Sooner or later, someone across the table will ask what makes your business different. It might be a possible partner, an investor or buyer, or a recruit deciding where to build a career. Or it might be a prospect comparing insurance agencies and advisory firms. Many successful owners find “What is your secret sauce?” hard to answer on the spot. After years of doing your best work, you may stop noticing how you do it. Yet that skill could be the center of your insurance agency value proposition.
When you can name that skill in one sentence, you have something to build on. It gives you a clearer way to explain why clients should choose your firm and provides a starting point for deciding how to grow your business. For independent insurance advisors looking to build on their strengths, the next step is turning that distinction into a practical growth strategy. Without it, prospects tend to see one more insurance agency or advisory firm like the rest.
Below, you will find out why the skill is hard to name, how to take it apart, and whom to ask. You will also see which skills earn a premium, how to compare yourself with competitors, and how to write the sentence. At the end is a checklist you can finish in one sitting.
Key Takeaways
- Your best skill is often hard to name, because after years of use you stop noticing how you do it.
- Clients, team members, and mentors who have watched you work often see your strength more easily than you can.
- People pay more for a skill that is rare, valuable, and hard to copy than for one everybody offers.
- You can build your insurance agency value proposition around one sentence that names the skill behind your results and the problem it solves.
- When you turn that skill into a method, your team can learn to deliver it, so the business can grow beyond you.
Why Successful Owners Struggle to Name What Makes Their Business Different
Owners who have built successful insurance agencies and advisory firms often struggle to say what sets them apart. The people around them can often see it more easily. If you have struggled to work out what you are good at, you are in good company. It is one of the harder questions to answer, especially early on.
The owners who get past it usually do the work on purpose. They look back at their earlier career, what they have learned, and the years spent building the business. Then they put the skill into words. When a partner or an investor asks what makes the business different, they can often answer in minutes.
The People Who Will Ask What Sets Your Business Apart
As your insurance agency or advisory firm grows, the question will come from several directions:
- A possible partner who wants to know what you bring.
- An investor or buyer deciding what your business is worth.
- A recruit choosing where to build a career.
- A prospect comparing you with other insurance agencies and advisory firms.
Each of these people is deciding whether to put money, time, or a career into your business. When you can say plainly what sets you apart, each of them has a reason to choose you.
Finding Your Differentiating Skill in Your Education, Experiences, and Mentors
“I’m paying you for your past. Your past helps me to build my future.”
Coach Micheal Burt, Performance Coach and Founder of The Greatness Factory
Your past is a good place to start looking for what sets you apart. One useful way to sort through it is in three parts:
- Unique education. Your education does not have to be formal.
- Unique experiences. These are the experiences you have created or lived through.
- Unique mentors. These are the people who taught you. Often you can name the period of your life when you learned something and who taught you.
Over time, these combine into a skill that belongs to you alone.
Why Your Differentiating Skill May Not Be the Service You List First
Think about a concert. The opening act can be good, and the headliner can still be on another level. What separates them may be the performance or the connection with the audience, even when the singing is close.
Your insurance agency or advisory firm can work the same way. The skill that sets you apart may be something other than the service you list first. You might be strongest at recruiting, at training and development, or at holding the whole business together.
How to Name a Skill You Now Do Without Thinking
A skill you use every day can be hard to name. You stopped thinking about how you do it long ago. To name it, you take it apart until you can see why each step gets a result.
Noel Burch, at Gordon Training International, described four stages that people go through as they learn a skill. His model is known as the four stages of competence:
- Unconscious incompetence: You do not yet know what you are missing.
- Conscious incompetence: You see the gap and start learning.
- Conscious competence: You understand why your approach gets a result. You do it well when you think it through, and you can explain it and, eventually, teach it.
- Unconscious competence: You do it well without thinking about how. That saves you time in daily work, and it also makes the skill hard to describe to anyone else.
If you have built a business, you are often at the fourth stage with your best skill. To name that skill, you step back on purpose to the third stage, where you can see each step again.
Why You May Be Underrating Your Own Skill
Many people have more of this kind of skill than they give themselves credit for. Some owners look at someone more successful and decide they are not there yet. They judge their own ability by another person’s results. Many also never sit down and ask what they are good at and what separates them from others.
Moving back to the third stage usually starts with noticing when you talk yourself out of your own strengths. From there, you can answer a few questions in writing. Then you walk through one result, step by step, until you see the skill inside it.
Recognizing the Self-Talk That Hides Your Strengths
Many owners describe themselves with a narrow label, such as “a good operator.” Their self-talk often pairs a strength with a weakness: “I am good at developing people, but I am a lousy CEO.” As long as you talk to yourself that way, you will struggle to see everything you do well.
