Here's the second section of a formidable list: the ThinkAdvisor Life Health 30 Under 30 award winners for 2017.
We published the first batch of 10 names last week. The third and final list will come out early next week.
All of the people on the list are young life, health and benefits sales and marketing professionals who are already making a name for themselves, in spite of being born after the Internet came to life.
Some could still be active well into the 2060s.
Note, as we said last week, that we've based these entries on information provided by the nominees, independent nominators, and other sources, such as LinkedIn entries. The ages, job titles and other biographic bits reflect how things were when the nominators submitted their nomination forms.
One thing that's clear is that these people are starting out fast.
Alan Flores
25
Santa Rosa, California
Owner
Alan Flores Insurance Agency
ThinkAdvisor Life Health: Why did you choose a career in insurance or financial services?
Alan Flores: I want to build a company that will allow me to work from anywhere while still bringing people powerful information.
Describe what you do.
I focus on educating clients and showing them the best options for their situation. I am not big on hard selling because I don't like the feeling I get when someone is trying hard to sell me something. The most important thing for me is to make sure the client knows exactly what they are getting and why they are getting it.
Share an achievement you are especially proud of.
Being a guest on a local radio station that allowed me to educate the listeners on life insurance and I have been invited back to cover more topics.
What is the biggest challenge you see in the industry, or what is the one thing you would change?
The Latino community does not have a resource to learn about life insurance so I am going to make another website that gives them the resources they need. From articles that cover what life insurance to more unique situations like buying life insurance with an ITIN.
What is the biggest opportunity you see in the industry?
The biggest opportunity I see is educating the Latino community about life insurance. There are so many people that could truly benefit from having a life insurance policy, but they don't have one because they don't have a trusted resource.
What do you think millennials are looking for in an advisor? How can advisors best serve this market?
I believe millennials want someone they can relate to. From my own experience, there are advisors out there that make you feel like you are in the wrong place when you go in to talk to them. It is as if you are too young to be talking to this advisor that has been in the industry for 30 years and knows everything.
What is the No. 1 piece of advice you would give to a young person looking to enter this industry?
I would say, don't get discouraged when people question your authority because of your age. Show them you are knowledgeable in your field to gain credibility.
Megan Frey
29
Seattle
Executive regional manager
Voya Financial
ThinkAdvisor Life Health: Why did you choose a career in insurance or financial services?
Megan Frey: Prior to my senior year of college at University of Connecticut, I completed an internship for a small company in Virginia. I was fortunate enough to be mentored by the company's owner, who recommended I consider a job in sales. At the time, I wasn't sure I wanted to spend my time convincing people to buy anything, but when I returned to school that fall I took a few courses from the business school and loved the relationship building aspect of sales. I interviewed with multiple companies, one of which was Voya Financial (ING at the time) in their insurance business. Shortly after getting into insurance, I realized I made the right choice. I love the flexibility of the job, the ability to create your own brand (while working for a large company), and the opportunity to work with companies that understand benefits will help their employees protect their hard-earned savings.
Describe what you do.
I lead the sales team in Voya's Pacific Northwest territory. Together, we focus on providing cost-effective solutions to brokers, consultants, and employers across five states. We have a diverse product portfolio which includes group life, disability, worksite (critical illness, accident, and hospital indemnity) insurance for employees, and self-funded stop loss insurance for businesses. Our team's goal is to build relationships, find outside–of-the-box solutions, and continually educating ourselves on the ever -changing industry so that we can serve as a trusted resource to our clients.
Share an achievement you are especially proud of.
One of the hardest decisions I made was to leave my comfort zone as a successful sales representative, as part of Voya's Southeast Region sales team (based in Atlanta) to take on my current role as manager of the Pacific Northwest team (based in Seattle). Our industry is so heavily relationship driven that starting over in a new market with all new people is incredibly tough. I'm proud of the fact that, although it wasn't easy, I challenged myself to try something new. There have definitely been days when I have questioned what the heck I was thinking. Then I reflect on how much I've grown personally, as well as professionally, over the course of the past two years, and realize I've developed a whole new network of partnerships, mentors, and friends. I've also learned that I can accomplish whatever it is I set my mind to.
What is the biggest challenge you see in the industry, or what is the one thing you would change?
The current workforce is extremely diverse. One of the biggest challenges I see is figuring out how to offer products and solutions that can be relatable to the 20-somethings just beginning their careers, to the 60-somethings who may be getting ready to retire, and everyone in between. We have to continue developing new ways to engage and educate consumers. For instance, at Voya Financial we are focused on different avenues to connect with employees about the benefits offered at their worksite. Whether this is through educational videos on an employer's intranet or social media campaigns via Facebook leading up to an open enrollment, we have to find ways to provide simple and relatable products to a very wide audience.
