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Transcript

Casey Combest: Welcome to the Insurance Leadership Podcast. I'm your host for today's episode, Casey Combest.

Today is jam packed with practical insights as we welcome Luke Aslesen. A leader redefining how employees understand their benefits. From his knack for simplifying complex insurance topics to his innovative benefits boot Camp, Luke's approach is as refreshing as it is impactful. Luke, thanks so much for being with us.

Luke Aslesen: Absolutely. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having man.

Casey Combest: Yeah, for sure. Your passion for breaking down complex insurance terms. It's something anyone can, see is inspiring. How did you get into this field? And what led you into the focus on benefits, education?

Luke Aslesen: I mean, how much time we got? I'll give you the abridged version. So, first of all, it's really good to be here. And, like we talked about prior to starting, like, professional dialed in, just buttoned up stuff is it's not lost on me. So I know the amount of time, energy and even the thoughtfulness of some of the questions you sent over. Just beautiful.

So, excited for this. The way I got into benefits, actually, my dad worked in benefits for 40 some odd years. We never worked together, but I was living in Arizona, pursuing my now wife, Rachel, and we were kind of thinking about moving back to Minnesota, where I currently live. And my dad was like, hey, have you thought about doing insurance?

Casey Combest: Sounds like, no, no, no, not on your short list.

Luke Aslesen: Unknown not yeah, not on my show about my long list. And and the more I thought about it, I would just like, sort of checks all my boxes. So, got into it, got directly into the broker side with this, incredible brokerage, in the Twin Cities here.

And about three years in, I built my book. I validated my contract, quick and was I was succeeding. I was doing great. Just cold calls, just doing the thing. And obviously, when you're a benefits broker, you need to be communicating this stuff to the end user.

The employee and I started doing my open enrollment meetings, and I was just like, oh my gosh, no one understands a thing that I'm talking about. Like people are showing up on their phones.

You get it, and they're just not tuned in. And I initially was was kind of pissed at it because I was like, listen, what I have to say is so important, right? But then, it just it got me thinking and I was like, oh, they're not listening because no one's ever taken the time to really engage with that.

This whole ecosystem of benefits seems to be focused around, you know, we as brokers, we sit with the C-suite. We're just experts by proxy, right? Well, the wake, that gets left behind are the people that use it. And just seeing this, many people ask such basic, rudimentary questions.

Casey just made me say, oh my gosh, surely somebody has a solution for educating employees. And the deeper I dug, the more I realized no one had done anything like this. And I was like, I'm a journalism major, a mass comm major by trade, I love connecting, I love taking complex things into selling them down. And that is just how I started on the engagement and education journey.

Casey Combest: That's awesome man. Yeah, well, Leonardo da Vinci says that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. And so, we'll just call you sophisticated.

Luke Aslesen: Wow! No. That is so funny, Casey. I have that printed out in my office.

Casey Combest: Are you serious?

Luke Aslesen: Yes, yes, yes. That's incredible. So great quote. Love it.

Casey Combest: Yeah. Absolutely, man. Well, that's so great to see. So, the origin of why you, began educating and helping people that, really need to know this information, to navigate life and their benefits.

Well, this is the Insurance Leadership podcast as you know. So we don't want to disconnect leadership from the industry that we work in. So how does your approach to benefits education reflect your overall leadership philosophy?

And what do you think makes you an effective leader in this space? I guess I guess another way to ask is, why should people listen to me? Luke?

Luke Aslesen: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll take everything I say with a grain of salt. Trust but verify. Right. the reason I think I've done well is, I just, I boil things down to their absolute, like, simplest form.

So I think so many people, myself included, you. We just get so deep into this, Casey, that we start talking, that we speak the jargon. We use the words we understand it, and then we forget that most of the world doesn't operate that way.

So, I'm a huge believer that I'm not in the insurance space. I'm in the people space. And that might sound kind of hokey, but, so many people are sad. They don't like their jobs. They are stretched thin financially, like we're human beings.

And so I just I'm like, how do I saddle up next to people and say, I see you, I hear you, I feel you, I'm going to help. I like to just lead almost from the side, if you will. And I've noticed that the more real I can be, and so much of our content and our platform in general is just real raw.

So many people are used to an insurance person showing up. And when Luke, you know, the, the Russian mobster who it looks like he just got paroled, that they're kind of like, oh, that guy's kind of like me.

I think I listen to him, so I think I just build really quick rapport with people. Because I don't try to blow smoke. I don't try to convince them of anything. I just tell the truth. And that seems to resonate with people in a big way.

Casey Combest: So watching some of your previous work, it's clear to see that you're passionate about helping employees feel confident, informed about their insurance options. What strategies do you use when you take these complex topics and made the make them relatable and engaging?

