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PODCAST OPENER
Welcome to the Inside Insight podcast presented by CR Solutions. At Consolidated Risk Solutions, we are taking our expert knowledge of the insurance world and using it to innovate the industry using technology, groundbreaking thinking and a personal touch. Join us as we talk to masterminds both inside and outside of CR Solutions about how the world of insurance is changing, and how we can be sure to grow along with it. If you have to manage insurance in your work, then you can benefit from the interviews, conversations and insights we’ll be exploring to elevate your business’s success.
INTRO (00:42 – 02:55)
Trevor Casey: We’re back again.
Beau Lunceford: Here we are. It’s time for more insurance talk.
Trevor Casey: That is something we do-do.
Beau Lunceford: It is do-do.
Trevor Casey: Do-do.
Beau Lunceford: I was like, we are 12 years old. Fantastic.
Trevor Casey: We got a good episode today with a real good guest, somebody whose name is well spoken around not only CRS but the industry. So I’m really excited about this conversation.
Beau Lunceford: It’s going to be a really good one and I think that we get to dig into a lot of different facets that I’m really excited about. I don’t want to give a whole lot away, but we’re going to talk about the next generation of insurance. We’re going to talk about how we can protect ourselves and protect people around us from just daunting mental health issues that are, of course, sweeping the nation, sweeping the insurance industry, how it is that we can surround ourselves with good people who helped to build us up? It’s going to be really great. So, today, our guest is Michael Yovino from Jencap. So, Trevor, tell us a little bit about Mike.
Trevor Casey: So Mike Yovino is a distinguished construction insurance broker specializing in OCIP’s and CCIP’s. He boats an extensive track record of successfully managing coverage for projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars across the nation. Before joining the Jencap team, Yovino held senior leadership positions including senior vice president of CRC, vice president at AmWins Brokerage of New York, and assistant vice president at Marsh & McLennan Companies. Recognized by his peers for his exceptional knowledge and extensive network within the industry, Yovino is regarded as a highly knowledgeable and well connected expert in the industry. So I’m excited to hear this conversation with Mike. One of the things about Mike is he’s just so knowledgeable. He brings things down to an elementary level, so you feel like you’re genuinely understanding the coverages that are needed, the problems that may arise. And, like you said, he really focuses more on not just insurance in the day-to-day work, but what is it that makes me happy? How can I help bring that into the lower generation? So I’m excited for this conversation.
Beau Lunceford: Let’s get into it.
Trevor Casey: Let’s get into it.
Interview (02:58 – 31:39)
Trevor Casey: All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Inside Insight podcast. We are here with a special guest today from Jencap, Mike Yovino. Mike is an Executive Vice President and construction practice Wrap Up leader over at Jencap. Mike, how are you?
Michael Yovino: I’m good. How are you today? Happy to be here.
Trevor Casey: I’m glad you’re here. We’re excited to speak with you. Your name is very well and highly spoken of in the industry, yet alone at CR Solutions. Everything that you continue to put out is it just seems like you’re a gold miner. So thank you so much for spending the time with us. Mike, you want to give us a little bit of background on yourself and kind of where you started and how you got to where you’re at now?
