The Power of Patients and Profits with Sally Pace & Leigh Dill

Experience real life success stories on Everything is Up! Host Tammera Hollerich interviews guests like Sally Pace and Leigh Dill, founders of Connect Healthcare Collaboration and the granite list. The broker community is incredibly grateful to have them. Sally and Leigh are helping people navigate a healthcare system that is convoluted and messy and giving them the knowledge to get through challenging situations.

Prior to founding Connect Healthcare Collaboration and the granite list, Sally was instrumental in the healthcare industry as a broker and Leigh had a full plate of children and spouses. Shanti Barstow, a high-tech female entrepreneur in the Dallas area, talks about her struggles to get pregnant and the valuable help she received from her family. Lastly, Rinigates, helps people with financial and healthcare literacy, based in San Francisco.

Hear extraordinary stories of those who have gone before you on Everything is Up! Find out how Sally and Leigh have created success and Tammera's advice to them to succeed. Plus, learn Shanti's struggle to get pregnant and the value of help and support. Its success stories like these that you won't want to miss. Tune in now to Everything is Up!

Blog Post

Blog Post 1:

Employee Benefits: What You Need to Know

The Everything is Up featuring host Tammera Hollerich features an insightful conversation about employee benefits with Sally Pace and Leigh Dill. With 25 years of experience in the financial industry, Sally shares what we all need to know about employee benefits.

When considering employee benefits, it is important to consider the needs of your company and its employees. Understand what the benefits package consists of such as health insurance, retirement savings, and other types of coverage. “Natural fit [is] 25 years of marriage later, I found myself in my husband’s backyard of employee benefits”, said Sally.

Here are three tips to keep in mind when considering employee benefits.

1. Have an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of different benefits plans.

2. Ensure the benefits package meets the needs of both the company and its employees.

3. Collaborate with other professionals to ask the right questions and make an informed decision on behalf of the company.

Tune in to this episode of Everything is Up to hear Sally and Leigh’s expert advice on employee benefits. You won’t want to miss their thoughtful insight as you evaluate your own employee benefits for your company.

Blog Post 2:

The Importance of Employees in Business

The Everything is Up featuring host Tammera Hollerich highlights the importance of employees in business with Sally Pace and Leigh Dill. As part of the healthcare industry, the broker world is the focus. “Started my career before I graduated college at HGTV, then went back home and got married a month after I graduated”, said Sally.

Employees are invaluable assets to business. They bring skills and knowledge, act as an extension of your brand, provide customer service, and create more value. Companies should create an environment where employees feel valued, and give them the resources they need to succeed.

Here are three tips to keep in mind when considering the importance of employees in business.

1. Remember that a business will only be successful if its employees are successful.

2. Invest in employees and create an environment where they can learn, grow and succeed.

3. Acknowledge the important roles and contributions of employees.

Listen to this episode of Everything is Up to understand what’s working and what needs improvement when it comes to taking care of employees. Sally and Leigh provide expert tips for creating a successful business model. Don’t miss out on their valuable advice!

Best Quotes

[[00:01:28] "No. Thank you so much for having us. We are excited. We love collaborating with really smart but mostly fun people and you fit that bill for sure."

[00:02:03] "Started my career before I graduated college at HGTV, then went back home and got married a month after I graduated. And convinced my husband that we were going to be in Memphis and then moved into the auto parts industry with AutoZone and communications, having been in the financial industry for about 17 years. And now, natural fit, 25 years of marriage later, fell myself in my husband's backyard of employee benefits."

[00:05:28] "Right at COVID, the 2 of you guys join forces."

[00:06:22] "It was designed to complement our other business lines. It was going to do for the industry what OpenTable does for restaurants or TripAdvisor does for hotels."

All Quotes

[00:01:28] "No. Thank you so much for having us. We are excited. We love collaborating with really smart but mostly fun people and you fit that bill for sure."

[00:01:40] "Sally paced, native Memphisian. I'm pretty sure I was born talking. And have loved getting to be in charge ever since."

[00:01:49] "And so have had a really fun career path that is an unusual career path that has led to being in the employee benefits arena."

[00:02:03] "Started my career before I graduated college at HGTV, then went back home and got married a month after I graduated. And convinced my husband that we were going to be in Memphis and then moved into the auto parts industry with AutoZone and communications, having been in the financial industry for about 17 years. And now, a natural fit, 25 years of marriage later, fell myself in my husband's backyard of employee benefits."

[00:02:55] "I saw around myself with talkers so that I don't have to speak a lot."

[00:03:23] "I went to Olympus thinking I was going to come out with an art history degree in a business major or a business minor and then go to interior design school. But I ended up in accounting and doing really well."

