Will Hackler and Jason Grantz: Optimizing 401(k)s by Simplifying Complexity and Empowering Execution

If you think retirement planning is just about ticking boxes and meeting deadlines, you’re missing the bigger picture—and the real opportunity. In this episode, we sit down with industry heavyweights Will Hackler and Jason Grantz to explore how smart, intentional plan design can drive better outcomes not just for employers, but for the people who count on these plans to retire with dignity.

Will, the creator of the Integrated 401(k)™, brings decades of experience in aligning plan strategy with business goals. Jason, a nationally recognized consultant and author, specializes in turning retirement plan complexity into actionable best practices. Together, they bring clarity, candor, and a serious dose of strategy to a conversation every advisor and employer needs to hear.

This is your chance to cut through the noise, rethink your approach, and walk away with ideas you can use.

In this episode, Shannon, Will, and Jason discuss: 

• The evolving role of financial advisors and employers in shaping retirement outcomes
• Designing retirement plans that align with overall wealth-building goals
• Navigating compliance, automation, and fiduciary responsibilities in a shifting landscape
• The importance of collaboration and specialization in the retirement services ecosystem

Key Takeaways:

• Starting new 401(k) plans with automatic enrollment at 10% and building in auto-escalation not only aligns with Secure 2.0 mandates but has proven to be widely accepted by employers and highly effective in boosting long-term participant savings without resistance.
• Employers can significantly improve employee retirement outcomes—and capture tax advantages—by redirecting year-end bonuses into employer contributions, rather than distributing them as taxable cash payouts.
• Many of the most avoidable plan failures stem from not reading or adhering to the plan document, which is the legal and operational blueprint for the plan and must be regularly reviewed and followed.
• Financial advisors who lack deep retirement plan expertise are far better served—and will better serve their clients—by partnering with a specialized consultant or TPA rather than dabbling in plan design and administration, which can expose both parties to risk and subpar outcomes. 

"Someone at the company needs to take ownership in running the plan." — Will Hackler

"Retirement plans should be viewed as if they were machines. And if you don't maintain your machine, it will break." — Jason Grantz

Connect with Will Hackler and Jason Grantz: 

Website: https://integrated-pension.com/

Will’s Lin

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the GAP, a podcast designed exclusively for financial advisors and employers seeking to enhance their retirement plan offerings and bridge the gap in America's retirement security. We talk to change makers and dive into innovative strategies, compliance updates, and best practices to help you provide top-notch retirement solutions, stay ahead of the future, and ensure a secure financial future for all Americans. Here's your host, Shannon Edwards.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Hello, I'm Stan Edwards, your host, and the owner of TriStar Pension Consulting. I would like to welcome all listeners to our podcast with a special welcome to those of you listening for the first time. I started this podcast because I have a passion for helping Americans achieve a dignified retirement. By sharing ideas, this podcast is just designed to help close the gaps that America has in retirement savings and coverage. By doing so, we can improve the lives of working Americans. Today we are joined by two seasoned leaders in the retirement plan space, Will Hackler and Jason Grant. Both of them bring decades of expertise in helping employers and advisors build better retirement outcomes. Will Hackler is the chairman of Integrated Pension Group and leads direct selling for the institutional sales and marketing team and integrated pension services. With 30 years of experience in the administration of 401k pension and profit sharing plans, Will has a deep understanding of what it takes to design, monitor, and optimize retirement plans of all shapes and sizes. He is also the founder of Integrated 401k, a process that aligns retirement plans with broader wealth accumulation goals. And on top of that, he has won Chapar Champion on the Retire Holics more than any other listener. Joining him is Jason Grants, CEO and Chief Revenue Officer at Integrated Pension Services. Jason is a nationally recognized leader with nearly three decades in the retirement plan industry. He is a respected speaker and author and has been widely published in many industry journals and publications. His main focus is providing clarity on often misunderstood retirement plan topics. He is the co-creator and primary author of the 401k Plan blog, a blog dedicated to clarifying complex retirement plan topics with an eye towards coaching best practices. He also currently serves with me on the American Society of Pension Professionals and Actuaries Leadership Council. Okay, welcome, boys. I am so glad to have you here. And I know this is going to be lots of fun. I want to start first with your personal journeys. Both of you. What first drew each of you to the retirement plan industry and what keeps you passionate about this work today?

SPEAKER_04 2:34

Those are some impressive bios, Shannon.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

I don't know where you Well, I will say I got them off of your website, LinkedIn, and ChatGPT helped. But they make you sound really good, Will.

SPEAKER_04 2:47

Yeah, it's like a couple of impressive people there.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 2:50

I might have rewritten some of that at some point for you.

SPEAKER_04 2:52

So I'll start with mine. Mine is fairly simple. My father suckered me into the family business when I graduated college. As you know, I've told the story a couple of times. Went and got a finance degree, was looking around for a job. And it's really funny because I had a couple of offers that uh of jobs that are kind of like what Jason started with, but I chose not to take those, which I don't know if that was a good decision or not, but you know, we're here anyways. And then uh, you know, worked in that the business with my father for a long time and just love the retirement plan side, you know, kept it was very interesting. You know, got the first designation for MASPA on the QKA side of it. And then I was like, well, I gotta do all this continuing education, so I'll just go take another test because you know that's a great way to get continuing education credits and to uh take care of that. So I just you know kept adding tests on and adding designations on until I realized like I can't keep up with all these designations now.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Right. So you're a collector of letters too.

