When Chris Wolpert founded Group Benefit Solutions in 2016, a certain inspirational quote about growing business always stuck with him: Sales guys have business cards, but experts have books.
"I was in my early 30s at the time and looking for little credit credibility," he sheepishly confessed. "With a background in writing and storytelling, I wanted to leverage that skill and thought writing a book would be a good way to do that."
It didn't take long for the benefits adviser to be published. It began in 2018 with a chapter in
In reflecting on those accomplishments, Wolpert initially toyed with the idea of self-publishing a book by writing an outline on how to build an employee benefits program in the post-Affordable Care Act environment, which served as a working title. "I was thinking, 'my God, nobody's going to want to read this. I don't even want to write it! So, what am I actually going to be accomplishing?'"
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After listening to a
"I thought, 'man, that's brilliant and is something that would catch and grab and hold people's attention,' which is the whole point of marketing anyway," he recalls, hoping readers would be entertained while they learn something new.
In the due course of time, he decided to replicate this strategy in the form of a comic book, noting how his children at the time were fascinated by Marvel movies, which had a lot of buzz around them. So, he sought to tell a fun story that was set in a fantasy world and began studying how to actually write a comic book, which is different from other forms of writing. That process included storyboarding — much like a screenplay — and after four or five drafts, he hired someone to do editing and provide feedback.
But it sat on a shelf for some time while he promoted the book for which he was a contributor. When he told several fellow advisers about the comic book, they strongly encouraged him to finish the project, including his children, which he described as "a bolt of lightning" that helped seal the deal.
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"At that point, I picked it back up, went through another two or three more drafts and found a guy in Malaysia who ended up doing the artwork," he says.
In the end, the comic book became his ultimate calling card. "It's been something that people recognize me for now, even more so than other areas of marketing," he reports. "It's always a good conversation point, and anytime I'm interviewed on a podcast, invariably it always comes up, and I've got a second one in the works."
The message for fellow advisers and their employer clients is essentially threefold: Reverse limiting beliefs about containing
While writing a book raises credibility, he believes a documentary takes it to another level and becomes required watching for prospective clients he's about to court.
"It's very easy for anybody to say, 'Healthcare is broken in America, and there's nothing anybody can do to fix it, especially if you're in HR, finance or in a leadership role these days," he says. "But you can take action, just like in the comic book, and affect positive change just for a company and its employees."
