20 years of insurance adjusting experience in 53 minutes

So if you're exploring insurance adjusting and you're wondering if it's a real career or whether someone like you can actually break it and make it work, this video will change how you see everything. Starting in 1999, I spent 20 years as a full-time independent property adjuster. And in that time, I worked six major hurricanes, I handled over 10,000 claims across every type, including catastrophe, daily, desk, and remote. And in 2025 adjusted dollars, I made over 3.2 million bucks. For the last seven years, I've mentored thousands of new adjusters through Adjuster TV and Adjuster TV Plus. And in the next 53 minutes, I'm gonna share some of the most critical lessons I've learned that took me from zero to earning real money in one of the most misunderstood industries in America. Starting now. So when I went on my very first storm, I was 60 pounds overweight. And I was eating McDonald's drive-thru, or really just any drive-thru that was convenient, pretty much breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And it wasn't until I started taking my health seriously and having a plan for my food, as well as making sure that I got enough sleep that I was able to be more effective, have a better attitude, which impacted my customer service. You know, getting enough sleep made it give you a lot more energy and reduced the chances that you're gonna burn out. A lot of burnout comes from not getting enough sleep and eating a bunch of garbage. I started using Xactimate in 1998. And that whole time, I was self-taught on Xactimate. A few years ago, I decided that I wanted to add, in order to add value to adjust your TV and to make me a better trainer, I decided to get my Xactimate certified trainer certification from Xactware. And so in order to do that, you have to get an Xactimate level three certification, and which was very challenging. And then once you do that, then you take a train-the-trainer course where they show you how to teach Xactimate. And so I taught Xactimate level one and two. And even in taking level one and two, there was little things in Xactimate that I didn't, that would have made such a big difference in the aggregate over the course of a storm, a week, right, or even a day, could add up to hours that would allow me to stack more claims into a day or into a week. Getting Xactimate level two certified, even if you're brand new and you have never used Xactimate before, I strongly recommend that you get Xactimate level one training and get the certification on top of it, which you have to take an exam, right? So they give you a couple of scenarios, and then you answer questions based on what you came up with and building out those estimates. This is going to train you on the software, the way the makers of the software intend for it to be used. And when you test yourself, you're gonna sort of prove to yourself that you're proficient and you can put it on your resume. And having even just a basic level one training will allow you to be, to get so much more out of any other trainings that you go to, whether it's through Adjust Your TV, Fast Track to Deployment, or it's through an IA firm's like carrier certification training where they may have Xactimate as a component of those trainings. Take Xactimate level one and two from me at adjustyourtvplus.com. And then to take your exams, then go to the link in the description where you're watching this video, or you can use this QR code that's on the screen if you happen to be watching this on a TV, which according to my analytics, there's a 30% chance that you are actually watching it on TV. Take your phone, if you don't know how to do this, it's pretty cool actually, and open up the camera app and point it at the screen and it'll put a little box around the QR code. Just tap that and it'll take you right to the purchase link if you want it. If you've already gotten Xactimate training and you wanna go ahead and take the tests. So it used to be that, especially in the early days when I was a little bit less secure, but even when I had some experience, if I knew that I was gonna be meeting a contractor that had a reputation for being aggressive, or I pull up to a house and I see several big lifted pickup trucks all with company graphics all over them and a bunch of dudes standing in the front yard and a couple of guys up on the roof with chalk marking stuff up and the homeowner standing there surrounded by all these big meathead roofing sales guys wearing their little sister's t-shirts. As I'm pulling up, I can see that they're getting like the full court press from the contractors saying, hey, we're gonna fight the insurance company for you and all this kind of stuff. That caused a lot of anxiety for me because I was anxious going into those situations. It didn't improve the anxiety level or the stress level of the insured. Universally, we shouldn't say universally, but usually had a not great outcome and it was very, very stressful and it also contributed to burnout until one day I was looking at my next appointment and I was like, I know these guys. These guys are, it's Mastercraft or Aspen Roofing or whatever, whoever it was and they're gonna be very, very aggressive and they're in a neighborhood that didn't have a whole lot of damage. And I thought to myself, what if they do have damage? Whenever I meet a contractor and no matter what they're doing, if there is damage on that roof, then I couldn't care less how aggressive or not aggressive. I don't care what the contractor is doing. It's we're buying the roof, here's your money, go to the next one. But when you have to argue about it and fight about it, that's when the stress comes and when those guys are super high pressure and they start pointing out things that are like questionable, that's when it gets to be extremely stressful for you as the adjuster. Until the day that I suddenly thought to myself, what if there is damage? I have to have an open mind about this, even though we're in a lightly hit area and there may or may not be damage. I've looked at several roofs in this neighborhood and I just, I mean, I couldn't find anything. I wanna find, as a CAD adjuster, I'm there to write estimates for damage, not to go out and deny stuff, right? So I'm trying, I wanna find damage because I get paid more, believe it or not. That one little mind shift made a really, really major impact on really the rest of my career. And all it was was saying, oh, well, you know what? There could be hail damage here. Let's just keep an open mind about it and get up there with just fresh eyes, right? And just look at it instead of walking up with the perceived preconception. It's gonna be a fight. It's gonna be a denial. I know I'm not gonna find any damage. Just stop doing that. And when I pulled up, a bunch of lifted pickup trucks, big musclehead dudes standing around the front yard, and I walked straight up to the homeowner, introduced