Luke Aslesen: I think it goes back to that last question. How do we make it as simple as possible? I think there's this, you know, again, we overseer in the insurance space, we understand this stuff so.

Well, but how do I think through the lens of the end user, that being the employee conversation with C-suite and those who are actually going to buy from us, that's that's a whole different conversation.

My concern, and I say this to all the groups I go into, I say, hey, Casey, CFOs, CEO, whoever I go, Casey, I hope you and I establish a really good relationship over a long period of time, but without sounding abrasive. You are my number two priority. My number one priority are the people that you're buying this benefit for.

And if we're not on the same page there, that's okay. I'm not for everybody. But again, you're spending 7 or 8 figures for a benefit for your employees. And if I'm not making what you're spending this much money on a true benefit for your people, I know I'm not just going to sell you some product.

So that's largely been my approach. And again, it's not for everybody. Some people do want the, you know, strictly professional, strictly whatever we're going to be, you know, blah blah blah, blah blah. And I do my my level best.

My team and I, we're very sophisticated on the funding like all of the benefits stuff. But at the end of the day, I want this to be as much of a cultural impact as it as a cost impact. And it seems that the whole industry, Casey, is focused on the money piece as they should be. I want to be very, very clear. That's not something we can throw out the window. This whole industry is full of bright, bright, bright people. They're typically finance people or econ people or whatever. And I just found this really interesting niche from like, oh, okay, I can focus on the employee.

Let me communicate to my buyer that I'm concerned with their business. I'm not concerned with writing a new deal just to make some money. I'm not concerned with that. I'm concerned with having your people actually understand it so that you look good so that they understand, oh my gosh, our team spending this much money, like people just don't get it.

So the easier I can communicate that to people's basic stuff, the better rapport I see overall.

Casey Combest: So that word engaging is kind of interesting here for people who haven't seen your content. How do you make it engaging? What is that? What does that mean? Do you do cartwheels, while you're explaining it or what do you do?

Luke Aslesen: A couple of things. First, we make everything really quick and simple. We are in the attention economy, and I think you probably know this. I think a couple of years ago was the first year that people had a shorter attention span than a goldfish. I think it's like six seconds or something.

And even as you're getting into video and editing and all this stuff, and this rule of thumb looks like every five seconds, change it up, do something, change the angle. If something like that. So, keeping it short, sweet and to the point. Also not using any jargon.

Just this should be fine for US military. I think insurance has the most jargon in any field, right? And so I just kind of cut through all of that noise. I'm like, people don't need to know the definition of an ACO, a PPO. They don't need to know about HRA. All of a sudden. They just need to know, like how it works. So I try to remove as much jargon as humanly possible.

And I quite literally not because people are dumb because they don't understand it. I try to filter it through the lens of a fifth grader. Would a fifth grader understand this concept because people are not tuning in to the thing overall, but they will engage in understand with a concept so short and sweet, getting right down to the brass tacks and keeping it simple, but also showing up as Luke. I understand that I don't look like the typical broker.

I don't look like the typical insurance person. So I just show up and I've got a bit of a potty mouth. And so when I get in front of people and I just talk the way that I talk, I'm not doing it for show. I'm just that's that's my vocabulary. People tend to say like, oh, that's that's interesting.

And then they want to watch more. It's it's again engaging them at a level that they're comfortable at and taking something that they've historically just tuned out entirely and making it into something that they go, oh, okay, I'll listen a little bit more

Casey Combest: Yeah. You've created a custom open enrollment program that address the specific needs of businesses and employees. What makes your approach different from, say, the traditional methods?

Luke Aslesen: Yeah. It's kind of a combo I haven't completely ditched. The open enrollment process. You have to operate within the framework that's built right, and everybody expects to do the 60 minute, once a year open enrollment.

So I still do those. But what we do is we don't show up for the packet. We show up with a one pager. It's got QR codes. It's got, NFC tags. You know, those things that you hover over with your phone and it pulls up a blank?

But we always say that the real engagement doesn't happen during open enrollment. It happens throughout the year. My end goal and the future state of what I believe benefits engagement will look like will be year round engagement.

And that means sending out text messages, sending out emails, sending out fun stuff. If you know Casey, the CEO of the company, were to send out a mass text about benefits to employees, people probably aren't going to tune. And not just Casey is not an awesome guy, but because that's the boss, right?

When Luke, the outside of the rebel, can come in and kind of, you know, go against the fray and do his, I'm saying that's where we tend to see a lot of people. The most recent open enrollment roll out, we did, you know, we get more, more than 70% engagement with the stuff that we send out.

So it's not that people don't care. It's just no one has taken the time again to really engage them. So open enrollment is an inflection point. But then also throughout the year, dripping stuff throughout and taking kind of a media approach to it, people are not going to read PDFs, they are not going to read long emails.