[00:04:41] "And so I grew to love the health care benefits in that space and got to analyze all the claims on the plan and be alongside."

[00:04:04] "I need to I'm quiet, but I do like to see more people. And I did love nutrition and wellness and FedEx at the time was opening a new department in healthcare benefit accounting and analysis."

[00:04:59] "It was starting to be the same thing every year."

[00:05:28] "Right at COVID, the 2 of you guys join forces."

[00:06:22] "It was designed to complement our other business lines."

[00:07:06] "It was going to do for the industry what OpenTable does for restaurants or TripAdvisor does for hotels."

[00:07:42] "It went away overnight. Oh. Just like that. Exactly."

[00:07:47] "And so, you know, and Leigh was such an awesome, you know, partner in crime in this to have somebody who understood what an employer would be looking for. And it really was the complement that we needed in our team to really be the leadership to drive this across the finish line. So, can 2 people be pregnant with the same baby? That's how but that's how we feel. Right?"

[00:08:26] "If you are an employer or you are a CFO, and all of a sudden, you have to lay off employees in the middle of a pandemic. I know the conversations that we had with, you know, our clients were, you know, I've got to let these employees go. But I don't want them to lose our health care because I don't know what this is going to look like."

[00:09:17] "And so I can see how valuable that had would have become at the time when you think about the unknowns that were actually going on at the time."

[00:10:36] "It's an extension of who you are. I'm just as much a colleague of Leigh Dill as I am a mom to William Hayes. And you don't take 1 hat off and put the other 1 on."

[00:11:05] "My son went to the My mom and dad to help out several days a week picking up from school and coming home to buy a grocery store gift from a sign. It was a mug that said hard work pays off. And he had picked that out for me by himself and asked my mom if they could buy it for me. And he said because she worked so hard."

[00:11:27] "I love being able to share that side to my son. I loved that our husband and I shared a lot about that. My husband is the only, you know, idea generator behind so many things we do, but also you know, a massive client of ours."

[00:11:45] "You leave. You leave, but you got a lot more mouths to feed than I do."

[00:12:39] "You have to have help. My in-laws live in town, and so they're wonderful, and they help pick up kids."

[00:14:10] "My kids are so ingrained in what we do, you know, because she and her husband have this tech company together. And She said, "they are a part of our business."

[Unknown] "I went to a girl's school, and I didn't realize it at the time. How they really motivated women to do the best that they can do and that you can have a career and you can have a family."

[00:13:21] "My son will say, no, mom. I want to work at the Granite list. Nice. That's what I'm going to do when I grab that. And he tells all his friends about it."

[00:14:47] "They grow up knowing no difference."

[00:15:02] "High schools brutal. I don't know. I just didn't like it the first time I was there. The second time I looked, I did even less."

[00:15:20] "I could not have done it without my parents and without my sister and, you know, everybody jumping in and going in."

[00:16:21] "But sometimes as leaders we get viewed as robotic, do it all women. And we know the 3 of us know that that's not the case, but you can be perceived that way by your team."

[00:17:16] "I figured out probably 20 years ago that if I was going to provide this incredible place for these young single moms to work, right, that I was going to have beyond a shadow of a doubt, be able to be flexible."

[00:17:39] "When we sat down as a company and put together our core values, I was the 1 who said, okay, flexibility is going to go on this list."

[00:18:07] "Flexibility is a team sport. Right? Because I also have got to have that flexibility."

[00:18:56] "If you have got a team where you have got moms, if I was going to give any CEO or HR team, any advice, it would be to make sure that flexibility is a core value of your company."

[00:19:25] "You're a mom first, you're a spouse second, and then third and only third. And while it's not always conducive to the business plan, then they're an employee. Right?"

[00:19:46] "My husband said to me this morning, " You look like you haven't slept in a month. And he said, I know, they always tell you everything you want to hear. Right? So, he said, you look like you haven't slept in a month. He goes, and this is how I know I'm a priority and number 10 in your list."

[00:20:16] "You have to allow flexibility, but in return, I think you get loyalty."

[00:20:57] "I now define men as waffles and women as a play on spaghetti. Men are very compartmentalized. Right? 1 thing at a time, and then you throw women, and we are just a pile of spaghetti. And everything is messy and it's all in her twine and it is delicious. Like,

[00:21:35] "We don't get through life without a laugh, I mean, we've got to have fun in this. Right?"

[00:22:10] "You have to love what you do too. And it's so it's and this is where we got here, and I don't think we had any idea of where this was going to go, where it was going to take us."

[00:22:22] "And it's so awesome to see a great group of women. We've got some great men too, but so passionate about what we can do for others."

