Post Race!

[Shaggy Hiker]

Wow, that's quite a curve-ball.

[homer13j]

The Smurfstang visits cow country

[Pc Monk]

According to Larry Wall, the original author of the Perl programming language, there are three great virtues of a programmer; Laziness, Impatience and Hubris

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.
Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to.
Hubris: The quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
source : http://threevirtues.com/

[dday9]

I'm feeling depressed y'all.

[dday9]

I don't know if I can keep my business open for many more months.

[szlamany]

Doing that insurance thing is not paying off for you? Can you add additional services in any way?

[dday9]

Unfortunately not. I'm a captive agent and cannot do any outside activity that is not approved by Allstate.

[Shaggy Hiker]

So....you're not really in good hands?

What's the basic issue? Insufficient population? Too much competition?

[dday9]

It is our strict guidelines combined with our rates in our area. We have an extremely competitive home insurance considering that we're the only admitted carrier in my parish that writes home insurance in the whole parish, but what Allstate did after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina left a bad taste in peoples mouth here. With our auto rates, if you do not fit into Allstate's specific niche, then we're going to be substantially higher.

My biggest issue is not the money; my family can live off of $20,000 a year. What I'm getting concerned with is that I have a 6 month validation item count, I'm a little bit half way to it, but I only have less than 60 days to meet it. If I do not meet the validation then I cannot keep my contract.

[dday9]

I'm kind of venting to y'all because I cannot really tell anyone else this. To everyone else, the business is doing great and I have a great career opportunity.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Heck, I don't even understand it. I don't know what a 6 month validation count even means.

So, you feel that people are going elsewhere because Allstate burned some bridges? I can understand that. Anywhere that has to deal with hurricanes has to deal with some screwy insurance situations. It's not easy for the company to figure out what to charge, either. I suspect that most companies underestimate their true liability exposure for an area by underestimating the likelihood of a direct hit. Those direct hits are frequent if you sum across the entire coastal area, but not frequent at any one specific point, so I would think that the temptation to understate the probability in order to make policies look more affordable is pretty strong. I guess it also depends on the return on investment that the insurance company sees if they don't pay out on a policy, so if investments underperform they can be left hanging.

Maybe there's no assurance with insurance.

[dday9]

My 6 month validation count means that I need to have so many policies in force(72) before my 6th month with the company.

Allstate and State Farm got nearly destroyed in 2005 because of Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina. The two companies had a combined homeowners market share of those who were affected was about 84%, which was way too large. In fact, both companies lost as much money in claims then they made in their company's history. So what did they do? They stopped writing homes all together in parishes that touched the Gulf of Mexico and those directly north of the parishes that touched the Gulf of Mexico.

[FunkyDexter]

I don't think there's much I can say except to wish you all the best. It would suck if the opportunity disappeared.

[szlamany]

You could do the half full take on this...

2 months to spin up...

Next 2 months got you 50% of your 72...

You have 2 months left!

Have you graphed or plotted your activity over the past 4 months? Can you see that it's increasing (holidays over - spring almost here...)

[dday9]

Yep, right now I'm purchasing 15 internet leads a day and I'm getting anywhere between 1-2 referrals a day. Hopefully this will be enough to reach my goal.

Yesterday my only employee quit(no show/no call) so I'm going to have to higher a new one today, just one more setback.

[szlamany]

Employees really stink - I'm going to guess that 1 out of 3 of the people I've had work for me have been even reasonable - and maybe on 1 out of 10 would be someone I would take on for a permanent position.

Back before I became self-employed I always fully signed on to whatever workplace I was in. I wish that was the norm.

[dday9]

I had no idea how bad finding employees would be. I have a lot of friends who complain that they cannot find a job, but when I tell them that I'm hiring they always find an excuse for one reason or another.

[szlamany]

I can almost find myself becoming some "old man Jenkins" complaining about the work ethnics of kids these days!!

My step daughter who's 22 is a manager at a store at the mall and works another job to pay off student loans - so I know she's not part of this crowd! But they are out there...

[dday9]

Heck I'm 24 and I come into work at 7:30AM and do not leave until 7:00PM.

My younger brother(22), before entering into the military was the same way too.

My youngest brother(17), has never worked a job a day in his life and when he does chores or errands he complains the entire time.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Well, he's a teenager. I don't think I really valued things correctly at that time.

I never owned a home when I was in the hurricane zone, but I have friends that do. The cost of living is insane because of the cost of insurance, but the cost of insurance probably isn't as high as it ought to be. I was living in the FL Keys. On average, they were hit once every 7 years, and since they are fairly small and low-lying, a hit is pretty nearly always going to be a very complete hit. However, as the dice would have it, when I was there in the 90s, they hadn't been hit in over 30 years. In the 60s, kids played ball in the highway because cars were so rare. Now, the place is thoroughly developed. The storm surge from a category 3 storm would submerge all but the highest points of the Keys. Oddly, that means that all the homes would be destroyed, but a few convenience stores might escape destruction.