What is the biggest opportunity you see in the industry?
The ways we receive our information and make decisions continues to change rapidly. Most people no longer read a newspaper to get caught up on current events, nor do they write checks to pay their bills. I think the biggest opportunity lies in the way we deliver solutions to the workplace. Technology is evergreen and will continue to drive the way we act as consumers. Finding new ways to educate, purchase, and maintain these products will allow for growth in the industry.
What do you think millennials are looking for in an advisor? How can advisors best serve this market?
I believe there is a general misconception that millennials just want things done for them. While we often feel we have a lot on our plate at any given time, we want to understand our options and how our decision will impact us not only in the short term but in the long term, as well.
From an Insurance carrier perspective, we need to make our products simple, but also provide the educational tools that allow millennials to make informed decisions. As a millennial, I don't want you to just hand me a product. I want you to show me the product and explain why it's the right fit for my situation. If I'm personally invested in my decision, I'm more likely to stick with it, which creates higher customer satisfaction and greater persistency.
What is the No. 1 piece of advice you would give to a young person looking to enter this industry?
When I first started as a sales rep, my manager told me, "If it was easy, everyone would do it." At the time, I didn't understand just how many times you would hear "no" before you might get a "yes" and that can really wear on you.
The best advice I can give is this. When you get knocked down, always get up. Even though you've done everything right, you still might get a no, but it's what you do with that no that makes you who you are and helps you define your personal brand. Learn, grow, and move on to the next opportunity, and what you learned from that last no might just help you get your next yes.
(Related: Invest in My Brand?… What's the Point?)
Alexa Hofmann
28
Life brokerage sales consultant
Boca Raton, Florida
The Stamm Agency
ThinkAdvisor Life Health: Why did you choose a career in insurance or financial services?
Alexa Hofmann: Landing in the industry was fortuitous, truly. I'd just wrapped up school and decided to take some additional part time marketing coursework which left me with some free days during the business week; this led to my taking a position doing some general office/admin work with my agency. Within a few weeks, I knew that this is what I needed to be doing.
Brokerage appealed to me strongly because of the multi-faceted role we as sales/design specialists take on and I really love what I do for that reason, the challenges and complexities and movement of the industry. But- what truly had me hooked was bearing witness to how often advisors are told their clients are an absolute decline and nothing can be done (often by multiple sources) and the knowledge that so many of these people may have ended up getting the coverage they needed if someone at the brokerage agency revisited the file to re-strategize how to go to bat for the client.
What drove me then during my early employment with the agency and continues to drive me now is the fact that there's such a great need for not only elevated levels of support but for awareness of how important it is for brokers not to lose sight of the fact that those files are people – because that's what is happening and it happens often.
Describe what you do.
I specialize in driving life insurance sales. As a sales consultant and marketer for a life brokerage agency, my role is all encompassing in that I work as a consultant and point person to advisors to support them in their sales success and I also head the development and marketing campaigns for my agency itself, so my work requires me to stay connected and in tune with both consumer and business to business sales strategy, trends and behaviors.
My agents rely on me to help them to identify and guide their clients into the best products and case design as well as to aid them in their marketing strategy by connecting them with marketing material, training and information that aids them in developing their potential client base.
My marketing initiatives for the agency as a whole are aimed at reaching and developing new agent relationships by promoting our message and offerings through digital platforms, media and editorial content. The part of my work I feel is most unique and a specialty area of mine is in life insurance sales for high risk clients.
My agency has been specializing in impaired risk underwriting for more than 50 years and one of my primary professional goals is to raise awareness among financial professionals for how important it is to seek expertise in underwriting high risk clients. I take a hands-on, concierge approach to clients with high risk medical conditions, lifestyle or financial situations and work with the agent from the beginning stages of the sale to secure quotes, prepare the case for submission and see it through to approval.
Having been trained in and after years of experience dealing with the most complex underwriting situations, I make a commitment to my producers to know their client's case personally and to communicate and negotiate with carrier contacts to ensure the best possible outcome for their client which means personal involvement in review of medical records, financials and taking initiatives to look outside the obvious and identify how and what to use to improve the underwriting.
Share an achievement you are especially proud of.
I'm incredibly proud of the successes I've been able to secure for my agents and would consider the reputation I've built to be one of the achievements that I'm most proud of. I'm so very, truly personally invested in everything that I work on that when the base of agents turning to me for all their business continues to grow and referrals keep coming in because they've been told that my work and results are so superior, it's a very rewarding feeling. Obviously spending so much time working on complex cases there have been all types of challenges, but it's the cases (without delving into too much personal detail) like a
client I worked on who is the single parent of a special needs child and had just about exhausted every effort to get life insurance, that make me feel proud to do what I do. That client had been turned down by 12 companies through 2 brokerage firms because of health and told there was no hope before the agent was referred to me. Placing those types of cases and seeing the relief it gave the client from the stress of
worry for their child's care and needs is an accomplishment I'm proud to have been able to secure for my agent and that I regard in high esteem personally.
