Being Client-Centric and the Power of Listening with Gianna Ricciardi

I think for me it's just go step by step. You can't eat an elephant in one bite. Like just go step by step. Don't try to race to the top or just take one step, put one foot in front of the other, make one action and another action. And sometimes when you take a lot of steps fast, it goes really fast. So it's just keep on taking those steps in the direction that you want to be headed and readjust along the way. And don't stop moving because when you stop moving, that's when you become paralyzed and don't end up progressing, but just one baby step at a time. I think that's the most important thing to keep in mind. Welcome to Super Entrepreneurs Podcast. Today we have with us Janna Ricciardi. Janna is co-founder and practice leader at Vida Assure. She has worked with finance, human resources and payroll teams for almost 20 years, designing employee benefit packages that meet the evolving needs of the work. Welcome to our show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. My pleasure. And thank you for taking the time to come on our show. I see that you have a lot of experience in this realm. Now, is this a business? Do you actually do this for corporations? Exactly. So you talk about experience. So I've actually been on the corporate side for most of my career. So maybe the first 15 years or so, we're working for big companies. I worked for an insurance company, one of the biggest insurance companies in Canada. Then I went into a national consulting firm, but I'm an entrepreneur at heart and you can't escape it when you're an entrepreneur. So about five years ago, I left, I branched out and I decided to start Vida Assure, which is an insurance brokerage firm, but much more boutique style. And yeah, so we work with businesses. We work essentially with small and medium sized businesses to help them put in place benefits. There's essentially three pillars. So we have group insurance plans, which would include the health, dental, vision, disability benefits that employees often get. The second pillar would be retirement plans. So these are the retirement schemes that allow the employees to become financially ready for retirement. And then you have the third pillar, which is the wellness. So more and more, I think employers are recognizing that life is stressful. We spend a lot of time at work. We want employees to be happy and productive, to miss work less. So they're trying to foster a healthy environment by putting together wellness plans. So this is what we do. This is what we do every single day for our clients. So talk to me about the wellness plan. How do you do that for corporation? It's, it's through talking with the client. It's really important when you're putting a wellness plan in place that, that what we say, it goes top, top bottom. So you need buy-in from leadership. So if leadership is just trying to rubber stamp something or just tick off a box, it's not going to work. The employer needs to believe in it and be involved in it. So when we meet with companies, we try to see what are the pain points? What are, what are, what type of employee profiles do you have? What are the issues that might be affecting them and what do you want to address? And then we come up with a plan. We, there's so many different things that we can do, whether it be beefing up the group insurance plan, doing education for employees, giving them self-service tools. And actually a lot of what we're doing right now is training for leadership. Cause I said, it's top bottom. So it's really training for managers, supervisors, team leaders, anybody's that's directly interacting with employees needs to have the training to be able to live and breathe that. So Jana, when we're looking at these, the training and creating a wellness program and whatnot, do you work with third party companies to provide that? Or you have all this in-house? Good question. No, we have a lot of partners and collaborators. One person can't know everything. One company can't do everything. And that's our strength is that we're the ones that are putting everything together. Once we make the plan or the strategy, we say, okay, what type of third party resources do we need? And we go out to the market and find them for the, for our clients. We're the one-stop shop so that the client or the business doesn't need to break their heads, going out to the market, trying to source everything, trying to figure everything out. And we do that for them. And we work with a, we have a huge network of people that we work with. That's awesome. You know what we're meeting here today for the first time. So I'm also someone that you can look at to help you guys with the mindset and the wellness side of things. So we're, we might be meeting for more than just helping you grow and sharing your message. So who knows? Of course, we'll have another meeting. We'll have to delve into that. For sure. My pleasure. So this is great. Now, well, can you share some benefits for entrepreneurs that are not aware? Going directly to the Fortune 500 companies out there to provide these benefits or going through a brokerage? What are the positives to, for going towards a brokerage rather than directly? Yeah, there's a lot of benefits, but my market primarily is small, medium-sized business. So I think that a lot of times when you're trying to deal direct with these big companies, you're, you miss some of that more human aspect to the business. And so for us, what's really important is we do a lot of hand-holding. So we don't just negotiate rates or proposals or negotiate renewals. It's really, we see ourselves as an extension of kind of the HR or payroll teams or finance team. Oh, that's a big one. Yeah, I know it's honestly, it's a really big benefit because one of the things, the things that we hear a lot from smaller businesses is that insurance is boring. It's complicated. And there's so much paperwork, it's compliant and they're too busy. They have so much to do. So we heard that and that's what we try to alleviate. So it's not just about negotiating. It's really about making it easy for them because or else