Drew Holley, Managing Partner of BIS Benefits, emphasizes the critical importance of employee benefits and health insurance in today's competitive business landscape, where retaining top talent is paramount. With a focus on serving clients with excellence, BIS Benefits has evolved into a one-stop shop for group health and business insurance since its inception in 1997. Drew shared how investing in growing and developing people and the organizational focus on mission, vision, and core values at BIS has allowed the firm to grow significantly. Drew shares insights on the growing need for businesses to review and adapt their insurance strategies, start the renewal process early, especially in a time of rising costs and changing market dynamics, and work with a trusted advisor. He highlights the significance of fostering strong relationships between business owners and their insurance advisors, ensuring proactive communication and support during critical moments. Listeners will gain valuable advice on navigating the complexities of employee benefits and the impact of proper coverage on workforce satisfaction and retention.

Takeaways:

• Understanding the true costs of health insurance is essential for business owners today.
• Drew explains that affordability of healthcare plans directly impacts employee satisfaction and retention.
• People are everything to a business and by far the most critical asset. One of the most important factors employers can easily overlook is the importance of employee benefits.
• The insurance industry is evolving, with technology playing a crucial role in operations.
• More private equity has entered the space than ever before on both the brokerage and client side.
• BIS Benefits focuses on building relationships and providing exceptional service to their clients.
• Becoming the trusted advisor transforming each organization's approach, design and implementation of healthcare is the vision of BIS
• BIS seeks to be a place where growth on the professional and personal level can take place and puts a significant emphasis on community, giving back, family, and more
• Hiring for values and personality fit is more important than industry experience in the insurance field.

Links referenced in this episode:

• bisbenefits.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• BIS Benefits
• State Farm
• Liberty Mutual
• Blue Cross
• Aetna
• United
• Travelers
• Hartford
• Innovative Outsourcing
• United Benefit Advisors

Welcome, everybody, to another edition of ATL alts.

This is your host, Andre Sindate.

I am joined today by Drew Holley with BIS Benefits.

Drew, we're going to jump into a lot today, but I'd like to welcome you first and foremost to ATL Alts.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's glad to have you.

I know we got introduced a few weeks ago and I hope you've been well since then.

You know, I wanted to have you on ATL Alts because I thought, you know, the conversation around employee benefits and health insurance and the cost of insurance is clearly top of mind for a lot of business owners.

You know, we all are in renewal season.

It's a busy time for you.

So I appreciate you taking half an hour, 45 minutes to talk to us.

But I always like to start these conversations with my guests by asking them the same question, and that is tell us about your backstory.

Sure.

Yeah.

Great question.

Loaded question.

Yeah.

You know, to use the Seinfeld quote, how quickly do you want to go through, you know, someone's life with a yada, yada, yada?

Yeah, yeah.

You know, give them the context.

We have, you know, more than five minutes.

I'll just share.

I was the baby of five.

We called them the original five from my mom and dad, born in Champaign, Illinois.

And then we moved to Burlington, kind of Burlington, North Carolina, suburb area.

You know, lived there until I was nine years old.

My dad was a small town Protestant preacher.

He was also a chaplain in the military.

So he traveled probably every four to five years with a work stop.

But given that I was the fifth in line later they had my baby sister, so there's actually six of us, but she was 13, 13 years younger than me.

They had a kind of in the later years, so it was a blessing.

Sure.

That kind of kicked me out of the baby order.

Yeah, yeah.

But so we ended up settling in a small town called Flintstone, Georgia.

And that's where my parents retired.

It's as small as it sounds, but it's with the growth of Chattanooga, Tennessee, northwest Georgia, you know, Flintstones been put a little more on the map.

If you're listening and you're in the Georgia area, you've probably heard of Ringgold.

So my parents retired on a small farm.

I was raised homeschooled.

We were kind of the weirdo families doing homeschool.

But what that gave me, I found later in my life and career is outside the box thinking, which I think is Very important, especially in insurance, because insurance tends to be a stale industry and not embracing technology or change.

But I was always a kid who loved competition, loved sports, was pretty much in sports year round.

Basketball, soccer, baseball were my kind of three main sports on a team.

And.

But if I had a ball, I was doing it.

Ping pong.

Yeah.

You know, badminton with the kids, whatever.

And, you know, we didn't have a lot of money growing up, but we had all our needs.

So how I got into the insurance industry or sales probably predates.

We used to sell Vidalia onions to pay for basketball shoes.

And I found out, I guess I was fearless and would knock on doors and, you know, sell the most onions.

Why?

Because it was competition and that would pay for our Nike shoes.

And that would start in middle school, because that was the first time I went to public school.

So quite a transition from going homeschool to middle school in seventh grade.

But I adapted and survived, thankfully.

And about the time when I got to high school, knowing I was going to have to pay my way through school, teachers were big on, hey, you got to have the HOPE scholarship.

Got to have the HOPE scholarship.

And for the HOPE to pay your tuition, you got to go to a Georgia school.

And we grew up Braves fans, but we were not big college football fans.

So I kind of had no.

I love watching college football now, but we had no, you know, flag of UGA or Alabama or Tennessee.

All my buddies in Northwest Georgia were that way.

So I kind of learned to love to watch college football.

Just wasn't something my mom and dad or their parents were big into.

Um, but yeah, from.

From there I said, okay, I gotta go to college.

You know, what.

What's going to be my next step?

And, you know, Sinatra is a Georgia school.

But I didn't want to stay around town, so I set on Kennesaw State.

It's grown into, I believe it's the second largest school now in the whole state.

Yeah, it's huge.

Yeah.

Yeah, they got a football team, you know, back when I went there.

But 20 years ago, I think it was the second year to live on campus and there was only like 800 of us.

Wow.

