Many abandoned factories are dangerous eyesores, memorializing a lost manufacturing era while waiting to be torn down. But some, after the broken glass is swept up and the critters chased away, get a second chance at life, with a little help from companies like OutsideAgents.com.
"We'd do our strategic planning meetings behind all these drywall boards where they used to test the ammo," said OutsideAgents.com co-owner Chad Burt of the abandoned ammunition and firearms parts manufacturing plant that in the second quarter will begin serving as the company's 12,000-square-foot, dedicated agent-development and -education facility. "I thought that was real great."
Burt credits online and in-person agent education and interaction as an important driver of the growth of his Jacksonville, Fla.-based host agency, ranked No. 42 on the Power List with 2017 sales of $219.2 million. So the decision to turn the gun parts plant into OutsideAgents.com's center for agent education a process that took "about a year and a considerable amount of money," he said marks a step up not only for the agency's educational offerings but also for OutsideAgents.com itself, he said.
"This is a long-term play," Burt said, noting that four-day course registration fees of $99 show the agency does not operate education as a profit center. "We want people to come here, have face-to-face time. Get to know our crew, get to know their reps, interact with each other. Be truly collaborative, be truly interactive and come out a better agent from the experience. We feel that, long-term, we can make you a better businessperson, a better travel agent, and [if] we get along, then we're going to do good business for each other for quite a while."
Having a dedicated facility offers a few advantages, not least of which is the additional capacity to host more agents more frequently: Burt plans 16 live events at the facility in its first year. It also offered a better, customized technology package.
The facility could "get rid of all the shoe strings and bubble gum as far as our internal technology goes. It had been patched together over 20 years. So we could start fresh and build something that was cutting-edge from a technology perspective," Burt said. "It also allowed us to build it the way we want to build it. So now we have a dedicated video production area, a dedicated live training area and a lot of other facilities that are all geared toward immediate development, but they all have their space, and we're not tripping over our own feet."
OutsideAgents.com's educational offerings incorporate best practices gleaned from its 4,600 hosted agents as well as suppliers, Burt said, but they primarily are developed in-house by the company's executives, including Burt's cousin, co-owner Steve Muraca.
OutsideAgents.com's lineage stretches to the November 1992 founding of Cruises & Tours Unlimited, a retail agency owned by Muraca's parents, Sam and Sheryl. Steve Muraca and Burt, who had a background in technology and Internet marketing, hooked up to develop and promote the OutsideAgents.com site for home-based agents shortly before the 2007-08 financial crisis. The recession, Burt said, allowed the fledgling division to appeal to many people agents as well as others who were looking for work.
"We applied what was working well for our retail side to the home-based agent side and started doing some marketing, starting bringing on some agents," Burt said. "It was luck and happenstance, and we had a URL that had a lot of use to it. I put together a website, a really basic one, and we started marketing it. Started building tools based on what our agents were telling us. So there wasn't a grand plan I can send you a scan of our first business plan; it's on the back of a hotel notepad."
The next step for Burt and Steve Muraca, who now also own Cruises & Tours Unlimited, is the development of what Burt called a "fully immersive" agent development program in 2018. That program includes smaller class sizes, five-day courses and more interactive learning.
"For example, when you learn about our CRM [platform], we'll have the actual lead developers from that system here showing it to you and walking around each small groups of agents and answering questions, giving out hints, tips, stuff beyond what you would get from the instruction manual," Burt said.
"For everything we're doing, we're going to show you a little something, and then we're going to turn you loose with it. I want you to walk out the door with your business pen, ready to rock."