Meet the team

Meet the author

Andrew Aceto

Andrew Aceto has worked in the P&C insurance industry since 2017, beginning his career as a Sales Specialist at State Farm before moving into telemarketing and sales development roles at Ted Todd Insurance, one of the top-performing Allstate agencies in the country. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Business, Management, and Marketing from Florida Gulf Coast University. ||| Over eight years, Aceto has held every role he now oversees, including making 400+ outbound dials per day as an SDR, qualifying leads, handling objections, and setting appointments before earning a promotion to Sales Development Manager at Ted Todd Insurance in 2021. In that role, he built training and accountability systems that became company standards. He joined Next Call Club in 2022 as Director of Operations, where he has since grown the telemarketing program from 3 SDRs to more than 50, with a target of 100 within the next 12 months. His team helped an Illinois insurance agency client achieve a new state sales record, and he has successfully led operational adaptations in response to TCPA regulatory changes without a lapse in client performance. ||| At Next Call Club, Aceto oversees recruiting, training, HR, and day-to-day telemarketing operations, serving as the primary escalation point for the SDR program. He also develops training content for external telemarketers and agency owners, drawing on operational experience across carriers including State Farm and Allstate. When he steps away from the office, Aceto trades screens for open water, spending time boating in Southwest Florida and hunting down the best local restaurants the Gulf Coast has to offer.

View profile

Meet the author

Andrew Filar

Andrew Filar has spent over 12 years in property and casualty insurance, beginning as a producer at State Farm in November 2013 and rising to become the #1 ranked sales representative in Florida, generating $1.65 million in sales in his second year. He holds a BS in Finance and a BS in Economics from Florida Gulf Coast University, an MBA in Marketing from Georgia Institute of Technology's Scheller College of Business, and a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification. ||| In 2018, he co-founded Peachy Insurance, growing it from $0 to $45 million in annual premiums within six years through seven negotiated agency acquisitions and a team of 50-plus employees. Before launching Next Call Club, Filar served in multiple executive roles at Ted Todd Insurance, the largest captive insurance agency in the country, where as Director of Sales he increased revenue by 75% ($2.5 million) while cutting departmental payroll by 30%, reduced cost per sale by 55%, and cut new hire ramp-up time in half. As COO, he led expansion into a new market achieving 600% of sales targets with 350% year-over-year growth. ||| At Next Call Club, which earned an Inc. 5000 ranking, Filar leads product, growth, and PR, including social media and speaking engagements. He has personally consulted more than 50 agency owners on scaling, acquisitions, and profitability, and mentored six producers who went on to open their own agencies. When he steps away from the office, Andrew is working through an ever-rotating obsession: cooking, hiking, skateboarding, or cataloguing his 8,000-plus Spotify ratings and 1,500-plus IMDb reviews.

View profile

Meet the author

Carissa McElligott

Carissa McElligott is an operations strategist specializing in helping property and casualty insurance agencies scale through better people, processes, technology, and customer experience. With over a decade of experience in agency operations and growth, she focuses on building the systems that allow agencies to grow without breaking. ||| At Next Call Club, Carissa serves as an internal consultant and force multiplier, partnering across the organization to build the operational foundation behind the company's services. Her work spans operations, analytics, process improvement, training, technology implementation, and strategic initiatives that help agency owners make better decisions and create more consistent results. Before joining Next Call Club, Carissa held leadership roles at Ted Todd Insurance and Peachy Insurance, where she helped build operational infrastructure, customer experience programs, training systems, and scalable processes that supported agency growth. As Chief of Staff at Peachy Insurance, she works closely with leadership to align operations, technology, and business strategy while driving key organizational initiatives from concept to execution. Carissa's expertise centers on building the people, processes, and systems that support sustainable agency growth. While many organizations focus primarily on acquiring new business, she believes long-term success comes from strengthening the entire ecosystem, including employee development, operational excellence, customer experience, and retention. Her articles draw from hands-on experience leading teams, implementing technology, improving workflows, and solving the operational challenges agencies face every day. ||| She holds an MBA in Logistics and Supply Chain Management from the University of Georgia Terry College of Business, graduated magna cum laude from Florida Gulf Coast University with a bachelor's degree in Business Management, and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®). Outside of work, Carissa enjoys spending time on Florida's gulf coast, trying new restaurants, cooking, and making memories with her nieces and nephews. She's also a lifelong fan of Survivor and The Challenge, and can almost always be convinced to debate strategy, alliances, and the greatest competitors of all time.

