We talked with Cole about:
- How Cole & Move Health provide financial advisors with expert healthcare planning guidance to help their clients make their next move in life confidently
- The resources he provides for advisors when their clients need healthcare planning
- The power of human interaction and why it’s still preferred over AI in healthcare planning
About Cole Craven:
Cole is the managing partner & head of growth at Move Health & he lives in Evansville, IN with his wife Meghan and their 2 year old son, Porter. Cole has a passion for creating empowered and informed healthcare consumers through effective healthcare planning. Cole cofounded Move Health after recognizing that financial advisors and their clients were under-resourced and uninformed when it came to healthcare planning despite healthcare being a top financial concern for Americans nearing retirement. As managing partner, Cole works everyday with the Move Health team to further their mission of making health coverage simple & clear. Cole is a lifelong Hoosier & loves spending time outdoors with his growing family, playing music & meeting new people.
Featured Resources
- Cole Craven on LinkedIn
- Move Health Partners on LinkedIn
- Move Health Partners on Facebook
- Movehealthpartners.com
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Full Audio Transcript:
Lauren (00:05):
Cole, welcome.
Cole (00:07):
Thanks for having me, Lauren. I’m excited to be here.
Lauren (00:10):
All right, so you guys are in retreat today. We have Cole, he is the co-founder of Move Health Partners, and this is not his first rodeo. He's sat in other ventures leading up to this but I think we'll let him get into that a little bit more. But what makes it unique too is that they specifically work with advisors. I'll let him share a little bit more of the background and the story on the educational component and making sure folks are set up for success. So I don't want to take the words out of your mouth but why don't you share a little bit about your background, about you, and we'll go from there.
Cole (00:44):
Of course. Appreciate it. Grateful to be here. Excited to share a little bit today. My background: I live in Evansville, Indiana, and so you can't see out the windows of the office right now but I'm in the heartland and so it's just cornfield straight up to our front door and then our office. That's not totally true but there is a lot of agriculture here. But so I'm in Evansville, my wife, our 2-year-old son and I live here and we love it. It's a great place. It's interesting. I don't think anybody sets out for a long career in health insurance. Typically that's not what people say. Lauren, I don't know if you know this — I was an advertising major in college and so I my goal was I was going to graduate college, I was going to go work for a big ad firm. I was going to move to a big city, do that thing, and there were just different plans in place and I'm so grateful for where I'm at and I love the work I do.
And so I kind of stumbled into health insurance through a close friend who now is a business partner of mine here at Move Health. And so it's been a really cool walk into health insurance. I started in a really large agency and so we had scaled and grown an agency from 80 team members when I joined to almost 400 by the time we made our exit last summer. And so it was really big and we garnered a lot of really good information from that, which really led into what we are doing now as Move. And so Move Health is a really exciting new venture. I'm excited to talk about it but more importantly I'm excited to hopefully give a springboard to both advisors and maybe even if there's folks who are walking through the exact scenario we help with who may listen to this idea of just being able to help them demystify what health insurance and Medicare is. And that's really what our mission is: to make health coverage simple and easy to understand.
Lauren (02:46):
So tell me a little more, because I feel like, okay, if you've done a venture before, it can be in a variety of capacities. You learn so much, you get over the learning curves of the basic entry of what entity type and how to set up teams and org structures and fundraising, and it could be fundraising, it could be going after VC capital, a variety of things. So you've had those learning curves. What was the trigger for you guys to get Move Health going and then I'm sure it just has grown that much faster because you're coming into it with that previous experience. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about why Move.
Cole (03:23):
Yeah, exactly. For lack of a better word, pun totally intended. Yeah, no, anytime I use the word move, I have to qualify it. I'm a dad. The pun is absolutely intended every time we say move but it's a great question. So as we were growing our previous agency, we had had a smattering of financial advisors and wealth managers who had come to us with like, hey, I've got a client who needs help with their health insurance. Can you walk through it with them? Yeah, that's fine. No worries. And we also market it in different ways as well and source clients differently. But one of the things we noted about financial advisors and their clients is there's this huge grouping of people who are under-resourced and really uninformed and not on purpose but they're uninformed when it comes to health insurance and Medicare and it's really sometimes preventing them from making moves in life, whether that's the jump from W2 to entrepreneur or the move from working to retiring before 65 or if it's a confident transition to Medicare they're trying to make.
And so we saw that in what we were doing but we didn't really have the capacity or the resources to build that within our previous organization. So we launched Move to specifically serve financial advisors and their clients with health insurance and Medicare guidance that helps them to unlock their next move in life. And so like I mentioned, that could be someone who wants to be a small business owner but they need to figure out how to cover their young family. It could be most of the time it's the 55 to 64 window. Hey, I'm 61 years old and I want to retire. I don't know what to do for health insurance outside of my job. Hey, my client is 64 and a half and they're getting all kinds of mailers and junk and phone calls from people talking about Medicare and there's a quarterback on TV telling them to go with this plan and what direction do I go.
