0 (2s):
Boom shake the room Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fireb brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like My First Million. Today we'll be breaking down how this husband and wife duo took on an ultra-competitive industry by applying their own fiduciary standard. To drop these value bombs, I brought Donovan and Chelsea Ryckis into EOFire Studios Donovan is a former series 65 Wealth Advisor and Chelsea is a division one athlete and insurance agent owner and they are a husband and wife dual taking on the employee benefits market for large Employers across the country. And today, Fire Nation,

0 (42s):
We'll talk about your goal, your North Star. We'll talk about the industry standard. We'll talk about creating your differentiator and so much more.

The Sales Evangelist (50s):
And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Donovan, Chelsea and our sponsors Sales Evangelist Hosted by my friend Donald Kelly is Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each week Donald interviews the world's best sales experts, successful sellers, sales leaders, and entrepreneurs who share their strategies to succeed in sales Right. now a recent episode you should definitely check out is The Five Ways to Do Daily Outbound with LinkedIn, Listen to Sales Evangelist. wherever you get your podcasts

Thought Leader (1m 22s):
ever thought of giving a TEDx talk, it's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. In four time TEDx. Speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit ThoughtLeader.com/fire to join Taylor's free trading, where he teaches you how to land a TEDx Talk and spread your message to millions.

0 (1m 42s):
Alright, Fire Nation. We have Donovan and Chelsea on the mic, so we're gonna have them both say, what's up to Fire Nation and Donovan. Why don't you start by sharing something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1 (1m 57s):
Hey John. Hey, Fire Nation. So something most people disagree with, I would say don't diversify your business, in fact, niche down until you start saying no to business. Hmm. And by doing that, you'll be working with your most ideal client, the people that bring you the most energy, and you'll be well known either in a niche or a vertical or a certain industry of your clientele that you're looking for.

0 (2m 22s):
Fire Nation. You know that I love saying niche till it hurts. Niche till it hurts. Chelsea, what do you got? Well,

2 (2m 29s):
I think this might get me canceled in social media culture Right now, but the whole work-life balance thing for me, work-life balance at the beginning. That's the caveat. It's a total lie. We'll get into it with you here in a bit. But so much of what we did in the beginning with those long days, long hours, working weekends, going and working way harder than our competition allowed us to be successful very quickly. And you wanna look at the people who are giving you the advice, right? I can't tell you how many times I had friends and family that were like, you gotta slow down, you're gonna burn out. But when I would look at where they were, I'm like, well, I don't want the life that you have. Nothing wrong with the life that they had, but I wanted something different, right?

2 (3m 9s):
So you just have to stay true to yourself. I think eventually the work-life balance becomes important, but at the beginning you gotta be all in

0 (3m 15s):
Fire. Nation, as you heard in the intro, we're talking to the husband and wife duo who took on an ultra-competitive industry by Applying their own Fiduciary standard. And Donovan, I wanna jump back to you because a lot of people don't even have a north star to point towards when they're starting their business. But you did. What was your specific goal when you started your business

1 (3m 41s):
Looking back? You know, I'd say the the journey is not linear, right? It's not perfect and it doesn't necessarily happen the ideal way that, that you had expected. So I kind of went through a couple different businesses, a couple different things, and all did well. You know, I'd say other people would probably look at it and and think it's successful. But you know, personally I wasn't finding it. So I had a couple things that I was looking for in whatever ideal kind of career business I really dedicated myself to. And I was looking for basically the ability to make a difference. I wanted to have personal kind of freedom of location. So if I wanted to work in Puerto Rico or Canada or Florida, wherever I'm at, that that wouldn't erupt interrupt my ability to service my clients.

1 (4m 30s):
And I wanted to work with good people that inspired me and be able to solve kind of new and different problems instead of just having, you know, a business that was a little bit more transactional where you just expected to kind of do the same thing, make the same sales week in, week out.

0 (4m 47s):
And Chelsea, I know you have a story to add to this as well, why don't you take that away?

2 (4m 51s):
Sure. Well, I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. My mom and my dad run a roofing company in Canada. So I saw it my whole life and I never really knew what that looked like until I knew what it didn't look like. So my senior year in college, I was playing D one softball, I sustained a brain injury and it actually stopped me in my tracks from becoming a doctor in an attempt to save the world a different way. I thought I'd go into nonprofit. I was making $30,000 a year and fundraising boatloads of money for a large national nonprofit after having a really successful event, the most successful they've ever had in the history of this particular event. I went and I asked for a raise.

