Benefits Benchmarking with Matt Lister | E105
Seeing how your benefits plans stack up.
On today's episode, Jason Pereira is going to talk to Matt Lister, CEO of Cloud Advisors. It is a company in the group benefits space, and one of the unique things they have done is they have built a benchmarking system that helps inform business owners as to basically how their plans stack up against competitors in the same space and helps advise around best practices and design. Service is free for employers. Paid by advisors and providers.
Episode Highlights:
01:04: Cloud advisors use the Canvas employee benefits marketplace. Matt explains how they show employers how their benefit plans stack up.
1.20: The number one reason why employers have benefits in the first place is to be competitive and what Matt has done is democratized access to benchmarking data.
02:23: Every advisor got their own limited pool of experience regarding different sectors, different types of companies.
03:26: Advisor has a limited view based on their experience and the industry or sector that they work. The employer generally has an even more limited view of based on their experience and you, you can just simply go around and ask some of your friends hey, does your company offer benefits?
04:58: Employers go through different stages where they don't need benefits perhaps when they very first started, they can't afford benefits and then they quickly start adding people and they get into a world where your benefits become table stakes. So, they become that checkbox.
05:12: You might have a small company with a few employees, and they all know each other. They can literally sit around the table, so in terms of attracting and retaining each other, it's a direct conversation with the individuals. Do you have an employee benefits plan and how strong is it or how up to date is it or what does it include?
06:35: Matt explains how their system has options for employers that have no coverage, they can get a sample plan.
07:17: Matt explains how their system intakes the benefits plan and breaks it down into hundreds of different variables that one can then compare by industry, region and group size.
08:17: Oftentimes the advisor does have the basis from experience and anecdotes to be able to say, here are the gaps in the program. But the data really tells a compelling story, and it gives the confidence the advisor to provide a better recommendation, but ultimately gives the confidence to the employer to make a more informed decision.
09:57: Matt explains how they developed the bar score, and it stands for benefits, action, retention, and it's like a credit score.
10:34: How that benefit plan stacks up overall, that is the first deliverable that Matt really focuses on with the advisor as well as the employer, is to answer that basic question. How is their plan stacked up? Are they in the bottom 50%? Are they in the top 10%, where are they?
14:15: With Covid, Matt has seen the geographical boundaries breakdown and even if you offer hybrid work, remote work, people are not drawing on labor from within driving distance of their office anymore, says Matt.
15:00: Matt explains how they have got a great benefits plan. They made sure that it's competitive within market and that kind of dissuades employees from looking, checking if the grass is greener on the other side type mentality.
16:42: Being more competitive, when we dig into the actual benchmarking, we typically organize it by benefits included versus not included on our intro report, says Matt.
17.14: Matt talks about the type is benchmark that they do. There are basically 2 types, he says.
18:14: There are employers that have like the lowest level of coverage possible on the left-hand Side and there might be employers on the right-hand side that have the highest level of coverage, the middle 50% range is what most people care about, says Matt.
19:41: Matt talks about the database that they have built and how they segregate problems and solutions.
21:18: Advisors have their preferred solutions. They have exclusive rates and all of that can be customized on that evaluation so that the employer gets excellent bottom line.
22:30: Matt says that they recognize that business owners are busy, and they have got businesses to run, and insurance is only a small component of that needs to be done efficiently and effectively and conveniently.
3 Key Points:
Matt talks about the big determinants, basically how benefits programs get structured in terms of, different industries or different careers, different development stages, what are the big factors implemented that should be impacting, and how a plan is designed.
Cloud Advisor has been in the marketplace coming up eight years and when they first developed the database, they had a very limited amount of data in it to perform the benchmark. Matt shares how they achieved about 15,000 employee benefit plans.
Matt talks about the client output and how they visualize the actual results.
