Retirement Success Can be a Simple Conversation
Retirement success is what most participants want to achieve. A good retirement plan advisor will also have that same goal for every one of their retirement plan participants! During the New York City 401kTV GENIE Awards, Communications Panelist and Category Winner, Ed Dressel, President and Owner of RetireReady Solutions, met with 401kTV Correspondent, Frank Licari. During their conversation, Mr. Licari and Mr. Dressel discussed how RetireReady Solutions has created a track record of success. Mr. Dressel offers interesting insight into how simple it can be to connect with plan participants when the conversation incorporates language that participants can relate to and comprehend. These tools and techniques have been responsible for raising participation rates and keeping participants on-track to save for retirement. Learn how Mr. Dressel works with plan sponsors and plan advisors.
Full Transcript
Frank Licari:
Frank Licari here at the 401k TV Genie Awards. I want to say congratulations for being here, for being a finalist. Give us your name and the role you play at your company.
Ed Dressel:
I’m Ed Dressel with Retire Ready Solutions. I am the president and owner of the company.
Frank Licari:
Okay. What got you here? What’s the honor about? How did you get here?
Ed Dressel:
We help advisors, 401k advisors. Also 403(b), 457, and federal employees, but we’re very good at helping advisors engage participants with an increase in deferrals and finding outside assets.
Frank Licari:
Gotcha. What kinds of things did you implement? What kind of problems were you seeing and what did you implement?
Ed Dressel:
Well, one of the major problems is that one when an advisor walks into the room, they will often talk about a) their credentials, or fees, funds, plan designs, fiduciary, all the things that the participant really isn’t that engaged about. A participant doesn’t go, “Oh, I want to know what’s good plan design,” unless they’re really an outlier.
Frank Licari:
Sure.
Ed Dressel:
Does the typical participant want to know how can I retire successfully? Most advisors with that question say, “Well I’m going to talk to you about the academic side, but for your most important question, I’m going to kick you back to the portal.” Participants just don’t go to the portal.
Frank Licari:
Sure.
Ed Dressel:
What we have designed is a paper report that allows an advisor to bring a participant each a copy of where they are at, what does the retirement look like based on the census data, what does it look like for you? Not only, so you’re giving three and you need to give eight or increase by eight and it’s going to cost you a couple of hundred dollars, but how does it affect their take-home pay?
Ed Dressel:
A participant gets to see that. They go, “Oh, that’s a little bit too much for me.” We also show them how to take small steps towards it. So you can’t go from three to eight or three to 11? Can you go from three to four or three to five this year and take small steps towards retirement success? Show them how much it’s going to cost in take-home pay. And what happens if you don’t do anything this year? What happens if you wait a year? What’s the cost of that? They get to see right away, you know what? I need to start and start moving in the right direction. Advisors have seen a lot of success.
Frank Licari:
Yeah. Tell me about that. Tell me about some of the results you’re seeing.
Ed Dressel:
Give you a couple of results. Both on the participant level and the trustee level. Gerald [Ornette 00:02:18]… Both of these stories will come from an advisor in Dearborn, Michigan. When I met him, I said, “Tell me a fun story.” It’s my favorite question to ask an adviser because they all have a fun story.
Ed Dressel:
He said, “We just rolled a simple plan into a k plan. We had 21 employees. We got 11 of them participating. Of the 11, we got them all to increase their deferrals and electively roll their $1.5 million into the new plan. Of the other 10, they all started making deferrals.”
Ed Dressel:
So, he has 100% participation and he found $1.1 million outside the plan. He’s engaged the participants and he goes back year after year and he’s increasing the deferrals.
Ed Dressel:
On the trustee level, he went to a trustee meeting recently. He tells this story in a podcast we’ll release next month. At a hospital, and they didn’t have an advisor before, their fees were a little bit lower. The first thing he gets before he talks is one of the trustees says, “Gerald, your fees are too high. You need to lower them.” Gerald says, “Hold on to that thought. Let me give my presentation, and then you can bring up your concern.” He gives his presentation showing the education he can bring to the participant and he’s proactive rather than being passive.
Ed Dressel:
He got done with the presentation, stuff I just described, and he says, “What are the questions or concerns?” And that same trustee, and he says maybe sarcastically, but the trustee says “You should be raising your fees not lower them. I want to be sure you stick around Gerald.”
Ed Dressel:
Gerald isn’t commoditizing himself. He isn’t trying to look like every other advisor. He’s saying, “I’m going to bring something to the room that’s going to be different than the other advisors and I’m really going to engage your participants.”
Frank Licari:
It sounds like he educated them in ways that they hadn’t been before, and all of a sudden-
Ed Dressel:
He’s proactive in the education rather than saying “It’s all up to you on how to get to retirement.” He says, “I’m playing the key role.”
Ed Dressel:
The other part of that is when they get closer to retirement, they have a relationship with Gerald so when another company comes knocking on their door and says, “Hey, I’d like to, you know, do you want to roll your money out of your 401k?” Gerald says, “I’m a key part of how they got there. We have a relationship.” He gets to keep them as clients and manage their assets.
Frank Licari:
Sure, and you’re not getting better than a 100% participation, so that’s great.
Ed Dressel:
That’s right.
Frank Licari:
Well, congratulations.
Ed Dressel:
Thank you, Frank.
Frank Licari:
What do you think of Genie Awards so far?
Ed Dressel:
This has been a fun time.
Frank Licari:
Yeah.
Ed Dressel:
It’s been great.
Frank Licari:
Great, well, it’s great having you.
Ed Dressel:
Thank you.
Frank Licari:
Thanks.
