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www.pasleycommercialinteriors.com
In an increasingly competitive market, the merits of using interior design as a strategic growth tool can make all the difference in not just surviving, but thriving,
FEATURING: ROBIN PASLEY, NCIDQ Founder & Design Principal
PASLEY COMMERCIAL INTERIORS Design to help your business grow
Demystifying Employee Benefits: Nick Dial on Making Insurance Make Sense
•Robin Pasley, NCIDQ•Season 2•Episode 6
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00:00 | 13:05
What happens when 91% of your employees don't understand their health benefits? Nick Dial, insurance broker and author, joins us to tackle this startling reality facing today's businesses.
Nick shares his mission to cut through the noise of employee benefits by eliminating insurance jargon and helping employers structure benefits that truly serve their team members. He highlights the dangerous "set it and forget it" approach that plagues most benefit programs, explaining how this static mindset fails to account for life's natural evolutions – from having children to caring for aging parents.
The conversation takes a powerful turn when Nick reveals the personal tragedy behind his passion. After his father-in-law suffered a devastating stroke in 2017, properly structured insurance became the financial lifeline that allowed his family to thrive despite catastrophe. This experience crystallized Nick's purpose: ensuring that when employees face their worst day, their benefits actually work as intended.
For business owners struggling with benefits administration or employees confused by insurance terminology, this episode offers a refreshing perspective that transforms employee benefits from an obligatory expense into a strategic asset. Nick's approach mirrors our own design philosophy – helping clients see what they can't see and asking the right questions to uncover true needs. We also discuss his new book, "Insurance Makes Sense," which offers a jargon-free guide to looking at insurance strategically.
Ready to make your benefits program actually benefit your team? Listen now and discover how to break free from the insurance knowledge gap that's costing your business more than you realize.
You can connect with Nick at nick.dial@outlook.com.
We welcome your questions! If you would like to learn more about us or connect for a conversation, please visit www.pasleycommercialinteriors.com.
Are you expecting your client to be the expert in any and all things interior? No, of course not, because the first thing you can walk in. Well, what questions do you have? Well, what do they know to ask?
Robin Pasley:
Right.
Nick Dial:
There was a study done that only 9% of employees actually know four basic terms of health insurance Premium, deductible, co-pays, co-insurance.
Randi Lynn Johnson:
Welcome back to Design to Help your Business Grow with Robin Pasley, hello. I'm her co-host, randi Lynn Johnson, and with us today we have Nick Dial, insurance broker and author. So, nick, tell us, what do you do to help small business owners?
Nick Dial:
Yeah, I help reduce the noise of confusion and frustration when it comes to employee benefits. So obviously there's a lot of different things that come with employee benefits. There's administration, there's education, there's implementation seemingly anything that ends with I-O-N, if for nothing else, with Iowan, if for nothing else. And what I basically help with is, like many other organizations who do a great job in preparing an employer's benefits, I take a bit of a different approach. I pretty much try to take it further, beyond just the standard finish line where the employer is otherwise appreciating and engaging with their own benefits as well as their employees, and they can measure that by employee satisfaction.
Randi Lynn Johnson:
So do you cover all sort like as a broker? I imagine you know everything that's out there.
Nick Dial:
Well, I would. I would certainly caution or at least preface to say I certainly wouldn't claim everything about insurance, because, boy, that's a moving target. But, um, yeah, so I help with medical, with dental vision, what we call our core benefits, and then there's some ancillary lines, all built within the package of an employer's benefit structure. So you have things like, you know, disability and life insurance and flexible spending accounts and HSAs and all sorts of different things, and so I coach the employers along the way of how do we structure the benefits in such a way that they speak to the employee, that makes sense to them and they could use the insurance as best as they possibly can. I'll stop on this.
Nick Dial:
To say is that in my world, we rely heavily on the jargon and the nuance and the cliches of what insurance is, and the irony to that, or at least the interesting thing to that, is the employees don't follow cliches, jargon or anything like that. They don't fully understand it. There was a study done by Policy Genius back in 2017, 2018, that only 9% of employees actually know four basic terms of health insurance Premium, deductible, co-pays, co-insurance. The vast majority of them just simply don't fully know. And what I also thought was interesting, that same study showed 96% of people overestimate their understanding of venture. So, when it comes to communicating, when it comes to educating, we need to get rid of the jargon and we need to bring in more of an understanding to it, and that's what I focus on.
Robin Pasley:
Oh, that is awesome. I remember when we first started talking about what you do.