SPEAKER_04 3:57

So I used to collect letters, now I'm slowly like letting them fade off to kind of run the business piece of it. You know, but JC came on a few years ago, so we've had some great growth. Uh been very fortunate with a couple of uh good decisions over the years, business-wise. Uh great growth, and certainly enjoy having the conversations with business owners about plans, uh, the CPAs, partners that they have, uh certainly some advisors at different times when we, you know, partner up with them. Uh, but just trying to make every plan that we touch better.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Jason.

SPEAKER_02 4:35

Yeah, so my journey is probably more what I would call the typical 401k industry professional journey, in that I got into this business after I graduated college by accident, like the rest of us, most of us have by accident gotten into this business. So I I went to Rutgers University, I finished in 1995. I was kind of noodling around working at you know Joe Jobs at a bookstore and waiting tables, things like that, until I was trying to find my first quote unquote real job. And a friend of mine, his wife was managing a call center for a group that was focused and specialized in 403B and 457B plants. And I uh needed a job. So he, you know, we got got me in there for an interview and I got my first uh professional gig and you know, got my series six, my 63, got my year of experience, uh, met a few good people in the industry who I'm still friends with today, who I still who are still in the industry today. One of them went to work for Alliance Capital. I followed them there, working in the 401k department in the operations on the record keeping side, and then worked my way up to uh internal 401k wholesaler. Eventually um got limited on my on the opportunity to move to the field because the only field positions would have taken me away from where I live uh and would have required us to uproot. And so we made a decision that we weren't going to do that and uh ended up getting my first field wholesaling job in 2005 with a company called First Mercantile Trust Company, which is now somewhere in the underneath the American Trust umbrella. About three years after that, I left First Merc and went to work with uh friend of ours, friend of yours, uh Pete Swisher, Dr. Greg Caston, uh David Blanchett, and a few other well-known industry people over at Unified Trust Company. And that's where I really found my success, found my feet. It's when I decided to um, we were an academic firm. It's uh when I decided to start writing, start publishing, wrote my first paper, started the blog. I've now done I haven't written on the blog in a little while, but it's it I wrote on it for about 15 years and really uh made my bones. You know, I worked my way up to from field from covering the Northeast to management, a partnership over at that firm, uh, until we also sold our company to what is now American Trust. And that's when I left and joined and became partners with Will, who actually up until that point had been a client of mine. So a little bit more of a typical story as far as uh origins, but our origin story on how we found each other is a little bit more interesting. In 2000, about 15 years ago, so I co-authored a paper with David Blanchett uh called Quantifying the Drivers of Retirement Success, where we wanted we had observed that when we would go to these conferences like the Aspa conference, at the time they called the Aspen 4K Sales Summit. Now it's called Napa. Back then it wasn't, but we'd observed at all these industry events that huge amounts of money were being spent trying to convince us at booth A that their mutual funds were the best mutual funds. And then we go to booth B and they would say, no, no, our funds are the best funds, and on and on and on and on. And I just looked at him and I said, you know, if we only just spent as much time, energy, and resources on impacting the things that matter the most to running successful plans, we would not have the problems that we have in our society. We would not have the savings gap, we would not have coverage gaps. And so that kind of hatched an idea. So I wrote this paper called Quantifying the Drivers of Retirement Success. And I actually had the unique experience, which I recommend highly, Shannon, of being in an audience when somebody quoted me without me knowing they were going to quote me to me. And people all like necturn was like, you know, it was like a record scratch from my point of view. You know, they all kind of turned and looked at me like, you wrote that. I was like, I wrote that. Anyway, later on in the conference, I saw Will, who I'd never met before, and he was talking to somebody else that I knew, and I just wanted to say hello to that person. I weap and said hello to that person, and I saw he was holding in his hand my white paper. And so I said to him, uh, hey, what what do you got there? And he starts going, Oh, it's this great white paper, you know, you know, it talks about everything that we believe in. And I just sort of held my name tag up at him and he went, he connected the dot. He went, That's you. And he put his arm around me and said, Come on, let's go have a beer, little buddy.

SPEAKER_00 9:18

And it was love at first sight, right? You guys just that's how we met.

SPEAKER_02 9:25

And then um, it wasn't long after that that we realized we were both Aspen the Benefits Council liaisons for our respective local chapters. We ran into each other at other events. We started doing business together, and 10, 12 years later, he's trying to get another grown-up in the room to help him run this thing.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

So he probably needs another grown-up in the room. I'm not gonna lie.

SPEAKER_02 9:49

That's been my direct experience, yes.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

That's awesome. That's a great story. So you both work with a lot of different employers and financial advisors. What do you love most about the work you do every day? Anyone?

SPEAKER_02 10:04

Uh yeah, I was waiting for him to go. I usually wait for him to go because I talk more than he does.

unknown 10:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 10:09

I like sort of the solving the problems, right? Saying, here's a situation you have, you know, how can we make it better? Obviously, I've been using this, you know, moniker, the 401k fix the guy. So I looked at all of them as how can I fix the problem? How can we make it better? And, you know, I try to do that every day in all the conversations that we have. Sort of sort through all the stuff that's happening there and look for the key drivers and what we can do to make that plan better.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Yeah. So that is that's fun.