myself, smile on my face, direct eye contact, and then I turned to the guy standing all around and I was like, whose sale is this? Because there's only one guy. It's not every single one of those dudes. They're not all gonna get a cut of that. They're just there as like muscle backup, right? And one dude steps forward, look him in the eye, smile, shake his hand and say, all right, let's take a look at this thing. Shoulder to shoulder, we're gonna walk up to the house, we're gonna climb up on the roof, and we're gonna take a look at it and see what they got, right? From that moment on, everything changed for me. As far as my stress level, it made doing catastrophe work so much easier, so much easier. And it made it a lot easier for the contractor. Those guys saw that I wasn't gonna be like coming up with a scowl on my face or a bad attitude or timid, and they all just kind of drifted away. So I was left with this dude, the guy whose sale it was, and we look at it and we find damage or we don't find damage and we move on to the next one. So keeping an open mind about what you think you might find at the house makes a massive difference in your attitude and your stress level when you're on catastrophe, when you're on a catastrophe deployment. Every single day that you're on catastrophe, you're on catastrophe deployment, right? Where you're away from home, you might be several states away, several hours away, a couple of day drive away, and you're living in a hotel. Every single day that you're there, you have to be productive in some way. And one little small thing can derail you for a day, which can cost you money. Because if you're sitting in the waiting room at the auto repair place because your starter went out, right? Or because there was some critical maintenance thing that you didn't take care of, like looking after the timing, the water pump, and really important things like that, that's stuff that you need to be doing in the off season, stuff that you need to do before the storm season starts. And that includes looking after your vehicle, making sure that your equipment's all in good working order and you have everything that you need, making sure that the pets are vaccinated and everybody's got their shots and dental appointments, all that stuff needs to happen in the off season. Because even if you just go to the dentist for two hours on a Wednesday morning, that's two hours you could have been out in the field looking at houses. That's two, it could be, for me, when I was doing this, that's two houses, right? That could be 700 bucks, that could be $1,000 in those two hours that I would have made, but I'm sitting at the dentist getting the teeth cleaning or getting a cavity filled or whatever because I didn't do that in the off season. You know, there are other claims-related things that you can actually do in the off season that are app-based, right, just in your phone. Pop into the app and click the little available button and then start getting assignments. You can do roof inspections. There are several companies like HancockClaims.com that will, all you do is they'll send you stuff on your phone, go out and look at the roof for whatever they need. Trying to do something in the off season for work that is kind of related to what you do as an adjuster is pretty important because it can also help you to get more certifications. So if you can pick up, you know, go out and scope, do like roof inspections for a couple of companies where that's all you're doing and you get 100 roof inspections under your belt, then you can go to HagueEducation.com and sign up for and take and get their Hague Certified Inspector certification, which is highly regarded in the industry and has a really robust training that goes along with it that's gonna make you an even better adjuster when the next storm season rolls around. So go to HagueEducation.com and click on the button for Hague Certified Inspector or HCI. If you've already got those under your belt because you are a contractor or you're already kind of doing this stuff, go there now and check it out. Use code adjustertv at checkout for a discount. So when I first got started doing this in the early days, I figured out a few things. I was starting to put the pieces together. And one of the things I figured out was that the more claims I closed in a day, the more money I got paid, right? Well, I took some shortcuts in the beginning that I learned were gonna damage me in the long run. And those were that I would call and leave a message at the homeowner's house. And with their time that I wanted to be at their house, and then I would just, whether they called me back or not, I just went to their house and looked at their house. And then if they weren't there, I would write down everything that I found on a door hanger and stick that on the door and then go to the next one. And that is called run and gun, okay? And that is, I didn't do that for very long because I got a little bit of a talking to by a manager who was like, listen, we really appreciate you being fast and productive and closing a lot of claims, but you have to also look after the customer. They have a lot of questions about what you, what you're doing at the house. They may have wanted to be there. They may have wanted their contractor there. So you have to give them those opportunities. So you can't just run and gun like that. And I noticed that once I kind of stopped doing that and made it a point to, in some cases, if they had a contractor, insist that the contractor was there, my customer service scores skyrocketed. And customer service scores are something that QA, anybody that's looking at doing a performance review on you as the adjuster, the number one thing that they're looking at is that customer service score. And running and gunning is not a good way to get a high customer service score. May make you more money. It's a sort of a short-term sprint kind of mentality versus having a marathon long-term mentality. You know, there's one thing that I think that can almost guarantee 99% that you will be successful as an insurance adjuster, as an independent property adjuster, doing CAD or whatever. Even if you don't have the best skills or you have an incomplete skillset, there is something that I, again, I believe can pretty much guarantee your success and your making your way into six-figure income. And that is to think long-term, be patient, and don't quit. The adjusters who don't quit, who when they're faced with a challenge of a slow year, or, you know, especially when getting started, or there just weren't that many claims and they have to find some other way to make money, they do it. They figure out a way to make it work and they keep doing it and they keep doing it and they keep doing it. Those are the people that end up making two, three, four, $600,000 a year as property adjusters doing daily and catastrophe work. If you quit, you'll never get there. If you quit at the first