8. Derek Rine: Driven To Create A Bigger Impact

Hey. Hey. Welcome back to the Broker's Voice. I am excited. This guy is a young stud that I wanted. I wanted people to learn about if you don't know about them already. Derek Ryan, Trifecta Health Solutions. Welcome to the Broker's Voice.

Thank you for having me, Mr. Neary.

Now, oh, this is going to be fun.

Because I love your story about, you know, benefit advisor turned, let's call it health insurance industry solution with the. The game thing, game changing things you guys are doing at Trifecta. But before we get there, let's give an audience a sense of where you came from. Now, most of us didn't get in the industry by design. You may have. Let's talk about you. How did you find yourself in the health insurance space?

Yeah, show and tell. When I was about seven years old, I told everybody, when I grow up, I want to be an insurance advisor. No. But, yeah, I naturally gravitated toward the industry. Just getting a business degree and going to college for that and knowing I wanted to do something in sales and marketing and my father just happening to have an insurance agency at the time and me thinking to myself and him telling me too, I'll never force you to do anything, son, but you'd probably be a fool not to at least explore this since we have a family business here. And so getting into that, I actually started out in home and auto sales on the PNC side for a breach then and got over the commercial a little bit and just realized how we had a health insurance advisor at the time in our agency. We had a couple folks doing that. And I just over time learned a little more and a little more about that and realized that arena was broken and that I was just astounded by how wide the premiums were 1000% higher in that business than they were property casualty. And I also, at the same time, from a business perspective, said, well, hey, if you master this, the commissions are also a lot bigger over here also. And so initially it was an exploratory thing where I thought, this is more broken. There's more of a need for this. I can be more creative here. The premiums are bigger, the money's better, and I can help more people doing this. And so I gravitated over to the healthcare side of things. And overnight, over a couple of years, I would say I became a nerd.

And then the Affordable Care act came into play and it was a whole new opportunity because I knew employers were more scared and confused than ever. And I really just did. At some point, I Wanted to help people. And so, yeah, so I ended up sticking with it. And obviously from there it's led me along a very, very fun and exciting path where I got to meet brokers all over the country through a mastermind group, including you obviously, as a former advisor, and that we developed a nice friendship. And it's obviously led me to my latest venture, Trifecta Health Solutions. I just feel like every step of it has just been in a self evolution and expansion and it just feels like I've been laid down this path and saw an opportunity then to take what I learned from that side of the business and take it to the next level by applying some technology and automating some things.

Number one, kudos to you to start your career in personal lines because that is not. I, I will say that is, to me, it doesn't seem like a fun side of the industry, but some people love it. And you know, it's funny, you talk about nerds, you know, Amy, my girlfriend, whenever she knows that I'm at a conference or I'm gonna go to, you know, let's go out to dinner and we're gonna have dinner with somebody else who's in the industry. She's like, I don't want to go. You're gonna be nerds and talk about insurance the whole time. Like, why would I want to be there? So I totally resonate with this smart woman. Yeah, well, and here's the deal. Not everybody's gonna like what I'm about to say, but you saw early that for many in our industry in the benefit space, we are grossly overpaid. Let's, let's just be totally honest with this. So talk about we're gonna get into Trifecta because your story and my story are very similar about. Okay. We realized where our calling was and it's not an easy path to take, but we took it. So we're gonna definitely get into that. But before we do, you're 32 years old, so you've had a lot of early success even in your 20s. And one thing I see is a lot of young advisors, they come in, they're fired up, but they don't get the training they need. And within a couple years, they're burnt out and they're out. What advice would you give somebody who is maybe five, six years behind you in age that's just getting into the industry? Now, I know you had your father, but what advice would you give that young advisor?