Tweetable Quotes:
"We show them how their current programs stack up by industry, region group size as well as how they can improve their program." - Matt
"When I started in the industry, my dad had spent most of his career working for a public crown corporation with the incredibly robust union." - Matt
"We will connect not just with the vendor and the vendors; information will actually perform an instant quote and an instant proposal so that the employer has everything they need to." - Matt
Resources Mentioned:
Full Trancript:
Producer: Welcome to the financial planning for Canadian Business Owners Podcast. You will hear about industry insights with award-winning financial planner and entrepreneur, Jason Pereira. Through the interviews with different experts with their stories and advice, you will learn how you can navigate the challenges of being an entrepreneur, plan for success and make the most of your business and life, and now your host, Jason Pereira.
Jason Pereira: Hello and welcome. Today on the show, I have Matt Lister, the CEO of Cloud Advisors. Could Advisors is a company in the group benefits space, and one of the unique things that they have done is they have built a benchmarking system that helps inform business owners as to basically how their plans stack up against competitors in the same space and helps advise around best practices and design, and with that, here is my interview with Matt. Matt, thanks for your time today.
Matt Lister: Thanks for having me, Jason. Great to be here.
Jason Pereira: Good, so Matt, tell us a little bit about what it is you do.
Matt Lister: Yeah, so Cloud Advisors is Canada's employee benefits marketplace, and as you talked about, our benchmarking service has been our, uh, sort of hallmark feature from, uh, on Day 1, so we essentially show employers, uh, how their benefit plans stack up, so we know that the No. 1 reason why employers have benefits in the first place is to be competitive, and what we've done is democratized access to benchmarking data, so we show them how their current programs stack up by industry region group size as well as how they can improve their program, and we make that service available through our advisor partners to all employers right across the country.
Jason Pereira: Excellent, so let's, uh, let's dive into that, so I mean, benefits programs. Right. These are a key consideration of compensation for most employers out there for a majority I would say, and everybody, one of the checkboxes that everybody looks for when hire, getting hired is hey, do I have a benefits program, and that can be both retirement and insurance we're talking about here, not just the one, right.
Matt Lister: That's right.
Jason Pereira: So beyond the what am I gonna pay you as a salary is the what other things am I gonna give you, uh, and basically, uh, these are the two big ones, so basically, typically, you know, what I've seen in the past having done some of this work myself is when you go and have this conversation the first time or even have with someone existing one, the question always comes up of, okay, but, like, am I doing the right thing. Right. Uh, uh, you know, how does this look –
Matt Lister: Hmm, right.
Jason Pereira: – compared to what you've seen, right, and of course every advisor's got their own limited pool of experience regarding different sectors, different types of companies, and, oh, I'm sure there's advisors out there who apply the same formula to every benefits program, but that doesn't make sense, right, so talk to me about what are the big determinants around basically how benefit programs get structured in terms of, you know, differing industries or different careers, uh, uh, d, different, uh, development stages. How, how, what are the big factors implemented that should be impacting how a plan is designed?
Matt Lister: Yeah. Yeah. Great, uh, great questions and lots to unpack there. We see about, uh, numbers about 80 percent of employers in Canada that offer some type of, uh, employee benefits package, and, uh, just to reinforce what you said about the benefits and the retirement plan, uh, be it a, a pension or a matching RRSP, from the employer's perspective it's all one employee benefits package, and, and increasingly today that is more than just traditional benefits and retirement plans. There is all sorts of other wellness offerings and things that can be tied into that, so while you also mentioned that the advisor has maybe a limited view of based on their experience and the industry or, or sector that they work in, the employer generally has an even more limited view, uh, based on their experience, and, you know, you can simply just go around and ask some of your friends, hey, does your company offer benefits and what does that look like, and, and you won't get much past the, the name of the provider, uh, in terms of describing what the benefits package is, and then, you know, maybe they've had a good experience working with some large employers. Uh, maybe they had an experience with them, no benefits at all working with very small employers, so, you know, this –
Jason Pereira: And oftentimes, I mean, their, their, their benefits, their just, their, the employees' perception of the, of the benefits plan is how much is covered, not necessarily if they're paying for any of it themselves, and also, like, I had this one thing that I wanted paid for. I didn't get what I thought it was gonna be, right, like, so, uh, it's amazing. Uh, ask someone who is an employee do you have a good plan or how good is your plan, it's really subjected to their personal experience at the end of the day.
