2022 - October Company Update

Welcome to my first company update of 2022, I have been meaning to do this for a while as I personally was inspired by a lot of people opening up their internals of their companies as they scaled. There is a lot of content to help people start companies, but I feel not as much as scaling up to a substantial amount.

My goal is to release this once a month from here on out.

Current ARR Goal

After talking with our team, I think we need to hit around 1.2 million annual revenue before we can move to the next stage of growth. We are currently at $300,000 in ARR about 18 months into the company, so this will require about a 6% growth month over month the next 2 years, or 10% growth for the next 14 months. Ambitious but that's what goals are for!

October KPI

Web Traffic

• October 16-31st (v2 launch date, reset data of Analytics on new launch)

Users

Total Users - 259

New Users - 259

Paid Users - its a secret, for now...

Revenue & Expenses

Revenue for the month of October 2022 was $31,587. It should be noted, I don't think some of our income caught the last day of the month just due to a delay in the sync, I am sure this next month the chart will make more sense.

Development Progress

• We launched our version 2.0 of our website expatinsurance.com. It was nowhere near feature ready and a slight downgrade from our last website in functionality, but its much cleaner design wise and on a platform we are able to iterate much quicker.
• We moved away completely from AWS Amplify to Vercel + Supabase to be able to launch changes quicker, so far we are loving it. Build time already went from about 15-20 minutes down to 1.5 minutes, nice!
• We integrated a completely new quoting system on the back-end to be able to live quote *most* of our providers, and are quickly adding in new features daily.

Business Progress

We have been really busy behind the scenes trying to set up the foundations for a strong growth year, I finally feel prepared with a solid team to be able to handle a large influx of clients. This has taken a while to set up, we are client advocates first and don't want to grow too fast and not be able to support clients for their complicated claims abroad.

Internal Sales Structure

One of the biggest changes we did, is we implemented a new internal sales team to help us increase revenue for the company. Historically we either had two models, Direct Sales, or a MGA network. This past 6 months however our internal management team was really busy and we neglected our direct sales, we almost solely relied on our MGA network to help expand our client base.

There is nothing wrong with this, this type of growth is very sustainable as they handle all client issues and communication. The downside is revenue growth is much slower to scale as it takes the second year renewal to hit before most of our money is made (i.e super high CAC). With our platform still in its infancy not making many direct sales, I decided to implement a hybrid program that mixed the two profit models a quick fix. This involved purchasing some of our top brokers' portfolios, taking about 50% more commission on them and giving them a salary into the future. This is why we had some large spikes in our income and expenses this last two month as we finalized contracts.

This new program has our broker network take a minor hit on overall pay in the future, but we took over many of their other support roles so they can just focus on sales and increase their overall production. The first month in, they are crushing it, increasing production by almost 300% so its working out so far and everyone is happy.

New Mexico TPA Office

We created a joint venture and office with our Mexican partner Novamar, we are going to use this office as a third party administrator for all claims in Mexico to help better scale our support teams, while also increasing revenue in our Mexican P&C lines. This has been quite the process dealing with the local Mexican government, insurance commission, and immigration. Doing business in Mexico is not easy, but this is a business moat right??

We just got done remodeling the floors and all the things that are never completed in Mexico. Our furniture just barely got in as well, we still need all our art, adding a few walls, computers, and all that jazz. The employees like the new space already so that's good. Hopefully we have some better photos down the road I can share. The employees here will work a hybrid schedule, coming in twice a week, and remote another two days. Our core team will still be fully remote and we will be finalizing a full separate corporate entity for this project around April.

My thoughts behind this is we will be able to scale our US entity just focusing on sales and marketing, while paying this TPA to handle all claim and renewal support, instead of over relying on the insurance providers. We are client advocates first and when you over rely on the insurers for support, it can make a conflict of interest.

Retained Legal Counsel

This year I am giving up full control over the company, sad day, but its for the best. Our employees have been working hard and deserve some equity.

