[Blog] Starting From Scratch

Daniel and Christina Seong were living the good life. It was 2007 in Southern California, the real estate market was booming and the couple was riding the wave of prosperity fueled by the subprime mortgages that eventually triggered the Great Recession.

They were selling real estate, making money hand over fist and asking each other why everyone wasn’t involved in the business. Daniel drove a BMW, Christina drove a Mercedes and they even bought a couple of beamers for Daniel’s parents and sister. They admit to dropping $300 on outfits for their two-year-old daughter, only to have her wear them once.

“We were making hundreds of thousands a month and being completely irresponsible. When I say we had the largest ego you’ve ever seen,” Daniel says, laughing, “I am kind of being modest with that—it was bad. It was real bad.”

Neither Daniel nor Christina had been raised in wealthy households, and they were unprepared for the overnight prosperity the early 2000s real estate market brought them. When the bottom fell out, their prospects turned overnight. They scraped by for a few years but ultimately had to file for bankruptcy and begin to rebuild.

“I can’t even call it starting from scratch,” Christina notes. “It was lower than scratch.”

The couple cried together, prayed together and decided they would stay together no matter what—if for no other reason than to make sure their four kids had two parents and a roof over their heads. The trials they faced created a bond that can be heard on their SeongLife podcast and seen in the social media channels where they document their lives now as a family of seven.

“I would not wish what we went through on our kids,” Christina explains. “But in hindsight, it was truly, truly a blessing in disguise. And if I could go back, I would do it all over again. Because of the struggles, our bond is crazy.”

That’s not to minimize the hardship and stress their financial collapse caused them. To keep food on the table, they applied for government assistance, and Christina recalls standing in line at the grocery store laying out food stamps. (This was before the era of EBT cards, when paying with food stamps became a more discreet process.) Daniel admits he refused to go grocery shopping with Christina due to the shame and embarrassment he felt.

While Christina took care of the kids, Daniel got his insurance license and worked two other jobs to make ends meet.

“In the first five years, I took seven days off,” he recalls. “She would go to church with the five kids, and they thought she was a single parent.”

Still, Daniel made time to have dinner with the family every night and play with the kids before taking a nap and heading to a graveyard shift as a call dispatcher at a home security company.

“A lot of people think they deserve some success because they’ve worked hard for a week,” Daniel notes. “They worked that weekend, so that Monday they should have off. It’s a different mindset, and you have to be completely committed without any limitations.”

He attributes his grit to the four years he spent in the Marine Corps before college.

“That’s where I really understood, and I visually saw, what hard work and total commitment look like,” Daniel explains. “Because the motto in the Marine Corps is mission accomplishment. That’s first, and then it’s troop welfare. You take care of your people, you take care of your family.”

At home, stretching every last penny, Christina was convinced the trials they were facing were temporary, and she was Daniel’s biggest cheerleader.

“I married him for a reason, and I don’t think I’m stupid,” she says. “He’s one of the most driven people I know, so I knew he was going to get us out. We prayed, we cried, but all of that was done in private. So, in front of our kids we were always smiling. They were so little, thankfully, they never knew we were struggling.”

Perseverance paid off, and the firm the Seongs launched, Great Park Insurance, is a testament to their resolve. The Irvine, California-based agency is the highest-rated firm on Yelp and has a reputation in the industry that belies its family roots. With a staff of 13, Great Park is licensed to sell policies in eight states, but 90% of its business is currently in California.

Daniel attributes their clients’ satisfaction to the strength of his team and their personal approach to business. One seemingly small but impactful way they do this is by loading up review sites with photos of their office and staff. (More than 3,700 are currently posted on Yelp.) While other agencies have a logo and maybe a photo of the office exterior, Great Park’s review pages on Google and Yelp include photos of staff members, parties and satisfied clients—all accented by the trademark orange walls of their office.

“Our agency is a little unique in that, and we have a great retention rate now,” he notes. “It’s not because of me, it’s because of the amazing team we have here at Great Park Insurance.”

Daniel notes that, from day one, Great Park didn’t have a marketing budget, so they have depended heavily on referrals, and the social proof demonstrated in online reviews and personal referrals has reaped benefits no ad campaign could have achieved.

“We want that personal connection so when people walk in through that front door, the policy’s already sold. It’s just a formality at that point,” Daniel says. “We want to continue that experience from when they see us on social to when they walk into the office. But our retention rate is so great because we take an educational approach.”

Building a world-class company has been a passion for Daniel and Christina, but they also sense a deeper stewardship to share what they’ve learned with others—both in business and in their family life. Daniel unexpectedly discovered a platform for doing this in late 2020 when he noticed his teenage daughters recording themselves on their cell phones dancing. When he asked them what they were doing, they showed him TikTok, the social media platform that allows users to distribute short video clips.

Daniel remembers telling his girls, “Well, that’s interesting. Maybe daddy will get a TikTok.”

They were initially unimpressed, but he decided to start with a daily dad joke, selected from a book he had received for Christmas. To the surprise of his skeptical daughters (and himself), Daniel’s videos went viral. The first week he had 10,000 followers, the second week 50,000 and after six months he had one million followers.

