I was at a meeting last week, and a few things stood out to me in the meeting. One was that the trusted insurance advisor had become a villain. Their Property and Casualty Broker was not far behind, and the 401-k rep was at a loss for words. Meanwhile, the CEO and CFO had never had better clarity on the roles these guys played and in some great part for once felt like they were holding the cards.

This wasn’t a poker game, nor was it a decisive scene in any imagination. It was, however, the current state of affairs and more importantly, the reality companies and the insurance brokers who work with them face and progressively over time will deteriorate.

On Friday, I was fortunate to have lunch with a very intelligent woman who is the most honest and to the point woman you can know. She’s clearly 50 steps ahead of everyone, so I asked her like I often do what she thought of some of our initiatives here at DS.  As expected she liked most but cautioned against others. What I took away from our meeting was that what people want is someone to help them take care of what needs to be done.

Let’s examine that scene I described earlier, in the past it was necessary to solicit a few different options for payroll, health insurance and property and casualty insurance. For each of these services would require various vendors, but more importantly multiple personalities and moving parts to manage. In addition, you would need someone to manage these relationships, in addition to that employee doing that they would handle Human Resource Issues.

As our economy is coming back companies large and small are seeking out ways to save money, but more importantly than money they are seeking the value of less vendors and increased efficiency. Getting back to the scene I described earlier the CEO and CFO had called in their health and property and casualty broker and their 401-k rep, the reason for the meeting was because they had found a better way to facilitate and streamline those functions.

As this relates even to our company, we’ve learned a lot early on through trial and error, which is a valuable experience but oftentimes costly. We work a lot with startups and the simplicity in their structures is unbelievable, they are the complete opposite of the big lethargic Fortune 500 titans. It’s important to draw the contrast because it relates to every phase of a business, less is more these days. The goal these days is to find a solution provider for the areas of your business that aren’t revenue-producing.

Let’s examine our internal operations here at Dinsmore/Steele, we utilized, in the beginning, many different formats for our email client and it became cumbersome, but we eventually moved our email client over to a multi-service provider and saved immensely in time, eliminating downtime and got the value of an industry leader.

Companies that are offering their services that help small to medium size businesses succeed are limited and niche at best, the ultimate solution needed is a system that enables these companies to comparatively shop the entire market for multiple solutions.

If you look at any company there are a few different areas that each company must have in order to be operable. There are really only three different types of companies, but each faces challenges at certain stages.

For example, a start-up faces an immediate challenge, when they created, hire their first employee, and place their first ad for help. Whereas an established company has different challenges, they need to cut costs and reduce their overhead, while balancing the employees’ benefits with the rising costs of vendors.

Finding a solution in the past required multiple vendors and a cumbersome ritual of obtaining the quotes, in addition to trying to figure out who really is giving you the best deal. So we created Dinsmore Steele, a technology company that matches companies with the best Professional Employer Organizations. Find out how we can help you.