Complaint Review: NAA - Andy Albright - burlington North Carolina

I too spent 3 years with NAA and I find this persons complaints to be valid. Personally I attended the main events, hot spots, joined the CLUBS ect. Being a new agent I enjoyed the training and meeting new friends. My upline people were top notch and very helpful. I did not dislike my time with NAA. BUT with that said as you mature as an agent you start to see the "smoke and mirrors". My first indication that NAA was not the greatest IMO in the world was that I NEVER got what I paid for with the A1 $25.00 leads NEVER! I purchased hundreds of them for my agents. NEVER once did I get 100% fresh Life Insurance Leads as promised.

Example of my complaint, IF I purchased 10 A1 supposed first time never worked Insurance Leads for $250 I would receive IF lucky 2 valid LEADS and the other 8 would be a mixed bag of old Final Expense Leads, Internet Leads ect. ALL  for the most part worthless leads. IF I wanted those type of garbage leads? I could have purchased them ANYWHERE for $5 a pop or less. When I questioned my upline about the RIP-OFF I got the standard answer.. It just is the way it is, still the best leads in the business, they worked for me, work harder, don't buy them, buy the phone book leads for .10 a piece and dial for dollars.

After spending thousands on these GARBAGE LEADS and seeing all the mentioned Big Guns leave, whom bye the way were Andy's people, I QUIT. And no NAA I am not a quitter, I just have integrety and don't like being lied to by anybody. Today when I write a insurance policy I write it directly with the Insurance Company. IF I write a policy with an IMO? I usually get 80% or better on my commission split and I am never required to share the lead expense with my agents nor am I responsible to pay for another agents charge backs like NAA required. ALL in ALL I consider my past experiences with NAA to be negative and costly. It was a tough lesson learned on how NOT to run a insurance agency.

You can call our post a rant which is really the only thing you can do at this point but the facts are the facts. NAA has lost most of their major leaders in a very short span of time. John Kight, Shawn Meike and Art Leizure (just to name a few), 3 of NAA's most revered leaders/recruiters with the largest organizations next to Alec Fitzegrald(#2)...gone like the wind. NAA's justifications : Sexual harassment, abuse of power, family problems, blah blah blah. Basically anyone who posts anything truthfull about NAA is morally corrupt, a criminal, about to be terminated, etc. When so many people who reached to top at NAA leave and they all do it almost simultaneously you have to as an intelligent and objective person take a closer look. All of NAA's top leaders brag about their gross incomes not their net incomes. We were surprised by the numerous forclosures of homes by leaders who did nothing short of cry thanking Andy Allbright for changing their lives at convention. You cannot deny the fact that Andy Allbright has forgoten what made him great in the first place...people! When you treat the people who bled for you and helped you build an empire like customers they go somewhere else. Post as many rebuttals as you have time to post but NAA is sinking like the Titanic! We are grateful for what we learned and the people we met, truly we are! The problem with NAA lies with it's CEO, not the many wonderful, creative, and hard-working family people who follow him. NAA does lie and say they do not make money on leads...utter bullshit! The mortgage leads are decent but definitely over-priced. The problem with the lead system is that an agent, you cannot choose the leads that you want to invest in. You get what is given to you and getting credit for bad leads is time consuming and usually results in a denial. Managers get slammed with lead over-rides and just this has caused many a manager to quit after going broke. They say that conventions, all-access passes, President's Club, convention, etc are all elective but if you don't partcipate in these things and you are a talented producer/recruiter then you will not be allocated the leads that you need and you can have your entire downline taken from you for not playing ball the NAA way! Simplified issue is the law of the land not just because it mentions no medical exam on the mortgage lead but because it issues quicker and has higher comps for NAA. How do you justify non-medical to families in their 30's in perfect health? It is only done if the family mentions it and for no other reason. As an independent broker you can offer more coverage for less premium 95% of the time...fact! Foresters is a good carrier but very small and cannot afford to underwrite risk at a cheaper price like most other carriers! Mutual of Omaha is an excellent carrier but very expensive and not remotely competitive! ING..the biggest carriere but NAA does not give it's agents access to any products worth writing. Who else is left? Baltimore Life lol? CFG ? NAA does not have anything in its arsenal that can't be out-quoted or replaced by any decent broker! We honestly hope tha Andy Allbright gets over his greed and huge Christian ego and fixes what is broke for the sake of all the people who are still there. We know many of them and deeply respect them but Andy is as fake as they come. Even his $1000 good samaritan award is total crap! Get this...you write 10K in annualized production for 2 months in a row and his holiness will donate $1000 to a charity in your name. Translation - a $1000 tax write-off for Mr.d****ebag himself! If you really want to reward people...give them cash not camouflaged good deeds which help your taxes! People are not dumb and it is catching up to Andy. Good luck to all in NAA...you will need it !!