Matt Lister: Yep, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, personal, personal story, uh, when I started in the industry, my dad, uh, had spent most of his career working for a public, uh, crown corporation with incredible, uh, robust benefits, and so he was, so his sort of opinion was like well, don't most employers have amazing benefits. Like, what, what –
Jason Pereira: Yes, crown corporations –
Matt Lister: – would be –
Jason Pereira: – tend to think that, but continue.
Matt Lister: Like, what would we be, uh, benchmarking here, right, and it's like well, my experience coming out of university and having, uh, part-time jobs and hourly jobs and, you know, working for some small companies and then starting my own benefits, it was like, well, I never even had benefit, so, okay, where's the, uh, there is a great divide here, and, and as we, as we, uh, we've learned, well, employers, and kinda coming back to your questions, employers go through different stages where they don't need benefits or perhaps when they very first started they can't afford benefits, and then they quickly starting adding people, and they get into a world where, you know, benefits become table stakes or they become that checkbox that you talk about, so you might have a small company with a few employees, and they all know each other. They can literally sit around a table, so in terms of attracting and retaining each other, well, it's a direct conversation with the individuals. Maybe they start bringing a small healthcare spending account or flex spending account or something to address some of those needs, but it's really once employers start to become 10, 15 employees, and they start to lose some of that personal connection with some of the employees that they start to hire, uh, that, uh, all of a sudden the group plan idea forms, and certainly once you get into 20, 25 employees, uh, it starts to become more and more prevalent that when they're out there h, hiring that question is being asked, do you have a benefits plan, and they have to at least satisfy that checkbox. Now, we'd like to go way beyond that checkbox in terms of saying do you have a benefit plan and how strong is it or how up to date is it or what does it actually include, but, uh, the further you go up that scale, uh, into the hundreds of employees or the thousands of employees, the more robust and the move benefits is really just table stakes, the foundation is part of the, uh, the total compensation and, and the employee experience of that company.
Jason Pereira: Awesome.
Matt Lister: Yeah.
Jason Pereira: All right. So let's talk about what's involved in the benchmarking. Okay. So I am an employer. I come to your site, and I, yeah, yeah. Okay. Let me see how I'm doing. What's involved?
Matt Lister: Yeah. So the first thing to look at is if you are one of those companies that does have coverage already is, is to take a look at the current coverage. You know, our system does have options for employers that have no coverage. They can get a sample plan and see what competitive benefits look like in their industry, so in terms of setting a budget and, and looking at what would a first plan, uh, potentially look like, um, but oftentimes what we find is that, hmm, you know, most employers have benefits already, but oftentimes they're quite a few years outdated, so, you know, the benefit plan was put in, in place when they were 15 or 20 or 25 employees, and now they're 75 or 80 or a hundred employees, and no one's really taken a look at it. You know, it's kinda renewed each year. Like, maybe there is a couple of minor changes. Maybe they even switched carriers, but they didn't switch plan design, so the starting point is really just getting that context of, like, how does this plan stack up in the marketplace, and, uh, so, you know, our system will intake the benefits plan and break it down into hundreds of different variables that we can then compare, uh, by industry, by region and by group size, and, uh, that's a whole other tangent we can take in the conversation here is just selecting that comparison group and what is meaningful, right. Sometimes you hear an employer say well, you know, we want the best plan at the best plan or we want a good plan at a good price. Let's get, well, what does that mean. Right. Like, what is a good plan for you –
Jason Pereira: I too want the world for nothing. I mean, **** –
Matt Lister: Yeah. Yeah. Well you hear that too. You hear that too. Yeah. I want the best plan at the lowest price, and it's like well, join the queue.
