We are taught that the path to success is linear. You get the license. You open the doors. You follow the manual. In the insurance industry, that manual usually involves a set of universal metrics. You make the hundred calls a day. You knock on the doors. You wait for the neighborhood to notice you are there.
The assumption is that if the KPIs are equal, the opportunity is equal. But the math of the real world is rarely that clean.
I immigrated to Canada in 2012 and in December of 2014 I began the process of acquiring my first book of business. That’s when I encountered a hidden tax that was not in the manual. As soon as I took over the accounts, clients began to transfer out.
I decided to call them. I wanted to understand the friction. The honest responses were a revelation. They saw my ethnic surname and decided, without ever speaking to me, that I likely did not speak English well enough to serve them. They chose the comfort of a familiar name over the potential of a new partnership.
Aside from my surname, anyone who meets me knows I speak perfectly good English. But in that moment, the quality of my work was irrelevant. The barrier was not my competence. The barrier was a lack of inherited trust.
Some of my peers had school friends, decades of local roots, and the benefit of cultural identity that better matched the “neighborhood.” They were playing the game on a field they had known for far longer. I was starting from zero in a system that expected the same results from me, even though we had different challenges.
This is where the idea of inclusive business thinking moves from a performative slogan to a strategic necessity.
True inclusion is not about lowering the bar. It is about acknowledging that the distance to the bar is different for everyone. When a distribution force is composed of people with equal talent but unequal advantages, a rigid and conservative strategy becomes a liability.
If I had followed the traditional advice of making a hundred cold calls to people who were already biased against my name, I would have failed. I realized very quickly that you cannot wait for passive attention. You have to earn a specific kind of permission.
I had to be fast. I had to be disruptive. I had to seek out select groups and demographics that were willing to value my insight over my origin. I had to build a fortress of trust within communities that understood the immigrant experience before I could ever hope to compete on “Main Street.”
The trade off was clear. I struggled to jive with a traditional partnership that demanded I play by old rules that were designed for someone else. I had to spend my time and my energy on building a permission asset with people who actually wanted to hear from me.
Inclusion in business is the realization that a diversity of backgrounds requires a diversity of strategies. When we force everyone into the same narrow marketing box, we ignore the massive untapped potential of those who are forced to innovate just to survive.
The hard work is not the hundred calls. The hard work is earning the trust of a tribe that believes in you. Once you have that, the rest of the metrics start to take care of themselves.
Are you managing your team by the numbers on the page or by the reality of the road they have to travel?
I am a Canadian insurance and investment professional and the President and Chief Executive Officer of Chazz Financial Inc. and Chazz Capital Assets. I write about leadership, markets, insurance, investing, and decision making, with a focus on how structure and incentives shape outcomes.
I hold a business degree and I am a Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute (FCSI®), a Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU®), a Chartered Financial Planner®, a Certified Health Specialist and a Mutual Fund Investment Representative.
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