Brokers don't work for them.

Brokers are retail salespeople for the insurance industry.

But I am the world's biggest super fan.

You're like a super fan.

Welcome to the Business Superfans Podcast.

We will discuss how establishing business superfans from customers, employees and business partners can elevate your success exponentially.

Learn why these advocates are a key.

Factor to achieving excellence in the world of commerce.

This is the Business Superfans Podcast with your host, Freddie D. Ready?

Hey super fans.

Freddie D. Here in this episode 190, we're joined by Donovan Pyle, CEO of Health Compass Consulting and author of Fixing healthcare.

Named a 2025 Benefits Advisor of the Year by the Validation Institute, Donovan is a naturally recognized thought leader helping mid sized businesses save an average of $1,856 per employee every year.

His insights have been featured in Employee Benefits News, Benefits Pro and shrm.

And today he's here to share practical, proven strategies to transform how your organization approaches health care.

Get ready for a powerful conversation packed with value.

Welcome Donovan to the Business Superfans Advantage podcast.

Great conversation that we had before we started recording.

Let's continue it.

Well, it's good to be here Freddy.

Thanks for having me on.

So let's go back to your backstory.

Everybody has a beginning and how did you come up with the organization that you're now helping businesses, especially both large and small businesses with their healthcare services and healthcare plans for their teams?

Yeah, so I started my career in the insurance business goes I started off on the carrier side of the business and just to level set for your audience, insurance carriers develop and administer insurance products but they're not typically very good at selling them.

So what they do is they sell through brokers.

Right.

And bro for sale to employers.

That's how, generally speaking, how 164 million Americans get their healthcare benefits.

Being that I live in Orlando, Florida, I was inspired by a gentleman by the name of Harris Rosen who starting in 1991, started pioneering new ways of health, of financing and procuring healthcare for his employees.

And he ended up saving his company over a half a billion dollars on healthcare over the next 30 years.

And he did it by providing a superior product and plan for his employees.

So that was very inspiring to me.

Very naively thought, geez, if I just flip the fence over and join the brokerage industry, I can probably start scaling those kinds of innovative solutions, help a lot of people and make some money doing it.

I very quickly realized that's not the business that the brokerage industry is in at all.

And that's how I ended up finding founded Health Compass in 2018.

What'd you do beforehand?

Before that?

The complete opposite life experience.

I was in the music business for almost 10 years full time in Manhattan.

If you were watching TV in the early 2000s, you definitely heard me playing on commercials for HBO, Chevy, Nike, Motorola and others.

After our record label went bankrupt, I said, you know what, this has been a great run, but I want the complete opposite life experience from the music business.

And what's the opposite of that?

It's the insurance business.

So that's what got me into it.

And it's actually been a pretty wild ride since.

Yeah, so that's when the pivot really took place, is when that company went under.

Then that kind of changed, sort of forced you to make a change.

This was right in the middle of the housing crisis.

It was just things.

It was kind of a dark time.

I was like, I want complete stability.

Instead of going to bed at 6am, I want to wake up at 6am and it's been an interesting journey, but a fulfilling one.

So talk about a little bit about what differentiates what you're doing versus the other HR companies or the companies that are providing health services to especially small businesses in a service industry, even in the B2B industry.

What makes you different?

Why you just a level set for your audience?

As I mentioned, US employers cover 164 million Americans with healthcare benefits.

They spent about $1.3 trillion last year doing it.

But the thing that most executives don't realize is that 25% of what they spent, that's $4,000 per employee last year was completely wasted.

The reason for that is pretty simple.

Since most finance and HR teams have virtually no technical expertise in healthcare financing or procurement, they rely on benefits brokers for financial advice on how to maximize their investment.

This is your second or third largest expense.

How do I get the most value for my money?

Since they don't have technical expertise in this area, they rely on brokers.

But here's the mistake.

They don't realize that brokers don't work for them.

Brokers are retail salespeople for the insurance industry.

They get paid by insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers.

And so because of that, they make more money when the employer's costs go up, not down.

So in effect, companies that rely on legacy benefits brokers are asking the fox to guard their hen house.

It doesn't work.

We've seen that healthcare is the fastest growing financial risk on most corporate canals.

Right here, right now, has been for years.

So I developed Health Compass under a different model.

And this model allows us to give customers unbiased advice about how to maximize their investment.

And that's really the key to optimizing these programs.

Delivering more value to your employees, giving yourself a strategic advantage in the marketplace.