What is the biggest challenge you see in the industry, or what is the one thing you would change?
Reaching the core of public opinion about life insurance is where I feel the industry's biggest challenge lies. Despite anything and everything that makes a top 10 msn list for why the millennial generation is so posed for turmoil, I for one am happy to be part of a generation whose world is constantly pulsing.
The fact that there is nothing stopping you from knowing about anything that you want to know about is amazing, but with every innovation and evolution that puts more information at our fingertips the unfortunate fact of the matter is that information from sources who are not knowledgeable or current in the subject matter is going to get in as well.
This topic is one that has been an issue of focus for me and a conversation that I've been working on furthering in recent months and the reason is because on any given day, at any given time, without fail I can skim my apple news feed and find more than one article reverberating a negative, outdated depiction of life insurance; these editorials are full of misinformation and almost always reinforce a negative image of advisors and the industry itself.
So, it is a challenge. Not only do we need to help educate people about their needs, we need to mold a more enlightened, modern understanding of life insurance itself out of the existing opinion about life insurance that millennials have formed based on their parent's experiences and behaviors towards buying life insurance and the reinforcement from many out of touch editorialists.
With all the reach in the world to research and learn about any item we so choose, if no one is pointing out that we must retire the life insurance we know about from our parents and grandparents and learn more about today's life insurance, we'll never break through to the point of true engagement that we need to transform life insurance from a "need" product to a "want."
What is the biggest opportunity you see in the industry?
I think the presence of AI and the innovations we're making and that are in the works when it comes to technology and medicine are going to transform the life insurance underwriting process and thus the industry. If you think about how far we have come already in the advances that we've made in evolving with medical research, testing capabilities and treatments to be able to offer life insurance despite certain medical conditions, the potential to be able to insurance countless people whom we wouldn't have able to before is huge.
In addition to the role technology plays in medical underwriting, the integration of interactive technology for health and wellness with life insurance coverage is also a game changer in terms of the financial landscape. Our industry is posed right now to be able to reach more people than ever and provide more people with life insurance than ever and that means the opportunity for us to help build a more financially independent and secure population who see their coverage as playing an important role in their life.
What do you think millennials are looking for in an advisor? How can advisors best serve this market?
I think first it's important for us to address that too many millennials aren't looking for an advisor, period, because they're hit so often with the message that advisors are not trustworthy or that they need to be on the defensive against greedy commission hungry sales people. The good news though is that people still want to understand and engage with someone who can offer guidance, so we as an industry can turn this around. What I think millennials respond to in an advisor is a sense of comradery, someone who is connecting on a real human level that engages them in their financial planning rather than just presenting and proposing.
Like I mentioned earlier, we can blast all the information and educational material we want about life insurance but if someone already has an existing impression of what life insurance is and who needs it and doesn't feel it applies to them, they're not going to read it anyway. To really do our best in providing professional service to the millennial market we should take advantage of all the opportunities there are to engage with other people. Connecting socially, sharing details about what went into the decision making in our own financial planning or helping to provide information and opinions about the products that are in front of people, not just those that we represent or sell are things to consider when thinking about how to appeal to people on a human level.
Above all I think it's important to think less about what we think people should know and focus on what we don't know; when you get to know the person first you can get right to the heart of where life insurance fits into their needs and what they may not know about the product or industry. We can ask people as many times as we want if they know how much coverage they need but if they don't realize they have a reason for needing the coverage then the insight we've been able to provide stops right there. What about asking people if they want to be successful in their personal, financial life; what if they answered no to the first question and yes to the second because they didn't realize that life insurance could be advantageous in various ways and life stages.
What is the No. 1 piece of advice you would give to a young person looking to enter this industry?
AH: Don't neglect setting personal professional boundaries. In an industry like ours, the competitive nature, and high expectations we place on ourselves and receive from others to make sales can be a great and challenging experience but it can also lead to feeling conflicted over how to deal with difficult clients or with a collaborative professional partner. Relationships are paramount and no one ever wants to risk a client being dissatisfied with them or their service but it's important to have a clear understanding of the extent to which the customer is always right and when you feel your personal professional boundaries are being compromised. Unfortunately, not everyone is respectful of other people's time and work, in life as well as in business, and spreading yourself thin out of fear or insecurity to appease a person who isn't treating your relationship with reciprocity won't lead to results but it will impact your confidence and the standards you set in business. Do great work and know the value of your time and efforts. If you regard your time and work with higher value other people will too and your business will flourish.