Some owners also feel like imposters when they compare themselves with people who have massive public influence. Narrow labels and imposter feelings are both part of the self-talk that holds a business owner back.
Written Questions That Take a Skill Apart Step by Step
To take a skill apart, you can choose one result you get more reliably than the people around you. You can then work through these questions in writing:
- What result do you produce that peers, team members, or competitors struggle to produce?
- Think of the last time you produced it. What did you do first, second, and third?
- Which of those steps would a capable new hire most likely get wrong, and why?
- What do you notice in a client, a recruit, or a case that other people miss?
- Where did you learn each part: education, an experience, or a mentor?
When you answer the third and fourth questions, you start to see the judgment you use without thinking. That judgment comes so naturally to you that you may no longer notice it.
Asking Clients, Team Members, and Mentors What Sets You Apart
Another person can often see what you are uniquely good at more easily than you can. What comes naturally to you is easy to overlook. Helping people see it is part of a good coach’s job. An executive who has turned around three hospitals that were losing money may think of that as doing the job. Someone watching from outside may see a turnaround expert with a skill for making bold, decisive decisions under high pressure.
Few people have every skill a growing business needs. Some owners are great at recruiting and weaker at training and development, or at the work that holds everything together. When you know which part you do best, you also know what to look for in a partner.
You can also get an outside view without a coach. The people who have watched you work already have an opinion about what you do best.
Who to Ask About Your Strengths, and What to Ask Them
The most useful people to ask are the ones who have watched you work up close:
- Longtime clients who have seen you handle a hard situation.
- Insurance agents, financial advisors, and other team members you have trained.
- A mentor, coach, or business partner who knows your results and your habits.
You can ask each of them the same question: “When you have seen me at my best, what was I doing?” When everyone answers the same question, you can compare the answers. When more than one person says the same thing, that answer deserves your attention. An answer that surprises you is worth a follow-up question. The person may be describing a skill you have stopped noticing.
Hard Skills, Soft Skills, and What Makes a Skill Worth a Premium
Once you have a name for your skill, it helps to know what kind of skill it is. People pay differently for different kinds. Skills fall into two broad groups:
- Soft skills. These are people skills, such as connection and charisma.
- Hard skills. You know how to do something that few people know how to do. You may know how to build something, create something, or understand the economics of a business better than anyone else.
Many of the most highly paid experts are paid for a hard skill. That is one reason to know your own primary skill well.
What you earn from a hard skill then depends on two things:
- How rare the skill looks to the person paying for it.
- Whether you price the skill for what it is worth.
Why Common Skills Get Commoditized and Rare Skills Earn a Premium
Your work gets commoditized when a prospect, recruit, or buyer decides that everybody does what you do. People pay a premium for something rare, valuable, and usually new that few others can replicate. When you can explain what sets you apart, you have more say over what you charge.
“If you want to cheapen anything, just make it common.”
Coach Micheal Burt, Performance Coach and Founder of The Greatness Factory
Pricing the Skill That Sets Your Business Apart
Once you recognize the skill that sets you apart, it is worth deciding what to charge for it. It is also worth deciding what to give away. Many owners give a lot away over the years before they see this. When you package what you know and price it for its worth, you keep more of the value it creates.
Giving some value away can still make sense when it has a purpose. With a free class, for example, people can try your approach before they commit to more. How much you give away depends on what you share and what you want the free part to lead to.
How Competitor Research Can Identify Opportunities for Insurance Practice Growth
A comparative analysis can help you understand where your insurance agency or advisory firm stands in the market and where it has room to grow. Study firms that are further ahead in the areas you want to develop, paying attention to how they position their services, communicate their value, and attract their audiences.
- What are they doing that you are not doing?
- How do they market themselves, and how do you market yourself?
- Where is your unique skill compared with theirs?
The goal is not to copy another firm’s approach. It is to identify what makes your business different and determine how that distinction can inform your growth strategy.
Building Your Own Version of What Larger Insurance Agencies and Advisory Firms Do
When you study people further ahead, it is easy to decide they have more money and a bigger marketing budget. A more useful question is, “What is my version of what they are doing?”
Florida Financial Advisors is the advisory firm led by Greatness Lab founder Jason Mickool. Its team recruits every day and trains its people every morning at 8:30. If you run a small insurance agency or advisory firm, a team like that can seem out of reach. You might think you have nobody to train. A better response is to ask what your version would be, and to start by recruiting one person.
