Using Social Media To Grow Your Employee Benefits Practice with Chris Hamilton

Hey. Hey. Welcome back to the Broker's Voice. I am excited because I get to have one of the good ones on. I am joined by one of the best in the industry. I'd like. I think I get to call him a friend. He's a good man. Chris Hamilton with Hotchkiss Insurance. Chris, welcome to the Broker's Voice.

Hey, Andy, thanks for having me.

Oh, this is going to be a fun conversation. Now, if you're watching this on Monday on LinkedIn, this is one of the very few times that I actually will pre record a Broker's Voice. But we're doing it because of a very special occasion. Chris lives in Fort Worth, Texas, and if you're unfamiliar with the NCAA scene, Fort Worth is where Texas Christian is, who is playing in the national championship tonight. If you're watching this on Monday. So Chris is headed out to LA to watch the national championship game for a once in a lifetime opportunity. Chris, I want to make sure I have this right. I got my Wisconsin shirt on, but is it, is this the, the horn frog? Is this how we do it?

You got it.

So, well, what's your prediction for tonight? Let's start there. Are they going to pull off the upset?

I think they are by eight. Seven.

Seven. Okay. We're going to go seven. I will tell you, as a, as a fan of college football, I probably got to believe most of the country is rooting for TCU outside of the southeastern part of the country. And so it's going to be a fun game to watch. Well, let's, let's get into your career. You know, you and I were talking offline.

You haven't always been a benefit advisor. There's two angles. I want to go with this per our conversation offline. In fact, I was just down in your neck of the woods on Friday shooting some content with Spencer Smith, who we both know. And I was with a good buddy of mine, Kareem Cade. And your name came up in conversation because we were. Kareem was talking about how his agency changed the day he hired a good buddy of his from grade school, a good childhood friend who came from the economics finance world. And Rob came in and said, kareem, the way you guys do it in the industry is all messed up. The healthcare finances are all messed up. You got to change how you're doing. You can't just be spreadsheeting this stuff. You have a similar background in that you came from banking before you got into this industry. Talk about how we'll even go back farther than that. In a minute. But talk about how your career in banking has really helped you today as a benefit advisor.

Yeah, so you know, I worked with the same type of companies that I work with today, mid market companies. And you know, really as a banker you're, whether you're financing an acquisition, that they're making equipment, working capital, whatever it is, you really have to understand the ins and outs of that business, how they compete, how they make money, all of those sorts of things. And a big component of that is understanding risk inside of those companies and expenses and margins and those sorts of things. And so naturally, because health care is so expensive or health insurance is, it came up in some of those conversations. And so that's really what one of the things on top of ACA being passed that caused me to really start digging in and looking at it.

That's awesome. Now let's go back even farther because in college you were an economics and finance major.

That's right, yes.

And I was a finance major myself. In fact, I had dreams of being a stockbroker at one time and I unfortunately graduated right at the time of the stock bubble back in 99, 2000.

But you, you made some comments about how economics and finance combined have a very large impact in what we do as benefit advisors. Talk about that. I loved how you said it.

Yeah. So when you think about economics and I had a number of professors in undergrad and graduate school that talked about this, I had some really good professors and they, when you break economics down to the most simplest form, people think it's, it's math and numbers and all that which it is, it's quantitative. But at its most simplest form, economics is the study of human behavior to incentives and disincentives. And so really it's under, it's like psychology, it's like how do, how are people going to, how are people going to respond when you do something? And so you know, when you think about healthcare and health insurance, there's all sorts of incentives and disincentives out there. And really if you just take kind of a 30,000 foot view of the industry, once you figure out what the incentives are and realize where maybe some of them are misaligned, if you can correct for that, you can get a different outcome.

Yeah, I love that, that, because I, I truthfully, I probably have never thought of economics and finance relating to each other that way. One, one is the, the behavior towards incentives or disincentives. Finance is the number side of that, how to use the numbers to drive that behavior.

Well, not Only that really finance, all, all finance is cash and how are we going to pay for something? And so the economics is understanding what are the drivers and what's happening as far as incentives and disincentives. And then you figure out, once you can adjust for that, then you figure out what's it going to cost and how do you pay for it.

And that's the finance piece, which has two very big ramifications in what you do today. Right. Because I think a lot of people in our space today know the disincentives and the incentives or perverse incentives when it comes to the health care and health insurance systems. But at the same time, what you're saying there is actually, as an advisor, how can I use economics to try to create a certain behavior from the employees that's right, through incentives so that they make better decisions about their health care and which is going to ultimately improve the finances of that organization's bottom line.

Yeah. So really, if nobody's, if you haven't heard of this before, you can search Porter's Five Forces and it's a strategy or a concept by Michael Porter. He's written entire multiple books about this. But really, when you think about an industry, you want to think about who the competitors are.

The cost of switching and suppliers and power of all these different folks in a particular marketplace. And what I did one night, I just sat down like, okay, let's think about the healthcare side and then the health insurance side. Who is everybody that's involved in the entire process? What's their incentive, what's their angle, how do they make money and what do they want to see happen over the next five years? And it can be something as simple as just a couple of bullet points that are each one of those things. But once you look at that and kind of whiteboard it or map it out, it's super eye opening to figure out what our clients want to have happen and what everybody else in the industry wants to have happen. It's not the same thing. So then the question becomes, can I design something that replaces each of these people that have a perverse or misaligned incentive with something that actually aligns with what the client wants and what we want? And then that's really kind of the genesis, if you will, of what it is that we do now?

Well, and you've done a fantastic job of creating incentives and making sure the right alignment is being incorporated into a company's health insurance plan to help drive better outcomes and lower cost. I'd love for you to Tell the people watching this. I thought this was such a powerful story. You and I have done some work together and I asked you, you know, what really drives you, what, what lights you up? What's that problem that really gets under, under your ass to go out and solve? And at first you said misaligned incentives, and we dug deeper and deeper, but all of a sudden you started telling the story of your brother.

Yeah.

And how, how what you watched your brother go through really has driven what you do today, if you're willing share that story.

Yeah, so I, I do talk about my brother now more frequently. It was kind of a private situation. But, you know, I, I openly share the story now because I think everybody can, can relate to it. It resonates with people because it's either happened to somebody in our family ourselves, a family member, a colleague, a friend, somebody has had this happen to them. But my brother got sick, and he was sick for several years and it caused him to spend, you know, tens of thousands of dollars out of his pocket. And it really, it took all of his savings and it kind of ruined him financially. And.

When I think about his particular situation, he worked for a Fortune 500 company that worked with a big national broker. So they should have been able to provide, you know, top notch health benefits. And I'm sure on the surface the benefits were good. And I looked at his benefit package and it seemed pretty status quo, just right down the fairway. But the problem is when you get sick multiple years in a row and you just think about the average American, right. I think statistics say that, you know, some high percentage of folks don't even have $1,000 in their bank account, right? So what happens when somebody ends up three or four years in a row hitting a five or six thousand dollars max out of pocket because you're sick, it takes all of your savings, you liquidate your 401k, you put all you can.