IAM2023 – Owner Focuses on Helping People Turning 65 or Getting Started on Medicare

In this episode, we have Garrett Ball, the owner of Secure Medicare Solutions. Where he shares his journey from working in sports management to starting a national independent Medicare insurance agency.

Ball has dedicated his venture to assisting people in navigating the complexities of the Medicare process, particularly those about to turn 65.

He differentiates his agency, stating its focus is on comprehensive, no-pressure information dissemination to clients, making it client-oriented, as opposed to being sales-focused.

He also shares valuable insights into his successful strategies in the business, such as focusing on the most profitable client group, leveraging the gig economy hit for various tasks, and the benefits and challenges of being a CEO.

• Background: Garrett Ball is the owner of Secure Medicare Solutions, a national, independent Medicare insurance agency. His company also manages 65Medicare.org, an online information-based resource for people turning 65 or starting out on Medicare.
• Secure Medicare Solutions & 65Medicare.org: This service offers unbiased information for those transitioning into Medicare. These resources fill an important gap given the complexity of Medicare and the numerous options available, making it difficult for people to make informed decisions.
• CEO Hack: Garrett recommends the book “The Pumpkin Plan” by Mike Michalowicz, which provides strategies for growing a remarkable business in any field.
• CEO Nugget: He suggests taking advantage of the gig economy by using platforms like UpWork to hire freelancers for specific tasks or projects.
• CEO Defined: For Garrett, being a CEO means having the freedom and flexibility to make decisions that align with his vision for the business.

Website: 65medicare.org

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Transcription:

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Garrett Ball Teaser 00:00

We, ideally, start talking to somebody, three, four or five months before they turn 65 and are eligible for Medicare.

And at that point, we help them understand Medicare itself and then look at the other options that are available for supplemental coverage that would fill in the gaps in Medicare.

Intro 00:19

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I am CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:47

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast. And I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Garrett Ball of Secure Medicare Solutions. Garrett, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Garrett Ball 00:58

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 00:59

Awesome. What I wanted to do was just read a little bit about Garrett so you can learn a little bit more about him and all the awesome things that he's doing.

Garrett Ball is the owner of Secure Medicare Solutions, a national independent Medicare insurance agency. His company also manages 65Medicare.org, an online information-based resource for people turning 65 or just starting out on Medicare.

Garrett, are you ready to speak to the I Am CEO community?

Garrett Ball 01:24

Yeah, let's do it.

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Gresham Harkless 01:25

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. What I want to do, which is ask you if you had anything additional you wanted to expound upon when I read your bio about your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

Garrett Ball 01:34

Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I can give you the story in a nutshell here.

So I was working in my early twenties and sports management. Basically, I was working from a minor league baseball team had been involved in that since I got out of college, I was working some really long hours during the very long summer month baseball season. Talking 80 hours a week, that sort of thing, and just decided that was something that I didn't want to do forever.

And I just started looking around and noticed that most of the other folks doing what I was doing were about my age or younger. And I knew it was time to do something different. And so, started looking for different opportunities to start my own business.

I was fortunate enough to make a connection with somebody who does basically exactly what I do now in Medicare market insurance and made a connection with him and started working with him and he was kind enough to take me under his wing for a few months. And then I went out on my own and haven't looked back since that was about 12 years ago.

Gresham Harkless 02:30

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. I had to dip my toe in the kind of like the sports industry. And that is extremely competitive and extremely hardworking industry to be in. But it's great that you got the opportunity to make that pivot and decide to start your business. So what I want to do is ask you a little bit more about what exactly are you doing with secure Medicare solutions.

Garrett Ball 02:47

Yeah. So, what we what we do is we really help people to navigate the complex waters of Medicare. So we, ideally, start talking to somebody, three, four or five months before they turn 65 and are eligible for Medicare.

And at that point, we help them understand Medicare itself and then look at the other options that are available for supplemental coverage that would fill in the gaps in Medicare.

