We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bret Brummitt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bret below.

Bret, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

Generous Benefits is a tip-of-the-tongue phrase I’ve always heard throughout my career that employers and their human resources team like to champion when they feel they have a competitive advantage when attracting talent to their firms because they provide superior benefits, or they feel that they spend more on their workforce.

However, when I use the term “Generous,” I’m using it to define a wider scope of benefits than what fits the standard checklist for an employer.

This comes from the idea of a Generous Orthodoxy, where Orthodoxy is the set of standards and practices of what is assumed to be “right,” but Generous expands that set of ideas and challenges those beliefs in order to maintain relevance and stay up to date within the conversation of that community.

Within Generous Benefits, we do focus on the norms of an assumed benefit plan, but we go much further and consider the whole employee experience and discuss the employer’s vision for that experience as well as how both the employer and employee can be good stewards of that vision.

This is the goal within the name, to build a benefit program not only to be something cherished but to be something relevant and sustainable to the whole entity.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I started in the insurance industry directly out of college and quickly experienced a whole new world that was completely foreign to my studies or any previous life experiences. My formative years prior to having a professional career were full of odd jobs, apprenticeships, and tons of autonomy working alongside skilled tradesmen and I quickly missed the world outside of an office building in the daytime. Looking back, it is no surprise that I pivoted over to the sales side of the insurance industry.

Once I got into sales, I got back to my tradesman roots and I started fixing problems for people I’d meet. I never liked the idea that I was an insurance salesman. I honestly still don’t like that terminology but I respect it and I respect the effort required to identify the right solution to a problem and earn a living because your audience appreciates your advice.

Today, I’ve built Generous Benefits on that same set of tradesman disciplines. We get paid for the advice we give because our results meet or exceed our client’s expectations.

When we first encounter a new client, there is typically an underlying problem that needs to be fixed. When it comes to a company’s benefit plans, there could be a strategic problem, a systemic problem, or a product problem. Often, all three problems exist and we work to fix them over time.

One of the most fruitful and rewarding exercises we do with our clients occurs during the intake process, way before we start the heavy lifting. We take our clients through a “deep dive” meeting with their leadership team and we provide questions about vision, current processes, their current results, and discuss future goals. However, the most magical thing happens during this meeting. Our clients are forced to slow down and open up about their current processes and share frustrations about results in front of their teammates. You would think that companies do this naturally, but they often don’t spend this time, and before our meeting is even concluded we’ve opened up space for improvement to occur and this lays the groundwork for a collaborative plan of improvement that could be a simple as a process change, or it could be as extensive as a five year strategic roadmap to realign benefits with the company’s vision.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

I generally don’t gravitate to prospecting for new clients, even though I understand the importance of growing our clientele.

Because I’m aware of this personality deficit, I have to be intentional about how I keep a constant pipeline of new opportunities. This is where my ability to build a good pipeline of Centers of Influence has been critical for my career. This is true from my very early career through today.

I make sure I know what is important to my Centers of Influence to help them become better at their jobs and what kind of education or resources I can provide to help them reach their goals. It is this step in understanding their goals and identifying how I can help even though I might not be a source of abundant referrals for each person.

And, just like finding new clients, finding the right Center of Influence and helping them know how to identify a good fit for our services is an ongoing project. Not sleeping on the connections you already have and not being complacent so that new connections aren’t realized is extremely critical for me and for the company.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

This sounds odd to say, but my “flat” personality has helped here. I’m not boisterous or excited by nature. This helps me to keep my mouth shut and listen. Perhaps this also helps me to speak only on the important stuff.

My colleagues often tell others that “I’m just being humble” or that “he won’t say it, but he’s the smartest at this or that.”

I know that I don’t have every answer to every problem, yet. I do know that I’m willing to listen, learn, and test.

I think that my ability to “test” solutions, “test” processes, or “test” products does make me and my team very unique. We learn tons through feedback when we test and improve both internally with our own team, and when we work with employers and their employees who are willing to collaborate with us for an improved future.

And, that experience we gain, does make us uniquely suited to know more than other firms, at least until they catch up and learn those same lessons.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://generousbenefits.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GenerousBenefits
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bretbrummitt/
• Other: https://generousimpact.podbean.com/