they might miss the opportunity to offer amazing benefits. And that's so important these days to attract and retain the right talent. Yeah. Yeah. Jenna, it reminds me, I also in the past have sold insurance other than life policies, home and auto and stuff. I know the amount of paperwork that is involved and I completely agree with you. It's funny. We have so much in common. Yeah. That is great. That is great. When, when I asked that question is because I know the benefits, what of it is that they actually go out and they find you the best available options and they actually work like you mentioned, part of the client, like they're shoulder to shoulder with the client, right? So it just feels safer. You feel more organized. You feel like you have the proper information. There's more handholding. I feel for the brokerage compared to the going direct. Yeah. And you know what? We know the market, so it does save a lot of time. So yes, we're going to, we're going to go out and do, let's say a market study to compare, but it's funny because a lot of the times I can almost guess which provider is going to come in first place. Like we know the market so well now because we do it so often that it just saves so much time. And like you said, it does add a lot of confidence to the person who has to make the decision. We don't have the same conflict of interest as the big companies who are trying to push their own product because we work with everyone. Yeah. That's a big benefit right there. Right. And are you restricted to any States or you're you work anywhere? So that's actually an interesting question because we're located in Montreal, Canada. So we're a Canadian brokerage firm. So our specialty and our licensing as well is restricted to Canada, but we work with a lot of international companies because partners, sorry, partners. Yeah, no, not partners. We have clients outside of Canada because there's a lot of international companies that are growing and expanding to different countries. So when they come into Canada, a lot of times they don't know the market and they don't really know where to turn. And we have a big segment of our business that is actually, for example, American cuts so close, right? We're just North of the border. So we have a lot of American companies that are expanding into Canada growing or their existing divisions, but they're growing. So they need to have expertise and yeah. So it's fun to be able to work with people from all around the world. Yeah. No, it's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Have you guys been looking at artificial intelligence and how to protect businesses? Is that something that has come up in your line of work? I think in the insurance industry, they're for sure looking for to AI, just like all industries to automate. I don't know to what extent I'm trying to think. I don't know to what extent we're looking at it as a bad thing or in terms of having to protect people from it for our industry, it's more about automation and making it easier for people to get access to resources. But for sure, as it evolves, you want to be careful. You just want to be careful that somebody who's giving you advice is a real person and it's not just a machine sending out something. But in general, I think insurance companies are utilizing AI to make the experience better for the end user. So it's a plus. Yeah, it's a plus. How did you get into this line of work? Is this something you were thinking about growing up? No, not at all. No, not at all. Actually, I fell into this. So when I graduated, I was looking for work like students, like graduates often do. And I just had an opportunity for an interview. And just to tell you at what point I had no clue about insurances. But the day before the interview, I was googling like, what is a deductible? I knew nothing about insurance. And it just happened that I had a good fit with the team. And they hired me and they trained me. I learned so much in my first, I guess, career move that I fell in love with insurance. And I really saw the need. I saw the benefit. And I decided to stick with it. So 20 years later, I'm still here. But it really happened purely by coincidence. In fact, I studied marketing. So it wasn't really exactly related. But like I said, sometimes when there's an opportunity, and it just clicks, you have to roll with it. So yeah, what is the what is that one thing that your colleagues look to you and say, you know what, this is such a wonderful quality that you implemented in our business that's making things better? Is there such a thing? For sure there are, I'd like to think it's just an accumulation of a lot of things, a lot of small things. But I've experienced. Yeah, no, I think that what I have is a book is an intuition or a way to actually relate with my clients. I think in insurance, it's so technical that a lot of times the companies that I've worked for, they would just produce outputs or reports that happen to be very technical and full of jargon, because it's the nature of the business. But I always and I think this is what people like about me is I always try to bring it back to the client and say, okay, this 50 page report that you've prepared and spent hours and hours preparing, what is the client going to get out of this? Is this valuable? If they don't understand half of it? Is it really adding value? The client doesn't care that you spent two weeks producing it, they care what they're getting out of it. So for me, it's always about making my product or my solution relatable, easy to understand and practical. So what's the client going to get out of this? How is this going to be useful? Yeah, good. Yeah. Yeah. That's excellent relatability, right? Like how do you dumb things down or make things more simple or make more humanized things, the relationship that is crucial, especially when you're working with clients. For anyone that is in such a business, looking to grow their client base, is there anything that you could share a secret preferably, that can help them grow what they do, knowing what you know? I think that everybody's different. So you have to look into yourself, everybody has