We were lucky to catch up with Conor Markins recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Conor thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. So, we’d appreciate if you could open up about your growth story and the nitty, gritty details that went into scaling up.
I first started my entrepreneurial journey in late 2017 after having a career ending ankle surgery that cut my college basketball career short. I was still in school when I got my insurance licenses and opened up my own firm in early 2018 based out of Huntington WV. I started off my career very strong in sales. I was able to make over 6 figures my first 7 months in business in 2018. Transitioning into 2019 I continued my strong sales pace while living on the road in Airbnb’s and hotels all over the Midwest due to our sales not being able to be done virtually at the time. I recruited and trained a sales team to join me while doing so. We grew our sales team to 10 people doing over $20,000 in annual premium sales per week. Moving into 2020 we decided we needed to expand into a bigger city with more client and recruiting potential. We narrowed the list down to 5 different cities that fit our target market and ultimately decided on Memphis due to it being a perfect fit. In March of 2020 me and 3 of my sales agents moved to Memphis and within the first week the Covid breakout hit. It caused major concern at the time due to all of our sales being done face to face, however we quickly adjusted to zoom Virtual sales and hit the ground running. 2020 was mostly spent laying the foundation for our new business model. Also I tragically lost my father and went through a year full of personal adversity behind closed doors. Moving into 2021 we were able to grow back to 8 sales reps operating out of of a 2000 sq foot office. We finished around $650,000 in total sales. In January of 2022 we purchased a new lease for a 5400 sq foot office to transition into. We used the fish bowl theory “put a fish in a small bowl, and it’ll only grow to be a small fish, put a fish in a big bowl, you’ll get a big fish”. And we were right, we’ve now grown into a team of 20 sales reps, with 3 staff members and are on pace to do over a million in annual sales. Next year we plan to scale to 55 sales reps and over 3 million in annual sales. Its taken 80 hour work weeks for almost 5 years to build the business to this point.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Con0r Markins was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1995 and raised in Ironton Ohio. During his youth, Conor developed natural leadership skills from athletics and learned to work hard and play with a chip on his shoulder early in life. He eventually moved on to play collegiate basketball at Shawnee State University on scholarship where he earned a Bachelors Degree in Business Management, and an Associates Degree in Business Finance. During college, Conor lost his best friend/roommate (Sean Elliott) that he learned many of his skills from and credits much of his success to the guidance he gave him and a critical time in his life. Conor also credits majority of his success due to his late father (Bradley Markins) who passed away due to a car accident while coming to visit him in Memphis for fathers day. His Dad was his best friend who he misses everyday and pushes himself daily to make sure his fathers legacy lives on forever.
Conor’s company OTM Financial, LLC takes pride in serving our clients with financial products to protect the assets their families value most with Life, Health, Accident and Cancer policies.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
My best advice for managing a team and maintaining high morale first and foremost is never ask something of your team, that you personally are not willing to do yourself. People follow leadership from the front with action and care, not from someone sitting at the top barking orders around. Its important people know you care about them as people just as much as their results. Morale comes down to culture. Most of the time when a workplace struggles with culture issues, its due to the leadership not having a clear cut vision of the type of culture they want. Our culture is a positive, solution oriented one. If there’s a problem, I expect positive solutions to solve it. When you expect your team to provide solutions instead of just enabling problems up the leadership chain, your business will explode.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
I have always said our best ingredient for success here has been providing great customer service and ethical solutions to clients real world problems at hand. We work in an industry that protects peoples assets during their worst times. We want our clients to feel safe knowing that on that worst day, they can rely on us to be here and help them fully along the way. We train all of our agents to always act in our clients best interest, even if that means walking away from sales from time to time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://onthemarks.us/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conormarkins/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/conor.markins.7
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conor-markins-061552158/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHKmdSmmi5R4JjdemDCmEIQ