From an interview that took place in Summer 2022
If you’ve stopped into the Synergize Hub for a hug, you’ve probably seen another logo floating around the building; two lowercase “I”s that look like two people chatting with each other.
That logo belongs to our roommate, Matt Allen, owner of Iconic Insurance. We owe a lot to Matt; without him, the Synergize Hub wouldn’t have been a possibility for us. He’s a great friend to a lot of people, and very generous with his time, talents, and resources.
It hasn’t always been that way, though. Up until a few years ago, Matt was content with mediocrity. He coasted through high school by showing up, doing only what was necessary, and going home. “For some reason, I thought that made me admirable,” he admits. “I saw no value in going above and beyond, for anyone or anything.”
Because it served him so well in high school, Matt continued the pattern into college. He’s intelligent, so he was able to skate by in class without putting in too much effort. In his spare time, he began playing online poker, which opened a door for him to make a living with even less effort than it took to go to class. At nineteen, he dropped out to play professionally, which he did for three years.
“Things were just easy for me,” Matt explains. “I didn’t value hard work. I didn’t understand the value of a dollar.” Truth be told, he’d never faced any real adversity. Because of that, when life did sideswipe him halfway through his twenties, it sent him reeling.
The changes began when Matt, his then-wife, and their two daughters moved to Zionsville to be closer to family. Shortly after the move, Matt and his wife split. “At the time, I didn’t have any family here, any friends here, a job here, or a degree. I faced an immense amount of adversity all at once. And as a guy who’s just been putting in minimal effort, I handled it about as poorly as you could possibly imagine.”
For the next two years, Matt struggled. Bitter and angry, he started using alcohol as a coping mechanism and often failed to prioritize his daughters. “I felt like the world owed me something for putting me through all these things – things that, by the way, were all my fault,” he adds.
This low point became a catalyst for a slow improvement in Matt’s life, one he took step-by- step. First, he focused on his physical and mental health. He started forcing himself to go outside, drinking water instead of soda, cutting back on alcohol, sleeping more, and eating better. All the small, incremental changes slowly began to add up.
Then, Matt picked up a “halfway-decent” bartending job at night along with a catering job in the morning. He started going back to school during the day to get a degree in economics. Finally, he was living the lifestyle that, as he says, is “normal for the majority of people.” Although he was finally putting in the work to improve his life and make ends meet, he still wanted things to feel easy again.
“I complained all the time,” Matt admits. “If I ran into that guy today, I’d give him a reality check. I had two beautiful daughters, I lived in a very comfortable place, I had a job, I had the ability to go back to school. A lot of people would kill for those things.” He took everything he had for granted, which left no room for one of the most important aspects of life: gratitude.
When Matt graduated from IUPUI, he found that the only jobs available to him were entry-level positions paying even less than he was making as a bartender. Again, he was frustrated. “I was thinking, ‘I’m doing all the things I’m supposed to do, where’s my golden ticket?’” he recalls.
Matt got his golden ticket in the form of Ryan Kelly, the manager of a local health insurance office in Carmel, who offered him what he saw as the perfect job. As a health insurance salesman, Matt had flexible hours and could control his income based on how much he worked. “The way I look at it now is very different than how I looked at it then,” he clarifies. “Back then, it was a means to an end. I still didn’t quite grasp why this was such an incredible opportunity for me, and how I could impact people through it.”
At that time, Matt loved the idea of working hard upfront to make enough money to be comfortable, and then coasting by once again. “I wanted to do just enough to support and provide for me and my family, and stop there,” he says. And for four years, that’s exactly what he did. But everything changed when he met with Synergize Founder Arron Stanton for coffee at Java House in Clay Terrace, back in 2020.
“I met with him because I thought he could help me get connections so I could sell more.” Matt laughs at the memory. Arron asked him about his life, his work, his family, and his plans for the future, so Matt explained his low-effort lifestyle and the reasoning behind it.
“I thought he was potentially going to be impressed, even, because I wasn’t being greedy. I wasn’t taking more than I needed,” Matt says. “I’m a little disappointed and embarrassed by it, but that’s who I was. I knew I was helping people, but I didn’t see that as the purpose.”
As Matt tells it, once he’d finished his story, Arron leaned forward and asked, “Are you ready for this?” He then proceeded to tell Matt: “I think you’re an incredibly selfish person.”
Matt distinctly remembers the way his stomach dropped. “I thought, ‘Maybe I didn’t tell the story right’.” He laughs as he recalls it. “And I got mad. But I wanted to hear what he had to say. And Arron told me ‘You don’t understand the opportunity you have here’.”
Arron explained to Matt that he had the opportunity to impact far more people if he’d put in a little more effort. “He told me, ‘It’s so easy for you to do this. You help people every day, right? You give them something that improves their lives, and it’s improving yours? Why aren’t you working harder to help more people?’”
Matt tried to justify his apathy by pointing out that he would never take more than he needed, but Arron argued that his mentality meant he had nothing to give, either. “He told me that I could make more money without all of it going to me,” Matt says. “I could pass it to other people who needed it, too.”
By the time he left the meeting, Matt’s anger had faded into confusion. He mulled over that conversation for a few weeks before deciding Arron was right. “I never wanted to be selfish,” he says. “I would prefer to be selfless. And I started to realize that, while I may not need much, other people do. And I have the knowledge and ability and time to make that possible for them. I needed to be doing more.”
In September 2020, Matt broke away from the company he worked for and started Iconic Insurance. He knew he’d be able to help more people if he was able to contract with and sell from a multitude of insurance companies. “I wanted to be able to sit down with anybody, in any situation, and have the ability to give them the best option on the spot,” he says.