View profile

Meet the author

Danny Trejo

Danny Trejo has worked in P&C insurance since 2011, building hands-on experience across sales, agency management, marketing, and financial leadership. He holds a 0215 Life Including Variable Annuity and Health license, along with certifications from the McKinsey Management Program in management, problem solving, and communicating for impact. Bilingual in English and Spanish, he has spent more than a decade operating at the intersection of agency growth, financial strategy, and mergers and acquisitions. ||| As CFO of Peachy Insurance since 2018, Trejo led the financial and strategic work behind acquiring six books of business and growing the agency past $40 million in premium. Before Peachy, he served as CFO of Ted Todd Insurance, a $70 million P&C agency spanning seven offices and nine books of business, where he produced five consecutive profitable fiscal years, reduced employee turnover by 30 percent, cut operational overhead by 15-plus hours per week per office, and increased lead generation by 35 percent year-over-year. He also generated more than $650,000 in Allstate Life and Retirement production credit in a single year as a licensed agent. ||| As a founding member of Next Call Club, Trejo oversees the financial, operational, and strategic direction of the platform, including partnerships, compliance, and member delivery. He helped build a network that now connects more than 200 insurance professionals, has facilitated M&A discussions among 50-plus agencies, and contributed to member sales pipeline increases of 20 to 40 percent. His e-commerce brand Via Citrus was featured in Wired Magazine's roundup of favorite products made from recycled and upcycled materials. Trejo grew up on a citrus farm in Florida, where his family still operates, and he is currently learning golf between international trips with his wife and their dog.

View profile

Meet the author

Guest Contributor

Founder of Henson Legal, PLLC, a compliance-focused law firm in Birmingham, Alabama.

View profile

Meet the author

Jason Boyd

Jason Boyd has spent more than 12 years in digital marketing across insurance, agency, and media environments, with his education rooted in Journalism and Communication and Media Studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. He holds certifications from Google, HubSpot, and LinkedIn, and built his early career leading editorial teams, writing advertising copy for JCPenney, and producing more than 1,200 commendation letters per month on behalf of Southwest Airlines' executive office. ||| At NextCallClub, Jason serves as Head of Marketing, owning the full scope of inbound marketing strategy for the brand and for the insurance agent clients NCC serves. He controls high-level strategy, project management, final deliverable approval, and reporting. In his four years working within P&C insurance marketing, he has grown the marketing function from a solo operation to a team of six contributors, all working under his direction. Before joining NCC, he served as Director of Marketing Services at Rogue Marketing Agency, where he was accountable for strategy, execution, and KPIs across client accounts spanning paid media, SEO, and content production. ||| Jason is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of Fictionphile, a fiction and media criticism publication he has run since 2012, and a former features writer for Comic Book Resources. His writing and advertising work has earned multiple first and second-place honors in competitive journalism recognition. He holds the view that P&C agencies stall when they rely entirely on their carrier for brand identity, and that building a distinct brand is the most underestimated growth lever in the space. When he steps away from the screen, he builds worlds of a different kind, writing science fiction, a craft he pursued formally in graduate school.

View profile

Meet the author

Krishna Reddy

Krishna Vardhan Reddy is the Chief Information Officer at NextCallClub, bringing a background that is genuinely rare in the insurance lead industry: a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earned in 2018 with seven semesters on the Dean's Honor List and a Dean's Engineering Scholarship, along with a study abroad year at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He holds a Tableau Desktop Specialist certification and a Certified Six Sigma Yellow Belt (CSSYB), and applies the methodologies behind both to insurance lead operations every day. ||| Before joining NextCallClub in April 2023, Krishna spent several years at Peachy Insurance as a Strategy Consultant, where he managed a $500,000+ internet lead marketing budget, built KPI dashboards across Tableau, Salesforce, and Klipfolio, and designed compensation grids that measurably improved sales performance and employee retention. Earlier, a supply chain consulting engagement using the DMAIC improvement cycle produced a $5.14 million reduction in safety stock costs and pushed service levels from 93% to 97%. At NextCallClub, he owns system reliability, technology integrations, and lead portfolio performance, applying the same engineering rigor to reduce client cost-per-lead by roughly 15%. ||| In June 2025, NextCallClub crossed 150,000 leads delivered in a single month, a milestone Krishna and the founding team set as their original benchmark when the lead-buying service launched three years prior. As CIO, Krishna focuses on the intersection of data and business decisions, the area agencies and teammates consistently come to him for. Outside of work, he plays padel, soccer, and cricket, practices yoga, and captains his own paddle team.

View profile

Meet the author

Lainey Stevens

Lainey Stevens is Marketing Manager at Trestle, an identity data company that helps businesses confidently engage with the right people. She leads product marketing initiatives, manages trade show strategy, and collaborates with partners on co-marketing campaigns. She also oversees Trestle's SEO and website strategy, helping create content and landing pages that drive organic growth and customer acquisition.

