New Agent Onboarding: Signed to Ready for Calls

For Aaron and Mike. Evidence: the agent's 25-email archive, an every-word sweep of his live SureLC portal (40+ views across 20 numbered files), and fact-checked research on SureLC, NIPR, and LIMRA (sources indexed in the appendix). Every load-bearing claim in the tables is tagged V verified, H hypothesis, U unknown; prose repeats table claims or cites the appendix. Unknowns are named blockers, never guessed.

The answer in ten lines

1. The real sequence has ten steps; contracting is only the middle of it.
2. Every step has one accountable owner today and a proposed product owner.
3. State differences: licenses, CE clocks, product training, carrier state lists, and appointment timing all vary per state; all eleven appointment rules are statute-verified (table below); the single open cell is Indiana's filing window.
4. IMO differences: branded SureLC per agency, agency-set contract type (LOA here), agency-enabled carrier lists, transfers driven by prior NIPR appointments.
5. The checklist lives in Peach Pilot as a readiness engine reading trustworthy signals; SureLC stays the contracting system of record, read, never duplicated.
6. Checklist versus bot: checklist owns determinable state; bot owns explanation and may never declare readiness or reveal disclosures.
7. Uplines see track-level progress and blockers, never background answers or documents.
8. Six tickets, dependency-ordered: T1 and T6 start now, T2 and T4 unlock when T1 lands, T3 and T5 stay drafts until the interviews answer their inputs.
9. Metric: signed-to-first-writable days and signed-to-declared-ready days, instrumented from day one, baseline from the next cohort.
10. Riskiest unknown: what At Carrier dwell means. Nothing may interpret it until Anna answers.

The story first

A new agent signed with Safe Life in early summer 2026. His intro call with Mike, Safe Life's owner, covered comp and training out loud, never in writing V. He activated SureLC through Safe Life's branded link V. On Jul 6 at 11:02 AM he created his first contracting request, American Amicable. Anna Collins at the Safe Life desk packaged and delivered it that evening at 5:30 PM V. The carrier made the contract effective Jul 11, marked Completed Jul 14 V. Occidental, a related carrier, appeared as a second active contract with no request ever filed V; why is a hypothesis H.

On Jul 11 he created three more requests in one 30-minute sitting: Americo, Banner, Mutual of Omaha. Anna processed all three the evening of Jul 13: two emailed to carriers, Banner delivered electronically through its transfer channel V. As of Jul 28 all three still show At Carrier, and nothing anywhere says whether carriers are still reviewing or nobody updated the record U.

Meanwhile the portal quietly says he cannot sell annuities in any licensed state until he takes a state course, his Georgia CE shows zero credits reported although his course history shows the hours done, his training sync has been failing since Jul 11, and a nonresident license expired unnoticed in April V. Nobody owns telling him. His honest position today: fixed life with American Amicable and Occidental, subject to per-state appointment confirmation, and nothing else.

Who's who, and six words you need

Aaron: Peach Pilot, assigned this issue, owns build priority. Mike: CEO and owner of Safe Life Policy LLC, the agency this agent signed with; he owns the readiness bar, and Anna's desk reports up to him. Anna Collins: Safe Life's contracting desk. Tyler: Peach Pilot, owns this discovery and the interviews. Safe Life Policy LLC: the IMO; Mike's agency. Peach Pilot: us.

The one-page sequence

One accountable owner per step; steps 8 and 9 have no owner today, so the owner shown there is our proposal, flagged as such. At a glance, by owner lane: Agent owns 1 licenses, 3 profile, 4 requests, 7 training. Agency (Anna's desk) owns 2 invite, 5 review and delivery. Carrier owns 6 approval and writing number. Upline owns 0 intro, 8 call readiness (proposed), 9 declared ready (proposed).

Step 8, proposed inventory for Mike to correct: CRM access, dialer or phone setup, a lead source assigned, script or presentation reviewed with the upline, compliance and call-recording rules covered, carrier e-app access confirmed, first calls shadowed, and an explicit first-call authorization. Built from what the evidence shows is missing; Mike's version replaces it (T6).

Step 9, provisional readiness bar until Mike defines the real one: licensed in the target state, at least one carrier contract active with a writing number or confirmed JIT path, product training satisfied for what he will pitch, E&O current, step 8 complete, and the upline's explicit go. Ships in no product until T6 replaces or confirms it.

The status model: what At Carrier actually means

Reconciling an apparent contradiction: SureLC is the system of record for the contracting pipeline, and still not a source of truth for readiness. Both are true: the stages and red/yellow gates are real and enforced; late-pipeline statuses depend on manual upkeep; readiness spans licensing, training, and call access SureLC does not model.

