[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it heart, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups and podcasts.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Welcome to Passage to Profit the Road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities who tell their stories about their business journey and also share helpful insights about the successes that they've had.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Did you know that 2 in 5Americans want to start a new business or are business owners? Well, we have lots of information to.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: Help them too and we also talk a little about the intellectual property that helps them flourish.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: So now we have Brandy Burch. She is the CEO of Benefit Bay and it's a software tech startup for benefits and she has a very interesting story. We want to hear all about what she's doing.
[00:01:01] Speaker C: Benefit Bay was founded in April of 2021 around some favorable legislation which if I could just simplify it for everyone. And this, it really means personal choice and benefits, allowing individual employees access to their benefit dollars to make the decisions for themselves rather than putting that very important and personal decision in the hands of their leaders or HR team or CFO each year. And we all know that healthcare in America has some room for improvement in the US side. It's really just driven up and up and up and up. And employees are unhappy with their benefits decisions often that their employers make. And their employers are really just trying to do the best with the budgetary decision they have to make. And it's a very complex situation that has a lot of moving pieces. So what we have done is solve the technology journey and the human heartbeat journey of personalized choice and benefits, which is very complex, meet the regulations and compliance around this space, work with brokers and consultants as well as employers, and then service that and using employee and ensuring that they end up with the right healthcare for them. And then of course we have to work with the carriers, the payers in our industry system. So we have to work with the overall ecosystem to bring the right product. It's really about transparency. It's about giving that employee a safe space to talk about their health outcomes, their mental health challenges, their fertility journey, find the right products that's there for them and not having to discuss it with a member of their team because not everyone is safe to share your secrets. Unfortunately, In a lot of employers they're now in self insurance products and they get to even see the claims usage of their team members. We never know when those decisions are used for good or when they're used for bad. So bringing this back to a personal decision in an individual policy puts all of that data back in the individual's hands.
[00:02:46] Speaker B: Wow, it sounds like healthcare on the blockchain almost.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Could you explain a little bit more how this works? Are you marketing your services to individual consumers or to companies? Do they go to a website and select the plan? How does that all work?
[00:03:02] Speaker C: Benefit Bay is go to market through the broker channel. So we work with national agencies, we work with small regional brokers and we have a small SaaS subscription fee for them to use our technology to make sure that it makes sense for an employer population. So they need to know where all those individuals sit, what the prices are in those regions and aggregate that data. That's what our tech does for that broker. Then when the employer decides this is what I want to do is give choice to my employees, we help them set what is equal buying power to what they used to have and make sure that they feel good, that Tom and Susie and John all have access to great care. And then that individual actually just gets to pick. So they may have a thousand dollars allocated to them for their benefits and they get to shop amongst any qualified plan in the ACA off Exchange Market. So this is not healthcare.gov this is us exposing to them every carrier that exists and covers their zip code and their, their network that they care about. And they get to compare the plans and make a decision for themselves. And what we find is employees are much more happy when they get to make that decision themselves. And then there is an evolution to personalization to where those extra dollars can be focused on. There's chronic care condition plans for diabetes, COPD for heart conditions. People can get access to care like they used to and then they can have low script prices. And it's really transitioning with geographic diversity of teams, with diverse teams in age, diversity in socioeconomic classes. One carrier plan does not fit alls.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: So what kind of guidance do you give to people who are looking to sign up for a healthcare plan? How do they make decisions about what type of coverage? I guess part of it is what's offered. But how do you figure out what's right for you and your family?
