integrity-benefit-partners

I Told Someone Not To Purchase Coverage From Me Today

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 09:10:31 GMT

Would a nice sale have resulted in a cushy commission check? Absolutely.

Would we be glad to help them with whatever insurance needs they have? No doubt.

Would many agents have fudged the truth a little and advised the client of the Medicaid requirement for them to jump on their employer's plan, even if that requirement were not 100% true quite yet? In our experience, yes.

But, it wasn't the right decision for her at this time. She already had coverage through Medicaid, and while she may end up being required to jump on her employer's plan eventually, she may still be able to utilize the free coverage afforded to them by their Medicaid plan without penalty.

Instead of burying the full truth, and relying on the half truths that would result in a commissionable sale, we assisted her in notifying Medicaid of her new health options so that Medicaid can make the determination and notify her. At THAT point in time (not this one) she will have a 30-day window in which she can jump on the employer's plan if need be.

Yes, it will require another 30-minute trip to meet with her and enroll her at that time, and yes it would have been easier to just sign her up while I was there, and yes many other brokers would have jumped at the chance to add another life to their books... but that would not have given this single mom the opportunity to retain low or no-cost coverage for a few more months.

Transparency and a higher regard for taking care of humans than for agency profitability is what sets Integrity Benefit Partners apart from the rest. We love our clients and we prove it daily.

Weddings and Business in a Crises

Tue, 12 May 2020 09:18:50 GMT

It’s easy to get caught up in the news of our current crisis and feel hopeless. That’s why I’m proud of a couple whose wedding I’m officiating in June. They’re being proactive with their situation, instead of ‘turtling’ and just hoping everything works out. I was actually so impressed with how they’re handling these changes that I wanted to share them. Many of these lessons don’t only apply to events, but also could help business leaders.

Who is present? And why are they here?

Through my conversation with the bride to be, she showed a lot of clarity about who needed to be at her wedding and who doesn’t need to be there. She’s been evaluating her vendors, communicating about how many people will be allowed to be present from different groups, and even evaluating her guests. While the idea of telling a friend or a family member that they are being uninvited from the physical ceremony isn’t exciting, it’s a reality of life for many couples right now! We even discussed not having me attend the rehearsal. Under normal circumstances a couple would freak out at the idea of the officiant not being physically there on the Friday night, but if you step back and evaluate it for a minute you can plan proactively and avoid issues!

I find that the same is true for many businesses. In ‘normal times’ it’s easy to just expect all of your employees to be at one location during your operational hours. And that’s completely understandable, because so many owners have this nightmare vision of what happens if a customer shows up and no one is there to help them. But how many employees do you actually need to work with a customer at your entry point? And how many of your employees actually work directly with customers anyway?

Re-evaluate Every Contract

The couple to-be has been talking to every vendor they had a contract with. The great news is that many wedding vendors have scaling cost and exit clauses that can be adjusted easily if communicated ahead of time. I imagine that their food costs are going to dip quite a bit with having less guests in person at the wedding than originally planned for example!

Have you talked with your vendors and individuals that you have contracts with to ensure they are still appropriate? Your business needs have changed a lot since the beginning of the year, and you shouldn’t feel bad about ensuring that you’re getting what you pay for…and stop paying for what is no longer needed.

I’ve got a lot of faith that their wedding in the Greater Indianapolis Area is going to be impressive for everyone in attendance in June! Are you ready for your business to impress people?

This post originally appeared on my website, https://bestweddingceremonies.com/crises

The Allure of Distraction

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 11:09:30 GMT

I think it’s been long enough… yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve made my point.

I picture you and your teammates anxiously perched around your late-version MacBook… still rocking the clothes you had on last Wednesday… cardboard and Styrofoam delivery boxes strewn about the office floor and credenza… frazzled hair just WAITING to see what I posted on Day 4 of my 5-day Disney series!

(it’s probably true…..)

Alas, you will have to personally spend the exactly 2.3 seconds it takes to look up Walt’s last 2 lessons on staying motivated and bouncing back from failure.

I have never had a problem staying motivated in my life…. ever.

I LOVE WORK!!! I love the people I serve and I love the genuine, caring, supportive, hard-working superstars that I work with! I bound out of bed every day - every single one and even on the weekends - and hop to it with excitement as to what the day may hold and what dreams I get to fulfill or watch others fulfill in the next 12 hours.

Sorry, Walt, I have never had a problem picking myself up in the morning or rebounding from failure.

What I HAVE had a problem with is this:

FINISHING. LITERALLY. ANYTHING.

...without starting 6 other tasks in the process. The allure of that cold, smooth little electronic buzzing, dinging, alerting, pint-sized drill sergeant in charge of my day proves just too much to ignore.

