Joe Price:
All right, let's get this thing going. Good morning everybody. Thank you for joining our webinar today. My name is Joe Price. I'm going to be the host of this fun little shindig and really we're going to have a great conversation about really maximizing RFI in the Q4. We'll give a brief history of the company so you kind of understand who we are and what we do, but really have great guests for the conversation today. This is the first of many. As we try to bring more education to the marketplace, we'll bring education and value to our benefit guru population. We'll have webinars in the future for users of our platform so that they know how to drive employee engagement. We'll also be doing future webinars directly to HR departments so that they can understand how to help employees feel supported and cared for. And so this is the first of many.
Joe Price:
We're excited that you're here, but let me introduce our guests today. First and foremost, the founder and CEO Enrollify, Mr. Adam Michaels. You might know Adam from various things. Obviously he has built and led large teams across the United States to really help business owners offer better benefit packages to their employees. He's got a bestselling book on Amazon where he talks about lighthouse organizations. You might recognize him also from YouTube where he had a very successful series called Elevate with Adam. What you might not know about Adam Michaels is most likely right now as he's on camera, he's got a pet pig sleeping by his feet. That's my guess. Whether he's going to fess up to that or not, I'm not sure. So Adam, welcome to the webinar. Thanks for being here.
Adam Michaels:
Thanks, Joe. I actually just muted just for a second because Piggy Smalls just walked in and was snorting and now is asleep at my feet. Nice. You called it.
Joe Price:
There you go. Our second guest is Mr. Chris Bernadine, who is the president and Chief Revenue Officer of Enhanced Care MD. Chris has been in this industry, really both of these gentlemen for many years. I promise not to out them on their ages, but they both have tremendous experience. Chris has got a unique experience in the marketplace where he's really watched enrollment from a lot of vantage points, whether it's running an enrollment firm being a part of that whole process. He's seen it from the carrier side of the business, running enrollment for one of the largest carriers in the United States. He understands enrollment from the broker perspective, and we're really excited and honored to have him join us today. Fun fact about Chris, not only is he a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan, right, go Eagles. He is joining us today, man, oh man, from a cruise ship as he leaves the Port of Capri on vacation in Italy, headed to other parts of Europe. So thanks for joining us, Chris. We appreciate your time today.
Chris Bernadine:
Well, Joe and Adam, thank you very much as well. Glad to be here.
Joe Price:
Yeah, good. So Adam, I'm going to start, I'm going to drive some questions and this one's going to go right to you. We've obviously got people joining us today who are in the Enrollify ecosystem already as benefit gurus, but I'm sure we've got people who are watching today that say, Hey, who is this Enrollify? What do they do? We've got people maybe wanting to use our platform or we've got people who want to become a benefits guru in the future. So I'm going to toss it over to you. Why don't you give us a little history of the company? How'd we get here? How are we now? What's going on?
Adam Michaels:
Yeah, thanks Joe. Appreciate it. Thanks for everyone joining today. When I left a corporate role in 2017 and stepped back from the industry for a few years to write a book and do some consulting, when I stepped out of kind of living in the work every single day, what I saw was an ecosystem that was broken for pretty much every set of stakeholders. Ironically, it wasn't benefiting any one of them. So we saw tremendous dissatisfaction amongst employees, 80% of them in the wrong coverage, 50% dissatisfied, 27% of turnover directly related to benefits. Human resource departments and brokers were struggling to try and figure out how to drive strategy with only 16% of their strategy actually being executed. And really, I saw a massive dilution of revenue to the career agent population that had been going on for quite some time. It was like a dilution that was coming as a byproduct of both self-enrollment and the move to Ben Admins and people thinking bolting on benefits just to a ben admin was enough.
Adam Michaels:
And then Silicon Valley's objective to disintermediate legacy distribution and replace humans ironically in human resources with AI bots and machine learning. And we thought that there was a better way to use technology to actually remove the friction and fragmentation in the system and democratize access on both sides of the equation. So give benefit counselors the opportunity to build credentials and market themselves across geography without corporate connection or politics or joining a Facebook group or any of those other types of things that historically have kept them really only limited to a specific geography. And then obviously, on the other side of the equation, we wanted to give people the tools and recipe to be able to increase employee engagement and neutralize apathy and really execute strategies at a higher level. So that's what we set out to do. And I think so far we're just getting started, obviously, but so far I think this is what we're trying to address, and a big portion of that is delivering value to each of the stakeholders.
Joe Price:
Awesome. I love to have a little follow up there. So you talked about building a company and building this thing that you saw was certainly a weakness in the marketplace, but I know you and I know your background and your thoughts. It's not just about building a company, it's about building a culture. And so talk to us a little bit about the culture that you're trying to drive and sort of the ethos of Enrollify.