[00:04:57] Speaker C: Part of it is what's offered in your area, part of it is your family dynamic. You know, you could be a divorced family, you could have you know, children that are living at the other home in another state. And so with individual coverage, health reimbursement arrangements, which is what unlocks this, then that individual has a right to have multiple plans as well. So they can have different plans for children that are at college in Cambridge. Right. So we really just lead to what matters to them. We have a full agency, you have to be licensed to provide insurance acumen or advice. So Benefit Bay Insurance Agency LLC is another entity that is part of our conglomeration, the SaaS technology. And that we are not trying to be that employer's agent because we want to make sure that they know we're objective. We're not being led by commissions, we're not being led by anything that's driving that decision. We even have carriers that are very difficult to work with that pay zero commissions to anyone in the chain. And if that's what that individual wants, that's what they get. So I think it's just going to bring all of that back. But at the end of the day, we try to have a technology experience. Most of us are pretty good with technology. 80% of the people are able to make their decisions just with technology. Most of us can do our own taxes and it can walk us through a little journey. That's what our tech does, walk us through a journey of what are we experiencing in healthcare, who are our providers, what drugs do we take, and get to the plans that actually cover those things and then chat about the other pieces. You can start easy and say, I want an HSA because I care about deferring my income. And then it's only going to show you HSA products. You can say, I only care about PPOs because I travel all the time and I see care in lots of states. I winter here and I summer here. Then it's going to show you only the PPO products, right? But it can even get more nuanced and complex and then our licensed agents can help.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: So right now, under the aca, you could not get nailed for preexisting conditions. So you have to still renew your healthcare every year, right? So let's say right now, let's say somebody gets some disease that they didn't have before, do they get penalized the next year? Do they get penalized for that? Do they choose a different plan? How does that work?
[00:07:03] Speaker C: So these are fully insured products that are not aggregated at the claims level for the individual. So that's a risk pool that is giant, it's national, and it's a risk Pool shared. So it is an ACA off exchange product. So they are not going to be able to raise those rates like they do if you were just Gerhardt Law. They look at you and they say, okay, you had 10 users, five of them were high claimants and we're going to increase you 39% and that's unfortunate because you care about your heartbeats. You don't want to start thinking about this. One thing is costing my whole team X and now everyone gets lesser healthcare. So this is going to take all of that away from the equation and allow employers to budget more effectively. If you set a high enough contribution level, you can set that budget for two or three years. These rates are only changing 2% or so a year. So if you've set a really high contribution, Big Brother just says you need to have lowest cost silver equivalent to affordability coverage. So traditionally people are giving more than lowest cost silver. As long as you remain above that, you could even be in a situation as a business owner that you're able to set a budget for a couple of years in a row. Imagine being able to do that when it comes to your healthcare.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: If somebody wants to access your services, how would they find a broker that would work with your company and provide these services?
[00:08:22] Speaker C: They could go to benefitbay.com, we can refer them to a broker if they work with Gallagher or One Digital or Hub International or nfp. We currently work with those national agencies. We also work with a lot of the super regionals. So they could really just ask their broker if they work with Benefit Bay or if they could get an ICHRA quote. They could look at multiple technology providers. I say may the best technology provider win.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: I'm just curious, what did you do before you started this business?
[00:08:47] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm an accountant. I have always loved being a people first leader. I took multiple roles that were within small to medium sized businesses where finance also had hr. So I've learned multiple aspects of the business every year. Healthcare was quite a thorn in my side and for the reasons that I mentioned. We would have premature baby that had a surgery. We would have something that would happen within our team and it would cause a problem for the overall population the next year with a rate increase. And then we have to switch carriers and then three pregnant mamas would be in my office or irate that they were having to switch carriers and providers. And every year it felt like I as a leader and our team really meant the best for our humans. But they were upset and sometimes would leave and so you would have a retention problem, but really you were having a budgetary crisis over healthcare. And I found myself starting to think about diagnoses that our team was receiving and things that were going to cause us a budget problem and I just really did not like it. Fast forward to the opportunity for joining this team. I was at a software company in San Francisco. I had taken that role to be more present parent after a divorce and I was working remote from home in a senior HR BP role. So back to ego versus passion versus what is really for you. Most of my colleagues told me you're an idiot. Why are you going into hr? You're not going to be as well respected as you are in finance. You should not take this role. But if I would not have taken that role in ancillary software, I would not have been recommended for this opportunity to be a co founder at Benefit Bay. And then I wouldn't have landed in a CEO seat when our CEO was asked to step aside. So this has been the biggest catapult of my career, but it also brought passion for people and my ability to operate a business into one place. And that's how I landed here.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Wow, that's an excellent story and it sounds like you're doing a lot of good. So Brandi, how can people find you?
[00:10:45] Speaker C: They can find our
[email protected] they can find me on LinkedIn, and that's Brandy Burch, CEO, founder of Benefit Bay.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer Noah Fleischman and our program coordinator Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, Risacab Busari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