At the bottom of smartphone addiction, psychoanalysts say, is award-seeking behavior. The smartphone is a low impact way to claim those rewards from the real world. But it means many of us are just on them too much, to our peril.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains writes about our brain and its ability to think deeply and concentrate fully. He doesn’t own a smartphone, which perhaps itself sounds a bit extreme, but I’m guessing he has a much more fulfilling life than I do. He states:

“One thing my research made clear is that human beings have a deep, primitive desire to know everything that’s going on around them. That instinct probably helped us survive when we were cavemen and cavewomen.”

That instinct now, however, with the entire world of knowledge at our fingertips, does not serve us. It enslaves us. It immobilizes us. It makes us less effective at out jobs and in our ability to serve those around us.

Our kids feel it, our clients feel it, unsurpassed clinical depression diagnosis rates show it. This little device and all the information it contains that we “think” we need to know each moment of the day are robbing us from FOCUS and THOROUGHNESS. They’re taking away our EDGE and masking our TALENT.

I have a plush velvet black box with black satin-covered cushioning inside (the casing for one of my most cherished sales achievement awards) that sits on the entryway bench inside my front door. It is labeled "The Box of Human Interaction." If you come visit me or my amazing teenage daughters, you will be asked to place your drill sergeant inside and we will proceed to have an ACTUAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE together! And not ONE MINUTE of it will be spent reading self-help articles or talking about what Walt Disney said all those years ago.

Did you really have any measurable change in the way you approached business last week when you read Walt’s words of wisdom on my wall? How about the 17,000 other short articles that popped up in your feed demanding your attention? Did they alter your success in your client relations? Did they change anything about the way you came home to your kids?

Let’s open up that desk drawer!

Stick the seargent where the sun don’t shine! (the desk drawer, that is...what were you thinking?)

Bring back FOCUS and EXCELLENCE to our craft and personal “phone-call-or-drop-by-not-text-or-email” service to our clients!

Let’s re-engage with our clients, our spouses, our growing-all-too-fast ankle biters, and our community!

P.S. This message is Walt Disney-approved.

Penalties Imposed on 5 Employers for Federal Labor Violations

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 09:19:14 GMT

The U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division (WHD) recently issued news releases announcing judgments against five companies investigated for various violations of laws and regulations.

Case Number 1: Child Labor Laws

A grocery store employed several minors in violation of federal child labor laws by allowing them to operate trash compactors and bottle recycling machines.

Following a WHD investigation, the store paid civil money penalties of $10,000 after investigators found the employer allowed workers between 15 and 17 years of age to operate or tend to the machinery. They also determined the employer scheduled 15-year-olds to work after 7 p.m., more than three hours on a school day and allowed them to work more than 18 hours in a workweek, all violations of child labor laws. In addition, the grocer failed to maintain complete records of employee birth dates.

Case Number 2: Overtime Wage and Record-keeping Violations

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) requires all covered employers to pay non-exempt employees at a rate equal to or above the federal minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour.

Additionally, the same law requires employers to pay non-exempt employees at one-and-one-half times the employee's standard hourly rate of pay for any time worked over 40 hours in a given workweek.

A health care provider has been required to pay 61 of its direct care support employees $92,275 in back wages for failure to pay overtime in accordance with the FLSA guidelines. Additionally, the company has been penalized for violating record-keeping requirements, as its records claiming to support compliance with overtime rules directly contradicted the findings of the investigation conducted by the WHD.

Case Number 3: Overtime, Minimum Wage and Poster Violations

A residential care facility has been cited $27,872 in civil penalties and required to pay $135,092 in back wages pursuant to a WHD investigation that uncovered widespread overtime and minimum wage violations against 56 employees. The company, in paying caregivers flat fees per day, instead of compensating them for hours worked, routinely neglected its obligations to meet minimum wage and overtime requirements under the FLSA.

Additionally, the business refused to pay staff for time spent attending mandatory work training and for interrupted sleep during breaks in their work shifts. Finally, the company failed to display mandatory labor posters required under the FLSA.

Case Number 4: Overtime and Payroll Record Violations

A heating, ventilation and air conditioning contractor has paid $20,547 in back wages to 18 employees after a federal investigation found the employer failed to pay workers overtime when they worked more than 40 hours in a workweek.

WHD investigators determined the company violated the FLSA's overtime requirements. The employer failed to record and pay employees for all of the hours they worked, resulting in overtime violations in workweeks of more than 40 hours. The company also paid two workers flat weekly salaries regardless of the number of hours they actually worked. By doing so, the employer failed to pay overtime as the law requires when the employees worked more than 40 hours in a workweek.

