Leadership Interview

MICHAEL POPE

VP of Operations

All leaders

The Seat

Broad Industry Set

The same industry-wide questions every HPM leader answers.

  1. For an agent who has never worked with an FMO, what does an FMO actually do on a normal Tuesday that an agent could not do alone?
  2. When someone chooses the wrong Medicare plan, what happens to them six to twelve months later that nobody warned them about, and how does a good agent prevent it?
  3. What is one rule in Medicare or the ACA that makes no sense until someone explains why it exists?
  4. What is the single piece of advice that, if a new agent followed it, would almost guarantee they wash out inside their first year?
  5. What decision does a new agency owner make in the first ninety days that quietly kills the agency by month eighteen?
  6. Two agents both step away from selling for six months. One comes back to a business that kept running, the other comes back to nothing. What did the first one build that the second one did not?
  7. When a CMS rule change or a carrier shift lands, who tends to get hurt and who tends to get ahead in the same six months, and what separates them?
  8. What is a book of business that looks impressive on paper but is actually fragile the moment the agent behind it steps away?
  9. If an agent builds their whole book through an FMO and later decides to leave, what should they have asked about book ownership and portability on day one?
  10. What kind of agent should you honestly talk out of this business, or out of going independent, before they get hurt?
  11. Where is the health insurance market actually heading over the next three to five years, and what should an agent be doing today to be ready for it?
  12. What is a moment in this business where doing the right thing for a client cost you money, and would you do it again?

The Operations seat

  1. Agents rarely see operations until something breaks. What are you doing every day so that it does not?
  2. What does making the product mean for an FMO, when the product is really the service an agent and their client receive?
  3. What is a signal that tells you an agent's book is quietly rotting even while their sales numbers look fine?
  4. What is the difference between customer service that keeps a client and service that just closes a ticket?
  5. When an agent joins HPM, what part of the operation surprises them most in a good way?
  6. What breaks most often as an agency grows, and how do you build processes that hold up under that growth?
  7. How much of retention is the agent's job, and how much is the operation behind them?
  8. What is one thing an agent could copy from how HPM runs operations to run their own book better?