Jason Pereira: What, in what universe do you exist in that that is an option? I, I would love to know ****.
Matt Lister: So, yeah, so yeah. I mean, we start by showing them that context of, of how they stack up. What are some common benefits that they include that other employers include, and are they at a reasonable level. What are some common benefits that they don't include and how, uh, what percentage of employers offer that, and this is sometimes new insight, at least to the employer. Oftentimes the advisor does have the basis, you know, from experience and, and anecdotes to be able to say, you know, here are the gaps in the program, but the data really tells a compelling story, and it gives the, the confidence of the advisor to provide a, a better recommendation, but ultimately it gives the confidence to the employer to make a more informed decision on, on improving their, their coverage at the end of the day, so by showing them where they're outdated, where they're under benchmarked, new opportunities in the marketplace that they haven't taken advantage of, gaps in their current program, that becomes the basis for deciding do we need to improve the plan, what are some of the priorities to improve the plan.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. All right. So you have that –
Matt Lister: Yeah **** –
Jason Pereira: – what's the kind of output they can expect to receive from you? So you're talking about all this. What, how do you make the, how do you con, how do you just relay this in, in an effective way that doesn't overwhelm them?
Matt Lister: Yeah. Yeah. Great, great question, and it's one that, you know, we, we asked ourselves certainly a few years in. When we first started, we were designing reports exclusively for advisors, and so, you know, that led us down a very detail oriented, every little, uh –
Jason Pereira: Let's overwhelm everybody to justify ourselves, right –
Matt Lister: – factor – yeah, uh, yeah. Some of the, the, kinda the old-school consultant's approach, right. Like, let's have more information than necessitates the need for an expert, right, and so, you know, we have an intro report that's, that's two pages with a comprehensive benchmark report. That ballooned to fourteen pages with a hundred and seventy five fields of benchmarking, and, you know, the idea was like well, that's great for the advisor to dig through, but that's even, that's certainly too much for the employer. It's, it's arguably too much for the advisor, and so through design and through ways of, you know, color coding and, and rearranging the report, we try and call out what are the priorities, but ultimately, uh, what we developed is something called our BAR score, and the BAR score stands for Benefits Action Retention, and it's like a credit score but for benefits, and so what it does is it actually summarizes all of the available benchmarking on both behaviors and retirement **** comprehensive, the up to 200 variables that I talked about, and it ranks it in a single score how that benefit plan stacks up overall, so that is the first deliverable that we really focus with, uh, with the advisor as well as the employer is just answer that basic question. How does my plan stack up? Are you, uh, are you middle of the road? Are you in the bottom 50 percent? Are you in the top 10 percent? Where are you, and then that can lead into where do you need to be to be competitive, right, and that answer, of course, differs, you know, by employer as well.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. All right. So let's talk about how it is you're actually able to do this. Like, how much information have you compiled here to be able to benchmark this?
Matt Lister: Yeah, so Cloud Advisors has been in the marketplace, uh, coming up 8 years, and when we first developed, uh, the database, obviously we had a very limited amount of data actually in it in order to perform a benchmark, and so we were quite limited in early years. We were licensed to a couple of, uh, founding advisor partners, get a few hundred employer plans in there and be able to benchmark at least here you are against 300 other employers, but we weren't able to drill down by comparison group that we can today, and it's really just through licensing the, the platform and working with more advisor partners, evaluating more groups that we've grown that, so we licensed, uh, nationally across a, a large advisor network that got us to several thousand, uh, groups, and, uh, today the database sits about 15,000 employer been plans. Now each plan may have multiple classes, so, uh, it's well over 40,000 benefit plans if you think about it in terms of the different classes and stuff that we can benchmark against, and that's just current client information 'cause we also benchmark, uh, prospective clients for advisors. We benchmark, uh, older plans or proposed plans or other things that aren't included in the benchmarking database but year to date I think an estimate is that we've, we've probably looked at a hundred thousand different, uh, benefit plans in the last number of years, and that's the data that, uh, ultimately, you know, we filter down to the 15,000 current plans that we make available for benchmarking today –
Jason Pereira: Excellent, so –
Matt Lister: Yeah.