And so just being able to take all that white noise and just remove it and be able to give people really clear, concise, and good truthful information about what their options are so they feel educated and empowered. And then beyond that, making certain they have a game plan in place they feel really confident in that fits within their financial plan. So that's our unique bend — we only serve financial advisors. So we can talk the talk, walk the walk, and we know what's important to an advisor to get feedback from on their client's health insurance and healthcare needs.
Lauren (05:47):
So you're actually working with the advisors business as an entity and then you're working educating the advisors to know I guess what to listen for when they're talking with clients. Did I summarize that correctly?
Cole (05:57):
Yeah. Spot on. So we know through some pretty intense market research that financial advisors don't want to be in the weeds on health insurance. It's not something they were trained on. They may carry it, they may go, hey, I'm health and life licensed but it's like, that's great, but you're not in it every single day, just like I'm not in a financial plan every single day. And so we let the aces be in their places. And so that's what we act as. We kind of treat ourselves as an extension of the team and all we ask for the financial advisors is, hey, you can now proactively talk about healthcare planning, knowing you've got someone in your corner who can help to demystify that for your client or make it clear or that you can bounce questions off of, hey, my client's thinking about doing Roth conversions this year; how's that going to impact their health insurance costs?
Some advisors don't even know that those two are correlated or how that ties into Medicare Part B premiums, etc. And so there's a lot of things that coincide between health and wealth, if you will. And so it's really important to understand what that correlation is. And that's the unique piece about working with us and our team as a financial advisor. You don't have to be an expert. We really tell advisors every day like, hey, you want to be able to bring it up, identify the opportunity for healthcare planning, and then raise the white flag and go, hey, I'm not an expert in this but I know someone who is and I want to help you. And so we've seen really cool results from that, whether it be from firm growth because they've introduced healthcare planning and maybe even the bigger piece is client retention. So an advisor is always seeking to add non-investment value. How do we do that? How do we not sit in a meeting and just talk about investment performance? Let's talk about things you feel every single day. And one of those things they feel and are concerned about is what does health insurance look like for me beyond my job?
Lauren (07:49):
Okay. So I just want to back up the truck here. So you were talking about how an advisor could bring it up to a client or maybe, I don't know, maybe it comes organically through a conversation. If I was an advisor, what would you tell me about how to bring it up with a client or what are the key triggers to listen for to make sure that this is, like you said, health and wealth, they're really intertwined. It's a really important component. What advice would you give to advisors who might be listening?
Cole (08:17):
Yeah, we would consider this internally, we call it client segmentation. How do you understand who's a good fit to talk with about healthcare planning? It comes down to a variety. I firmly believe everybody can benefit from a further understanding of what health insurance is. Even if you're in a job and you have to select between a couple of different employer plan options or whatever it might be or understand how health insurance works, I believe everybody could benefit from that. And statistics and surveys would show Americans don't understand health insurance but as we're thinking exactly, it's complicated and it's not getting any simpler.
Lauren (08:53):
It's a lot of things that continue to change.
Cole (09:01):
It changes, yes. And then your own situation changes like everything you got it figured out, then it changes again. There are multiple axes that are working against each other in trying to make it clear. And so being able to cut through that noise is important and having an education. But as I think from an advisor's perspective, the people who are really primed for this conversation would be the individuals who are nearing retirement. That's a good conversation point to bring up. Hey, before you bring it to me as a concern, I want to bring up to you health insurance and retirement. This is something I know retirees are concerned about. I want to make certain you have a clear understanding of what health insurance costs are going to be. Because I think the other piece is advisors need to understand that as good as some financial planning softwares are out there, health insurance is still kind of like the wild west as far as estimating those costs within those platforms.
So many variables can go into what costs are. And so people who are nearing that retirement conversation, people who are already in a distribution phase of retirement, touch base with them. If you haven't talked about health insurance, this is a really quick and easy way to say, hey, I care about you. Obviously I'm watching investment performance. Obviously we're talking about tax planning. Obviously we're doing some of all the key things. Here's another way we can go deeper on your financial plan that allows us to not only forge a deeper relationship client to advisor but also for the advisor to add value in a really meaningful way. The other thing would be, hey, I've got 15 clients this year who are turning 65 — being that first person who reaches out before those mailers and all that stuff starts up, saying, hey, I care about you. I know you're going to get blown up in the next six months.