Michael Yovino: For sure. I actually started a little later in life in the industry. Some people get in right after college. I worked at Marsh & McLennan in Manhattan on 6th Ave for roughly three or three and half years, started in 2000. It was about three, three and half years there in the risk management excess casualty group. It was pretty good training, learned a lot from there. Need to make a little bit of a change and moved out and tried the wholesale space, which I was speaking to some of my advisors and they were like, look, some brokers there are client facing, some brokers are market facing. He goes you got to decide what you like and some people tend to do both, but not everybody. But for me it was move a transition and it just worked out where I was looking for a change. So I ended up going over to Stuart Smith, which then became AmWins and I was there until about 07 and in October, 07 I moved to Tri-City, which quickly became Crump because we got sold. Well did I know? And then couple years later 2013 turned into CRC. So I spent about 16 and a half, 17 years at CRC and enjoyed my tenure there and then left there in 2021 and came over to Jencap. So I’ve been here going on, this September will be 4 years. So I haven’t moved much, but I do enjoy the wholesale space. At Marsh, I working in that umbrella space, gravitated and enjoyed insurance in general. But coming to wholesale yet people had to find a niche. And for me, the niche worked out to be construction. I worked with a gentleman by the name of Jim Conroy at AmWins for a bunch of years and we started getting into the wrap up stuff together. And from there, I quickly learned that I enjoy it conceptually because through college and high school, I worked for an electrical contractor and I always enjoyed seeing stuff get built. So now that we’re in insurance, it’s easy for me to take a look at what’s going on with what’s being built. I kind of understand how it’s going. You kind of could feel what’s going on in the field when they’re looking at these things to build them and it’s just something I’ve enjoyed. So from there, that niche kind of worked out where I would turn around and tell people, you know what, give me a shot on some of your stuff as a new broker, I could do a lot with umbrella placements. So we turn around started working in the Wrap Up space building umbrella towers because back in the day it was mostly two line wraps. So the access was the wholesale play. From there, it’s kind of just gravitated to construction in general. For me, it’s always been a strong focus on coverage, not price. And I think that’s one of the areas where it’s served me well is that I’ve spent a lot of time reading forms, getting to know coverages, trying to understand how the contracts tie in with the additional and short wordings, making sure that the insurers have the broadest coverage possible. And coming over to Jencap, they saw a need in the space. I have a counterpart on the West Coast who runs the practice with me, Chris Bauer, at the time he was really the only person here that was heavy project Wrap Up space. So having me come over was great because now we had two people to bounce off of them. And I told him I said, we should really work with our younger producers because you and I can’t really get to everybody anymore. It’s hard to compete with some of these big teams at the other wholesalers who we know and respect. I mean, they all do a really great job. There’s some pretty good names out there and now we’re building out this practice nationally where we’re touching more brokers and making them know that Jencap has the players, they can maintain their relationships. The brokers that we’re working with internally aren’t giving up those relationships. We’re not looking to steal anything from anyone. We’re really just trying to build a company out and create awareness. And it’s been great because in doing that it’s brought us back to talking to many of our old partners like my friend Josh, with you guys and other third party firms that we reconnected with. So we’re trying to bring up a more complete solution to the broker that doesn’t necessarily do the Wrap Up on a regular basis. They don’t have the parts internally. So we’re able to bring everything to them to make them and be in front of the insurance a little more complete. So they’re competitive.
Trevor Casey: One of the things you said there that I find very interesting is, we all know that insurance is a relationships game. So most people take that book, they hold it very, very close to their chest and they’re more or less aggressive when somebody comes in and tries to take that relationship. And I think one of the things that’s interesting that you spoke to is that your guys’s team is not that way. You’re not, hey, this is my relationship. I’m holding it. You’re totally open to saying, hey, I’ll take you under my wing, and I’ll teach you the ropes. This is my client, I’ll break you off a little piece for the help, but let’s teach you how to build these relationships and how to complete the business. I think that is something that we don’t see a lot in the industry or it may be out there a lot. We just don’t hear about it. I think that’s interesting. Could you maybe talk a little bit more to how you guys structure your team and how your relationship building looks like?