SPEAKER_02 10:43

Echoing what he says, I agree with all those things. I would say that I get a charge the most out of all of our little minor, minor victories. The major wins everyone gets a charge over, right? You close a big account, you know, you solve a real hurdle that you're experiencing in your business. Those are all like they charge you off because you've solved a major, a major problem for yourself where you've you've done something very good. But I really like it when I watch something that I sort of imparted to another team member that's like a learning lesson, or I've watched one of our younger employees do something that I know that they've seen me do, but they did it without asking for help. And I and it's caused us to win a small piece of business, or it's caused us to solve a small problem that is going to have big dividends. And so I get a charge off of all of our little wins, our minor victory laps, the things that we do in our Tuesday morning meetings that cause us all to give snaps to our to a specific teammate who we might call out because they did something that we're proud of. So to me, that I get a charge out of that. That's the business owner side of me, watching us have our little successes in celebrating them. And then on the professional side, I mean, I know that over 30 years, both of us have impacted thousands of people in a positive way, even mostly indirectly, candidly. It's by designing plans to impact higher savings rates and the higher to impact higher uh contribution rates and higher participation rates. Those things get done at a thousand-foot level, but they trickle down to have a real positive impact on the end user, which are the participants. And knowing that is what gets me up and gets me to work every single day.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Yeah, I that's what I've said before too, is like I am truly happy when I pull up to my office, right? I know that I'm going to work and I'm going to make a difference in somebody's life that day. And that's the that's the thing that keeps me coming back to work and off the golf course during the week is knowing that we are making a difference. The longer that we're in this industry, the more you can see it. And every time, you know, I get to put in a new plan for a company that's never had one before, I think those things really make my day. Okay. Tell us about integrated pension services. What makes your approach to retirement plan design and administration stand out in today's market when there's so much noise around us about, you know, tech and you can put a plan in in eight days and this only takes 30 minutes and this is all hands off and automated. What makes you all, because I know you're not like that, but what makes your approach really stand out in the market when there is so much noise for all of the advisors and the CPAs and the business owners right now? You know, we have to make ourselves stand out somehow.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

Can we answer that by saying we stand out because we don't do any of that?

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Yes, you can.

SPEAKER_04 13:38

So yeah. One of the things that, you know, that I make sure that we always do is when we're talking plan design and we're talking recommendations for plans, you know, we put together what I've dubbed our study piece. And we, you know, walk those business owners and CFOs and HR people through those and CPAs, you know, through those studies to see, okay, if you do this, this is what the effect is. Like these are the benefits out of it, these are the you know, pluses and minuses that you can get out of it. And nine times out of ten, we get to the end, and somebody says to me, Well, what should I do? And I'm like, I don't know. Like you, I'm just giving you these bases, like, you know, I need to know more about like your situation to make a real recommendation for that. And that's where we're a little different, where we work with a lot of advisors, a lot of financial planners, and help them run plans for their clients, right? And you know, we have this moniker that we use in our industry that you know, or in our firm, the LIM. It's but and I'm not gonna go down the piece of that, it's another acronym, I'll drink for that. Uh but uh, you know, I always go back and say, Have you done any planning? Like, how much do you need to be saving? Because that's where the driver is behind all this. Like, it's great. Like, I could design these awesome plans for you, but if it's too much or too little of what you need to be doing, then the plan doesn't make sense, right? So, you know, there's times we certainly will turn stuff away and say, hey, go do the SEP or the simple or you know, something in that direction, right? Because you're just you that's all that is necessary for you. Other times we're gonna say, Yeah, hey, here's the 401k with profit sharing, and you should bolt on cash balance because you're behind the eight ball and you need to put a lot away. And you know, let's do something like that. And other times, you know, we have conversations too and say just like, hey, based on what you've told me, the the plan doesn't make sense for you in your situation. And I think that's a piece that's missing sometimes, you know.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

