The Granite List Live

Navigating a sea of benefits solutions is daunting at best, and new vendors emerge every week. Hosts Leigh Dill and Sally Pace bring brokers and employers a solid resource when it comes to uncovering what’s new, what’s needed, and what is happening now to allow for the best plan design possible. By staying on top of trends, brokers and employers can in turn stay on top of spend while improving employee engagement and outcomes. Listen in as experts across all spectrum of the benefits universe share their secrets of success on The Granite List. Live.

Here is the full transcript from this episode:

Announcer: Welcome to another episode of The Granite List Live. Navigating a sea of benefit solution is daunting at best and new vendors emerge every week. Host Leigh Dill and Sally Pace bring brokers and employers a solid resource when it comes to uncovering what's new, what's needed, and what is happening now to allow for the best plan design possible. By staying on top of trends, [00:00:30] brokers and employers can intern stay on top of spending, while improving employee engagement and outcomes. Listen in to this episode today.

Sally Pace: Welcome, everybody. Welcome to our introductory episode of The Granite List Live. This is Sally Pace, and I'm here with Leigh dill. Leigh, tell our audience a little bit about yourself before we jump into what The Granite List is and why we're doing this podcast.

Leigh Dill: Yes, thank you. I'm so excited to be here and excited [00:01:00] to share with you all of our vendors that we've been interviewing. My background is in accounting, and I found out pretty quickly that tax returns were not for me. I was at the right place at the right time to join a large local company when they were going from a fully insured platform to a self-insured platform. We had over 400,000 lives that we were managing.

So it really was its own ecosystem, which was really interesting to me, looking at the medical, dental, vision, and disability plans and seeing the [00:01:30] different risks associated with it and the different disease states that were happening. We were doing analysis and reporting on what was going on and plan recommendations. And of course, being that large of an employer, we had multiple vendors coming to us with their ideas. So after being there for a couple of years, I was lucky enough to join Sally at Connect Healthcare Collaboration doing data analysis.

Did that for a couple of months, and then COVID hit, which changed our direction [00:02:00] not completely-

Sally Pace: Pretty completely.

Leigh Dill: ...but a nice 90-degree turn. And so here we are.

Sally Pace: Well, I'm pretty sure we're the lucky ones to have the awesome team that we have under the CHC banner. My background is actually in marketing and communications as an executive in the financial industry. The irony is I don't like numbers, you do, but I spent the better part of my career helping to tell the story behind [00:02:30] them. That's why healthcare makes so much sense to me because it is a numbers game in many respects, and it's, unfortunately, one that so many employers see those numbers climbing year over year.

We've been fortunate to be aligned with and work with a lot of brokers and also vendor solutions that are working to combat that day in and day out. So like you said, we've looked at what our business model was and how we could add value to the entire benefits arena. [00:03:00] I love how this journey has taken us in places that we never dreamed of back in 2019.

Leigh Dill: Back in 2019 and before, everything was in-person. You receive lots of business cards, going to conferences. You found out what was out there. It's a relationship game, and it still is. Brokers and vendors trying to find each other. It's a referral service, what you've used before, what you're comfortable with. Fast forward into 2020 [00:03:30] and really beyond, who knows what's going to happen after this?

Sally Pace: True.

Leigh Dill: Thanks to everything, technology really is amazing, but the healthcare world is behind as far as how people find each other. Brokers and vendors are both looking for new connections and new ideas. That's really why we built The Granite List was to bring them together, and we definitely don't want to leave out the employer audience as well, because those are who are in clients are. At the end of the day, the sense of community [00:04:00] at The Granite lists, finding each other at point of interest is what we've built and why we're here today.

Sally Pace: One of the questions as we talk to those three different constituents, vendors, brokers, employers, that always comes up is, how'd you come up with the name? I love the story. As you and I know, it's certainly a labor of love and a lot of thought went into it. But for those of you in the audience that haven't heard it, I'd love to share a little bit about why we came [00:04:30] up with The Granite List. Of course, granite is a solid foundation.

It's firm. It's solid. But in our discovery, what we also found was that The Granite Cutters Union back in 1877 was the first group in the United States to offer plan members sick benefits. Now, obviously, it was gruesome work. I'm not sure as it has advanced. It's still a very tough job, but what we loved beyond just the obvious need for sick benefits and caring for people was this [00:05:00] whole other component that was uncovered, and that was the true spirit of community that you alluded to, Leigh. We found that The Granite Cutters Union had a newsletter.

I like to think of it as kind of the precursor to modern-day GoFundMe. And if you had a colleague that had a need that extended beyond the need for their sick benefits, you could submit their story to your supervisor and that story would get published and The Granite Cutters could rally around their colleague and really help improve their quality of life, their family [00:05:30] member's quality of life in whatever way they had a need.

Today, The Granite List, which is powered by Connect Healthcare Collaboration, we're really doing work to continue to instill that same sense of community and add real value and lasting value to plan members, but doing it in a very modern way. We're really excited about The Granite List Live.

It gives us the opportunity to sit down with many of the vendors you'll see on the site as you search [00:06:00] and get them to tell their story to you in a way that is meaningful, that hopefully inspires you, our audience, to learn about a new component or a new solution that you may not been aware of before, and really think about this community that we're building and how you can use The Granite List and by way of The Granite List Live to improve the quality of your plan.

Leigh Dill: I think that's a great way to summarize it. We'd love for you to join our community and listen in. [00:06:30] Listen to the stories that everybody has to share, because everybody has a great story to improve the lives of others. It's been a fun journey. We're just beginning.

Sally Pace: You can find us online at www.thegranitelist.com. Tune in to our next episode.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Granite List Live. Access our entire library by visiting your favorite podcast venue or [00:07:00] subscribe in our site, thegranitelist.live.