Michael Yovino: It’s a great question. I’ve been doing this for a while. It’s 25 years almost and it’s not an easy job. And it wears on you. I kind of tell people all the time, it’s a young broker’s game to have the energy. I don’t have the energy I had in my 30s to continue to get out on the street and hustle like I used to, or go into every cocktail hour or every carrier event. So I try to structure my days where it’s smaller lunches, smaller dinners, you can kind of get more content out of it and have discussions, that’s from a practical side. But for me, it was the last 8-9 months to a year. It was a little bit of a fact finding mission on myself too, because the reality is I was starting to burn out because I couldn’t keep up and there had to be a different way to do it. And had some pretty great advisors over the last few months that we came up with a plan of, let’s look at the strengths and weaknesses and what really do you do well, what do you enjoy doing and what are you really good at and came up with placing deals, coverages, negotiating the right terms, relationships, markets and retailers and what do you do with that? So the culture here is very open. We’re very much into sharing, very much into collaboration across the company, the practice leaders and I, we all the practice leaders, we speak on a regular basis and trying to figure out how do we cross sell better? How do we do this? Where can we bring each other in? But the other part of it is and a gentleman I spoke with said, “For somebody that’s been doing this as long as you to take younger brokers that you want to work with, you can move the needle on their learning curve from 10 years to 3 years, because now you’re giving them your credibility with those retailers that they deal with.” Where as in the beginning, I used to joke, but one of the people I worked for said, “Unfortunately you got to kiss a lot of frogs to find a Prince.” So it’s hard, it’s frustrating. And as the markets changed, as wholesalers have consolidated and the markets are consolidating or shrinking limits, it’s very difficult for a new broker to come in and just hit the ground running and build a book. 4-5 years back in my day, maybe now probably is 10 years for some of them, some of them burn out. And then the part of the collaboration where we’re sharing of revenue allows them to build a book of business so they have ownership. So it kind of combats the fact that maybe I got to leave. You don’t want to invest that time and effort into somebody and just see them leave. Now, look, do you want to wish everybody well and no one’s really out to get anybody here, but we’re all here just to do right for the company, continue your growth path. But going back to what we were saying, for me, what works out great is, I’m in my 50s and I’m not going to do this for a long, forever. I don’t plan on it. If I’m having fun, at some capacity, I’ll be in it because I enjoy it. I enjoy the social aspect of the business as well and the friendships. But if I had to sit here and just slug out deals in the center of the ring day after day after day, getting into your late 50s, early 60s, you’re going to burn out. It’s going to become a health issue too, because you can only take so much stress and it’s a stressful job. So I had to come to the realization that maybe this new path is something that works a little bit better for me. And somebody said to me, “Sometimes a smaller piece of a bigger pie is not always a bad thing.”
Trevor Casey: You can eat more pie probably, more variety.
Michael Yovino: Maybe. It doesn’t work for everybody, believe me.
Trevor Casey: One of the things that you said, I saw Beau kind of perk up because he loves the word burnout and just things are associated with it. But one of the little nuggets that I think you said into that is that you spoke to your team of advisors when you were feeling that you were approaching burnout or you were burnt out. And that’s one of the things that I have noticed with a lot of these “Power Brokers”, if for lack of a better term, is most of them have a team of advisors, not a formalized team, but people that they’re bouncing ideas off of. They’re not just saying, I’m rolling on my back, belly up, just saying, whatever throw life at me and then just taking it. Could you kind of explain what that looks like or how you created this team of advisors? Because I think a lot of young brokers find themselves in a position where they’re like, I am approaching burnout. I have a guy that wants to help me, but I can’t go to him for my personal problems because it could be personal, it could be work, it could be whatever, how did you as a successful senior broker build out a team of advisors and what does that look like?
Michael Yovino: Without getting too much into the details, we had a sales coach who worked with us for many years from the Crump days through here and it turned into more. We used to joke and say it’s almost like a couch session. You should be belling me by the hour because it’d be like a therapy thing. His name was Walt Gerano. He was very impactful. He worked for Anthony Coltrane. And unfortunately he passed away in July. But before he passed away, we used to spend a lot of time just talking about stuff. But he would always tell me he’s like, honestly, you’re good at these things. The stuff that you’re trying to do that you’re battling and combating are the things you’re not good at. He goes, you need to find a way to make that work. So after Walt passed, I started making some notes and I found an individual and a very successful in the industry, extremely successful. And I called him one day and asked him if he can give me an hour or so of his time and he said sure. So we sat down and it was amazing because it was almost like he could see the questions I was going to ask before I even ask them and he could tell. He even said to me at one point he goes, looks to me like you burned out. He gave me little tidbits of things that we talked about. There may be 10 or 12 items on a page. But with that, I took it back and I started thinking about, so what does this all mean? And how do we want to do this? And where do we want to go with it? What do I love to do? And what’s the best parts of what we do and how do we grow? Because if you’re just going to go out there and you’re going to try to compete with one of these huge teams that has 28 people on it, you just can’t do it. One, you don’t have the premium. Two, you don’t have the people. Three, you can’t get to the retail brokers. You’ll kill yourself trying to fly around the country and work keeping up with the e-mail. At home too, having conversations, because if you’re married, your spouse’s knows you pretty well. So you can have those candid conversations. And then from there, it went to an internal discussion up the ladder internally with our key executives and just really started to talk about what I was wanting to do. And then went to office leaders after that. Once I had a plan and had some conversations to see how we could plug into that office to bring value or our value proposition to the teams with what we’re trying to do with this practice group and take it one step further. Take that proposition and call up our key retail partners, ones that we’re doing a lot with, some that we’re trying to develop, but they’re sizable and asking them how do we better align with what your needs are? I don’t know, my wife will probably kill me if you’re saying that you can cut that out too. But she’s like, you’re giving away all your secrets. And I’m like, it’s not a secret. I mean, it’s between us offline, I ran into a buddy of mine from RT at an event and he looked at me. He goes, bro from Facebook. He goes, I thought you were ready to just retire. I’ve seen you doing stuff with the kids and now I’m talking to you and it’s like you’re a recharged battery ready to go and having fun again. It’s just being able to find the fun.