their own, if you like to say, superpower. But we're going to get to that. I think for me, it's just go step by step. You can't, you can't, what's that expensive? You can't eat an elephant in one bite. Like just go step by step. Don't try to race to the top or get, just take one step or one foot in front of the other, make one action and another action. Yeah. And sometimes when you take a lot of steps fast, it goes really fast. So it's just keep on taking those steps to in the direction that you want to be headed and readjust along the way. And don't stop moving is when you stop moving, that's when you become paralyzed and don't end up progressing, but just one baby step at a time. I think that's the most important thing to keep in mind. What's that one consistent thing that you guys do for your business that's been helping you? Going back to what is the one thing that we're doing that can help another entrepreneur? Again, it goes back to listening to your clients. I think in any industry, for sure in my industry, but in any industry, everything it's really about being client centric. What are the client's needs? What are their expectations? And you mentioned at the beginning, how, you know, we focus on meeting evolving benefit needs. And that's so important because there's nothing that stays fixed and doesn't move. So your client's needs evolve as well. And actually insurance and the financial sector is in a huge transformation right now because of technology, because of so many things, because of the pandemic. And so when the day that you stop listening to your clients, and you need to pivot. So you listen, you listen, you take an action. You listen, you take an action. That's really what's so important to us. Very good. Very good. Lessen the ego and listen to your customers and take action and trial and error, test it, see what works better and utilize. Absolutely. So Jana, what do you feel your innermost superpower is that got you to this point in life? So I'd like to answer that by circling back to a story. So while one of my managers early on in my career used to always say that we have two ears and only one mouth. Really, we should be listening twice as much as we're speaking. And it goes back to my whole philosophy of being client centric, because at the core, being an entrepreneur is seizing opportunities. And when you're really listening and paying attention to clients, collaborators, the market industry, that's when the opportunities just seem to pop up right at you. And that's why it's a little bit of a, it's a strength really to be able to hone in and to really focus on what the other person's saying, not just let it go in and out. And I would say that's something I'm proud of. Very good. I love that. Speak less, listen more. Wonderful. I like that. And I call this exclusive listening because listening completely shifts everything because we miss so much when we don't actually listen. And a lot of podcast hosts, for example, and I was one of them before I would be just be trying to figure out what the next thing to ask. And I would miss the power behind that vibration that was coming from the guests into my ears. And I was comprehending what they're saying. I was losing that effectiveness of what they're sending to me, broadcasting to me because I was, my mind was over there in the future. I was trying to figure out what am I going to say next? Yes. Because the importance was I want to make sure I ask the right questions, right? So what happens is that power is lost. And then I don't, you don't get the actual response that the guests even deserves. So I really, truly believe in listening. And I love the fact that the way you run your business is based on listening to your customers and implementing what they say, because there's a lot of businesses that say this, and there might be a lot of variables involved, why a lot of them don't get implemented, right? Because they just have to find out the right ones to help with. But the ones that do listen and implement and look out for the customer base, they win, right? Because now the customer feels, they feel at home. They don't, they feel like they're heard. They're respected enough to see what their viewpoint is and to see if the implementing is going to help them and other people. So that's a great quality for your business and yourself. Thank you. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much, Jana, for taking the time to come on our show today. It was wonderful having you. I'm looking forward to seeing your growth continue to grow. If there's anything that we can help with, let us know. And audience, thanks again for joining us today for another episode. Jana's information will be in the show notes. Check out her site, her information, see how she can help you and your business. Oh, I forgot to ask you, do you do anything for personal side as well, Jana? We do, but we focus more on business owners because our clients are businesses. So then once we help with the employee benefits and they need help on the personal side, then we also help them. Okay, great. One more question for the audience. How many languages do you guys speak? Me? No, in the brokerage, how many languages do you care towards customers? Officially English and French because those are the two. Of course. Yeah, but the team, we also speak Spanish and Italian. Yes. So we're sure we can help, but officially we would do all the documentation and everything in English and French. Of course. But we always love Montreal is so multicultural. I can probably get by with, I can, I probably know snippets in some, like maybe some Greek, some, some Arabic. You know what? I can, I can get by. Good. Yeah. The reason why I was asking, because the audience, somebody might be in there that have difficulty with English and they're looking to branch out to Canada, for example, because our audience is all over the world so that they, it's good information for them to know. Yeah. Even if I don't know, if I don't know, I'm sure I know somebody that can help them. Wonderful. Well, again, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Jana. Thank you so much. It was really a pleasure.