Transcript of How to Keep Key Leaders Without Raising Salaries (And Why It Can Profit the Company) | Ep. 322 with Bob Nienaber Founder and CEO of BenefitRFP

So, Bob, Nina Bur. I want to know, and I'm interested today to learn more about what do I need to know about retirement. And what you've been doing with benefits and with executives is something I've never really gotten to learn about. So I'm excited to learn about that. And I think as we grow in Scalar companies, we all need to understand not only our own compensation, but also the compensation of the other C-suites suite as well. But what should I be thinking about right now when it comes to my retirement?

It's a pretty broad question you just asked. So whether you're at the top end of of income in America or at the bottom, or somewhere in the middle, You always need to get as much money as you can, and not just your money that you're saving, but also any corporate matches. So the first thing you want to always look at is whatever benefits exist, whether it's an executive plan or some type of 401(k) or pension, how much can you maximize that the company is going to add to your plan? And you always want to do it on a pre-tax basis. I know we get into the differences between traditional and Roth. Don't worry about that. Get as much pre-tax money as you possibly can. Let those dollars grow for as long as they can, and pay attention to investment strategies that you're using. If you understand investments, then enjoy just loading up and making sure you're always in the top placement areas. If you don't, understand investments, and most people don't, so don't be shy, but reach out to somebody, usually a sponsor of the plan will help you with those investments. But you want to save as much as you can.

As you get closer to retirement or to the period of distribution from these funds, There's actually a lot of tax laws that exist that Americans don't typically understand. First off, when you transition, you don't want to simply take the money out and pay the same tax rates that you would have been paying when you set the money aside. And there's a lot I'm talking to you from California, where we have the highest tax rates in the country. There's a lot of plans where I can take distributions out in a lesser tax area, a different state, when I retire. I could retire in Nevada, where they have a zero % income tax rate, and I can pay zero % state tax on those dollars that I distribute if I utilize the right tax laws that exist. And these rules on source tax, and as they call it, have been around since Clinton's period. So It's been around for a long time. The other thing that most Americans don't realize is that, let's say I do a great job of saving over the 20, 30 years that I'm working, and my money is in a 401(k), and I end up with a couple of million dollars between what I've deferred, what my investments have done, and what the company matches have been.

And now I got to pull that out. There's a Department of Labor reg that enables all participants in these corporate benefit plans to get their money out without paying the taxes after distribution. And that's important. The number one thing that anybody rich, not so rich, somewhere in the middle, are going to face, that's going to be restrictive in reducing their benefits is taxes. And you can eliminate those taxes in a qualified plan if it's set up straight. And so remember, that's a part of DOL 92. 6. It's a a complex rule. But when you work with people that work with these programs, they can get it out. And it's all legal. There's no gray area or anything like that. And then once you've reduced the taxable impact, now it comes out to the time of distribution. Most distribution periods last as long as your working career these days because people are simply living longer. So if I'm going to live 25 years, I'm going to have eight years of that time. It's probably going to be considered my go-go period. That's where I'm young. I still got enough money. I've got energy. I want to travel the world.

I want to do all these fantastic things. And And so I'm going to invest my dollars into programs that will continuously give me some growth. Same thing with the slow-go period. It's probably anywhere from 9 to 15 to 20 years of my lifetime that the money is going to sit. So people, if you put it into bonds or if you put it into fixed accounts, you're guaranteed you're not going to have enough money to last through your retirement. So you need to manage that probably in the same type of investment strategy that you'd use while you're still earning the dollars. And then when it gets to this low-go period, this is where everybody says, oh, I've got to have my cash ready for this logo period. No, you really don't. You probably have 20, 25 years in most cases before you're going to need that. And this low-go period and no-go period is where you're sitting on the retirement rocking chair out front of the house and people are feeding you and taking care of you. You have plenty of time to get there. Oftentimes the same amount of time that you earned your money during your working careers And so if you really set up your program properly, you'll have money during all three of those distribution periods, and that way you have the most fun you can possibly have with your family, traveling, kids, whatever you want to do.

Bob, I want to maximize the beginning time. I really do. Because I feel like I'm not going to have a long runway. Hopefully, medicine, my knee has already hurt. And I'm like, I'm only in my 40s, so I can only imagine if I'm in my 60s. I hope I get to do all the things. I want to be set up correctly. So thank you for sharing that. I never fully understood C-suite compensation at corporate levels. I think we hear like, $30 million package, trillion dollar package, and we're not really sure, what does that really mean? Does that mean I'm taking home 50 million, 20 million, trillion dollars? What does this all mean? And what do these companies need to understand with their C-suite in terms of benefits?