2 (5m 32s):
So I asked, instead of $30,000, will you pay me $33,000 and here's my business plan on how I'm gonna make even more money for you next year. Well, they said, no, it wasn't in the budget, but they're gonna send me a bonus check. So, you know, little me is super excited about this bonus check. A few months go by, had to inquire about it a couple times it finally came in and it was $10, period. So that for me was that moment where that's, no one ever is gonna tell me my worth again. I Donovan actually framed that check for me, it's in my office hanging up and it's that daily reminder of nobody will tell you your worth. So my goal ultimately when we started the business was to never be in that position again.

0 (6m 15s):
Oh, Fire Nation. If you are not moved by that story, like check your pulse. I mean, I can so clearly remember being back in the military and you know, just busting my butt to be the best officer that I could be and, and just looking around and knowing I'm working so much harder than every other officer, this exact same rank as me, and then months and months and months went by this and we would all get our paychecks and we'd go out to the bar that night to kinda like celebrate and do our thing. And then it struck me, all these guys are getting paid the exact same amount of money as me, and I'm doing so much more work. I'm working so much harder. And they're, they're just in cruise control and they, they're, they're just not getting any less money than I am, although they're putting in so much less work.

0 (7m 2s):
And that's when I said to myself, man, I'm gonna serve my time here and, and, and continue my commitments to the military, but when I'm out, I am never putting myself in this situation again. So I love that story. And Donovan, I wanna talk about the specific industry that you and Chelsea are now in and why you chose it.

1 (7m 21s):
So we are in financial services, but more specifically we are employee benefits consultants. So we work with Employers, usually large corporations, 500 employees plus on advising them and basically trying to mitigate and lower the ever rising cost of healthcare in this country. So our competition is huge, it is very competitive. We're usually working against, you know, publicly traded companies that do a couple billion dollars a year.

0 (7m 51s):
So Chelsea, I wanna talk about how you've been able to successfully compete against much larger, better funded businesses. 'cause a lot of people, when they're in a specific industry, they're like, man, they're just so much bigger than we are. They have so much more money than we do than we do. They started so much earlier than we do. And we give each other all these excuses of like, why we're not going to go for it, why we're not going to succeed. But you've, you're doing all of that. Tell us, tell us how

2 (8m 22s):
Well it's evolved over the last few years. But at the beginning, the first six months when Donovan and I partnered, we each had our own agency. When we partnered together, we decided, you know, the first six months are all about focusing on partnerships. So we found other insurance agencies that were not writing employee benefits and we aligned ourselves with them as that expert. And then we actually leveraged their credibility in their respective communities. And we built a network of over 60 referral partners in the state of Florida, which then started to expand to the southeast and is now nationwide. And that was really nice from a volume perspective, which is what we needed in those early days to get that runway of funds upfront.

2 (9m 3s):
Because, you know, I think we alluded to this, we were a scratch agency, we had no funding, it was just the two of us busting our butt every single day. So it was nice to have that volume. But on the flip side of that, a lot of the business we were getting is not our ideal client. And for what, what we mean by that is we're very values-based. And I know we're gonna talk a bit about alignment and values and what that means to us within our Fiduciary standard. But something that's super exciting that just happened in September is we actually sold 80% of our business. Wow. Yeah. And it's crazy to even say it and it's a seven figure deal, very exciting time for us. But it wasn't, it wasn't in any attempt other than to align ourselves with our Fiduciary standard, which I know we're gonna chat about here soon.

2 (9m 51s):
And

0 (9m 51s):
Chelsea, I wanna actually stick here for a second with you because Fire Nation's listening and they're hearing the success story you sold for seven figures. You're still retaining 20% of your company despite that. So I mean, you have real upside as well, which is super exciting. What piece of advice would you give to our listeners who are like, man Donovan Chelsea, they've done that, they were able to compete against larger, better funded businesses. I want to as well. What's one just quick piece of advice you'd give to them

2 (10m 22s):
Out educate your competition. So I remember in the very beginning, you know, probably one year into the agency, it's still just Donovan and I, we closed a huge deal. It was the largest at that point. We had just landed in Cuba for a weekend vacation and we worked the entire time. We, you know, we were so in it, so committed, so ready to go on this crappy Cuban wifi. We made everything happen in three days. It was amazing. But the only reason we won that account and had the opportunity to grow the business after that was because we were out educating our competition. So from the day one, we've reinvested when we, even when we felt like we didn't have the money, we would reinvest by going to conferences, getting certifications, becoming experts in that niche, which is the Fiduciary standard in employee benefits advising.