He moved on from dad jokes and began posting videos on family life, parenting, finances and marriage. Three years later, across TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, he now has 1.4 million followers. Daniel noticed his messages were resonating, and he sought a platform for delivering longer-form content, leading to the launch of the SeongLife podcast in April 2023. Since then, he and Christina have released more than 50 episodes and have tackled topics as serious as divorce, bankruptcy and racism and as lighthearted as kids’ sports, eating out and the trials of car seats.

“People message and email us, and 99% of the time, the messages are very kind,” Christina notes, recalling times people have reached out and credited the couple’s social media and podcast messaging with helping them with financial and marriage challenges. “I don’t think we’re anything super special. If anything, all I can say is I’m just happily married. But whatever we’re doing, if it’s helping other couples, other families, it’s a very good feeling.”

When he first started posting, Daniel was not even aware he could monetize his social channels. TikTok pays creators between $.02 and $.04 per 1,000 views, and Daniel made a little money that way. But as their engagement on TikTok and Instagram grew, brands began reaching out for promotional partnerships, offering much larger amounts for sponsored posts for brands such as Buick, McDonald’s and Tide.

“When you think about it, it’s a 60-second Tiktok, and you can get $15,000,” he notes. “So, in a year we’ll do over six figures.”

Daniel explains, however, that there can be a misconception about how easy it is to create engaging content on platforms like TikTok, and he admits it takes more time and expertise to strategize, plan and shoot a 60-second video than it does to create a 45-minute podcast episode. It’s also easy to lose followers by cluttering your channel with promotions and neglecting the core content people are following you for.

“It’s not like we can have an ad a day because there aren’t too many companies that are reaching out to us at that level,” he notes. “You want to say true to your channel, but sprinkle in some ads. Also, the ads that we accept are products that we would actually use.”

Daniel says they are intentional about not promoting their insurance business on their social media channels and podcast. They don’t even respond to public comments asking what they do for a living, wanting to avoid the appearance that they’re using the channels to market themselves. However, other commenters typically reply to the questions, answering the question for them and directing people to Great Park Insurance’s website.

On his second podcast, Insurance Buttoned Up, Daniel interviews subject matter experts on industry insider issues such as insurtech and the E&S (excess and surplus) market, as well as offering career and business advice on topics from public speaking to productivity and marketing.

According to Future One’s 2018 Agency Universe Study, the average age of P&C agency principals is 54, and 15% are age 66 or older. At 44 (Daniel) and 43 (Christina), the Seongs consider themselves “babies” in the insurance business, and they sense a particular stewardship toward their Great Park team.

These days Daniel has stepped back from selling policies. Although he still goes into the office every morning for meetings with his team and with carriers, he also travels to speak at industry conferences and to meet in mastermind groups where best practices are shared and trends are discussed. He’s particularly interested in staying on the cutting edge of how insurtech is reshaping the marketplace.

“I’ve been very fortunate to be an angel investor and an equity partner in a lot of these companies,” he explains. “But again, it’s making an impact in the industry—not just on the agency side—but on the technology side as well.”

Although the early years of starting Great Park were grueling, Daniel now has room to breathe, and notes that the business has given him the flexibility to spend more time with his kids than he would have in any other career.

“If you ask my kids today, they think Daddy’s retired. They don’t think I work,” he says. “I drop them off at school, and when they’re at school, I’m at the office. Having five kids, we’re very busy with activities, but in the evening, I’m always able to take them to their activities, be with them and just really enjoy our time together.”

Christina manages both family and business finances and comes into the office several times a week to help with paperwork and send out commission checks. The rest of the time she has her hands full scheduling school activities and sports for their five kids.

With the growth of their social channels and podcast, Daniel and Christina are in the process of launching Black Tie Media, a company to resource other content creators like themselves, as well as the SeongLife lifestyle brand to support the messaging and community their social channels have created.

Although Great Park’s success has raised the possibility of getting snapped up by a private equity firm or acquired in a merger, Daniel says he has no intention of selling any time soon. A year and a half ago, the Seongs were approached with a buy-out offer Daniel says would have been the largest amount of cash he’d ever had in an account.

“We actually spent the money for about a week,” Daniel says. “We thought, oh my God, we’re going to be able to do this for our parents. We’re going to do this for your parents. We’re going to be able to do this for the kids.”

When the shock wore off, they ultimately decided not to take the offer, not only because of the effect it would have on their lives, but on those of the Great Park team. The family atmosphere the Seongs have cultivated at Great Park means they were acutely aware of how an acquisition may have disrupted the lives of people on their team.

“The industry has given me, Christina and the kids everything we have. Some of the best friends I’ve met are in the industry. There are people coming in right now, and this is the way that they’re feeding their families,” Daniel explains. “What I really want to do, my sole purpose in life professionally, is to leave the industry better than I found it, to just move two inches every single day closer to that goal. Because one day, maybe my kids will want to get into the business.”