I got into this business through the training side, and I never left it.
Fifteen years teaching. Thirteen in insurance. Around thirty thousand people have sat through something I built.
I started out teaching high school, which is the least glamorous and most useful training I have ever had.
A room of teenagers will tell you immediately when you are boring. They will not be polite about it, they will not wait for the evaluation form, and no amount of subject matter expertise will save you. You learn to hold attention or you learn to dread Mondays. Everything I know about running a room I learned there.
Insurance came next, and I found the same problem waiting for me in a different building. Rooms full of capable people, sitting through material that was accurate and forgettable. Good producers being handed information when what they needed was a way to practice. I have watched an enormous amount of well-made curriculum die in a binder.
So that became the work. Not writing better content, though I write a lot of it. Building the thing around the content that makes it survive the week. A cadence people can keep. Reps that happen before the customer is in front of them. A standard the owner asks about on Monday morning. That is the difference between a training day everyone enjoyed and a team that sells differently in ninety days.
The software came out of the same frustration. I got tired of watching good material lose to the calendar, so I started building tools that keep the practice going after I leave. That is what Film Room is.
Own the curriculum end to end for a training practice serving insurance agencies and their teams. Write it, deliver it live, and rebuild it when the market moves.
- Around 30,000 agents and team members trained
- 700+ live sessions delivered in the past year, in person and online
- Built a recurring weekly training series, multi-day boot camps, and new-producer onboarding programs
- Designed field marketing and territory programs, including a Spanish-language outreach rotation
- Presented on life insurance and business-market strategy at regional boot camps
[One or two lines on what you did on the production and team side. This is the section that proves you have carried a book, not just taught one.]
Where I learned to hold a room, build a lesson that lands, and tell the difference between a group that understands something and a group that is nodding.
Sales and conversation
- Discovery and diagnosis before product
- Life insurance conversations that do not stall
- Cross-sell language for service teams
- Rate increase and retention calls
- Referral asks that are not awkward
Business market
- Buy-sell agreement funding
- Key person coverage
- Section 162 executive bonus
- Permanent versus term positioning
- Getting the first meeting with an owner
Leadership and systems
- Building a weekly team cadence
- New producer onboarding and ramp
- Daily standards and accountability
- Field marketing and territory design
- Coaching conversations that change behavior
I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am up early, I lift, I play pickleball with more confidence than my record supports, and I build things on nights and weekends that mostly never ship. The ones that do are on the work page. I write a weekly note called The Cadence about all of it.
Dan Presley has spent fifteen years teaching, thirteen of them in insurance. He writes sales curriculum, delivers it live to agents and their teams, and builds the software that keeps it from being forgotten by Friday. Around thirty thousand people have been through something he built. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.