2 (11m 11s):
So educate yourself, find your niche and just run with it. Don't look back

0 (11m 16s):
In Fire Nation. Yes, they might be larger, yes, they might be better funded, but you can choose who's better educated. You can choose to out educate your competition, to outwork your competition all day, every day and we have a lot to talk about around this topic. When we get back from thanking our sponsors,

Hubspot (11m 35s):
the new year is upon us, and that means new goals, more growth, and upgrading your day-to-Day workflow. While most sales folk are stuck in the mud of manual scheduling, digging into data and tracking down leads, let me share with you a better way to win so you can crush your Q one. The new HubSpot Sales Hub is smart sales software for today's multitasking reps. It's built to help you manage every stage of your sales pipeline with ease. It's filled with easy to use and powerful tools that make closing deals and collaborating across departments A breeze Sales Hub is an all-in-one platform for things like converting contacts into customers and accelerating sales with smarter sequences. Plus, you can supercharge your work with AI powered apps like ChatSpot. ChatSpot combines the power of chat GPT in your HubSpot smart CRM to give you a gen AI powered personal assistance. How's that for upgrading your workflow? Bottom line Sales Hub is focused on helping you work smarter, not harder, so you can get after all those other New Year's goals, close more deals and get on track for your best Q one yet. Explore the new HubSpot, Sales, Hub and AI tools like ChatSpot at HubSpot dot com slash sales.

Thought Leader (12m 36s):
Do you have a message inside that you know is meant to be shared with the world? Giving a TEDx talk is one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And Thought Leader can help you get there. Thought Leader is a speaker coaching company that has helped over 550 and counting coaches, speakers, Entrepreneurs authors, and experts land TEDx talks. Thought Leader is not affiliated with Ted or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder Taylor Conroy is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EOFire guest. You might be thinking a TEDx talk sounds great, but where do you start? Taylor has put together a free training that is going to teach you how to land a TEDx talk in as little as 90 days. Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online and more. Visit ThoughtLeader.com/fire, join Taylor for his free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs. That's ThoughtLeader.com/fire

0 (13m 36s):
Donovan. We're back, and I wanna start with you because you and Chelsea have created this big differentiator that really sets you apart. What is that?

1 (13m 47s):
Yeah, that's something that evolves over time. You know, when you start a business and you start to figure out where you exist in the marketplace, it, it's not something that that comes right away. I think it comes to Chelsea's point with all the education we were getting, you know, in a new business, we were going three to four conferences a year, you know, spending a lot of money traveling across the us but that's kind of what allows you to find that. So for us it was really looking at how the entire employee benefits marketplace operates, and then looking for a more ideal structure that kind of aligns with both Employers and employees, which wasn't really happening specifically, you know, aligning interests with compensation.

1 (14m 34s):
We were challenging our client's view and their understanding of what was going on and providing them with more data. So that, that was the top three things. So I'd say, you know, the first thing was fixing perverse, what we call basically perverse incentives and how that kind of works in our vertical of employee benefits is that most companies have what they call broker representing the options and the choices they bring for their employees for healthcare. These brokers are basically representing themselves as buyer's agent, right? Employer, I am working for you, I'm gonna get you the best deal. I'm gonna, you know, find you the best plans and I'm gonna service them real well.

1 (15m 17s):
The truth of it though is that they're actually getting paid as seller's agents. So they're not getting paid directly from the buyer they're working with. They're not coming to an agreement on compensation, they're not even disclosing it. They're getting paid by the insurance company a commission. Now that doesn't necessarily make everything evil, but if that reason is not being disclosed, it can lead to basically interest not being aligned in between, you know, our role as the consultant and the employer. So that's the first thing we did. We disclose all of our compensation from day one. Usually we set up commission prohibition, so we're basically working with that employer directly to get a fee from them instead of getting paid a commission by the carrier.

1 (16m 3s):
And we're also foregoing any bonuses. So there's nothing kind of on the backend that might be motivating our behaviors. The sad story is, you know, like these commissions come as a percentage of premium. So if a employer gets a 10% premium increase for their renewal next year, that means the Advisor gets to share in that and they get a 10% bonus as well. So just kind of not a situation that made a lot of sense when we're talking about the relationship between the two.

0 (16m 36s):
See, what I love about this Fire Nation is that it aligns everybody's expectations and goals together because now they understand, hey, this is what's best for everybody involved, not just two of the three people in the equation. And you know, you really are going into this kind of stuff, And, A, little more depth Chelsea. When you guys decided to launch and just continue to create content for the Ethos Effect podcast, talk to us about this.