Adam Michaels:
Well, I think on a local level, I always had a lot of influence on the success of people around me, whether it was through training or coaching or mentorship, those types of things allowed on a local level for us to be able to control results and control outcomes. But the further you got away from that proximity, the more difficult it became, which you alluded to thanks, by the way, for that ridiculous introduction of a bunch of nonsensical things. But it was one of the reasons why I turned to social media to try and share the lessons that I had learned was really about internal transfer of skills and knowledge. What I've seen in our industry as a whole is a lack of focus on delivering value to internal stakeholders. And this hits the benefit counselor population more than any.
Adam Michaels:
If you look at our industry, only about 2% of people survive the first two years.
And a lot of them, it's not because they hate the business or they hate the leadership or they hate the products, it's because they're not making enough money. And so what I wanted to do was give them a way to grow credentials and monetize their expertise and actually have a trajectory or a pathway that could keep them in this business that has been incredibly rich for me. Right. I've had a great journey. I've created a lot of wealth, generational wealth for my family, and I think it's tragic that a lot of people don't succeed. And I think there's a miss in, I think a lot of the entities that once put entrepreneurism front and center and really encourage that growth. They've kind of taken a backseat and prioritized other stakeholders, whether it's shareholders or whether it's corporate executives or whoever else it is. They've forgotten that nothing happens until someone sells a policy, right? That's where everything starts.
Adam Michaels:
So we wanted to curate inexperience and knowledge, a learning opportunity, a way for people to grow and monetize their expertise at scale. And I also think that there's a huge miss in corporate America and the gig economy in terms of delivering opportunity that really meets the modern worker. And so in Enrollify, we're creating this new category of opportunity that allows you to make a living or really just to make your life better. And so if you have wanderlust and you want to travel the world, you can do what we do from anywhere in the world. We have benefit gurus that live in Panama and some that are traveling across the United States in a van like seeing natural parks. And so the idea was to deliver the promise of the gig economy through what I think is the greatest vehicle in the world, which is the insurance business. And so I think for single moms that don't want to drive an Uber at night or deliver Instacart or for military spouses or disabled veterans or retirees that aren't ready to hang it up, but they've been pushed out of corporate jobs because they've hit that in the mid sixties and truthfully sixties are the new twenties now, or the new thirties or forties. So it's an opportunity that we think can have broad implications for those that decide to get engaged.
Joe Price:
Awesome, awesome. So Chris, I'm going to pepper you with the first question. Now again, you've been in this industry a long time. You've seen enrollment from many, many different angles. You've been the chief mucky muck of enrollment at a lot of different entities and are doing it again. Now, why choose and Enrollify as kind of a strategic partner to help you achieve what you want to achieve?
Chris Bernadine:
Sure. Well, great question, Joe. In speaking with Adam, prior to as I was starting this new venture, we started looking at, in our past venture, we had all the tools that Enrollify has today. We had text and email capabilities. We had the capabilities of doing a landing page for employees to make an appointment. We had a phone center, we had the calls and everything lined up. However, it was about eight different platforms that were all tied together. So we had the scheduling component was one software, the calendar was another, the phone system was another. The emails, the texts, the landing page, the webpages were all different softwares. Not only were there all different softwares, we had different individuals throughout our organization that had to work with them. What really brought me to Enrollify was a few things, but one of 'em is everything is in one spot.
Chris Bernadine:
When you go to build the case, as we call it, where you go in and put the company information and put how many enrollers, what states, what type of benefits, whether it's face-to-face, it's telephonic core, voluntary, what carriers, what software, you can put all of that in a very simple, easy way of uploading those that know me, say, if Chris can put it in there, just about anybody can put it in there because when it comes to it, I'm not always the best there. So be able to go from beginning to end. One person can do it with one software. That was the biggest thing that drew us in there. It made it very simple and very easy, and not having to worry about eight different plugins, eight platforms, one can go wrong and it could mess everything up. This is all through one platform. So it's very simple.
Joe Price:
Awesome. So let me transition. We've got a lot of folks on the webinar today that are within our system, right? They're benefit counselors, they're benefit gurus. They've raised their hand and said, Hey, I want an opportunity. I want to be chosen to be Enrollers for whoever's running our software. So again, because you've been in this industry a long time, because you've seen this aspect of the business, there's got to be advice that you can give to those folks to say, Hey, like Adam said, man, I want to be an Enroller. I want to supplement my income as an insurance agent. Here's a great way to do it. What are you looking for? I mean, what are those characteristics? What are those things that you're really looking for to choose an Enroller? And maybe more importantly, what are you not looking for? Why don't you give us some idea on that?
