The Action Catalyst
Scaling With Purpose: An Action Catalyst Panel (Business, Leadership, Growth, Technology)
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What strategies do the guests use to structure their businesses for growth?
This episode is sponsored by Southwestern Coaching. Southwestern Coaching has helped over 12,000 people increase their incomes by over 25% on average. As a successful salesperson, you know the importance of increasing your sales, but sometimes you might just need a little extra push and accountability to meet your goals and grow your business.
Southwestern Coaching will help you increase your income through one-on-one sales and leadership coaching tailored specifically to your needs. Together we will elevate sales.
At Southwestern Insurance Group, it isn't just about the policy, it's about who's got your back. I'm David Stewart. I'm the founder and president of Southwestern Insurance Group. Southwestern Insurance Group was founded on the idea that insurance is more than just an afterthought. It's an important part of your life. It's what allows you to achieve your goals and dreams.
Our process is simple, our people are fantastic, and our service is phenomenal. We put your needs front and center with personalized service and quality coverage options that can evolve as your life changes.
I highly recommend Southwestern Insurance Group. These guys are young.
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Chapter 2: How do the guests identify and eliminate friction points in their operations?
They're really energetic. They're kill-getters. They can shop their rate. And so they're really competitive, and they're able to get you the best rate. And they're super transparent. So if they can't meet what they currently have, they'll tell you.
Visit SWInsuranceGroup.com to get a quote or learn more today. From all of us here at Southwestern Insurance Group, we look forward to serving your family's home, auto, and life insurance needs.
Top leaders, meaningful conversation, actionable advice, bulldoze complacency, ignite inspiration, create impact. Produced by Southwestern Family of Companies. This is the Action Catalyst. It's one thing for a company to reach success. But once you've done that, you've got to know how to scale it. And our next two guests know a thing or two because they've done exactly that.
And they're here to explain how today.
Chapter 3: What role does data play in decision-making for business growth?
David Stewart's the founder and president of Southwestern Insurance Group, one of the fastest growing agencies in the nation. So let's please welcome to the stage David Stewart. Adam Outland, president of Southwest Consulting, as well as the founder of their student coaching division and the president of Kindness for Kids, as well as a host of the Inside Great Minds and Action Catalyst podcast.
Welcome, Adam Outland. All right. So two presidents on the stage at the same time. Do you guys have a designated survivor? Are they in a bunker somewhere in case the worst happens here?
Oh, yeah, for sure. Keeping them safe.
So, David, I'd like to start with you, actually. Often when you're looking at how to structure a business for growth, sometimes it can be more about deciding what to eliminate or to offload. Okay.
So in all seriousness, I feel like that's kind of my job every single day. And over the past seven years, that's really a lot of what I'm looking for is where are the friction points and how can I make it easier for us to do business?
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Chapter 4: How do the guests balance tradition with innovation in their businesses?
And with that, the highest value business possible. And so as I look for those things, naturally, I have, you know, we have we have a team now, we have a sales team, a client care team, some leadership, and we're all looking for those pieces where the friction is starting to build up.
And say, OK, how can we alleviate the bottleneck and the constraint to move faster, better serve our clients and all of those fun things? And so one area that we've done that, just to give a nice example, is with a specific client profile that we had that early on in the business actually generated a lot of revenue for us. A lot of upfront revenue helping this specific type of client.
And so it was a win for everybody. We were really excited. We're like, cool, we found this niche. We're helping all these people and all this money is coming in. So the sales team is excited. Lo and behold, after six months, a year or so, we started to notice some friction in different areas.
For instance, retention or claims and service that we have to provide to these types of clients specifically. But the sales team themselves never would have really noticed that they just saw it on a small scale. And as long as it didn't have a massive impact on their commission check, just wasn't something that they noticed until we saw the aggregated data on this client segment.
Moving over to the client care team, they do a great job of reporting feedback, but naturally they were just a little bit, we just felt a little bit behind all the time and we couldn't catch up.
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Chapter 5: What impact does technology have on improving client experiences?
And so when we finally nailed down this client type, we were able to make some specific changes so we could work on higher value tasks for the client care team and sell higher value clients on the sales side of the business. So there's a few things that we did to navigate that to open the flow, raise just the amount of revenue we could generate from our ideal clients.
So one thing that we did was we slowed down our marketing, our incentives for that specific client profile. We slowed it down so we would naturally cut off that lead flow. We changed the incentives on the sales structure. And then we also taught our client care team how to better identify those clients.