You really got to spend the time to separate yourself and, and Build your own brand and find your niche and find your strengths and what you're good at and what you're passionate about, whether that's a specific market size that you want to serve and you want to be the best at this, Even if it's 20 like groups and you're out there finding, turning over every rock and every strategy you can for 20 life groups. But you simultaneously need to build and separate yourself with unique strategies, number one, that are differentiators to the marketplace. And number two, you really got to build your personal brand and think about what's going to connect with the C suite and your clients. And then you just have to outwork other people. There's people that are going to be able to say that they have 30 years experience on you and you're competing against them. And you got to be able to look at the owner or the HR director, whoever your target market is in the eyes and say, this is why you want to do business with me and not this person. And you got to have a good answer. And it has to be nothing related to your age or experience. It's got to be because you belt built your own personal brand, you have your own niches, and you've outworked these other guys that are doing this for 30 years. And then you have to be confident about it.

Such good advice. Because you talked about passion. I see too many come in because they were sold. Hey, you can make a lot of money in this industry, maybe over a period of five, six years. You work in four, four, three, four days a week. And they don't have passion behind what they do because they're in it for the money. And those are the folks, unfortunately I see get burned out pretty quick because they don't have a good, why a good passion behind it. So that, that's great advice. So let's talk about your calling. You know, I said this a little bit earlier. I've been, I was an advisor 17 years and then I had this calling that I wanted to help other advisors build brand message. By the way, I did not pay Derek to say what he just said, but that spoke to my heart about building a grant.

You had kind of the same calling. So take us back a couple years ago, you're with David Ryan and Associates, you and your father, and kind of walk us through that process of where you went from the benefit advisor leading the team at David Ryan to now you're running Trifecta Health Solutions.

Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, I did when I became a nerd on the benefit side, I did have a blast doing it for a number of years and really, really enjoyed that. Found that my niche I thought was helping mid size to getting into the larger territory. Self funded employers, anywhere from a couple hundred employees to several thousand employees, manage their second largest expense which they had transparency with and be able to put some really unique niche cost containment strategies that not to give myself too much kudos, but I would say probably less than and 3% of advisors in the whole country were putting into some of these big groups and it was a lot of risk and I had a lot of failures along the way and a lot of awesome successes along the way. But I just learned that that was a part of the process and the only way to fix and solve healthcare is to take chances.

And to put yourself out there and it's gonna require a lot of failure. But at the same time the successes on the other side of it were well worth the failures I had trying to put in some unique cost containment strategies. And as I developed this roadmap and was doing this and was talking with my dad and deciding whether or not it was going to be my passion someday to just simply take over the family business which included health insurance and personal lines. And I thought is this really where I'm going to have the biggest impact on the most people and help the most people and help change the healthcare system, which I am passionate and convicted about. Being able to keep the quality of health care where it is and expound upon that without having to transition into single payer is something that's really on my heart for this healthcare system we're in. And we talked about selling and eventually obviously sold a wonderful national firm, I'll say one digital that kind of gave us the freedom to succeed in what we were doing and keep consulting the way we were. As I was going down that path at the same time I just felt a calling that other advisors weren't going to take the steps to do what I did unless they were willing, unless they had some of this process automated for them. And there were some other pain point areas along the way. I realized that no one was really touching and yet I thought they were some of the most profound areas in healthcare. One of those being payment integrity, which is medical bill review. Whereas you and I know Andy, we've talked about in the past there's at least a 7 to 10% profit leak for virtually every employer in the country just on or more obviously just on that area as far as being able to forecast outcomes for early interventions and Things like that. We built an impressive AI model, but that was something I was passionate about is how do we detect these huge claims early and get ahead of it. And then obviously the area that's probably growing the fastest inflationary wise and probably the most crooked in our industry at the same time, as we all know, is pharmacy. And so that's kind of how Trifecta started, is we started building a platform from some focus groups and some discussions and partnering with some different folks on what three areas do we want to address. And we thought, man, if we do this, we're going to have the Trifecta. And so, and that's, and that's hence how the name Trifecta actually came to be from one of our focus group sessions where we were like, you know what, maybe we're going to call it that. And so the name, the name stuck. And since then those three areas that we're really passionate about.

So repeat those three again. Yeah. What are those three?