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All right, let's get back to our conversation.

Let's talk about that a little bit about the optimize your investment because I've really never heard of anybody really talking about that because I ran a company a couple of years ago.

We went to a HR company that we brought on board to take care of the HR services and then they in turn dealt with our healthcare benefits for the team and the 401k and all that stuff.

They handled all that stuff and it made it easy for us because we went to one place but nobody really talked about the finance aspect of it.

Here's the plan.

This is why it's so wonderful.

You're only paying this much for people and blah blah.

You get this great coverage, yada yada yada.

And you're throwing a completely different twist to this.

So I want to know more and our audience wants more.

Inherently, we as consumers, we always want goods and services to be commoditized.

We always wanted to make it super easy to buy things, but convenience comes at a cost if you're buying.

For example, if you go to buy something at the gas station, it's going to cost more than if you went to Walmart, right?

Sure.

If you drove the five miles.

So couple takeaways for your audience.

First of all, health insurers don't actually take on any risk, okay?

It is the businesses and employees that take on the financial risk and pay for all of the healthcare services and goods that are consumed.

So that's a really important insight and mind shift for businesses is that it doesn't matter what carrier with, they don't actually take on risk.

Their job, and I detail this in my book, is to serve as wholesale distribution for hospitals and drug makers.

That's what they do.

They sell hospital services and drugs.

They make money on the price of those services and goods.

So expecting brokers and legacy insurance companies to manage your health care supply chain is a mistake.

So let me just unpack that a little bit.

Most business, a lot of businesses view healthcare as a single line item expense.

We're going to pay $300,000 a month.

And that's where end the story.

In reality, healthcare, it's thousands of individual expenses each month.

What do I mean by that?

Talking about the hospitalizations, the surgeries, the labs, the imaging, the drugs, these things all cost money.

And here's the opportunity.

Here in Central Florida, health care prices vary over 1100%.

For example, I went and got bought an MRI for myself a few weeks ago because I know how to buy.

I was able to find an MRI for $400.

Many employees are paying $4,000 or more for that same MRI.

It's completely unnecessary.

And so this waste, this arbitrage here, this is what's generating these annual increases that businesses are being faced with at renewal time each year on their second or third largest expense.

When we talk about optimizing health plans, we look at it through the lens of a maturity model.

And you have a technology background so you're familiar with this concept.

Over time, as an organization grows and becomes more sophisticated, the way that they finance and procure healthcare for the organization is, is also going to become more sophisticated and become more optimized.

One of the first steps in our maturity model for our mid sized businesses is putting them in a position where they can actually see their supply chain.

Once the CFO can actually see the supply chain, that's when the light bulb goes off and they say, wow, there are massive opportunities here to increase value for our employee populations and improve our bottom line.

In the process, you're going to be able to provide better services, better health care services for your team, which is your most important asset in the business and more importantly, you're putting dollars back into the pocket of the business.

So basically a W all the way around because the company's winning and the employees are getting better health care services.

So what's the downside?

There isn't one that I can tell right now.

The downside.

There is a downside and I'll give it to you.

It requires a little bit of engagement from the executive team to learn.

That's the downside, is that they have to engage.

If you're just passing all this off to hr, let's face it, is overworked, has a million things to do, doesn't have P and L responsibility.

They're not motivated in many cases to really optimize in this area.

They're being educated by brokers in many cases who don't have the financial incentive to actually help them solve these problems.

Makes sense.

You mentioned a book, so let's talk about that book.

Yes, absolutely.

Title is Fixing Healthcare.

How Executives Can Save Their People, Their Business and the Economy.

So basically the thesis for the book is that it clarifies this $300 billion a year opportunity that's hiding in plain sight for businesses.

Right.

Most healthcare books, as you're probably aware of, Freddy, they talk about, they spend, they waste your time talking about these system wide what could be if only we had a blank sheet of paper and only if we could get Congress to act and do all these things.

That's a great thought experiment.

That's all good and fine, I love having that thought experiment.

But this book talks about the power and the control that executives have over right now without any congressional action from Washington DC.

And so here's the thing.

Most executives, one, they don't know how much power they actually have and two, they don't have a roadmap or the clarity on how to actually leverage that power.

And so that's exactly what the book does is it lays out the executive playbook for solving these problems and, and giving them the process for doing it.

Sure.

Because you don't know what you don't know.

At the end of the day you have no clue until you learn.