2 (17m 6s):
Yep. The Ethos Effect podcast, it's basically we're going to be spotlighting business pioneers who've unlocked their ethos and have leveraged it to become trailblazers and revolutionized their industries. And what inspired us to do this is what Donovan was talking about, being transparent, right? With the compensation when we were working with clients, there's a couple other things. Healthcare packages very rarely are Employers getting access to their claims data, which happens to be the only thing that matters when it comes to rising cost of healthcare. So we were seeing in our industry, you know, perverse incentives, lack of data, so Employers can make data-driven decisions and the lack of focusing on the root cause of the problem, which is the management and frequency and severity of claims.

2 (17m 51s):
So when we started working the way that we were working, you know, I mean there's other people in the industry doing it just not a lot. And the reason is right, these large publicly traded insurance or brokerages, they're not incentivized to do this kind of work. So we know what it's like to go against giants every single day in an effort to do the right thing. And we know how hard it is, right? You get kicked in the teeth and you get back up some days you're like, man, is this really worth it? Like I feel like I'm fighting a good fight, but holy crap is this hard. We wanted to create a place where we could spotlight people in other industries doing that same work because we feel like very often they're under recognized. So that's what the Ethos Effect podcast is.

2 (18m 32s):
And we actually had our first guest this past Saturday, Michael Gordon, 15 times serial entrepreneur, founding partner of Teladoc, which is now a 3 billion market cap. Wow. When it was founded in oh two, huge people that were able to spotlight. And it's a very exciting time for the podcast

0 (18m 49s):
And Fire Nation, you can tell that Donovan and Chelsea are gonna bring the energy, the passion, the heat, and that's actually where I want to end. And let's start with you Donovan. What is the one thing that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our conversation today?

1 (19m 4s):
You know, I've been a long time listener, John, I've been listening to you probably, geez, must be seven, eight years ago. Wow. I think going back to what I said kind of in initially like the journey of entrepreneurship of your business is not necessarily gonna be linear. There's times we really progressed and then we kind of changed our business model or the clients we were serving like Chelsea was alluding to. We sold off 80% of our clients, but we did so because we looked at it and it was a typical Pareto principle, right? Those 80% of our clients were only generating 20% of the revenue coming into the agency. But doing that really changes everything.

1 (19m 46s):
It changes the volume, it changes what you're focusing on every single day, but it's good for the business and also for our end goals at the same time. So I would just say the journey's not linear. It's gonna go up, it's gonna go down, it's gonna go sideways, maybe even backwards, but enjoy the process. As long as you feel like you're doing the right things, you're serving your customers, you're gonna get to the place you wanna

0 (20m 8s):
Be. Chelsea, what about you?

2 (20m 9s):
Very similar. It's just for me, transparency and my personal ethos and actually the ethos of our company is that if something can be done better, it should be. So look at your personal life, look at your business, look at anything that you're touching, and if something in that world can be done better, why are you sitting and waiting? Somebody's gonna come and out, educate you, outcompete you for that business, for that spot in your life. You know what I mean? So if something can be done better, it should be, which is just constant evolution. Don't be afraid to grow. Don't be afraid to learn. Don't be afraid to change

0 (20m 40s):
Chelsea. Let's give Fire Nation a way that they can connect with you. And Donovan, the Ethos Effect podcast is of course a great place to start. What else would you have for them for a call to action?

2 (20m 52s):
Call to action. You can find us on LinkedIn Chelsea reiki or Donovan reiki and our company Ethos Benefits LinkedIn will definitely be the best place.

0 (21m 1s):
Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with DRCR and JLD today, so keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit EOFire dot com. Just type Donovan or Chelsea on the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with links to everything that we've talked about. Donovan Chelsea, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Donovan and Chelsea for sponsoring today's episode. Fire Nation's successful Entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That's why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you and accomplishing your number one goal in a hundred days.

0 (21m 43s):
And we're talking step-by-step. Visit the FreedomJournal.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Sales Evangelist Hosted by my friend Donald Kelly is Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Each week Donald interviews the world's best sales experts, successful sellers, sales leaders, and entrepreneurs who share their strategies to succeed in sales Right. now, a recent episode you should definitely check out is The Five Ways to Do Daily Outbound with LinkedIn, Listen to Sales Evangelist, wherever you get your podcasts ever thought of giving a TEDx talk, it's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. In four time TEDx.

0 (22m 24s):
Speaker Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit ThoughtLeader.com/fire to join Taylor's free trading, where he teaches you how to land a TEDx Talk and spread your message to millions.