[00:22:59] "This impacts that, you know, there's this movement, right, to disrupt healthcare, you know, just to disrupt healthcare here in the US. And, you know, as I was doing research on what you 2 ladies have been doing. The 1 word that came to mind is impact. Right? This impactfulness that you guys are so passionate about, I see in your work."

[00:24:40] "People don't really want a revolution. They want an evolution. It's scary sometimes to totally turn the tables."

[00:24:51] "What I love about the journey that we're all on in this space is that we get to meet the storytellers no matter what it is."

[00:25:16] "It had to be done within a month and that was going into the enrollment business. It was part of our 3 year plan. And literally it became part of our 2022 business plan overnight."

[00:25:50] "As we look at the next couple of years and where we want to go and what we want to do, it really does just hinge on helping others have success and telling their story."

[00:26:10] "We want to do all this where we struggle with communication to drive employee engagement. I think that is a crucial element and we fill that void."

[00:26:57] "There's always that financial component to any business. There's also this to serve, right, and to have things not always be self-serving in this world."

[00:27:11] "I've been in the benefits space for 25 years. And, yeah, we've always been seen as you know, just that slightly better than the used car salesman. Right? Because we were always just in there trying to sell them something."

[00:27:24] "And so now, here we are. In this revolution evolution, right, of this healthcare space. And the lack of education or the lack of understanding, not just employees. Right? But you've got HR people and you've got these are humans trying to navigate a healthcare system that is completely broken and convoluted and messy and, you know, there's a build price and a negotiated price and this and, like, wait. We can't possibly expect them to actually even know."

[00:28:55] "We then have so many stories about saving employees' dollars. But ultimately, we're saving the employer's dollars by really navigating these employees."

[00:29:39] "We talk about how we're educators and communicators, but we're also ultimately listeners."

[00:30:14] "I said, well, did you know that you had the high hospital indemnity plan, and you also took out the critical illness for stroke, and that if you file these claims, you'd get 40000 dollars back."

[00:30:29] "I don't know how to do that. I don't have the time to go and learn how."

[00:30:39] "Plea, how can this lady file a claim? She filed her claims out of money back. And since then, we said, we've built out a landing page for everybody to go to and they have exactly no accessory to go to file all these claims."

[00:31:17] "We sit down and open enrollment and they're like, yeah. Yeah. That's fine. That's fine. That's fine. Right? And they make these elections, you know, they're kind of thinking about what their take home pay is and what they can afford. But in enrollments I've sat in, right, they really know, but they don't know. Right?"

[00:31:38] "I wouldn't say anyone is, you know, it's not like we're sitting across the table from uneducated individuals because we are people that are, you know, fairly educated and it's not like most of them have a third-grade education. Like, that's not who we're sitting with."

[00:32:17] "And yet, if we go back to And I I really do think that the industry is changing because we did have those road road warriors in the industry for years and years and years where they would take a handful of leads and go into some city and sit at somebody's table until they got the check, and then they were on to the next. And it was all about the sale. It wasn't about education."

[Unknown] "The ACA actually did bring some decent things to the table and education and compliance. Forced all of the brokers and agents that are out there to take it a different approach because the legality of everything became very different."

[00:33:34] "We became so tech driven, so app driven, and we have lots of fabulous partners, both on our marketing side and also on the Granite list. That is doing incredible AI advanced, you know, advanced technology app driven stuff."

[00:33:55] "People need people. And we have on that wall hashtag, everybody needs somebody. And what we know we're exceptional at in this great news and I do think, like you said, the tide is turning. People are demanding better."

[00:34:48] "COVID did masturbate on both sides of that coin. Right? Because you know, when we get sent to our room for 2 years, jokingly. Right? We just don't know, figure I mean, literally, for literally -- Right. -- we got sent to our room for 2 years. And the disconnect began to happen, the depression, and even the fallout of that today, right, is the, you know, craving that human touch, that human interaction, that human like, I just like being around people."

Topics

The Power of Women in the Healthcare Industry: An Interview with Sally Pace and Leigh Dill

Healthcare Benefit Accounting and Analysis in the Workplace

The Challenges of Balancing Parenting and Entrepreneurship: Discussion with Natalie Hayes and Leigh Dill of Connect Healthcare Collaboration

The Impact of High-Tech Female Entrepreneurship on Families: Shanti Barstow's Story

I need 10 of those minutes to go and express my frustrations.

Accepting Your Emotional Needs as a Leader

The Importance of Flexibility and Loyalty in Parenting

Financial and Healthcare Literacy: An Interview with Rinigates

Navigating A Broken Healthcare System

Filing Claims for Financial Compensation

Grateful Impact of Sally Pace and Leigh Deal on the Broker Community

Episode Links

Resources:

•  The Everything is Up Podcast

Connect with Tammera Hollerich

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Connect with Leigh Dill

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Connect with Sally Pace

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