Stop Hiring Yes Men: Skip Wilson's Unfiltered Playbook for Building a Business That Lasts

The Three Questions Every Stuck Insurance Agent Needs to Answer Right Now with Andy Neary

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Andy Neary, former professional baseball pitcher turned insurance industry consultant and founder of Complete Game Consulting, for a conversation packed with hard-earned wisdom on branding, leadership, mindset, and what it really takes to go from stuck to scaling. Andy’s path into insurance started the way many do: by accident. After playing Division One baseball at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and spending two years in the Milwaukee Brewers minor league system, he found a pink slip in his locker and a family friend pointing him toward New England Financial. But the limiting beliefs that derailed his baseball career, fear of judgment, fear of comparison, fear of failure, followed him straight into his sales career and kept him mediocre for the better part of a decade. The real turning point came in 2014 when he and his fiancé Amy packed up and moved to Colorado, giving Andy a blank slate and the push he needed to bet on himself for the first time. He built a personal brand on LinkedIn when most people in the industry were still laughing at the idea, generated inbound leads by showing up every day with valuable content, and eventually had peers asking him to teach them what he’d done. By 2021, he walked away from his book of business entirely and went all in on Complete Game Consulting, which today helps insurance professionals craft a sales message that gets the right prospects to say, tell me more. The heart of this conversation is the mindset gap between six-figure and seven-figure producers, and Andy breaks it down into three shifts. The first is investing in yourself without waiting for someone else to foot the bill, a non-negotiable he says separates top producers from everyone else. The second is putting in the work when no one is watching. The third is owning the result, good or bad, and treating every loss as data rather than defeat. From there, Andy walks through the three questions every stuck agent needs to answer: what makes you different, what is your zone of genius, and who is your ideal buyer? Get those three things clear, he argues, and you have the foundation to become a genuine thought leader in your niche, regardless of whether you’ve been in the business two months or twenty years. Andy and Ty also dig into the future of the industry, and Andy makes a compelling case that AI won’t replace the relationship-driven insurance professional, but it will absolutely replace the transactional broker. His take is that the producer role is shifting from consultative advisor to industry expert, and agents who embrace that shift and use AI to automate the mundane so they can spend more time on relationships will thrive. Those still evaluating their stance on AI, in his words, are already getting left behind. The episode closes with two pieces of advice that Andy, a self-described natural introvert, says changed the way he sells. First, if you believe in what you sell and believe it helps people, you have an obligation to tell as many people as possible. Second, your job in a sales conversation isn’t to win the business, it’s to help the prospect make a clear and confident decision, even if that decision is no. Andy leaves everything with one final word: consistency. It’s the only secret sauce, and the best producers in the industry have simply mastered the art of showing up every single day. As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com 🔗https://andyneary.com 🎙️ @thetybradyway with @accelerateyourinsurancesales

Stop Hiring Yes Men: Skip Wilson's Unfiltered Playbook for Building a Business That Lasts

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Skip Wilson, digital marketing veteran, agency founder, and self-described framework guy, for a candid and practical conversation about building a business from the ground up, leading with intention, and defining success on your own terms. Skip’s origin story is one of the most disarming you’ll hear: he got into marketing at 16 by telling a girl he was a writer to impress her, and then actually had to become one. That early pattern of committing first and figuring it out later carried him all the way to a VP of Digital Media role at iHeart Media, where he spent over a decade building and leading teams at scale. When he finally left the corporate world to go out on his own, the imposter syndrome he’d somehow dodged in his fearless teenage years hit him full force, a reminder that confidence isn’t linear and that even the most experienced leaders have to keep earning it. Skip opens up about watching his father, a lifelong entrepreneur, lose his business, including the planes and everything that came with it, and how witnessing that from a front-row seat taught him that there is no such thing as arriving. You never get to stop building. He also shares one of the most relatable struggles of his career: learning to code while dyslexic at a time when WordPress required actual programming knowledge. Something that took him five times longer than anyone else, and something he quietly pushed through without ever letting a client know. The conversation takes a sharp turn into team building and leadership, where Skip is refreshingly specific. He offers a mathematical framework for employee performance built around four levers: desire, ability, expectation, and tools. His argument is that most underperformance isn’t a talent problem but an expectation problem, and that giving people a clear scorecard for their role changes everything. He also makes a strong case for hiring people who will push back, disagree, and tell you when something is dumb, especially in the early days, while acknowledging that his own tendency toward bluntness required him to eventually hire a COO to bring the warmth and relational culture his team also needed. On the subject of success, Skip draws a clear line between who he was twenty years ago, chasing a name and personal recognition, and who he is today, someone who actively shies away from the spotlight because he’s more interested in impact than in being known for impact. His definition of legacy is sitting on his desk in the form of a fortune cookie he kept not out of superstition but because he genuinely hopes it comes true: you’ll become known for your generosity. He points to Milton Hershey and Walt Disney as his north stars, two builders who created not just great companies but entire communities and whose generosity still sends students to college and fills theme parks decades after they’re gone. Skip closes by inviting listeners to reach out at info@draftmediapartners.com, where his team offers free marketing audits and business strategy conversations, because as both Skip and Ty agree, entrepreneurs take care of each other.   As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com 🔗https://legendarypodcasts.com/skip-wilson/ [https://legendarypodcasts.com/skip-wilson/] 🎙️ @thetybradyway with @draftadvertising

