We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Justine Bell a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Justine, appreciate you joining us today. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

We are a health insurance agency, so we help pair who need health insurance with the best, most cost effective plans for them. Originally I worked on the P&C side, which is super competitive. I came from the non-profit sector, and it was really important and fulfilling for me to feel like I’m helping. Doing business insurance is fine, but saving a business a few hundred or thousand dollars a year just wasn’t making the same connection. I was noticing, however, that there was a lot of stress about health insurance. I like to be the person who can help answer questions, so I started to dig into it and find mentors to help teach me how to help answer those questions. I kept learning more and more, and people would share my information with their friends until I was doing only health insurance. Then, after a while, there were too many people and I had to hire someone. Now we’re a staff of four and we get to help people every day. I think one thing that we’re the most proud of is our empathy and ability to listen. We feel that an individual or family knows what plan would be best for them if we can help educate them to understand how the policies work. Then we can support them in choosing for themselves and then helping them execute that plan.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

We purchased our book of business from our prior agency, so we did have employees from day one. And as soon as I was able to make my own financial decisions and realized that our budget was going to work, we went looking for a third employee because we were super stretched. Hiring was more difficult than I expected, mostly because people want to put their best foot forward, so it can be difficult to wade through to see the person beneath the promises. But I do think we ended up with the right person. We are all working moms at our agency, and one strength that we have in the hiring process (and something I’m super proud of) is that we have what we call a ‘flex 40,’ meaning that we have to have at least one person in the office at a time and employees are expected to work 40 hours a week, but within that we’re free to make it to our kids activates, pick them up or drop them off at school, etc. Because of that, we have to be really specific about hiring employees that won’t take advantage of it, but when we find the right fit it’s like magic.

Let’s talk M&A – we’d love to hear your about your experience with buying businesses.

We purchased our book of business from our old boss in January of 2023, and have gotten to pay our own path and pay our own bills. The process was bumpy, we did a private sale between the two of us (without a broker), and getting funding to purchase an insurance book of business was more complicated than we anticipated. But we’re so happy to have done it, and we’re doing great.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

We do two specific things. The first is that we remind our clients at the end of the sales process that we are here for them all year. So if they run into something strange, like a claim that doesn’t feel like it’s paying correctly or a billing issue, we encourage them to please call us. There are many agents out there that we feel like just sign their clients up and then ignore them, but we always joke that we’re more like social workers than sales people, and we’re always here to help.

We also always reach out to all of our clients during open enrollment, when they all have the opportunity to change plans. We never want them to feel like they’ve been abandoned, and we know that re-enrollment can be scary. So to make sure that they’re taken care of, we do that enrollment with them each year if they would like us to.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cedarrivereast.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61550589812415

Image Credits
Melik Brown, M3 Group