It is one of the hardest jobs I've encountered and the numbers back it up as there is a little less than a 15% retention rate of employees after 4 years. A big part of this is there are a lot of costs associated with the job, for example: you rent your office space from the company and have to pay for it, the same with the mandatory company computer, as well as your licenses, the majority of the planning and organizational software necessary to do the job, and professional liability insurance among other expenses. It's not uncommon for my first salary paycheck ever month to go entirely to these costs.
You spend about the first 3 months of work without any form of salary so in additional to trying to learn about all the products and services, you are required to try to sell these products in order to make money, even though you do not know enough to adequately sell them. Additionally in the short term the pay isn't competitive with other companies in the industry, it gets better after about 5 years and catches up, but that is due to the compounded residual pay in addition to the bonus structure.
There is a terrible work/life balance as I typically find myself leaving home by 5:30am and getting back home after 10pm. This is mainly because the job is at it's core a sales job, which would be fine, but in addition to going through the typically sales process (prospecting, making calls, preparing for appointments, running appointments, closing the sale) you don't have an assistant of any type so you are also responsible for the administrative half of the sale (filling out paperwork, processing paperwork from start to finish, following up with and correcting any errors made by yourself, the client, or the home office-who unfortunately are very understaffed and as a result make an immense amount of mistakes). This gets better after time when you can afford to hire an assistant to handle the follow up and paperwork, but again that is an entirely out of pocket expense with no company support.
There isn't a very clear channel of communications at any level of the company. When paperwork needs to be followed up on you can easily wait on hold for 30+ minutes just to talk to 4 different people about the same problem before ever getting to someone who can solve it. There needs to be a restructuring and a serious reevaluation of how best to provide insurance.