Imposter Syndrome is a Liar: How Rome Madison Walked Past a Billionaire’s Entourage and Changed His Life

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Rome Madison, a two-decade veteran of the precision medicine and life science industry turned keynote speaker, author, and confidence coach, for a conversation that is equal parts biography, business wisdom, and raw inspiration. Rome unpacks a journey that began not in a lab or a lecture hall, but on a football field in small-town Dennison, Texas, where he graduated college with a 2.0 GPA in general studies before teaching himself the language of genetics and genomics from medical school libraries. He spent his early career at the ground floor of the precision medicine revolution, building networks of key opinion leaders at top medical schools before eventually rising to VP of Sales. When a leadership regime change left him tutoring his own peers and spoon-feeding the industry to the very people he reported to, he made the leap in 2016 to launch his own consulting firm, Genomic Selling Solutions, helping early and mid-stage life science companies stop burning through capital and start competing with sound strategy. His first client? A multi-billionaire doctor who was making headlines for claiming he would cure cancer, whom Rome approached cold at a major oncology conference by walking straight past his entourage and sticking out his hand. The heart of this conversation is confidence, and Rome’s framework for building it. He breaks down the three anchors he teaches in his Confidence Clinic: acceptance of who you are in the moment, self-competence rooted in your genuine areas of strength, and strategy, even an imperfect one. Together, these three things allow anyone to show up powerfully, not because they have it all figured out, but because they’ve stopped letting what they lack drown out what they know. He speaks candidly about imposter syndrome, noting that a persistent 2.0 GPA graduate with no PhD had to override every instinct telling him he didn’t belong before he could build something remarkable. Rome also offers one of the most refreshing definitions of success you’ll hear, pushing back on the idea that hitting a revenue number or acquiring a status symbol constitutes a life well built. To Rome, success is a place you live, not a moment you reach, and it has to be defined by meaning and fulfillment first, with the metrics following behind. He traces that philosophy back to a season of unemployment early in his career, when a college friend mailed him a copy of The Purpose Driven Life and its opening words, “It’s not about you,” rewired how he saw everything. That single habit of reading, of biographies, of books that challenged and stretched him, is what gave him the discipline to self-educate into one of the most specialized industries in healthcare. He closes with a tribute to the two people who shaped him most: his mother, the first college graduate in their family who put herself through the University of Texas as a single working mom and told Rome he had absolutely no excuse, and his grandfather Richard Jackson, born in 1920 in Chickasaw Indian territory, an eighth-grade education, 33 years at Southwestern Bell, a pig farm, real estate, and AT&T and Walt Disney stock that kept sending dividend checks long after he passed, ultimately funding Rome’s daughters’ college accounts. As Rome puts it, as a Black man in America, he knows he is his ancestors’ wildest dreams, and he wants every listener to stretch their vision of themselves just as wide.   As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram 🎙️ @thetybradyway 🔗 YouTube | romemadison.com

From Quitting 80 Times to 7,000 Apps: Scott Heusser's Blueprint for Medicare Success