sign of any kind of inconvenience or any slight obstacle or challenge, you're never gonna get there. If you find a way around, over, or through those obstacles and you just keep your head down and you believe, you have faith in your mind and in your heart that you can actually do this, that this is real, that you can make this kind of money, it will happen and it'll happen sooner or later, but it will absolutely happen. It won't happen if you stop. If you're like, well, I'm gonna try and do this for two years or one year and if it doesn't work out, then I'm out, because then it wouldn't have been real or whatever, you will fail. You're guaranteed to fail, guaranteed. So you have to think long-term, be patient, and don't quit. You know, the independent adjusting world is really, really small and it's really, really tight-knit. If you go to a conference in 2025 and you go around to all the booths of all the independent adjusting firms, you'll meet managers, you'll meet operations directors, you'll meet all kinds of trainers, all kinds of people that have an interest in finding new talent, and that's why they're at a particular conference, like the National Association of Catastrophe Adjuster Conferences. They're there to recruit, right? They wanna meet people, they want to build out their roster, they wanna find talented people, and they're competing for you, right? So you go around and you interview with all those folks and you meet them and maybe you run into them at the networking events, on-site or off-site, and you chat them up or whatever and you get to know them just a little bit. And then the next year, you go to that same conference, you're gonna see this, it happens every single year, you'll run into that same person that you were like kinda chatting up with. You'll run into this IA firm and they're wearing a different colored shirt with a different company logo on it, and they're over here now. They got poached or they quit and they wanted to change things up and they took an opportunity at a different firm. So now they're over here at this firm. Well, they knew you there and maybe you got some work out of that networking contact that you made, now they work over here, right? And so you're like, oh, I didn't know you were working for Acme Adjusting. You now have an in at this other firm. So, oh, well, you guys, I'd love to interview with you guys over here. Oh yeah, totally, dude, you don't even have to interview with me. I'll just get you, we'll just get, go and fill out the application and everything. We'll get you on board and then I'll just get you going, right? I met you last year, you did some work for me. Now I'm gonna take you over to this other company. So now you're diversifying. So the key here is that networking in this industry is not linear, it actually compounds. Also, network with your peers. You absolutely have to make friends with folks. Theoretically, it could be your competitors. But here's the thing, you sit next to somebody in an orientation or in a carrier certification training and you chat them up and you go have coffee, you have lunch with them on the break and then maybe you go out to dinner with them or a bunch of adjusters or whatever, get to know those people. Nevermind the fact that you're gonna hear about work from them. And if you happen to go on the same storm as them, you guys can be like a knowledge-based network for each other. Like, hey, do you know what we're supposed to do with the, before I call my manager, what are we doing with this, send him a picture. Hey, do you think this is a hail damage? What is that? I don't even know what that is, right? That person may have gotten a job over here as a recruiter or a trainer or a director of operations or something. You just never know. And then you run into them and they're standing there in the booth with the company shirt on. Hey, what's up, dude? This company is so good. Have you onboarded with it? Have you applied at our company? You've gotta do it. It'll totally get you in, right? I'm telling you, not linear, it compounds. Did you know that in over 20 years of handling catastrophe claims, I never once handled a single hail claim in the state of Texas? Texas has the most hail damage costs, et cetera, of any state, number one. And it's more than the next three hail states combined. It is huge for hail. I worked hail every single summer, but looking back on it, I hamstrung myself because I didn't get, I didn't have a Texas license early in my career. I did work Texas on hurricanes and things like that, but I never worked a hail claim, which is kind of a bread and butter of a catastrophe adjuster. I didn't get any Southern state licenses or Gulf state licenses until mid-career. And I think that that hamstrung me and the opportunities, the amount of work that I could do, primarily chiefly because hail season and the spring storm season starts a lot earlier in the year than it does in the Midwest and the upper Midwest where I was mostly working, like St. Louis, Minneapolis, those kinds of places. Every license that you get, every single one is a key to more opportunity, period. Sometimes adjusters end up in court. If you get a letter saying that you're negligent, accusing you or alleging that you didn't do something that you should have, that you were negligent, right? That's what errors and omissions insurance is for. The person who's suing you is gonna call it negligence. You're gonna call it an error or an omission, right? And it may be that you didn't do anything wrong at all and you didn't make any error, but they just didn't like the outcome. So they're coming after you. General liability is for if your ladder falls over and hits the insured on the head and puts them in the hospital or you damage their property and they decide to sue you for that. And there is one company that I know of, and I'm 99.9% sure that this is the only company that does it, that provides E&O and general liability insurance only for the insurance industry. So they only do this kind of stuff that is unique to our industry. They don't do, if you're a baker and somebody chokes on a piece of bread in your bakery, none of that stuff. This company only does stuff for the insurance industry and that's CPLIC. We call them Kaplick. They call themselves Kaplick. If you go to cplic.net slash adjust your TV, there's a free download of a document that I put together with their help that shows all the different kinds of insurance that you need to have as an adjuster to protect yourself, right, includes like commercial car insurance and stuff like that. So go to cplic.net slash adjust your TV, download that for free. And they have a bunch more information and you can get a consultation from Kaplick about whether or not you need E&O from them or that you're eligible for it, right? Because if your brand's making new and you haven't done claims before, you probably can't get E&O from them. You're gonna get E&O coverage from your IA firm, most