The Insura-Preneur Podcast

For agency owners serious about the Insurance Trifecta—Faster Growth, Higher Margins, and Peak Valuation.Hosted by Michael Jans—founder of Agency Revolution and architect of the longest-running mastermind in the industry —The Insura-Preneur Podcast delivers the real-world systems, strategies, and shortcuts used by the most successful independent agencies and insurtechs across North America.Each episode arms you with practical tools and elite insights so you can:- Accelerate organic growth without confusion, chaos, or cold-calling- Increase margins through smarter marketing and streamlined operations- Engineer a peak valuation using models proven to boost your exit paydayYou’ll hear from the top thinkers, marketers, tech leaders, and M&A insiders in the industry—all focused on one thing: helping you build an agency that creates real wealth for you, your family, and your community.No fluff. No filler. Just what works.Don’t just grow your agency. Engineer its future.

The Insura-Preneur Podcast is a business podcast hosted by Michael Jans, with 100 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Michael Jans hosts The Insura-Preneur Podcast, a business show with 100 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #321

  Your Agency Has an AI Exposure. It's Not in Any Contract

  Sep 3, 202619 min

  Every independent agency is using AI. Every agency has contracts with vendors, with carriers, with technology providers. Almost none of those contracts account for what the AI is actually doing. That is the gap this episode exists to name. Cal Durland, Executive Director of AUGIE (the Associations & User Groups Information Exchange) and holder of the CPCU, and Donna LaGoy, Chief Enterprise Platforms Officer at Highstreet Insurance Partners, sit down to talk about what AI means for independent agencies. Not the product demos. The exposures nobody put in a contract yet. Donna is the one who walks through the concrete risks. Her first warning: the agency that buys a consumer ChatGPT account, drops two client declarations pages into it, and asks it to compare coverage. Her words: "You're exposing your client's data out in the deep, dark web." The fix: buy at enterprise level so data stays inside your environment. Her second warning - and the one nobody thinks about - involves the carrier portal. If an AI agent acts on your behalf in a carrier system, does the carrier know? Is it contractually permitted? Her follow-up is the part that lands: "What's gonna happen to your appointment with that carrier if you violated and you didn't realize it?" She maps the build-versus-buy decision without picking a side: weigh budget, time, and how fast the technology is moving. Build and it may be obsolete next month. Buy and it costs more but someone else keeps it current. Vet several vendors. Take the free demo. Get referrals. Cal puts the fear in context. The industry heard the same warnings with download and with real-time. Her line: "We have a proven history of that." AUGIE - which anyone in the industry can join at augiegroup.org - is producing a checklist out of conversations like this one. For agents who are serious about protecting their clients AND their own E&O from AI exposure: visit AIBriefingRoom.com

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  Episode #320

  18M Homes, 3 Questions: Plymouth Rock Goes Inside ChatGPT

  Aug 26, 202615 min

  A three-question insurance application sounds like it cuts the agent out. If a carrier can quote 18 million homes from public data alone, what room is left for you? Bill Martin, President and CEO of Plymouth Rock Home Assurance Corporation, argues the opposite. "The tech is not a direct writer tool," he says. "It is actually better in the hands of an agent." Plymouth Rock Home Assurance pre-rated every address across six states from tax assessor records, online listings, community data and weather, then correlated it against every loss database they could find. Three-question application. Name, address, date of birth. Three coverage options. Good, better, best. Then a buy screen he calls "the binding moment." Plymouth Rock does not ask about trampolines, dogs or roof age. Every bind is followed by an inspection. The risk is judged as a whole. Agents take a policy over through what he calls Home Policy Marketplace, then cross-sell, review and advise. Separately, the people who quote and do not buy become leads for agents. On the effort behind the simplicity, early in the conversation: "If you want to make your customer and agent's life easier, you have to work harder." And asked at the end what he would tell an agency principal about the AI economy: "Don't believe 99% of what you read" about AI failing or being evil, and "seize these tools and use them to get ahead." Plymouth Rock's ChatGPT plugin is reached through ChatGPT itself. There is no separate download.

