In business, or arguably anything you do, timing is one of the most crucial factors. Not only is timing unpredictable, but it can lead you down a road you never thought you would travel—and that can be a good thing or a bad thing. In college, I had a football coach who went from cutting the grass at a tech start-up company to becoming a sales rep for one of the first companies in America to mass produce the floppy disc. I'm still in my twenties, so I have never actually seen a floppy disc, but the moral of the story is his timing to go work for the start-up in a relatively unknown industry opened up an opportunity for him to get into sales. And the rest was history. My coach ended up amassing millions of dollars, rose to EVP of the company, retired at 50 and now coaches at his alma mater just for fun. A truly incredible story about good timing. If he goes to cut the grass five years later, the company has already exploded and there's no room for him. Five years prior and they don't even have the capital to hire him, period.

If you ask me, 2015 was one of those “floppy disc” years for the benefits industry, a time where things change and there are immeasurable opportunities that can't even be truly fathomed yet. As a brand new college graduate, I weighed options to go work for many different nationally recognized companies. But when I took a more objective look before making my final decision, I asked myself, 'Where is the opportunity to do something that nobody has ever done before?' I found that opportunity in employee benefits. The industry is changing dramatically; we are at a crossroads and have the privilege of rewriting the book on how to design health plans for employee benefits packages.

Investment banking five years ago was the same as it will be five years from today, and a lawyer five years ago operated his practice in the same way he will five years from now. But if a benefits professional relies on what he did five years ago to run his business going forward, he will surely be toast. There is no way a broker or a carrier rep can survive by doing what those before them did, and therein lies the opportunity to become a revolutionary.