Matt Mallory with The Mallory Agency

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to High Velocity Radio, where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with the Mallory Agency, the man himself, the CEO, Mr. Matt Mallory. How are you doing, man?

Matt Mallory: [00:00:35] Hey, Stone, great to be here. Thanks so much for the opportunity.

Stone Payton: [00:00:39] Oh, it’s my pleasure, man. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. Got a ton of questions. Probably not going to get to them all, but maybe a good place to start is just a little bit of an overview mission purpose. What are you and your team out there trying to do for folks?

Matt Mallory: [00:00:54] Man Of course. Great question. Yeah. Mallory Agency, we are in our fourth generation. I get to be the fourth generation of CEOs have come through this lineage. We are a 115 year old property and casualty privately held insurance broker serving clients coast to coast and overseas. And and so we’re really changing the nature of the client broker relationship. And the reason that we are different is because we make a difference and we really treat clients their entire insurance program as a living, breathing entity, which has been missing for a long time in our industry.

Stone Payton: [00:01:32] Do you guys focus on a handful of specific industries or types of companies more than others?

Matt Mallory: [00:01:40] Certainly do. I think years ago my dad, if he was still with us, he would be 69 next week. And as a boomer, you know, he was brought up in the generation of just anything and everything, right? Be a generalist, never say no to new business. And our mentality and our path is changed a little bit and I think quite for the better to being more specialist, expert and niche driven. So we have deep expertise within industries such as restaurants, real estate, construction, technology. And then if you really unpack property and casualty and coverage wise, we have been wildly successful in advising really great clients under coverages such as worker’s compensation and high value property. And and with that success, we want to repeat it right and repeat it in a grand way.

Stone Payton: [00:02:35] So let’s roll the clock back a little bit. When you decided to go into the the family business, was it a tough decision or was this something you knew really early on that that’s that was going to be your path?

Matt Mallory: [00:02:49] Well, spoiler alert. I never wanted to be here. I, I certainly did not grow up when I was a ten year old boy. And all the kids are talking about being, you know, a professional athlete. I never said, well, I can’t wait to be an insurance producer or insurance CEO. No, sir, that was not me. I came into this business kind of kicking and screaming and bull canter. I came into the business unemployed. So I realized I had a pretty good childhood growing up, and I came in not having a clue what insurance was or even could spell it. And my heart really wasn’t in it. And I had to understand and learn really quick to be humble and learn and listen and pay your dues and earn your stripes. And now, 15 years later, I cannot imagine doing anything else.

Stone Payton: [00:03:35] Well, you’re clearly enjoying it. I mean, I can hear it in your voice. What? What do you enjoy the most, man? What’s the most rewarding about the work?

Matt Mallory: [00:03:45] I love so much connecting with great business leaders, great executives that are just smart, well connected, good leaders, great financial minds. And being the guy that can be there, shoulder to shoulder with them and help their company be more profitable, protect their company. A lot of these companies that we are so fortunate to get to partner with are really on the way up. They’re growing and we call it the hockey stick phase, right? They are growing maybe sometimes at rapid pace. And to be on that ride with them and to make sure they are protected and that we are we are helping their economics and helping them move the needle in a positive way. It’s so fulfilling to be able to do that and to be a part of that. That’s just a that’s a feather in the cap. That’s a win for us.

Stone Payton: [00:04:35] So how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a company like yours? Like, how do you get an opportunity to to have a substantive conversation and get a shot at writing and writing the business with folks?

Matt Mallory: [00:04:52] Yeah, another great question. Thanks. We we are intentional on who we want to connect with. So I tell our team quite often the best clients you want to partner with and really be an advisor and a trusted partner. That’s what that’s the language. That’s the buzzword of our industry. Right? Everybody wants to be a trusted partner or an advisor. Hmm. Well, to do that, you’ve got to be in the client’s circle. You have to be in his or her fraternity or trusted network. So we have to find out how to get in there. We have to find out who those people that he or she, the client, trust and leans on. And once we get an opportunity to be in those circles, we want to make sure that we that we perform, that our output as a deliverable to the client is nothing short of excellence and we can get to that level really. Stone is less about selling insurance and it’s more making sure that we can advise accurately and very with great relevance what the client needs from protecting themselves on the risk. If we’re doing that, we’re doing our job successfully and it’s a great day.