Talk to a resource I know and trust at least for an initial conversation. And you can make your own decisions after that point. But a lot of times that results in the client saying, oh wow, they're thinking about more than just my money. They truly are doing comprehensive planning and they're acting as that kind of center of influence. And so those would be some of the things we would look for, that early retiree space, folks who may be already in their distribution phase of retirement, folks who are getting ready to transition to Medicare. The other one we see all the time is people who are already on Medicare and they might be 73 years old and they haven't reviewed their coverage since they turned 65. And there's real opportunities for optimization, whether it be via prescription drug coverage or whatever plan or choice they went with initially. Medicare is not set it or forget it either. And so we always like to say, hey, we need to do an annual review. And so the wrap up of this segment is like anybody could benefit from healthcare education, anybody could. But I think kind of that early retiree, that distribution phase, that transition to Medicare are the really low hanging fruit that's a quick and easy way to add a lot of clients in a pretty low lift manner.
Lauren (11:55):
Yeah, I mean just as you're talking, it makes me think about CRM systems and when to put in triggers based off of, like you said, client segmentation. Those things are not forgotten about along the way to have the conversations or unique clients, business owners or they're part of the military or other sort of unique conditions that might be good prompts to bring up these kinds of conversations. So if someone is having these dialogs with a client, are there things they need to know at a baseline to be able to come to your team to sort of vet it out? Or is it more just like, hey Cole, we have a conversation, or can I introduce you to these folks? What does that actually look like?
Cole (12:34):
Yeah, really good question. So it can happen a variety of ways. And so it happens to the best of the advisors who do proactive healthcare planning that they get caught in a reactive state. But we always encourage like, hey, we encourage proactive action. And most financial planners are really good about that. But there is the occasion that a client comes to them and says, hey, I need help with my health insurance. And there's that Talladega Nights scene where Ricky Bobby holds up his hands and goes, I don't know what to do with my hands. And the advisor's like, I need to find a resource. What can I do? And then somehow they stumble upon us, whether it's via a webinar or a podcast or something where they've caught us and they go, I need help. And so usually what happens is the clients introduced to us at Move have either done that in that proactive or that reactive fashion.
And the first thing we do is always start with education. And a lot of times we actually encourage the advisor as long as the client's okay with it, we encourage the advisor to be on the call as well, at least initially. And a lot of times the advisor will leave that conversation and say, I really learned something, so thank you. That happens every single day. And so being able to walk through a thorough education, because most of the time the clients we are working with who are coming to us through an advisor, it's the first time they've ever had to buy health insurance outside of a job. And so they're struggling with that. And I've had people say, this was the biggest pain in my rear trying to figure this out, and I did all this research. And then you just turned it on its head and made it easy to understand.
So education first, needs analysis second. Hey, tell me about what your needs are. Tell me about the doctors you see, the prescription drugs you take. We do a really deep dive on the needs. And then what I always say is our team's superpower is being able to take 100+ available options in a particular zip code even and narrow it down to one or two and say like, hey, here are the options we suggest, and being able to give them that information. So hopefully that kind of answers the question of it doesn't matter if the initial conversation starts proactively or reactively; it's going to walk through the same client process. And the other piece being we think a really important part of what we do is closing the feedback loop for the advisor as well as being able to say, hey, there's a lot of times where an advisor will say, I've got an insurance guy.
It's great. It's kind of a black hole. I don't ever hear anything back. I think it's fine. And my challenge to that is always it’s fine what you aim to give to your clients with your service. Like no, you don't. And you want someone who's going to work in consultation with you because there are a lot of correlations between health and wealth. And so being able to have someone who closes that feedback loop, gives you, hey, we chose an HSA eligible plan, they thought that was an important part of their tax strategy you had mentioned. So we went that direction. They're taken care of. Here's their annual cost via premium, here's their fixed annual cost, here's their annual exposure. Being able to loop all those things back. And this is not an infomercial for Move Health. I don't want it to come off that way but I think if someone's health insurance partner that a financial advisor is working with is not doing those things, they should maybe consider finding one that does and does it really well because it’s an important piece.
Lauren (15:42):
Yeah. What I appreciate too is you can speak the language, the advisor's language and what they're looking at from an analysis side of things. So it's not just sort of a transaction as a partner but it's more of an actual partner. So yeah, you're playing the same game together, which is important to be able to help the end client. Super interesting. So just as we're wrapping up things here too, as you look ahead in the insurance world and the advisor world, are there any sort of trends you're seeing as it relates to your work? Obviously AI is a big deal. I don't know if it does or does not impact your day-to-day work, just any sort of direction it's going, maybe even politically, I'm not sure. I'd love to hear a little bit more on that.
