Pros
Uncapped Commissions Flexible Hours Management Opportunities Looks good on a resume if you survive long enough Essentially in a role at AIL you are a contractor. All positions are 1099. This means that you can create your own hours, work whenever you want and earn as much as possible because it is fully commission. If you are an absolute hustler you MIGHT be able to do well. There's a lot of factors that go into this which I will go into later in the review. You can work 1 hour a week if you wanted to (although you probably wouldn't make any money) or you could work 70+ hours per week (like a lot of people do, sadly). You could make literally 10k in a week or $20. I have had 5k weeks and $0 weeks when putting in the same effort both weeks. Your income is truly unpredictable. A lot of people enjoy the flexibility of hours and full commission because they know they have earned every cent of their paycheck. Their is also a great bonus structure in place that rewards you for writing more business, which incentivizes a lot of people to go above and beyond. You get paid for recruiting people (MLM style), and when you are a manager you get a cut of their commissions (MLM style). This works for a lot of people and they love that style.
Cons
So onto the cons, which there are a lot. Keep in mind each Agency is different and this is a reflection of the Agency I worked for and is not always true of every agency (although other people in the company is other agencies do have similar experiences). The training is terrible. I had prior sales experience so I did a lot better than some people that were less fortunate in that aspect. The company really has a throw people at the wall and see who sticks approach. In the manager meetings I went to they literally described it that way: "If you hire 50 people per week, 25 will actually end up working for you and completing their Insurance License courses, 15 will finish initial training and you might have 5 that stick around for longer than 6 months. Let's do the math you have made X amount off of the ones that left at this point, it's still worth it!". That's not a joke, that is how things are approached and it is a very turn and burn culture there, once you start to not put up crazy high numbers upper management forgets about you, stops giving you leads and leaves you in the dust because they aren't making money off of you. The leads are terrible. They say that you will get X amount of leads per week to call and set appointments with. First off I want to point out that I had to beggg for leads every single week just so I could produce, secondly 50% to 75% of those leads are either reused or so bad that the people that pick up do not think they have made the inquiry. Now this could be the lead vendors fault but there is also no way that the SGA and MGAs do not know about it, as I and many other agents brought this to their attention over and over again. LEt's say that you do set an appointment with one of these "clients". 50 to75% WILL NOT show up and will either ghost you or block you as a lot of the products AIL uses to get people to show up to meetings are labeled as a scam if you look them up online. Try it right now, look up "Child Safe Kit". Yeah, says its a scam. So even though we aren't scamming them, people don't know that and won't show up to appointments. Now let's say they do show up, 50% or more WILL NOT qualify for Life Insurance. Whether that be due to health or they simply cannot afford even $20 extra per month to protect themselves for funeral costs. So if you do the math, you are going to be making a ton of calls, setting a few appointments and getting even fewer to show up and even fewer qualify or want to buy. I don't care how good you are at selling, it doesn't matter if you've got a client that has literally no money in the bank or is extremely obese or has cancer, you can't sell to them. Now sales is a numbers game and that is part of it, but these numbers are NOT what are told to you when you are first hired, they are way lower and do not meet the expectations you are given when hired. If a client cancels on you your paycheck gets cut until you pay the company back. This really sucks and although you can never go into debt, it really hurts when you have already had a bad week and then someone cancels, leaving you with an even smaller check. To be successful you have to work 50 or more hours per week. It's not worth it unless you have a great network of people to sell to. They will tell you that the leads will always be coming, but they won't and within a few months the Agency stops sending you leads and expects you to be purely referral based. Overall, if you are looking for a sales job, just find one that has base pay so you aren't screwed. The market is hot, don't work here and screw yourself over.