likely, especially if it's from a big IA firm, but it can get expensive because they take money out of every single paycheck. If you're gonna be in this for the long haul, then you wanna have your own E&O and general liability insurance. And honestly, it's a fraction for better coverage than it is if you get the umbrella coverage from your IA firm. So cplic.net slash adjust your TV, download that guide, get some information and make sure you're protected. About eight or so years into my catastrophe adjusting career, I was taking whatever residential stuff that they had. I was commercial certified, but I always got a mix. It wasn't until later in my career that I actually got, would get commercial only assignments. I was just taking whatever they had for the most part. And just, I was being a yes man, which is you absolutely have to do. And I think it's something, an attitude you have to cultivate and maintain throughout your career. But there comes a point where you're gonna be a yes, but man or woman. My manager asked me to, they had a bunch of supplies, like I tell mailers and shirts and handouts and door magnets, all kinds of stuff had been sent to my hotel to be dispersed to the adjusters that were staying in the area. And my manager said, hey, there's a guy over at this other hotel. Can you just drop a box by or take some supplies to this person? I said, yeah, sure, no problem. It was after, I think it was after dinner. So I go over to this guy's hotel room and chatted him up. And it turns out for this same companies, for the same two companies I was working for, the eye firm and the carrier, he was only doing commercial. That's all he did. And I didn't realize that that was an option. The only real reason that I was getting any commercial work as just sort of a general adjuster was because it was stuff that he couldn't handle. It was beyond his workload. So I was basically getting scraps from this one person who was doing all the major commercial stuff, which is incredibly lucrative for a whole lot of reasons. And he said, he basically said, I just wanna do commercial only. I'll work for you guys if you just give me only commercial work. And that's all they gave him. So he was the commercial guy. So all that simply to say that sometimes, once you get to a certain point in your career where you've built up a reputation, people are familiar with your work product, you can start making demands, so to speak. So instead of like as a brand new adjuster, a lot of times you'll see on social media, well, I wouldn't take a single claim until I had gotten a fee schedule and knew what the split was and negotiated this and that and it's due, there's no way. I affirm, if it's a huge event and they don't have any other choice, they're gonna use you, but the rest of the time they're gonna put a note in the file. This person's fighting over nickels and dimes. This person is challenging to work with. Because if you come at a dispatcher, all they're trying to do is just get the storm staff and you start trying to negotiate stuff. The dispatcher really doesn't have power to do that. First. Second, especially when you're brand new, your objective is to get experience. Your objective is to start handling claims, get your name on the boards, get some points up there and start building your reputation as an adjuster and start building your skillset. Later on, you can do like this guy on that particular storm who was doing only commercial work and say, hey, I've worked for you for six years or five years or four years and I've done great work. You guys kept me super busy. You tell me all the time how good of a job I'm doing and all I wanna do is commercial. Make it happen. Now you're in a position, you have some standing, you have a place to negotiate from. As a brand new adjuster, you have zero negotiating power. You just have to take what you can get and the good news is that it doesn't take long to build your reputation. Once you start working and this clicks with you and you get your brain wrapped around it, then you're off to the races. So one thing about field claims work, even daily work where you're kind of just working in one particular territory or your town or small region, doing catastrophe work, doing field, any kind of field claims work where you're in and out of your vehicle all day long, every day, you're going to, all your equipment is gonna be subject to wear and tear and it is a sort of accelerated wear and tear. This goes for vehicles as much as anything else but in particular, it goes for your computer, okay? You'll hear advice out there where people will say, you need to have the most powerful computer that you can get your hands on to run Xactimate. You need to buy yourself a gaming computer. Gaming computers can be $5,000, $2,500, $3,000. They're extremely expensive, right? And they may be really, really big and they may be really, really heavy and have a bunch of lights on them and all kinds of stuff like that. I'm talking laptops here. You don't need a computer that's that powerful first because Xactimate can run on just a regular old specced computer that you can get from Costco for 800 bucks. But the main reason why you shouldn't be doing that is because again, field use is incredibly rough on equipment and computers are delicate pieces of, you know, they're electronics, right? Vibrations, dust, putting it into your bag, in and out of your bag and you know, you bang it, you happen to, it slips off your shoulder in the parking lot or slides off the hood and you know, it could be in its bag, you know, in a sleeve, lands in the parking lot and bumps it, right? Run it into the door of the elevator going up into your hotel room. But you need a lightweight, small 13 inch screen on a computer for running Xactimate. You will appreciate it, what you lose in like screen real estate, you'll appreciate in just how feather light it is and how easy it is to just carry into the insurance house or wherever you need it to be, right? Also, an inexpensive computer is inexpensive to replace and easy to replace. You don't have to go back on Dell.com and go through the whole thing and check box all these things and order some fancy pants computer if your computer dies, right? Just go back to Costco or Sam's Club, whatever and pick up another one, download it and install Xactimate on it and you're back, you're back in the running, right? It might take you two or three hours to do that versus having to sit around and wait for your new computer to be shipped to you because you think you have to have a gaming computer. Just get a small, as powerful as it needs to be to run the software computer and just use it for work. Let's say you have been doing claims for two years and you had two really good hurricane years and you backfilled the hurricane stuff with a few really good hail storms and then over the winter, there was winter storms and you got to work up in the Northeast for some pipe freeze claims