It's an interesting question. We all watch TV. We all hear the bits about Elon Musk being worth a trillion three, and it is baffling to us. But that's so extraordinary. That's so unusual. Most CEOs and most C-suites The C-suites are usually the CFO, COO, CEO, those types of folks. Most of them will make a little more money than the rest of the pack in the company. They're not making tens of millions of dollars in most cases. Very small percentages of CEOs are ever in that type of environment. They are paid extra because they have extra responsibility. They have the job of managing the culture of the company, of real seeing to it that their company clients are taken care of properly that they keep the team together. And so when you hear about C-suite benefits, like an Elon Musk, you would think, well, he's a C-suite, so he's probably using these plans. No, he doesn't have any need for them. He's so outside of the box. But if I'm making $500,000 a year as a C-suiter, and my job is to keep the culture together, then I'm going to use an executive benefit platform for the top people.

And I have to use an executive benefit program in this country Because plans like 401(k)s and ERISA plans like that, they're actually restrictive against highly compensated people. It's the group hug. They want to keep everybody together. It's a benefit plan that has to be fair for everybody. But what do you do when somebody's making money outside of that box? And so what most companies do, because believe it or not, most companies actually are absolutely fair. They want to do the same for the CEO that they do for the lowest paid person in the company. They want to keep everybody together. They have a doctrine that really relates to that. And so they'll build a benefit plan for the senior executives to keep them around. You want to keep that culture They're the ones that are successful, that are driving the company and doing all these things. And then you also want to have a plan that also ties in all of the lower paid people because maybe they're just younger. Maybe they're just getting their career started, maybe they're fresh out of school and just getting on, it doesn't mean they're bad people in any way.

It means they're just not at the pay level of somebody that's maybe been doing it for 30 years and has a lot of experience. And so for those folks, they'll put together benefit plan that enables them to save and get some company dollars shared into their program so that they can all be successful. And the longer you keep everybody successful together, then the more of a success culture you're going to have. Turnover is one of the most expensive areas in a company. If I lose somebody making $100,000 a year, it's going to cost me about $300,000 to replace me. And so it's better off to put together a plan to keep these people people well paid, keep it competitive as they come up the corporate ladder, wherever they are, keep it all tied together so that the company stays together, the culture stays strong, and we all can reap the success together.

Yeah, I remember hearing this before when I was in a corporate job around, like you're saying, it's two times the salary to hire and then X amount to fire. So the goal is to keep people as long as you possibly can if they're a fit for the right job. What size does a company need to get to? Or if I'm a founder, what do I need to look at in terms of where is my business at a point that I need to really look into this?

I think it starts... I generally just in my practice, because I've been doing this for over 30 years, usually companies have $200 million or more of annual revenue, or the ones that come to me all the way up through the Fortune 100. But if you're a company doing $30 million a year, and you have one or two really strong people that would significantly hurt your company by leaving, then you need to do a plan for them. And that's one of the nice things about a non-qualified plan, is it enables you to really design a plan for one, two, three, five people, very small group, to make sure they stay around. If you don't, they're going to get picked up by your competition. And then, as you said, they're going to be replaced. And now you have all this tremendous cost. Your culture is going to change your clientels at risk of being taken All these things happen. But I would contend that you might have a small group of people that would need a non-qualified plan, even if you have a small company, even if it's doing 10 or $20 million. It really comes down to, where's my biggest risk of somebody leaving?

And even if I have somebody that maybe just graduated college, but they came to you, they were referred to, they're 23 years old, and you've already recognized recognize that this kid is going to be something in the future, but they're not at the income levels to qualify for a highly compensated plan, then by all means, there are some special benefits you could do for them as well. So it's not just the top, top people. You as an owner, as a founder, you're always looking for special people that are in your midst that you want to keep locked in to your organization because you know you can help them. At the same time, you're going to help yourself by keeping locked into your organization. So, yeah, again, it doesn't really matter what size the company is.

I'm starting to see some companies giving out some equity or shares to their employees, not public-luchated companies, but private companies. And I found this to be very interesting as a way, because I think we're seeing some industries now, the pool of people that they're trying to get, it's ultra competitive. There's certain AI and other things where the people that can actually do this job is small, so they're getting highly competitive, and they're going after people that are like... I know someone 23 years old working at SpaceX, for example, that I'm sure these people will be set up for life with their compensation packages. But How do you see this in terms of the future of... Younger people, I think, really want to be a part of something. They're passionate about being part of it. They obviously want to make money still, and they want to feel that they're really a piece of it. And I think companies notice that there's also this ultra competitive group of people that can... They're okay to bounce around. I think our generation above were like, You stay there forever and you retire. Now, it's like, I'm okay to bounce around.