If you have a $300,000 house that gets destroyed every 7 years, on average, what would the insurance rate have to be per year? There are lots of factors going into that, but any company that has to shell out to replace all thouse houses in the Florida Keys every few years is going to go broke unless they charge a fortune, or can spread the costs across a wide area.

I'm not surprised that companies have pulled out of the Gulf Coast region, I'm just surprised that any remain.

[dday9]

When Allstate was not writing the wind and hail(aka hurricane) we had to write a split policy through the fair plan which is Louisiana Citizens, any admitted carrier can write through LA Citizens I believe. The policy with Allstate(W&H excluded) was cheap, like $700. The W&H through LA Citizens was ridiculous, I remember writing $2k - $3k W&H only policies.

[Gruff]

Wind and Hail. I wish. Try getting volcano insurance. (aka Mount St Helens.)

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'd just lava to get such a policy, but it's ashking too much around here.

[dday9]

[homer13j]

I had no idea how bad finding employees would be. I have a lot of friends who complain that they cannot find a job, but when I tell them that I'm hiring they always find an excuse for one reason or another.

There's a guy in my neighborhood who stands at the stoplight at the end of a freeway off-ramp with a sign "unemployed & homeless - please help." One day I rolled down my window and when he walked over looking for a handout I told him "I'll give you $200 to paint my garage." He told me to eff off and walked back to the curb.

And my garage still needs to be painted.

[dday9]

I'll do it for $200 and a flight up to yankee country!

[homer13j]

Even if I bought you a bus ticket its still around $300 to get you here and back.

And Cleveland is NOT "yankee country" We hate the Yankees here...

[dday9]

Anything north of I10 is yankee country.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I-10? Isn't that pushing the Mason-Dixon line really far south? I-40 seems more reasonable.

Yankee is a pretty funny term. Outside the US, it's all of us. In the south, it's northerners. In the north, it's either New Yorkers (baseball), or the Northeast. The further NorthEast you go, the further NorthEast it becomes...until you get to New Hampshire or Maine...and then they tell you to go home.

[dday9]

Nope

[Shaggy Hiker]

I learned my geography wrong.

[dday9]

Yeah, they teach it wrong in schools. Kind like "history is written by the winners" so goes "geography is written by the locals"

[FunkyDexter]

Yankee is a pretty funny term. Outside the US, it's all of us.

Nah, that's just "Yank". We still think of "Yankee" as applying to the North but only in period dramas and Westerns... otherwise you're just one big mass to us (and I'm not talking about the obesity problem).

[NeedSomeAnswers]

I had no idea how bad finding employees would be. I have a lot of friends who complain that they cannot find a job, but when I tell them that I'm hiring they always find an excuse for one reason or another.

What many people don't always realise is that recruitment is a skill, employing the right people for you organisation is not always an easy task.

I have done a fair amount of recruitment in my time and it always amazes me how wrong companies get it. Sometimes it is recruiting people who just aren't good enough but more often its actually recruiting people that just aren't quite right, maybe they aren't going to stick around or don't really really want the job so don't put enough effort in e.t.c.

When i do it i tend to spend as much time if not more trying to figure out the persons personality, and how bright i think they are than what there exact skill base is. Skills are important but sometime they can be focused on too much instead of making sure you have the right person who is going to fit in with you and your team.

[FunkyDexter]

I have a lot of friends who complain that they cannot find a job, but when I tell them that I'm hiring they always find an excuse for one reason or another

What's the constant here?

Only kidding.

[FunkyDexter]

I've made some bad hires on the basis that they were all that was available and I needed to hire someone. There's such a dearth of decent programmers out there and the company usually didn't want to pay top rates so you end up having to take what you can get. I'm not advocating this as an approach.

Mind you, I've had some great hires too. I just got lucky that they were on the market at the right time.

[dday9]

My hiring process is rather simple:

1. Since I only need to focus on new business, I need sales people. I get all candidates interested in the position to take a personality test.
2. I only then call those who tested as either a:
   
   1. Sales Superstar
   2. Sales Leader
   3. Closer
3. During the interview I implement behavioral based interviewing in order to weed past the "I work great in a team environment" crap
4. At the end, and this is the most important I will tell them:
   

   You seem like a great hire and if I had two positions available I would certainly hire you, but you just do not seem sales superstar to me.

5. And then just shut up to see if they fight back from that objection
6. If they fight back then I take 1-2 days to analyze the answers that they gave me in the interview and then call the applicant to let the know one way or the other.

[Shaggy Hiker]

(and I'm not talking about the obesity problem).

One of our proudest cultural exports.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'm glad I don't have to hire, at the moment. What a pain.

[SJWhiteley]

...

I never owned a home when I was in the hurricane zone, but I have friends that do. The cost of living is insane because of the cost of insurance, but the cost of insurance probably isn't as high as it ought to be. ...

Insurance and taxes more than doubles my mortgage payment.