Payment integrity. Medical. Medical bill review and recovery is a result of overspend from billing errors in the medical industry. Number two, pharmacy, obviously pharmacy overspend. And number three is forecasting and predictability into where claims, claims are going, which we can do using some technology. That's where Trifecta started. And we had a lot of failures along the way, even with that model. Because as you and I talked about again, Andy, you just had, in order to be successful in a new venture or to really make an impact, you have to be persistent and you have to outwork those failures and you have to have the mindset that even if this model or I, or whatever, your brand sucks at first, that you are not going to stop until you're successful, until, until you make this, until you make this a reality. And so since then we kind of build upon some of our failures and things on. Our first model wasn't a total failure by the way. I'm just saying that kind of to let people know that the first iteration of something usually isn't the one that's going to hit the jackpot. And now we were given an even bigger vision along that path to build a full blown data command center that we call the Trifecta Command center that not only looks at those three areas, but looks at about 10 more areas. And we're building and automating technologies for all different parts of the industry now where we think this could become a one stop shop for employers and advisors to manage their spend to gain complete transparency with their costs, which most don't have now.

Well, and I want to get into that a little bit here before I get there. I want to go back to, you know, your right before you guys sold the one digital you, you wrote a 3000 life group, didn't you?

Yeah, I may have.

I'm just giving Derek some crap because back then when he wrote that 3,000 life group, let's be honest, it's probably unheard of for David Ryan and associates to write a group that size, right? And oh yeah, and in the mastermind, we had to hear about it for months. Did you Hear Derek Rhino 3000 Life Group? Did you hear Dick? Just giving you a little crap, buddy.

Let's talk about. Okay, so trifecta three things. What I love about this is you, you help address the past, the present and the future. The past is claims, payment integrity, right? When you find the waste, you can actually go get some of the waste back. The present is your current pharmacy costs are out of control. Let's fix those. And now let's put something in place to help you predict what's going to happen in the future if we can. And I love that. So you now, you've now gotten the point. And I hope everybody heard what he said. At first it was messy, but now you've built this into a full fledged command center. And I love that analogy.

Astronauts can't get into space without the NASA command center. And so how does an advisor. So if I'm sitting listening to this Derek, and I'm a benefit advisor, what kind of group should I be thinking about for this? How can I take advantage of the, the trifecta command center?

Sure. No, it makes sense. Well, first of all, you have to realize that whatever access you think you have to the raw data for your clients, you probably presently don't have it. And so that was the first real, that was the first reality that hit me between the eyes when I became a little more sophisticated as a self funded advisor, was that these TPA reports and stuff I'm looking at, this isn't the real, this isn't the whole story. This isn't, this isn't the full set of raw data where you're overturning every, every rock to find out where things are a little messy in here. And so that reality that hit me between the eyes when I finally realized it was one of the biggest things that I think advisors need to educate their employer groups on prior to even thinking about putting in some sort of analytics or claim data center. They have to come to that realization that I don't have Full control of the data narrative right now and how do I go about gaining access to that. And so the Trifecta command center is wonderful for advisors that are looking to go upstream or already are already have self funded clients for groups that I would say are maybe in the captive size of 100 lives that are maybe in a group captive or an unbundled level funded plan all the way up to obviously groups that are multi thousand life groups that are looking to just have better control and oversight over their data and to see what financial levers they could be pulling or what cost reduction opportunities are left on the table that they haven't successfully achieved yet. And so I would, I would have died to have had this as an advisor. And even though I was putting in pharma solutions, I was putting in payment integrity solutions, I was looking at a kidney dialysis programs, medical management. What people are 65 and on the planet should go on and on and on. I had a big checklist I tried to execute on isn't it advisor and it cost me a lot of hours and a lot of time. I could have written a lot more groups in the time I spent trying to solve healthcare for the ones I had. If I would have had an automated data solution that I could have brought and had a, an automatic generated quarterly or monthly report that showed me everything I was leaving on the table as far as financial levers and then also giving me some predictability into what's coming, I would have just died. I mean I couldn't have gotten that in front of my groups fast enough.