Robin Pasley:
I saw the value in that because I and I also saw the overlap of what we do for business owners and taking what seems complex and simplifying it and then advising from that position of what they're going to really need to get the thing done that they want to do, and I think that's what I see, that such value and what you bring to businesses because of that, because that is so. It's such a spider web of information and, especially if they're supposed to, an HR director, understand all of that and that's just way outside of their purview of just taking care of people.
Nick Dial:
Yeah, yeah. And what's more I can only add a footnote to that, robin is that when it comes to insurance, imagine it like this. It's dating probably all of us a little bit here. Imagine 5 am, there's an infomercial and there's this guy wearing the green apron and he's got the raw chicken that he's putting onto the skewer and he's talking to the camera and the audience, like put the plate on it, put it in the back, you take the glass up, you turn it on. He points to the audience and then he says set it and forget it Right.
Nick Dial:
One of the single greatest issues and you could probably appreciate this as well One of the single greatest issues is when we get in such a rut of thinking we've established our insurance, we're good, we've done the, pulled the thing up, turn the thing on and we've set it and forget it and we don't make those adjustments with the ebbs and flows of life. If you'd imagine the peaks and valleys and there's a peppered line in the middle of that. That's almost a euphemism to suggest that we've established that peppered line as the common norm of how we interact with insurance, where we don't follow the ebb and flow of life having a child graduating from college, getting the first job Maybe the parents are going into a nursing home at that point, and insurance doesn't always have to take dramatic changes, but it takes changes and we don't get there. And that's the point. Is walking any employer through the changes and, frankly, their employees changes is what's missing, I think, in this industry and we don't do enough to be able to help the employees out.
Randi Lynn Johnson:
That's awesome Helping them see or to know the right questions to ask.
Nick Dial:
Exactly. I think a simple way of saying it is are you expecting your client to be the expert in any and all things interior? No, Of course not, Because the first thing you can walk in. Well, what questions do you have? Well, what do they know to ask?
Robin Pasley:
Right.
Nick Dial:
Versus. How do we maybe start asking some questions Absolutely? How do we engage that conversation differently? That's almost an art that we've maybe not lost, but it's like dormant and we can, you know, wake that thing up a little bit.
Robin Pasley:
Right. So you know with what we do as interior designers for commercial businesses. I think our sweet spot is helping them see what they can't see.
Nick Dial:
There it is.
Robin Pasley:
And asking the right questions kind of helps open up that conversation for us. I mean, we do two or three interviews before we even present a proposal to them because we want to get to know them so much and understand what their needs really are.
Robin Pasley:
And then on the other side of it, we do like an hour and a half deep dive discovery interview to learn about the project itself and who the company is and how we're going to accomplish the project. So I mean you're doing the same thing, You're helping them, take what feels ethereal out here and make it more concrete.
Randi Lynn Johnson:
Well, it's great to even know I didn't. I am totally guilty of the set it and forget it but, just hearing from you that, like you have permission you, can you can change it, you can tweak things like yeah, that's great, and I hope that is a gift to our listeners as well.
Robin Pasley:
I think about the idea that that's just a column. I don't want to think about very much because it's so just like you said. There's so many nuances to it. Want to think about very much because it's so just like you said, there's so many nuances to it. There's so much information, I think, for any business owner to know that you are a phone call away and that you could take that off of their plate and literally be the person that they just pick up the phone when they're just not sure They've got an issue with an employee, They've got something changing in the next renewal or something that they need to address, and instead of having to go figure it out on their own, they can just call you.
Robin Pasley:
I think that's amazing.
Randi Lynn Johnson:
How can they get ahold of you?
Nick Dial:
Nick, yeah, so they could reach out to me both by email by phone. I'd imagine the contact information will be on the screen.
Randi Lynn Johnson:
It sure will, that's perfect.
Nick Dial:
They could reach out to me there and, if I may, I don't want to take us too far, but can I speak? One of the single greatest reasons why I do what I do is because of my father-in-law. I'll share this briefly. In 2017, my father-in-law went through a massive stroke. He was the only one that was working. My mother-in-law stayed at home with their five kids and when that happened, their whole world financially turned upside down, until we found the insurance that he built was going to work perfectly. It was seamless of a transition. To this day, they've paid off their house. Their last kid went through college and that was just in a matter of months from the stroke happening to this day.
Nick Dial:
My mother-in-law, yet, from stroke to today, has yet to fill out a job application to supplement any income. Why do I say this? Well, I'm meeting with this HR director and her benefits coordinator last Friday and, unfortunately, there they had an employee over the holidays who had lost a child, and what was so frustrating for me as a professional to try to keep it professional was that I was literally sitting next to my wife just reminiscing over what happened to my father-in-law and I'm like I've got to do something. I've got to jump in and do something. But the point is is that there's so many great organizations out there that do great work, that have, you know, help behind the scenes.
