LAS VEGAS — My mom — whom I don't make a habit of quoting — always told me not ask a question I didn't want the answer to.
Now, I'm sure someone much more famous said it long before my mother, but that reprimand kept bouncing around my head as I sat down with a table full of HR execs and benefits managers at the Corporate Benefits Summit here earlier this week.
About a dozen of us — give or take — sat down near the end of the first day to talk about brokers, and why employers shouldn't be so quick to get rid of them.
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(I sketched out the concept after hearing about so many companies shuffling their employees off to the exchanges, as if doing so would eliminate their need for a broker. Or consultant.)
While the table skewed toward larger employers, the perspectives still varied wildly. To my right sat the benefits director for a large (start-up) multi-employer group who'd decided to go it alone. In fact, she detailed her struggles with some of the smaller group members who refused to cut loose their legacy "do-nothing" brokers.
To my right was a VP of sales for a large multi-national corporation. He dismissed brokers out of hand. Said he didn't see the use for 'em. Of course, he was also a CPA who had an ERISA attorney in house so, yeah, he had a luxury most small business owners don't have.
But it wasn't all bad. One HR veteran couldn't say enough good things about her broker, even suggesting she'd follow him anywhere. In fact, she mentioned his firm only in passing.
"It's the broker, not the company," she insisted.
She added later, "Don't sell. Just work."
Pretty good advice for all of us.
(She actually had a lot more to say than that, but I think I'll save it for another time…)
There also was a benefits manager from Houston who'd recently been forced to switch from one big house to another. And she couldn't have been less happy about it…she loved her old broker, and hated the apathy her new team greeted her with. But, again, it didn't have a damn thing to do with the broker firm itself — big, small or otherwise — but her regular contact, the relationship she'd cultivated then had cut out from under her.
A couple of things stood out in the hour I spend chatting with these people, one of them being the old cliché: It's all about relationships. But to hear these people talking, it really is. They don't care if you're working out of a skyscraper off the Miracle Mile or a Main Street storefront next to a hardware store, they wanna feel like more than a commission check.
It might be my shortest trip of the year, but I'll be damned if it'll probably be the most eye-opening. It gave me a wealth of story ideas, a couple of really good conversations and, most importantly, a perspective I clearly don't consider enough.
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