Florida Financial Advisors began at a kitchen table with two people. Many owners in that position would start by going out to sell more insurance. The firm’s first step was to hire a recruiter, who brought in 15 people. Those 15 people became the first team to train. When one of them showed management potential, that person became a manager over the others.
How a Distinctive Skill Can Set Your Advisory Firm Apart
You can often stand out more with one narrow skill than with a long list of services. Author Rory Vaden, cofounder of Brand Builders Group, is known for one specific skill. He has a systematic process for launching books onto the New York Times bestseller list. Because his process is so specific, major influencers go to him when they want a book to reach that list.
Writing Your Insurance Agency Value Proposition in One Sentence: X Solves Y
You can state your primary skill in one sentence: I am good at X, and it solves Y problem. That sentence is the heart of an insurance agency value proposition. To write it, you choose one skill and connect it to a problem someone else has.
Here are a few illustrations of the form:
I am good at (X) | It solves this problem (Y) |
Building recruiting and training systems for small insurance agencies | Owners who cannot grow past what they can sell themselves |
Designing retirement income plans for business owners preparing to sell | Owners who do not know how the sale of their business will turn into income |
Training new insurance agents to be productive in their first 90 days | New insurance agents who take months to make their first sale |
Short works best here, because a partner or buyer needs to remember the sentence and repeat it to someone else. If your sentence needs a second paragraph to make sense, the skill or the problem is usually too broad. You can narrow one of them and write the sentence again.
Once you have the sentence, the problem half deserves a hard look. You want to know how big the problem is and whether it is the right problem to solve. You also need to explain what makes your firm different and why that distinction matters to your audience. For a more detailed framework, read how financial advisors can communicate their value. After that, you can build a method around the skill so that other people can deliver it consistently.
Sizing the Problem Your Skill Solves
In general, the bigger the problem, the more people will pay to solve it. When you size the problem, you get a sense of what the skill could be worth. You also learn who is likely to pay for it.
You can size it with questions like these:
- How many people or firms have this problem?
- What does the problem cost them each year if it goes unsolved?
- How often does it come up: once in a career, once a year, or every week?
- Who feels it most: the client, the insurance agency owner, or the buyer of an advisory firm?
If your skill solves a large, costly, or frequent problem, you can usually charge more for it. If it solves a smaller or rarer problem, the skill can still be valuable to the people who face it. When you know your audience is narrow, you can market and price the skill with that in mind.
Choosing the Right Problem and Focusing on One Target
It is also worth asking whether people can tell what your business does. Have you chosen the right problem to solve? An owner can have a strong skill and still aim it at a problem that is too small. Some aim it at several problems at once.
One way to handle both concerns is to pick the single problem where your skill makes the most difference. The skill may help with others too, and you can still build your sentence around that one problem.
Turning Your Expertise Into a Repeatable Business Process
After you name the skill and the problem, the next step is to write down what you do as a method. A method is a repeatable way of doing the work. The method is where you get leverage, because once you teach it, other people can do the work too. There is a method to how you recruit, for example, and a method to how you train and develop people. Work that you improvise differently each time is hard to hand to anyone else, so it is hard to scale.
Some owners work out their method by writing a book. To write one, you have to think through what you believe and how you do the work.
Once other people can follow your method, you are no longer the only one who can deliver the skill. A partner who wants to use the skill cares about that. So does a buyer. A business that runs without its owner is one of the things buyers look for in a business they want to own.
Checklist: How to Name Your Secret Sauce
You can work through these steps in one sitting. Your answers will get sharper after you talk with the people in step 2.
- Take the skill apart. Choose one result you get more reliably than the people around you. Write down your steps, the one a new hire would most likely get wrong, and what you notice that others miss.
- Ask what others see. Ask two or three people who have watched you work, “When you have seen me at my best, what was I doing?” Note the answers that repeat.
- Trace where it came from. List the education, experiences, and mentors behind the skill.
- Compare with people further ahead. For two people you compete against or want to catch up to, note what they do and where your skill differs. Then note your version of their approach.
- Write the sentence. Complete “I am good at ___, and it solves ___.”
- Size the problem. Note how many people have it, what it costs them, and how often it comes up.
- Pick one target. Choose the single problem where the skill makes the most difference.
Communicating Your Value to Support Business Growth
Once you have named your skill, you can build your insurance agency value proposition around it. You can then use it to explain your value to a prospect, a recruit, or a buyer. From there, you can use the sentence in two ways:
- Explaining your value. Develop a clear explanation of what you do, who you help, and why your approach matters. You can use this guide to the Explanation of Value to build on your value proposition and clarify what distinguishes your firm.
