Posts by Michael Byrnes, Oklahoma City RedHawks

You might think trying to sell Thunder tickets is possibly the easiest job in the city. In some ways it is. “When I got here 5 years ago, 7 out of 10 people I spoke to were not NBA basketball fans prior to the Thunder,” said Scott Loft, Vice President of Ticket Sales, Retention and Database Operations for the Oklahoma City Thunder.

When I opened my insurance company three years ago, it was (and still is) the worst possible time for insurance companies in 60 years. However, I’ve been able to increase my business to six times its original size just through networking with referral partners.

I started in insurance about 9 years ago working with a very successful insurance carrier. When we met our goal of being in the top 2% in the nation, I thought I would feel more financially and emotionally accomplished. They didn’t measure success the same way I did – I wanted to genuinely help people and have more control of my financial future. In January of 2012…

Who have your best hires been? Believe it or not, my worst hires have been people who had long term experience and great technical skills. So what was the problem?

How do you go about making the sale? What is the best way to prospect for new clients? What is the proper balance of advertising, direct mail, cold calling, networking, referral mining, all those things that you can do. What’s the proper balance?

We run our business, SeatbeltPlanet.com, on love. How we relate to people, including customers, vendors, and employees, all comes back to love. The Greeks had something pretty cool figured out. They had four different words to talk about the different kinds of love.

At SeatbeltPlanet.com, we think in terms of MAPS. For those in Oklahoma City, we’re not talking about the OKC MAPS project. We’re talking about four core principles we run our business on.

As an estate planning firm, we’re much more involved in sales than most other types of law firms. Usually the only time you go to a law firm is when something’s wrong, like when someone has sued you, or during a divorce, bankruptcy, car wreck, etc. We’re not like that. Estate planning is almost the cosmetic surgery of our industry; what we do is elective.

We’re a very small law firm. We started in 2002 with just myself and Dustin Davis for about two years. As we grew we were very cautious with our expenses and wanted to grow slowly and appropriately. Today we’re at 21 employees with offices in Edmond, Tulsa and Dallas.

The RedHawks have always been a very sales-driven organization. All of the revenue streams within the team functions are really intertwined and it all goes back to ticket sales.