Claim-to-evidence matrix

Readiness snapshot for this agent (evidence as of Jul 28, 2026)

Sellability is a computation, not a status; each component shows separately, and the columns mirror the step 9 bar exactly so the two cannot drift. Net stays conservative where a component is unknown. Absence is honest: "none found" means no gate appeared in the captured views, weaker than verified clearance, so carrier-specific requirements stay U until checked.

Anna's desk, as evidenced (a strawman for her to correct)

Built only from the 19 timestamped request notes (portal 16, 17); unmarked steps are V, gaps are U. Anna corrects this in the review, and her corrections replace it.

1. Invite and account setup: not evidenced from the desk side U; the agent received the branded activation link (email 02)
2. Agent creates and signs; the desk sees it after producer review (created 11:02 AM, reviewed 11:08 AM, Jul 6)
3. Desk review and packaging: observed turnaround same-day (American Amicable, Jul 6) and two days (wave two: reviewed Jul 11, delivered evening Jul 13). What she checks, and how not-in-good-order items are handled, unknown U; this case was clean
4. Delivery per carrier, as observed: American Amicable electronic packet; Americo emailed; Mutual of Omaha emailed; Banner electronic through its transfer channel. A producer copy sent every time
5. Carrier follow-up and chase cadence: not evidenced U
6. Writing-number intake: numbers exist on the Contracts page, but where they arrive first and who enters them is unknown U; research 5 says manual agency entry is the norm for most carriers
7. Marking Completed: American Amicable went Completed Jul 14, three days after the carrier's Jul 11 effective date, consistent with manual after-the-fact marking H
8. What the desk does not own, per the evidence: licensing, product training, CE, call readiness (V by absence)

Where each readiness field comes from

The snapshot's columns are only buildable if every field has a source and an acquisition path; this is that map, and T1 to T5 scope against it.

The concept: a readiness engine, not a checklist page

The agent runs on four tracks at once: licensing, contracting, product training, call readiness. Different owners, different failure modes, no connecting system. SureLC models one track, email carries the decisive signals for another, training lives in a third place, call readiness lives nowhere. The product reads the trustworthy signals from each track (NIPR license state, welcome emails with writing numbers, training certificates, the upline's explicit go) and answers one question per agent: what can you sell, where, and what exactly is blocking you. SureLC and the inbox cannot do this by design. That gap, not a prettier checklist page, is the ownable thing.

Checklist versus the Q&A bot

The rule: the checklist owns anything with a determinable state, an owner, and evidence. The bot owns explanation, reads checklist state for status questions, and carries hard prohibitions.

Bot prohibitions, explicit: it may not declare readiness, may not interpret At Carrier dwell, may not expose background disclosures or documents, and may not state carrier or state rules it cannot source. These become acceptance criteria in T4/T5 and the bot's system prompt.

State and IMO differences

• State: licenses and CE clocks per state V; product training rules differ per state (GA: one-time four-hour annuity course) V; carrier state lists differ per request (MoO excluded TX) V; appointment timing (JIT versus pre-appointment) shifts when ready-to-write arrives, our eleven-state table is an open blocker U
• IMO: branded SureLC URL and per-agency credentials V; agency sets contract type (LOA here: no banking page, comp through hierarchy) V; agency chooses which carriers an agent may request V; prior NIPR appointments turn requests into transfers with release implications V, norms unknown U; comp grids IMO-specific, verbal here, changed mid-onboarding V

Appointment timing, the eleven states

Operative statutory text checked Jul 29, 2026; official state sites where reachable, two rows via legal republishers (flagged, small currency risk). A 2009 carrier guide misclassified Florida, so it is treated as known-unreliable and carries no weight here. Rules are normalized: Pre-appointment (appointment must exist before acting), Appointment on filing (effective the moment the carrier submits), Explicit just-in-time (statute expressly permits the producer to act before appointment), Insurer-side acceptance window (statute permits the insurer to accept a first application from a non-appointed producer, not the same as permitting the producer to solicit), Model-act filing window (notice due within N days of contract or first application; producer solicitation permission not spelled out the way Texas and Virginia spell it out).

What this changes, with one hard boundary: these rows are the statutory tier, what the law permits. A second tier, carrier practice, sits on top and is unknown (U): carriers commonly require their own onboarding confirmation before accepting business regardless of what the state allows, so the readiness engine must AND the two tiers and never tell an agent he can write from statute alone. Within the statutory tier: in Georgia an appointment is effective the moment the carrier files it; in Florida nothing may be written until the appointment exists; Texas and Virginia expressly let the producer act before appointment; Maryland lets the insurer accept a first life application from a non-appointed producer. Whether the carriers actually filed his American Amicable and Occidental appointments is still the U in the snapshot. T3's config table now starts with all eleven rules resolved (one filing-window cell open) instead of zero.