And, you know, I thought about maybe doing pre law, thought about marketing.

Just joined business school.

And how I got into sales and insurance is Kennesaw State.

A lot of people know this.

Even it's advanced in the last 20 years.

A lot of people get into sales, but they didn't have a degree in sales.

You know, they had a marketing.

They had a business management and they go into corporate America and find out, hey, you might want to try sales.

Well, Kennesaw State had a sales degree, but they hosted a national collegiate sales competition.

And I was one of those just kids that if there was a low hanging fruit opportunity to get an easier grade, I would do it.

So one of my teachers said, hey, you can get 10 extra credit points on your final grade if you go volunteer for this competition.

I'm like, I don't.

Well, there you go.

I mean, come on, right?

Yeah, that's right.

Speaking of insurance, I mean, speaking of insurance, that's your first insurance lesson right there.

Yeah, it was, it was a risk of reward, right?

Pretty, pretty low risk.

Yeah.

A little bit of time, one day, 10 extra credit.

I could bomb a final, but get extra point.

Oh, sure, sign me up.

And back then it was VHS tapes.

But the competition, again, I wasn't in it.

I was volunteering.

Was just kids.

Were kids.

I say kids now where I'm at.

But college age students were, you know, trying to sell at the time a CRM software to business owners.

And the business owners were the classmates.

The competition format, though, were employment, employers, interviewing.

But it was somewhat scripted, somewhat based off of what's called spin, selling situation, problem identification, need.

And from that point there were points awarded how well you followed building relationship, handling objections.

And I fell in love with that.

I was the guy.

My volunteer job was doing the recording.

And I'm listening to employers grading people.

I'm like, oh, I think I can do that.

So I immediately changed my major to sales.

Competed in that competition, won the local, competed in the national.

Did not win the national by any means.

There was way more talented people than I was at that time.

But, you know, made it to the quarterfinals.

And then, and at that point it's like, okay, I want to be in sales, but what do I want to sell?

So didn't quite narrow it down.

I would equate it to, I want to be a lawyer, but there's lots of law to practice, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So about that time, I was a senior and you know, no kid in America wakes up and says, I can't wait to get in the insurance industry.

Right?

And, you know, career fair and counselors.

In high school, there was no one saying, hey, you should look at becoming a state farm agent.

It might be boring, but everyone needs it.

I mean, there's not much of that, or at least in my experience.

So I didn't really know a lot about insurance other than the, you know, the local state farm guy.

Probably had 75% market share in our county because we were a rural county.

But Liberty Mutual was hiring, and they were paying $18 an hour, and I was paying my way through school, So I said, 18 bucks an hour?

Sure.

What do you guys do?

And so got that job and kind of learned the basics of auto home life for personal lines and turns out I was pretty good at it.

I just kind of understood contracts.

I grew up in a rural area with a lot of people that were really good at, you know, fixing cars and working with their hands.

I was not.

And, you know, I wish I was, especially now being married.

I wish I was a better fixer on the house.

You and I both.

That's right.

Yeah.

But I just kind of don't have the brain for it.

I can do it.

It might take me four hours and take someone handy 10 minutes, but, yeah, from there, Liberty Mutual was a great fit for me.

And I just, you know, I'm a big believer.

And now that I have kids, I want.

I want people to enjoy the work.

And if your interests are aligned with your work, it feels a little bit less like work and you enjoy it.

Yeah.

And, you know, just reading contracts, helping people, understanding numbers, that, that was.

That just kind of came natural to me.

So did well there, but I just kind of had a.

I really didn't want to work for corporate America.

So did that intern for a year graduated, but I had a family friend, and his name was Ray Bachman, and it was a family friend of my girlfriend at the time, now my wife.

And he's the B in the bis, Ray Bachmann.

He was the founder of this agency.

So I was interviewing, but this was right around the financial crash, which I had no idea what was even going on.

Senior in college and the housing crisis and was interviewing for quite a bit of jobs, but you know what industry I go to.

So had a little dapple of insurance, but Ray owned bis and he was giving me some counsel that insurance, if you think you'd be good at it, working for an agency may not seem like the sexiest job coming out of college, but over time, it can give you extra time and extra money to really help others.

And that's really what I wanted.

I wasn't just looking for a career to make the most money just for myself to, you know, die with the most toys that I can't take with me anyways.

It was really, you know, I wanted a family.

I wanted to be home for ball games.

And insurance seemed to be a path that allowed me to do that.

Work really hard while you're at work, but be able to go home, you know, nights and weekends.

And so through Ray's kind of council, we had an opportunity and I went to go work for.

I knew a friend in college who went to go work for an agency.

He was a couple years ahead of me.

It was a small agency, five, six employees in Marietta.

And I was probably a little arrogant thinking I was going to get a lot of job offers.

And I'm like, oh, man, which one am I going to choose?

And sure enough, there was only one on the table.

And so I took it and was at that agency for six and a half years.

We did just employee benefits.

Ray finally recruited me.

On the benefits side, we did start a commercial insurance like workers Comp liability auto cyber Bonds.

We got into that about three and a half years ago.

So the benefits is much bigger.

But that the group insurance business insurance is rapidly growing.

Yeah, that's a wonderful backstory.

And there's a lot of areas I feel like I could pull on and would love to ask you about.

I mean, we have listeners that are, you know, managing teams in terms of leadership.

We have.

We have a lot of listeners who are managing practices, you know, financial advisors, wealth advisors, and a whole host of just business professionals across, you know, areas of finance, insurance, asset management.

I'd love to ask you one or two questions just about that backstory.

You know, you talked about growing up in a rural area and now finding yourself, you know, leadership team, big agency.

A lot of employees probably come from a lot of different backgrounds.

Love to ask you more of a leadership question here.