And all of a sudden you go oh wow, never thought of it that way or never looked at it that way.

And that completely changes the dynamics.

But until then you're clueless because you don't know.

And I don't mean it in a bad way, it's just you don't know what you don't know.

Exactly.

Finance teams and HR teams don't have technical expertise in this area.

And for decades they've been learning from the brokerage industry who, you know, in many cases the mantra is that they're lowering expectations, right?

They say, hey listen, healthcare costs just go up every year.

There's not a whole lot we can do about it.

We can fiddle with some co pays and deductibles and maybe shift some more costs onto the employees, but that's just rearranging the chairs on the Titanic.

So what you really need to do is focus on the fundamentals.

Brokers again make more money when costs go up, not down.

They financially benefit from lowering expectations amongst the C suite.

So I want to raise expectations.

I want executives to go on offense.

I want them to take back control and lead the way.

Now let's talk about that and share a story where you stepped into a company or got invited in and what their situation was before and then what their situation was after you worked with them and completely kind of restructured their whole healthcare benefits as we talked earlier, provided better service and put cash back into her pocket.

Quick story.

We got a call from an executive director of a large teachers union here in central Florida a few years ago and they said, hey Don, we've got some of our union members sitting on this insurance committee that meets every month and they're smart people, but you know, they don't know this insurance stuff.

And they're being asked to make decisions about this $65 million healthcare budget which by the way is crushing our members.

It's becoming so expensive that people can't even afford to use their plan.

Can you just come in and tell us what we should be pushing for in these committee meetings?

So we went in, we did an analysis of their program, we said, wow, here is some really low hanging fruit.

You are a self insured program.

You haven't gone to RFP for a new pharmacy benefit manager.

This is the organization that is supposed to be managing and maximizing your pharmacy supply chain.

You haven't gone to RFP for a new pharmacy benefit manager in seven years.

And by the way, you're with one of the worst ones.

Push for a new RFP in these committee meetings.

So they did that.

They got 11 responses.

They picked a pharmacy benefit manager as better than the one they had.

Not the best one in our opinion, but they picked a better one.

They saved about $3.6 million last year on drugs with virtually no disruption to their employee population.

You could say that those guys are big superfans of you and your team did for that company.

We Love superfans.

We want lots of superfans.

And this is an opportunity that's hiding in plain sight.

There are so many municipalities who are in the same exact position and they're not getting clarity on how to take advantage of these opportunities because they rely on legacy brokers who, who just aren't motivated to do it.

And here's my argument to the benefits industry is that, listen, the irony of this situation is that employers need high quality benefits experts out there helping them.

They really do.

But in the legacy model, the legacy revenue model, where brokers work for the insurance companies, brokers are actually financially penalized when they help employers maximize their investment.

So that's not fair.

In reality, Freddie, there are thousands of benefits professionals who work tirelessly every day and really want to help employers and patients, but they're stuck in a system that doesn't actually reward that.

This is my argument to the industry is like, if we're going to remain relevant and actually meet the demands and needs of employers who cover 164 million Americans with healthcare benefits, we have to redesign the revenue model so that we're incentivized to help businesses meet those objectives.

Because what you're really doing is putting money back into the company's pocket that gives them the ability to hire a, a better team member that might be a little bit more qualified.

And now they can afford to pay that person the wage that person deserves.

And so that in turn helps them grow their business because they've got better talent on their organ, on their team, and because they've rerouted the money that you're helping them save, that in turn transforms that business into really being able to scale effectively with good talent.

And they're able to attract a good talent because it can offer excellent health benefits to that talent.

100%.

My message is about transforming healthcare frustration into a strategic advantage.

You're absolutely right.

The first step in healthcare transformation is getting unbiased advice.

And in my book, I lay out two different ways to do it.

One is you can replace your broker either full stop or partially a management consulting firm like mine, Health Compass Consulting, that actually serves as a fiduciary to the employer in our contract.

There is a growing number of us that have emerged in the marketplace over the last 10 years and that serve as an antidote to the legacy brokerage industry.

So that's one way to get unbiased advice.

The second way you alluded to, and that is to bring benefits expertise in house.

Find these people, put them on your payroll so that you know they are aligned with your interests.

This is something that people like Mark Cuban have been advocating for over the past few years, is for businesses to really build out their benefits teams so that they get unbiased advice and can really optimize in this area.

And as I lay out in my book, the math of it, the numbers can be fantastic.

