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Mitch Clouse of Clouse Insurance Agency joins Jethro Jones for a Spokane Daily conversation about his local business.
Hosted by Jethro Jones of Optimization Doc. Discover more Spokane business conversations at Spokane Daily.
Spokane Daily tells the stories of how local people actually make a living. Join Jethro Jones, the Optimization Doc, for conversations with Spokane-area business owners about why they started, how their businesses make money, what's working, and what they're building next. From solo operators and family businesses to growing local companies, each episode goes inside the work: the people, numbers, decisions, and challenges behind the business. Hear practical lessons you can use, discover businesses worth knowing, and meet the people shaping Spokane's business community. When we talk about AI, we focus on what it means for local businesses.
But it's part, I would say an action is just getting in this business place. It's just carriers are, every carrier has their own website or portal that we have to jump into and utilize. We spend a ton of money for our own agency management system and sometimes we just put systems, one system's not talking to the next. Quite honestly, the insurance world is still very technically antiquated and so we're having a couple things. together and just so we can get things done. Welcome to Spokane Daily. I am your host, Jethro Jones. I run Optimization Doc where I help businesses make and save money through fractional operations
support. A lot of it having to do with AI. Today we're talking with Mitch Klaus of Klaus Insurance Agency. Mitch, welcome to Spokane Daily. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. So what do you do and who do you do it for? Well, I am an independent insurance agent and I primarily work with businesses and I help them understand their insurance program and find ways to fill in any gaps or holes that they may have. Okay, very good. And why did you start the business, Mitch? Well, I got in the business in my teens, dad owned the insurance agency. I was working in high school.
I was working at a Mexican restaurant as a dishwasher for gas money. And he approached me after a while. And I'm the last of four kids. Anyway, he approached me and said, hey, I'll pay you 50 cents more an hour. You come work for me. It was a no brainer. I mean, it was more money during the day and I didn't come home smelling like that, the sourdish rag at the end of the night. And that began my insurance career. Oh, how fascinating. What a great, great story of starting when you're a teenager and doing it for all these years. So give me the numbers. How do you actually make money? What does that look like?
Who are your biggest customers? Like how do they? Gotcha. All that kind of stuff. Well, typically in insurance agencies, We get paid commissions by the insurance companies. Sometimes we have to add a service fee depending on the situation. But our biggest clients are really just, Main Street Businesses, one of my clients is started out as a business coach. He was a part-time college professor, became a business coach, exploded that in 10 years and now he's working with major, his clients are our major corporations. You know, they went from nothing to, you know, I don't know exactly what they're, you know,
several tens of millions of dollar a year in revenue. And we just started out with him. He just needed one particular general liability policy and then it just expanded from there. And I love those. I love getting clients that, you know, when they start out small and they just expand and they grow with you and whatnot. and we just found him the right carriers along the way as his business grew and expanded and so. Yeah, that's awesome. And this is the kind of thing where when you find someone good, you wanna stick with them for a while because they can understand your circumstances and what you need and understand all the things
that go into getting insurance for different things. And that was what Tyler was saying on the last episode of, He, you know, he talks to his insurance guy and he just gets it done, which is amazing. Yeah, absolutely. And Roland, I think that's kind of also having the value of an independent. Had another case where a CPA buddy of mine referred in one of his clients and their particular challenge was their carrier wasn't writing or wouldn't allow writing works comp out of their home state. and really just hampered the client for a while until they came over to me and we were able to find a carrier that fit their needs
and these guys are just going like gangbusters and they're probably in, oh, 15 states now. Awesome. So what is working really well in your business right now? What's working really well? I would say just communication with the clients with the clients is going really well and we've actually dialed it in. We've kind of we've shifted our focus and we're working with just specific clients so we've decided to solely focus on commercial insurance and that's going really well. It's it's freed up a lot of bottlenecks and dealing with persnickety insurance companies mm-hmm so yeah on the other hand what is harder than it
should be for you right now what is hard I would say actually just getting business placed it's just you know carriers are every carrier has their own website or portal that we have to jump into and utilize we spend a ton of money for our own agency management system and these sometimes are disparate systems one system's not talking to the next. Quite honestly, the insurance world is still very technically antiquated. And so we're having to cobble things together and just so we can get things done. I was telling a friend the other day, 80% of my day is just filing paperwork, if you will. Now it's all online, it's emails and that sort of thing,
but we still have to archive and document and whatnot. 80% of my time is just dealing with that nonsense. We're finally, with AI, we're finally getting away from that, but it's still gonna be, well, probably a year or two before we're actually totally dialed in. Yeah, interesting. I'm thinking about the process of having to go to a different company's website and submit a bid or request for information or whatever you do to get a quote, having to go through all that process. And I'm thinking about how recently I have started using AI with a browser open to say, go into this browser and go figure all that stuff out for me