Jason Pereira: – plenty of, plenty of data, enough to justify. The question becomes or at least, uh, rationally be able to do so. All right. So talk to me about basically the, a company, basically any company who's got benefits or looking to get benefits looking to approve before they go to it. Like, what are the key considerations for how they should differ? I mean, I mentioned size and, and industry. Talk to me how, about how drastic those two factors can impact someone's ability, like, uh, someone's plan design.
Matt Lister: Yeah. So I mean, there is kinda two, two ways you can sort of approach this. You, we can look at a company that doesn't have benefits, like, how should look at setting one up to start with or, you know, looking at their current coverage and, and how should they go about evaluating it. Um, and I kinda touched on the, uh, the comparison group capability. Now with 15,000 groups, we can look specifically at a particular industry, region and group size, and so the BAR score is a great way, a great place to start. It's a national ranking that shows them overall against all 15,000, how does their plan stack up, uh, but that might not be the most meaningful for a small employer in Alberta that only draws from Alberta, and it's like well, uh, it doesn't really matter what these large publicly traded companies in Ontario are doing or these unions in another province are doing, uh, I don't compete against them for, for people, and I think that becomes a really good question to ask is who are we competing against in the labor market, so what types of employers are we either hiring from or what types of employers are we losing talent to, and that might inform the comparison group because oftentimes we'll see these, uh, really basic comparisons like national or provincial or industry or region, and that's great 'cause you get a really big sample size, and you get a really good sense of where the starting point is, and sometimes, uh, advisors will wanna go very detailed just to that particular industry, region and group size, but that's not always the best comparison because when we talk to an employer they may say well, we actually, uh, we hire against the, you know, the large employer across the street, you know, that's in town, so forget –
Jason Pereira: Yeah.
Matt Lister: – about the other small mom and pop shops, uh, we need to know how we stack up against this thousand life group, right, or we need to know how we –
Jason Pereira: ****
Matt Lister: – stack up, you know, we remote work –
Jason Pereira: Like remote, right, like, yeah, like remote work –
Matt Lister: – **** –
Jason Pereira: Yeah. Like remote work **** –
Matt Lister: Yeah re, re –
Jason Pereira: – yeah, that's an awesome factor **** –
Matt Lister: – remote work is a great one. With COVID we've seen the geographical boundaries break down, and if, you know, if you offer hybrid work or remote work, well I'm not just drawing on labor from, uh, within driving distance of my office anymore, and I could have, uh, an employee in, in any, any province in the, in the country or, or even globally, so now it's like well now I do wanna look at national, uh, and I just wanna look within industry. Other times, well, maybe I'm hiring for office staff or management or other roles that are cross functional across industries, and the industry is less important, so I think that's actually a great first starting point with, uh, an advisor and the employer is to ask like how competitive is their current plan today, but who do they need to compete against, and, uh, and where can they strengthen the plan such that they are given the confidence of their current employees that, hey, we have benchmarked our plan. We've got a great benefits plan. We made sure that it's competitive within market, and that kinda dissuades employees from looking, checking if the grass is greener on the other side type, type mentality, and then equally when they're hiring, they can go beyond the checkbox and say, well, hey, uh, we've got a very strong benefits plan. It's, it's benchmarked against these industries or all employers in this province, and this is how we stack up, so, you know, we know that we're not just checking box that we've got something that's gonna be very valuable to you.
Jason Pereira: Yeah. And, and I think it's just –
Matt Lister: Yeah.
Jason Pereira: – it's one of these things where the employer checks the box because they know they need it, and then it's not something that they're, you know, it's not a day-to-day issue for them, and they forget about it, but this is one of those things where it's very easy to spend money in the wrong places if you're not careful, and, and also just to have something that's just not effective, but it's, it's one of these, uh, but, uh, again, it's, it's just, it's ever more important the more you grow and the more competitive your landscape, so making sure that you take the time to get the right one is, is incredibly important, so before we, you know, kinda, yeah, sorry go back **** before we, so I wanna talk a little bit more about the output, right, so you, we've talked about –
Matt Lister: Yeah.