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Chelsea Hopkins
29
Topeka, Kansas
Marketing relationship manager
Advisors Excel LLC.
ThinkAdvisor Life Health: Why did you choose a career in insurance or financial services?
Chelsea Hopkins: My parents divorced when I was younger and most of my childhood we lived paycheck to paycheck. At the time, I never knew what sacrifices they were making for our family. I've since learned both of them had dipped into their 401ks to help pay the mortgage or keep the lights on or buy Christmas presents. They did what they had to do for us to survive in the moment. Because of those sacrifices they made when my sister and I were younger, neither of them have much saved up for retirement — and they're both close to retirement age. It's important to me to be able to help other families avoid going through the same situations they had to go through.
Describe what you do.
I have a broad title of "Marketing Relationship Manager" because my position is a catch-all for what we do on the Marketing team at Advisors Excel. My main priority is to assist financial advisors from all over the United States so they can focus on serving their clients in retirement planning. Each advisor/advisor's office is different; it's important everything I do is personalized and customized to their specific needs. That's the best part of what I do — every phone call, email or situation that arises is diverse and it is my job to come up with solutions to ensure the advisors we work with can focus on helping their clients.
Share an achievement you are especially proud of.
The company I work for has put a huge emphasis on serving others. Whether that be through our company helping financial advisors and their respective clients or via us as individuals serving in our community. Through our Big Brothers Big Sisters Corporate Program, I've developed a solid relationship with a child who needs a strong mentor in her life. Although we've only been matched for a year, I am proud of the connection we have built. I believe it will be a lifelong friendship and I can only hope that my mentorship helps to lead her away from the various forms of adversity that she may have to overcome throughout her lifetime.
What is the biggest challenge you see in the industry, or what is the one thing you would change?
At this point in time, I think the biggest challenge in the industry is the unknown. There is a lot going on with the Department of Labor ruling and the Trump presidency and no one really knows how it will all shake out. Uncertainty seems to be a theme surrounding those two topics and until there is some resolve or direction with both regarding future retirees, I think they will continue to be industry challenges.
What is the biggest opportunity you see in the industry?
I believe tapping into the millennial market is one of the biggest opportunities we have. By leveraging an existing client base and getting introductions to younger generations we can start filling a pipeline for future business. I think the general public is typically reactive and waits until close to retirement age to actually start planning retirement past their 401k investments. If we start educating individuals before they are close to retirement age, it would better prepare a generation that will not have social security and pensions to lean.
What do you think millennials are looking for in an advisor? How can advisors best serve this market?
Millennials are looking for someone to educate them, make suggestions and help implement financial plans — but ultimately let them have a hand in planning their future. Millennials are a strong willed, independent generation and want to make their own decisions, so they need a partner that is transparent, willing to listen & give them sound financial advice while allowing them to be involved in the decisionmaking process.
What is the No. 1 piece of advice you would give to a young person looking to enter this industry?
Control the controllables. You're never going to be able to tell a client exactly how the market will perform or have every situation run as expected. So, control what you can — the relationships you cultivate, the hard work you put in, the people you surround yourself with, the accountability you hold yourself to — the rest will fall into place.
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Kory Johnson
26
Tampa, Florida
Financial advisor
21st Century Financial Inc.
ThinkAdvisor Life Health: Why did you choose a career in insurance or financial services?
Kory Johnson: I grew up in a family of small business owners. Going into college, I knew that I wanted to start my own business one day, just as many of my family members have done. The problem was that I did not know the industry or market that I wanted to pursue.
Once I was introduced to the financial services industry at the University of South Florida, I realized there was a substantial disconnect with small businesses and personal financial planning. While small business owners put their companies' finances first, many ignore their own personal financial planning needs. This was my opportunity to begin a career that will allow me to build my own business as well as be a resource to other fellow business owners.
Describe what you do.
I provide financial clarity in an increasingly complex financial world.
My commitment to my clients are to help them create more money supply now, increase their wealth, minimize their risk, protect their wealth, and do all of this without reducing their lifestyle.
I am an advocate for my clients, their families, friends, and the people they work with.
Share an achievement you are especially proud of.
Throughout my career, I am especially proud of the relationships that I have built with my clients. What I enjoy most about my business is that it gives me the opportunity to meet new people and discover what financial goals they have and what motivates them. Every referral that I am introduced to from an existing client is an achievement that I am extremely proud of.
What is the biggest challenge you see in the industry, or what is the one thing you would change?
The biggest challenge that I see in the industry is the countless perceptions people have in regards to what makes an ideal financial plan. There are far too many "financial entertainers" today that give blanketed advice and promote a one-size-fits-all plan to their audience.
