Tennis Led GetAQuote.com Founder Down His Path for Success

Tennis was Marcio Pepe’s lead into insurance – and to success in the business – and it was a path laid years ago before he was an adult when he headed to the U.S. from Brazil to pursue the game at the highest level he could.

Pepe was born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and he took up tennis at a young age. His mother’s best friend lived in La Jolla, Calif., so she sent him to the U.S. in 1996 and the woman became his guardian.

Pepe found a small apartment close to her in La Jolla, and he attended La Jolla High School from 1996 to 1998, playing tennis every year.

“I was one of the best junior tennis players in Brazil and California was the place to be in the 90s for junior tennis,” he said. “I trained every day for five hours a day and became one of the best players in the U.S. in my age division.”

After receiving numerous offers for full scholarships, he chose the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he played for four years from 1998 to 2002, while majoring in economics with an emphasis on accounting.

Tennis had been good to him, but Pepe was also a realist.

“By the end of my college tennis career, I realized my dream of winning a grand slam and becoming a successful tennis pro were very small, so I decided to quit competitive tennis when college was over so I could focus on my career,” he said. “I wanted to apply all the discipline, hard work and commitment I leaned from tennis to business. I wanted to be successful, and I was very hungry for money. Tennis gave me everything. I met most of my best friends, including my wife, through tennis. I traveled the whole world through tennis, and I still play tennis every day. Tennis was the most important influence in my life.”

That decision led him to State Farm, which gave him his first foray into the world of business. He worked there from 2002 to 2004.

“I loved the idea of residual income that insurance offers,” he said. “Also, different than tennis, with sales if you work hard enough and make enough calls, you will have guaranteed success. In tennis, nothing is guaranteed, but sales is all about numbers, so I applied my work ethic to insurance sales and achieved success very quickly.”

He parlayed that success into his own brokerage firm, Adurakane Insurance, which he launched with a partner in 2004. The focus was on a promising growth area: group health and commercial insurance.

After some time, he was led by that experience into the world of leads.

“I used to knock on doors and network all day,” he said. “In 2011, I learned about web leads and split from my partner and shifted focus.”

He called learning about leads and what they could do for his business “life changing.”

“It was simple math because the metrics don’t lie,” he said. “If you order 100 leads, will you get 20 legit opportunities on the phone and close half or at the very least a quarter of those. So, you will close between 5% to 10%. All you need to do well with leads is desperation for success, discipline and consistency.”

In 2011 he started Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based MPX Insurance, which focused on buying homeowners insurance leads, a move that he said took him from “zero personal lines premium” to $23 million by June of this year.

“I feel that if we did $23 million in nine-and-a-half years with no resources, no team and unstable leads, we should be over $100 million in the next nine years,” he said.

His love for leads led him in February to launch GetAQuote.com, which is now the focus of his business endeavors. GetAQuote.com is a lead generation company that offers “live, high intent leads,” including shared or exclusive home, auto, life and health leads. They sell exclusive insurance leads in all 50 states.

“We are willing to invest some time with the agency before they go live to make sure they are setup for success,” Pepe said of the business model. “If they only buy leads for a month and don’t have a positive ROI, they will not buy leads again and that would have been a waste of time for everyone around. So, we spend time fine tuning the filters, demographics of the campaign and we want to make sure they have the tools they need to be successful.”

He said the company strives to distance itself from lead companies focused on volume, or “turn and burn type of operations,” as he calls them.

Pepe described a flawed thought process that’s common in insurance lead buying, in which companies pay a few thousand dollars for leads and don’t continue. However, a business may pay two times revenue or more for a book of business.

“Why wouldn’t you do that with leads? You have to keep going. It’s the cost of doing business,” he said. “You just keep purchasing, keep purchasing. It’s a model that works.”

The website’s portal prompts users to “take a simple quiz,” which asks whether the quiz-taker is an agent, leading to questions about the type of leads being sought, and contact information. Consumers are directed to insurance purchasing options.

GetAQuote.com’s revenue in 2021 is projected to reach $10 million, with what Pepe describes as “exponential growth” on the immediate horizon.

“This company will become a unicorn eventually and will compete head-to-head with other multi-billion-dollar companies such as Bankrate, Zebra, EverQuote,” he said.

The plan is for GetAQuote.com to eventually become a portal where consumers can get a quote for goods and services beyond insurance: auto insurance, a dog walker, a new roof, solar panels, a personal trainer.

MPX has continued to grow, and now has 23 employees, with plans to grow to 50 employees a year from now. GetAQuote.com is ran separately from MPX Insurance, though MPX only orders leads from Getquote.com.

When Pepe’s parents (Marcio and Lilian), who were both physicians, divorced, his mom married an American citizen from Saratoga, Calif., and he and his mother became American Citizens.

Being in the U.S., and the lessons he learned from tennis, are two things that Pepe credits for leading him to his success and to building his successful business models.

“I feel very fortunate to be an American citizen and live in the most incredible country in the world,” he said.