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty hosts a high-energy training call with his longtime friend and agency-building veteran Scott Heusser, who breaks down the four types of Medicare agents and shares the habits and strategies that helped him grow from a corporate career at United Healthcare to running an agency that wrote 7,000 applications in a single year. Scott opens up about his journey, from managing United Healthcare’s broker division and scaling from 25 to 1,200 agents overnight, to nearly quitting 80 times during his first year running his own agency on the East Coast, before the mentorship of Ty Brady and others helped him push through. Before diving into the four agent types, Scott challenges every listener to write down their top three daily priorities, backed by the sobering stat that only 11% of Americans actually accomplish their top three priorities each day. He also makes the case for 50 contacts per week for full-time agents, showing that 2,500 annual contacts at just a 10% conversion rate equals 250 applications, simply from opening your mouth and telling people what you do. Scott then walks through all four types. The lead driven agent relies on sources like Our Marketing, Target Leads, Lead Heroes, RGI, Facebook, and the Integrity Lead Marketplace, with the real differentiator being how hard you work the lead, not what you paid for it. The Medicare seminar agent hosts dinner events to deliver Medicare 101 presentations, with one of Scott’s North Carolina agents building a 300-client book doing nothing but seminars for two years. The Medicare kiosk agent works high-traffic locations like Walmart during AEP, county fairs, and even rural Dollar Generals, where Scott’s team once wrote 25 brand new to Medicare applications in a single county fair weekend. Ty adds a key distinction every kiosk agent needs to know: the rules restrict approaching people, but engaging someone or asking a question is a different matter entirely. Scott’s message is simple: success comes down to habits, hustle, and being willing to tell your story wherever you are.   As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram 🎙️ @thetybradyway with @heusserscott

From Mortgage Crash to Marketing Mastery: The Hard Fought Journey to Becoming the Expert Everyone Wants with Mike Saunders

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Mike Saunders, a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, and the creator of the federally trademarked Authority Positioning Portfolio. The two have history, Ty was a guest on Mike’s show years ago, and now the tables have turned for a conversation that is equal parts business strategy, personal philosophy, and hard-won wisdom from someone who built something real the slow and honest way. Mike’s journey did not start in marketing. He spent a decade in the mortgage industry at JP Morgan Chase before the 2007 crash effectively wiped out the world he had built. Rather than wait it out, he got his MBA in marketing, launched his own firm, and promptly made every mistake a new entrepreneur can make, chasing every client, offering every service, and spreading himself so thin that nothing stuck. For four to five years he describes it plainly as a desolate and dark time, with a wife, four kids in private school, and the pressure of it all bearing down. But buried inside that stretch of struggle was the moment that changed everything, the day he handed out his first book at a conference and watched the room respond differently than they ever had to a PDF or a blog post. That one moment became the foundation of everything he does today. What Mike built from that moment is a concept he calls the Authority Positioning Portfolio, a done-for-you system that positions independent financial advisors as celebrity experts through podcast interviews, TV placements, press releases, and books, all indexed by Google and working around the clock to pre-frame trust and credibility before a prospect ever picks up the phone. He draws on a principle from 1960s philosopher Marshall McLuhan to explain why this works: the medium carrying your message gives it as much value, if not more, than the message itself. The same insight that might get ignored on a LinkedIn post becomes instantly compelling when it is delivered in a televised interview. It is not about the content changing. It is about where it is seen. One of the sharpest moments in the episode comes when Mike flips the script on the ghosting problem that plagues so many advisors. When leads no-show or disappear without explanation, most people assume it is a follow-up problem or a pricing problem. Mike argues it is a credibility problem, and the terrifying part is that no one ever tells you. They just quietly decide you are not worth their time based on what they found, or did not find, when they Googled you. The solution is not more ads. It is permanent, indexed, trust-building assets that are working even when you are not. Ty and Mike also dig into what separates people who succeed from those who stay stuck, and Mike’s answer is simple but unsparing. If you are not moving forward, you are moving backward, because everyone behind you is still moving forward. He shares the story of an advisor who chose the higher-priced package not because it was comfortable but because he had learned that every time he stepped into discomfort and trusted the process, it worked out. That, Mike says, is exactly the mindset of someone ready to grow. He also introduces his daily VIP Three habit, three outreach touches per day to referral sources or strategic alliances, and his end-of-day practice of recording one good thing, a simple discipline that keeps gratitude and momentum running in the same direction. The episode closes with Mike finishing one of Ty’s sentences in a way that lands hard. You either win or you lose? Wrong. You win or you learn. It is a phrase that captures the entire arc of Mike’s story, from mortgage crash to marketing mastery, and it is the principle he would leave anyone with who is just getting started. Mike can be reached at MikeSaunders360.com [http://mikesaunders360.com/], where his full authority hub, interviews, and contact information are all in one place.   🔗 https://mikesaunders360.com/ [https://mikesaunders360.com/] 🎙️ @thetybradyway   As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com [thetybradyway@gmail.com] Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway