Andy Harbut

All day everyday.

I am taking a leisurely train ride from Vermont to NYC today; decided to take some of our new, "employee assessment" tools for a spin. The EQ testing was interesting. (I did fine, so this is not coming from a place of sarcasm or resentment...just an observation.) If I had to characterize the mechanics of the test for someone who knew nothing about it, I'd say "this is a test of your ability to recognize thizz face across diverse racial and gender presentations ."

One time, in 2003, when I got a promotion at Aon from the service center to commercial risk broking, it took nearly two weeks after my start date for my new manager to requisition a computer for me. That's right: as an internal transfer, I spent two weeks without a computer. As I head back to NYC for Insuretech Insights today, while I'm excited about what we're doing, I also miss the good ol' days. 🥲

I am on my first @joinScalepath cohort meeting. I genuinely like all of these guys and am really appreciating the conversation. I am not being compensated for this endorsement ;)

We can all agree Scientology is maybe a little hard to swallow. But, I'm a pragmatic guy, and dogma not withstanding , I tend to look at the merits of any particular philosophy based on its utility. (I know, weird tweet, but bear with me.) When I was 15, I picked up a Scientology book at the public library. It was some sort of "L Ron Hubbard better living through diabetics" book. (It's the only one I have ever read any part of.) The only thing I remember reading, which has stuck with me for thirty years, is this: The way to know if a couple is compatible is to see how long it takes either person to respond when spoken to in a conversation. If it's similar, they are a match. Big delta in response time, look out. I see this play out all the time in my life; not just romantic relations. I don't know if response time is necessarily a leading indicator of the likely success of a relationship, but it seems to be a frequent hallmark of disharmonious communication styles, and therefore, working relationships.

What can I say? We have the coolest merch. Fun fact: the inspiration for the orange color was a vintage Silca bike pump. SMBash is again proving to be the most bang for the buck. If you're serious about buying business, or interested in getting better at running and scaling, this is the place to be.

It's that time of year :) I'm in need of a recharge and this is where I do it. Doesn't mean turning off the lights. Means getting inspired by what my peers are doing. Looking forward to seeing everyone (and maybe not doing deal work for three days....or not.)

Thank you, Texas ETA Summit for having us. I was genuinely proud to be on the panel alongside folks that I have deep respect for, and there is most certainly a sense validation when insurance, and its importance, is recognized.

Representing at the @HoldCoConf I might do a survey here of who owns more than two business? (Hopefully we have a few gaiters left for Texas!)

Hope everyone has a better day than this guy. I have seen some real doozies from the excavators working in St. Louis City. This isn't too bad, but bad luck on what feels like the first day of Spring. I am super happy they're here, don't get me wrong. All the infill in the neighborhood is being built with basements, water proofed correctly, and adding to population density. But these brave souls, I'm sure they come in from South County, and they clearly struggle to excavate lots that have existing foundations and/or retaining walls. Quiz Time: Win a beer on me tomorrow night in Austin, TX if you can name the type of insurance, AND the coverage part, that we hope Mr. Eddie the Excavator carries. Any particular policy endorsements we should look for?Any potential coverage disputes?

