David 0:00

How can we use the resources that we have at our disposal as benefits consultants in ways that maybe aren't commonly used so that we can drive vastly different outcomes and reduce commercial risk? We'll find out on this episode of Shift Shapers.

SPEAKER_03 0:17

This is the Shift Shapers Podcast, connecting benefits advisors with thought leaders and entrepreneurs who are shaping the shifts in the industry. And now, here's your host, David Saltzman.

David 0:30

And to help us answer that question, we've invited Chris LeBrec, who is founder of Tarpon Benefits. Welcome, Chris. Thanks for joining us today. Good morning, David. Thank you for having me on. Oh, our pleasure. So let's start a little bit with your journey because in this industry, we all have kind of interesting pathways about how we got to be doing what we're doing today. So give us a quick overview of how you got here.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Sure. I've been in the business for 31 years as a benefits consultant, starting with a small family-run agency in New Jersey, and then sold that to Insurance Office of America, and eventually became the managing partner soon after that, the president of the Employee Benefits Group at Insurance Office of America here in Orlando. So I've been in this business for quite a while.

David 1:15

Truth that if you stick around long enough, you know, there are a few of us left. The few, the brave, the crazy. So let's start with a with an exposition here. What's the problem that we're working on? And give us your take on how that happened.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Oh, where can I start? I'm not sure 21 minutes is going to be long enough for that conversation, but candidly, it's population health management, right? It's it's improving the health of those in our charge and improving the administrative experience of those who are also responsible for the health of those in their charge. And solving for that is not an easy thing. It's an extremely dynamic environment, what they call a wicked environment. It's like voter sentiment or weather prediction. Population health management is a very, as I said, dynamic environment that requires, I think, an approach from a lot of different perspectives. I think the broker community, the consultant community has done a good job, especially in the last three to five years, of bringing in new resources to improve the cost for healthcare, to improve the end user experience. But I think there are other things out there that we're not necessarily leveraging as well as we can. And there's a bunch of reasons uh for that.

David 2:25

So let's dig into those reasons. And one of the things that I that I know you are keen on is these things we call social determinants of health. Explain what that is and why that's a driver of this problem.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

