In Part One we saw how, unlike Betty Crocker, Judy Diamond was actually a real person who started a document retrieval business in 1959 and, with the passage of ERISA in '74, gave the U.S. business world a stunningly lucrative glimpse into the not-so-seething underbelly of the retirement and benefits industries.
The problem with the ERISA Act, at least from the perspective of Judy's clients, was that the government didn't pass it simply so financial advisors or insurance brokers could make money. The feds put disclosure provisions in place to protect the rights of plan participants, not for lead generation.
Rather than provide the raw data the Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration (now EBSA) gave her, Judy took the extra step of reorganizing the government data into something useful. She took information nominally disseminated to assist in compliance and turned it into deep-diving prospecting and lead generation tools: now anyone could contact 401(k) plans in their county, identify the biggest health insurers, and prank call competing providers.
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By the mid- to late-1990s, other companies jumped on the "we should probably do what Judy's doing" bandwagon, and Judy faced a dilemma: continue selling data and making money, or give the data away for free.
Had she been employed at a larger company with an entrenched bureaucracy, riddled with power squabbles where nothing mattered but the next penny and long-term strategy was a word you wrote on dirty bathroom walls, she might have gone with the "sound" business answer to her dilemma and fought toe-to-toe with the data heavyweights.
But Judy was neither stupid nor a big fan of boxing metaphors. She gave the data away for free.
In Part Three, we'll catch up to the present, then hop into the Delorean and head to the future.
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