The average age of someone in the insurance business is 54, and for most firms, recruiting a younger generation into benefits has been very challenging, to say the least.
I’m pumped that I was able to secure three millennial rock star benefit strategists who are breaking through the benefits status quo and taking their geographic markets by storm to speak at the EBA Workplace Benefits Renaissance in a session entitled, “Adviser Transformation: The Next Generation.”
Let’s meet our star-studded panel of “rising star” millennial experts, who are transforming their family firms one client at a time:
Taylor Lindsey, fourth-generation partner at Employee Benefit Consultants in Richlands, VA. Considering how frequently our industry changes, Lindsey truly believes that age is just a number, as is overall industrywide experience. Ashe says, “Get out your leather gloves, and set your mind on something you truly believe in.” For Lindsey and his firm, that means “creating smarter consumers of healthcare.”
Derek Rine, vice president at David Rine Insurance in Fairlawn, OH. Rine is a second-generation healthcare innovator working with his father to reinvent his family’s firm. Very soon after joining the family business, he figured out that he needed to be able to bring more capabilities to his clients than the larger competitor firms in his market. He and his father are committed to the vast differentiation and transparency that they believe is required for them to triumph over the incumbent firms they run into when prospecting for new clients. Rine sums it up best when he says, “The root of the [healthcare] problem happens to be a lack of transparency in the healthcare industry… and status quo brokers are not helping the situation.”
Bob Gearhart, Jr., partner at DCW Group in Youngstown, OH, is a third-generation “healthcare supply chain manager.” He’s passionate about fixing the disaster that is healthcare and health insurance and greatly believes that the “fix” everyone is seeking is more likely to come from the younger generation of advisers, who have more to gain by fixing the problem than an older generation, who may be only a short period away from retiring and/or selling their businesses. Gearhart firmly preaches that “there has never been a better time to enter the insurance industry,” and he’s on a mission to help erase the stigma that is often times associated with the employee benefits business. He further says that “when both the healthcare delivery and health insurance industries’ business models are changing, and your largest competitors are too entrenched to evolve or change direction, the opportunities are endless if you know where to look.”
I’m excited to be hosting these EBA 2018 Rising Stars on stage at the upcoming Workplace Benefits Renaissance conference. If you’re in the tristate area surrounding Atlantic City, NJ, and you weren’t originally planning on attending, do yourself a favor, and clear your schedule.
Need some more information or maybe even a little assistance covering the registration fee? Please share this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and don’t forget to tag me. As a thank you, I’m more than glad to try to pull a few strings and see what I can do to help you become Borgata bound!