- Becoming better known. Once the skill has a name, you can work on getting it in front of the right people. When they already know what you do, they come to you, which is how financial advisors attract clients without chasing them.
Other owners at live coaching sessions and events can tell you quickly whether your sentence is clear.
How Insurance Agency Owners Can Turn Their Strengths Into a Repeatable Growth Strategy
Naming your secret sauce takes some reflection and a few conversations with people who know your work. It also takes a close look at the owners ahead of you. When you finish, you have one sentence at the heart of your insurance agency value proposition. You also have a skill your team can learn to deliver.
You do not need everyone to know what you do best. What matters is that the people you are recruiting, training, and developing know it. When you can tell them plainly what you do best, they have a reason to build their careers with you. A partner, a buyer, or a prospect also has something specific to remember and repeat.
Name Your Secret Sauce With Greatness Lab Tell us what you do best and who you want to reach. We will talk through how to put your skill into words, and ways Greatness Lab could help you package and price it. |
Questions Owners Ask About Their Insurance Agency Value Proposition
What is an insurance agency value proposition?
An insurance agency value proposition is a short statement of the skill that sets your insurance agency or advisory firm apart and the problem that skill solves for clients, recruits, partners, or buyers. A useful form is one sentence: “We are good at X, and it solves Y.” The statement carries the most weight when the skill is rare and valuable, and when your team has a method for delivering it too.
How do you differentiate your business as an insurance agency or advisory firm owner?
An insurance agency or advisory firm owner can differentiate the business by naming the specific skill behind its results and the problem that skill solves. A good starting point is one result you get more reliably than the people around you, taken apart step by step. People who have watched you work can tell you what you do best, and when you compare yourself with competitors further ahead, you can see where you differ. From there, you write one sentence: “I am good at X, and it solves Y problem.”
What does "secret sauce" mean for an insurance agency or advisory firm?
The secret sauce of an insurance agency or advisory firm is the specific skill that helps the owner and team get a result few others can get. The owner builds that skill from their own education, experiences, and mentors, which is why no two owners have the same one. Once the owner names it in one sentence, “I am good at X, and it solves Y problem,” a partner, buyer, recruit, or prospect can see why the business is different.
How do I differentiate myself and stand out as a financial advisor?
You can stand out as a financial advisor or insurance agent by becoming known for one specific skill that few others offer. To find it, take apart one result you get more reliably than the people around you, and ask two or three people who have watched you work what you do best. You can then write one sentence that names the skill and the problem it solves, and use it with prospects, recruits, and partners.
Why do successful insurance agency and advisory firm owners find it hard to describe their own strengths?
When owners have used a skill for years, it becomes automatic, and they stop noticing how they do it. This stage is called unconscious competence. To name the skill, explain it, or teach it, an owner takes it apart step by step until they understand why it gets results, which brings them back to conscious competence.
What is the difference between a hard skill and a soft skill for an insurance agency or advisory firm owner?
Soft skills are people skills, such as connection or charisma. A hard skill means you know how to do something that few people know how to do, such as building something or understanding the economics of a business better than others. Many of the most highly paid experts are paid for a hard skill. An owner who knows their own primary skill well knows what they can offer at a premium.
How do insurance agents and financial advisors avoid being commoditized?
Insurance agents and financial advisors get commoditized when a prospect, recruit, or buyer decides that everybody offers the same thing. People pay more for a skill that is rare, valuable, and hard to replicate, so it helps to be able to say plainly what sets your insurance agency or advisory firm apart. When you also build a method around that skill, other people on your team can deliver it too, which makes it more valuable to a partner or buyer.
About the Author
Jason Mickool, Founder and CEO of Greatness Lab
Jason Mickool built Florida Financial Advisors from a kitchen table conversation into a national advisor enterprise. It grew to dozens of locations across more than a dozen states, and he completed a nine-figure transaction. Today he brings that operating experience to Greatness Lab. There he coaches insurance and financial business owners who want to build, scale, and exit on their own terms. He is the author of Built to Lead, Built to Scale. Connect with Jason Mickool on LinkedIn or at jasonmickool.com.
Coach Micheal Burt, Founder of The Greatness Factory
Coach Micheal Burt is a performance coach, best-selling author, and founder of The Greatness Factory in Nashville, Tennessee. A former championship basketball coach, he teaches the Prey Drive and Monster mindset frameworks to business owners and financial advisors. He partners with Greatness Lab as its Greatness Executive Coach. Connect with Coach Micheal Burt on LinkedIn or at coachburt.com.