I believe that I know the individual that posted this report, in 2012 there was only 1 husband and wife couple from Riverside that would have had the volume necessary to boast being in the top producers within NAA, and they did in fact leave the company around July 2012, so I am 99% certain I know who these people are, and they were top producers, but not top 25.  I can say that they are not trustworthy, and that in fact the gentleman who wrote this post is not even a licensed agent due to a felony in his past, and his wife in fact is the legally licensed agent.  Part of the reason they left is because they were in the process of being terminated because it had come to the attention of NAA (through consumer complaints) that he was running appointments without his wife being present.  It saddens me to have to bring this information to light, but this rant is nothing more than a retaliation.

The first thing I wanted to say as a rebuttal to this post is that there are a lot of details in this post that are just completely false or highly exagerated.  I understand that some people believe that they have found better opportunities, but to bash NAA with inaccurate information after the system that Andy Albright created taught you how to succeed in the insurance business seems very misleading and ungrateful.  The parts that say that NAA are experts at teaching agents how to sell insurance, and that the fact that NAA sells mostly simplified issue seem to be the only truthful parts of your post.  I will take quotes out of your post and explain how the information is completely wrong.

1.  "By the 3rd year, my wife joined and partnered with me and were in the top 25 producers out of over 2000 agents for the year of 2012. We grossed over $100,000 but netted $58,000."   In 2012 to be in the top 25, you would have needed to have approximately $250,000 in AP, which with an 85% contract you would have grossed way more than $100,000.

2.  "I realized that NAA was nickel and diming me with clubs that are voluntary but that you are expected to join (President's Club $120/mo), an all-access pass($60/month), leads ($40 each for new ones), lead over-rides on all of our agents, 4 conventions per year, and countless weekly meetings"   Presidents club is OPTIONAL and if you choose to participate, you can joing for $10/week, all-access is completely free for all new agents up to a 70% contract (you forgot to mention that) and it is designed to help offset the cost of conference rooms used to train new agents, and finally at an 85% contract A leads (newest leads) are $34.19 not $40 and you get a 15% discound on leads if you are on a standing order which to be a top producer, it would almost certainly be a requirement to ensure regular lead flow bringing the price down to $29.06.  Also, these leads are less if the agent is at a lower contract, 55% agents pay roughly $25 or $22 depending on how they place their orders (again your exageration is very misleading).  One last thing about leads, you do understand that direct mail is a 1% response, and that it takes $35 in postage to create a lead, not to mention the overhead, such as employees, software, paper, envelopes, ink, electricity, and a mortgage on a 48,000 sq ft lead factory.  The true cost to create a lead is closer to $75 but everyone in the process from the agent to the Agency Manager all the way to Andy pays their portion to deliver these leads to new agents for as little as $22.  As for the 4 conventions... they are optional, and as of 2014 we only do 2, 1 in January, and 1 in July.

