Bryce Heinbaugh is CEO of IEN Risk Management Consultants, an employee benefits consulting firm, and President of Concierge Nurse Navigators, a clinical patient care navigation organization.

How did you get your start in the benefits industry?

Oddly enough, this is all I've ever done in my professional adult career. At the age of 22, during my final semester of undergrad, I found out I needed to have emergency open heart surgery. As I went through the recovery process, I began to try to solve the problem of how I could acquire health insurance as an "uninsurable" individual. Exactly 363 days later, I started a health insurance agency. I didn't know what I was doing, but I figured, "I have a personal example, I have credibility having gone through this, and I think I can help small businesses in this space." Those first few years were not easy. It was very difficult to cold call and knock on doors. A colleague suggested I enroll in a health care MBA program at a university in Cleveland. He said, "I understand you're self-employed and not interested in climbing the corporate ladder, but this isn't necessarily about the education; it's about the handshakes and the social capital you don't currently have."

I thought about it for a few weeks and decided to enroll. It was an executive MBA program, so every other weekend, you spend the night on campus and eat your meals with other professionals. We had physicians, hospital leaders, clinicians, but I was the only one in the class who represented payers, so I provided a different perspective on things.

While I was in the program, I shook the hand of a man who owned an independent third-party administrator in Ohio called JP Farley Corporation, and that handshake was the social capital that I needed. His name is Jim Farley, and he took me under his wing. He's now 73 years old and has been in the business a long time. He said, "Bryce, I'll show you everything you need to know." And that's where the real meaningful work began for me.