and then you're up in the Northwest for weight of snow. You were busy and you were so busy that you spent way less time at home than you did on the road, which was great. And you were very excited about that. You made a lot of money, right? And you're looking out there, you're at home and you're looking in the driveway at your 2005 Toyota Corolla that you were running claims in for the last two years and you're like, you know what? I deserve a new vehicle. I deserve something better, something that's gonna be more comfortable and you'll start to rationalize, well, my comfort is important and I find something that's, the fuel economy may not be as good but it's got a bigger tank, so it'll go farther and it'll look more impressive to the contractors when I pull up, instead of my little, the paint's a little bit faded on my Corolla. It still looks okay. It's non-district, nobody really notices it. But I pull up in that puttering up at that with my luggage rack, with my ladder attached to it and it kind of looks a little bit low rent, you're thinking to yourself, right? So now you find yourself down at the Ford dealer and you get yourself a F-250 Tremor, right? Just decked out, costs you a $90,000 pickup truck, brand new, long bed, crew cab. You sit up really high, it's got really cool, big knobby tires on it, whole nine yards, right? It's got a huge screen and it's got, well, it has navigation built in. You know, I use maps all the time for, you know, that's how I get around. It's how I get to my claims, it's how I make money. So it's gotta have navigation, right? So then you've got all this, you know, bells and whistles and all this kind of stuff all over it. First of all, you're gonna tear it to pieces, right? You're gonna put the tens of thousands of miles per year on this vehicle and it's gonna wear it out a lot faster, even if it's a diesel. You know, a diesel isn't broken in until it's, you know, got 100,000 miles on it. We're gonna hit 100,000 miles in a couple of years. Two, one and a half to three years easily, right? And now it's broken in and now you're just, you're just racking up miles on it. You're driving it all over the country, you are driving it on back roads, you're driving it in traffic, it's sitting and idling pretty much all day long in the hot summer in San Antonio on a hailstorm. This will wear out your vehicle very quickly, okay? Don't be buying new cars and immediately taking them and working with them. Long story short, just like with the gaming computer, laptop, buying a nice vehicle, there's something that you're like, if you're a home, right? And you like, you wanna treat yourself, you've got all your other bills taken care of and you're like, no, I don't need to upgrade my vehicle for home, right? I need a pickup truck because I haul a horse trailer and I need to, you know, I do a lot of building stuff and have a shop and I need to like go get wood and whatever, and so I need a pickup truck for that, blah, blah, blah. Fine, whatever reason you can, excuse you wanna come up with to buy a nice pickup truck, an $85,000 pickup truck or whatever they are these days, go for it, but don't be using that for work. The Corolla, if you can keep that thing going, maybe take and give it a paint job, take it in, if you're not handy or super mechanical, take it in to a trusted mechanic and an off season and say, find everything wrong with this, look at the maintenance schedule, bring it up to current with the maintenance schedule and everything else that's wrong with it, fix it. Whatever it is, if it's a suspension, you need to replace the radiator, all that stuff, right? If it needs transmission work, put a bunch of money into that car and it'll last you another five years working claims. Again, I don't know what paint job is for like a Toyota Corolla, but just getting it painted white or the same color just to freshen up the paint. I replaced the taillight housings on my 4Runner, which had LEDs in them and the LEDs were starting to go out. They were $160 a piece, and so it was like 300 and some dollars, including shipping to get those taillights and they would rock auto deliver them to my house. And it took me, you know, once I got the figured out where all the screws were, it took no time at all to just pull out the old ones, chuck them and put in the new ones. I did the same thing with the headlight housings, right? And that alone refreshed the look because, you know, over time the headlights, they'll start to get hazy and like get yellow to whatever. And it even like can affect the safety of the vehicle. You know, at night when they get hazy like that, it reduces the brightness of the headlights so you can't see as far, right? And then you hit a deer and then, oh boy, even more problems, right? So if you could have seen a hundred feet farther with brighter headlights, you know, a couple of few hundred bucks to replace the headlight housings. I mean, you can try and use that little like polisher thing. I tried doing that several times. I had the dealer do that one time and it never lasted. Just replace them, right? And that goes for anything else on a car. This car is gonna get beat up. You can put money that you put into a beater car, and I don't mean a car that's a junker. I mean a car that is just something that you're not gonna pick up a first date with. It's a car that works great for work. It's reliable and you just fix it up a little bit. That's gonna be money much better spent than buying a brand new vehicle and destroying it by using it for field work. Does that make sense? So long story short, do not drive your fancy luxury car that you bought with your store money. Do not use that for work, period. And I know because I did it like a dummy. You represent the insurance company when you are driving around in town and you have company door magnets on your vehicle, right? When I was a field support manager, I was doing ride-alongs with the adjusters who were on my team, right? And I wasn't really their manager. I was more like I helped them. And like the newer people I was doing some training with and the experienced people, I was, you know, okaying if they wanted to total or whatever, I can say yes or no based on the rules because they want to have my name in the file, you know, trying to total every, so some of those guys wanted to total every row from me, but anyway, whole other topic. I did a ride-along with an adjuster who was super nice guy. He had his wife and their toddler. It was like a 1996 Astrovan, right? And it had a lot of body rusts and, you know, it looked like it ran. You know, I would meet the guy at houses and follow him to the next one and follow him to the next one and then I would go meet some other adjuster. This guy, super handy. You know, he was very, very proud of the fact that he bought that Astrovan for a couple of hundred bucks and he fixed it up himself every single time. His wife had to get in there and like start it and he had the hood open