I mean, I I have a couple of different uh thoughts on the question too, because you know, at one level, uh there's the industry side, right? The industry uh is the great distraction. That's the way I look at it. The industry is constantly uh trying to uh tell us about all these, and I'll put big air quotes around the phrase, game changers. It's a game changer, it's a game changer. Nothing there is no game changer in my experience. Uh there are things the game is always in motion, always changing. There's always new things coming into the market, there's old things getting phased out. And so being in a practice setting, we just have to be aware of what's out there and see whether or not it has applicability to our clients or not. And so there are things that the industry talks about a lot that we just simply don't use. We just discard because we find it to be distracting from our main mission, which our main mission is to uh create and optimize our as many plans as possible. We design plans to maximize participation rate, we design plans to maximize savings rate. We are on the advisory side, we optimize the plans by making sure we engage clients in a prune process, but we don't get overly complex because we find that the more complex you get with clients, the more likely you are to lose them during the process. Even if you're a great communicator, which I think we're pretty good at it, we still have clients that we know we can see them on paper what they should be doing, but we still have to get them from A to B. And sometimes that's a step process, and you have to resist the urge to sort of like dump the entire like bucket of all your tools on top of them and just sort of say, okay, one thing at a time. Here's what we're gonna do first. We're gonna make sure that that works, we're gonna get that up and running, we're gonna make sure it works smoothly, then we're gonna do this, then we're gonna do that, and we're gonna keep evolving it so that eventually you have as close to a perfect retirement plan for you and your business as possible. But on the uh practice side, we've developed an approach to the business, which I think it's it's not unique, but it's uncommon. So Integrated Pension Group is actually two different companies. It's integrated pension services, the third-party administration firm, it's integrated pension advisors, the retirement plan consulting and advisory practice. And the two were at one point just you know started like a traditional what I call producing TPA in the sense that Will and before that, his father Bill, they ran their local TPA shop in central Massachusetts. And if you drew a 50-mile radius around their business, that's where all their clients were. Most of their business was stemmed from their own sourcing, right? They meet some accountants, they get some referrals, the business gets in the door and they deploy both services. What eventually happened was Will and I started talking about developing wholesale model. And this is even before I joined the practice. Will got uh Will was the business was originally called Hackler Associates, and he was being he was being approached by and he was approaching a firm called Integrated Partners. And at the time, his pitch to them was going to be if you bring me in, I'll become the 40K arm of the RIA firm. And so Will started doing that. And then what we f what he found, I think even earlier than when I was ready to hear it, was that it needed a wholesaler approach, but he was not a wholesaler. And so I he needed somebody, he got Will's 10,000 times better with CPAs and accountants than I am. Like he just is. He could speak tax, he could talk the business owner language that they talk. But when it comes to advisors, he needed a wholesaler to be part of the group. So I came in initially to kind of take over that side. And it was during the pandemic that with the timing was right. And what eventually happened was we had exponential growth. First year out, we did three times more business than we'd ever done before. And it's been consistently going at that pace. And it's because of the dual approach that Will can focus on the accountants, he can focus on the relationships that he's developed and built over the years in the areas that he's really good at. And I can focus on working with the advisors using this relationship-based wholesaling model, which is now including us doing a lot of splitting where we go to advisors and we say to them, Hey, you guys either A, don't know anything about retirement plans, B, know a little, but C, it doesn't matter how much you know because you don't like retirement plans, which is the majority of them. And we say to them, we don't work with individuals, we don't do financial planning, we don't do wealth management, we don't sell insurance products, we're not a competitor to them for the business they want. And we can help them run the 401k plan and optimize it with and take away the heavy lifting from them. And so because we're we've built the facilities to do business as it's basically a it's the specialist model, but without the boundaries of a specific broker dealer ecosystem. And it's really worked well, especially with the advisors that are, you know, they have five plans, they have 10 plans, they have 15 plans, but they're not specialists, they don't want to be, and they're very happy to let us just come in and do our work. And then they get to like capture all the stuff they want, which is the people that are retiring, the wealth management, the other benefits, the business owner account, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

Right. No, that's very interesting what you guys have done. Will, can you share with me and my audience how integrated 401k, how the integrated 401k process helps align a retirement plan with broader wealth building strategies for both employers and participants?

SPEAKER_04 21:14

Yeah, I I touched on that a little bit already, Shannon. Like, you know, where we stop at the end and don't go through that recommendation process without knowing the financial planning end of it, right? How much they need to save, what's important on that side of it, so that the plan fits what the business and do is doing, what the owner is looking for, you know, what the employees need in order, you know, to match it up. And that, you know, that's the big component of it is stopping, making sure that these things are matching up before you take any further steps with it. And like Jason had said earlier, right? Sometimes it's walking before you run. So we may start with one strategy, knowing we're going to build on it. But, you know, making sure not to put a strain on the business, right? Making sure that they get through those steps and understand it before, you know, they take it on any further.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

So thank you. Jason, you said one of your passions is simple is helping simplify complex retirement plan topics. And that's you've written a lot about that. What do you think are some of the most misunderstood aspects of plan design or compliance that advisors and plan sponsors need to understand better?

SPEAKER_02 22:29

Oh wow. That's a big question. So I mean with the clients, I think most of it depends on where you get them and the where you meet them. Do you meet them when they're starting a plan or you meet them when you're taking over a plan that already existed? So when we meet a client when they're just starting up, in order to get a client to really from A to B, you have to recognize that you're not going to be able to teach them all the things they need to know in the first meeting. And so the their fiduciary responsibilities, right, as a plan administrator or as a business owner, are many. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. We just simply say to the client, look, you don't need to know all these things. Here are the main things you need to know. And then make sure that they understand that, like at the end of the day, it's our job to give them the best counseling and the best advice. It's not our job to implement our counseling and advice. It's our job to tell them what we think. And then if they tell us they agree, then we help them to implement the things. We're helping, we're helps, we're not taking over in the process. Now, I know there's a lot of stuff in the marketplace now, you know, complex things like pooled employer plans and there's uh discretionary fiduciary services that are out there on both sides, you know, on the investment side and on the plan administration side, that are supposed to do those things. But at the end of the day, the clients still need to also have some autonomy and they still there the buck still stops with them. Right. Yeah. And so if they don't know that, then they will eventually get it wrong. Something will happen. And you know, recently there was an episode of another podcast that I listened to where that was discussed, where it was discussed that at the end of the day, the employer can never get away from being a named planned fiduciary over their plan, even when they adopt a pooled employer plan. Right. They still have the underlying responsibility to their employees. And so that's a fairly that's kind of an old or oldie but a goody. The other thing that I wanted that I make sure that I let all advisors know, because they're all going to experience this as well as the employers, is that retirement plans should be viewed as if they were machines. And if you don't maintain your machine, it will break. And so there's got to be a you can't just we set it up and up, we never have to look at it again. There has to be this constant oversight, this constant tightening of the, you know, tightening with the wrench. There's got to be this constant maintenance, otherwise, you know, that we get brought in to come and fix the plan because it broke.

SPEAKER_00 25:02

Right. Exactly. At least annually, right? At least an annual tune-up or something needs to be done. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

Agreed. Using analogies like that, that the plan is a machine and needs to be maintained. That's how we simplify our communication to get people to sort of, you know, we try to meet them where they are, not try and bring them to where we are, because we could get we could go into the very deep end of the yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

We do like to go down rabbit holes, don't we? So all of us know that the retirement landscape is shifting rapidly. Our whole industry is, it feels like is changing daily. What trends or changes do you all see right now that advisors and employers must pay attention to in order to stay compliant and competitive, competitive as employers, competitive as advisors?

