Benefits Benchmarking with Matt Lister | E105

Financial Planning For Canadian Business Owners

Jason talks to Matt Lister, CEO of Cloud Advisors. It is a company in the group benefits space, and one of the unique things they have done is they have built a benchmarking system that helps inform business owners as to basically how their plans stack up against competitors in the same space and helps advise around best practices and design. Service is free for employers. Paid by advisors and providers.

Episode Highlights:

• 01:04: Cloud advisors use the Canvas employee benefits marketplace. Matt explains how they show employers how their benefit plans stack up.
• 1.20: The number one reason why employers have benefits in the first place is to be competitive and what Matt has done is democratized access to benchmarking data.
• 02:23: Every advisor got their own limited pool of experience regarding different sectors, different types of companies.
• 04:58: Employers go through different stages where they don't need benefits perhaps when they very first started, they can't afford benefits and then they quickly start adding people and they get into a world where your benefits become table stakes. So, they become that checkbox.
• 06:35: Matt explains how their system has options for employers that have no coverage, they can get a sample plan.
• 07:17: Matt explains how their system intakes the benefits plan and breaks it down into hundreds of different variables that one can then compare by industry, region and group size.
• 09:57: Matt explains how they developed the bar score, and it stands for benefits, action, retention, and it's like a credit score.
• 17.14: Matt talks about the type is benchmark that they do. There are basically 2 types, he says.
• 19:41: Matt talks about the database that they have built and how they segregate problems and solutions.
• 22:30: Matt says that they recognize that business owners are busy, and they have got businesses to run, and insurance is only a small component of that needs to be done efficiently and effectively and conveniently.

3 Key Points:

1. Matt talks about the big determinants, basically how benefits programs get structured in terms of, different industries or different careers, different development stages, what are the big factors implemented that should be impacting, and how a plan is designed.
2. Cloud Advisor has been in the marketplace coming up eight years and when they first developed the database, they had a very limited amount of data in it to perform the benchmark. Matt shares how they achieved about 15,000 employee benefit plans.
3. Matt talks about the client output and how they visualize the actual results.

Tweetable Quotes:

• "We show them how their current programs stack up by industry, region group size as well as how they can improve their program." - Matt
• "When I started in the industry, my dad had spent most of his career working for a public crown corporation with the incredibly robust union." - Matt
• "We will connect not just with the vendor and the vendors; information will actually perform an instant quote and an instant proposal so that the employer has everything they need to." - Matt

Resources Mentioned:

• Facebook – Jason Pereira's Facebook
• LinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn

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