and was fiddling around under the hood, holding something and doing something over here to get the car to start every single time. It had some dents on the body. That's great. You know what, you saved a lot of money and if you're just starting out and you are coming from a place of being absolutely broke or you're, you know, very young and you don't have a whole lot of resources saved up and you have to do that, I'm gonna tell you at least try to find a vehicle that doesn't look like a total junker. Again, like I said, you're representing the insurance company when you pull up in front of somebody's house. They're gonna wonder, where are all the thousands of dollars a year that they spend on their premiums for their homeowner's insurance? And if the company car is a rusted old beater like that, they're not gonna be, they may wonder why they're insured with this company. Where else are they trying to save money? By the same token, you don't wanna be pulling up in front of an insurance house in a brand spanking new like S-Class, anything, Mercedes, BMW, any kind of a luxury brand vehicle, a big old Escalade that's brand spanking new. If you pull up in front of an insurance house with a car like that, first of all, you're gonna ruin it, right? Like we just said earlier. Second of all, you pull up in front of an insurance house in that vehicle and then you scope the loss, you meet with their contractor and you fight with the contractor and you say that there's no damage. And then you tell the insured, well, thanks and hand him your card or whatever. And you go and you jump in this $115,000 vehicle. They're not gonna be super happy. And I promise you, the first thing that they're gonna do is they're gonna call their agent and complain that their insurance adjusters are driving around in luxury vehicles and denying claims. And I can see where you guys are spending your money because they still don't know that you're an independent contractor and you're just driving your own vehicle, right? They think that that's your company car. And that's probably a worse, they're both bad looks, the Junker and the luxury vehicle, but the luxury one might even be a worse look than the Junker just because of that perception. Nondescript, you know, late model, Japanese SUV, a minivan. Personally, I don't think pickup trucks are a great storm vehicle. I think that anything that gets a really good fuel economy, even a car, we have a Subaru Crosstrek that we use for buzzing around town and for going skiing and whatever. Also have a pickup truck for telling stuff. But if I was gonna be out in the field running claims, I probably would take that Subaru or get an older Subaru that I just had for claims. Light, right? Some just nondescript color, put a luggage rack on it and put my ladder on there. It's got a ton of room in the back seat. Gets 32 miles to the gallon and people are gonna forget it. They're not even gonna look twice at it. It's just a little car, right? You can go even more nondescript than that with the little like transit vans, right? The sort of micro commercial vans. Have a ton of room in the back and you can set up a little office back there and everything else. So let's be practical. Let's not be driving around luxury vehicles. And when you go to orientation on the next big hurricane, you're gonna know who the adjusters are because it's gonna be a whole line of F-250, F-350, Dodge 3500, whatever pickup trucks, Duallys, everything else with ladder racks and ladders all over them. Those are adjusters trucks. And that is, don't do that. Cause you might be able to get pretty good at fuel economy with diesel. What are you doing with a pickup truck on when you're looking at roughs? You're not putting materials back there, right? And you don't need a full-size long bed pickup truck to carry around an extension ladder. You can put that on your car. I ran with a 32 foot extension ladder on top of my Toyota 4Runner for 15 plus years and it didn't look stupid and it was perfect. It was perfect. All my stuff was secure inside that vehicle and nobody said boo or even thought about my car. It didn't look like a luxury vehicle. It just looked like a little SUV. I had my first storm and then I did another storm and then on my third storm, I started to, was really getting into the groove of putting together a file. And keep in mind, this is back in the late 90s, early 2000s when we were still doing a paper file. And that is, we would write the estimate up and exactimate, print out a few copies of it. One for the file, one for the agent, one for the insured, whatever it was, right? Writing checks, handwriting the activity diary, taking pictures with Polaroid cameras, printing, you know, stapling those on a piece of paper and handwriting, doing all this stuff, right? I could still do a hail claim in about an hour. From the time I showed up at the house till the time I drove away and the file's totally closed, I could go straight to the office and turn that in and be done with it, right? Getting systems down. When I figured out that instead of taking three hours to do a claim, it took me an hour and a half to do a claim or 55 minutes or 45 minutes to do a claim, I could do more claims during the day and it wasn't stretched, probably within seconds of having that first thought to this next thought, which was, I could give myself a raise on my next paycheck by being just even 5% better at whatever it was I was doing in the claims process. And the second I figured that out, I started to look at my whole process and how I was interacting with the insured, how I was running my schedule, how I was planning my day, how I was moving around properties, through houses. I started to get very, very, very interested in all the ways that I could take less time to do those things. This was probably the single biggest thing that I figured out as an adjuster that I feel that put me squarely on the top of the first call list for the companies that I worked for. Being more efficient helped me make more money because I could get more done during the day. I could get more claims closed week to week. And the more claims you close, the more productive you are. You're showing up on a list in your manager's spreadsheet, right, or in their system. They can tell what your numbers are, right? And the people that are closing a lot of claims, they see your pending shrinking, they're giving more claims to Matt because Matt has 167 claims closed with six pending right now. The next person has 80 claims closed with 30 claims pending, and so on and so forth. I'm getting the new claims, okay? In the same amount of time that everybody else is doing 50 claims, I'm doing 250, 150, 300 claims, right? Depending on how fast or slow those adjusters are. And so I'm making more money per day, I'm making more money per storm, and I'm getting more storms because my managers are like, well, Matt really is knocking him out of the park. And especially after I figured