3.  "Their final expense leads read as if it was a government subsidized insurance program so 75% of those leads were garbage."   The Final expense leads did have some wording on them that caused some confusion and I admit that I was experiencing similar objections with approximately 30% of these lead.  What you forgot to mention is first of all, if the client said to you they thought it was a government paid program, NAA gave you a 100% refund on these leads, and secondly, NAA is very good at identifying issues of this type and correcting them.  Within the last 6 months, our Final expense leads have been completely reworked, and withing the last 3 months, these new FE leads have been approved by most states for distribution and they state right on the lead that this is...and I quote "a life insurance program designed to pay for final expenses not paid for by the government"

4.  "NAA lied  me about the fact that more than 50% of people who apply fully underwritten get declined and rated. This is not true."  We lead with Simplified issue because that is what our leads say on the front, they are asking for information on Mortgage life and DI without a physical exam.  We sell Fully Underwritten as well, and for clients that want to go through the exam, we can help them too, but to say that NAA lied to you, what you mean to say is that someone within NAA lied to you, its a bold statement to say that the one person that told you this speaks for all of NAA, because I doubt that one person was Andy Albright

5.  "Charge backs for us were huge, almost 20K in 2012. This was not because of poor salesmanship..../Don't forget that the 60K that we made in 2012 was with no participation in the NAA program and we paid around 20K for leads and charged back another 20K"   First of all, the $20k in chargebacks, if you are counting this against your gross which is how you made a net of $58,000, your math is completely wrong.  The gross income of $100k already takes into account any and all chargebacks because if you get a chargeback, they use your next commission to pay your chargebacks, so at the end of the year, these chargebacks have already been taken out of your 1099 income, and you still made over $100k gross.  To say you lost the business and it was not due to poor salesmanship, and it was because of the fact that another agent came behind you and sold a cheaper product is just not correct.  In life insurance, clients buy you as the agent, if the client loves you and you are truly taking care of their needs, the next agent wont even get in the front door.  I dont doubt that you are a decent salesman, but you are probably a hit and run agent that doesnt even call his clients if you get a cancelation notice fromt the carrier, and by the way, an 80% persistency is above industry average, I recently talked to an AFLAC agent that said if he got 50% persistency he was doing very good, there is no such thing as 100% and to blame your 20% in chargebacks to NAA is just plain stupid.

In summary, here is what happened to this individual, he paid someone to do his 2012 taxes, wrote off absolutely as much as he possibly could as a self employed individual paid income taxes on $58,000 with a gross of over $100,000, but he is not wise enough to know that his chargebacks were already deducted prior to his gross earnings.  He basically did not understand the math behind the numbers, and as a result He got upset and started shopping for another IMO, and right around the same time, 2 complaints regarding his ethics came into NAA and he was in the process of being terminated, and there you go, a pissed off agent that is looking for retaliation.  I will say that this agent was not in my downline, and I know the details because I have friends in this business that knew him intimately.  There is more that I could say regarding this incident, but suffice it to say, it is mostly a rant.

For the fun of it, I like to catch up on Andy Allwrongs stories... I too was there, won a trip to Portugal back in 07 with IOF and was loving NAA. Then I realized that I only netted $30K on a $100k production year, my very first and only year. By the time we had quit and hit the road of independcy we had qualified for the trip and went. It was hilarious, we hung out with 3 other couples who had also walked but wanted to go on vaca, we laughed at Allwrong and his followers. I hated the religion, I hated the lies but Portugal was nice.

So the good news, there are greener pastures, there are better options. WE have been fortunate enough to stay in the business, work in our Ppajamas on the phone exclusively and operate a successful brokerage offering all carriers and products in life, di, and annuities. We did over $150K last year and should exceed $200K this year with expenses less than 10%.

I am happy to chat with any one that want to learn how to be independent and help do whats in a clients best interest by underwriting them and evaluating if they should buy fully underwritten vs simple issue, instead of forcing them into simple issue products like Allwrong pushes.

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