View profile

Meet the author

Luis Lushman

Luis Lushman brings more than 20 years of customer service experience and over a decade in the insurance industry to his role as Senior Account Manager at Next Call Club. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration with a minor in Organizational Communication from the University of Central Florida (2011), along with a Certificate in Strategy Execution and Negotiation Mastery from Harvard Business School Online. Luis is also a licensed 2-20 Florida Property & Casualty Insurance Agent and holds a 2-15 Florida Life Including Annuities & Health license. ||| Before joining Next Call Club, Luis served as Director of Customer Experience at both Ted Todd Insurance and Peachy Insurance, where he oversaw customer service operations supporting approximately 30,000 customers at each organization. Earlier in his career, he managed daily operations for a ten-agent team as Senior Customer Experience Manager at Ted Todd Insurance and spent nearly seven years as a Customer Account Specialist with the City of Palm Bay, providing bilingual English and Spanish service to residents. That foundation in agency operations informs how he approaches client work today. ||| At Next Call Club, Luis leads account management and conducts Discovery Calls to evaluate fit for prospective agency partners. He is the go-to resource for client escalations, performance metric interpretation, and internet lead strategy. In one notable client engagement, he identified a lagging quote rate despite healthy contact rates, recommended targeted sales coaching and objection-handling training, and helped the agency achieve measurable improvements in both quote and close rates. He also partnered with a colleague to redesign and launch the Dashboard Service, onboarding the first client within days of launch. Outside of work, Luis spends time with his wife, daughter, and son, cheering on Little League games and dance recitals. He also plays guitar.

View profile

Meet the author

Next Call Club

Next Call Club is a boutique lead generation and telemarketing partner built by insurance agents, for insurance agents. Focused on home and auto, NCC pairs high-quality leads and live transfers with dedicated SDR teams, sales training, and compliance support so independent agencies can grow profitably. ||| Every lead and call runs through nine quality checks before it reaches an agent, and success is measured by profitability per agent rather than raw volume. A proud member of R.E.A.C.H., Next Call Club builds every growth strategy with TCPA compliance and consumer respect at the core, helping agents nationwide replace guesswork with systems that scale.

View profile

Meet the author

Pao Ruiz

Pahoran Arroyo Ruiz holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration and Management from Brigham Young University–Idaho and brings hands-on financial experience spanning banking, bookkeeping, and process automation. Before joining Next Call Club, he spent over two years as a bank teller at Banco Santander in México while simultaneously serving as a bookkeeper for Universal Sports LLC, a Texas-based business, giving him parallel experience managing financial records across multiple organizations. He holds an Intuit Bookkeeping Certification, a QuickBooks Online Certification (Level 1), and an EF SET English Certificate at C2 Proficient level. ||| At Next Call Club, Pahoran works as both an Accounting Assistant and an automation specialist, splitting his time between maintaining clean financial records for Peachy Insurance and building internal workflows that reduce manual overhead. One standout contribution: he led the automation of a significant portion of the team's spam remediation process, cutting roughly five hours of manual work per week. His concurrent role as bookkeeper at Peachy Insurance reflects the trust placed in him to own financial accuracy across active, revenue-generating agency accounts. ||| Pahoran's perspective on agency growth centers on operational willingness to change. He believes agencies that continue relying on legacy processes leave measurable time and money on the table, and he backs that view with the automation work he builds and maintains daily. Teammates and agency partners come to him when finances need to be untangled or when a repetitive process needs a smarter solution. Outside of work, Pahoran develops web projects and plays piano, having performed at several small concerts.

View profile

Meet the author

Peter Godley

Peter Godley has spent 14 years in insurance sales and agency growth, starting as a sales representative at the Rich Mathews State Farm agency while completing his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, Management and Operations at Florida Gulf Coast University in 2015. He holds dual licensure through Florida's Department of Insurance: a 2-15 Health and Life license and a 2-20 General Lines Property and Casualty license. His expertise sits at the intersection of sales infrastructure and rapid agency scaling. ||| After logging tens of thousands of cold calls early in his career, Godley was tapped to spearhead sales for the launch of Peachy Insurance, where as Chief Revenue Officer he helped grow the agency from scratch to over $45 million in written premium in six years, making it one of the fastest-scaled agencies in Allstate history. His sales department produced 10,000 items in 2023 alone. Earlier, as Director of Sales at Ted Todd Insurance, the largest captive insurance agency in the country, he led and developed a team of more than 35 agents, and within his first six months as Sales Manager had already built the highest-producing team in Georgia. Among the results he points to most: leading a sales team to over $1 million in written premium in a single month. ||| As Co-Founder of Next Call Club, Godley works directly with agency owners on sales leadership, outbound system development, and execution, drawing on firsthand experience running a high-volume agency to give clients a level of operational transparency rarely available in the lead industry. When he is not working, Peter is focused on being a great dad. You will usually find him with his wife, daughter, and golden retriever somewhere near the beach, cold brew black in hand.