You know, when thinking about identifying folks for your organization and your team, how does that background and how you grew up, you know, you talked about being homeschooled, one of six children, not having, you know, a lot of money, but having your needs met and then, you know, being around in more of a rural setting versus growing up in a big city.

Yeah.

You know, when you're meeting new people and they're sort of on their journey, whether it's a career change or it's their first role.

What are some of the things that are, you know, that are going to stick out to you, given some of your background and now the firm?

Yeah, it's a great question.

Well, there is no business without people.

And if you're a business leader, you're really in the people business.

I'M blessed enough to have Ray again.

The founder of the agency is still an owner, but he's really delegated a lot of the responsibilities because he sold internally to me and my other business partner, Brian.

Brian's wonderful.

That's a lot of effort.

But when I think of my rural background, I'm very grateful for it.

I tend to do well with blue collar groups because I kind of know their language a little bit more than in the city.

But when I think about the staff that we want to bring in, we really are about culture.

If we don't have great staff, I can't deliver on our promise of being the best in serving.

And you know, so for me.

But I talked to a lot of business owners.

Experience is super helpful.

But if you don't have our core values.

Our core values are everything.

Sure.

Because, you know, so we look for people that have the values and are teachable and are hungry and want to come in first.

And then we also look at.

I'm a big believer in personality assessments.

You know, as a kid who again, not many people would get on the phone and cold call 300 dials in a day.

And that's what I did to build my book of business.

You know, I was just wired.

But I've learned through multiple personality assessments.

You know, if you have a few listeners are familiar with disc or if you've done the colors test or red, I'm one of those guys off the chart there.

So I'm a big believer in, you know, finding the right people to have the value system.

But where would they be happy?

Where are their interests?

Yeah.

You know, if you're a detail oriented person and you prefer to more or less work alone, you're probably not going to be in sales.

If you're sales and not a detailer in person and you don't want to spend hours on spreadsheet, you're probably not going to be in accounting.

And that's a very softball example.

But those are the things that we really look for.

And we don't always get it right with our hiring.

But you know, our values are following through, humble, hard to serve, integrity, hard to learn.

And perspective is a unique thing for us which is just always balancing that work life balance.

You can always have another career.

It's hard to have another first family or first spouse.

And so I really want people here that buy into that.

And so our interview process is about that.

So I have no problem hiring people with no industry experience that can meet those values because we can teach you the industry and in fact, sometimes if you have industry experience that really can hurt you, I've found, because you might have learned the bad habits or again, can't think outside the box.

Well, this is the way the insurance, insurance always done it.

And I'm like, well, that doesn't make it right.

So yeah, we're really looking for that.

And now I wouldn't say I discriminate.

You grew up in urban or, or, you know, rural, rural America or even outside of America.

But it's nice for me to connect with people that kind of, you know.

Yeah.

Get, get what it was like to, to, to grow up maybe in the country or in the farm, which I did.

Yeah, I, I asked you that.

A little bit biased in a way because I grew up in a smaller town in the middle of America from Kansas, you know, and I meet people and they see me and they hear my name and they think, oh, it must be a foreigner or I've never heard that name before.

And I, you know, being in our industry, in, in wealth management and asset management, you know, I, I've, I've always somewhat felt like an outsider.

You know, I still feel like I can contribute and I spent a lot of time on my education and a lot of resources at the benefit of a great spouse too.

And I've moved in and out of the, of the industry, I guess, in different facets.

You brought up the legal area.

You know, I started out in banking and worked in capital markets and now I'm working in wealth management.

Because I've found over the years through my journey that I really found I was most fulfilled when I was helping people.

You know, I, I enjoyed working with institutions and calling on real interesting endowments and, and, and these big organizations.

But I also found like within my industry that was over not overly corporate, but it was more of a corporate hierarchy.

Right.

To get a decision made.

And I, I found over the years and I guess it's just, you know, maybe comes with time and knowing yourself and knowing what you enjoy doing that working into, you know, working with individuals and families and small businesses who are, you know, really grinding away day to day and finding ways to help them, whether it's secure their future or, you know, we want to talk about benefits, you know, securing their workforce.

Right.

So I think we have a kindred spirit in that regard because I find myself here in a big city of Atlanta and I'm always drawn to and connected to people who have somewhat of a similar story, you know.

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, it is unique and now that I have kids who are growing up, city kids, I.

Right.

I do enjoy getting them up to my mom and dad who did retire on a farm.

Sure.

Just to get some of that, that work ethic and different lifestyle.

Yeah.

But yeah, I agree.

Yeah, we go back every year, you know, not solely for this reason.

Obviously we love to see the family.

But yeah, both, both my in laws who are in Iowa and, and spend most of the summer in rural Missouri at their lake home and then you know, my folks who are still, you know, in Kansas.

It's, it's important, you know, for us to, you know, make sure the kids know their roots and kind of where it all started.

But for sure it's a slower, a little slower pace and there's a lot of, there's a lot of good in that I found.

So I want to talk about, you know, bis benefits.

You know, you, you gave this great backstory of how you matriculated to you and Brian purchasing the firm.

Talk to us and maybe give us sort of A high level, 10,000 foot view of the industry.

You know, we want to talk about benefits.

You talked about health insurance.

But now you guys are into a whole bunch of other lines of business and other areas.

And I know you work with a lot of different carriers to use the industry terminology.

So maybe give us a perspective.

I always like to ask people, why should we care?

You know, why should business owners, financial advisors and financial professionals really take a minute from their busy day of serving clients and growing their practices to really stop and think about insurance?

Because we all know what it is.

But I don't know that many of us appreciate obviously all the ins and outs and all the dynamics of the industry and there's more and more risks and more and more costs.

It seems like that people have to think about every day.

Yeah, yeah, it's.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna.

There's two different needs on the benefit side and the business insurance side.

