For those of you who have ever changed a tire on your car, imagine trying to loosen the lug nuts with a small wrench.  Would it work?  No, of course not.  To get them loose, you intuitively reach for the lug wrench with the long handle. 

Why?  Because it’s all about leverage. 

Leverage gives you the advantage in many things. Mechanical leverage gives you the power to remove your car tire.  Financial leverage enables you to purchase a company without spending your own money.  Positional leverage lets you wield greater authority than you typically might otherwise.  All of these forms of leverage are powerful, but for today’s topic, we’re going to focus on another form of leverage: intellectual. 

As every agency owner knows (or quickly learns), you are the default answer to all the agency’s problems.  At least that’s how your clients and staff see it, and it certainly feels that way.  That’s because the way you want your agency to run is locked up in your mind and intellect.  This makes you the final point where all issues must be resolved.  There’s no one else to go to, so every problem, issue, and concern filters up to the top where you must deal with it. 

Given this, is it any wonder that so many new and growing agency owners express the same sense of exhaustion, stagnation, and overall frustration? 

There really is only so much information any one person can keep in their head and only so many balls a juggler can juggle at one time before one falls to the floor.  And when one comes down, they generally all come down.  When that happens, you as the owner, are left wondering what you did wrong.  Maybe you failed to hire people early enough.  Maybe you didn’t specialize enough early enough, or maybe you just needed to work harder. 

The truth is that none of these are the likely cause of the problem.  In many cases, the cause of the problem is a lack of intellectual leverage. 

Intellectual leverage is what energizes an agency and propels it forward.  It’s the fuel in the agency’s tank, but it doesn’t come automatically.  At the beginning when you started your agency, the knowledge of how your agency should run and what it’s supposed to be existed solely in your head.  There’s nothing wrong with that, and at the beginning, this is exactly where it should be.  An owner who starts an agency without considering how it should run is in deep trouble from the outset, so you initially build it around what you know and think. 

The mistake many owners make is they keep that knowledge in their head long after the initial stages instead of extracting it and using it to create leverage within their agency.  Leverage has the effect of multiplying the power of something, and within your agency you need to multiply your knowledge, values, and skill early on or you’ll burn out. 

In short, you need to leverage it.

Without this leverage, your agency has a 1-to-1 ratio of effort to result.  If you want more income, the only way to get it is for you to work more hours. However, when you extract the knowledge and information in your mind and use it to create systems within your agency, you are effectively leveraging that knowledge, vision, and decision-making ability to create a 1-to-many ratio of effort to result. 

Your agency is now free to grow without requiring a 1-to-1 increase in your time, and your success is no longer dependent directly on your effort alone, but rather on the systems you’ve put in place to manage the agency. 

This leverage can take many forms, from delegating carrier relationship management to owning and auditing the agency’s SOP’s.  The good news is that you get to decide how you’ll leverage your mind to build the kind of agency you want.  There’s unlimited room for creativity here, and when done correctly, you as the owner get to watch the engine you’ve built make far more revenue for you than you could have done for yourself. 

Now that’s leverage.

Disclosure: No AI was used in the writing of this article.