Pros
Some of the leaders here are really good and committed. I count myself lucky to have had who I did. There’s a caveat to that I’ll put in cons. Good carriers available. If you’re willing and able to talk to people in real life and to network, you can get access to a lot of great carriers and sell all sorts of products. I notice a lot of the negativity in reviews are towards final expense sales. That’s easy to predict: final expense is a terrible product and by its nature it is targeted at elderly people who have mishandled their money for their whole lives. Also if you know more than one boomer you probably can already guess that they’re not overly concerned with leaving behind much for their descendants. My advice if you take the plunge is to study everything you can about ALL of the products. Learn what an IUL is, inside and out. Learn what mortgage plans are. Know what product works for which demographic and MOST OF ALL play to your strengths. Also do not join here if you are hard up for money. You need to have a good nest egg to get started. If you want to do it, spend enough time to be well versed and studied and with lots of money to grow your business. You can do it part time. If you live in a small town or you are a part of a community, you can definitely use FFL to get started in the insurance field. Commission is real and the money can be good. The reason people get chargebacks is because they’re encouraged to close, close, close and not to make sure that they’re really giving the best products available. Huge word of advice: if your leader encourages you to sell Americo, ignore them. It’s a terrible product and you WILL get a chargeback.
Cons
I had a good team but even keeping my head down I still detected some agency drama. I believe it when people say that they were untrained. Not all of the leaders in this organization are there because they want to lead. My leader was honest about which leads were trash and which weren’t. It’s not hard to figure out how to manage time to make calls to people who were suckered in to responding to an online survey or something. You have to be willing to sit down on a phone. I didn’t get into this industry to talk on the phone. This is more subjective because it’s not for me. Understand that FFL is primarily aimed at people who are going to be telemarketers. It’s not a dirty word, it’s just the truth of it. It definitely isn’t for everyone. Online training isn’t really there. You can see FFL’s training and some scripts on YouTube without joining. You also can join conference calls and training sessions but those mostly go at prime work hours, so you need to either be doing this full time or have flexible hours at your other job. Not fun. <- This is the main reason I left. There’s no challenge in sales, just long hours of drudgery as you go through lists and lists of names to call, and all lead types combined, it really is around 5% who actually want the products. So good work ethic and attitude count for a lot here, but charisma counts for almost nothing: at the end of the day, unless you do things your own way, you are an online and telemarketer. That’s just too depressing for me. You need money to start. Not a little bit either. You need to pay for leads up front. Hundreds or even thousands of dollars and that’s just before you even know what you’re doing. The biggest con is in the hidden costs. You need to be able to afford monthly fees you didn’t know about in order to even use some of the software required for the job. I hold this against the company because they didn’t tell me about this at all. Without the right tools, you won’t know which product to sell, regardless of your level of knowledge of insurance.