Nick Dial:
What I would like to think separates myself and my company and those who I work with. We want to jump right into the trenches with any one of those employers who are going through bad days Because, frankly, what I didn't mention is a year after the stroke had happened, my wife calls me up and I travel a bit for my job. She calls me up and she says we miss you when you're gone. It's never easy that you're ever gone, but the only way you make it worth it is if you take care of everyone, the way you took care of my family, and I've never forgotten that, and that's behind, that's the message behind the book, that's the message behind any of my contacts is I just I don't care what you guys do from a product standpoint. I just I just want to help. I just want to matter in the world of your employees that if their worst day happened, they have someone who's going to be their advocate right there.
Robin Pasley:
I love that you plugged this, because and I love that you you think about your people, like you I this is one of the things we connected on right away is that we're people, first people, and that that's what gets us out of bed in the morning to both do our jobs is to take care of people and to let them know that they're valuable and they're. What they value is valuable to us too. So, so um insurance makes sense is your new book that is now available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Robin Pasley:
So tell us just a little bit about this.
Nick Dial:
Yeah, that was uh. As I mentioned, that was kind of the that started out from my father-in-law story Um, I joke about it but that I was sitting in Madison, wisconsin, the same year that my wife told me the promise and so we had the stroke. In 2017, about four or five months after that, I was meeting with a client and a guy was just so just very antagonistic, I guess, about insurance. He had a wife and three kids at home and I wasn't mad at him but, given the proximity of what happened to my father-in-law, it was real fresh and he just had this attitude like I don't plan on anything happening to me.
Nick Dial:
I don't need insurance and I'm like I don't care that you buy a thing, but can we not be arrogant about this? Like, this is a serious deal. And so, about a year after that, I was sitting in Madison Wisconsin airport waiting for a flight and I was like I joke about it's that the inspiration of my father-in-law and this gentleman's conversation just converged in my brain and had a baby, and I couldn't do anything with it aside from venting and make a fool out of myself in the airport. So the best thing, the next best thing I did, is I grabbed my iPad, I just started typing and over the next hour that I was waiting for my plane, I look at it and you know however many pages later I was looking, I was like, well, that'd be a really bad book, but I think I've got something, and so, yeah, so that's what the book is really about is a buyer's guide of how somebody can look at insurance strategically. I like that. I have.
Nick Dial:
I have a thesis in that we as a society look at insurance as a consumable product, which I would say is a logical fallacy. We buy insurance no different than we buy cups of coffee or cars with the intention to drive it, to drink it, to wear it or whatever. We never intend, like the gentleman said, I don't plan on anything happening to me. He's exactly right, we never plan on it, but that should honestly be the precursor to understanding why we might need the insurance in the first place. So what this book goes over and, by the way, it's more macro than micro, it's not going to get people lost in the jargon goes over and, by the way, it's more macro than micro. It's not going to get people lost in the jargon. Fortunately, people have already said it's really easy to read. Thank God because I wrote it. But the point is is that it's meant to help offer a bit of a different perspective into which insurance belongs.
Nick Dial:
Where and how do I use it, proportionate to my finances? Yeah, no, the thing is, is that when it comes to the book itself, imagine someone coming up to you. It's like Robin. I know nothing about interior design, but all I want to know is how to spend my money wisely and how to make my place not look like junk. Right, same thing for me is, if someone comes up, it's like Nick.
Nick Dial:
I know virtually nothing about insurance. All I know is I want my worst possible day covered with the least amount of money spent. That's kind of a. That's a great way to set up, okay. Well then, how do I establish kind of the bare essentials? If someone comes up and they say I know virtually nothing about insurance and I want to know how to be able to start? Well, it may not be starting perfectly. That's not the idea and I misspoke earlier. It's not a perfect start. It's a matter of how do I get started, that I know there's confidence behind my insurance and, as we said it earlier, just when you set it up, don't forget about it. Just set it up well and don't forget about it.
Robin Pasley:
So that's what this is going to do.
Nick Dial:
That's what that book goes over.
Robin Pasley:
Yes, that's awesome, I'm excited. Thank you so much for joining us.
Nick Dial:
Thank you for having me. This has been fun.
Randi Lynn Johnson:
All right. Well, that'll do it For us all. The information, how to reach Nick, where to find his book, all that will be in the show notes, and we will see you next time.
Robin Pasley:
Thanks guys.
Randi Lynn Johnson:
In an increasingly competitive market, the merits of using interior design as a strategic growth tool can make all the difference, and not just surviving, but thriving Hasley.
Robin Pasley:
Commercial Interiors designed to help your business grow.