Why should you care?

Well, from the benefit side tends to have a much.

Just naturally it's more of a hybrid.

It's not such a business to business sale because it's affecting your staff, which should be your number one asset if you're a business owner.

Because again, without your staff, you know, again, you don't have a company for most people unless you're a sole proprietor working on your own.

So the number one is, you know, it's taking care of your best asset on the benefit side.

Number two, it's very expensive.

So if you don't pay attention to it.

You know, costs can creep up.

Number three, it can be, to use a tennis term, an unforced error.

Yeah.

So if you have a January 1st effective date and you move from Blue Cross to Aetna or vice versa, and the broker you've hired, because again, you know, there's the insurance carriers, the Aetna, the United, the Travelers, the Hartford.

But really my competition isn't the carriers, it's the broker.

And on the benefit side, we really have to be in the logistic business.

And that has really become evident in the last four to five years with payroll deductions, software, enrollment.

I remember the days of paper going to do open enrollment meetings in McDonough and South, handing out printouts and then the printouts, you know, the HR manager would email the people and say how much to come out of your paycheck.

That has become more centralized, a part of, you know, the ecosystem of enrollment and deductions.

So the third reason would be the unforced error if you switch from one carrier to another, but you do it late.

If you're submitting paperwork for a January 1 group, after December 10, you're toast.

You're probably not going to have ID cards.

And the last thing a business owner needs is their top performing staff member, or lowest performing for that matter, wanting their kids to get prescriptions on January 3rd and they can't because you're not live in the system.

You're not live in the system because you didn't start early enough, you weren't proactive.

So that's, that's a why.

So who you pick as your advisor, I'm seeing it really evolve over the years.

Used to be, well, how low of rates can you get me on the health insurance?

Obviously that's important.

I want low rates.

I'm a business owner.

Right.

But, but also, you know, have to live on planet Earth and I can't find a rate that's 50 bucks a month.

And that might have been the case in the 80s.

It just doesn't exist anymore.

So, but, but hiring a broker who understands payroll logistics, working proactive is very important and I see it as segmented.

So I'm a big believer.

I'm not a fan, if you're listening.

I don't mean to offend.

I don't like the term fake it till you make it.

I have no problem saying I don't know that answer, but I'm going to find out.

No problem with that.

I think sometimes as professionals, whether you're a doctor, lawyer, White collar, even blue collar.

You put too much pressure on you that if someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, that you have to know it and you're somehow dumb if you don't.

Not at all.

Not at all.

And I bring that up because we're not bis our competitive advantage.

We're not going after 5,000 person groups or you know, 500 even.

We really like that 10 to 100, 125 employee range because it's so underserved.

And especially in the last decade there's been so much private equity gobbling up small businesses.

But also my competition, independent owned brokers.

And so when they buy up the independent broker, typically the top talent goes up market to the much larger organizations.

150, 250, 300 employees.

And unfortunately the unexperienced or the team that maybe don't even really like their job.

That's why I really like hiring people that like their job.

So they want to stay here and do a good job for our clients.

They're not expertise on the groups under 100.

And so the care, the why is if you don't have a broker who really knows what they're doing, has a really good team and understand it, you're probably going to have some problems.

Whether you have the problems today, it's going to come later.

So that's the why.

On the business insurance side, it's a lot easier I have found for the business owner to ignore it.

They may have a broker who's a really assigned a1,800 number with a huge agency assigned to Travelers or Hartford or one of these other carriers and they haven't had a claim in three years and they're like there's no problem if the rates go up.

It doesn't affect my staff again on the benefits.

If the rates go up and if you don't eat the cost as an employer, it's like giving your employees a, you know, a demotion.

They're getting a pay decrease if their health insurance costs go up 500, 500amonth.

Did their salary go up 500amonth?

So that has to tends to be paid attention on the business insurance insurance of the whole building.

They may say I can afford a 10% because the increase because of time and it's not going to affect the rest of the staff.

But when a claim happens, you know, a year down the road, three years down the road, do you really know who your broker is?

Is it assigned to one, you know, one contact at a billion dollar insurance agency that has no idea what you're going through as a business owner, will they care?

Will they follow through?

So that's, that's the why.

And if someone pitched it to me that I'd be like, I want to know who my agent is.

Not because I need a need now, but it, if you have a claim and it's, you know, you can't get access to your computers if you don't know who your agent is to hold the carrier accountable and filing the claim, right.

Doing it and executing, you might be in a bad position.

So those are the why.

Hopefully that answers.

It does.

Well, it does because I, you know, I probably like you.

I'm in sales, you know, I'm out networking, I'm meeting with people, I'm on the phone.

And when you meet somebody that's maybe from the traditional insurance side, they'll talk about, well, just give us a call.

We can, you know, just check your rates and kind of give you a quick proposal and no obligation.

Right.

But very rarely do you hear that second side which you just described, which is, hey, in the event something happens, you want to have a relationship with the broker.

You want to actually know, especially if you're a business owner who, who's going to help me through this process because it's not going to be quick, particularly if it's, you know, involves an injury or involves, you know, property loss.

So I love that you talked about both sides of it.

I want to focus on the business side a little bit here.

What are some of the, what are some of the things that you're, you're seeing in the last four or five years?

Because you said this private equity, right.

And this is a show atls, we talk about alternative investments, you talk about consolidation.

More and more small and medium sized businesses are being rolled up into these platforms.

There was a great article last week in the Journal about, you know, private equities coming for blue collar.

I read it.

Right, yeah.

Plumbing, the H vac, the, the lawn maintenance.

Right.

And it's true.

I literally have a client going through that right now.

Exactly.

So I'd love to talk about with, you know, what, what other trends are you seeing over the last four or five years with respect to the business side?