and how exceptionally good it is at that kind of stuff where there's a clear structure and it's like, this is what you have to input. and then having a source of record that it can go back to and say, this is where I'm pulling all the information so that you are not having to feed it in again and again. Have you done anything like that? No, not to the extent, because we have to be very careful with compliance because every state jurisdiction has their rules and whatnot on privacy, which is, we like that. I mean, we want- Yeah. to protect our clients information. If we get the assurances that all of the PII if
you will is scrubbed out and we're going to use AI then I think there'll be a better adoption rate with it especially with insurance because the last thing we need to do is is put something out there then it gets out in the wild because of these AIs pulling data from the world. You know, the last thing we want is, of course, that to happen. But then there's the financial aspect of it getting hit with like an email claim, that sort of thing. So we're very no claim. What's that? You know, errors and emissions. And that's the thing too, is, you know, how are professional liability policies now responding to this rapid deployment of AI and ever-evolving you know insurance
moves at glacial speeds you know so it was we'll take like employment practices liability that something is still relatively new in the insurance world it's been out probably 20 years now but it started out as you know these large mega corporations say like Coca-Cola or something needed something to come in the insurance company or the insurance market responded but for that to get mainstream took several decades you know so we'll just have to see where like I say AI and insurance protection work well together well I've been experimenting with local AI on my own computer so that nothing ever leaves my computer and I'd
be interested to see if that would, setting something like that up, if that would make your job easier to know that it's not leaving your computer, it's only going into the websites you would visit anyway and staying on your computer. Yeah, yeah, no, that would, and I've seen cases or ads, I think, for like these set top boxes, if you will. You know, it's interesting how I was telling, talking to my bride the other day, how it's It's interesting how things were evolving. Used to be you had a computer at your desktop, didn't talk to the world. Now they had the greatest thing was computers talking to the world.
Then it went from that to clouds and server farms and everything's in the cloud now to now we're circling back to, now we're gonna probably have a set top box, if you will, a desktop AI that works. to yeah works but yeah if we can have guarantees as best can that our clients data is just not getting out there yeah well that's that's something that you and I should talk about a little bit more because I think I can give you a solution that'll do that and make your life a little bit easier and you know if 80% of your time is doing that then we can we can free up a lot of that time so anyway all right what should people in Spokane know about
you and how can they connect with you Wow well okay I guess probably the fourth generation here great granddad lived here was a wheat farmer granddad was a weed farmer anyway mom and dad born and raised I did spend some brief time outside of a brief kind of a lifetime my formed in years outside of Spokane and then moved back here recently we bought a carry and I bought a piece of the old family farm and built the house on so I guess really what they need to know about me yet we've got roots here I'm just here to help whoever it needs help really. Yeah excellent okay time for oh yeah and we also want to
make sure people know Klausinshinsh.com for Klaus insurance. All right rapid-fire questions the best business decision you've ever made. Best decision well okay besides bringing my bride in I'd say that they've really got to give kudos to that. But also bringing on my partner, Jonathan, really. I mean, he's really helped out in opening up doors and whatnot. Excellent. And what local business deserves a shout out? I'm going to say Perfectus business consulting. Really, you know, that old adage, professionals use coaches, amateurs don't. And I like the fact that they've got different tiers or levels
or pricing of who they can help and how to help. Yeah, very good. We're going to have Kendra on the show here in a little while, so I'm excited for that. She's got a phenomenal story, too. She sure does. It's very cool. What do you want to accomplish in the next 12 months, Mitch? Personally or business. I'd say business, I'd love to grow the, always want to grow the business, But you know, we could we could stand to grow the business probably 25% in the next year, we could definitely do that. Excellent. I really would like it all to be pretty much from this region. Yeah, Spokane focused serving the local community. That's
that's what I love. That's why I'm doing this podcast is to connect with more business leaders and stay focused here in Spokane. Because you've been all over the country and you've got clients and customers all over the country and so really making the focus here where You're living this is powerful. Yeah Absolutely. I mean we're licensed currently We're licensed in 20 states including the District of Columbia I was just talking to a potential client in New York, you know kicking around getting licensed there, but I really would like Our agency to Spokane be the the regional presence for just the western path of the country.
Yeah. Awesome. Very good. Well, once again, we have been talking with Mitch Klaus of Klaus Insurance Agency, Klaus, C-L-O-U-S-E-I-N-S dot com. Mitch, thank you so much for being part of Spokane Daily today. Indeed. Thank you for having me, sir. Appreciate it.