Respect. The three most important things I've learned is people, product and process. I strongly believe you have to treat people the right way—and with respect. Yelling at a company rep is rarely the way to solve a problem.

More than money. Success isn't simply defined by how much money you make. We define success as to how we solve our clients' problems.

More than words. Service is more than just a word. Before, my background was in client service. Listening to insurance agents talk about how they were going to make so much money from a client, and then dropping them later to find a better one, I recognized I was going to do it differently. You can't just sell a product and move on. You have to be part of their solution.

One-stop solution. This means being creative, innovative and diverse. We're a one-stop employer solution. Obviously that means we need diversity in expertise. I might know major medical. And I might know voluntary, but I might not have a complete focus on human resources. That's why we have HR expertise on our team, or retirement or whatever the client needs.

Strategy critical. Today companies need a strategy—which means more than putting this product or that product in a group; strategy also means helping them understand and create the best path for their business and still stay legal.

Make that change. Knowledge is the most important tool we can have, and unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation and a lack of knowledge about the single biggest change to the industry in our lifetime. It's a lot of hard work to gain that knowledge and to stay on top of the changes.

So to survive you either need to do a lot of research and reading or work with someone who does that. That's why a lot of brokers come to us looking for help.

Photograph by Troy Stains