Competency

A Discussion on Skill, Honest Self-Assessment, and What Separates the Top of This Profession from Everyone Else

Every agent in this profession ought to be willing to answer three questions honestly, and the honest answers are usually the uncomfortable ones. What is your level of competency in your profession? How much time outside of doing the job do you spend expanding your knowledge and your abilities? And where would you go, as a bail agent, to level up your skills? Most of us will answer the first question with confidence, very few of us can answer the second one with an actual number, and that gap explains a great deal about why some agents build a career in this business while others simply renew a license every two years.

We have bail agents here in Mississippi who have been writing bonds for over thirty years and have never paid off a felony bond. We have agents in this state who can pick and choose their clients and carry almost zero bail forfeitures. How did they do that? What do they know that you don’t? Was it luck? Was it skill? Competency.

Luck is the comfortable answer because it lets everybody off the hook, but luck does not survive thirty years of felony exposure, thousands of defendants, changing judges, changing courts, revised rules of criminal procedure, and every economic condition that has moved through this state since the early nineties. Something other than chance is carrying that record, and every agent who has built one will tell you the same thing if you ask, which is that it was built one file at a time by paying attention when it would have been easier not to.

Competency in this profession is knowing which questions to ask on the first telephone call and knowing which answers should end the conversation, and it is recognizing the difference between a cosigner who is genuinely on the hook and a signature on a page, and it is understanding which address will still be good in ninety days and which family will call you before the court date instead of after the forfeiture. It is knowing the docket, knowing the clerk, knowing the judge’s expectations, and knowing the statutes better than the people who quote them back at you. None of that comes with a license. All of it is learned, and it is learned on purpose.

That is why leveling up has to start with an admission most experienced agents do not want to make, which is that none of us knows everything about this profession. Time in the business gets confused with expertise all the time in this industry, but twenty years of doing the same thing the same way is not twenty years of experience, and the state minimum for continuing education was never designed to make anyone excellent. It was designed to keep a license active. There is a considerable difference between developing and complying, and the agents at the top of this profession figured that out early.

The individuals who lead in sales, carry the lowest forfeiture rates, and earn the highest public reviews for quality service all understand one thing. They must demonstrate competency consistently; from the moment they answer the first call until the defendant walks out of that jail. Not on the easy files. On every file. That consistency is what the public sees, what the courts remember, and what other agents eventually notice, and it is the entire reason those agents can afford to say no to business the rest of the field takes without thinking.

So how do you level up your career and become one of those people? You go where the knowledge is, you go on your own time, and you find the agents who already have the record you want and ask them how they built it, which costs nothing except pride. At the MBAA those leaders are in the room, on the committees, and teaching the classes, and they are willing to help. That is why they are there.

You just have to participate.