And then maybe we can dive into, you know, what happens when there's a sale or there's a transaction and how does that impact the, your role?

Right.

Are you now dealing with a private equity firm or platform or are you dealing still with a business owner?

But let's focus first on the business side?

Yeah.

Well, the first thing I've seen on the business insurance, they use the word hard market, which essentially means the rates are going up.

Okay.

Unfortunately, on the healthcare rates, rates have been going up for 25 years.

So my tolerance for a hard market coming, starting my career on the benefits side.

And actually it really did start on the, what we call property and casualty, the auto home, sure.

And then I kind of went on the business and I'm licensed on both business insurance and benefits, but it's just been inflationary the last couple of years.

Whereas, you know, they probably had a good run, the insurance carriers and business insurance, where, you know, there weren't substantial increases, at least increases enough to disrupt the business owner to wanting to move all of that, you know.

So for us, it's been, it's been positive because, you know, when you start a company from zero on the business insurance, that division hard market just gave us opportunity to have advanced.

That's what we've seen.

But what I found with the private equity buying insurance agencies is that the agent is not even going to send an email, let alone pick up the phone to tell you about it unless you call them.

And that's just foreign to me because of the benefit side.

But that is, that's what I'm seeing in the marketplace on the business insurance, if you're exploring a sale.

So every deal is different.

I've probably, I don't know, I've had probably 35, 40 clients just in the last, you know, six, seven years that got acquired.

And every private equity or family wealth office that bought the client, whether they bought a majority or minority, is different.

Sometimes they're like, hey, you can still use the same vendors you want to, whether it be insurance broker or technology companies or anything else.

Sometimes, yeah, I know my client gets bought out.

I got immediate competition.

Sometimes it doesn't matter how great of a job we do, you know, the new company.

And that's, that's the downside of selling if you're a business owner, is you might lose control.

And I'm sure all those are talked about, discussed on the upfront.

So, you know, we're always respectful.

You know, we always see ourselves as just a steward of the client.

We're not, we don't own you as a vendor.

We have to earn it every year.

So, yeah, if I've got a client that gets bought out, I want to try to earn it and keep it if I can.

But I'm not afraid to say, hey, does this mean you got bought out?

Are we going to be getting kicked out soon?

Are they giving you a chance to pick your vendor?

Hopefully you want to advocate for us.

So I just, I just think it's a better approach to just have an honest discussion about it right when it happens.

You know, sometimes a client gets bought out not by private equity.

They get bought out by still a small business that's in our target market.

So rightfully so.

I, you know, want to say, hey, we want to continue to do a good job with the division that you just bought, but is there an opportunity for, you know, looking at yours and if you sell a portion of your business or if you have growth business insurance, again, something might need to be updated.

Yeah.

If you go advance into another location, if you buy a new building, that's an opportunity for your coverages to be reviewed and see if it's accurate.

So you might be on the purchasing side and so letting I find an error that a business owner might make.

You know, you should let your benefits broker and your business insurance broker know if you have expansion, you know, again, new division, new states, there's just some things that we need to know to protect you.

Not that has got to usually be done that second, but that's why we want relationships with our clients.

We want to know what's going on so we can protect them.

Yeah, I'd love to take minute and walk through the customer's buying journey.

You talked about where you focus at BIS benefits in that 10 to 100, 150 employee firm, clearly a sole proprietor that's got one or two or three employees, there's a lot of those businesses out there.

But that individual that started a company and now finds themselves with 10, 20, 30, 50 employees, they're facing a range of different issues.

And then you just brought up like if we buy physical real estate, if we, if we expand, you know, so when, when that customer, that business owner or their advisor, right, they have a wealth advisor that's seeing this and they say, you know what, there's probably some additional risks and I'm earning my CFP right now.

I'm in the process of going through that.

And you know, a lot of times insurance things in this particular round, they're usually outside the area of competence within the typical advisor.

So you're going to go to an outside party, right, you're going to call somebody like you in to say, hey, I've got a client, they're growing, they want to talk to an expert, talk about that customer's that the options they have and the journey they go through and the importance of selecting if you will, the right broker or yeah, I call you more of an advisor than I, than I would a broker.

But talk about what that, that owner that, that family need to be thinking about and what are they generally going to see in the market, who's going to approach them and say, hey, we can help you.

Broker, advisor, insurance man.

I've been called worse.

You know, it's just so funny when I'm sitting in a waiting room and getting ready to go on an appointment appointment and they say the insurance man is here.

I always scratch my head saying, high school career fair.

I never would have thought that, but here I am.

Well, yeah, if you're, if you're a financial advisor, we probably have a lot of clients.

In fact, we do these things called benefit booklets where we talk about, hey, what are your medical plan, how much does cost, dental, vision, how do I look at the doctor?

Maybe you make an offer letter.

A lot of our clients say, do you mind putting the 401k on there?

Right.

We do it a lot.

So like I have, you know, financial advisors that, you know, we're talking about an employee benefit, what a 401k is.

We just not 401k experts.

So we don't do that part.

Right.

But yeah, I mean if I'm a, if I'm a personal advisor to a business owner and you're saying, well look, how do we increase your retirement contribution?

The easiest thing is saying, well, what's your insurance?

You know, golly, you got 30 employees, you haven't shopped out your building insurance in six years.

Yeah, why not?

Well, I hate insurance.

That's usually the reason.

Sure, and I get that.

But it may be a low hanging fruit opportunity.

The same thing on the benefits, you know, our number one competition against the broker.

And if the broker is the brother in law, second cousin, former roommate, next door neighbor, they've been with them 10 plus years.

I'm usually kind enough to say, well, here's some things that you could look to do.

But I usually can't help them because breakups are hard.

So that's the number one thing is what is your relationship like with your current agent or broker?

