Pick Yourself Up – Jordan Shaked

“Success is measured by how high you bounce when you hit the bottom.” – General George Patton

Since coming to USHEALTH Advisors Jordan Shaked has always strived to be at the top of his game and at the top of the leader board when it comes to being an all-star agent at the company. Since joining USHA in April of 2018, Jordan has produced more than $8 million in individual sales, consistently writing more than $1 million every year, including just a few years ago, when he wrote $2.4 million in a single year.

Talking about and seeing the success Jordan has earned is easy, but talking about how he got to the doorstep of USHA is a bit harder. Yet by Jordan sharing his struggles, we all learn and become stronger. Jordan says he works hard to do the right thing. It’s hard to believe it was just a few years ago, before he found USHEALTH Advisors, that trying to do the right thing nearly cost him his life.

Courage can have consequences, good and bad… though as you look back, you understand it’s the only way to thrive. Nothing happens to you, it happens for you.

“It was one night in 2015 in Coconut Creek, Florida, and I saw this girl was getting beat up by a guy,” says Jordan. “I didn’t even know her, but I decided to intervene. I ended up getting jumped by 20 people and needed emergency brain surgery. When I got to the hospital, they told me I was ten minutes away from dying. And getting past that, I was in a pretty deep depression because I couldn’t really do much. I always worked out, always took care of myself and kind had to lay low for about six months. Healing up from that, dealing with the depression and getting myself out of that hole was definitely my greatest challenge up to that point in life.”

“I got hit in the head with a gun during that brawl, that’s what happened. Cracked my skull and had air leaking into my brain, but I had no idea and thought I was fine. When the fight was over I was thinking I’m going to call this girl, make sure she’s ok, I’m going to go home. My buddy was the one who had some cuts on his face and I told him you’ve got to go to the hospital. But it ended up being me, the one who was in pretty bad shape… he was okay. Through that whole thing, to be honest, I kept a positive outlook on everything. I was in the hospital and they told me that they had to transport me to a different hospital for brain trauma. It’s like four in the morning, I’m ready to go into surgery. I was ok with it. But my mom walks in crying and that’s when it kind of hit me like, all right, this is probably a little more serious than I thought.”

“After about 6 months I was finally able to get back into the gym and started feeling good physically and mentally. A month or two later, my fingertips in both hands went numb. I started seeing my neurologist again to figure out what was going on. After about a month of testing I was misdiagnosed with MS. So after I finally started getting back to myself, I heard the words multiple sclerosis, not really knowing what it meant. After doing some research I felt like my whole world was collapsing… again.”

“I started seeing a chiropractor three times a week. I had a ton of swelling in my neck and after a few months of work with the chiropractor  and countless MRIs the numbness went away. My last MRI showed I had two herniated discs in my neck and it looked like MS on the MRI due to all the swelling. Once I got the clean bill of health is really when I got a different outlook/prospective on life.”

“As much as people can be there for you, they can’t really understand what you’re going through. I mean, I almost lost my life, but the way I thought about it was I’m here for a reason. I don’t know what it was at that point in time. But I remember sitting in the hospital bed, I was in intensive care and I had ESPN on that same weekend that this happened to me. I saw that a soccer player got head-butted or something, had the same exact surgery for a fractured skull, and he ended up passing away. So that day I had an epiphany. I was like, I’m meant to be here, right? God wants me on this earth for a reason. I mean, after those events I always strived hard to become the very best version of myself.”

It happens more than most of us want to admit, constantly questioning the things going on around us, on the outside. Too often it takes a dramatic circumstance to stir an awakening for us to then look inward and work on what we can control, the inside. When that happens, by growing, we learn we already have all the answers.

“I really love taking people to the next level,” says Rebecca. “Besides just teaching them about our products, I love teaching period. I think I wanted to be a teacher in my younger life and I’ve created these different courses here to educate the agents, from insurance 101 to marketing 101.”

Rebecca says it comes naturally – her desire to show others the way – because she learned so much from the man who led her family, her dad.

“The whole thing made me a stronger person and it made me appreciate life way more because I could have lost it. Now I have a wife, I have two kids. I have a family that I never thought I could have and a career that I love.”