So I imagine to get highly qualified people, companies need to relook how they give out this. And I'm just specifically around equity and shares.

Yeah, I would say, One, there's a plan out there that a lot of companies are using that I absolutely hate. And it's because the perception or the sale to the companies is it's just cheap. And that's a phantom stock plan. There's no real stock associated with it. You're setting it up as a private company that we're going to pay you out in 10 years, and it's going to be worth X, but there's no funding behind it. There's no real meat behind it. So participants don't really believe it's a benefit. And so when a company comes with the real benefit and they say, you know what? We got here some real benefits for you, the person is going to jump. The other thing is a lot of companies will sponsor a Fantoms stock plan because, as I said, they think it's the cheapest way to go. Well, in 10 years, if you promise somebody $5 million and you never funded for it, that $5 million is real. You really owe them that in this day and age, and it's going to be the most expensive the $5 million you've ever pulled out of your pocket in your life.

So it always makes more sense to set up something that's funded. We see a lot of promises, and those are also the most failed benefits that exist out there, too. So you hear this story all the time. It's cheap, cheap, cheap, and it fails, fails, fails. And we know this. People get picked up all the time. They get chased around all the time, and you got to do something for it. So that's where you need to really sit down with the true benefits consultant and say, this is what I'm after. What's the the best way to do it. Look at the scenarios. That's one of the things that our company has been very successful with, with our proprietary technologies. We can show every single benefit plan that exists in America. We can show all of the funding tools. We have a heat map tool that has won all kinds of awards. And what it does is it compares every investment, every insurance product that's out there. So you can see what's going to give you the best results for our company, utilizing the company's demographics. We can even keep the company's assets that are funding these tools 100 % tax-free.

And so there's a lot of ways to really do it. We show clients everything. When we do an audit, we don't sell anything. We don't sell product. We don't sell services. We simply lay out where the services are, where the products are, so companies can make an intelligent decision, because we know from our experience, companies can make the best decisions for themselves, as long as you give them fair and equitable data so that they can make those decisions. And that's what we do. But as far as just really keeping everybody locked in, I always tell companies the same thing. And this is a guaranteed I've stayed with for 30 years. If you build a plan properly, it will cost you less to build a plan and fund your people than it will if you simply write checks out to them all the time. You'll eliminate turnover. People are still going to leave at some level, but you're going to eliminate quite a bit of the turnover because people People that are successful don't necessarily look at the dollars and cents on their benefits. They just look at it as an overall look. Am I going to be okay?

And they see the company's putting away some programs for them and all that. And there's a lot out there, then they're going to be okay. And then the other thing that I have always really actually had bets with companies on to prove me wrong, and I've never been proven wrong, when a plan is set up properly, it will actually produce a profit for the company. Not a cost, but a profit for the company. And I've never been proven wrong on that in my entire career. And I speak in front of tens of thousands of people every week. So I'm still waiting for that day where somebody come in and show me something different. So that all tells me that if you don't have a plan, get with somebody that's competent to put together a plan for you. Get rid of the fears of having a plan that's not going to be right, because there are so many great solutions out there, and just start putting together for yourselves.

I like the prove me wrong guarantee. I enjoy that. I think that's a good one we can all learn from. You were really an industry leader. You are an industry leader, but you really carved this niche. You became one of the first or the biggest in your industry or the most well known in your industry. I think a lot of people are looking at that as something, what advice do you give to somebody who's thinking about doing that? The reason why ask is, it can be hard to do this compared to be it's simple to do the thing that everyone's doing, but also who wants to do the thing that everyone's doing? So what advice do you give for... Because you did it yourself and You've been successful at it. You exited a company, and you've done all these things. How can someone else do that for their industry?

Yeah, I mean, if you want to take my example, I guess. I've always provided benefits for my folks and for myself. That's why you go into business. Some of us are on the ownership side, some of us are on the employee side. But here's the key factors. If you look at it on either side, and this is an equation that's been around for as long as I can remember. If you take a dollar and you double it for 20 years, you're going to have a million dollars. Take that same dollar and double it every year, and you add a 40 % tax rate to it, you're going to have a little $12,000. People are amazed at that. Nobody knows that math better than the IRS than your taxers. And so if you think about it from a company standpoint, if I help my employees avoid that by using pre-tax dollars. So their money is going to grow into a million dollars. And I do it for myself. I might pay taxes later on. I might even have a distribution based on some type of formula for the IRS or for the state that I'm in.