They will watch a 45 second video. They will watch a 62nd video. They will watch something fun and engaging with Luke. So it's kind of, again, just morphing the two things. How do we catch people when they care about it, but then also keeping them engaged throughout the year, which is fun. I don't know, sometimes even just silly videos and content marketing.

Casey Combest: No, I love it, I love it. That's a great way to keep everyone engaged for sure. We'll take a moment to tell our listeners a little bit about Benefits Boot Camp.

Luke Aslesen: Yeah. Benefit boot camp. That was actually, born of your quote guy, good artist borrow, great artist steal. And, I love, one of my first ever clients. They introduced this topic to me. They were like, hey, could we do this, like, five years ago? Hey, can we do, like, benefits boot camp or quarterly?

We just do a call with people, and it can be, you know, 30 minutes, 45 minutes where we can get new hires or people who want a refresher, or we'll give them HSA money, some sort of incentive to be on the call.

So Benefits boot Camp is just a 45 minute session where we typically do it quarterly. I'll tell leadership teams, get your new hires, depending on the waiting period for joining the benefits, but get your new hires on the call. Make sure that's mandatory, but then also put some sort of reward in there for people to show up.

And we talk a little bit about the benefits. Just benefits 101. Hey, if you're new to this or if you've done this a hundred times, let's take a fresh approach to this. Let's talk about why this is important.

I'm not going to convince you that health insurance is like the greatest thing on the planet. Public sentiment around the thing is just so negative. And so I'm like, hey, listen, I'm not here to convince you that it's not overpriced or it's not, you know, fill in the blank.

I'm here to tell you that you do need it and spending the five grand a year to have it or whatever that number is, it's a heck of a lot better than spending 500 grand on that emergency surgery that you're going to be paying out of pocket for if you don't have it.

So long answer. Long benefits boot camp. It's just this creative way to do like a quarterly, sometimes monthly with people to just do, again, a 45 minute video that gets them to actually tune in to why they should care about the benefits, and then how to best utilize them.

Casey Combest: One I know for you and you do things like that, it's got to feel great to help people learn about these complex topics. What's been some of the more rewarding work you've done? Maybe some of those stories you could share with us?

Luke Aslesen: You know, there was one recently, this this last year for open enrollment. I had a gentleman at one of my manufacturing clients, Spanish speaker, and we had just introduced an air copay because they had so many people defaulting to the air.

So we put a $500 copay. Not crazy. Most groups do it. Well, this gentleman talked to me afterwards, and he was I mean, language barriers, right? So that was already challenging. But, he was like, why did you do this?

I went to the E.R. three times last year, and I was like, well, why did you go to the E.R.? Turns out, Casey, all three of the times he went, he didn't need to go there. And I was like, hey, did you know that urgent care exists? And he's like, what's what's urgent care?

That, like, we saved the planet so much money. We saved this guy so much money. And then to have him again, Spanish speakers from Mexico. So to have him then go back to whatever community or friend group that he's a part of and be like, hey, did you guys know that the E.R. is not where we default to?

Like that was super rewarding because steer you and I are like, well, of course urgent care exists. Why wouldn't you? Right. But there are millions of people. My wife is an E.R. nurse, and, I said to our wants a few years back of like, hey, man, what percentage of people come to the E.R. that shouldn't be there?

And before the question wasn't even out of my mouth, she goes 75%. 75% of people should not be coming to my E.R. and taking up a bed. And I was like, oh, my gosh. So that is just a recent story, but that that feels good, man. Because this guy was horrified. He's like, oh my gosh, if I go to the E.R. three times a year, that's going to cost me 1500 bucks on top of whatever I'm going to spend. I'm for sure going to hit my max out of pocket.

I just saved that dude a boatload of money, and then I'm able to go to leadership and be like, you guys, this is working. This is working. People want to know and understand it. So, anytime I can save people stress and money, that's a huge win. That feels really good.

Casey Combest: That's a story for another day. I do have a clumsy friend in high school that he went to the E.R. three times in one week, and he 100% should have been there for everyone. But that is very rare. That is very rare story for another day.

As as we're sort of moving toward the close of our show today and as it relates to your Mission League, what do you feel like is the biggest challenge you're facing and going to face as it relates to employees knowing more about their benefits?

Luke Aslesen: A-P-A-T-H-Y. Apathy. I'll say this. So I'm blue in the face. Casey, we like this whole country is so apathetic towards health insurance. And again, that's why I say I'm not in the insurance business. I'm in the engagement. I'm in the people space.

And what we try to focus on so heavily is that apathy piece. Like, how can people and we probably ask ourselves the same question, everybody in industry, how can people spend so much money on something? But not take the time to understand it?

I mean, if you just take a really big step back and think about, I mean, it's roughly ten grand to have single coverage, 25 grand to have family coverage split between employee and employer, of course, but that's so much money to be spending.