That's my number one question because I need to know where I stand and you know, I'm happy to help people.

I don't really like to be used though.

No one likes to be used.

Yeah, I want you to go through all this work to run my retirement portfolio and all we're doing is just Keeping existent honest.

Right.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I really want to say, hey, can I help you?

You know, let me ask you some questions.

And it's really about four or five things.

That's really.

It is.

I go back to that spin, selling.

I'm just pre wired, pre programmed to just ask questions.

I don't lead with.

Here's how great BIS is.

There are a lot of good brokers in metro Atlanta, both on the business insurance and benefits.

And I know some of them, they do a really good job.

So if, if they, if someone were to say, drew, talk this business owner, I'm asking questions, really saying your broker could be doing a great job.

I got nothing else.

Maybe consider this.

Here you go.

And then I've helped them, you know, so that's how I approach it and that's how our sales team approach things.

We're really looking for the people that aren't getting helped, aren't getting served.

And usually just a few questions will tell us the areas where they're not.

Now a lot of times it still means we need to shop it out and that's the expectation.

We shop it out because we, you know, whether it's business or the benefits.

But yeah, I mean, that's the number one thing if you're talking to a business owner.

Obviously growing top line revenue will cover a multitude of sins.

But if you don't review a big overhead cost from time to time, yeah, you're going to get rate creep and then you might not have the adequate coverages and you could be missing out.

Yeah, you have a, and you have a sizable team.

You know, I'd love to maybe drill into how you've built the team from, you know, as I'm looking through your materials and preparation for the interview.

You have an operations team, you have a risk services team.

You talked about having a sales team.

You've got a leadership team.

You know, can you talk about how all those members and how the different pieces of your team kind of come together for the benefit of that business owner?

Because it jumps out at me when I see this.

It's like I could look at you and say you're a big organization.

You have a whole bunch of producing agents all in sales and somebody offshore or somebody in some central office handles everything else.

But you've kind of got a different architecture and you're all together, you're all basically here in the metro Atlanta area.

And your materials show that.

So I'd love for you to maybe help us see that.

How does that come together?

Why have you guys at BIS Benefits built the team in that way?

Because the perception is I have my insurance person, I have my insurance guy and he handles everything.

Generally it is a he.

And you don't know what's going on behind the scenes.

You don't know how the, the sausage is made, as they say.

And I'd love to maybe get into that a little bit with you at Bis Benefits, how you built it differently.

Well, I didn't build it.

It was a collective effort how you're.

Managing it and leading differently.

Yeah, yeah, there's, there's no I in team and, you know, no one person does it all.

And the core of it was he cared and he wanted to serve and he wanted to help people.

And, you know, big believer, the more people you help, the more customers you get, the more you grow.

Our model, I am not 100% motivated by, I want to grow to get the most toys to.

Then, you know, on my deathbed I say, wow, I'm so glad I grew the agency to a hundred million revenue.

So I, you know, had all this extra stuff I can't take with me.

Ray doesn't think that way.

Brian doesn't think that way.

My other business partner.

And we generally just try to hire people that think that will think that way.

It's just, you know, we again, just think that there's something more than just, you know, I need to get everything on my own.

If you have that mindset and you got good processes in place and you have a good game plan, kind of our, if I'd say there's any niche is I've just learned to say no.

The next best thing in sales to a yes is a very quick no.

So qualifying again.

Even if I think I could help the small business, if it's your next door neighbor and your cousin who you're eating Thanksgiving with dinner, sorry, I'm probably not going to get the deal.

Even if I think I can help you, it's just hard.

So that's been my niche.

And then we just, you know, train salespeople to say, hey, you really want to go out and help people that aren't getting helped.

Here's the couple reasons.

But stay disciplined, know when you're being used and know when there's a strong personal relationship.

Yeah, that's that model and then having again really good processes.

We use CRMs.

What we do is too important to write it on a sticky note and then put on your desk.

Everything is organized.

If I have a meeting with a client or I do a webinar, we write everything down, we log in on our CRM, we create tasks and we execute.

And we actually this year signed up for EOs.

Some of your listeners might know what that is.

Entrepreneur Operating system.

And that's helped us to take it to a whole nother level.

A lot of those things we were doing, I would just say it gave us more of a language and there's a little software component to really help us grow.

Because it's difficult if you're a business owner to go from 8 employees to 27.

I feel like it's been a huge mountain and where we might be in five, 10 years.

We've got some goals, we'll see if we get there.

But I think it really just takes having really good team members meet those values that I talked about, follow through, you're humble, hard to serve, integrity, hard to learn.

Perspective, those.

We have to have people that think like that here.

Yeah.

And then we have to again the personalities again.

You know, we have a 24 hour response time or less.

That doesn't mean we solve everyone's problems.

But you know, we live in a ghosting world, especially post pandemic where you email or you call someone and they just feel like they can ignore you even if they're a client.

That can be frustrating.

We are leaning in the opposite direction.

I always say think Comcast and do the opposite.

So that that's how we've been able to grow is we've been, we've got a marketing process to try to reach out to businesses because we're, we want a lot of bats, we want to talk to a lot of people, see if we can help.

But going back to, I'm not afraid to say I can't help you or your broker's doing a good job.

And as long as you have a good prospecting process, you're naturally going to get some clients.

And then if you execute on doing a good job for your clients, you know you're going to retain a big portion of them.

Our number one reason why we wouldn't retain a client is they get acquired going back to the private equity and usually it's the ones that get acquired to where they want them to use that vendor.

So that's how we've kept it up is just, you know, Understanding our values, our proposition.

We really want to help people.

We really want to do a good job.

We want to be innovative.

But it's those people that weren't getting it before, and that's why they picked us.

And we work really hard to keep doing it.

We're not perfect.

We'll make mistakes.

