As many of you know, I worked for a third party administration (TPA) for almost 5 years. I liked my co-workers, loved the work, but I didn\u2019t love constantly fighting for a decent raise every December. The majority owner of this producing TPA was a master salesman, but his partner who acted as the COO was incompetent and just a miserable man to work for. The place seemed to have a large turnover of employees and I told my boss that happy employees never leave, only unhappy employees leave.<\/p>\n
After taking a contractually required break from the retirement plan business (which included a Department of Labor investigation), this TPA owner has started a new financial advisory practice where independent ERISA fiduciary services are offered. I have received many calls about this development as this TPA owner and I never saw eye to eye after I left (with much thanks to his partner for that).\u00a0 I even received a call from the head of a producing TPA that inherited my old TPA\u2019s block of business and this is after this person had blown me off previously. I don\u2019t know the purpose of the call, other than lamenting that my old boss is stealing this guy\u2019s business. My issues with this old boss is in the past, what he\u2019s doing has nothing to do with me because he\u2019s not taking food out of my mouth and I loathe to get in any fight that doesn\u2019t involve me (I wish some of my family members took that advice).<\/p>\n
The point is that people can be incredulous that this old boss of mine is in the advisory business again, but the fact is that happy retirement plan sponsor clients never leave. As a retirement plan provider, be less concerned with what the competition is doing and be more mindful of how you treat your client.\u00a0 If they want to hire a provider who left some unanswered questions about allegations made against them that really doesn\u2019t matter because the client clearly wasn\u2019t happy if they are getting rid of you.<\/p>\n
Providers may tell me that they have had happy clients terminate them and I just believe that because of the difficulty in changing plan providers, no retirement plan sponsor client making a change was happy with the current provider\u2019s work. \u00a0It may be a simplistic approach, but that\u2019s my story and I\u2019m sticking to it.<\/p>\n
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