We retained legal counsel in the United States that specializes in international businesses to help us handle a new equity share program for employees, but also prepare us for more complicated endeavors abroad.

CFO Hire

I have run through so many accountants in the past, its surprisingly hard to find accountants that are willing to take on more complicated global clients like us. I think I found the one however and hired her as our new CFO.

I am really excited to relieve the pressure on me to handle all the nitty gritty of our finances day to day, and most importantly have a pulse on our cash flow.

New Product Launch

We successfully launched a new insurance policy with our most trusted insurers, BMI.

We have been asking for a Non-US plan with more limited benefits to lower the cost for our clients that don't need all the bells and whistles of their higher end plans.

We really enjoy BMI as they have been in the market for decades, have a strong AM rating, are underwriting policies inside the United States instead of offshore havens like Barbados or Puerto Rico, and overall they have a great team leading the ship. Since launching we have increased our production with them almost 10x, doing almost 100k in new premiums with them this last month.

Another New Policy?

We also started working on an inpatient only plan with one of our smaller AM rated insurers, RedBridge, to help fill the gap of people looking for catastrophic plans abroad. There are some plans that are “defined medical benefit” plans that meet this need, but we see these plans as very limited and not worth the clients money.

We just got notification that another one of our insurers VUMI launched something similar and we are talking with them to see if it's available to the global broker network but we will see. We will still pursue this with Redbridge first as the lack of AM rating from VUMI after such rapid growth combined with a large recent corporate restructure is concern for us.

The actuaries have been pushing back on this idea very hard though, so we will see if they bring it together.

Pay Increases

We raised the salaries on some key employees this month by 40%, nice! Our core goal of revenue increase is to get our employees compensated well, as they stuck with us during a downturn during COVID and definitely could use some extra cash!

We also planned a strong dividend program for all employees and plan on remaining private for as long as possible.

New Brand Nomad Insurance

We recently purchased nomadinsurance.com for a future project. We are still vetting insurers to see if any will white label a product with us, that also offers global coverage and is AM rated. Is that too much to ask for?

This project will be shelved for now, but the seed has been planted.

Plans for Nov / Dec

Quote Improvements

Our development team's main goal is to launch the rest of our product lines in our smart portal, Life, Travel, and Mexican P&C. These aren't a key focus of our agency but we just hired some brokers to start to expand these lines and definitely have a large market potential.

Almost there!

Broker Portal

Once we get our sign up process a bit more automated we are going to switch gears and start working on our affiliate and MGA portal for brokers. These are tools for agents to help manage their referral networks, and also help them keep track of clients across all of our providers more easily. Our brokers are on our ass daily about this, so hopefully we get it done the next two months.

I just finished integrating all the data sources into our postgres Db, so it shouldnt be too hard to set up the broker views from here.

CFO KPI Work

We are working with our new CFO to try to set up a new profit model to hit our goals. They have been great combing over our books so far, and we are excited to see how they integrate with our team.

Equity Split

We are planning on starting the new entity change in December / January to help with the books.

We are moving from an LLC to a C Corp most likely to make shares easier to issue down the road, double taxation here we come!

Marketing Tracking

The V2 of our portal wiped pretty much all of our tracking we had set up, im slowly integrating it back in but we need to finalize our integrations with:

• MixPanel
• FB Pixel
• SimplyAnalytics

TPA Improvements

With our new office opening, we have a lot of improvements and capital needed to get it up and running. I got too used to be full remote!

Key focus this month is to get all of our computers ordered, get our Mexican support staff on stable work schedules, and finally integrated with our support platform Zendesk.

Marketing Focus

Lastly we need to get back on our marketing grind, we have been neglecting it with all the changes the last few months and we have a blueprint for some new growth channels, SEO content strategy, and branding campaigns. Good news is we are growing well completely organically, which means we are in a good position once we turn on these levers.

We started the hunt for a new head of growth, I used to run a marketing agency and our team is decent at it, but we need better leadership and someone that understands growth hacking on a level well beyond me. We don't have the revenue for this yet, but always good to start putting out the intention to the world.