Insurance agency systems: build around your newest agent

Mike Curry was doing appliance repair before he got licensed. No sales background. People at his old job placed bets on how fast he’d be back.

He didn’t come back. He built a private health agency, lost it almost overnight, and rebuilt it bigger. He’s now a division leader at USA Benefits Group, and when I sat down with him, the thing I wanted to hear about wasn’t the growth. It was the systems he built so the growth didn’t fall apart.

Watch the full interview with Mike on YouTube.

Insurance agency systems start with the newest agent

Mike runs everything through one question: how fast and how easy can I make it for my newest agent to have success?

He remembers what his own first months felt like:

• Contracts coming at him from everywhere
• Underwriting and products he didn’t understand yet
• Needing training beyond a video library
• Needing someone in his corner who’d actually pick up the phone

Every one of those is a spot where a new agent quietly quits. So he spent a full year hunting for the cracks. Wherever people fell through, he built something to catch them.

His second focus is his team leaders. They’re still selling, and every hour they spend answering questions from someone who’ll never write an app is an hour they’re not producing. A lot of what he built protects their time as much as it helps the new agent.

Why he chose renewals over starting from zero

Mike started in life insurance and did well. But he described life as “starting over at the gym every year.” You build the muscle, and then January comes and you’re back at zero.

He watched his agents run the same hamster wheel. Buy leads, write business, spend the income on more leads. The only way out was recruiting, and most agents weren’t willing to work 60 hours a week to get there.

Private health changed the math for him because it pays renewals. An agent who works the leads through one open enrollment can walk into the next year with income already coming in. That’s what he wanted to offer people: something that compounds instead of resetting.

He still sells life, and he says the best life lead is often a health lead. He just wanted the foundation to be something that keeps paying.

Private health plans are usually medically underwritten, and they aren’t the right fit for everyone. Some clients belong on an ACA plan, Medicare, or something else. If you’re new to the product, start with our guide on how to sell private health insurance before you pitch anyone.

Losing it all, and how he got back up

After a falling-out with the ownership of the brokerage he was with, his agency was moved out from under him. He found out from a text while his family was pulling into the driveway for a beach trip.

He leaned on his faith and a lot of prayer. What I took from the conversation was how practical he is about it. He’s teaching his son the same thing in baseball: when you strike out, get really fast at forgetting it. Learn from it, sure. Just don’t sit in it.

He’d spent years helping agents who weren’t on his team, sometimes an hour or two on the phone with someone who’d cold-called him, with nothing in it for him. When he rebuilt, those relationships came back around. Almost his whole former team followed him within a few months.

And he uses the setback as fuel. “It put the biggest chip on my shoulder,” he said. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need to fight complacency.

The onboarding ecosystem, step by step

Mike’s line is “don’t just join an agency, join the ecosystem.” Here’s what that looks like when a new agent comes on:

1. A back office that handles the basics. Contracting, tracking, and KPIs all live in one place from day one.
2. An onboarding specialist. Her whole job is to hand-hold new agents through contracting and setup, the stuff that normally leaves people stuck and alone.
3. Contracting with the core carriers only. His agents can access a lot of carriers, but they get contracted with the handful they’re most likely to write. They can add more later. Starting with everything just creates noise.
4. One CRM with everything in it. Carrier tools, resources, and training all sit inside it. He got tired of telling people where everything was, and new agents got tired of asking.
5. A university with a mindset track. It covers scripts and sales, but it’s also built to move people out of an employee mindset. Running a business is different from a 9 to 5.
6. Live training three days a week. One of his top producers, a former educator, runs it.

That last piece is a filter. Mike’s frustration was people who get licensed, get contracted, sit through all the training, and then won’t take a single live call. “They’ve been working their whole life to get on the football team. They’re on the football team. Here’s the playbook. They won’t step on the field.”

So new agents train in the live sessions first. Once they’ve written an app or two, they meet their team leader.

An AI underwriting assistant built from experience

The other piece Mike built is an AI underwriting assistant.

Someone once asked him if they could just feed it the carrier brochures. His answer was no. Brochures barely scratch the surface. What makes his version useful is that it carries the experience of his leaders, from both the sales side and the underwriting side. An agent drops in the details from the fact-finder (state, prescriptions, health history, what the client wants), and it suggests a product, a backup option, add-ons to consider, and objections to expect.

It works at 2 a.m. when nobody’s upline is answering the phone. He figures it’s right the vast majority of the time. Not every time. So if you build one, confirm with the carrier’s underwriting before anything goes on an app.

If you build something like this, the inbound side matters:

• Client health details are regulated. Prescriptions and health history fall under GLBA, state privacy rules, and your carrier agreements no matter which tool reads them. Use a business-tier AI account that doesn’t train on your data, and strip names and identifiers where you can.
• Check carrier agreements before uploading their material. Some limit how underwriting guides can be shared or stored.
• It advises, you decide. The licensed agent is responsible for the recommendation, not the software.

Leads that book themselves

The last pillar is leads. Mike’s team runs its own ads and its own creative, so agents aren’t stuck buying every lead at retail.

His follow-up runs the same way we set it up for our own agents. Many leads book straight onto the agent’s calendar. If they don’t book, the CRM follows up automatically. He compared it to his old life days of 300 to 500 dials on a dial day, and said his agents don’t hit that in a month.

To be clear, neither of us is telling you to stop calling your leads. But more and more agents I talk to spend their day on booked appointments instead of dialing through leads.

The takeaway for your agency

You don’t need Mike’s size to use his approach. Look at your newest agent’s first 30 days and find where they get stuck alone. That’s where your next system goes. Fix it now, not on a to-do list. Mike calls himself a “right now guy,” and it shows.

If you want a CRM with the follow-up and booking already built for insurance teams, and a place to keep your training resources, take a look at NextLevel CRM.