out the whole customer service thing, you know, Matt's customer service scores are really high. He's extremely productive. We have to keep Matt busy because we don't want to lose him. So I would get more storms per year and make more money per year. And the second I figured that out, everything changed for me. So being intentional about how your quality and your efficiency is, that's where your creativity comes from, right? That's where you apply your intellect and your smarts. How fast can you get these claims done while also maintaining high, very high quality on your file and your customer service and making the homeowner feel or the policyholder feel like they were given a fair shake and that they got good customer service from their insurance company. Figure that out and everything will change for you. Did for me. So early in my career, I had a season that got a late start and I was not working in the off season. I was just going on vacation and just, you know, messing around at home in the yard, you know, going out with friends or whatever and started to run out of savings before the next deployment came along and had a panic attack and I had to start selling things off. And had I actually, and I started doing this after this, obviously, but had I had some kind of work in the off season, I wouldn't have had that problem at all because all the money that I made that previous summer would it be sitting in savings, earning interest while I was being a bartender, which, you know, back when I was single, probably would have been a great job for me. We didn't have Uber or Lyft or Uber Eats or anything like that back in the day. Work that's easy to get and easy to quit, but having a plan for when you're not working cat or, you know, you're not on storm deployments, having something to do to protect that savings and to keep paying your bills until the next storm season rolls around, in my opinion, is pretty critical because why are you even doing this anyway? Do you want to travel for the rest of your life? Depending on how old you are, you know, maybe you do. You have to look at your storm seasons as your ways to make a lot of money that you sock away into savings, but then protect that savings and protect yourself by doing anything that you can in the down season, work that's easy to get, easy to quit, so that you can keep your bills paid and not dip into your savings so that you can actually build something there, a retirement, or maybe if you wanted to buy a house or a property for cash, you work for five years and save all that money up and then just plunk it down on your property and then you've got paid for a property, right? Think ahead, have a goal with this because storm season's not kicking off the way it normally does. It's getting a much later start and you just ran out of money. You know, the first week of November, or maybe it's even a little bit earlier than that, it's the last week of September, it's still kind of warm outside. Unless something else happens, you know, a hurricane blows up or whatever, you're probably gonna be not working again until spring or until some winter storm pops up. Take a break. Just give yourself a chance to decompress. It's gonna take several days to not wake up at 4.30 in the morning, right? Your need to do this may vary, but for me, I needed a couple of weeks just to kind of like not have the responsibility of like a very rigid, strict, I'm working 16-hour days, scheduled, regimented day to not doing anything. It takes a little bit of time to make that transition. So give yourself that time to make that transition. If you wanna spend time with your family and pile them into an airplane and fly them to the beach, you know, go for it. This is one of the big benefits is that you really can take vacations when you need them. Unwind all that burnout and get rid of it and get fresh. And then once you've taken a couple of weeks, then start picking up some work just to keep paying your bills while you're waiting for the storm season to start up again or you're waiting for a winter storm. Take a break. Let yourself decompress. It's important and it makes it easier to have a long career doing this. It's probably one of the reasons why I did it for 20 years when most of, I think the average lifespan of a career of a catastrophe adjuster is like two years. I did it for 20. Prioritize your mental health and be proactive about fighting burnout and you'll have a long career doing this and you'll make a lot of money. The number one, and I mean number one complaint that I hear from high firm team managers, their managers, carrier cap managers, the number one complaint that I have, and I ask, right, especially go to conferences or if I get on calls or whatever, I'm like, hey, what's the number one thing that adjusters, that's your biggest pet peeve that adjusters do that you wish that they would not do, right, or that they would do better? And 100% of the people that I ask always, they don't have to think about it at all, they say, oh, you know, adjusters that don't communicate, that don't return my phone calls, that don't return the insured's phone calls, that tell the insured that they're gonna call them by five o'clock on Friday and it's already the next Wednesday and they still haven't called the insured, the insured's calling their agent or they're finding, they're gonna get your manager's number somehow, it happens, and they're gonna be screaming that person's ear off, hey, I don't, adjuster said he was gonna do this, right, he didn't, right, creating work for everybody. If you don't communicate with your manager at the minimum, right, if your manager sends you a text message or calls and leaves you a message and you don't call him back, because you don't have a, either you just don't give a crap and you don't, you know, like, I don't like to call that guy back, why do I need to, I'm out here working my butt off, doesn't he understand that I'm, you know, I'm out here making money for that company and I got stuff to do and I don't have time, right? If you have that bad attitude, you shouldn't be doing this in the first place or if you don't have a system set up where it makes it easy to call people back, then you're gonna be, quickly end up on the DNH list, okay, or DNR, right, DNR stands for do not rehire, right, it means do not use on future events. If you can't answer the phone, if you're up on a roof, have a system for calling back within a couple of hours or it's between claims or whatever it is, as soon as you can to be like, hey, what's, hey, I just saw you left a message or I saw that you called, what can I do for you, what do you need, right? They appreciate that, sometimes adjusters will be out working and working and working and they won't answer their phone and they won't call their manager back and that drives managers absolutely crazy and they learn to hate your guts for that. It's a simple thing to prioritize communication in your daily schedule. One