The return on investment for hiring one highly qualified benefits professional can be 30 to 1, depending on the size of your industry.

So huge opportunities await for those that actually engage.

What's happening there is you're providing.

A.

Better service to your team, AKA all the employees in the company.

So that helps with retention, that helps with team members being much more excited about the company because they're providing excellent services or health services for them and other things.

One of the things I talk about is that's where the growth engine really begins, is once you create super fans of your team, the employees or the contractors that you're working with.

And because at the end of the day, that's the front line to your prospective customers, existing customers, suppliers, distributors, the whole business ecosystem.

So what you're really doing is you're really empowering that because of the services that you're providing.

You're really empowering that company to basically level up their whole organization.

100%.

I'm so glad you mentioned that because as labor markets have hardened over the past several years and great reshuffling of talent coming out of COVID businesses have been reminded of why they even offer benefits in the first place.

And it's like, oh yeah, we do this to help us attract and retain the talent that we need to meet our business objectives.

So how does your benefits program support your human capital strategy?

How does your human capital strategy support your business objectives?

So really taking a step back and thinking about why we're investing in this area, are we even investing in the right things?

Freddy, we built a tool this year to help businesses understand what their employees actually value.

It's so easy to spend millions of dollars on some shiny object that your employees don't care anything about.

There's a million of them out there that you can spend money on.

But how do you have a structured way for getting feedback from your population about what they actually care about?

Sometimes it's things we don't even expect that are low cost benefits and perks that people really value.

And so you got to take that into consideration.

Yeah, and you bring up a great point there, Donovan, because one of the things I've talked about is the little things are really the big things is one of my quotes.

At the end of the day, short mindedness.

Aunt Lucille is in the hospital and Susie wants to go visit Aunt Lucille because she's in the hospital.

Well, you can't go because you've got to be here in the office all day.

One of the things I take, I've talked about on the podcast and other things is that's cheap money to go see Aunt Lucille.

Don't worry about it.

We got you covered because we appreciate you as a team member.

And she's going to feel like a wow, I'm actually able to go and I'm not getting paid for this.

Sometimes people trip over pennies for the big money.

That's a cheap expense.

What's it, 100 bucks, 200 bucks for the day?

It's nothing.

Yeah, in a scope of things.

But now you just create a super fan out of her because she went to see Aunt Lucille and she's going to tell everybody and everybody goes, man, that's a great company.

And that's how you start creating those super fans internally in the company.

That becomes contagious externally.

I love that.

I totally agree.

In fact, one of our teammates is out today actually doing that very thing, taking care of her family.

I try to put myself in their shoes.

Things happen.

And if you can't take care of your family, then what are we doing?

That's how you start creating those super fans.

That's a growth engine and I think people overlook that.

It doesn't cost a lot of money.

And I bring that up because you talked about people spend millions of dollars on shiny objects that people don't care about.

Well, to that person, go and see Aunt Lucille or to your team member spending time with their family, to them that's the most important thing at that moment.

It's these simple things that are very easy to overlook.

And listen, as a business owner, I'm guilty of it too.

But you know, and this is why we really have been so adamant.

We're a service company and so we're all about process and frameworks and making sure that we have the right process in place.

And serving employee populations absolutely needs to be part of that process.

Otherwise we're just throwing things against the wall and hoping it sticks.

Yeah, I mean, we, we've been together going on 14 years in January, but we actually got hitched last year and most of our trip was covered because she won a multitude of prizes and there was a choice of what you wanted that the company offered because she's one of her top salespeople, one of the choices was $500 Airbnb gift cards.

So every time she won, it was like, what do you want?

I got, you know, she always picked the Airbnb cards, except for one of the times I think I got a drone.

So she won a drone.

So she goes, you want a drone?

Sure, I'll take a drone.

I'll learn how to use it yet.

But those are the different things that they did.

That was cool.

And then they gave her the choice of what she wanted versus here's your shiny object.

And at the end of the day, you go, yeah, that's great.

I'm gonna put that over there or re gift it or whatever.

Yeah, 100%.

So just a general method around how to invest is, you know, if for the things that you're seeing, your population, for the most part, values, those are things that you probably want to pay as an employer, pay 100% of that perk, that line of coverage, whatever it is.

But for the things that you're getting mixed reviews on, just make it available.

As an employer, you can make these things available at a discounted rate for your employees, and so give them choice.

When I first got in the business, I used to meet with employees individually during open enrollment and actually educate them about their benefits and help them customize a benefits package based on their individual risk tolerance, needs, and budget.