Well think about that. You know I don't think any solution in our industry is truly absolutely perfect. But what you guys are doing, what you guys are doing though is again you talk about plug in the gaps. You guys are helping eliminate past waste, current waste and future waste. I mean when you think about plugging the holes in a health plan that's about as good as you can have it. And you know when you think about, I love what you said too is you don't need to be going after just thousand life plus groups to do this. Take a 150 life group that's in a captive. They could take full advantage of what you guys have built at Trifecta Health Solutions. So now I want to ask a question I don't normally ask. I'm going to flip it. Let's say there's an employer listening who does fit that size. How can they start challenging or what questions should they be asking their broker that lead them down the Path to, to utilizing a solution like you guys have at Trifecta.

Yeah, I would, I, you know, if I was an employer and I was paying attention to all the transparency acts that are coming out, whether it be the no surprises act or whatever it is, I'd be asking my advisor, are we really taking full control of our data and are we really looking at every opportunity right now to meet our fiduciary obligations? That's what I would be asking my advisor and my advisor's response probably would be, well, you know, as your advisor, I'm unturning every stone and you just have to challenge, are you really, what data solutions are we looking at and what potential cost containment strategy and things items are we leaving on the table? What's our multi year plan? And force them to say, what's our multi year cost reduction plan to not only mitigate the annual medical trend of 7 or 8%, but how do we really, really cut into this deeper and solve it? What's your plan for that? Where do you see this thing going? And, and I'd be challenging my advisor on that if my advisor didn't have good answers to those questions and mitigating and cutting those costs and thinking about, now let's take advantage of all these acts for transparency and how we can do a deeper dive into our data. And that would be a big red flag for me.

Yeah. Again, I go back to thinking about something about what I said early in the call about how our industry has been kind of grossly overpaid for a long time. But if you're an advisor who is building plans that are able to go back and help an employer claw back some past waste, you're implementing solutions that eliminate the waste they're dealing with today through pharmacy, could be MSK surgeries, you name it. And you're helping them set up a platform that can truly prevent future waste. You are earning every single dollar you are getting paid.

And so Derek, let's wrap it up right here. If I am a advisor, I'm like, man, this is the solution I've been missing. I'm, I'm where Derek was three, four years ago. What are the most effective ways to get in touch with you and your team?

Yeah, absolutely. You can get in touch with our team, obviously by coming directly for, through, through me or some of my partners, Jeff Borglin or Steve Papadakis. We love to, love to talk with you and be happy to share my contact information. But yeah, we'd love to do a demo, we'd love to do A demo with you. Sometimes you can see what our trifecta command center looks like, and we'd love to provide any materials and collateral you could use to help win prospects. This is, I would say, for groups.

This is a wonderful thing that you should be thinking about for existing groups, because then you have a story to tell for when you go out and are looking for prospects. But once you have this in your existing groups and you have a couple great stories to tell about what you found, this becomes the ultimate differentiator and prospecting tool.

Well, that's just it. I think a lot of people, a lot of advisors hear this, and they immediately think, I'm going to use this as a prospecting wedge. Right. But there's not a better way to actually start using this by thinking about that one client that if you lost them, it would be painful. That's the client you should try this with first. Because if. If you can implement a solution like this, guess what? You're never going to lose them.

Yep.

It is one of the best client stickiness.

Strategies that is around. So, Derek, I want to thank you for your time. This is awesome. And it was good catching up. I love what you guys are doing there because, number one, I love the fact that you were an advisor for a while, but you saw you had a greater calling to help the industry as a whole. Hell, help the country as a whole. And two, you stepped into the discomfort of doing it knowing it would be messy. And here you are a couple years later, and you've got a really beautiful product. So kudos to you for that. Most are not willing to do that. Yeah.

Hey, really appreciate that, Andy, and thanks so much for having me. As always, buddy.

Awesome. For everybody else listening in, you know what happens when you get the clarity, you get the confidence, and they come together. You take massive action. So take Derek's words to heart, especially those young advisors listening in. Stop thinking, stop contemplating, start doing. It's going to be the best thing you ever did with your career. All right, guys, have a good weekend.

Take care.