of the big things that my students tell me after they graduate from my training is that the communication piece, the scheduling piece, the time management piece, which is all part of this, you have a spot in your schedule for every possible thing that could happen, makes it easy for you not to be surprised and get, have train wrecks happen or you have a built-in buffer against calamity, right? Communication is one of the biggest pieces. Doesn't mean that you have to communicate more, it just means that you have to do what you said you were gonna do, right? It means that you have to return calls promptly, especially from your manager and you need to prioritize customer communication, so important. I think that one of the biggest things is one of the biggest sort of mental shifts, and there's a few, but this one I think is pretty significant that made a pretty massive difference and made this work, I think, a better experience for the customer and it made it, honestly, it made it easier for me to do the work. I had much, much lower stress level. I didn't have like panic or high blood pressure or high anxiety doing catastrophe work. It was, once I figured this one out, it made the, like I said, it made the work a lot easier and most storms that I worked were, dare I say, cakewalks after I figured this one out and this lesson that I learned was that everyone is your customer, okay? And this is like, oh, well, it's customer service 101, so the customer is your customer and your manager is your customer, right? Yes, but the agent is your customer, right? Which is the sales apparatus of the carrier. So your IA firm team manager is your customer. You're sort of a independent contractor, right? So you're, they're hiring you because of your work, your ability to do this work. So if you treat them as though they are your customer, right, and you're serving them, then it makes that relationship better. The carrier managers, right, the people, the QA people, the file examiners, the cap managers, all those folks who you may or may not like directly interact with, treat them like your customer as well anytime that they, you have any interaction with them because you, they're the ones that hold that first call list. So generally speaking, when an insurance company says, hey, we had a big hailstorm in St. Louis and they reach out to your IA firm that you work for and they say, hey, we need 50 adjusters in St. Louis for hail. And they'll shoot an email over or hand a list or say, and these are the, you know, if you have these 10 adjusters available, we really want them to work on this storm, right? And it's, this is from the carrier. I was on that list. A lot of adjusters worked their way onto that list. They're your customer, right? The customer is your customer, obviously. And the, I think the biggest shift here for me was to recognize that even the contractor was my customer. The public adjuster was my customer. The attorney, any attorney that may be involved was my customer, right? Why were those guys my customers? Because if I treated them with the same dignity and respect and I worked to establish rapport with them the same way I do with the customer, the agent, with everybody else, then my interactions with those folks became way smoother, way, anxiety dissipated, stress was absolutely reduced. And because I was making an effort to, you know, look them in the eye, shake hands with them, crack a little one-liner joke or whatever, you only really need like one or two jokes and you can use them with everybody because you're gonna meet different people every single time. Those kinds of things show those people that you're a human being and they're more likely to interact with you on a human level than adversarial level. Because when you're adversarial, you other your opponent, right? And they become less than human. And this is just human history and human nature. If you can do an end run around that and show that you are a human being and you're there to help and you're there, you know, let's work on this together kind of attitude, then it makes it very, very, very hard for them to be a jerk to you and to try to do underhanded things to you because they feel bad about it, right? Because they may actually, in spite of themselves, decide that they like you just a little bit. And that's all you need, right? If you're going to the grocery store, even if you're not wearing a Storm shirt, right? With the red shirt with the company logo on it and you're going through the checkout line and, you know, some poor little old lady has got a whole huge pile of groceries that she just went through and then she pulls a big bundle out of her purse with a rubber band wrapped around a big bundle of coupons. And then the checkout person's like trying, having to go through 50 coupons. And then, and then they pull out their checkbook and you're like, who even writes a check? And you're, oh, you know, doing this kind of thing. You're standing in the line. People will see you do that, right? Oh, the State Farm guy, he kind of like lost his shh in the checkout line at the grocery store. Can you believe that? Even if you're not wearing a Storm shirt and you're standing there in the checkout line and you do the same thing, you're in the neighborhood where all your claims are. Somebody is going to recognize you. People will see you. And you might go, you might've forgotten to take the door magnets off your truck and it's got the company logo on it. And somebody who was in line behind you and was like not really impressed with your puffy behavior sees, you know, happens to walk out at the same time as you. I have that same company. I hope that's not my adjuster, right? The small things. And you may never hear about it. It may never have an impact on you or it may. Why would you want to have things out there that could have an impact on your career, on your relationship with your customer, your clients, everybody who's your customer and have an impact on your ability to make money, right? Why have that floating out there? Or better just have a good attitude all the time. Treat everybody like they're your customer. Always walk into a situation with how can I be helpful? How can I be a benefit to this situation? How can I serve this situation instead of how can I get something out of the situation? How can I get around this? Or how can I benefit? How can I personally benefit from the situation? Flip it around and life's easier. It's just straight up. And you'll find that in unexpected ways these things will come out, okay? Just pure and simple. Most adjusters completely miss this. And it's one of the biggest reasons that they don't get picked up after their first storm. What are IA firms really looking for? And what separates the ones who make it from the ones who don't? This is such a big deal and such a big topic that I actually created an entire deep dive video about it. And you can check it out right here and I'll see you there.