Chris Bernadine:
Sure. So when we're looking for, when we're selecting an enroller, in the past we used to have data sheets full of enrollers and have to do a profile every year, and we would kind of go through them on a case by case basis. But really what we're looking for today when somebody is putting information into Enrollify or setting up their profile, is to make sure all your data's in there. We want to make sure that you're licensed in multi-state, that you have the capabilities of doing not just voluntary, but core enrollments, communications. Because if we could go back to the days that I started when you could just go in and see a hundred percent of the population in a voluntary only enrollment would be great. And then things changed over the years to benefit statements or core enrollment.
Chris Bernadine:
So it's understanding voluntary and core benefits. You don't need to be an expert. I want to say that you don't have to be a year veteran. Somebody new can be taught those things. And I know there's several tutorials and videos within the Enrollify platform to be able to educate the Enrollers or the benefit gurus there, but we look at what states are you licensed in, what products do you know? And then what platforms do you work with? Almost every carrier today has an enrollment platform, whether it's a, a navigator, an ease benefit, focus, benefit connect. However, there are more and more every time you turn around, there's a new platform for enrollment out there, but it's understanding how platforms work, how the enrollment works. And then for me it's selfishly good attitude, good work ethic, somebody that seems to be a go-getter. We've seen a lot of our best Enrollers started in sales but didn't want to knock on a door, but once they were in front of someone, they're terrific.
Chris Bernadine:
We firmly believe, well, somebody with the right attitude and the right work ethic, we can train them as long as they're licensed, but really it is how do you grab us when you go into the system? We talked about this a little earlier. There's one, I won't mention the gentleman's name just because I don't want to put him on the spot, but there's one of your enrollers or gurus that when I'm demoing or when I'm talking to a client, not only can I show them all his qualifications and how much premium he rolled, how he's rated by the Enrollify system, but I will tell everybody that's loading into their profile, put in a short video, this gentleman put in a short video, and I tell you, you can get a picture of who this individual is, how caring, his enthusiasm, everything that goes along with it.
Chris Bernadine:
So it's really being licensed in the states, understanding the platforms, again, it doesn't mean that you have to have enrolled for the last 10, 15 years. We take a lot of newer people, as long as they understand those pieces, and those are really what we're looking for. What we're not looking for is someone that has been in enroller for a long period of time and they're used to doing it their way. The Enrollers that are successful with us and in the business these days are using whatever systems out there and tools that are out there and working through that. And you can usually pick that up. We understand it's great that you have experience, but every enrollment's a little bit different. How you educate and what you're educating is a little different. It's being very open-minded to learning the material and using what's given to you. In our case, we do a lot of virtual enrollments or even face-to-face. You never know when I would walk through the door and want to sit with an enroller or listen to the calls, which we do every week. It is that someone that wants to go out and be personal and wants to go out and do, here's how you were taught and go out and do that. And we will have opportunities for those people throughout the year, all year long.
Joe Price:
Yeah. So how important is that kind of transparency? So again, you're running as an enrollment entity. Broker partners are coming to you to help handle enrollment on these cases that are really important to them. I mean, we know how competitive that space is. We know how hard it is for brokers to kind of continue to retain clients year after year after year. And so as they're bringing you in, that kind of transparency of, hey, who's going to represent this brokerage in this particular enrollment, how important is that kind of transparency today for those brokers that you're dealing with?
Chris Bernadine:
It's very much a need and wanted. I always tell a quick funny story that I was out in Abilene in Odessa, Texas. Now those that know me well know I'm a Philadelphia Yankee, right? I'm a northeast born kid and to walk around in Abilene, Texas. So we went out and did a couple meetings and everybody loved it, but weren't purchasing anything from me. So of course I'm a Yankee from the Northeast. I asked why. It's because I was from the northeast. So when you're going in as an Enroller and certain areas of the country, we want to be able to use, I mean, it's a unique thing these days that with virtual enrollments, if we're doing a case in Abilene, Texas or in that area or in Louisiana or in Alabama or even Florida, it makes a difference of where the Enroll is from. So if you're in those areas, we'll pick on those individuals that fit into those areas.