Trevor Casey: That’s awesome. Speaking of fun, one of the things that I really love about Jencap is how innovative as a company you guys are. Like, the team that you have built, the underwriters, the brokers, the leadership, you all are just striving for so much. What is the mentality at Jencap that has built such a culture of innovation and drive? I speak with a lot of brokers across the country and underwriters and I don’t feel like I’ve ever spoke to a contact at Jencap that was like, man, I hate my life. Everyday they’re happy. They’re excited about what they’re doing. It seems like you are feeding your energy to these people and it’s exciting to see how did you guys kind of build that structure?
Michael Yovino: Look, I’m here only a couple of years. So it starts back with our founding partners. I mean way back. We have Bauer and Joe Hayes and JJ and the executive team and they just created a culture in the offices of sharing. They care about the people out here. It’s a culture of fostering talent. And our training program, we’re bringing a lot of our newly college grads that come into our programs. They’re getting ground level training. They meet on a monthly basis, weekly basis working on deals. The person who runs that bar. Winsky does a great job with them. She’ll bring in people like myself or Ben Beasley or Candy Crouch or Deb de Guardi. They’ll bring us in to teach the classes to them and we’ll give them a sample submission and we’ll spend time there. And then for myself, I enjoy spending time with these younger people too saying, hey, look, it’s a people business. Text messages and emails aren’t how it gets done. You got to call your underwriters or your brokers. How was the weekend? How’s the family? Get to know them. But genuinely care and that’s kind of what’s going on here. People care, they want to help. I think we’re breaking down the old walls of traditional, what you would hear of, it’s my broker, it’s my relationship. Don’t do this, don’t do that. I have a lot of the younger brokers I work with in our New York City office. They’re really great producers and they have great opportunities in front of them. So sometimes they don’t get every look because maybe the broker has an existing relationship or they don’t perceive that they have the expertise to get that done. So it kind of breaking down those walls of what traditional brokerage production space has been. And it is a culture of openness and sharing, which is great. We hang out, talk, have laughs, we share deals, celebrate wins. If somebody has their head handed to them in a deal, you pick each other up and just kind of promote it along. And I know for myself too, lately I’ve been spending a lot more time with certain brokers on layering deals, program structure coverages, reading forums, having those discussions. And then it also goes into, like I said, the practice groups into the different lines of coverage. How do we best bring those collaborative efforts from multiple lines of coverage together to a broker so that they realize it is a one stop solution? People could say we perceive to be the smaller side, even though we’re a huge company. But I think from a brokerage standpoint we’re building and there’s room to grow. I’m hoping people would see that. We are having fun and hopefully they do want to come over here.
Beau Lunceford: So I would love to dig into the idea of the next generation of insurance for a second if we can. My hope is that there are people who are listening to this today that are either looking to bring in the new generation of insurance or they are the new generation of insurance and they’re looking to find a place to be. As Trevor’s already kind of mentioned, Jencap has a great establishment of how it is they treat their younger people and how it is they’re bring them into the fold and showing them how it’s done and training them up really well. So from either the perspective of the next generation of insurance or companies that looking to bring in that new blood, what kind of advice or what kind of insight can you provide for that?