SPEAKER_04 25:51

Wow. Uh there again, you have very loaded questions here, Shannon.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

I try, I try to keep you on your toes.

SPEAKER_04 25:58

So, you know, one of the things we wanted to make sure we bring, you know, across, and Jason's touched on it a little bit here, is you know, the employers need to understand you someone at the company needs to take ownership and running the plan.

SPEAKER_00 26:11

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_04 26:12

You can't just set it up, you can't you just move on. Someone has to take ownership, whether that's the business owner, the CFO, the HR person, your larger firms, you know, whatever, you have a committee of people, but someone needs to take ownership of it because it can't be done by us. It can't just be done by the industry, it can't just be done by you know setting it up on the website and running from there. There is, you know, those pieces have to be done, and someone has to take ownership with it. So find someone in the company that's willing to take ownership on it, and they can, you know, communicate with service providers like ourselves, right, and get those steps done and manage the plan well. On the advisor side of it, you know, I think we've talked about this a little bit too. It's like you either get into this side of it in the retirement plan space or partner with someone.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

Right, right. Get a good partner.

SPEAKER_04 27:09

Or get into it and know it and make it a, you know, a substantial piece of what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 27:15

And I think that that so many financial advisors would benefit from finding a good partner. I mean, I have one financial advisor that I work with, and he has told me for like 10 years, I hate 401k plans, I'm never going to do them. And we I actually drug him to Napa Summit one time. It was because it was in Vegas. That's why he agreed to go. And we had a long talk and he was finally convinced, and now he loves them, but he has someone in his office who does them. He doesn't do them because he hates them. And I think that that if more advisors took that approach and partnered with somebody, then I think we'd be everybody would be happier, right?

SPEAKER_02 27:52

I fully agree. I mean, that's our business model. I mean, that's okay. That is really what we tell advisors all the time is we know they don't like it. You know, we just tell them, we're like, well, hey, we know you don't like it. We're not offended by it. We love it. Right. So we do. But if they ask me to work with like an individual client on their individual issues, I'm gonna, you know, I can I'm gonna be running as fast as I can the other direction. Um so to, you know, along what Will was saying, I fully agree with the comment about either be in the space or partner with someone who's in the space or get out of the space. Like that's kind of where the where I view it from the advisor's point of view. No, there shouldn't be there really shouldn't be people dabbling in it without a lot of experience or know-how. It's it's too dangerous a spot uh for most advisors, but a lot of them still do it. When it comes to like the you know the landscape itself, secure 1.0, secure 2.0, the things that I think give me the most uh pause when it comes to like pay attention items, it's the data. It's we have the most guar like most industries, like most things, garbage in, garbage out applies here in our system. But because we're such a data-rich and data heavy environment and it relies almost totally on one specific set of data, which is the census data. That what we try and impart very heavy, heavy-handedly, actually, is that we want all the data. We don't want you to do not take any license on picking and choosing who you think should and shouldn't be included. Just include everybody because we need to know who the part-timers are, we need to know who the how many hours they work, we need to know all this stuff because as sure as we're sitting here, there's somebody that didn't include someone on their census and it won't get discovered for five years, and then when it does, we're gonna have to go in and do makeup contributions and get the thing corrected. And it was all because the person who sent in the data said, Oh, they're only gonna be here for they were only here for the summer and they don't count, and they didn't leave and they forgot that they didn't include them to us, right? So stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 29:54

Yeah, totally agree. So, from your perspectives, where are the biggest gaps in America's retirement readiness today? Is it access, band design, participant education, or something else, something completely different?

SPEAKER_02 30:09

Well, I mean, I still think we have a big coverage problem in the United States. It's a challenge because the worker, the economic ecosystem for workers is changing.

unknown 30:18

Right?

SPEAKER_02 30:18

You have more people working at home, you have more people working in the gig economy where they're not working uh one full-time job, they're working for multiple part-time jobs. And you have, you know, state by state, you have different requirements now for whether companies should offer a retirement plan or not. So I think coverage is still an issue. I don't love the solutions that have been presented at the national level. I don't think that they're I don't think that I don't think you can, you know, solve the coverage gap by having a national mandatory mandate that's going to be put out there by our U.S. government and then not account for the harm they're gonna do on the other side to the private sector, to the industry that's actually been doing this for the last 40 years. So I don't love that solution. I think that to me is really the main issue is still coverage and getting more people in plan saving. But once once people do have a workplace plan, there's there's still a lot of good work that needs to be done on that side. Will, anything to add to that?

SPEAKER_04 31:13

Yeah, I mean, interestingly enough, earlier this week I had you know client meeting and uh we were going over some final numbers as it was getting ready for filing, and he's like, What's really this is weird. Like, what's going on here? I don't really understand what's going on here. And he was asking some questions about some details. So I dug into the numbers and I looked at it, and I and it was very surprising. Their workforce was just offered the plan, you know, the 401k plan, right, a couple years ago. They we finally talked them into putting it into a match in a large majority of the employees started to contribute right away as soon as he instilled the match last July 1st. Okay, and then as it went on, we could see the number in the percentages of what would people were contributing. They went from just doing small amounts, making sure they got the match to 15, 20, 18, 21 percent of contributions. And we're like, wow, like to see this working, right? Because we took those steps, we implemented the plan, talked to him a couple years about putting in a match, finally got him to put in a match. The employees responded immediately from that, and then over the next six months, they really like started, must have gotten their statements, gotten their paychecks, noticed that the accounts were building faster, and went, wow, we kind of like this, and started moving up their savings rates. And it was pretty impressive to see as a group.

