According to Servant Insurance Services, a servant is one who puts the needs of others before self and is willing to go the extra mile to help others. Sounds simple, but using the servant mindset to serve the business community resonates among clients of the company.
Although Servant is just two years old, Managing Partner Mark Priestaf helped form the firm on the foundation of a larger agency that Priestaf had a 50% ownership stake for nearly 30 years.
“Typical philosophical differences in management style and direction necessitated the formation of Servant,” Priestaf recalled. “The new organization gave Wayne Weese, my managing partner, and me the ability to start fresh in the agency’s direction and focus.”
Besides a client-first mentality, a differentiator at Servant Insurance is the use of a proprietary-software program developed by sister company Dynamic Benefit Systems (DBS) to develop consumer-directed health care programs in real time. Gone are weeks of meetings and planning while various options are discussed. The system, developed in conjunction with Dan Morrill, employee benefits vice president at Servant and president of DBS, shows the effect of various decisions and plan options at a glance, allowing employers to tweak plan offerings and discover the costs associated with each option.
“The key component we as benefit brokers felt was missing in the marketplace was a tool to aid employers and their brokers in the design and communication of CDHC plans,” Priestaf said. “Standard spreadsheet presentations and analysis provided to the employer by brokers proved extremely time-consuming, lacked clarity, were largely static in nature and, frankly, just didn’t do the job. We reasoned that with appropriate design and communication software, three potential failure points involving the three key players in the equation—the broker, employer management, and employees—could be eliminated or significantly reduced.”
Those failure points include poor communication and understanding of key CDHC concepts, employers making a poor decision about health plans because of a lack of clarity, and lack of buy-in among employees.
The result is the DBS system, which allows analysis of various plan options in real time for not only coverage but also potential impacts to the employer’s bottom line. Faced with nearly constant double-digit increases in health care premiums, employers can tailor benefits to minimize increases and take advantage of CDHC offerings. Employers also can examine the impact on employees in the form of employee payroll plan contributions of the various plan designs as well net employee out-of-pocket maximums, after the impact of HRA and/or HAS contributions are factored.
“The motivation in the design of our software places the employer and its employees at the center of our world and drives every additional broker tool and resource that we, as practicing brokers, offer within the software,” Priestaf said. “Our daily struggle, as a broker, is to humbly honor and fulfill our agency value system that was the impetus for our choice of our name, Servant Insurance.”
- Company: Servant Insurance Services Inc.
- Headquarters: Oshkosh, WI
- Website: www.servantinsurance.com
- No. of employees: Approximately 17
- Nature of business: Servant Insurance Services provides employee benefits insurance as well as commercial, personal, property, and casualty insurance.
Key executives:
- Mark Priestaf, managing partner
- Wayne Weese, managing partner