Many insurance agents are dumb. (Sure, I could have said that more eloquently, but l'm not in the mood.) They avoid providing any more information to business buyers than they absolutely must. Some will go out of their way to obscure and redact info, either to CTA or to protect their interest in keeping the insurance business post-close. Here's a walkthrough of what we often see. They (they = either the target co or ins. agent) intentionally misrepresented their operations on the application. How do we know it was deliberate? A General Liability policy might have a rating classification that the specifically exclude certain types of work performed by the business; say, a landscaper that does sprinkler irrigation installation has GL rating class that reads "no irrigation." We all know they do irrigation; it's 15% of revenue and in the CIM. The ins. agent won't turn over the most recent application. Pretty easy to infer why. In other cases, some agents will say "I cannot provide XYX because I don't want the liability if you use that information and find it's incorrect." Ok, cool. Just give me the info and that disclaimer... Here's an instance where these two manifestations of jack-assery meet: In response to the request for loss runs / claims info, the agent provided an XLS of their own making which simply had nothing on it. (Listen up insurance agents: Want to create an E&O claim for yourself? That's a good start.) Why would they do that? Because loss runs are needed to get quotes from insurance companies, and they want to make sure they keep the business. The problem with trusting the seller's insurance agent, the one the seller tells you is a great resource to the company, really knows their business, etc., is that the seller who tells you all of that IS EXACTLY THE KIND OF GUY WHO WILL LIE TO YOUR FACE, AND HIS INSURANCE AGENT IS EXACTLY THE KIND OF AGENT THAT WILL LIE TO AN INSURER. You just won't find out until you buy the business and have to deal with the repercussions. And, something else we tend to see: where there's smoke, there's fire. I'm not saying every guy who cheats on his wife also parks in handicap spots when no one is looking, but I'd bet more than average. What's the solution? Thorough diligence by a well-qualified advisor. If the seller and their agent don't want to play along, it should be a red flag. And: You can buy insurance for seller fraud resulting a breach of seller R&W for transactions under $10M EV, and it's quite reasonably priced.

The bank: "we have the policies we made you bind before you bought the business, but we need the coi's for you to close." Insanity.

In case you didn't believe me

I have never used AI for anything anyone has ever read that has my name on it, except for a deck I did three years ago about fleet safety for a logistics company. I had just landed in India and found two emails and a voicemail from my boss with an assignment for a portfolio company of the sponsor that owned us. I had no stock materials in our existing library of collateral, and didn't even have a professional designed PPT template. I was jet lagged to hell and already has a full workload. So on that one, yep, I cheated.

I tuned into Netflix to watch Jake Paul get his ass beat. He fights out of Puerto Rico? Presumably to avoid taxes (?) ironic that the advertisements were for turbo tax, because our stupid federal tax code is so confusing and difficult to navigate that there is a huge industry around simply filing a tax return. Advertisements for turbo tax are some kind of open public secret that you can get more money back if you know how to game the system. Crazy town.

As long as I'm at it, has anyone noticed that @meow is becoming QuickBooks that makes sense? E.g., the first time I used QB, I thought "how can I pay bills from this? It's not a bank. I am going to tell it to tell my bank to make a payment. Why not just make the bank's website do accounting? " Evidently, the product development team at Meow got my memo...

The thing about being in business with your friends is that it's really, really hard for people not to unknowingly / inadvertently take advantage of it and act in a way they would not, if you were not friends (sorry for the double negative). I say this as someone with experience on both sides of the inequality (not really an equation, is it), both as a partner and as employer. (Ed. note: as I re-read this before hitting "post" it occurred to me that, on first past, I didn't include "...and as an employee." Good example of how easy it is to be self-centered, even when you're trying not to be.) That said, I'd rather be in business with my friends than with people I don't have any particular feelings of affection for, or personal relationship with, even if sometimes get mad at each other and the business threatens the friendship, or the friendship makes the business less profitable than it could be. That's life. (I don't yap about it a lot, but I believe people are flawed, we are going to transgress each other, and it's only though God's grace that we ever can find it in our hearts to put down our resentments. In my view, forgiveness and love go hand in hand. You can go through life being pissed off at everyone who has ever wronged you, but I choose not to live that way.) It's like being in a band or a marriage. Sure, sometimes you are going to fight, and sometimes you even treat each other poorly. You feel bad about it, air your grievances, and forgive each other, and try really hard to (a) make sure it doesn't happen again, and (b) pray that the other person forgets. I always thought it was weird when you see a band talking about how they aren't friends IRL. If the band is terrible and doesn't make real music that has an emotional resonance, I get it. But phoning it in to make it look like they are all having fun on stage when secretly they hate each other's guts? That's just disingenuous. PS - things are fine with me and @MrJoshFro I have other business interests that aren't on X and just needed to vent. PPS - at some point I'm going to have grok write a book using every third X post of mine as the chapter outline. Then I'm going to send it to my employees for Christmas.