SPEAKER_02 32:45

That's amazing. The one thing that I think that's happened in the last few years with the advent of Secure 2.0 is they by putting in the mandatory automatic enrollment to plans established uh after a certain date, and then having the auto-escalation go go all the way, be also part of that up to 10%. It's forced a lot of us that are on the plan design side that are designing these new plans to kind of look at that and go, practically speaking, this thing's gonna break with the escalation, right? The clients are gonna forget to escalate people. So why don't we just start everybody at 10 and escalate to 10, and then you basically handle it in the document that it's already done that way. And as long as as long as everybody fills out a form at the enrollment meeting, then they've effectively, once they tell you what they want to do, they've opted out of the negative election. But what we found, what I found very interesting as a result of all that was 10% doesn't get a lot of pushback. And years ago, when automatic enrollment was not mandatory, it was just a concept we were all touting as a good idea, and then you know, Quaca and Yaka and those things all came out, everyone was like, Why do we start them at? Well, we'll start them at 3%, right? We'll do 3%. And oh, I don't want to make my employees do anything, I'll let them choose how much we just get a lot of pushback back then. And now, I mean, I think the last 50 plans I've designed with 10% automatic enrollment, and not not a single client has pushed back. So I think it's interesting how when you just say to somebody, well, this is the way we do it because the law kind of mandates you get here anyway, and it's a good idea. And as long as someone fills out a form, you don't have to worry about it anyway. It's just for people who don't fill out a form that, or you know, go online and fill out a you know, an online form or they sign up on their phone or whatever. As long as it's only for the people who don't tell you what they want that they get automatically enrolled at that level, then the employers go, oh, that makes sense. I understand that, and they don't push back. So I think like the more you have frank conversations about defaulting to a best practice, defaulting to something that leads to the better outcome, as just, oh, this is just the way we do it because this is a best practice, or this is the way we do it because the law is going to make us do it it this way anyway, so we're just getting it out of the way up front. Those kind of conversations remove the barriers, instill confidence from the clients that they're that they're in good hands. And then they just implement your advice. And I think that that's been really very, very illuminating for me over the last few years since the really since Secure 2.0 kind of pushed the issue to the forefront.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

Yeah, we do the same thing, and we don't get a lot of pushback either. So hopefully it's gonna start making some real difference in people's lives because they need to be contributing higher rates. What role do you all feel like financial advisors play in helping close all of these gaps that we keep talking about?

SPEAKER_02 35:33

But I think that's our job, right? As financial advisors is to fill the gaps, right? So we and I think um if we're doing our job right, we're first and foremost, we're proactively looking for the gaps because we're trying to fill. We're trying we're not just trying to solve the problems the client knows they have. We're also trying to solve the problems the client don't know they do not either don't know they have or don't know they're going to have. And we're trying to do that ahead of time in a way where they'll be willing to accept the medicine as part of the meal. Right. So I mean, I think that that's what we try and do. And I think that good retirement plan consultants, good retirement plan advisors, that and we know a lot of them, you know a lot of the same people we know. That's what they all try to do as well. We don't necessarily always agree with all the things that everyone's pushing all the time, but I think we're all ultimately trying to do the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

Agreed. I think, you know, I've said this a lot about our industry. I think our industry is really unique because almost everybody I know in this industry has good intentions and wants good things, and they're very collaborative. Like I'm willing to share information with you all so that we can build a better system. We, you know, we have roundtables with other business owners where we're sharing best practices and things, but all of us seem to be working to simply improve this industry, whether it's the financial advising side or the plan administration side and getting the coverage gap closed and the savings gap. It's a really unique industry to be able to be a part of.

SPEAKER_02 37:02

Well, Will and I don't view the world uh like we don't view the world competitively.

unknown 37:07

Right.

SPEAKER_02 37:07

We do the world collaboratively. So we don't have competitors, we just have people we do business with and people we don't do business with. And as you know, on the TPA side, we trade cases all the time, right? So you know, plans move around, and that's just part of the uh that's part of the business model, and we know that. So, you know, we might lose a case to the TPA down the street uh for one reason or another, and then the next month we win a case from them. And and so it's just it's just the way it goes.

SPEAKER_00 37:36

Agreed. So looking ahead, what's your vision for the retirement plan industry over the next five to 10 years? And how are you preparing integrated pension services to lead into the future?

SPEAKER_04 37:49

Well, I think a lot of you know, with the Secure Act, Secure 2.0, state mandated plans, I think people are becoming more open to closing that coverage gap as you're talking about. So therefore, there's going to be more plans established. And I think we need to, as an industry, get better at removing some of the barriers, taking away some of the head trash, you know, for that. It's just saying the plans are good, this is how we're gonna set up, automate where you can for that piece of it. A joke that I have in the office is the clients see no value in the 5,500. Okay. There's no to them, they know they have to get do it because we've told them they have to do it, but they see no value in that. And therefore, we need to get that process done as fast as we can so we can move past the 5,500 being signed as part of our job, and more is looking at it as okay, here's what the 5500 tells us, here's the consulting piece that we need to do out of the ADP test, the 5500. What are those things telling us to make the plans better?

