somebody to help you work it out because there's a lot of complex situations either operationally or personally when you're working through, whether it's a leadership position or anywhere else. And to feel like you have support inside and out of your organization is just really important.

Ben Markland: I think that's great. Yeah. And, I kinda have done the same thing myself, have some really good friends and mentors that have become very successful in industries that have nothing to do with insurance, and I really like to lean on them because, leadership or success or, growth or climbing or even just what I said about liking what you do. Getting perspective from people that have done it and don't really know what I do myself I think that's great because there's always gonna be parallels.

Emily Raspante: Yes.

Ben Markland: What we do is different. We're all humans. And [00:21:00] like you said I'm much like you, motivated by numbers and leaderboards and stuff. You're right. Some people hate 'em. We tried to bring one in at Morgan White, and we have, but in doing research I was a little bit like, "Yeah, this could be bad." Because, people on the bottom don't like that at all, and there's lots of studies on it like, hey, leaderboards might be bad for people at the bottom. And people at the top are gonna be at the top anyway. They don't even need a leaderboard to see that. Looking at things like that and to find out that, I've got a friend that runs a Chick-fil-A restaurant. Guess what they do? They have a leaderboard, and I was like, "Okay, let's bounce this off of this guy, and we'll see what's going on." And there's just a lot of parallels and what I've also found with this industry, even though there's so many people in it, it's actually a small world.

Emily Raspante: Yes, it is.

Ben Markland: So we're sitting here, for the audience, we're at a conference in Miami right now, and there's tons of people here, but they all know the same people.

Emily Raspante: Yes.

Ben Markland: And we're in Mississippi. You're in Minnesota. We talk to people in California, everywhere else, and everybody knows each other. And it's very interesting. So anyways I appreciate that [00:22:00] perspective. That's kinda hit home for me when you said that one.

Emily, thanks for joining us. I really do appreciate you kinda sharing your personal journey and kinda what you're doing. I think obviously the sky's the limit for LeClaire. Thanks for joining us, and thanks everyone for joining us as well.

Emily Raspante: Thanks, Ben.