Stone Payton: [00:06:01] Well, I have been on the line with you for like 6 minutes now, and I have no doubt there is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that you can do all of what you just described in spades. But to pull it off, you’ve got to have a solid team. Would love to get your perspective on on recruiting, selecting, developing the team. That’s going to also live into all of those things you were just talking about.

Matt Mallory: [00:06:26] And how hard it is to find the great people. I think the challenge right now that everybody is experiencing, of course, is talent for our industry. What is so arguably unique is there’s nothing tangible. So we have to find people that are very good at communicating and articulating the value of something intangible. We can teach insurance and risk to just about anybody, but that’s not who we’re looking for. We’re looking for just like on the client side. We want people. We want clients and partners with great financial minds, good business leaders, deep business and financial acumen. We want that with our team, people that understand how our clients operate. We want our team to have great business acumen, financial literacy, self driven, very ambitious. They want to become better people personally and professionally. When we can find those, those individuals, we really want to be intentional on bringing them on our team and showing them the value of who we are and how we’re making a difference. Because it’s just so easy to hire just anyone in everybody but anybody. And everybody is not a great fit for who we want our client to be associated with.

Stone Payton: [00:07:39] And it strikes me that your your work involves a lot of education. I mean, you need and want to work with a well informed client. So you must you must invest a great deal of energy in in helping these people understand what they need to know to to get the right kinds of coverage and things that they probably are not even on their radar. Yeah.

Matt Mallory: [00:08:06] Yeah. Well said. I’ll hire you tomorrow. Great way to say it. We. We are very focused on being prepared for the unknown. Being proactive, removing any kind of barriers that a client may feel, even if it’s not actually there. We have to remember on our side, on the broker side, is if we think something is important, relevant of great value. But the client doesn’t either. We haven’t communicated that value clearly or the value is, quite frankly, doesn’t exist. So we have to understand what’s important to the client. It’s a bit of a crystal ball and a prophetic mission of wanting to get the telescope out and look down the line and think what’s coming next, what even could be. And we presume a little bit about what the client is looking for in meeting. Try and advise that if we can do that effectively and bring in value. Then again, like we discussed earlier that the insurance is kind of a secondary topic. The first topic is let’s prepare your business for greatness.

Stone Payton: [00:09:14] All right. So let’s paint the picture a little bit. As I understand it, one of the areas that you do have quite a track record in, in a great deal of specialized knowledge and expertise and is serving the the hospitality industry. And I don’t know the first thing about it, except I love to stay at nice hotels and nice restaurants. But for the case of this conversation, let’s say that my business partner and I, rather than than run a network, we’re going to we’re going to open a restaurant or a couple of restaurants. And so we we come to you. What does that process look like? Can you kind of walk us through the the early stages of that relationship? And the in my language, I come from the training consulting world. I would call it an engagement. Right. But can you kind of paint the picture for us? What happens next?

Matt Mallory: [00:10:07] What a fantastic word to use. I love it. I think I’m going to borrow that stone. I love the term engagement. We don’t use that term enough. Absolutely. We meet with someone. It really is a exploratory discussion of just wanting to learn more about them. It’s not about us yet. It’s just about them because we have to learn if we’re even a fit. And we’re very quick to tell the client if we’re not one because we don’t want to. We if we advise and we show value, the value has to be mutually seen. If we can’t show value, then we need to move on and in a cordial way, part ways. So we want to find out if we’re fit. We asking a lot of questions about the business from what exactly the profile of said restaurant is. And you’re right, we have great expertise in depth in restaurants currently with our restaurant practice, which I lead is a national practice. We’ve got clients in almost every state within the continental U.S. and we’re very proud of that. Most of those restaurants are on the non franchise side right now, but we’re very, very proud of what we’ve been able to achieve within our practice group and we ask a lot of great questions to these business leaders.

Matt Mallory: [00:11:13] Tell us about your restaurant. How does it look right now? What’s the profile? Where do you want it to go? Where do you expect it to go? Tell us about your team, how your team operates, how it functions. So we try and keep a peer to peer a little bit more of a of an intellectual and business acumen discussion with them. And then we can unpack a little bit more and go deeper on the risk side. But a lot of the questions that we ask, the answers that we receive from the clients, give us insight. As we move along this path, we tend to use the term assessment. We want to assess what’s going on with the client to really determine if we’re going to be a great fit and if we can if we can offer value to them and if we can, then it usually ends up being a great partnership.