So we ideally like to take somebody from not Knowing a whole lot about it and that way we can help them understand, start from scratch, help them understand Medicare itself and hopefully shorten the learning curve that they have.

Because it's a pretty big transition for folks as they go off of either, group coverage or people that are on an individual health plan to go from that to Medicare is a pretty, pretty big change.

And it's certainly a lot of complex terminology and things that people just don't understand.

Gresham Harkless 03:44

Yeah, I can imagine, making that transition as any transition is a lot to learn. But especially related to something like your your health care or your medical, I imagine that there's a lot that kind of goes into that right to understand.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Awesome. So what I want to do is now ask you a little bit more about what what do you feel makes your organization maybe unique?

Garrett Ball 04:04

Yeah. So, we really, there are tons of companies out there now that do what we do. As with the, just like other industries with the baby boomers, as they're moving through their, the ages here, they say, is there now, The folks turn a 65 now are, baby boomers.

And, that has driven a lot of industries, as and really, so there's been definitely an influx of new companies that are doing what we do. But what we think makes us stand apart is that, we really focus on being information-based and not no pressure, not just low pressure, but no pressure.

Our philosophy, although we're in sales, my philosophy is not to be salesy. It's just to give people the, all the information we can give them, all the knowledge we can give them, help them feel comfortable with what they know. And then, use kind of an attraction-based marketing philosophy where we want to be that the experts and believe we are the experts.

And then when you're ready to talk to us, you'll call us and come to us for come to us to actually buy whatever you're going to buy, whether that's a supplemental policy or whatever other type of plan you need.

Gresham Harkless 05:06

Yeah, that's a great kind of what I call a secret sauce sometimes to where you're able to create content and provide value to people so that rather than them.

or You trying to call them in order to for them to do business? They're coming directly to you because you are the go to person because you provided so much value and information and you were a vital resource to those people that are just turning or over 65.

Garrett Ball 05:29

Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely our philosophy and is to position ourselves as experts and be experts and continuously keep up with the changes and Medicare, obviously it's always changing, but, and that, that has served us well, I would say We didn't start with that being our unique selling angle and, but we have over about the last five or six years have evolved that way.

And that has really made a big difference and in our business and just the ease, of talking to people and selling interest to people.

Gresham Harkless 05:57

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack, and this might be an app.

It might be a book, but the idea is something that makes you more effective and efficient as a CEO. So do you have a CEO hack you can share with us?

Garrett Ball 06:12

Yeah, I would throw out one book that I'm that I read about, but Three years ago, that has really been instrumental and a more recent kind of change to my entire business.

And that would be a book is called The Pumpkin Plan. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but a spy and author, and I'm probably going to butcher his last name. I know who you're talking about. Mike Michalowicz, it's I believe is how you say it. It's Mike Mike Michalowicz. It's anyway, the book is really.

It's an interesting book. It takes the analogy of what champion pumpkin farmers, the philosophies they use when they're growing these huge pumpkins that win whatever, blue ribbons at state fairs and that sort of thing.

The idea is that for your business to make the most profitable parts of your business grow, you have to weed out the parts that aren't profitable, which is a pretty obvious thing, but I think it's difficult as an entrepreneur to remember that you may have to do that.

And what that's looked like for my business is we started focusing instead of, we still certainly can help people that are 70, 75 years old that are on Medicare, but we've really made our focus people that are 64 years old, just like that's our ideal customer where we want to talk to people that are between 64 and 65.

And that's been that's the most profitable client to us. And that's the person we ideally are going to serve.

Gresham Harkless 07:28

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I've heard a lot about that book. I haven't actually picked it up, but I've seen it. I wasn't going to jump in to save you on. I don't know how to say his last name either.

So I think you did the best job that I had better job than I could have done. But it was great to see how you have been able to implement that too, to be able to figure out and kind of niche down, maybe so to speak about who exactly is your avatar or ideal client.

Garrett Ball 07:48

Yeah, no doubt. Yeah, it's been a great transition. And, in any business you have to know exactly who you're serving or else you're going to serve no one, so.

