The Crumdale Connection | EP 04 Jake Willcox

[Jessica Willingham] Welcome to The Crumdale Connection. I’m your host, Jessica Willingham. I’m speaking with Crumdale Partners President of Enterprise Revenue, Jake Willcox.  Welcome.

[Jake Willcox] Thanks for having me, Jess.

[Jessica Willingham] Thanks so much for joining us. So, tell me about Crumdale Partners. What challenges are you seeing in the market and how are you providing innovative solutions?

[Jake Willcox] Yeah, so the market is extremely large, right? And it’s hard to navigate sometimes. But there’s also a lot of consolidation that’s happening in the market right now. A lot of carriers are vertically integrating their stacks around healthcare. And it’s creating a need for new solutions because the options are limited and they’re becoming more limited year over year through this vertical integration the carriers have been up to for the last couple years. So, Crumdale’s job really is to seek alternatives, provide disruptive, innovative solutions to our partners that they can then take out to their employer groups to show some value.

[Jessica Willingham] And can you speak to some of those solutions that you provide?

[Jake Willcox] Yeah, sure. So, our Integrated Health offering is extremely exciting. It is a direct competitor to some of those carrier options, where we are de-coupling and un-bundling all the services and provider services that the carriers are bundling together that they own, to drive a better outcome and to decrease costs.

[Jessica Willingham] So, you’re pulling together essentially all of the component parts in this fragmented marketplace, and you’ve got people backing that up. Can you talk about some of the brainpower at Crumdale?

[Jake Willcox] Yeah, sure. So, you know, Crumdale really is a people-first company. We have a ton of expertise. You know, over the last four or five years, our headcount has grown at Crumdale exponentially. We’re bringing the brightest minds from around the industry and around the country to the Crumdale team. We’re utilizing all that expertise to navigate this complicated system that we have here to build solutions from the ground up, to partner with best-in-class vendors, and to pull it all back together and make it super easy and simple for people to use and to understand.

[Jessica Willingham] And when all of those elements align, everything comes together to work for you, for your partners, brokers that you choose to work with, and their employer groups. And the model at Crumdale is quite unique in the way that you work with those broker partners. Can you speak to what you’re looking for in those relationships?

[Jake Willcox] Yeah, sure. So, this obviously doesn’t work unless everybody wins. We call it a win-win-win. So, you know, when our employer groups are saving money, our brokers look good, so the employer group wins, the broker looks great and they win, and we’re ultimately winning too because we’re reducing costs and driving waste out of the system. So, you know, we wouldn’t have a business unless we were able to provide that win-win-win. And so Crumdale really operates as an insurance entity working with distribution partners – our brokers and consultants – to help them with their opportunities with their employer groups. We don’t go direct to employer groups; We work exclusively through what we call our limited distribution model.

[Jessica Willingham] And what are you looking for in those brokers as part of that limited distribution model?

[Jake Willcox] Yeah, so what we do really is different than the way healthcare has been delivered over the last 30 to 50 years. And some of the distribution partners out there in the United States aren’t good fits for Crumdale because we’re actually doing something that is counterintuitive to how they’ve operated and maximized their own profits, you know, all of these years. The carriers, you know, play funny games. They utilize overrides and incentive bonuses and, you know, sometimes those dollars that come on the backside are too important and they’re too insurmountable to create a relationship with Crumdale who’s looking to really drive waste out of the system and create better outcomes and lower costs and, you know, when a broker partner isn’t aligned completely with us and they’re really relying on that brand name of that carrier partner and those overrides and those incentives, it’s hard for them to move to a product like ours.

[Jessica Willingham] So, Crumdale really is all about alignment of interests, and when you work together, everyone wins – Crumdale, the broker, the employer group, and most importantly, the employees you serve. Can you talk about what alignment of interests means to you and any closing remarks?

[Jake Willcox] Yeah, sure. I think, you know, as our business continues to grow and we learn more about the marketplace and more about the needs in specific markets, what the brokers are looking for, what solutions are out there, we’re gonna continue to, you know, innovate and ideate and build new solutions and make what we have already today even stronger and more robust. At the same time, we’re constantly evaluating our limited distribution network of partners. Things happen. Things change. You know, we need that alignment more than ever so that we can produce better outcomes. And ultimately if we have those better outcomes and we have that alignment between our broker partners, it’s really good for them too because, you know, the last thing that we want to do is spend a lot of time, you know, working on projects or opportunities that go nowhere. And brokers don’t want to waste their time either, right? And so, no more than ever, it’s important to understand what does the data tell us? What does the process tell us? And utilizing data and process to figure out who is a good partner with that alignment in mind.

[Jessica Willingham] Well, when we work together, everyone wins. And I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us.

[Jake Willcox] Thanks for having me.