Stone Payton: [00:11:55] So do restaurant owners typically come in and feel at least like they know what types of coverages they need and want? And if so, do you sometimes have to tell them? Well, yeah, maybe, but maybe not so much over here. And there’s this whole other thing that you really ought to think about, like. Well, I mean, I don’t even know. I guess if somebody slips and falls, that makes sense to me. But there’s probably a lot more than that that you should be covered for if you’re if you’re running a restaurant. Right.

Matt Mallory: [00:12:29] Yeah, absolutely. You know, just like every industry, unfortunately, within the property and casualty insurance industry, you’ve got some bad actors and we’ve also have some some individuals that kind of have forgotten the term professional and they’re just it’s a bit more amateur play on how they advise. So you have those moments where you see the client’s insurance program that has just not really been advised correctly and accurately and hasn’t really been proactive or operating efficiently. But to give some of my peers the credit, that credit is due, some of these programs are put together quite well. That could be put together a little bit better. But you always have the discussion with them of. This is how the industry looks. And we look at the industry from a two perspective. We look at the industry of being a restaurant industry from these are the current ebbs and flows of what we look at in restaurants, how restaurants are performing on a more global scale, global stage, and also kind of macro wise in your own market. Because remember, some of these discussions we have are maybe geographically based on coastal property versus inland. Maybe it is restaurants that are in a very high or rather very dense urban downtown city kind of area where there could be some crime issues. Maybe there is a maybe it’s the type of food they’re serving. And there could be a potential for a foodborne outbreak type scenario depending on what’s going on with a type of food from supply chain. There are so many different little avenues of what about this? And all we do is engage with the client, ask them what they’re doing about it right now to build it, advise them better later. So a lot of those different conversations that we bring in some insurance questions that may be a little bit cross-eyed feeling, but we have to make sure the client knows because of worst case. The worst thing possible is for us to know something and fail to advise or ask the client about it.

Stone Payton: [00:14:35] Okay. So let’s zoom out a little bit and talk about just this whole idea of leading a business in general. We touched on, you know, this whole idea of getting good people and identifying those folks. Let’s talk a little bit more about development and culture. What kinds of things have you learned to do? And I don’t know, maybe you’ve even made a mistake or two along the way you might be willing to share, but to to to create a culture that allows you and yours to to serve in this way and do it consistently. Have you learned a few things that, you know, if you were going to write a book, it would be, you know, here’s some dos, here’s some don’ts and just leading a business.

Matt Mallory: [00:15:19] Boy, have I ever. Four years ago, I took over the position of CEO. Quick historical context. My dad named Rick Mallory was third generation. He died unexpectedly in 2018. Our perpetuation plan was for, excuse me, five years when he turned 70 and I turned 40 and I’ll be 40 next year, he was going to hand over the role of CEO to me. So I started leading and took over a company I had no way to prepare for. Arrogantly, I thought that I was ready back then, and realistically and actually looking back, I was I had no idea. And full candor. In 2018, I could not even read my own pal. And I had to have basically a crash course in financial literacy, really with my CFO of how to do that. We changed language in the office from in our company, from the Met runs or owns or anything like that. I get the opportunity to lead people. If you’re going to leave people, you have to be a leader and you have to understand what that means and humble yourself and know what it means to be a leader, which means being able to lean into wise counsel. Most every one of my leadership team has been doing this longer than me, which is a fantastic place to be. I get to lean on great people, great financial literacy, great business acumen, and they have full knowledge and full welcoming for me to call me out when I am not being the leader that I’m expected to be. As far as how we empower people. Our culture is very, very centric on we invest in you team member. We don’t call anyone an employee. We don’t call anyone on staff.

Matt Mallory: [00:16:59] We want to find great team members. I tell everybody in their onboarding, we are intentional on how we are going to invest in you through compensation, through empowerment, through trust. We expect that that investment to be reciprocated. We invest in you. We expect you to invest back in us. What does that mean? That means you come in every day and give us your best. You want to become better in every category of the word, but we’re going to empower you to give you that opportunity through advancement and title, pay, responsibility, trust, etc. We expect you to want to become better and we expect you to call each other out on your team and empower your team and have that trust with your team and that encouragement of We’re going to become better because I’ve given everybody the path of where this company is going to go and I have full intention and whatever it is, in five or ten years when we achieve some of the results I expect us to achieve when we achieve that, not. Matt Mallory This is not this is not the Matt Mallory show. When we achieve that, I’m then turn around to our team and I’m going to say, Wow, look what we did together. That is our mission. It’s not on a wall, it’s not formally written down. But that is our path is that we’re going to find great people, empower them, invest in them. We ask they invest back into us so that when we achieve exceptional goals that maybe some people didn’t think we were even capable of, we’re going to look at each other and say, look what we did together.

