By Dan Cook // Photography by Kevin Garrett
The scene was one of the earlier meetings of Nelson Griswold’s now-legendary (and 10-year-old) NextGen Mastermind group in Florida. Randy Hansen, the boss of PSG Washington in Seattle, was listening to remarks by an invited guest. Suddenly, something she says caused him to sit upright.
“Very quickly I realized she was one of those people I wanted to connect with,” he recalls of Kim Eckelbarger. “I told people, ‘We gotta figure out a way to get her to join.’ She did, and has been very valuable for us.”
Eckelbarger seems to have that effect on people. She measures her words, making sure she listens carefully before speaking, then cutting to the heart of a matter, and, more often than not, offering an unexpected insight.
“Kim is just very impressive,” Hansen says. “When I listen to her talk about our business, not only does she have empathy for people, but she also understands how to design plans to reduce costs. But she knows how to navigate the line between reducing cost and offering something that is just too much noise and hassle for employees.”
Eckelbarger remembers the meeting “like it was yesterday.”
“I shared with the Mastermind how I built my business by providing service before the sale, and that I didn’t quote to win business (the no-quote piece seemed to be what they liked the most). I executed compliance for prospects even though they were not my clients and eventually they became my clients,” she says.
“I also shared how we were able to get several local agencies working together rather than competing. This mirrored the treatment the Mastermind provided me. They let me try collaborating with them, and then I wanted to be a member of the Mastermind. It was a very natural fit.”
Climbing the ladder
Eckelbarger has a difficult time taking credit for her success as founder of Tropical Benefits in Trinity, Florida. She prefers to cite the many individuals in the industry that have helped her move up the benefits ladder. She refers often to her many mentors. But the tables have turned of late. Now, it is she who is doing the mentoring.
Perhaps her humility stems from humble beginnings. Born and raised in a small Indiana town (Pleasantview) between Indianapolis and Cincinnati, she learned about hard work at a young age.
“Do you know what detasseling is?” she asks. [Answer: Not really.] “It’s when you’re picking corn and you remove the tassels. That’s what my twin brother and I would do in the summer—detassel corn. We had machetes; we’d whack away at the corn, pull off all those tassels. We came home tired and dirty, but we learned about work ethic. It was my daddy’s core value, and that creates pride. With the money I earned, I bought my first stereo.”
The road to the founding of Tropical Benefits was not much easier. She was the first in her family to graduate college, earning, at her father’s behest, a degree in finance from Indiana University. (“He wanted to make sure I could get a job!”) She married and moved to Florida, where her husband landed a job.
She found a position with a Professional Employers Association, providing administrative duties for small businesses. That gave her the first taste of insurance, and she found it to her taste.
There followed a series of job hops, all providing valuable learning (so painful, others not so much). Meantime, she was schooling herself and collecting mentors.
While working for a public insurer in Florida, she realized no one was training her. “So I found a book online by Clay Kelley: ‘Success in Selling PEO.’ I read the book and called him all the time to ask him what I should do. He trained me.” That habit of hers—going directly to the knowledge source and seeking information–would become a hallmark of her work life.
Obviously impressed by his acolyte, Kelley provided an entry to a new job for Eckelbarger. Soon, she met another mentor: Don Brown.
“He was a partner of the agency I worked for but had left. He trained other agents in his service-before-the-sale theory. He said, ‘Put value first.’ For instance, I was never allowed to quote to win business. It was off the table. The clients came because you added value, because we had compliance systems we executed on.”
Her journey continued. A particular twist in the road occurred when, while working out a non-compete from a former employer, she joined the insurer her husband worked for. It wasn’t a great fit, so she left. ”And they got mad and fired my husband!” she says. “So there we were with two kids and he’s out of work and I’m looking, too.”
She landed with yet another firm. But when that one slashed commissions by 50% in 2010, she’d had it. She hung out her insurance shingle and, collaborating with several trusted industry peers, she started to build the business.
Not long after, she struck the mentor mother lode: the NextGen Mastermind group. As noted by Hansen, she was invited to join and did so.
“The beauty of what we had in that room … I was a one-man shop, and there were about a dozen people in the group. And all of them taught me so much. These people elevate you.”
Among her Mastermind mentors are a group of very successful women brokers. “We would go to the conferences and have a girls’ night out,” she says, laughing at memories unshared. “The boys wanted to join us but we said, ‘No way!’”
Hansen, first a source of advice, soon became a recipient.
“When she starts talking about things she’s doing, people tend to listen,” he says. “I can just bounce ideas off her. At least once a month I’m emailing or calling her for her input. In this business, things are changing so rapidly … Every day we run into things we need an opinion on, and hers is one I value. With Kim, it’s a fact or she isn’t gonna talk about it.”
Thus the mentee becomes the mentor.
“I want to change the industry. It’s messed up. If we don’t, something or someone else will. And I’d rather be part of it than watch it happen.”
To that end, Eckelbarger loves to take her message on the road, speaking to groups wherever she can.
“I even started a group locally with three other female agency owners called HR Heroes. Here we created a road show all over central Florida helping HR implement compliance solutions. We actually have earned clients together this way and built amazing friendships,” she says.
Cost-conscious shopping
It’s her clients who receive the most lavish attention. When she says she offers personal service, it’s no exaggeration.
Example: A member of her Kia Dealership plan needed knee surgery. With her eye on the progress toward the surgery, Eckelbarger notes that the woman was about to make an expensive and totally unnecessary choice.
“I saw she was going out of network and I advised her to go inside, to the Advent system, and get it for free. She switched the surgery, got a free, high quality knee.”
With another plan member, she went to bat for her knee surgery with the CFO of the hospital that was going to perform the surgery. When she saw the estimate for the procedure, she saw it was thirty times the Medicare rate.
“I called the member and she said she couldn't afford it. I talked to the CFO of the hospital who said he’d reduce it, then pulled a fast one and we were back at the original estimate. So I got her to get a second opinion at another hospital. She ended up with free surgery. It mattered. She has two small kids and no extra money. And that’s what gets me up in the morning.”
No wonder Randy Hansen has her on speed dial.