So as a benefits consultant, when you look at what you do for the client, which is placing the right coverage at the right time, educating the end user how to use that coverage, what the resources are out there, but there are other aspects of what drives poor health. So food deserts are a great example. Looking at the population of employees that you're working with and where they reside, are they in a food desert? Do they have good access to quality nutrition, which is a big driver? There's other pressures out there on employees, financial pressures that drive a lot of their behavior. There are social aspects of their connectivity with the employer. There's a lot of things out there that are what I would call proximate causes of poor health. And proximate cause is the thing that triggers the thing you're trying to solve for, right? So if you want to improve the health of a population, providing the right coverages, right deductibles is very important. That's the block and tackle of what we do. But understanding these other challenges, hurdles, barriers to improving the health of a population, which reduces cost and improves medical outcomes, is very, very important. And I think that's a big part of it. The reason we don't see a lot of exploration in this space, I think it comes from the typical insurance agency, large or small. Mostly I have seen that their different divisions are siloed from one another. And they do work together. They do quote unquote cross-sell, but they don't necessarily share data. They don't have infrastructure to support what that looks like at the client level. That is to say, most agencies and most carriers are not sharing occupational injuries and work comp claims with their healthcare carrier. They're not sharing it on any data platform at all. And those two things are very, very interrelated. And that's a simple, easy thing to look at that drives or can drive cost of care on both sides. So, but that information is not being shared because most agencies have very separate divisions, property and casualty and their benefits consultancy are not necessarily connected at that level. Yes, two producers who meet at the water cooler talking about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the game over the weekend may decide to share an account because maybe the P and C producer heard that healthcare has been a problem for them and he heard that pain. So he's introducing it. But they're not necessarily saying, hey, look, you know, we've done the best job we possibly can to reduce claims in your workers' compensation. However, we also notice that a lot of your employees have or are basically in poor health before they even get injured, which drives the severity of that claim. I'd like to introduce you to my benefits partner who can improve on the comorbidities that are in your group, which will ultimately reduce the severity of claim and maybe also reduce the frequency of claim for you. And they get together and share that. Typically, those two divisions are siloed financially on their PLs and the way they operate. So most agencies don't build infrastructure to support that. I think that that's when I talk about resequencing the assets we already have, unique to every client in ways that we haven't before, that's really what I'm talking about. And I would invite in a human capital management practice to amplify employee engagement. I would invite in your retirement planning and financial services division to make sure that you're providing knee-to-nee financial counseling for every single employee, to assure their debt-to-pay ratios are in order and right-sized. Ultimately, you know, if population health management is our charge, holding on to an employee for a longer period of time allows us to actually have an impact on their health overall. And so if we can help reduce turnover through human capital management and employee engagement practices, then that supports what we're already trying to do. So there's an exponent value to this. If my job is to support the health of an organization, help them find out where they are in their healthcare journey as individuals, what they need to do next, and how to improve on that, or just maintain it. I need to understand all of the things that are happening at that end user level and bring resources to bear to make sure that they feel, you know, that those are personal and relevant and accessible, not too expensive, not difficult to understand. And they can use them in real time. So right sizing debt-to-pay ratios is extraordinarily important. And if I can do that, I'm going to reduce turnover. If I increase employee engagement through communication practices and leveraging a human capital management practice, well, that does make a difference in turnover. It makes a difference in training cost. It makes a difference in productivity at the employee level. So I look at five real key areas at that end user level. Number one is professionally. Are they professionally fulfilled? Do they have a sense of future belonging within that organization? Do they know what their progression looks like as far as moving up in the salmon ladder of success? The military does this really well. E1, E2, E3. You know the proficiencies that you need to achieve to move up. And I don't think we have done a great job in educating employers on the implications of that. Socially connecting employees to whatever the cause of the organization is. This is a very interesting conversation that has really amplified in the last, let's say, three years. A lot of employers are asking, what do we stand for? What's our purpose? Because the younger generation, candidly, I would say every generation, we just didn't ask for it. But the younger generation is demanding that there's a cause that they can connect themselves to, something greater than themselves, right? That they can feel good about when they go to work every single day. That social connection and that bond with that group to collaborate on solving for those issues increases productivity. It also increases the mental health of the employee. And as a result, it has implications on healthcare and healthcare costs. There's the safety aspect, right? And we're not talking about pandemic free services and proper lifting techniques per se. We're talking about psychological safety. People are not very innovative if they're afraid a chandelier is going to fall on their head at any given moment. It's a very important thing. And historically, that was considered, let's say, a soft thing, right? CFOs would say, come on, really? Let's just let's make widgets and sell widgets, improve shareholder value. And that's that's very important. That's table stakes these days. Connecting people, making them feel safe from pandemic free services and having proper lifting techniques, as well as psychologically safe. Are they able to push back on the people that they report to? That's a social cue that you've got the right team, that you actually have people that feel empowered, emboldened, that have a sense of autonomy, have a sense of purpose. That's extraordinarily, extraordinarily important. And then there's health, obviously, which right is it's a derivative of a lot of these other things. If you have a sense of future belonging in a professionally fulfilled, if you feel safe in the broadest aspect of the term psychologically, if you are socially connected and engaged and financially you feel confident enough that your debt-to-pay ratios are correct or where they need to be, right-sized per se, then your health is typically better. So understanding that there's an exponent value of looking at this on a larger scale, I think is really important. And I think most average agencies, you know, your typical agency has access to all of these resources, but they're not taking it and looking at it like as a quilt, as a fabric that you weave together uniquely to every single client that you work with, that actually has exponent value. One plus one starts to equal three or three point five versus two. And here's part of the reason that we struggle with this, right? It's what I call the HR conundrum. HR typically doesn't want to put all their eggs in one basket. So my previous employer, which was Insurance Office of America, IOA, we would typically get maybe the retirement plan and the benefits, but not the PNC, or we would get the PNC and we could never get the benefits. And what that left was that leaves the HR director or whoever's responsible at the client level to tie all these things together in a way that where data is being shared. And your average client has HR director, and I had a lengthy conversation with an HR director out of New York City yesterday, and I kind of laid this out for her and I wanted, I wanted her opinion. She said, You're spot on with my world. I have to deal with a payroll representative and a payroll carrier. I have to deal with a benefits representative and multiple benefits carriers, point source solutions that have been brought in. I have to deal with a property and casualty carrier. I have to deal with a property and casualty consultant. I have two of them, by the way, a workers comp consultant, and then I have a specialist in my industry. I also have a bond line in my organization because we're a contractor and we do a lot of work. So I have a bond agent and a bond carrier. You can see how their world breaks down very quickly into transaction and away from strategy. If people are your number one asset and your relationship with those people is your strongest currency, you can't be focused all day long on transaction, on making sure scopes of work are met, performance guarantees are either met or exceeded, that contracts are written, and that all of these things are woven together at the administrative level to perform seamlessly at the client level. That's extraordinarily difficult, but they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket with any one consultant. So it starts to break down and the performance, the engineering leakage can be massive. And ultimately, if my job is to provide a really strong benefits platform and make sure that I'm trying I'm improving or maintaining the health of that population, I've got to be aware of all these things and the implications that they have on what I'm already trying to do. So I really believe it's it's resequencing the assets we have, unique to every client, taking a lot of that load off HR from an administrative burden standpoint, and then watching the results play out over time. It's not, this is not a silver bullet. It doesn't happen overnight, as we well know, and you're not going to solve for something as complex as population health management in an overnight event. There are things you can do to bring cost controls in, and I think the industry is doing a very, very good job of exploring resources around technology and AI as well as data. I think that's taken leaps and bounds, but I think there's a lot more for us to do, David.