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  Episode #319

  The AI That Names Your Next Commercial Client

  Aug 19, 202618 min

  Almost every AI vendor in the agency space works the back of the house: service, operations, automation. GridPull works the front. It is built for the producer asking the three questions that decide a commercial lines pipeline: who to call, when to call them, and what to say. Martin Mashalov, co-founder of GridPull, joins Michael to walk through how the tool answers them. It builds a targeted prospect list by territory and lines of business, then enriches it — pulling renewal dates and coverage signals from publicly available records. Its Super Enrich feature goes further: it names the actual decision-maker at the business - the person who decides whether to buy, not the switchboard - then hands the producer a ready-to-use sales script, a drafted outbound email, discovery questions, likely objections, and the detail on the business itself. Research that used to be drudgery, he says, is "just there for you in 30 seconds." The differentiator his users name: GridPull matches prospects to the agency's own appetite - the lines it quotes, the industries it serves, the carriers it has - rather than handing over a lead nobody at the agency can actually quote. And he talks about what is next: reading geography for exposure — weather and natural-disaster risk in a region as a reason to pitch property coverage — and for property developers, architectural detail on the specific building. A newer feature works the existing book: cross-sell gaps, under-serviced policies, lines the client does not have yet. Actively in development. Martin comes to insurance from applied math and an AR app for real estate, and he is based in New York City. Full disclosure from Michael on air: GridPull is a relatively new company, bootstrapping at this point. That honesty is part of the point. Links gridpull.com — a demo is available there martin@gridpull.com

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  Episode #318

  AI Just Jumped the Shark. Inside a $70M Bet to Rebuild Agencies.

  Jul 31, 202622 min

  AI has jumped the shark. It is not a future technology conversation anymore. It is an acting agent, making real decisions, sometimes decisions nobody authorized. Michael Jans lays out the evidence from Q3 2026 and what it means for your agency right now. Inside the episode: → A submissions vendor processing unstructured business at 87% accuracy → A Canadian insurer issuing real-time life insurance decisions up to $5M with no teleinterview and no medical evidence → An OpenAI containment incident where models took actions their own handlers never authorized → AGI Holdings' $70M raise to buy independent agencies and rebuild them on a native AI stack → 1Fort, Parametric MGA, and Vertafore's six-tool AI rollout → The NAIC AI Model Bulletin, now live in 20+ jurisdictions → The 3-Question Vendor Test: Threat, Default, Audit Michael also shares how one AI Growth Academy member added $125,000 in income from direct mail using the Sales Letter Studio. If you write commercial lines and you are not asking your vendors these three questions yet, this episode changes that today. Stay ahead of what is coming next: AIBriefingRoom.com

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  Episode #317

  AI Bots Are in Your Carrier Portal. Here's the Fix.

  Jul 22, 202613 min

  AI vendors are sending bots into carrier portals right now — using the same shared login credentials your team has always used to sign in. The carriers are the ones on the hook for whatever those bots touch, and it's already showing up as regulatory risk: New York alone has fined insurers millions of dollars over cybersecurity failures under its Part 500 rules. In this episode of AI for the IA, Michael sits down with Alvito Vaz, Executive Director of ID Federation and a 30-plus-year veteran of insurance technology, to unpack how the industry got here and what actually fixes it. Alvito's point is blunt: this isn't a new problem, it's an old one wearing a new face. Agencies have shared credentials with colleagues for years. Now those same credentials are being handed to a hundred bots at once — and carriers have no reliable way to tell a bot from a person, or a controlled bot from an unsupervised one. ID Federation's answer is SignOn Once, a standards-based trust framework that lets an agent authenticate once into their agency management system and pass a secure token on to carrier partners — no repeat logins, no repeat MFA prompts. It's already live with two of the industry's major AMS partners, Vertafore and Applied Systems. The piece still missing is carrier adoption — the third leg of what Alvito calls the channel's three-legged stool: carriers, agents, and technology providers. That's the ask of this episode: agents can go to idfederation.org and use the "Engage Your Carriers" action to push their own carrier partners toward adoption. It's a five-minute step that moves a real industry-wide fix forward.

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