Season 2 Episode 15
Season 2 Episode 15
Rick Holmes is a 31-year veteran of the Employee Benefits and Health Insurance consulting industry. During his career as a consultant, he has worked with thousands of employer groups and frequently acts as an expert resource for his peers.
In 2010, Rick founded Lakeshore Benefit Alliance, LLC (LBA) in Birmingham, AL, and actively serves as the Chief Executive Officer. Since founding LBA, Rick and his team have developed numerous proprietary insurance products that have helped change the health insurance landscape, by helping employers and employees offset hundreds of millions in healthcare costs.
Presently, Rick enjoys solid relationships with some of the world's most prominent Reinsurers, TPAs and Insurance Carriers.
In this episode Ryan is excited to welcome Rick Holmes, President of Lakeshore Benefit Alliance. Holmes is here to discuss the hallmark steps of securing seed funding to build your startup.
Holmes is a 31-year veteran and expert consultant in the employee benefits and health insurance industry. He covers a variety of topics: what seed funding is, how to determine how much to raise and how long it should last, what material is needed to raise it, and what types of investors are a fit for your early-stage startup.
Nevertheless, Holmes was more concerned with preserving control over his vision of success than with avoiding failure. It was a natural progression for him to become an entrepreneur.
By starting a business, he took control of his time and benefited from his efforts.
What kept me going was that I never let anything in life stop me from taking chances to make the business successful.
A startup’s seed financing process (also known as seed capital, seed money, or seed funding) is the first step in raising capital for a business. As part of seed money, investors invest their capital in exchange for equity stakes in the company.
Considering Holmes’ background in disability and life, their situation was a little different. The insurance companies wanted Rick’s business to succeed because the more success he had, the more successful they were. As a result of this relationship, they were willing to give Rick his seed money.
The key is to invest that seed money in the right areas of your business. It is essential to building recurring revenue. The advice Rick gives is to keep your expenses low and spend a lot less than you earn.
By keeping our expenses low and staying debt-free, we can simply be lean and mean when things get tight.
Even the most outgoing agent can find cold calling challenging. To reach one prospect, agents need hundreds of leads. As Holmes points out, there is no substitute for activity.
An agent’s ability to uncover a client’s needs and build a relationship is a particularly important characteristic. Rick advises not to waste the business owner’s time. Learn as much as you can quickly and make new friends.
My famous line is...the purpose of the call is to have an opportunity to meet you and nothing else but make a new friend.
As healthcare costs rise, Gap Insurance continues to rise in popularity with agents and groups alike. The purpose of gap policies is to supplement medical coverage and help offset medical expenses related to inpatient and outpatient care.
Holmes states their gap insurance is often referred to as their secondary business. Our goal is to be able to demonstrate that we can be a solution to the rising healthcare costs for our agents.
Gap insurance is just so untapped, and no one has heard about it.
A successful insurance agency requires a lot of time, effort, and investment. Passion and desire are important when it comes to sales, service, and growth strategies.
Be sure to tune into next month’s episode as we continue our discussions with the best leaders in the industry.
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