SPEAKER_02 39:02

To add to what he said, and he said a good word there in the middle of his uh comments, which is automation. We're automating as much as we can. You know, from a business philosophy point of view, our goal is to if a computer can do the task, we try and figure out how to get the computer to do the task. And if a computer can't do the task, then we look to our human resources to fill that gap internally, starting, you know, uh, you know, bot in a bot as a bottom-up approach to that. Ideally, long term, because of the increase in automation, AI technology, things of that nature, and because the consolidation that's been ongoing and will continue to go on, including ourselves. And we've done an acquisition, we may have more down the road. Because of those two things in conjunction, you know, that's sort of why we've organized our practice the way we have, where we've sort of, so okay, we've got the third-party administration practice that can stand on its own two feet on its own as a TPA. We've got the uh investment, the retirement plan advisory practice that can stand on its own on its own two feet. We can do business in one or the other or both, and we embrace technology and automation to the extent that we can deploy it and that we have the ability to implement it, and try and discard the what the technologies that are not necessarily that you're gonna be you might solve problem A, but incur problem B as a result of implementing the wrong technology. And that's gonna be our challenge across the industry, I think, is making sure the technologies that do come into the space are good and are not harmful as an unexpected result.

SPEAKER_00 40:43

Right. Agreed. What is one fun or surprising thing most people might not know about the retirement fin industry? Besides AsphA annual.

SPEAKER_02 40:58

I was gonna say seeing Will do karaoke at Aspen annual is a surprisingly fun thing to do to see. I think we're a great group of people. I think the industry itself is a cottage industry within a huge financial services industry, and while there are elements of the broader financial services industry that do play their way into our space, for the most part we're just a fun bunch of nerds.

SPEAKER_03 41:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:27

That just kind of geek around and you know, because there's that sort of uh base sort of willing to laugh willingness to laugh at ourselves because we all know what we are. I really think that that's like a real one of the things I really love about the community of people that we know is that we all do have the ability to laugh at ourselves because you know it's kind of silly when you think about it all about what we all have.

SPEAKER_04 41:50

I mean, I think it's there's definitely that collaboration that we have. It's you and I sitting down and talking about what we do for the business Shannon and saying, hey, what works for you? What have you had like what have you done in this situation? What have you done for that? And we're all so willing to share and talk to each other that you don't find that in under other industries. You know, they're still closed off, they just don't go in that direction. They wouldn't even think of calling their competitor, you know, down the street across the country about what's going on, you know, in the groups that we're involved in. Obviously, we have those discussions so it's surround some beers. Yeah, chat bar, but you know.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

A lot of times it's around some beers. That's what you know. I don't know what other industry I could have found that would have given me five other best girlfriends that I could go to the beach with once a year and do nothing but talk about nerdy stuff coming out of Washington that has to do with retirement plans, right? My golf girlfriends would tell me to shut up in the first 10 minutes of the conversation.

SPEAKER_04 42:49

Yeah, I mean, I I have a very like epic story of catching a cab with Eileen Ferenzi.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

Oh, nice.

SPEAKER_04 42:58

We happened to be in the line together, happened to talk at you know, we were in going to Nashville for an event, and to sit in that cab ride with her for 40 minutes, I was like, I'll pay like 10 times the cab fare to have that experience. And then she's like, Oh no, I'm not even at the this hotel, I'm further down, I'm gonna pay for it. What?

SPEAKER_00 43:20

Like, you know, right, yeah, yeah, I know. It's a great industry we're in. If you all could give one piece of advice to a financial advisor looking to improve their retirement plan offering today, what would it be? One piece of advice.

SPEAKER_02 43:35

Partner up with someone who's really good at this already, and there's no shame in there's no shame in having a mentor that could also be your business partner. That's the way I view the world. No, I think that's great. Even though I think I'm a lot smarter than Will.

SPEAKER_04 43:51

Yeah, I mean, like we said, this industry is willing to collaborate, so I partner up, go talk to somebody, you know.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Meet them, you know. Yeah, I I think that's the right advice. And when someone's trying to get into the space, you know, if you're gonna there's the hard way in and then there's the easy way, it's really easy to just find someone else who knows what they're doing and learn from them until you feel good about going along.

SPEAKER_00 44:15

Exactly. So for employers who want to help close the retirement gap for their employees, besides putting in a plan if they don't have one, where should they start?

SPEAKER_04 44:25

This is my soapbox moment, Shannon. Right.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 44:28

You know, bring it on, Will. I I stand on the soapbox and say this all the time. So many companies want to give out like cash bonuses at the end of the year, right? But or do some incentive plans with the cash. But when you let's say you have 50 grand that you decide you're giving out in cash bonuses, well, now you have payroll taxes, you have unemployment taxes, you have all those things that are tied to payroll, that it doesn't make it 50 grand, it makes it 57, 60 grand. Well, why not take that 50 grand and put it in the plan? And whether that's jump starting someone's retirement that hasn't done that, or adding to the piece to it, you know, for some employees, it became, you know, that time value of money can make such a huge difference for them. And oh, by the way, you happen to get a tax deduction for it.

SPEAKER_00 45:23

Yep. I totally agree. I totally agree. So looking to the future, what excites you most about where our industry is headed?

