I became a unit manager in 2023.
I thought I was ready. I had years of experience as an agent, a good track record with clients, and genuine belief in the work. What I didn’t expect was how much leading a team would change the way I thought about money — my own money, and my clients’.
Here are the things I learned in that first year that nobody prepared me for.
Lesson 1: Watching others’ financial journeys accelerated my own clarity
When you’re an agent, you manage your own client relationships. When you become a unit manager, you also observe your team’s client relationships — the conversations, the obstacles, the outcomes.
In one year, I watched more financial decisions — good ones, difficult ones, tragic ones — than I had in my previous years combined.
I watched a young agent’s client delay insurance until a diagnosis made her uninsurable. I watched a couple finally align on their finances and feel visibly lighter after one conversation. I watched an agent struggle to articulate the value of protection to a client who only wanted returns — and I recognized the same struggle I’d had earlier in my career.
All of that watching forced me to look at my own financial life more honestly. It’s hard to encourage others toward clarity you don’t have yourself.
Lesson 2: Your income stability is not the same as your income security
As a unit manager, my income became more variable. It’s tied to production — mine and my team’s. In good months, it’s abundant. In slower months, it requires discipline.
That variability taught me something I should have understood sooner: income stability (a consistent paycheck) is not the same as income security (a financial foundation that holds even when income fluctuates).
I had spent years building income stability. I hadn’t built enough income security.
That first year, I rebuilt my emergency fund more seriously than I ever had. Not because something went wrong — but because I finally understood that the purpose of an emergency fund isn’t to survive a crisis. It’s to maintain your standards and your decision-making quality when things get uncertain.
When you’re financially stressed, you make different decisions. As a leader, I couldn’t afford to be making stressed decisions on behalf of my team and my clients.
Lesson 3: The way you talk about money is the way your team will talk about money
Leadership is imitation at scale.
I noticed early on that my team mirrored my language. If I framed insurance as a product to sell, they framed it as a product to sell. If I framed it as a tool for protecting people’s most important financial decisions — they framed it that way too.
The same was true of how I talked about my own finances. When I was transparent about my own financial habits, my team felt safer being honest about their clients’ challenges. When I modeled intentional planning, they felt more confident recommending it.
You cannot lead a financial services team without a coherent, honest relationship with your own money. The team will feel the gap between what you say and how you actually live.
Lesson 4: Protecting yourself is part of serving others
In my first year as a unit manager, I finally got my own financial protection properly in place.
Not because I hadn’t known I should. But because leading a team made the stakes feel more real.
If something happened to me, my team would lose their leader. My clients would lose their adviser. My family would lose their provider. And all of the people I was responsible for — in different ways — would have to absorb that loss.
Having the right insurance, the right structure, the right protection in place wasn’t just about me. It was about the stability of everything I was responsible for.
That realization changed how I talked to clients about insurance. I stopped presenting it as a product and started presenting it as infrastructure — the foundation that keeps everything else standing.
Lesson 5: Progress is not always visible, but it compounds
The most humbling part of my first year was how slow growth felt.
I expected that leading a team would feel like acceleration. Sometimes it did. But more often, it felt like planting — work that wouldn’t show results for months or years.
The same is true of financial building. You don’t see the results of an emergency fund until you need it. You don’t see the results of consistent investing until time has done its work. You don’t see the results of protection until, one day, it protects you.
This is the hardest thing to hold onto when you’re in the middle of doing the work: the most important things you’re doing right now won’t be visible yet.
But they’re compounding.
That’s the thing about foundations — they’re invisible until the storm comes, and then they’re everything.
I’m still in the middle of this journey. My team is growing. My understanding of leadership and money is deepening every year.
What I know for certain is that becoming a unit manager didn’t just change my career. It changed my relationship with money, with responsibility, and with what it means to build something that lasts.
I’m glad it did.