We just tend to own them when.

We do so well.

There's two, there's two areas.

Two final areas I'd love, I'd love to ask you about and you know, for backstory, I think it's helpful to understand how you and I got connected.

Right.

I think this brings the whole point home.

I, as an advisor, was referred to a very large agency, had a great call with, with one of the folks that oversees the southeast region.

He's not based here.

I think he's based in maybe Wichita.

And I think it came through my sister actually, who's the CEO of a pretty good sized employer there.

And I said, who do you guys use for employee benefits and health care?

You know, these types of things?

Because I'm calling and cultivating those relationships, right.

And she gave me the referral.

But they, they, they did the work over a week or so, and they said, ultimately, you know, Drew Holly is a better fit, made the referral to you, and here we are.

Right.

So I think that says a lot about those relationships and folks being able to say, like, maybe not the best fit for our organization, but we've got somebody in mind.

And I think we align real well because the size of companies that you're supporting, that 10 to 100, 150 employee, it's generally in my sweet spot too, in terms of the business owner that I'm looking to go in and help.

So there's two areas I'd love to finish on in the next few minutes.

One is human resources.

You know, human resources at a small company can sometimes fall to.

And I say fall to because it sometimes is in addition to being the office manager and in addition to doing payroll, you're also hr.

Do you see that?

Or is that just a kind of a misnomer?

Because I've worked at a lot of small firms and a lot of times, you know, it's usually my wife who says, can you go talk to hr because we didn't get our cards.

And I said, there's not an hr.

It's like the person's the accountant.

They're also doing benefits and payroll.

Can you help inform us?

Do you guys have an HR offering?

Are there solutions or tools that you can use as a business owner to sort of help address that.

Those issues and those matters that come up.

HR is one of the most loaded words.

What one person means, someone else means something else.

So you know.

Right.

It's so funny because I remember taking an HR class in college.

It's hr.

And then the office came out, if you remember the movie.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And all that.

There's all sorts of jokes and means.

I love a good HR manager with a really good sense of humor because it's really true what they go through.

Oh, yeah.

So appreciate them what they go through.

So one of the things HR might be is again, I go back to the payroll and deductions on the benefits side, which affects 401k.

Because I've been in those opportunities.

They're like, hey, when some new employee comes into my office, they got to sign a W2, they got to sign an i9, they got to elect their benefits for the 401k.

How does it magically make it to payroll?

That's where software enrollment, deductions, payroll.

And you know, I know a lot of good people who are sales reps for payroll and.

But there's a lot of misinformation.

Let's call it tunnel vision.

Only their perspective.

I feel like we've got the perspective, the quarterback perspective of the total ecosystem.

So a lot of HR needs is how do I onboard people, how do I terminate and how do I, you know, get away from the manual stuff?

There's lots of solutions.

And if you're benefit broker, it doesn't seem like they have a handle on that or they're kind of, you know, being too salesy and telling you what you think you need to hear instead of really what the truth is.

I'd say that's alarm.

Yeah, that's one side of the hr.

The other is, you know, handbook questions.

I have an employee that's, you know, went on a workers comp claim, but I'm not sure if they should still be on the benefits.

That's a common question.

They're disabled.

How long do I keep them full time?

How long do I keep them on the company?

Some of those stuff just years of experience as an employee benefit advisor.

We can give good counsel and advice and depending on the master contract, sometimes.

So we offer our client.

There's another vendor that we have and partnered with which we'll partner with others.

One of them we give allocated hours to a company called Innovative Outsourcing where we'll team up.

A good example is, hey, I'm thinking of changing my PTO policy.

You know, going from, you know, a traditional to an unlimited pto.

I'd love some counsel so we can get the HR person on there.

We even have allocated hours just based off the client size to a benefits attorney.

Those are sticky situations.

Hopefully they don't have a lot of that.

Sure.

But you know, I don't have any of those in house.

As a W2 full time employee, very few brokers do and would allocate those sources for a company with, you know, 30 employees.

Last thing we have is we're a member of the United Benefit advisors and imagine 130 roughly independently owned agencies like BIS all across the country.

We go to three conferences a year.

We pay dues to be in there, we're peer reviewed to be accepted.

But it really keeps us innovative.

And one of the things we collectively as dues, we pay a corporate attorney to keep an eye out on federal laws that affect employee benefits hr.

They send us compliance notices, we curate it.

We don't bombard our clients with 25 emails a day.

We say this one might be prevalent.

This has to do with Affordable Care Acts raised a minimum affordability pricing which is usually indexed to inflation once a year.

So we think that's relevant, we'll send it to a client.

So I'd call that as an HR resource.

Hopefully that answers.

Yeah, it does, absolutely.

That's great.

I can even think of a number of conversations I've had either on this show or outside of this show with you know, attorneys who say oftentimes these employee matters that come up, they don't come up often, but when they do, oh man, that can be a huge, it's, it's not, not necessarily a huge problem.

It's just that it, it can take a lot of mental energy, can cost a lot of money and you got to get it right.

Right.

Because there's a lot of compliance and regulatory and legal ramifications with, with these matters.

They're highly sensitive.

Last, I want to talk about the Benchmarking Trends report.

You brought this up when we, when we met.

So if you'll, if you'll give me a couple more minutes of your time, I'd love to sort of understand some of the regional trends that you're seeing.

You know, we can focus in the southeast here.

I'm going to quote from the report that, that, that you shared with me from the UBA.

Most employers increased their percentage of premium contributions by just 3% on average across plan tiers.

And so those average monthly premium contributions obviously vary depending on the situation.

The employees could be single, they could be employee plus spouse, they could be employee plus children, they could be a family.

You pointed to the fact that rates have gone up over the last, you know, 25 years.

