Pros
55% commission on insurance. Good bonus opportunities if you're able to hit them monthly.
Cons
Their training program is very small, many other firms do it a lot better. From the start they ask you for 75 names before you sign your contract, they are not trying to get leads from you. Once you sign, you're immediately thrown to the wolves. You need to have 10-15 appointments set each week, when I asked what prospecting methods I should use, I was told to go walk business to business, join some networking groups and start using LinkedIn, that was the extent to the guidance I received. So you're expected to know what to do already or ask someone for help. My office was a very competitive environment, so unless you make a friend and share all your business nobody else is willing to work together. Since it's all commission based sales, everyone wants part of your business, and my management had favorites, where they tried to get you to share your business with them. During your 1 on 1, I started to learn that management only documented the negatives from the meeting. For example if you had an outstanding week but lacked in 1 small thing, this was all they would document. I learned from and old partner that they do this, so that if you're not hitting your goals it makes it easier for them to pull your contract. My performance reviews continuously got more and more negative until my partner was screaming at me in his office, this man was not afraid to cuss you out in front of other agents. After dominating my first few months and winning top performer awards, I started to get the feeling that my partner was trying to force me out of the company and pass my book down to one of his favorites and I felt like this was confirmed when 2 other teammates of mine had quit, passed their books down to someone not on this partner's team, and received phone calls harassing them about not giving their book to his favorite. I went to the managing partner to complain about everything and he had no room to take me off the partner's team. This may be slightly unprofessional but in a business where I'm supposed to be my own boss I had to try and take control of my quality of life at work, so I stopped answering calls and emails from the partner, I went to a senior adviser for help, and stopped going to performance reviews, basically cut the partner out completely. This is when my business started to get back on track and when the partner found out that I had a very large client coming in, he reached out to me to try and come up with a plan on working with the client and how he could help. Looking back at the experience, I can't believe that I was treated this way, I have always had good relationships with my team and especially management and performance has never been an issue. During my first few meetings before joining the company they talked about positive experiences and give examples of people who had done extremely well, before choosing this career you need to be realistic, if you can't make this career on your own, it might not be a good idea to try, because you will not be met with the support that you might expect. Also any mandatory training that require you to travel come out of your pocket. Mandatory training in a city 2 hours away, I paid for gas and food. Mandatory training 2 states away, the cost comes out of my Ledger, they won't tell you about this during your interview.
