As you think about how you're going to spend the time at home in isolation, or perhaps isolated in your office during the corona outbreak, I'd like to give you three things to think about working on.
The first is to spend some time working on your business. We're often so busy just handling day-to-day things that come up, that we don't have time to work on our business, and while we should, we don't. Take this opportunity to think about, "How can I improve my marketing? How can I recruit people? How can I improve my social media presence? What are other things I can do to drive revenue?"
As you think about that, remember that we have excellent tools at OAA. One of the things I would recommend you think about using in this planning and thinking process is our sales forecasting tool; I think you'll find it enormously helpful.
The second thing I think you might want to consider doing is focusing on the people that work for you. If you're in a virtual environment using Slack or Microsoft Teams, those tools will help keep your team connected. At OAA, we're using Microsoft Teams and finding that it's almost the same as being in one physical location together. We're using it to encourage people and to avoid social isolation, which I think over the coming weeks is going to be a big problem for many. You can avoid that by focusing on keeping your team healthy and keeping everyone engaged and motivated.
The third thing I'd like to recommend is that you pick one or two areas where you can improve your own personal skills. Many personal insurance agents want to get into commercial insurance. This is an excellent time to learn those skills. Many commercial insurance agents want to learn how to "niche market". Now's the time to work on that. Whatever it is that you've been dreaming about, whatever it is you've been thinking about in terms of developing your skills, now's the time to develop that. Our Chief Learning Officer, Karen Youngblood, can be an enormous help to you and I encourage you to reach out to her or our agency growth coaches.