We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan James a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Ryan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are 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. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

Like a lot of people who start a new business, I started as a one man shop. I had very little resources in the form of capital, so I started by doing something quite inexpensive and that’s networking. I joined networking groups and met with as many people as I could to explain what I was doing. Over time those meetings became more targeted and eventually I started getting business from referrals. I decided I could conduct two meetings a day and still have time to do the behind the scenes work of running my business. What that meant was if I wasn’t conducting two client related meetings a day or ten a week then I was filing the extra time with networking meetings. Each week I had ten meetings that were either related directly to my business or networking for more business. What eventually happened was I would have this recurring situation of getting so much business from networking, that I had no more time to network. Then in turn when that business closed, I saw a lag in revenue because I hadn’t been networking and doing those “top of the funnel” activities. My calendar would become full of a lot more networking than actual business and the lopsided pattern would repeat back and forth. I hired a part time admin which helped somewhat, and it allowed me to take on more business, but I still had the same pattern of being busy and then dead. However, at this point I was generating enough revenue to hire someone to help with marketing. After about six months these additional marketing efforts paid off and it flattened out my highs and lows. As my business continued to grow, I got busier and found myself working 15+ hours a day, every day. I decided to hire another adjuster to do what I was doing in hopes of freeing up more time. While expectedly costly in the beginning, the concept seemed great. However, I found I went through a lot of people. Each one seemly not working out for a different reason than the others. What I realized is that the service we provide has a lot of difference facets to it. You need to have a license to do what I do and as such I was hiring licensed people and trying to manage them to do the whole job. They each had certain strengths and weaknesses and I decided to hone in on that. I also began to think of Henry Ford’s assembly line. Instead of hiring a licensed person to do the whole job, I recruited for certain segments of the job. It turns out that people were really good at the parts they enjoyed and not surprisingly so much at the parts they didn’t. Breaking down the job into smaller pieces not only makes it quicker and easier to train someone but it also means I can plug them into the part of the job they enjoy the most. Another great aspect of this strategy is that it makes growth easier to handle because it was now scalable. I created trainings and written processes for each job. More recently I began using videos to do this which have been well received and easy to create. As we grow and I notice someone getting backed up, we can then hire for that specific role more quickly. There are also cost savings involved because not every aspect requires a license. Therefore, I am able to hire unlicensed people to do those support functions. Now this didn’t all happen overnight. We had to grow into it. But my vision allowed me to create the framework and as we grew, start to narrow the focus of the people I already had working for me and then add new people to fit the different positions. Today Liberty Adjusters is doing more business than I had ever envisioned when I started the company. What’s more, creating this team of people who enjoy what they do and giving them a way to earn a good living has become one of the most rewarding aspects of being a business owner.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I previously spent 20 years working in the financial industry as a Financial Advisor, Bank Manager and Private Banker. After 20 years I decided it was time for a career change. I had always been entrepreneurial and decided I was going to go into business for myself. It took me a number of months to decide what type of business I wanted to start. Having had the eye of Hurricane Charley go over my house a number of years prior. I knew how difficult insurance companies made it to receive the compensation I was entitled to. That and having my second daughter born with a grave health condition that resulted in my spending hours a day arguing with insurance companies for months on end, made me decide to go up against the insurance industry and fight on behalf of consumers who were trying to get what they were rightfully entitled to. I find this business very rewarding because I get to help people in a big way. These are sometimes people who have been completely displaced from their home due to some unforeseen circumstance. And their insurance company is doing very little to help them in a timely manner. Even resolving smaller claims is rewarding because when your home is damaged and you have to live in that damage for months on end because your insurance company isn’t helping you, it can be very stressful. I know this because I’ve been through it and I see it in my clients’ faces and hear it in their voices when I talk to them. Being able to provide them with that check and feel their gratitude is so much more rewarding than my previous career.
Some of the things that I feel separate us from other Public Adjuster firms are that we listen to our clients. Not everyone wants to fight it out for the last dime. Especially when that means the claim may drag out longer. In my line of work, we are paid on a contingency. It’s a percentage of what we recover. Maximizing that amount for ourselves is not our main goal. I want to make our clients happy and make sure they are satisfied. We advise them on what they might expect and we try to do it in a realistic fashion. We aren’t going to promise them the world just so they will sign up with us. We also aren’t going to drag out their claim just so we can make an extra dime. Any offer we receive, we are going to review with our clients and discuss their options as far as next steps on how we will respond. We will give our advice and discuss pros and cons. In the end we always do what our clients decide is the best for them. Our reputation is how we grow our business. So as long as our clients are happy, I’m happy. Another key part of this is communication. The claims process is lengthy by design. So there may be periods of time where there isn’t much to communicate. However, when someone calls us, whether it’s a client or one of their contractors we have a strict policy to always call them back within 24 hours. I’ve heard a lot of stories about people calling other firms for weeks on end with no response and that just doesn’t fly with me.
Before I started this business, I wasn’t a fan of the insurance industry but having worked in it for several years I am amazed by the games, manipulation and extreme lengths insurance companies go to avoid paying claims. Insurance companies come up with names and slogans to make them sound like they care about their customers and should be trusted. It’s a shame but nothing is further from the truth. I have made it my business to learn their tricks and come up with ways to counter them. When we start to consistently outsmart their tactics, they will change them. It’s kept the job interesting. I liken it to a never ending game of chess that we’ve gotten really good at.

Any advice for managing a team?

I have never treated some people as being more important than others regardless of their position in society and the same is true with my company. I truly care about the people who work with me, and I say work with me rather than work for me deliberately. Everyone who works with me is important and I make sure they know that. I take the time to learn what drives them and what they value most and I work to recognize those areas in the ways I reward them for their accomplishments. I want my team to want to come into work because they find what they do to be rewarding rather than just a way to take home a paycheck.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I mentioned earlier in the interview how in 2020 I was working more than 15 hours a day in the business. I kept trying to hire other adjusters to come work for me. I think I went through five or six before I hired a business coach and decided to completely restructure my business model. I spent the bulk of 2021 putting together and trying new processes so that I could not only handle current growth but also handle a substantial amount of future growth. I wanted to make my business scalable so that I wouldn’t run into the same problems later on down the road. There was a good deal of expense involved and it was a challenging transition. The result is today I spend very little time working in the business and most of my time working on the business. It allowed me to go from being a self employed employee to being a business owner.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.libertyinsuranceadjusters.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liberty_adjusters/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/libertyadjustersflorida
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_9mORwRCopV4z9tkgtYqgA