Just even like that process in itself, people find hugely valuable because if they don't know how to use their benefits, they don't know what they are.

They're not going to value it.

And if they don't value it, then all of this is for not.

You bring up a great point, because a lot of times, some of the benefits might have a gym membership and things like that, and people don't even know about it because no one's going through and says, hey, by the way, you got all these little extra perks that you could be utilizing.

And you're clueless because again, go back to what I said earlier.

You don't know what you don't know.

And nobody takes the time to go read through the whole stack of paper that's this thick.

So what you're doing is really, when you're spending that time to helping that person understand their benefits, all of a sudden they go, oh, I didn't know I had this choice.

And I didn't know I have this available to me.

That changes the whole dynamics.

Showing me care.

That's really what it is, right?

Show them that you actually care and that they are important to you and it doesn't have to be expensive to actually do that.

Having the right partners is essential.

Getting unbiased advice, getting real expertise in this area goes a long way.

Sure.

So where can people find your book.

So they can go to fixinghealthcare.com and buy it directly off the website?

We've got a bunch of good resources that we're building out there.

One funny side note, my uncle was kind of skeptical about the thesis of my book he ran.

He was one of our beta readers.

He put the whole thing through ChatGPT and said, hey, is Donovan Pyle right or wrong?

ChatGPT's analysis in my book is awesome.

I posted the whole thing word for word on the website.

So if you want the cliff notes for it, you can certainly read ChatGPT's analysis of my book.

It largely agrees with the premise of it.

Its criticism was that I'm not talking about a lot of these system wide issues that are going to require huge acts of Congress or anything like that.

I'm talking about the scope of the book is here is the power that executives have right now and here's how you actually use it.

Here's what you can do.

That's really quite important because right now everything is for wording appropriately is fluid.

Everything is fluid at the moment is the way I'm going to word it.

And so what you're doing is you're actually helping people make some decisions because when things are fluid, people kind of hold back on making a decision.

Well, they're uncertain.

But now that you've got a way to say, okay, forget the noise, here's a way, here's proven fact.

And one of the things that you really talked about that I want to really emphasize for our listeners and RFPs request for proposal for those that don't know what RFP stands for.

But getting requesting for a proposal from a multitude of vendors in the healthcare space for your company is a really a brilliant move because you're cutting out the complete the middleman in the equation.

You're dealing directly with the supplier.

What's really interesting, Freddie, is when businesses start getting unbiased advice, one of the first revelations they have is that, oh my goodness, the marketplace of strategies and solutions is huge.

They never knew for years.

Most businesses have just been shown three or four insurance companies on a spreadsheet and say, well, which one do you want to pick?

The marketplace is huge, it's vast, it's dynamic and of course that creates its own challenges.

There's all these options out there, what's best for us?

Well, you got to have a process for establishing that too.

But yes, I mean the RFP process, it's such an important part of the overall process for optimization and you really need to have a robust procurement process to do well in it.

That's where you guys come in to help the companies with that whole process because that's your expertise.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Great.

Donovan.

It's been a great conversation and I could talk on this for at least another 10 minutes and great insight.

How can people find you?

Sure you can go to fixing healthcare.com I'd encourage if you're executive, I'd encourage you to go to fixing healthcare.com grab the free executive summary of my book and again, it's going to give you the six step process for making healthcare transformation a reality at your organization.

If you're an employee, employee listening who's frustrated with rising healthcare costs and stagnant wages, go to FixingHealthcare.com download the free executive summary of my book and give it to your boss.

They are the ones who have the power to solve these problems, but only if they have the clarity on how to do it.

Great advice, great insight.

We'll make sure that's in our show notes.

Thank you again so much for your time and definitely would love to have you on the show down the road.

Thank you Freddie.

It's been a pleasure.

What a powerful conversation with Donovan Pyle.

The biggest takeaway Healthcare doesn't have to be a runaway expense you accept year after year.

It can become a strategic advantage when business owners stop outsourcing responsibility and start leading with clarity.

Donovan showed us that when executives engage, ask better questions and demand unbiased advice, they don't start saving.

They don't just save money.

They create better experiences for their teams, stronger retention and healthier businesses overall.

And that's the real lesson here for service based business owners.

When you take ownership of the systems that affect your people, you don't just cut costs, you build trust, loyalty and super fans from the inside out.

If you enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to hit subscribe and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes and don't wait another minute.

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