However, I'm going to maintain as much as that money as possible. By doing that, I increase my human life value, which means when I die, my kids get more. And if I teach my kids properly, their kids get more, et cetera. And I can do the same with my employees. When I built out the company that I most recently sold, built it from the ground up, never used debt. Just built it on the way that you normally build a company. And I got my team involved always. Always had good partners, always had good teammates to grow it. And then in the process, I ended up selling over $100 million worth of personal businesses. There was nothing magical about that. I just understood where the cost effects were. And the biggest thing that an owner or an employee will ever lose money to is to taxes. You get that under control, you get that managed properly, then you're all going to be much more successful. And that's what we do. That's what we educate people on these things. I was lucky in my career that I worked with, I think, the last four or five white houses.

And then I had a chance to work with Congressional tax people, work with both the Senate Finance Committee and the House Weights and Means Committee. I didn't do this because I like hanging out with politicians. Believe me. I did this because those are the people that actually write the rules. And then in the process, when they wrote the 409(A) regs around executive compensation 20 plus years ago, I was brought in for different discussions with that. And It's very fortunate when you get those opportunities to work with the teams that are working with the people that are writing the rules around these things so that when they do something stupid, and as is often the case, unintentionally by a congressional members because their hands are tied up in a lot of different areas. They're not going to be the experts on this stuff, so somebody has to help them. And then we just put it together. And my job these days is to continue working with those rules. They get adjusted once in a while, which is fine. And there's great benefits in Congressional adjustments when they come in for participants and companies. And we work with that stuff to make sure that our clients and participants are absolutely getting the most they can out of life.

People are shocked that the amount of difference in money they have working with our company, I'm sure companies like ours, versus where they were situated before they started working with us. And when they find that really doesn't cost them anything or the company anything to just do it right, in fact, it dries up revenue on both sides, then they really get involved with us.

Was there something when you exited that you didn't expect to happen?

Yeah, every exit. That's a fun question. Every exit, I can tell you, every time you sell a company, the one thing that is guaranteed is what you thought was going to happen, doesn't happen. It happens differently. So you have to be ready to bounce. And one of the things that I always tell sellers of companies is during the sale process, you're so conditioned. People are so conditioned to make sure that we're doing everything right for the buyers. I've got to deliver, I've got to deliver, I've got to deliver. And then when the deal gets done, They realized the buyer didn't deliver what they were supposed to do. Well, it's got to go on both sides. And I've had that effectively hit me. One of the companies that I sold came back, got it back for free because the buyer did not maintain what their obligations were. And as a seller, yeah, I take what my promises are to the foundation, to the buyers. They're doing me a great thing. They're buying my company. They believe me. Same time, though, if a buyer comes in and they start changing the game, then I firmly believe in having that contract, that sales contract, play a favor to come back to me as as a company if they're not going to go down the right route because it might affect how I'm paid or my buyout or whatever it might be.

So that's become real conversations.

Fascinating. Well, Bob, this has been great. I've talked to a lot A lot of people, well over a thousand people, never heard about this before, always was curious about it. And thank you for sharing around the exit and strategies and what people should expect there. If people want to get in touch with you, how can they do so?

A lot of people I've written a lot of books on this stuff and some best sellers, so they find my books in airports or whatever. Probably the best way these days is just get in touch with me through LinkedIn. You can just go to bobneenabrent, LinkedIn, and friend me, and we'll go from there. You can always go out to benefitrfp. Com, which is the company that we sold into the Simplicity Group, and you guys can look at information. But please don't be shy. One of the things I always tell people, the biggest mistakes companies make on these things is they think they have a stupid question that nobody's going to ask and nobody's asked before. Again, I've been doing this for 30 plus years. I'm passionate about every aspect of benefits and how they can help you. We know every Everything about these benefits. We work with them every single day, and we will tell you which ones will work the best, which ones you want to stay away from. So we can give you the best advice. We can give you AI benchmarking, control data so that you can see exactly what a plan will cost you before you implement anything and before you pay a dime to us?

There are no stupid questions. The only stupid move anybody can make in a company as a participant or as an owner or shareholders, not take that 10 minutes to make a call because we will take care of you.

Well, Bob, thank you so much for joining us today, sharing all this insights. I can't wait to look more into it, and I can't wait to see what happens in the future for you. What are the next things, challenges, what's going to be happening in the future? I'm fascinated, but thanks for joining us today on Founder's Story.

You got it. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.