Today we’d like to introduce you to Bret Brummitt.
Bret, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I actually landed a job in insurance sales back in 1999, at a youthful age of 24. Back then learning how to be an adult and raise a young child was a much more pressing issue than rising up the ranks of an organization.
Being the youngest person in our firm meant many things in the midst of the dot.com era, one of which was becoming the defacto expert on all things computers, internet and technology. Thankfully, that role fit me well.
Growing up as a person over the last 18 years has really been a simultaneous coming of age through the organization as well. I constantly learn how to interact, manage and motivate our team each day. Having an education in psychology actually leads to business interactions rather well, and having a vast array of personality in our organization can keep you on your toes.
I went on to be the “managing partner” at a firm where I experienced a huge lesson in financial analysis, strategic decisions, personnel development, hiring and also leading a charge to do none other but grow a bigger technology department. We tripled our staff over 3 years and took on the audacious task of beta-testing 2 other companies software interfaces. And that is something that is extremely rewarding and extremely taxing when working out daily glitches that your team can’t control.
In 2019, I opened by own benefits firm with the desire to provide generous and meaningful benefits aligned with our employers’ strategies. It has been a fun and rewarding experience.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It has been a stressful road, but a rewarding road. The leap of faith to move beyond just sales as a sole source of income and move into organizational management, people development and product development is an overwhelming task.
The biggest obstacle has been expenses. Having to personally invest 50% to 70% of your personal income back into a company is rewarding as you get back to a break-even level, but all along the way it is hard not to doubt that your decisions are wrong and that influences outside of your control will ultimately sidetrack your goals.
Learning to empower other teammates is also a really easy idea to talk about, finding ways to reward their successes is actually really hard when you don’t specifically know what battles they are facing and winning. It is easy with sales, much harder with service and software.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
A few years back we would have described ourselves as an Employee Benefits Insurance agency with exceptional service and the best negotiators for rates.
That just really wasn’t enough, so we changed.
Now, we are still an insurance agency at our core, but we have grown into an HR Technology and Insurance Advisory firm. It is now engrained in our culture to make sure we are on the cutting edge of our industry. Instead of just looking to provide good products at a great price, we dig deeper with assessing the organization goals of our clients and we align technology, products and our people to create measurable impact. It’s all about creating organizational efficiencies and training our clients to think outside the box and ask “what if” questions.
What were you like growing up?
I was a borderline runt, always too skinny to be taken seriously as an athlete. I did play baseball all the way from grade school to adulthood, and even still play in the Dallas Men’s Baseball League.
I collected baseball cards, went to card shows and stood in line for hours to get autographs of the heroes from the era before as well as the current stars at the time.
I also was very much interested in fixing things, which let me to car restorations in my teens and early adult years. I’ve owned way too many cars and ended up with an affinity for undervalued European cars of the 70’s. To this day I still own an Opel GT and two other modern tiny European cars too.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.GenerousBenefits.com
- Phone: 214-659-1236
- Email: Bret@GenerousBenefits.com
- Twitter: www.twitter.com/bretbrummitt
- Other: linkedin.com/in/bretbrummitt
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