About The Voluntary Benefits Shop

I realized recently that after all the excitement and hard work of rebranding our business, setting up a new website and starting a blog, the About Us section of our website was really unfinished. I put some generic, placeholder language there, then got hit by deadlines and never properly fleshed out the section.

So last week I polled my staff and asked: What do we want people to know about us? What should be in that About Us section of the website?

Leadership secret #14: get your staff to tell you what to do, then run with it

And I got some good answers! Some people focused more on our services -- the value proposition for our customers. That gave me some good ideas for future improvements to the website proper. But from doing my homework on online marketing, it's pretty clear that the importance of the About Us page is that it's not about your sales pitch. Or rather, it's the part of your sales pitch where you present the more personal side of your business, the side that a customer might relate to more as a person, less as a consumer.

So here is attempt #1 at really explaining who The Voluntary Benefits Shop is. Maybe someday we'll even add nice photos of all of us.

This is one of those blog posts where we ask the deeper questions...wait, where are you going? Come back!

About Us

The Voluntary Benefits Shop was formed in 2013 by four partners with a long history in the voluntary benefits business. If you did the thing where you add up the total number of years in the business per partner to illustrate our experience, we have about 80 years of experience. That's a lot!

Before we started the business (originally called Mid-Atlantic Benefits Group) we all worked high level positions for a large quacking carrier. We ran sales, training and market development for several states. That was good, until it wasn't. There were a lot of things we wanted to do differently.

One thing we really liked doing was working with group benefit brokers. They needed help with voluntary benefits. They needed expertise and they needed enrollment services. We decided The Voluntary Benefits Shop was going to be an indispensable resource for brokers to develop their VB business.

We also knew that we wanted our business to be more than a regional concern. That takes a team. We started with more partners than employees, so finding the right people to help us has been a big part of our story.

When we look at all the jobs that, in the early days, were done by a partner but are now done by a person or whole department that specializes in sales, administration, product recommendations, enrollment, call center, case management, new business processing, customer service or special projects, we're very proud of what we've built and of how it continues to grow.

We have a great team! This crew has run benefit enrollments in all 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and Guam! <imagine photos of smiling faces here>