Michael Yovino: Look, the bottom line is, there was a lack of training for a long time. When I first got into the business, it’s kind of the tail end of it. But there was training programs at a lot of the retailers and insurance companies or a lot of times people who had family in the business, their kids would end up going to work for an insurance company for a couple of years. Why? Because you actually learn how to read a forum and understand how rates are figured out and where the pricing comes from, whether it’s based on losses or not. I think for a while we got away from that. That is an industry. But I am seeing from the wholesale side. I know ourselves, we have our training program. I know AmWins has one. I know RT has a good one as well. So bringing up the younger brokers the right way out of the gate so that they’re not just pushing paper and not looking at the terms and coming in, you start to alleviate some problems. But then I think you find way of having them involved in offices where they integrate to those offices and they find a place or a niche. It’s kind of like when you go to college. You need to find a friend group. It’s not much different. And then I think where the differentiator comes in is having somebody who’s been at this for a while as a seasoned broker, really explaining to them what you do and do not do as a broker. For example, you’re doing a layer deal, you don’t layer trap a market, you know what I mean? Or disclose what’s going on above them or omit something that may not look to be right, but you weren’t told about it by the retailer, but you know it exists. So what do you do with that? So do you talk to that retail agent? You can’t break confidentiality in some ways, but if something’s just blaringly wrong, these burgers need to know it’s not about the money, it’s about the insured. When you work for the money, you stop working for the insured. It’s not what’s right. So the money comes. It may take a little longer, but it does. Learning to do the business the right way. I was sitting the other day with my own son and I was looking at an inspection report from a job site that’s maybe 30% built and he’s like, what is that? I’m like, that’s project I’m insuring. I see it on a piece of paper. So I kind of have an idea what they’re building. But then when you get the pictures and you see the tower crane set on a pad, no building there yet. There’s other cranes on the site and there’s steel and pipes and concrete in the hole and people walking around in hard hats. And then you kind of see the finished picture. They’re not going to get that unless somebody like me takes that time to explain to them how it is and why it’s the way it is and what we’re insuring and how we do it. And teach them too about how contracts work and additional insurance and contracts and permits and why the insurance is a critical piece. Basically, I tell people that asked me what I do, I said, “We keep companies and keep individuals solvent in the event of a major catastrophe.” But a lot of people these days will turn around and they look at the industry or different industries, could be pharmaceuticals, it could be anybody that makes money. They’re going to look at you as the bad person. But the reality is it’s the win on the other end. I guess the best example would be the person that buys the life insurance and you’re wondering why you’re doing it. Someone told me he goes, you don’t understand it until you deliver your first check. He goes, then you see the impact on why we’re doing it. No different than what we do. Again, what we’re doing for businesses, it’s great because then I love the construction space just because you actually get to see a finished product from start to finish. So it’s cool.
Trevor Casey: That is one of my favorite things about what we do as well as is the throwing a name of a company out there just like Procore. If you’re integrated with Procore seeing because there’s a place in there where you can put pictures and I like to go in there and just snoop around and look at pictures just because it’s just cool seeing the start to the finish. Anyway, Mike, we appreciate the time. This has been such an insightful episode. I feel like I have a lot of things that I want to do some self-reflection on after this call. But before we let you go, one of the things we always like to ask everybody or we’ve recently started liking to ask everybody, is what is your inside insight? What is it that drives you? Is it a quote? Is it a song? Is it a poem? Is it just a mentality? What is that driving light for you at the end of the day?
Michael Yovino: That’s a good question. Hard question. That one I wish should have prepared for.
Trevor Casey: We like to drop that one because it puts a different. If you have time to think about it, maybe a little different than off the cuff.
Michael Yovino: I guess the best thing I could say is, you getting up and trying to just do the right thing every day and be yourself. That’s the reality of it. I don’t know if that’s really the right thing to do, but where to say. What drives me? I don’t know, I never really thought about that one. That’s a tough one to answer. It’s complicated. Because there could have been a different, a lot of different things.
Trevor Casey: And it could be something you could discuss at the dinner table at night or just ponder on for the next couple days. What you’ve just said is very aligned with a lot of people’s thoughts is just making sure that they’re waking up every day doing the right thing. Because ultimately, like you said, the money will follow if you are doing the thing and what’s best for your insured and not just a money hungry loser who’s going to eventually do something that’s fraudulent and end up in jail.