Because he can sell insurance from dozens of companies, Matt is uniquely positioned to help individuals and small businesses. One that sticks out to him is a small business owner in Noblesville who wanted to provide health insurance for his ten employees. “That’s a typical sentiment I get from a lot of small business owners,” he says. “They care about their employees, and want to help them, but the quotes they get from companies are $600, $700 per month, per employee. And it’s not doable for them.”
In this case, Matt was able to walk into the business, sit down with every individual employee, and find out what each of them needed for their families and situations. “All ten of them needed a different health insurance plan, because they all weren’t in the same situation. At the end of the day, all ten of them were able to get health insurance for their families, including dental and vision, for under $300 per month,” Matt explained. “And the owner was able to pay 100% of those premiums.”
“Prior to starting Iconic Insurance, I never would have been able to do that,” he adds. “There are lots of other small businesses in the exact same spot that don’t know something like that exists. I just have to find them.”
Although being insulted by Arron gave Matt some of the motivation he needed to step out on his own, his business coach, Randy Wheeler, helped him put wheels on the idea. “He sat there and stubbornly forced me to tell him what my business was going to be, despite me saying ‘We’re going to sell health insurance’ twenty times in a row,” Matt says wryly. Another asset is his friend Brett Luce, who handles Iconic’s operations. He takes Matt’s giant visions and breaks them down into bite-size, achievable pieces.
One change to his business model that Matt never expected was the ability to have effective virtual meetings. “Brett has made that process viable and functional,” he says. He now has clients in sixteen states. “So many people whose hands I’ve never had the pleasure of shaking, but who needed help and didn’t know where to get it.”
Right now, Iconic is still in its startup phase. With the help of Brett and Randy, Matt is constantly refining the company. “There were a couple of times when I didn’t know why I had a business. I still kind of own a job at this point,” he admits. It’s still completely overwhelming for him at times. “As cool as it is that I’m the marketing department, and the legal department, and the accounting department, and everything else, it’s eight different hats that I wear. And I need to be the best at all of them, because my name is on the business,” he adds.
Although there’s no parent company to hide behind if he screws up, Matt knows the work and stress is worth it. “This is going to allow me to help so many more people on a broader, grander scale. It’s difficult to see, when you’re planting the tree, the shade it’ll give you in 20 years. But you still have to plant it.”
It helps that Matt is a total health insurance nerd. When we asked him about his hobbies, learning about insurance was actually at the top of his list. “I actually find it fascinating. Somebody has to,” he says with a shrug.
He also enjoys finding new ways to lead a healthy lifestyle. “If I’m not at my best, I can’t help people,” he points out. He reads a lot – “probably an annoying amount” – and spends time with his daughters whenever he can. He loves to cook, grocery shop, work out, and take care of things around the house.
“A lot of people will think that stuff is incredibly boring,” he says. “But all the incremental changes in my mindset have helped me look forward to cleaning, meditating, going to the gym, eating healthy, even my cold showers in the morning.” Matt also loves writing music and playing piano. He has a keyboard at the Synergize Hub, which he uses mostly with headphones (but we get to hear him play occasionally, too).
These incremental changes have made Matt’s philosophy on life shift into something completely different than that of his younger self. He has a tattoo on his arm that reads “Memento Mori” – Remember that you must die – to remind him of the finite time we have on Earth. It faces him because “I need to try to be a good person at all times. You could be taken at any moment. This could all be gone in the blink of an eye. All you have is how you treat other people.”
Another piece of wisdom Matt carries with him is the idea of wanting what you already have. “This is a Stoic phrase, but you can get on the hedonic treadmill of thinking about what you want next,” he explains. “You get used to what you have, when at one point, it was all you wanted. At some point, for example, I really wanted these shoes. Why can’t I wake up and still want those shoes as much as I did the day that I bought them? I try to frame everything in my life that way.”
Along with the philosophers that have helped him shape his worldview, Matt has a lot of mentors. Some of them, he’s never met: doctors, podcast hosts, and authors. “I’d be eternally grateful to be able to thank the ones I haven’t met,” he says. “I’ve taken things from all these people and built a life I, Matt Allen, enjoy.”
Matt counts several Synergize members in his mentors too. When he has a need, he always looks to the members’ businesses first. We’re especially grateful for his willingness to put up with us by moving into the Synergize Hub at 421 S. Rangeline Road – although he insists it’s an enjoyable arrangement for him. “I love coming to work every day and hanging out with two of my friends,” he says. “It’s comfortable for my clients, for Brett, and for me.”
“It was a big line-item expense for Iconic at the time,” he adds. “But because I took the leap to start my own company, my revenue was increasing. And I knew this Hub needed to happen. The fact that I was even allowed to assist in that happening was one of those moments when I could step up and do more and allow the impact to be greater. I’m trying to make up for past selfish Matt. And wouldn’t you know it? Revenue at Iconic is up even further now, and I can give back even more.”
Matt is still on his journey of change and improvement. He knows it will never truly end. “I’m lucky that I always have hope. I have hope built in,” he says. “I’ve changed a lot. My kids see it, my friends see it, my dad sees it. He’s told me it’s helped him change for the better, too.”
As long as Matt is growing and changing, the amount of people he will stretch and impact will only grow along with him. After all, if there’s one thing Matt never wants to be, it’s finished. “I don’t think anyone should be stable,” he says. “If you’re not actively living, you’re dying. I was actively dying ten years ago. If you want something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done.” He smiles. “What got me here was continuing to challenge myself. So I will, until further notice, be in a perpetual season of change.”