“A lot of people in my businesshave made people like you have low expectations of us.” Not your typical opening line when meeting with a prospective customer, but David C. Smith is not your typical adviser. The vice president at EbenConcepts is steadfast in his belief that it is time to elevate the way employers think about employee benefits – and the brokers who sell them.
EBA’s 2013 Health Plan Adviser of the Year, Smith, 45, didn’t set out to change the course of advising. A political science major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, soon after college, Smith took a job on the political campaign of Dennis Wicker, who was running for North Carolina lieutenant governor in 1992. Talk of “Hillarycare” was hitting its stride, and Smith was assigned to be the campaign staff expert on health care. Once Wicker won and North Carolina passed a small business health care cooperative plan that re-wrote small-group health reform in the state, Smith found he had “inadvertently become an expert on health care.”