Michael Yovino: That’s the one thing I would say I lived by for my whole career is. One, know your coverage. I got this from my cousin who worked at Marsh. He started in the mail room and he retired at 53 as a managing director with Marsh’s twelve largest clients were his. He is very successful and he always told me he goes, you got to know your coverage. You need to know what you’re talking about, what you’re selling, know the product. But the other thing he always told me he goes, you can’t broker with your pocket. He goes when you start working for your pocket, you lose sight of the fact you working for the insured. So I would say if I had to put something around it from a business perspective, that’s kind of how I do my business and always have. I would rather do a deal either for free or let it go rather than not do it right.
Trevor Casey: And that has shown over your career with how successfully you have been, you have set people up for success and you’re rewarded tenfold at the end.
Beau Lunceford: And just this conversation also supports that too. All those things you’ve talked about how you experienced burnout and you took care of yourself. You took care of the person that you are before the money of it that you were willing to have hard conversations about how it is that you get to continue doing what you love doing without totally just draining yourself out. You talked about how you are building up, not to harp on the next generation, but you’re building up this next crew and showing them how to do that, showing them how to do their jobs while still taking care of themselves, while still focusing on relationships, not focusing on that pocketbook. You may feel like, I guess that’s an answer maybe. But I really think that the reality of that is already been really shown in this conversation alone. All those things have grown to be true. So I think that you’ve given a great answer for us and we appreciate it.
Michael Yovino: I appreciate it. Like I said, I work with a lot of the younger brokers right now and a big part of my time too has been spent on them trying to instill the fact who you got to find a working on balance. It’s so easy as a successful broker just to keep chasing it and you just forget about what’s important.
Trevor Casey: Well, Mike, thank you so much for the time. Thank you for the insight. We are excited for this episode. I feel there are so many gold nuggets that you dropped along the way. Thank you again for joining us as a guest. Anybody who wants to reach out to Mike for business questions, we’ll drop some contact information, LinkedIn in the show notes. So until next time, we will see you again.
Beau Lunceford: Thanks again, Michael.
Michael Yovino: Thank you.
OUTRO (31:45 – 33:48)
Trevor Casey: We’re back again.
Beau Lunceford: We are here. That was a great conversation. I like Mike. That was my first time really getting to spend a lot of time with him and I don’t know if it is conveyed in the conversation or not to other people, but boy oh boy, was I just soaking it up. Like you said, as soon as he said burnout, my eyes were just a sparkling.
Trevor Casey: Shot open.
Beau Lunceford: Yes. I was ready to dig in and talking about how it is the next generation of insurance professionals is coming into the space, what it is that they’re looking for, they’re having all these opportunities or at least chasing all these opportunities to grow and learn how to exist in this business well and effectively. And then people like Mike who are stepping in to make sure that that happens for them while also surrounding themselves with people who make them better. These teams of advisors and this collection of professionals and advance people in the industry who are seeking to make it a more, I don’t want to say a better place, but more effective, more engaging, more productive, all the buzzwords that you can think of.
Trevor Casey: I don’t think you could have summarized that any better. So I don’t have much to add because it was just like everything that I was thinking. So, Mike, thank you so much for joining us. We truly appreciate your expertise, your willingness to share your knowledge and just the Jencap team as a whole. We feel that you all go out of the way to really step outside of your current circle and then really build relationships with other people.
Beau Lunceford: And to educate.
Trevor Casey: So we’re extremely appreciative of your time. If you have any questions for Mike, want to learn more about his process of burnout, what it may look like to be a broker under him or just Jencap, or you’re curious about coverage, feel free to reach out. We’re going to have all of his contact information, LinkedIn and such in the show notes. So thank you again, Mike. And until next time, stay covered.
PODCAST CLOSER
Thanks for tuning in to Inside Insight presented by CR Solutions. If you like anything that you heard today, subscribe, follow and rate the show so that other industry pioneers like yourself can find it. Maybe even share it with someone you think might benefit from this episode. Do you have a question that you want answered or a concept that you need explain, you can email us at info@c-r-solutions.com with the subject line “Podcast Question”, and maybe your question, we’ll make it onto one of our episodes. You can also submit a question via our website at c-r-solutions.com/podcast. There are no dumb questions, only opportunities to learn something new. Now that’s a wrap on this episode. Join us next time on Inside Insight presented by CR Solutions. Stay covered.
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