Caleb Conner

Building & buying insurance agencies. Sharing real analysis on operations, valuations, and growth.

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

Today was the seller’s last day after 30 years running the agency. We kept it conversational and respectful the whole way through. But now that she’s gone, something shifted. There’s nothing like being in control when you’re the one responsible. Putting your own stamp on it. Building it your way. Genuinely empowering. Fresh enthusiasm for this next phase. Lesson learned.

[BILLIONAIRE UNIVERSITY® @TheBillionaireU]

Warren Buffett on why patience is key

The last 20 seconds are the most important.

[Black Edge @BlackEdgeFund]

Warren Buffett: "If we can't make a decision in five minutes, we can't make it in five months."

In a Q&A, a shareholder from Munich, Germany asks Buffett a specific question: how large is the universe of companies whose intrinsic value he carries in his head — the ones he could act on within a day or two if the market offered an attractive price?

Buffett doesn't give a number. He reframes the question entirely.

Speed, he explains, doesn't come from knowing more. It comes from refusing to think about most things at all.

"Our immediate decision is whether we can figure out what's being offered to us or not. I mean, there's a go no-go signal."

That signal fires almost immediately:

"Charlie and I are often thought to be rude when we think we're just being polite and not wasting the other person's time. So, as they start mid-sentence in their first conversation with us, we just say, 'Forget it.'"

He continues:

"We know very, very, very early in the conversation whether somebody's talking about something that there's any chance is actionable by us, and we don't worry about the ones we miss."

The filter isn't about the quality of the opportunity. It's about whether Buffett is equipped to judge it:

"We want to make sure that we don't waste any time thinking about things that, when we got all through thinking about them, we're not going to know enough to make the decision on. So we just rule those out, and that rules a lot of things out."

What survives that filter gets decided on immediately:

"So we make decisions—we can make a decision in five minutes very easily. I mean, it just is not that complicated."

Then comes the line that explains the whole system:

"If we can't make a decision in five minutes, we can't make it in five months. You know, there's—we're not going to learn enough in the following five months to make up for the fact that we went in deficient in the first place."

Deliberation doesn't fix a knowledge deficit. If you weren't already competent to judge the thing, five months of study won't close the gap — it will only manufacture the confidence to act badly.

So when the input arrives — a phone call about a business for sale, or a price in a newspaper, a magazine, an annual report, a 10-K — the only thing Buffett is looking for is a "significant differential between price and value." If it's there, "we move right then."

"And Charlie and I don't need to talk to each other about it; I mean, we both think the same way and we have generally similar spheres of knowledge."

Charlie Munger then names the mechanism directly:

"The answer to your question is we can make a lot of decisions about a lot of things very fast and very easily, and we're unusual in that respect. And the reason we're able to do that is there's such an enormous other lot of things that we won't allow ourselves to think about at all. It's just that simple."

He gives his own example:

"I have a little phrase when people make pitches to me, and about halfway through the first sentence I say, 'We don't do startups; they don't exist.' Well, if you blot out startups, there's a whole layer of complexity that goes out of your life."

And he confirms this is a system, not a one-off:

"And we've got other little 'blotter out' systems, and using those we finally find out that what remains is still a pretty large territory that we can handle."

Buffett closes with the part most people get backwards:

"We waste—I would say we waste a lot of time, but we waste it on things we want to waste our time on. And then we're very selective about that, and then we're good at it."

The five-minute decision is not actually made in five minutes.

Source: 2008 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

Reminder: It is very difficult to time the market (some would say impossible). One of the problems/features with the real estate market is that the price is what any one person will pay for the property at any given moment. So you can say something is worth X ( $1M ), however unless you have the right buyer at the right time then it’s just a wish.

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

@Bradleyflowers Really great! Thanks for sharing.

[Ryan McWhorter @rmcwhorter99]

give me six hours to chop down a tree and i will spend the first four figuring out how to give to axe to claude

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

Lessons Learned buying insurance agencies: Don’t buy tech too fast. I had an agency management system, then added a separate lead system to grow personal lines in a niche commercial agency. That was a mistake. Then I tried another platform and spent on consultants to connect everything. I was spending like a bigger agency, thinking I could outgrow the cost. Turns out, integration glue is expensive, and commitment is long-term. Take your time. Understand the full picture before you buy. Count the costs.

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

Lesson Learned: This is less of a lesson learned and more of something I got right. Putting down 70-75% of the purchase price in cash (while not optimal for cash on cash return), is beneficial for handling the swings in cashflow, and also allowing me to sleep easier.

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

Lesson learned. If I could go back on my last acquisition I would have paid 50k less in order to hire someone to train to replace the owner. I think this would have eased the transition, tremendously.

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

A lesson learned:
After hiring several consultants to help me with the transition of my insurance agency data, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually more valuable for you to dig in and understand the technical details of the new system.

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

Organic growth feels pure.
Acquisition feels faster.

In insurance agencies the real advantage usually sits in the middle: buy a solid book, then apply better operations, tighter P&L discipline, and retention focus.

You’re not just buying revenue, you’re buying time, a platform you can improve, and access to markets and carrier appointments that are much harder to earn when you’re starting from a thin book.

That’s the premise that keeps pulling me toward acquisitions.

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

Watched a webinar yesterday with someone billed as a lean / TPS expert.
Quick disclaimer: I’m by no means a TPS expert. I’ve never done Six Sigma training and I’m not a black belt. I’m just a fan of systems who’s read a lot of books on lean production and Toyota-style thinking over the years.
Anybody who’s spent time with those ideas knows one-piece flow is a core principle for reducing waste. So I asked her a simple question:
How do you think about one-piece flow inside an insurance agency when almost every policy involves handoffs and back-and-forth between people?
She didn’t seem familiar with the term.
My first thought was that the natural next conversation would be to map the value stream — lay out the full flow of a policy from intake and data collection all the way through to issuance and completion. Establish a rhythm or takt time for how quickly work should move through the system. And then intentionally build capability in your people so a licensed producer or CSR can own the entire flow instead of constantly handing it off.
We still don’t have that conversation much in this industry. Curious if anyone else has tried designing true one-piece flow around the policy itself.

[Caleb Conner @crconner]

@Jason I’m in

[1000yearhouse @1000yearhouse]

Work ethic.

[1000yearhouse @1000yearhouse]

So I’m at meeting house (essentially the local pub) at bar with my comrade playing chess when a fat plate of nachos lands a few stools down. I tell my friend to tell whoever ordered those nachos to pass them down. I don’t know who it is. They pass them down. This is my life.

[Department of Government Efficiency @DOGE]

Last week, Treasury went live with its first automated payment verification system. In total, $334 million in improper payment requests were identified and rejected due to:
-Missing budget codes
-Invalid budget codes (i.e. the payment was not linked to the budget)
-Budget codes with no authorization (i.e. the budget had already been fully spent)

[ENPICA @ENPICA1]

Check out our new website. https://t.co/YCOqkbVp3O

[Naval @naval]

The most expensive trait is pride.

[MATT GRAY @matt_gray_]

Success has a pattern:

Create once
Systemize twice
Automate forever