Jordan’s success in building the career that he loves comes from a strong work ethic. His consistency in annual production at USHA comes from putting in the reps in every part of his life, whether it’s at the gym, the other place Jordan loves to be…

…or working with USHEALTH Advisors, it’s a discipline Jordan says he learned from the man he loves, his father. Jordan says it was his dad’s example and his story that taught him some tough life lessons.

“My father is a saint, he’s taught me everything,” says Jordan. “Before I was born he got into some trouble with a few of his Israeli friends while he and my mom were living in New York. So he ended up needing to go back to Israel. That’s why we moved to Israel when I was about a year old. And then when we came back, I was about seven. I remember after we got back from Israel and growing up for those few years in New York, before we moved to Florida, I remember seeing my dad only once or twice a week. I was still young, but I always wondered why. So later in life my dad told me his story, told me everything. It helped when I started getting into some trouble in high school, and then in college, which I never finished. He told me the story of everything that happened to him and I realized he had been living at a halfway house and coming home on the weekends.”

Jordan says it was also seeing his dad work so hard that instilled that same drive in him to make things happen.

“My dad worked for an audio-video company,” says Jordan. “He started as a rookie, pulling wire and he worked his way up to be one of the best project managers. I mean, he took companies from nothing to million dollar companies. So it was good to always see the way he worked and the way he appreciated his clients, his customers, whatever he needed to do to get the job done. And so growing up he always wanted me to have a job. I wasn’t the type of kid where they were handing out money to me whenever I needed it. He was like, if you want something, you go and you work, you go make money and you buy things yourself. My dad and my mom, I mean both of them are super hard workers. My mom’s been a teacher. She always worked hard so we could go to nice camps and stuff like that. Seeing how they both worked, how they provided for us, it definitely instilled that in me.”

And Jordan needed those examples, because when Jordan walked in the door at USHEALTH Advisors, after working at an audio-video company just like his dad did, it was shock and awe.

“Oh dude, it was rough,” laughs Jordan. “My first day, I mean, I walk in and I was so intimidated. Everyone is on the phones, it sounds like everyone knows what they’re talking about. And to be honest, now, if I went back, probably people didn’t know what they were talking about. It’s funny how intimidating it was to be in a sales room. I mean, I had a desk, I had a cube, and I was just going over this pitch back and forth and I got on the phones, had no luck. So driving home my first day, I forgot who I called, I think it was my mom. I was like, this isn’t for me, this is not for me. And she said, “just give it a chance.” And then I ended up speaking to my older sister who was in grad school in England and she was in a sales job, just to kind of help make some money. And she said to me, “listen, everyone there is there to help you. No one there is talking sh*t about you. Everyone’s there to help you out and you’ve always made friends everywhere you go, you know how to talk to people.” She’s like, give it a try. And that kind of opened up my eyes. If she could do it, I for sure can do it. And that next day I set up two appointments for my sales leader, they closed, and then the next week I was literally writing business on my own.”

“That first week was definitely tough. And you know how it is when you first start. So my first week writing, I issued 20,000 in AV, (annual volume). And then obviously Thursday night, Friday morning, everything, all the weekly production, goes back to zero. So I started bugging out. I was like, all right, let’s see if I can do it again. I asked myself, is this just a one-time fluke or am I actually decent at this job? But I had the hardest work ethic. I was in the office at 7:40 am before anybody, and I was leaving work at 10, or 10:30 pm, every single night, and this is after everyone had left. So I’m kind of teaching myself at this point. I had the help of others and stuff during the day, but at night I was literally learning on my own and teaching myself what works and what doesn’t. Obviously it’s trial and error. You get on the phone, you mess it up, you mess up the phone call, you know what you did wrong. So I was kind of teaching myself and I grew really fast from just that practice alone.”

Now, for Jordan, growth is the goal, personally and with his team as a Field Training Agent with USHEALTH Advisors, showing others how success is developed, day by day.