And the only attention it gets for most people is the 60 minutes. Once a year, and during that time, they're usually checked out. If I'm really good at engaging people and I still have people tuning me out,

I can't imagine what other brokers and other insurance people have to deal with. So, I'd say apathy, but man, that's a really fun problem to solve. We are like, if we can solve that, when we solve that, oh my gosh, it's going to be incredible. Like we have really big we're casting a huge vision with this thing.

We're just saying we want every single person to understand how the nuts and bolts of their health insurance works. And it's going to happen. It's just going to happen. We just feel that we are on it. To quote the Blues Brothers on a mission from God, man, we're just doing something that we feel is really special and really important and really impactful. So we're fighting the apathy giant. And, we're getting we're getting beat up along the way, for sure. But, apathy, I would say, is the biggest challenge that we face.

Casey Combest: Every good fight you get beat up a little bit. Right? And, it sounds like just, helping people to understand what's on the line. That's a lot of your job and what you're doing.

Luke Aslesen: Great point. Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Casey Combest: Well, what advice would you give to leaders who want to communicate benefits more effectively and create a culture where employees feel informed and engaged instead of, say, confused.

Luke Aslesen: Hire Luke. Obviously. know. Good.

Casey Combest: Well, thanks so much, Luke. We'll let you go on that. No. yeah yeah.

Luke Aslesen: Right. There's two sides of this coin. There's the money piece and there's the time engagement piece. And almost all of the time money energy gets spent on that cost piece. I'm trying to even educate my leadership teams and say, hey, listen, this is not an immediate reward.

You could switch from a fully insured plan to an extra say and save 100 grand to whatever it is that's going to be immediate. You're going to feel that it might not be a good long term strategy. My goal is for you to I'm trying to boost your culture, man. That's all I'm trying to do. I want you as a business leader who has put your blood, sweat and tears into building a business and then a top three spend for you is insurance that your people don't understand even a little bit.

So I'm just like, let's get people thinking about this and talking about this. And it's really fun, Casey, to see people. There's some companies and some people that are kind of starting to figure this thing out alongside of us. But I would tell leadership teams to press their brokers, press their carriers, press whoever for actual solutions to the engagement problem. Because when you capture the hearts and minds of people do it, they'll they'll listen. They'll do, like, the good stuff.

So, yeah, just even thinking about it and it's crazy. In the same way, employees don't really understand this piece of it. Leadership teams are not focused on it. Not because they're dumb or not because they're not, trying to do good stuff for their people, but nobody is talking about it. So I just want to bring awareness to this thing. And the more we talk about the problem and then the solution, I think we're going to see a massive change in the entire space.

Casey Combest: Awesome, awesome. As we look to the future, what trends or innovations do you see shaping the way businesses educate employees about benefits, and how can leaders prepare for these changes?

Luke Aslesen: Probably, you know, in life, Casey, you can pay for thing even two ways money or time, right? There's different iterations of each, but whatever you're getting, you're giving up your money or you're giving up your time. And we have agreed collectively that giving up our money is more valuable than giving up our time.

And, I think that getting people to engage, like, understand the time piece of it, prepping them for the fact that this is going to take some time. You know, even for my fully insured groups, you know, the more complex you get and the more you actually dive into solving this health care problem within your four walls as a business, it's going to take more time.

And I know that sucks to hear because nobody has any spare time. But I just as a good project manager, as somebody who looks into the crystal ball and see the future, I'm like, hey, it's going to take more time. But that is what's going to lead to the healthiest possible culture.

So letting people know that, hey, I if you want to just keep on spending a whole bunch of money on this thing and not seeing things change, God bless you. I can't really change that. But I try to prep people and say, hey, change is hard enough, but let's plan on spending more time digging into this because there's no magic, there's no magic wand, there's no silver bullet.

And the only way that this gets fixed is if we really intentionally take time to study the problem and then figure out the problem and solve it, I think.

Casey Combest: Well Luke, thank you so much for your time today. And thank for thank you for being authentically, Luke, you just you have this authenticity about you. I like it, man. Where where can people find out more about you and if they're interested in learning more about what you're doing.

Luke Aslesen: Yeah. Connect on LinkedIn. I love connecting on LinkedIn. I'm super active there. And if there are, I know there's a lot of groups that are interested in educating their people. Our website dot get informed.com getting framed so it's informed without the o or the e. Take it take a tour on there.

You can get a free trial of our platform. We built the Netflix of insurance. Literally. We had our tech team build out the Netflix for our insurance content. But that's all on LinkedIn, I would say. Just connect with me. I again, I like I like engaging with people. I like following people as well.

So the bigger network I can build on there and just teach as much as I can receive information from people. That's probably the best way.

Casey Combest: Awesome. Thanks again and thank you guys so much for listening to another episode of the Insurance Leadership Podcast. Have a great day everyone.