Jason Pereira: – how do all this and all that. You've got this simplified, but let's talk about the client output a little bit more deeper, and, and how you visualize the actual results, and I, I, 'cause I'm, I'm looking at your report right now. I think you've done it very cleanly and very, very well. Talk to me about how you do that and how you do that a little bit differently depending on the benefit, uh, the benefit we're talking about.
Matt Lister: Yeah. So, you know, in terms of the, uh, the BAR score itself, you know, that's a starting metric. We do a national, industry, region and group size comparison, and it's done sort of like on a heat map where we're showing, uh, whether or not the plan they're in red, you know, potentially in the bottom 50 percent, in the yellow in the middle range or, or one of the shades of green in, in being more competitive. When we dig into the actual benchmarking, we typically organize it by benefits included versus not included on our **** report, so we look at like what is the current plan, what do we have today on the left-hand side versus what does the comparison group have on the right-hand side, and one of the things about our reports is we try to make them highly actionable and just cut straight to the data. We give you the numbers that you're looking for. We show the range in coverage that exists out there and really guide you to here's how your plan stacks up, so we'll do two types of benchmarks. We'll do one of the prevalence of the benefits, so if you have life insurance, and 95 percent of these employees have life insurance. You have long-term disability, and maybe only 70 percent of those employers have long-term disability, and then we'll break into the details about that coverage, and there's, of course, uh, you know, the devil's in the details, so you can start to look at what, uh, what are the, the highest-level factors that people care about. Like, what is the level of life insurance. Is it a flat amount? Is it multiple of earnings, and already on life insurance, you know, we're probably talking in more detail that most employers look at, but our system automatically organizes all that information for them from the benefits plan booklet, so we intake all that complexity. We organize it into the report, and then we color code and we match them where their current coverage is to where they stand in the market, and we do it on a quartile ranking, so what that means is we'll show what the, the bottom 25th or the, the bottom 25 percent of the market offers, the middle 50th or the median what the, the middle of the market offers and then the top 75th and the, the top 25 percent of the market, and of course, there are outliers. You know, there will be employers that have like the lowest level of coverage possible on the left-hand side, and there might be employers on the right-hand side that have the highest level of coverage, but the middle 50 percent range is what most people care about. They wanna know like generally speaking, how do we sit in, uh, on this mix, and so they'll get this pattern emerging on the page of some stuff is low in the left-hand side, some stuff is high on the right-hand side, and ultimately that can guide them to, you know, here are the gaps in coverage, um, that we can consider, and we'll produce as many versions of that report as the employer needs for the specific comparison group that they care about, so we can do that by industry, region and group size. Again, you've always got that BAR score to, uh, uh, to summarize everything as well.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. So you also at the beginning of the show talked about how you're a marketplace. Now, I know you specifically deal predominantly with agencies. You're not an agency yourself. How do you bring the marketplace into the entire conversation in order to enable people to solve this problem, or, a problem if, if it is a problem, if they're, uh, that their package isn't what it should be.