David 12:47

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SPEAKER_01 14:29

That's a great question. And I think really you have to start with incentive alignment. We talk about incentives, compensation. I think of that like gravity. It's eventually going to wear you down. If it's not correct, your behavior's only going to be just so good. So I think you you align the incentives. You have to build trust bridges from a service implication standpoint between the different divisions. I think that's one of the biggest challenges. If you have a personal lines department that no one wants to refer to because their performance isn't great. And, you know, as a producer, you hear a lot of challenges in the auto division or homeowners. That trust bridge isn't there. You're not going to have, you know, I'm not going to take a 500 life group that I have consulted to and deploy my personal lines department in that if I know it's going to cause a problem and create risk for me in losing the entire account because the CFO's wife's jewelry ploter wasn't placed in time and she lost her wedding ring and all of a sudden I got a big problem. You have to build those trust bridges. You also have to understand, I think it's it's critical as you educate your sales team and consulting team on the implications of one plus one equals three and why that makes sense. That's an education process, right? The science behind understanding how health is improved when finances in that home are improved, understanding that so that you can educate the client really well on why you're introducing that resource. I think that's that's a big part of it. But tying these things together and ultimately finding ways to share data across those different divisions within the typical agency.

David 16:01

Isn't the crux of the matter, though? I mean, you and I know that the road of agencies is littered with benefits advisors who have a hookup with a P and C firm and they're going to work synergistically and it's going to be great. But aren't you really taking two almost different approaches and trying to meld them into one? You're taking benefits advisors who are, if they're doing their job properly, more consultative. And you're taking property and casualty folks who are more transactional in nature, and you're asking them to create this kind of hybrid third. How do you blend those?

SPEAKER_01 16:30

Yeah, that that's that's the kind of secret sauce, I think. I think having business development managers that kind of reside between those two areas to help drive the process. I mean, I don't like to malign PNC agents by, you know, getting too much into the transaction versus consultation, but I don't know a whole lot of PNC agents that don't want to increase their revenue, simply stated, right? So if you look at if you're a PNC agent, you look at your book of business, how many medical accounts, how many benefits clients do you have in your PNC book of business? Well, knowing full well that the workers' comp severity and frequency of risk goes down when you introduce a strong benefits plan, why wouldn't you do that? So it's kind of understanding the science between those two areas and and how they implicate each other is really crucial. It's the educational process, though, David. That's a heavy lift. So you look at this as a typical agency and do some analysis on what's a 10% take up rate look like financially to the organization and financially to the producers, and then take steps from there. You know, what does that how do you do that? You're not you're not going to turn this around overnight because you've, like I said, you've got an education process internally, and then you have an external education process at the client level, and you've got to build that trust where the client is starting to put all of their eggs in your consultative basket. But getting someone in between property and casualty benefits, retirement planning, human capital management, personal lines, all of these resources that we have to tell this story really effectively and to back it up with science and results and eventually case studies, I think is, I think it's the future of our industry, honestly. I think our clients, as we've all seen, right? They're now, you know, as of this December 27th of last year, they're seeing, sorry, two years ago, they're they're seeing what our revenue is, our revenue streams. They want to know where we're making money as a benefits consultant. Well, they're not gonna stop at that. They're gonna start saying, well, okay, that's how much you're making on my benefits. How much are you making on my retirement plan and my property and casualty? And am I really getting the value here? I read on LinkedIn this morning, someone stated that 2023 is gonna be, you know, there are a lot of surprises that are gonna come. Let's get ahead of that. Let's get ahead of the surprises. Let's be the one that's surprising. You know, have these conversations at the client level. I can tell you, I have over the last year and a half to two years had this conversation at the client level with the data behind it and the science behind it. I gotta tell you, they're they're starving for this. They're starving for a different approach uh that creates different results. Because healthcare, with our, you know, with the average increase every single year, and now with property and casualty in a hard market where they're getting hit, I hear property and casualty agents complain they got a 20, 25, 30% rate hike. So that happens in our business all the time. You know, that's that's not surprising. So, but they're they're struggling with how to deal with that. And there's a lot of incentives you can provide at the consultant and the salesperson, the producer level, um, not the least of which is, hey, you know, if your client is getting a 30% increase in their property and casualty, why don't you get them to look at their benefits? Perhaps you can make up that difference by doing a better job on the benefits.

David 19:35

Well, and that's the point. I mean, I think if there's a 2023 mandate, it's that I hope, you know, I keep lighting candles and saying prayers and hoping white smoke comes out of the chimney, but it's that we'll finally move the industry from cost to value, which I think is the overarching theme that you're talking about. And we hope you'll come back and chat with us some more about that. We're out of time for for this episode, but we'd love to have you back and maybe we can have that conversation.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

I would appreciate the opportunity, David. I'm very excited about the future for our industry.

David 20:05

Chris LeBeck, founder of Tarpon Benefits. Chris, thanks for sharing your expertise with our audience. Thank you, David. I appreciate it.

Announcer 20:11

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