So when they realized they were in one of these specific situations, they're working with someone in the specific profile, how to better work with them faster and more effectively. And then we were able to add automation to basically take care. I don't know, almost 90% of that off the client care team's plate. And so the goal is always to just raise the value of the work that everybody's doing.
And so we were able to hire people to fill those gaps in the lower value work. But naturally, if we have a salesperson who could be selling somebody that generates $500 in revenue, that's going to stay with us for 10 years. We want that versus maybe $750 in revenue for six months. And so we were constantly looking for those things. And thankfully, we've made some significant changes in that area.
Chapter 6: How can curiosity be leveraged as a superpower in business?
So we're seeing a massive improvement in retention just by the virtue of selling different client types and by allowing our sales team to really just focus all of their time and energy there. The sales team is also spending a lot of time servicing those clients. So we were able to offload that and then even offload it to automation.
So that has really allowed us to just spend our time on the highest value items.
You touched on this a little bit, but what were a couple of the early wins you've gotten from these changes so far? And they have to be measurable. So what kind of metrics and KPIs are you using for benchmarks to what success looks like when you've reached it?
The lifetime value of the client is really important in our company. Naturally, we're in a reoccurring revenue model. And so if we can get somebody to stay with us for 10 years, that's worth way more than even just a higher revenue client for one year. And so we're seeing higher retention also for us claims.
Like, so if we do home and auto insurance, if someone has a claim, we're happy to service them and support them. Also, that costs our partners, the insurance companies, money. So we're seeing lower claim volumes, lower cost claims because we have more ideal client types.
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Chapter 7: What are some early wins from the changes implemented by the guests?
So with that, we've really focused on referrals as well. And so lower cost for acquisition. We're getting referrals from our ideal clients. So those are some big ones. Also, our team is just happier because they're not dealing with... Those clients tend to complain more, cause more drag, and are not providing the most value. So it's kind of funny how that correlates.
The lower value client also tends to cause most of our problems. So by reducing that, everyone's a little bit happier, honestly.
Yeah, no, great strategy. Adam, you were looking to move in one possible direction with Southwestern Consulting, but in doing so, you kind of stumbled upon something more foundational that needed to be addressed, including kind of redefining what a Southwestern coach has traditionally been and what revenue really is, where it comes from. And it was the data that led you there.
Can you tell us a little bit about how you kind of got to that point?
Yeah. And none of this ever happens in isolation, right?
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Chapter 8: What future steps do the guests envision for their businesses?
We have a great person and client experience. We have an amazing marketing team. And we have now a relatively clean hub of data that we could pull from and have team members actually look at all these numbers. And in the modern era, it's not about recording data. It's about how you interpret it. And there's about 18 million ways you can interpret a set of data.
But when we looked at it and we started having conversations, some of the things that we came to the conclusion of as we tried a few different models is that we realized our sales team was a little constrained with their creative ability in different ways they could sell. And some of that constraint came from the fact that when we hired a salesperson, we also simultaneously hired them to coach.
And when a salesperson and a coach did a great job, we simultaneously asked that person to then lead a team. And, you know, God forbid, they were actually great at leading a team. We then added some extra responsibility to them. And so then you wonder, you know, what is it that kind of maybe degrades the sales from some of these folks? And it might be a little bit of a capacity issue.
It's something that our partners registered on a list about a year ago as one of their challenges. So when we looked at the capacity issue on the other side, we also looked at our retention problem. So something Dave just shared is, you know, it's a lot better if you can have a client for 10 years than maybe a high-level client for one.
And I think there's a lot of value to that idea of longevity and retention in our relationships. So when we looked at our client retention, it wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't great. We realized it wasn't due to the coaching that we provided, but more due to the retention of our coaches themselves that could come in and come out.
In a sales model where you have a direct sales force, there's always going to be some turnover. You want to reduce it. You want to make it as little as possible. There's always going to be some turnover there. What you don't want is turnover to be there in the delivery part and in the service part of your model. You want that to be as stable as possible.
So with a stable delivery team, you have stable retention. There's a very long-winded way to say that a couple of realizations we made is that by bifurcating our sales and our coaching delivery team,
we stood a better chance at having our coaches have a two, three, four, five, six-year retention because we could actually be assigning our clients to our top-tier coaches that already have great retention and then allow our sales team to actually pursue sales and the creativity that comes with an enterprise sale, a local sale, and everything in between, and they could continue on to sales leadership.
So that's a little bit of the journey and the exploration we're on right now.
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