The employer also failed to maintain payroll records as required by law.

Case Number 5: Prevailing Wage Violations

The Davis-Bacon Act requires all companies with government contracts in excess of $2,000 with either the United States or the District of Columbia to pay workers the same rate or higher than the "prevailing wage" rates prescribed by the U.S. Secretary of Labor for each specific job classification. These rates are defined as the wage paid to the majority of laborers in the classification on similar projects in the area.

The WHD is requiring a federal contractor to pay 69 employees $293,051 in back wages and fringe benefits after concluding an investigation into the company's failure to pay required overtime to workers in the air traffic control tower on an Air Force base. The company also paid wages below the prevailing rates required for construction work under a U.S. Department of Defense contract.*

Stay in Compliance

One of the many things that sets Integrity Benefit Partners apart from other employee benefits brokers is our value added services.

No Cost DOL Mock Audits

We ensure our clients are protected in the event of an actual audit. Our on-staff trained compliance auditors will work with you on a robust audit checklist to make sure your business is in compliance, and that you're confident and ready with a smile on when the regulators come knocking. Add this to our many other value adds, including a complimentary HR management system that will rock your world, along with the fact that our typical client saves upwards of 27% on their group health plans, and you can see why we have insane client loyalty and explosive growth.

How can we help your company today?

* Cox, Beckman & Goss. “Re: Cox, Beckman, Goss & Company Newsletter for February 25, 2021.” Message to Lydia Clark. 25 February 2021. E-mail.

Getting Naked

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 11:09:29 GMT

I recently finished Patrick Lencioni's book, Getting Naked. Before you get too excited, the title is provocative but the book is not about what you might think. Everyone keeps their clothes on throughout the entire book.

The gist of the book is that the most effective way for a professional service provider to interact with prospective clients and current clients is to become vulnerable… "to embrace levels of humility, selflessness and transparency for the good of the client."

What struck me about this core message is the similarity between what Lencioni is advocating and what I have been teaching for years now. I call it SERVANT "Selling". There is no question, Lencioni's title has sold more books.

Whether you call it "getting naked" or "SERVANT Selling" there is unbelievable power in this approach. For one thing, it is a more natural way for most of us to interact with a prospective client than feeling compelled to go into "sales mode". This approach gives you permission to just serve, to be yourself, to be helpful. Don't worry so much about whether you get a new client. Focus on positively impacting this human being sitting in front of you. When you put aside the desire to sell somebody something, you are free to just serve.

Another powerful element of this philosophy of doing business is attentiveness. Attentiveness can be defined as "showing the worth of another person by giving my undivided concentration." When your approach to another human being is to humble yourself and to serve by listening intently, there is incredible power in this. On more than one occasion, when I have gotten this right (which isn't all the time), I have actually had people tell me that I am incredibly validating. When I asked what they meant by this statement, the response was essentially, "You ask great questions. You listen intently and you stayed focused on me and my business. Do you realize how validating that is?"

What a privilege to have that kind of impact on another human being. I think Patrick Lencioni would agree with the philosophy behind the title of my book: Stop Selling…Start Serving. If you prefer to think of it as "getting naked", I'm cool with that. However, you frame it, I encourage you to approach your next conversation with a commitment to serve, not to be served. To listen; not to sell. You'll be glad you did and so will your client.

Blessings,

Jack Frisby

Best Tax Software for Business?

Fri, 20 Mar 2015 11:03:39 GMT

Now, look.... I'm actually a CPA, but don't judge me. I left that world many moons ago because I needed human interaction more than just 3 months out of the year. Having owned my own business for the last 11 years, I find myself hoping, yes even dreaming, that there is SOMEONE out there who has a state-of-the-art tax software and business management software package that provides the day-to-day necessities of:

an income tracker
expense analysis
some form of app for receipt scanning/categorization
budgeting functionality
bank import and automatic expense categorization (so I don't have to do it)

Sounds like your standard, run-of-the-mill, "we're just like Quicken" accounting software, right? Here's the catch:

I want to push a button any day of the year and have my tax forms completed and tax liability estimated as if I were filing that day. I want a better way to estimate my business and personal tax liability WAY sooner than April 14 (yes, I'm a slacker, but according to my accountant, I'm not the worst of his clients, by far, although I find that hard to believe). I'd like to know in November or December if I need to make a sizable charitable contribution, or set more aside in my retirement account, or pay myself less of a salary, WITHOUT having to pay my accountant hundreds of dollars to do an estimated return.

Seems to me, with a few entries of personal information, and a downloadable update of the current year's tax forms when they are released, this should be a pretty pain-free button push.

Who knows of an amazing software like this? Who will save me from adding 370 gray hairs every April? Who will be my Batman today?