View profile

Meet the author

Richard Rees

Richard Rees brings nearly 10 years of P&C insurance experience to his work at Next Call Club, where he serves as SDR Manager and Trainer. He studied General Education and Psychology at Youngstown State University from 2009 to 2014 and continued graduate-level work in Clinical and Applied Psychology at Kent State University through 2016. He holds active Ohio insurance licenses in Accident, Health, Life, Variable Life, Variable Annuities, Property, and Casualty (License ID: 1134457). ||| Richard began his career as a producer at a large Ohio agency, spending nearly five years on the agency side before joining Peachy Insurance, where he progressed from sales representative to SDR Manager. In that role, he led a team of five SDRs producing 20 or more transfers per day per rep. Since joining Next Call Club in January 2024, he has helped scale the SDR operation to more than 100 callers supporting independent agencies nationwide. Across that work, he has logged more than 10,000 hours of call review and coaching, reduced early-call drop-offs by 22 percent by restructuring first-ten-second openings, lifted connect-transfer rates by 25 percent through talk-path testing and feedback loops, promoted three SDRs into team-lead roles, and cut average ramp time by one week through structured onboarding and call-review cadences. ||| At Next Call Club, Richard owns the SDR program, leadership pipeline, training initiatives, recruiting, and daily production. His background in psychology shapes a coaching methodology built on observation before adjustment, fitting instruction to how each individual learns and processes feedback. He has been recognized as a Top Regional Producer, a three-time Top Agency Producer, and a recipient of the Craig Wiggins Silver Award. Outside of work, Richard spends most of his time with his wife and five children and serves within his church community. Few people guess that his post-high-school education began at Le Cordon Bleu, where he completed classical French culinary training before his path turned toward sales and leadership.

View profile

Meet the author

Ryan Hill

Ryan Hill brings 11 years of P&C insurance experience to his work as a Sales Trainer at NextCallClub, where he trains sales and service teams for agency clients focused on increasing revenue, improving retention, and building scalable operations. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Emory University (2007) and has built his career entirely within the insurance industry, progressing from producer to sales manager to director-level leadership. ||| Hill's production record is among the most documented in his field. As a multi-line agent at Peachy Insurance, he became the first Georgia office producer to write $100K in new business in a single month and was named the company's top sales producer for 2018. As GA Sales Manager, he oversaw book growth from $3M to $16.2M in 27 months while coaching multiple agents to $100K production months. Over his tenure at Peachy, he contributed to growing the agency from $0 to over $50 million in premium and personally trained more than 20 producers to reach $100K monthly production, including a newer LSP who recently wrote over $130K in her first full month. ||| At NextCallClub, Hill consults directly with agency owners on operational performance, lead and marketing strategy, compensation structures, KPIs, and sales process development. His core focus is improving contact-to-quote rates, bundling, close rates, and referral generation so agencies can scale without increasing their marketing spend. He currently serves as Director of Sales Training and Development at Peachy Insurance concurrently. Outside of work, Hill spends his time on fitness, discovering new spots around Atlanta, and recharging with his family. He runs entirely on black coffee, and has no plans to change that.

View profile

Meet the author

Ryan Williams

Ryan Garr Louis Williams is a Data Solutions Consultant at Next Call Club with over five years of experience in the P&C insurance space, beginning his career as a Sales Development Representative at Peachy Insurance in 2021 before moving into a data analyst role and eventually transitioning to vendor strategy at NCC in August 2024. He holds a B.S. in Marketing with a Minor in Business Analytics and a B.A. in Music, both from Florida State University's class of 2020, and carries five professional certifications across Salesforce Administration, Tableau, and SEO disciplines including Foundations, Link Building, and Video. ||| At Next Call Club, Ryan owns the full lifecycle of lead and call vendor relationships, managing integrations, performance analysis, and quality feedback loops. His work on NCC's dispositions system has produced measurable improvement in vendor lead quality by systematically returning performance data that helps vendors identify what is and is not working. He brings a perspective few data consultants can claim: he has personally called the same leads he now manages at the vendor level, giving him ground-level context alongside his technical fluency in Salesforce, AWS, Tableau, R, and marketing automation. ||| Earlier in his career, he grew a managed social media audience of over 18,000 users and increased tweet engagement by 340% and retweets by 275%. Ryan holds a core belief that P&C agency growth requires both data and process together, with data pointing the direction and process executing it. Outside of work, he composes and arranges music, travels, and visits Disney World. His most unexpected credential: he is a classically trained tuba player who performs with a Polka band at Oktoberfests each fall.

View profile