Gresham Harkless 07:55

There you go. I love that. I love that. So that kind of brings me to what I call a CEO nugget. And do you have a CEO nugget or a piece of advice or word of wisdom you can give for other entrepreneurs and business owners?

Garrett Ball 08:05

Yeah. I would say one of the, my first piece of advice that comes to mind would be is to, as a CEO or entrepreneur, it's easy to get caught up in trying to do a little bit of everything or do it all. The one thing that's been very successful for me is using the gig economy. There are so many resources out there now.

You can outsource everything from, content on your website to lead generation to data entry to, there are just so many ways to outsource. We're not a huge company. I don't have a lot of folks working for me. So, I use that gig economy to freelancer, which I think is Upwork now all, there's so many different sites out there.

You can find really qualified people to do a job that really is an entrepreneur you shouldn't be doing. There's, you have to do as a business owner, you have to do the jobs that create profitability, not the task that aren't going to bring you. Profitability. And so my, I guess my hack or my nugget would be to, don't be afraid to outsource.

Gresham Harkless 09:02

I love that. I love that. Yeah. And especially with so many opportunities out there with the technology that you have to leverage at your fingertips where you can say, Hey, I need a logo done. Maybe that I can go to this site or like you said, Upwork is it definitely a good site as well too. So no, those are, that's a phenomenal CEO nugget that a lot of people can take into account.

And I know you touched on it kind of like. What the goal of this podcast is really to redefine like what it means to be a CEO. You touched on how the economy in the world has changed and how, there's a gig economy around now. So we're hoping to have on different types of CEOs to define what that means.

But I wanted to ask you very specifically what does being a CEO mean to you?

Garrett Ball 09:39

Yeah, being a CEO. To me, I would say just means freedom and flexibility, first and foremost. It's just for me to be able to wake up every day and decide what I need to do that day to make, to advance my business is complete freedom, first of all.

And then it's also just the flexibility, not just of what direction you're going to take your business, but also just the flexibility of where, where you can work what kind of work needs to be done is just it's a very, very much a free freeing feeling to be running your own business for sure.

Yeah, certainly plenty of of stresses and burdens and the difficulties that go with it, but overall at the end of the day, it's it's definitely a wonderful thing.

Gresham Harkless 10:20

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. Sometimes you go through everything so that you have that freedom and the opportunity to be able to do that.

So sometimes you go through the startup phase or startup periods in order to build your business and put it into place. And now you're able to maybe delegate a lot of those things like you mentioned before, or take those things off your plate so you can focus on the highest level things.

So I think that's a phenomenal definition. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Garrett, I truly appreciate you taking some time out of your schedule. What I wanted to do is try to give you the mic, so to speak, to see if there is anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know about you and then also how best to get a hold of you.

Garrett Ball 10:53

Yeah, sure. Thanks. And as far as other anything else to know about me I'm certainly happy to talk to anybody that's starting a business or, that has some related business that if there's a Connection to be made there, see if there's any synergies between our businesses. So yeah, to get in touch with me, I'm on Twitter at MetaGap INS is and my Twitter handle and that's MetaGap is M E T A G A P I N S.

So that's one way my the easiest email address for me is probably Garrett@65medicare.org and that Garrett is with two R's and two T's. So those are probably the easiest ways to get in touch with me. I certainly would welcome any conversation anything I could help or offer to to somebody just starting a business.

And certainly happy to give back and help if I can.

Gresham Harkless 11:40

Awesome. No, I truly appreciate you taking some time out of your schedule. I think you definitely have given back, especially reminding us to niche down and be very focused on exactly who we're targeting. So I appreciate everything that you're doing.

Truly appreciate the impact that you're having upon the world. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Garrett Ball 11:57

Thanks a lot. It was nice to talk to you.

Outro 11:58

Thank you for listening to the I Am CEO podcast, powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I Am CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business at ceohacks.co. This has been the I Am CEO podcast with Gresham Harless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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