“When a new agent comes in I train them the way I would want to be trained, not sticking them on the phones right away,” says Jordan. “They need to understand what we’re selling, what our competition is. So I have them sitting in while I’m making dials, while I’m kind of training them and dialing at the same time. But the first week is just learning our policies in and out. And then after that we get them on the phones and we’re also teaching them, an hour or two during the day, who our competition is and how our business is run. So I mean it’s really just having that one-on-one with them, or if you’re having multiple agents sitting in a room and discussing everything, rather than just sitting with them on the phones and dialing right away.”

“Not everyone learns at the same pace. Myself, for example, I understood when I messed up a phone call why I messed it up and I changed it. But not everyone operates on that same timeline. So I mean, everyone needs a certain type of training with what they’re good at and with what they’re not so good at. So everything should be individualized.”

And it’s not just the individuals in his USHA family Jordan is responsible to care for, it’s also his personal family, the center of Jordan’s world.

“It’s why I do all of this, my family,” says Jordan. “I ended up meeting my wife Danielle on Bumble, believe it or not, and we hit it off right away. She’s the love my life. I looked at her and I just knew!

“We got married in August of 2019 and then we had Mia, my first daughter. Amazing. She’s our first child, but it was tough. It was right before Covid hit. So we had a Covid baby. No one helped us. We were on our own trying to juggle that and work at the same time. It was definitely tough. It put a strain on our marriage as I’m sure it did with a bunch of other people. But we got through it and I mean, and it’s beautiful. We had our second daughter, Emma, February of 2023. So she just turned one. She was a premature baby, six weeks premature. She was in the NICU for a week.”

“When we were able to bring her home after that week, my dog Mac who was my best friend, I got him in college when I was 19, got diagnosed with lung cancer. I had him for 12 years at that point and I just, I can’t explain it… it was so tough, trying to balance life with a premature, newborn baby, just getting her home and then knowing my dog was going to pass away. It was a lot. I got into another deep depression, didn’t really know how to handle my emotions.”

“Then Mac passed away and it’s still hard. And now I try to look at the beautiful things, the beautiful parts of it. Mac had some time with our newborn, Emma. He loved her, loved both the girls. It’s always going to be a loss deep in my heart, but I mean, as a man, you have to suck it up. You have to be there for your family. You have to go out and provide. It was a dark last year for me for sure. It was a down year for my business.”

A down year. But let’s put life in perspective for a moment and look back at how Jordan has responded.

First of all Jordan’s not alone. Everyone you will ever meet in your entire life is going through something. And Jordan’s something might be different than what you are experiencing in the moment. But the year before all of these life events happened, Jordan had produced $2.4 million in business with USHA. Last year, the “down” year, as Jordan refers to it, Jordan wrote only, $1.1 million! For many USHA agents, $1 million in business in a year is a dream not yet realized, and Jordan has already done that multiple times since coming to the company, even during the year he was facing several tough personal challenges.

Remember, it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you respond to what happens to you. And Jordan has not only responded, he’s excited about the future. He’s coming back full force.

“And so last year wasn’t the best,” says Jordan, “so I made it a point to say that 2024, it’s going to be a new year, right? I’m going to freaking kill it. I’m going to run, I’m going to hit the ground running and just kind of let last year be. It now lives in the past.”

To thrive in life, it’s constantly one foot in front of the other, kicking aside the obstacles and the adversity as they come, but always moving forward. Looking back, Jordan is slowly realizing he has done just that. He’s already faced a near-death experience and is still going step-by-step, every day, taking care of his business and his family.

“Obviously in life, everyone goes through their own things,” says Jordan. “You have to pick yourself up. You have to get out of that rut, whatever the case is, and just pursue what you’re meant to be on this earth for, right? So I mean now that when the whole brain surgery thing happened, I always said I’m here for a reason. It was my family, they are my destiny, to have these beautiful girls and be there and watch them grow up and walk them down the aisle someday. So no matter how hard things can be, it can always be worse, but you can always pick yourself up and just strive to be the strongest and best version of yourself.

A philosophy to live by. No matter what, pick yourself up… and keep moving forward.

Until next time, thanks for taking the time.

Your Storyteller,

Mark Brodinsky