Editor's note: Benefits Selling's Broker of the Year finalists will be revealed Monday-Friday this week. Meet our first finalist.
John Cerasani meant to play in the NFL, but life had different plans for him.
"I played football in college at Northwestern University," he says, "and I think that I'd planned up until probably the last game of my senior year that I was going to be playing in the NFL. Then I had an injury and realized it wasn't going to happen. So I started interviewing with every single company that came through the career services center at the university."
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That's where he landed his first insurance job: a sales rep at a self-funded health insurance company, Great West. He's since founded Chicago-based Northwest Comprehensive, a brokerage firm that focuses on employee benefits for colleges and universities, and authored the book "Paid Training," which talks about the advantages of starting your own business and working for yourself.
"I think the biggest challenge brokers have today is finding a way to differentiate themselves and distinguish themselves from the competition out there," Cerasani notes.
"Items like Affordable Care Act compliance, looking at options such as consumer-driven health care, looking at things like wellness programs — all of those are areas that should be focused on. Brokers should be bringing that to the table. Those aren't really additional values; those aren't differentiators. So when I observe brokers out there talking about things like transparency of permissions as a value to their client, it's funny to me, because those aren't added values, those are givens.
"All of those things put a broker on a level playing field with the upper tier of the rest of the competition," he adds. "And once you're in that category, once you're a part of that and you're in that company of the more sophisticated, upper tier of brokers up there, now the challenge is how to distinguish yourself from that group."
That's why, he says, Northwest Comprehensive has established a niche in the college and university employee benefits realm.
"That's why we've been able to grow," Cerasani explains. "We've really been a small player, but we've dominated a very specific niche. Year in and year out, different opportunities will come up to explore different avenues. The issue has been that it's never made sense because year after year, our college and university book of business keeps growing substantially."
Cerasani says he would like to explore other types of employers — but he wants to make sure the quality of his offerings isn't compromised.
"I would want to explore with very strong quality control measures, and obviously do it in a way that would not sacrifice any of the level of service that our current customers are already getting," he says.
And Cerasani thinks it's an exciting time to be an insurance broker.
"Anyone entering the industry right now is in the midst of health care reform," he notes. "It's not something that happened five years ago. You're going to learn a lot about something that's a groundbreaking social policy issue. To me, it goes beyond your career. You're jumping into a career path that really is in an industry that everyone's paying attention to right now, which I think is exciting."
Photo by Bob Stefko
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