SPEAKER_02 45:33

I mean, I'm excited about the direction the business has gone for the last 15 years. I mean, I think we have a great industry lobby group that helps us to identify problem areas and fill those gaps. So, like a lot of what came out at Secure 2.0, a lot of that was really helpful. So I mean it's helpful to expand coverage, it's helpful to get higher savings rates, helpful to get more, you know, higher uh contribution, you know, participation rates. Those things didn't exist 15 years ago. You know, a lot of the stuff that uh we were dealing with 15, 20 years ago when you know I've been in the business 30 years. I mean, we daily valuation was new when I started. You know, we were working with single fund family products that were in A Bay A B loaded shares, whatever. Right? You know, most of the pricing concerns that existed back when uh Jon Stewart did that piece, or it was John not John Stewart, I forget who it was, who did that piece about 400k plans being too expensive. Most of that stuff is largely washed out of the industry. Fee compression came. Fee you know, fees for the most part are on new business, certainly on new cases when we take over plans. Very competitive. I think that there's a what I'm excited about is what I see is continuing to see what I've seen happen, which is that the industry is sharpening. It's a mature industry. The platforms, the products, the offerings of the different providers that are out there are getting better. The services are getting better, you know, and it's all towards uh getting more people in plans, getting them getting access to plans into plans and saving more money. And you're seeing that. You're seeing the out you we're starting to see the results of that. We're seeing studies come out from different places that are showing that the average savings rate for people that have access to plans is like two to three times higher than it was 10 years ago. Which is, I mean, it you know, doesn't bring a tear in my eye because I'm not that emotional about it, but it does kind of you know make me makes me like very proud of what we, the collective we have done to improve, you know, not just the industry, but the actual to improve real tangible results for the people that we serve. So I I mean that's what I'm excited about, is continuing to see that evolve.

SPEAKER_00 47:48

Yeah, I totally agree. My husband and I had a conversation one time, and I was super excited about you know all that we do and talking about how important our industry is and blah, blah, blah. And he looked at me and he goes, Shannon, you're not a heart surgeon. You're not saving lives. And I snapped my head around at him. I'm like, Yes, we are saving lives. We are actually saving lives. I mean, we're not cutting people open and fixing their heart, but we're saving lives.

SPEAKER_02 48:11

I know you. I would not have wanted to be on the receiving reaction.

SPEAKER_00 48:15

He doesn't, he didn't get it. I was like, Yes, we do. We save lives. So, yeah, totally. Okay, finally, we asked this question of everyone on the show. What does closing the gap in America's retirement security mean to you personally? Will, you first.

SPEAKER_04 48:32

I think it just it's a culmination of like 30 years worth of work, Janet. It's like I've been working at this for a long time, and you know, we've touched, like Jason says, you know, tens of thousands of participants now. It's just closing that gap is means we just we're continuing to add upon what we've done. We're continuing to get better both in our firm, in the industry, about these things, and it's helping more people save, and that's what matters.

SPEAKER_02 49:02

So many of us have firsthand or secondhand experiences with people that have experienced elder poverty. And elder poverty is frequently a function of exactly what we're fighting against, which is people not having money that they've saved up or accumulated up over the years. And so I kind of think of ourselves in a very corny way as you know, we're champions fighting against elderly poverty. And I think we all do our best to do that, even if we're not necessarily thinking about it that way. But when I see, you know, we all know the studies show that if when people have access to a workplace retirement plan, they save. And if the younger they have access to it, the larger their account balances are when they retire. And if we could enable people to be able to successfully retire at a reasonable retirement age, you know, somewhere you know in their 60s or you know, uh, and retire with dignity with not having to worry about financial well-being or outliving their their money, well, then I think we've done our job. You know, like I that and that's I mean, if that's is that the gap that we're trying to close? I guess it is, you know.

SPEAKER_00 50:14

Yeah. Agreed. Did we not did we cover everything you all wanted to cover? Or do you have anything else to add?

SPEAKER_04 50:24

Shannon, why you know, we never covered my number one bullet.

SPEAKER_00 50:27

Your number one bullet, okay.

SPEAKER_04 50:29

RTFD.

SPEAKER_00 50:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 50:33

Read the effing document.

SPEAKER_00 50:36

Yes. Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_04 50:39

From Sarah Simeno, like I, you know, she wrote that, you know, she talks about that, and man, does it come up all the time? All the time. People don't read the document. The rules are in there.

SPEAKER_02 50:50

Just follow the document. It's a I mean, those of us who have ever encountered a plan that we know is broken, and we say to them, if I go to my ERISA attorney and I bring him your story, the first thing out of their mouths is gonna be, well, what does the document say?

SPEAKER_00 51:04

What does the document say? Yep. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 51:07

And so, you know, the document it codifies the law, uh, takes the giant law and it narrows it down to from you know 5,000 pages to 50 pages or whatever. You know, what does the document say?

SPEAKER_00 51:19

That's what we ought to do. Absolutely. Well, thank you guys so much for sharing with us today and for the work you're doing to help sponsors and advisors strengthen their plans and better serve working Americans. Your work helps close the gaps we talk about on this show. For anyone who wants to learn more about the work that Will and Jason do every day, we will have their contact information in the show notes. You can also catch Will every other Thursday night in the chat bar of the Retire Holic Show at 4.30 p.m. Pacific time. Thank you for joining us on The Gap. Join us next time.

SPEAKER_01 51:54

Thank you for listening to The Gap. Be sure to check out the show notes for important links, retirement plan resources, and more at TryStarPension.com. While you're there, sign up for our information packed newsletter. And if you enjoy the conversation, follow our podcast, share it, and tell a friend about it. And most importantly, rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Thanks for listening.