Chris Bernadine:
So it's important to be transparent about those pieces and whether you're new, I've said it a couple of times now, you don't have to have a lot of experience, but you do have to have a good energy, a good work ethic, and want to be able to follow directions. And again, when we send out an invite for gurus to contact us about a case, what qualifications do you have? Well, we can preload them in. So the more you have doesn't mean you have to do 'em for a long period of time, or maybe you're willing to get those. So a lot of our best enrollers actually will call us and ask for feedback too. They're not just out to make a per diem or a commission on the case. They want to know they're doing well. And one, the rating like Amazon for the gurus within Enrollify now goes a long way. So I mean to be able to, now it's not the enrollment company saying, my Enrollers are good. These are actual individuals. Talking to a guru can be able to see those things. So there's a lot being transparent and a lot just being upfront as well. So important things all around.
Joe Price:
Alright, perfect. Love that insight. Thank you. Hey, Adam mentioned being able to look at somebody's profile in the system. Can you walk us through what a profile would look like and give the gurus on the call today an indication, again, like Chris said, of what you think the most important things are just on the profile perspective?
Adam Michaels:
Yeah, I think we have a slide too that we could share on the screen, but the idea that we had in mind when we set out to build the platform was to create kind of Yelp for benefit counselors. And so this is an opportunity to put your best foot forward. A lot of what I built and design, like I say, what we built was because it was answering a lot of the challenges that people like Chris or brokers that I would go and talk to when I was in my previous roles, what they were looking for, what they wanted to have was confidence in a baseline competency. They wanted to know that they understood the business or the industry. They wanted to know are they professional, are they communicative? Do they have teeth? Can they be presentable? And so what the idea of the profile is really about is being able to put that best foot forward. So we recommend that it's like a dating site. If you don't have a photo or you don't have a video, you're not going to get a whole lot of dates because the perception on the other side of the screen is you're hiding something, what are you hiding? And so put up a professional photo. You don't have to go and do a glamor shot, but a photo could be a photo of you and your kids, right? You want it to be authentically representative of you.
Adam Michaels:
The badges in the Training CV, we'll talk about this a little bit, but we've curated the largest library of professional development in the industry. Why did we do that? Because all the time when I was in front of brokers, they'd be like, you're awesome, Adam, we love you, but who the heck is going to talk to my employees? And what do they know beyond this cancer policy? What do they know? And so as Chris said, whether you've been here for two minutes or two years or 25 years, you can go in and take what I'm going to call foundational courses, HSA courses, HRA, you can take product specific courses, you can take platform courses, you can take courses on selling or selling in a virtual environment. Fortunately, we have really talented team of people that have put together what I think are some of the most really best, most agnostic coursework that our industry has ever created.
Adam Michaels:
That doesn't exist anywhere else. If you're in the colonial ecosystem or the Alac ecosystem or the Chubb ecosystem or you're an independent, it's up to you to go and learn things. And there's nobody out there that's really investing in delivering you value. So when you take those courses, and that's going to raise your guru score, and so your guru score and your profile are going to elevate you in search. And then people like Chris are going to see, okay, this person's got a five star rating and this person has this level of effectiveness and they've done this amount in lifetime sales. But the other thing that I'll just mention is E&O insurance. A lot of enrollment firms will not select you if you don't have E&O. So for those of you that are not part of Napa, join Napa, it's like a hundred bucks a year. It will dramatically increase the number of opportunities that find you.
Adam Michaels:
And the other thing that Chris said also he indicated, is multi licensing. You don't have to be licensed in a lot of states, but what I will tell you is if you want to be smart about getting more opportunities, licenses in California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, those would be the ones that I would automatically go to where the largest population centers are. Having a South Dakota license, probably not an urgent opportunity for you. That does mean those that have South Dakota licenses are going to find themselves in opportunities that are specific to that. So you should be strategic about where you expand and then maybe put in your profile, willing to get licensed in other states for the right opportunity, put it in there, let people know that you're ambitious, that you're willing, and you're desirous of doing more. So Joe, that would be the highlights.
Joe Price:
Nice. Yeah, that's really, really good. I would add languages. If anybody's got multiple languages, be sure to put that in your profile. I think more and more, it's definitely a need and a desire.
Adam Michaels:
The key Joe is just to take care, to care about what is in there and realize this is what is representing you to people that are selecting you. And also know that you're ultimately in control. You don't have to say yes to every opportunity. So what you want is your inbox to fill all the time and you get a text message once a week or once every couple of weeks. It says it's time to Enrollify, here's the opportunity. And Chris puts in all the details and says, here's the economics. It's a per diem or it's a per se per strategy executed, or it's a percentage of commission total transparency of exactly what it's going to be if it's a per diem or a per se per sold nightly compensation getting paid every single night. So we're removing all that friction. We're removing all the concerns about having to chase down money from an enrollment firm. So there's a lot of value that we're bringing.
