A career in the benefits advisory space was not Ed Ligonde's original plan. But a variety of first-hand experiences with
At 19, Ligonde was a Division I soccer player at UCLA. When he realized it was something he could potentially turn into a career, he overtrained, leading to stress fractures in both legs that required surgery and ended his days of playing competitively. Yet it took getting into the B2B brokerage industry for him to fully understand
"I ended up finding out that that surgery was well over $75,000 — it may have been over $100,000 when you consider all the follow-up care — and my parents had a pretty hefty portion to pay," Ligonde says.
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Ligonde later began sitting in the waiting room of the medical office where his mother worked as a family nurse practitioner, where he helped patients better understand the access and costs associated with their insurance plan. Here, a lightbulb went off.
"I realized that there is a drastic void of education in our system; there is rarely any savvy consumerism," Ligonde says. "I made it my mission to understand what kind of impact brokers have."
That mission led him to his current role as partner and market director at Nava Benefits, after his previous employer, Nielsen Benefits Group, merged with Nava in 2023. The transition has been a good one, Ligonde says, as he and his team from Nielsen all still work together in different capacities at Nava, and the end goal of helping employers and their employees remains the same.
"We're here to help employers manage the lives of their number one asset," he says. "And the way we're doing that is by helping them get their best return on engagement, helping them understand their benefits and helping that process be as easy as possible. If we keep reminding ourselves that we believe in the same 'why' at the end of the day, then how and what we do falls into place."
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Ligonde recently spoke with EBN to talk about his transition into B2B benefits, his approach to building a new team at Nava, and how he prioritizes his own well-being.
Business-to-business benefits advisory wasn't your original career plan. What ultimately led you to it, and what made you want to stay?
I was working in business-to-consumer financial advising back in the 2008 timeframe of economic downturn, as a young kid out of college talking to business professionals about how to spend their money. I wasn't getting a lot of joy out of it. I wanted to join the medical device sales industry — I was intrigued by the process of orthopedic access after my surgery — but in order to do so you needed business-to-business experience. A friend of mine was a benefits advisor in the B2B space and suggested I join him, so I took a leap of faith and a massive pay cut and joined, not knowing anything about what I was getting myself into.
From the outside, the industry makes it seem really easy and that you just deal with renewals and sell people insurance all day, and in the beginning that's what it felt like. It wasn't until I sat in the waiting room of my mom's office [and saw] that it's about more than just brokering insurance at the end of the day. We're working with employers on their second-biggest line item expense. If I'm telling an employer, "Hey, you should spend $2 million on these benefits," but then 90% of your employees don't know how to access it, what kind of return on engagement are you having? When I started putting all these pieces together, that's what kept me in the business. I found this passion for connecting education and access to care.
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What is your philosophy for building a successful team within this industry?
I read a quote a long time ago that said, "If you take care of your people, your people will take care of your clients." I took that in two different kinds of schools: I want to get to know my team individually as people; if they know I have their back, then they'll have mine, and our clients will become the beneficiaries of that. I ask about their families; I call and say "Hey, this is just a friendly check in, how are you?" It doesn't mean you need to be best friends, but at the end of the day, we're working in a people business. We're not really selling products; our products are ourselves in this business.
The second aspect is making sure we all believe — at least closely — in the same things, because that's the only way we're going to keep pushing this mission of education. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of that employee and not let our frustrations cloud our ability to succeed for this particular member. We're not slinging insurance every day — we need to remember why we're in this business in the first place.
How do you prepare your team to be confident in your absence, and what have you learned about the need to unplug from work for your own well-being?
When I first became a manager, I did not know how to disconnect. I thought that if I'm working harder than my team, they'll respect me as a leader. I needed to work smarter, ultimately, which meant when I'm off, I'm off, so they can feel comfortable being off as well. Everyone knows I have a passion for travel, and it creates a really good connection. When I get back they ask for pictures, and the fact that they're asking leads me to believe they were comfortable while I was out, and we have a great enough relationship that they know I respect when they're out, too.
