President's Message

The Birth of the Insurance Benefits Broker

In 1989, I left a well-paying accounting position to become an insurance benefits broker – causing my family and friends to doubt my sanity. Turns out it’s highly beneficial to have accounting experience as a benefits broker.

Analysis, compliance and reporting – all part of my position with a third party administrator (TPA) – wasn’t that different from the work I’d done as a CPA. Then the TPA became part of a national chain (no fun) and I decided to found my own benefits firm.

Growing from Benefits Brokers to Employer Services

EmSpring “springs” from the roots of our original benefits firm, FCG Benefits. Not many years after I joined forces with Ed Haines, a stop-loss and disability insurance expert, we realized employers needed options other than the traditional enterprise level payroll and HR technology giants. We discovered a national partner, the ProSential Group, that offers independent broker and employer services firms like EmSpring the ability to provide leveraged buying power to our clients for payroll and HR services. It’s been a good move, and I’m pretty sure our employer clients agree.

Today, despite no one on the EmSpring staff having any formal sales training (and virtually zero golfing abilities), we’re here and growing. With few traditional insurance sales skills, our growth has been almost exclusively through referrals. Thanks to great relationships with independent CPAs, our reputation has spread into employer groups of all sizes and industries.

EmSpring’s Future

EmSpring has a business plan for the next decade, but I certainly expect that it will have to change often to stay relevant. Yes, we are much larger than in 1997, and our offices are in three very different communities in the Northwest. Our secret? We remain simply client-focused and not shareholder driven. That makes a very big difference in today’s world. EmSpring is a service organization – we add value to our clients or we are irrelevant.

Despite the many dramatic changes destined for us, I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years will bring.

Dan Fisher, CPA, CGMA
Founder & CEO
EmSpring Corporation