The metric

Two numbers the product exists to move: signed-to-first-writable days and signed-to-declared-ready days. n=1 supplies no baseline because the one missing datum is the signed date itself: the archive starts after signing and the intro-call email is undated in the export. Mike or the agent can supply it in the review; either way T2 instruments both timestamps from day one and the next cohort establishes the real baseline. Target direction: down, with silent windows like this agent's Jul 13 to 28 eliminated as a side effect of surfacing blockers.

Decisions we need in the review

Review agenda (the exact questions)

Anna: (1) Which carriers update SureLC automatically versus by your hand, and how often do you update the rest? (2) What does At Carrier mean for Americo, Banner, and Mutual of Omaha right now? (3) How did Occidental appear with no request? (4) How do releases and contracting debt work on transfers in? (5) Your desk flow from invite to Completed, including NIGO fixes and carrier chasing. (6) Who is supposed to tell an agent about training, CE, and license blockers today?

Mike (who, as Safe Life's owner, can also answer or arbitrate any of Anna's desk items above): (1) Your actual bar before an agent takes a live call. (2) Correct the step 8 inventory. (3) Who should click "ready," and would you use the evidence panel? As agency owner you may already have agency-side SureLC visibility the producing uplines lack (U, confirm); the T5 upline view targets those producing uplines. (4) What does sales training completion mean? No attendance or completion record for the Weekly Edge calls appears anywhere in the archive or portal (V by absence, emails 11 to 25).

Aaron: (1) Accept or reorder ticket priority and dependencies. (2) Confirm the metric pair. (3) Confirm the bot prohibitions as acceptance criteria.

Build-ready tickets for next cycle

Owners: Aaron assigns T1 to T5 at planning; Tyler owns T6 now. Start now: T1 and T6. Unlock when T1's model lands (same cycle): T2 and T4. Discovery-dependent drafts until T6 answers land: T3 and T5.

Open blockers, named

• Anna's answers (T6): At Carrier truth per carrier, Occidental origin H, release and debt norms U, her desk SOP
• Mike's answers (T6): the readiness bar, the corrected step 8 inventory, who clicks ready
• Indiana's appointment filing window U; every state's rule statute-verified as of Jul 29
• Worth fixing for this agent regardless: LIMRA sync failing since Jul 11, NM license lapsed, GA CE done but unreported. Someone should tell him; today nobody would.

Appendix: the assignment, as received

Linear issue PEA-555, as relayed by Tyler; the Linear connector was down when this pack was assembled, so this is the relayed brief, not a verbatim copy of the issue body. Paste the verbatim body here at review. Aaron's ask: define how a new agent gets from signed to ready to take calls. Deliverables: a one-page onboarding sequence; who owns every step; state and IMO differences; where the checklist should live; what belongs in the checklist versus the Q&A bot; whether uplines can see progress; build-ready Linear tickets for the next planning cycle. Base it on Safe Life's real process, then review it with Mike and Aaron. Discovery, not a build.

Appendix: source index

• Emails 01 to 25 (the agent's archive, May to Jul 2026; timeline in safelife-email-timeline.md): 01 intro call confirmation; 02 SureLC activation; 03 first submission (American Amicable); 04, 05 carrier welcomes with writing numbers; 06 password change (Jul 11); 07 to 09 wave-two submissions; 10 Americo comp reduction effective Jul 20; 11 to 25 training and community broadcasts.
• Portal 01 to 20 (every-word SureLC captures, Jul 28; 20 numbered files, some holding several views, 40+ views total, with a master index): 02 contact info + welcome banner; 03 DBA (LOA); 04, 05 licenses; 06 per-license details; 09 the 19 background questions; 10 history (empty); 11, 11a CE and training per state; 12 course history; 13 E&O; 14 signature; 15 documents; 16, 17 requests, all stages, all 19 notes; 18 contracts, codes, NIPR appointments; 19 help and support; 20 account menu.
• Research 1 to 15 (fact-checked findings with citations, pea555-domain-research.md): 1 stage model; 2 BGA review and wizard; 3 manual status upkeep; 4 delivery mechanics; 5 Completed and writing numbers; 6 profile hard gates; 7 red versus yellow notices; 8 in-wizard training validation; 9 LIMRA AML reciprocity; 10 LOA banking; 11 NIPR identity import; 12 licensure precedes appointment; 13 request types; 14 NIPR appointment filing; 15 PDB monitoring. Open questions 1 to 3: bundling, JIT states and fees, release and debt norms. Statutes checked Jul 29, 2026, per-row sources in the appointment table (eleven states).

Note: drafted with AI assistance from real onboarding evidence; pre-review, Anna's and Mike's answers pending (T6). Tyler owns this doc; send questions and corrections to him.