Lester Morales and Brandon Weber come from different backgrounds, and were raised on opposite ends of the U.S. But the two
When the Puerto Rico-born
For Weber, who grew up in northern Alaska, he always understood healthcare was financially unsafe for his blue-collar family. Despite starting his career building software and then becoming a technology entrepreneur, he always wanted to help fix the nation’s perverse healthcare system.
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Today, the pair are rising stars in the benefits advisory space, both fighting to find ways to provide better care at lowerprices. As CEO of Next Impact, Morales focuses on what he calls “Transparent Health Benefits.” Weber serves as co-founder and CEO of
EBN recently spoke with Morales and Weber about their respective healthcare journeys. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The benefits landscape is changing, and breaking from old solutions is now the only path toward lower costs and better outcomes for employees. How can this turn into a huge change management exercise that requires careful execution?
Weber: When doing our foundational research, we were blown away by how much amazing innovation there actually was in the design of insurance, funding benefits and digital health solutions that provide a better outcome for a member or their family at a lower cost. But all of them had very poor engagement and distribution inside of the communities that they were trying to serve.
It has to be easier for buyers to do the right thing and deploy the best tools for their employees. The environmental landscape around us, in terms of economics, makes the status quo unacceptable. But we have to bridge the gap between an unacceptable status quo and the better landscape in front of us.
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Morales: The entire industry is built on misaligned incentives. What clients call a premium health insurance, companies call revenue. A broker makes more money when their client spends more money. A hospital makes more money when they screw up a surgery. But this system isn’t broken — it was completely designed wrong from the beginning. We shop for everything in our lives, but we forget that healthcare is a consumable and shoppable good or service. The adviser is going to need to lead this change.
Conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion have reached a fever pitch in recent years. To what extent have you both been able to build a diverse team within your respective organizations?
Morales: As a minority, this has been top of mind since I got into the business. At a very large consulting firm between 2012 and 2015, I was one of 120 executives in North America — and one of nine people that was not a white male. Next Impact is a minority-owned business out of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Ninety percent of my workforce is fluent in Spanish and English and are U.S. citizens. I sit on the advisory board of the risk management school at Florida State University, where I got my degree in risk management insurance. My job in running breakout sessions and committees is to increase diversity, not only the color of your skin or things that you believe in, but also just getting young blood into this business.
Weber: We think about DEI as an operational advantage and basically set a goal: Nava is going to be the most diverse benefits brokerage in the industry. That is a topline focus of ours. We started recruiting people from all different backgrounds and geographies: we have war veterans, young people, massive diversity across gender and race, etc. We’ve had to recruit across a lot of different industries — we’re bringing people in from McKinsey Consulting and Deloitte and teaching them benefits. Diversity of thought is an absolute competitive advantage.
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How do passion and purpose come into play when scaling world-class client success in the face of fast growth?
Weber: It’s the thing I think about every single day because Nava is growing super fast, like 53% in Q1. We are adding lots of new customers and members, and it is absolutely paramount for us to figure out, how do we continue to deliver what we think is best-in-class client success for the HR team and their employees? One of the big focus areas of ours is we want to be the first benefits brokerage that the members themselves know and love.
Morales: What’s hard is rolling up your sleeves and getting dirty. So, this person that gets in the weeds and is okay with, ‘you know what, we were buying everything from this one company, and now we’re peeling it out.’ I always joke, ‘you were buying everything from one, and now I’m going to have you sign six contracts.’ But understand that the only way to fix this is those six contracts. A person who wakes up wanting the easy button is not going to excel.
What role is technology playing in leveling up benefits brokerages?
Weber: Our client success team are the heroes of the story in many ways and many days. They are truly the boots on the ground that are helping human beings figure out how to manage this healthcare system. It’s insane that you have to manually type hundreds of rows of information from spreadsheet A to spreadsheet B. Technology has a role to play. There are opportunities to take broad swaths of what we call brain damage off of the plate of those folks, so that they can be more effective at delivering high-quality service, being proactive and building great relationships with people that they serve.
