One of the hardest calls you'll make as a producer:

Especially when you're still building your book…

Is deciding when to walk away from a prospect and when to keep pushing.

I get it, it feels empowering to say no, and there's real utility to being selective with your time and energy. If you spend your career grinding away on accounts that are too small or just not a good fit, you're going to end up stuck, overly busy, underpaid, and wondering why your book isn't growing the way you want it to.

But here's the other side of that coin.

Some of my best clients today started as what I'd call a “3-star prospect”.

A newer company, one to three years in, maybe a crappy agent in place, and clearly needing help…

And I took a chance on them, and it worked out really, really well.

When you start with someone when they're small and grow with them, a lot of times they become fiercely loyal because they remember who showed up for them when they were in a world of hurt.

Now, it's not a guarantee, and once they grow other producers are going to come chirping, but if you did your job and you were there for them, they remember that.

So here's the deal:

If you’re going to make exceptions on three-star prospects, you better be able to see five-star potential in them.

And over the years I've found there are some pretty consistent signals that tell you whether that potential is really there.

Here they are:

A lot of what I look for is psychographic, not demographic.

And the biggest one is ambition.

I'll meet a contractor who's two or three years in with only a few mil in revenue, but I can just tell he’s a mover and a shaker.

He's got that it factor.

He gets things done, his whole life he's been someone who takes chances and pushes forward and figures it out, and there's a real hunger for growth that you can feel in the conversation.

You can't fake that and you can't manufacture it, and when you see it you know it.

The next thing I want to know is:

Whether this is a side hobby someone's taking a flyer on, or whether this is someone who's been building toward this moment their whole career.

Did they go to school for this, did their dad do it, have they spent three years as a project manager at a big construction firm learning the craft before going out on their own?

That background and reasoning matters. And not just to you, because underwriters are going to ask about it too.

We've all gotten calls from people who couldn't care less about their coverage.

But then there are buyers who, even if they're not insurance nerds, are genuinely engaged, they ask good questions, they listen when you're talking about things that matter, and you can just tell they actually want to make sure their business is protected.

That tells me a lot about how they run everything else in their operation.

They take pride in their business.

I'm not spending my time on a three-star prospect if they're treating me like just another person to get a certificate from.

That's a dead end, and I ain’t got time for that.

But if they're genuinely looking for someone to grow with, then i’m in.

Partnerships leads to referrals, to real relationships, to an account that compounds over time, and that's exactly what you're looking for when you decide to make an exception on a smaller prospect.

Partners scale. Vendors flail.

Yes, I just made that up on the fly.

This is probably the most telling signal of all:

And I've seen it play out over and over again across a lot of contractors of all different sizes.

The bigger, more successful ones? The ones who turn into 5-stars? They genuinely care about their people, and you can feel and see the difference in a first meeting.

I'll ask about benefits and just listen to how they respond, because you don't have to be able to offer benefits to pass that test, plenty of small operators can't yet, but if someone says "I don't really care" or "I can't find any good help, these workers all suck," that's a signal you don't want to ignore.

Negative people tend to stay small, and they tend to make your life miserable along the way too.

When I'm sizing up a three-star, I'm looking for the it factor, a background that tells me they're primed to be doing this, genuine pride in how their business is run, a partnership mindset rather than a vendor mindset, and the kind of person who actually cares about the people around them.

Find all five of those things in a smaller prospect, and I think there's a real chance that three-star turns into one of your best five-star clients down the road.

Swing away, champ. -MS