Adam Michaels:
Keep in mind that you're in the driver's seat to negotiate. So if your profile is better and you're really effective, you can command more money. You can say, Hey Chris, you know what? 300 bucks a day sounds good, but I don't do it for less than $350. And he may say, you know what? Not my cup of tea and move on. Or he might say, you know what? You're good enough. You're worth it. I'm willing to pay you $350. So we're creating a free market that really it manages itself around supply and demand. And so again, getting back to core foundational fundamentals that I think have been missing. Benefit counselors have never had any power in the equation, and so we're giving them a little bit of power, but we're also making it a heck of a lot easier for a guy like Chris, he doesn't have to pay for travel expenses, he doesn't have to pay for lodging, he doesn't have to pay for taxes. All that kind of stuff comes around having this negotiated platform. Benefit counselors aren't used to having the power to negotiate. Usually they just get what they get or they get nothing.
Joe Price:
All right. We got three minutes left. I'm going to move fast here. Chris, I want to come back to you real quick. You got benefit counselors listening to you. They want to be part of a fourth quarter open enrollment. What's the one piece of advice you give 'em today to make sure that they're the obvious choice in Q4?
Chris Bernadine:
Obviously the benefit season has just started. It is coming up for the fourth quarter. Every enrollment company out there is either starting to look for people starting to build their fourth quarter bullpen. The biggest thing I will tell anyone is that someone that wants to work, spend the time on the profile in there. Again, more detail, the better, less detail, worse. I loved what Adam said. It's like a dating site, right? I mean when you're looking at what's in there and the little video, as I said earlier today, that the little video kind of gives us a sneak preview of who this individual is. So I would tell you, and then the second thing is once you get a position for an enrollment exceed, do more than ask on the first enrollment or two. If somebody works with us and does more than ask, we certainly are going to bring 'em back for a second one, they do it again. It's the third, fourth, and then we're going to be using them every week of the year.
Joe Price:
Awesome. Thank you. And we do appreciate, again, you joining us from the middle of the ocean, man. Have a great happy hour. Don't leave yet, we're not done, but have a great happy hour on the cruise ship. Adam, five things to become the obvious choice Q4.
Adam Michaels:
Yeah, go into our courses and take some professional development. I think there's always room for personal growth, and I think you'll find the micro content to be engaging and valuable and hopefully we've gotten a lot of positive feedback, but I think it's essential. It's going to improve your guru score, which ultimately elevates you in search. Think about SS e o, how that works. The higher your gurus score, the higher you are in search, each of these things will contribute to that. Taking courses is one of them. Be other centered. I think that what makes HR teams most excited about working with our platform is this idea that at our core, our focus is benefiting people. It's this other centered idea around really trying to help people feel cared for and supported, feel cared for and supported is essential.
Adam Michaels:
And so if you're doing that, don't forget to let people know that after they're enrolled that they're going to get a notification that says, Hey, how was your experience? Could you do me a favor and give me a five star rating? Those ratings are everything. And so just like when you're at a restaurant, you want to make sure that you massage that so you get it. Ask, be proactive and be consultative. This is not schlepping more product. And when you start to understand, when we as an industry start to realize that our best potential and the greatest value that we can do to affect change in society around benefits is to talk about the entire tapestry of benefits and how it goes together. This ultimately leads to better persistency, better penetration, better satisfaction, and hopefully salvaging what looks like a helpless kind of healthcare system in the US and be a good listener, be empathetic, be other centered. I think that some of the coolest things we've ever gotten during the height of Covid, we had a case we were doing out in the Pacific Northwest, and I remember there was a grocery store and people were dying. There were frontline workers and Portland and Oregon was on fire, and one of the people said it was just so nice to talk to a human. We're part of a anti AI movement that's trying to return humans back to human resources. Guys, the irony of eliminating people from the equation is nuts. And so together we can really not only improve outcomes, but help people feel confident in their decisions and cared for in the process.
Joe Price:
Awesome. Well, thank you Adam, and thank you Chris. Again, we appreciate you guys joining today and giving us a little bit deeper dive on Enrollify, most importantly, what it takes to be a successful benefits guru within the system. I want to thank everybody for logging in and watching today. We're right on time. A couple of questions came through and we don't have time to answer 'em, but we will answer your questions. If you've got more questions you want to know more about Enrollify, you want to know what it takes to be a benefits guru. If there's anything we can do to help you, Enrollify.com/contactus, we're happy to help you drive whenever you need to drive. Again, Adam, thank you Chris. Enjoy your next adventure and until next time for the next webinar, we'll see you. We are out. Thank you.
Chris Bernadine:
Have a terrific day.
Adam Michaels:
Thanks so much, Joe. Thanks Chris. Enjoy, ciao, baby.
Chris Bernadine:
Thank you.