Cole (16:25):
Yeah, really good questions. I think there's a couple high-level things we see as trends in the space. And I'll touch on just some statistics initially. So there's 40 million Americans between the ages of 55 and 64, and there's a ton of them who are ready to retire early and they're saying, I'm ready to retire. Their financial advisor says, you're good to go. We just have to figure out health insurance, kind of that last puzzle piece to put in place. So 40 million Americans are in that space. To add on top of that, the rate of people turning 65 every single year, right? Now it’s 12,000 people a day.
Lauren (17:02):
Holy smokes!
Cole (17:03):
Who are turning 65 in America. And so you go, the opportunity there for proactive healthcare planning for advisors is there. We know there's 40 million Americans between 55 and 64. The average age of a financial advisor client is 59 and a half and 12,000 people a day are turning 65. And so as we think about trends, proactive healthcare planning is going to become an expectation of advisors, not something you get to dabble in or touch on reactively. It's going to be something clients expect. And there have been some surveys and things I could go on in super in-depth on that have correlated that. And so that's one piece. I think another thing is though the 55 to 64 generation is becoming increasingly tech savvy, they also still very, very much value human interaction.
Lauren (17:55):
That's true.
Cole (17:56):
And it's one of those pieces you really can't replace. And so I think it's one of those things where it's like, of course the person who gives health insurance and Medicare advice says AI can't do it. AI can't do it yet. It may be able to do it at some point but I would strongly caution against using an AI type of system to arrive at a healthcare plan because there are so many intangibles that come up with health insurance and Medicare that are unique to each person's situation. Who knows, AI is going to transcript this podcast. I'm certain Lauren, it's going to read it and go, it's true. It's going to gray ball me or something and say like, hey, he can't use AI or slow him down or whatever it is. But all that to be said, we feel very confident the size of the market for proactive healthcare planning is really important.
Financial advisors should be talking about as we think about trends but then beyond just that clients are beginning to expect it. And then beyond just that, clients still want someone to really walk through this process with them. They don't want to do it on their own, and they want someone who’s sitting there going, hey, you've done the research, you've followed your financial advisor's plan. You've done a really good job in all these parts and pieces. Let's help demystify this last piece so you can make your next move. And so those would be the trends I would see sticking out. From a legislation standpoint, there are a couple changes that are coming potentially at the end of 2025 via the American Rescue Plan Act. Essentially, in 2021 they enhanced the tax credits that were available on the ACA marketplace, and that was open until the end of 2025.
And so I think the entire industry has its ear to the ground on what's going to happen next with those enhanced subsidies. Anything I'd say at this point would be me guessing and like a financial advisor would say, I can't beat the market and I'm not going to try to. And so from our perspective, I don't know what the inner workings of CMS are and beyond just that we don't know what's going to happen with the next presidential election. And that will have potentially an impact on these things. Anytime you're weaving the government and health insurance and financials and all those things together, you just have to roll with it and figure out what comes next and figure out how to optimize. And so there are changes that could potentially be coming but we are staying close to those to make certain we're not surprised by them and making certain the people we serve aren't surprised by them either.
Lauren (20:31):
Yeah. I also appreciate what you said earlier in the conversation about how there's so much noise out there and that, just to give an example, you talked earlier about just that human side of interaction. How many times have you been to a website and you're like, I just had this problem. I don't want to read through a million FAQs. I'm Google searching. I think the world's going to end but what I appreciate what you're talking about is it's that human to human. It's okay, we can help shine a light. We've been here before and this is the course and let's figure out your particular situation. And I think that's a lot of the value add, especially when you're working with something as complex and potentially that could be as fragile. It really interlocks with someone's personal situation in the short and long term.
Cole (21:16):
It's one of those things where we have said it time and time again, our mission is to make health coverage simple and clear. But beyond just that, when it comes to health insurance, when it comes to Medicare, the most perfect and accurate information you can get is a really big deal. And so being certain, one, as a financial advisor, your client's not being sold something they don't need, that's one piece in the insurance space that candidly we're up against in making certain that, hey, listen, we're not going to try and sell you something. We want to make certain the feedback you are getting is truly objective. And then beyond just that, having a clear understanding of how their health coverage is going to work and what the financial impact of that is, hey, here's what it will do, here's what it won't do. Here's what happens in your worst year possible with this option, best-case scenario, here's what happens as well. But being able to take that noise level and just bringing it down and saying, there's a lot of things you can ignore. There are some things you can't but there's many things you can't ignore and if you're getting blanketed, yeah, if you're getting blanket advice from someone, it's probably not right or not unique to your situation.
Lauren (22:24):
Yep. Yep. A hundred percent. Well, Cole, thank you so much. We'll make sure to link to your website, movehealthpartners.com, and I appreciate your time and just insights about this whole world, the complexities and what you all are doing to help shape it and provide clarity. So thank you.
Cole (22:41):
Of course. Grateful to be on, and thanks for having us, Lauren.
Lauren (22:44):
Absolutely.
