"Who is the better captain?" and 9 Questions with Keith Captain of First Choice Agents Alliance
Question 1:
What's your favorite sports team and why?
Keith:
I'm not a big pro sports fan. I like college sports. I know people will disagree with this, but I'm a big believer in the idea that at that point in time, the players still have a passion for the game more than anything.
For me, it's University of Virginia. Virginia basketball or football.
Obviously, the basketball team has probably one of the best stories out there. Think about them being the first team ever to lose to a number 16 seed in the NCAA tournament. And the very next year, to turn it around and win the National Championship. It doesn't happen!
Question 2:
Any team, any sport, any category…who is the greatest of all time?
Keith:
I would lean towards somebody like a Michael Jordan. What makes me think about Michael Jordan is that special that just came out recently, The Last Dance.
"The Last Dance," a 10-part docuseries that chronicles Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls' dynasty.
What I love about him—and you saw it even more throughout that special—is his competitive side. I don't care what sport, activity, game, shooting quarters, whatever it was, he wanted to win, and he would win at all costs.
It reminded me of how the NBA is today versus what it was back then. I mean, those teams, every game mattered.
It was not, "I'm going to take tonight off. I don't feel like playing tonight." There's no taking a night off for Michael Jordan, every single game he played he wanted to be the best player on the court, every single game.
Question 3:
COVID put a lot of team sports on hold. How have you coped?
Keith:
At first, it really bothered me. I found myself watching things like…don't laugh, but I was watching the cornhole championships because it was the only thing that was on ESPN that was live sports.
They were wearing masks while throwing cornhole, because it was the only thing, where you could be safe enough and stay six feet apart during that time.
And then sport by sport, they started to come back. Some of the European Leagues and soccer came back a little bit quicker than some of the other stuff.
It's amazing what you find yourself investing your time in. Getting outside. Doing different things with your kids when you probably would have been watching a game. It's actually been surprisingly good.
Question 4:
We hear you almost broke your ankle recently when getting back onto the soccer field. Do you care to comment, sir
Keith:
Oh, man. I still try to sometimes live my glory days in soccer. I played up through college, Division I.
I probably need to realize that I'm not as young as I used to be, but my mind tells me that I can still get out there. My mind tells me I can play, and I can play competitively with quality players, but my body tells me otherwise.
My wife asks me all the time, "Why do you do that this to yourself?" She also tells me before every game “Don’t get hurt, or don’t come home.”
Question 5:
You studied sports management in college and you're a huge sports fan. Is that career track still on the table?
Keith:
Ooh, I'll never say never. I love sports and love being involved in sports.
Sports management is the business side of sports. My actual first job offer was working for a professional soccer team, DC United. I got an offer there and ended up turning it down.
Ultimately, I ended up taking a position at an insurance company instead. I wonder what would have happened if I would've taken that first paying job. If you ever have looked into sports, whenever you start in a sports league, you make very little money. I mean almost no money. You're a grunt at the very, very bottom.
At this point, I think the ship has sailed. I think this is going to be my career and I'm having way too much fun doing what I do now. And I can still get the competitive edge on the side through coaching.
Question 6:
Your company is relatively new to AgencyKPI, what's your impression, so far?
Keith:
I've been very, very impressed. Everybody makes it so easy. You guys have a great balance on the technology side, but also understanding and balancing the insurance side. Some of the groups that we work with, they get the tech side, but they don't get the insurance side. You guys get both.
And so what I feel more than anything out of this is, I have a partner. It's not just a vendor relationship. It's a partner—that we're both trying to achieve common goals—so I really, really liked that about it.
The data has been fantastic, I have used it already. We're getting ready to go into planning season for our agents, and for the first time ever, I'm going to be able to sit down and have a data-driven dashboard report, that I can review with each agent and say, "Here's exactly what you've written with every company. Here's your exact loss ratio with every company. And let's plan, how are you going to move your agency forward going into next year."
In the past, I would have to take all of the reports from all of the different companies that we have, and I would literally sit there, take the data, put it onto a master spreadsheet and then create different dashboards, individually for each agent that we were going to be meeting. As we've grown, the efficiency change in that alone, we couldn't handle it. So probably the biggest thing is just the fact of having this data at my fingertips. If somebody has a question about something, I can go into the system, hit a button and review it.
So when we meet with carriers, when we meet with agents, it's going to be data-driven conversations, so that we can tell the story we want to tell within our own organization. Here's how much we're growing, here's our overall loss ratio, or here's our new business volume that we can hit. In the past, we had to look at that either on a one-off situation or we would look at a ballpark number. I could give you a range of what it was, I could give you a feeling of it. But now, I can actually say, "Here's exactly what it is. Here are the facts."
Question 7:
In December 2018, your son, Mason, who was 12 at the time, started beating you in chess. Has your game improved?
Keith:
Oh, that's a rough one. That's a low blow right there.
I'm going to be honest, because I'm always honest. I typically only play games that I know I'm going to be good at. And when I got to a point where I was no longer going to be good at that game, and he was going to always beat me…I'm not sure I've played him since 2018, because I'm not going to win.
Once that happened, I said, "You know what? I'm going to change the game. I'm going to go a different direction."
I can still beat him in pretty much everything else. I can beat him in every sports activity. But he destroyed me in chess and knows moves that I never learned how to do. And I stopped playing because of that.
Question 8:
What are the best qualities of a captain?
Keith:
I think about my Dad. So my Dad used to say little things like, "Captains are winners. Captains are leaders.” And he would put that mindset in my head. "Captains stand out. They don't go in a crowd, they step outside the crowd."
The Captain name got me in trouble my entire life, by the way. It was, "Hey, you're a Captain, so you need to be the captain of the sports team. You're a captain, so you need to go lead this project."
But the flip side of it is, it taught me leadership at a very young age. And I talk to my son about this now, as he's actually the captain of his soccer team. I tell him, "Listen, you've got to be able to demonstrate what you want others to do. Being a leader is not necessarily running out there and telling all of the other kids, 'You need to do this. You need to do that. You need to this.'
You need to be the hardest working player that's on the field. You need to be the one that's leading the group in the activities. You need to be the one that is setting yourself apart from everybody else.
And if you're doing all of those things, then they're going to respect you. And they're going to see you as a leader and as the captain of the team. But just having the title, doesn't make you a captain."
Question 9:
Who's the better captain and why: Captain Kirk or Captain America?
Keith:
Definitely Captain America.
My youngest son is into the Avengers, and so we've seen all the Avenger movies.
Cap—as they call him in the Avenger movies—the way he leads among his group and can fight like nobody else. He's definitely the best Avenger.