But talk to us a little bit about some of the findings from the survey and how do you utilize this information and this data from the survey in talking to, you know, your prospects and your clients?

Yeah, great question.

So I would call this a competitive advantage that we do have over most brokers.

Again, to the great agencies in Georgia that are part of the uba, there's only a few.

We all kind of share that, but it's a lot.

A common question a business owner, HR manager ask is, what are my clients paying?

Or what's the average cost of healthcare?

Right.

I can't really Google what small businesses are doing.

So it's a very hard, they're not publicly traded like Google and Apple.

So part of our charter, being in the United Benefit Advisor, without revealing a client's names, once a year we have to submit our clients, you know, average copay and pricing and what do they contribute.

And then every agency across the country is doing it and we organize it.

It's not perfect, but it's about as good as it gets.

Where we can draw clues, conclusions, and ultimately, as you said, employee benefit advice, you know, that's what you look at as advisors.

Yeah.

And so one of the biggest thing I always try to get people to understand is affordability.

And I'll probably say it twice.

Affordability for the staff of your health care plan is attention.

It has just as much to do with what you contribute as it has to do with your rate.

So a business owner that's grown and they have 401k, they never offer benefits.

They call me and say, drew, I need healthcare, run me a quote.

And I say, slow down, let's talk about right now how much it's going to cost you.

Yeah.

And you almost like have a gun to their face saying, how much are you going to contribute per full time employee?

That's your overhead.

I can tell you the stats.

The average employer contributes just under $500 a month per employee.

So simple math, 10 employees, if all 10 take coverage times 500, it's going to cost you 5,000amonth, 60,000 a year.

Now let me do my job and run some quotes and try to, you know, make that $500 go as far as possible.

But you Know, a lot of times I have to be the bearer of bad news, but it's the truth.

And sometimes the truth hurts.

And I can say, look, your employees are complaining about the price of healthcare, but the average price of healthcare is roughly 650 bucks.

So that means we need to at least find one plan where it's costing your staff about 150, 160amonth.

We need one plan.

At least.

That does it.

But if I'm staring at a business owner and they have rates that are far below the average, but they're contributing very small, I got to be like, they're complaining because you're not contributing enough.

Yeah.

You know, yeah.

And they may take my advice, may not, and I don't get offended if they don't.

I just, that's my job to say they're complaining.

Now, there's some sometimes simple solutions and that offer your staff more than one health insurance plan.

Here's a bucket of money.

A single male is going to have different needs than a married couple with young kids.

And then they're going to have a different need than an empty nester.

So give them two, three plans to choose from.

Here's a bucket of money.

So that, that benefit, you know, benchmarking.

Yeah, that's a big talking point.

Once a year, usually saying, and, and I always use my example.

I have clients that have much lower rates than me and they complain about the renewal and I'm like, I'll sign up for your rates right now compared to my company, for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

But, yeah, it gets clues and it gets some clues.

Yeah.

And once a year it's updated and so we can say, look, I know it's expensive, I'm probably going to get there one day.

I remember the price I paid for a car when I was 16.

And I'm sure, you know, my youngest is about to turn 13 and what he pays for that car, I'm like, how can you do that?

Well, that's inflation, you know, so, you know, we can, as business owners, if you stay in the industry long enough or in your business, it's going to get probably discouraging to find out you're contributing 600amonth or seven or 800.

But again, the way our inflationary monetary policy works, it's only going to continue.

So just get ahead of it and budget and increase if you want to have really good staff.

And in a tight labor market, if your benefit plans are not strong, you're probably going to lose people.

Yeah, no doubt about it.

And you know, to bring it full circle.

You talked about employees are the number one asset.

You know, I think any savvy, smart business owner that's got a company that's, that's growing, right, you want to be growing.

It's going to come down to the people and retention.

So lastly, how do we get a hold of you?

How can people learn more about you?

I'd love to give you the last word, Drew.

We appreciate you coming on ATL alts and whether that's an email, website, phone number.

If people want to learn more about bis benefits, how would they do that?

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple different ways.

I don't mind sharing my cell phone just because in sales, you know, oh.

You don't have to do that.

You don't have to go that far.

But, you know, website's the easiest way.

BisBenefits.com BisYou can Google us.

You know, my email is Dholly D as in Delta Holly.

But just google bis benefits.

You'll come to our site, you'll see our contact information.

We've got a chat feature, live number.

If you reach out, you'll find me.

And, yeah, I'm happy to have an honest discussion to say, hey, you're doing all the right things.

I think your broker's doing a good job.

I have no problem saying that.

So I welcome conversations to, if nothing else, reaffirm.

And I've done that myself where I've talked to other people and I appreciate it.

I think there's always a line of, okay, but I still want you to work on it.

I'm like, okay, yeah, but if I save you money, will you make a switch?

And they're like, well, how much money?

Well, I can't cut.

I can't get your insurance to zero.

So if that's your expectation, maybe, maybe it's not worth the time, but I'd love to talk to some of your listeners, see if I can help and be a resource.

Well, I have no doubt that you could.

There was a lot of great sales nuggets in here and information, but I think there was also a lot of real practical advice for folks that are thinking through these issues, particularly at this time of year.

You know, it's something that I think it's easy to overlook when it comes to insurance or like you said, you just have your friend or your buddy, your neighbor that's kind of handling it.

And, and sometimes those folks are doing a great job.

But, but I think today you sort of enlightened us around a lot of the issues and opportunities.

So I want to thank you, Drew Holly Bis Benefits managing partner, for joining us today on ATL Alts.

I look forward to checking in with you, and I encourage our listeners to listen to the show.

Please leave us comments.

I'll put the show notes and Drew's contact information out there for you to, to reach out to him and his team.

And with that, Drew, thank you for joining us today on ATL Alts.

Thank you for having me.

All the best.