Matt Lister: Yeah. Well, I, I do think it's a problem and, and what we have looked at is benchmarking and everything we've talked to so far, benchmarking is like a problem identification machine. You know, you're gonna find the gaps or you're gonna find the areas that are under benchmarked or outdated, so you're gonna identify all these problems, things in the left-hand side, the things that are low, and, uh, it's only half the equation or half for the employer. Right. Okay. Great. You've told me about what are the problems are in my plan. You know, what are the solutions, and so the marketplace, uh, really serves to find those solutions for employers. So what we have is we have the benchmarking, which identifies all of these problems, and that's the marketplace of data, you know, the, a marketplace of data about the industry, what other employers are doing, what the trends are and, uh, and ultimately what the levels of coverage are out there. Then we've developed a solution marketplace, and the solution marketplace is, uh, products and services from vendors across the benefits, retirement, HR and wellness space. Uh, we've got about 500 solutions and growing in there, and what the system can do in the plan evaluation is match, uh, eligible solutions directly, uh, to that employer, so if they don't have, uh, a program like, uh, an employee assistance p, uh, plan or they don't have virtual mental health services or critical illness or one of these, uh, benefits, the system can search the solution marketplace and see is it available with the current carrier as an add-on solution. Are there other standalone vendors that offer, uh, **** and, uh, and ultimately, uh, what is the rate and what would it cost, and so we'll connect them not just with the vendor and the vendor's information, but we'll perform an instant quote and an instant proposal, so that the employer has everything they need to, oh, you've identified the problem, and you've offered the solution, and we know what it costs, so the advisor and the employer right then in the meeting, especially for some of these, you know, low-cost high-value items, they can take a decision to add these to their, to their benefits package, and so the solution marketplace exists as another service on platform for our **** partners and our HR professionals to be able to search by any keyword, you know, what's available in this broad marketplace of employee, employer group solutions, and, and then it also exists for our software to be able to pick and choose, and commonly, you know, advisors have their preferred solutions, maybe they have exclusive rights, and all of that can be customized on the particular evaluation that the employer gets.
Jason Pereira: Excellent.
Matt Lister: Yeah.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. So the bottom line is is that this is a nice little end-to-end solution for how advisors can basically raise the bar for the kind of the information they're getting. I mean, the, the reality is most advisors wanna do the right job, but we didn't have the toolset, so great work here.
Matt Lister: Yeah. Thanks. I, I'll just, uh, expand on that because one, one of the things that when I started as an advisor in the industry, you would almost hesitate to offer benchmarking. You knew it was valuable, but you also knew that it was man, it was manual, and it was labor intensive to pull together different data sources and structure a report for the client, and maybe you could only achieve a small sample size when you did it, but if it's valuable to your client, you're gonna do it. If it's valuable to a prospect and you might be able to help them and, and win their business, you're gonna do it, and so this, everything that we do in this industry exists to serve the employer and, and ultimately their people, and so by automating this, it's now become something that any advisor can freely offer to all of their clients all year round, uh, at any point that any employer can access, and they don't have to go through a high-priced consultant and, and a long process. Uh, we recognize that business owners are busy and, and they've got businesses to run, and insurance is only a small component of that that needs to be done efficiently and effectively and, and conveniently, and things like our BAR score, uh, and automated benchmarking allow them to very quickly, like, instantly in the first meeting, get a view of how their plan stacks up, how they can improve it, what it would cost to improve it, uh, and they can take a decision from there, so trying to make it as simple and easy for all employers now to get insight on what they, uh, could and should be offering their people and ultimately enhance benefits that Canadians rely on in the marketplace.
Jason Pereira: Excellent. So, Matt, thank you so much for taking the time. Where can people find you?
Matt Lister: Yeah. So we're online. Our website is, uh, cloudadvisors.ca. Employers can actually search the marketplace directly through benefits.cloudadvisors.ca and sign up for a, a free account there. Uh, we're also on all major social media platforms. We're very active on, uh, LinkedIn and Twitter. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram and other platforms, so encourage to, uh, to connect with us. We've got a great marketing team putting out, uh, all sorts of helpful information to the broader HR, uh, audience, uh, but not just our benchmarking services, but, um, we host webinars and other things, uh, that on, uh, emerging trends and topics that I think employers would find a lot of great value in as well, so.
Jason Pereira: Excellent.
Matt Lister: That's where we are.
Jason Pereira: Thank you. Matt, thanks **** time.
Matt Lister: Awesome. Thanks, Jason.
Jason Pereira: So that was my interview with Matt Lister, CEO Cloud Advisors. If you enjoyed that podcast, as always, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Sound Cloud, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, take care.
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