Stone Payton: [00:18:32] Well, I got to say, man, your passion shines through. I can see how it would impact everyone around you. And in the same breath. This is not my first rodeo. You’re human. Sometimes you just. You got to recharge, man. Where do you go? And I don’t necessarily mean a physical place, but where do you go for for inspiration and to recharge the the batteries, whether it’s reading or a place or an activity? Where do you go?

Matt Mallory: [00:19:05] Yeah, I mind, body, spirit. Right. Got to stay healthy. You got to stay centered. I’m a big believer that readers are leaders. I try and consume positive, enriching content, and that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. For me, I’m a man of faith. I’m a Christian. I start my morning in prayer and try and get inspiration and encouragement and and guidance and direction from from the Scripture. That’s how I started in my days. I’m a morning person. I enjoy getting up and having that time just to be centered and get prepared. Whether I think it’s going to be a great day or there’s going to be some challenging conversations I have to have, I need guidance with that, and I need to come and start my day with a very humbled heart and spirit and and figure out how to do that and be effective. My team expects that from me and I need to show them what that looks like. Outside of that, I’m a big believer. Break a sweat once a day. I love to play tennis with my kids. I love to be on a road bike. I’ve got a rower at home I bought from Hydro. What a fun thing to have. I’m a big believer, even if it’s 5 minutes. Break a sweat, get your heart pumping. And that’s a great way to be good to yourself and a little bit of self-care. So those are just a few things I believe in. I wish I was more consistent, I should be. But I think that as long as you’re focused on it and you’re attempting, that’s a good day.

Stone Payton: [00:20:31] All right, man. Before we wrap, let’s make sure that we that we leave our listeners with a few actionable items. I’ll call them pro tips. Right. The things that they ought to be thinking about, things they questions, maybe they should be asking things they ought to be looking for when engaging someone to help them with getting the right kind of of coverage. Number one pro tip is reach out and talk to Matt or somebody on his team. But but but maybe, you know, someone’s listening to this and and there’s some things that maybe they ought to jot down or go read a little bit about. Let’s leave him with a few people. I’m going to call them pro steps.

Matt Mallory: [00:21:12] I would start by looking at how proactive a firm is, how diligent they are in the industry. And I don’t mean insurance. I mean the clients industry. What’s the track record? What’s the proven, demonstrated client deliverable track record? How much experience have you had and what kind of results have you had? What’s the expertise? What kind of team do I have that will be proactive and partnering and serving with me? Client Those are some things I start with. In fact, every client we engage with, I can come with them at full conviction and confidence of. This is the kind of team we have that serves peers just like yours all over. These are the kind of results. This is the client deliverable and output that we are very, very proud of because we have worked very hard to make sure that we can be at this level. Those are some of the questions I would tell anyone that wants to engage, whether it’s my firm, especially even thinking about looking at a new broker of record, of what kind of what’s the transition and what is the expectation I should have from you? And then we just we roll it out to them.

Stone Payton: [00:22:28] Fantastic. All right. Where can our listeners connect with you? The best way for them to reach out and have a conversation with you or someone on your team, whatever you feel like is appropriate, whether it’s website, email, LinkedIn, I just want to make sure that they have an easy path to to connect.

Matt Mallory: [00:22:46] Of course, love connecting with new people. Linkedin, of course, is a great way. Also, you can email me. I’m fine with people emailing me and I can give that out publicly right now. Matt M Matt team at Mallory, Agent SI.com. Like everybody else, my phone is on me from dawn to dusk as well as looking at emails. So happy to connect with people and and maybe offer any kind of guidance, whether it’s on insurance and advising on insurance or some of my aches and pains and a few successes I’ve had from leading a company full of great people.

Stone Payton: [00:23:23] What a pleasure. Matt, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. It’s it’s marvelous to have a conversation with someone who is so dedicated to serving their market and is clearly committed to developing their people and giving them at least a path to purpose and fulfillment. This is what a marvelous way to invest a Thursday afternoon. Thank you for for hanging out with us, man.

Matt Mallory: [00:23:52] It’s been so much fun. Thank you for the invitation.

Stone Payton: [00:23:55] My pleasure. All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, CEO of the Mallory Agency, Matt Mallory, and everyone here at the Business RadioX family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.