Corporations are looking to wellness programs to keep employees healthy.
As health insurance premiums continue to skyrocket, more and more corporations are looking for ways to keep their employees healthier in an effort to reduce insurance claims. Wellness programs are an effective way to target common health problems within an employee population, but most corporations do not have the necessary expertise or desire to run these programs themselves. You can broker these wellness programs to various companies and make a healthy profit if you have the know-how.
Instructions
1. Contact a well-respected health and fitness center in your area. Ask to speak with the fitness manager and tell her that you wish to partner with the business to provide wellness programming to local companies. A good fitness center will have qualified staff who are familiar with these types of programs and they will generally be happy to work with you on this type of partnership. Negotiate a payment agreement, and offer exclusivity to the most viable gym in the area so that they are more inclined to work with you. Develop partnerships with gyms in various areas, even other states if necessary, so that you can grow your business as word of mouth spreads.
2. Purchase a good health risk assessment software program, or HRA. The HRA is a software program that asks employees questions about their health habits and evaluates their current health status. Once employees have taken the HRA, the software is able to provide a report that demonstrates prevailing health problems. This information will help you focus in on what wellness programs are needed for that particular company's employees.
3. Create a list of companies in your area to provide wellness programming for. Look for companies that have at least 500 employees. As a general rule, companies will need a few hundred employees before they will consider the expenditures involved in wellness programming.
4. Create a name and a sales proposal plan for your company. Utilizing the information you have gathered regarding how much the fitness center has agreed to charge for the wellness programming and the expenses of the HRA software, create a service list that factors in your time and how much profit you believe is reasonable for working as a corporate wellness programming broker. You will need to either set up your fees based on a real costs plus profit business plan, or you can roll your profit into the fees you charge for the other vendors and pay them directly yourself.
5. Beginning with a list of ten, pitch your services to companies that have had good financial performance for the last several years and have a few hundred employees. Contact the human resource department and ask for the employee benefits manager. Find out if she has considered wellness programming for company employees and if so, what she has specifically tried. Ask her if she can meet with you to have a brief discussion about wellness programming.
6. Call each company and take notes about your discussions. If you leave a message, make a note to call them back in a week. Never give up, as persistence is the key to sales. Keep calling and make as many appointments for meetings as you can. The goal of your first meeting will be to assess the company's current expectations of and budget for wellness programming.
7. Meet with the human resource department manager and discuss the current wellness initiative. Talk to him about how you will assist him in working with the health risk assessment, or HRA, to objectively identify the current health status of their employees. You will then want to explain how you will connect employees to the preferred health and fitness provider who will run the wellness programming, based on the information provided by the HRA information.
8. Discover what the company budget for the wellness programming is and determine if serving as a broker will make financial sense for both of you. If they have a budget that will cover your costs and provide you with the profit margin you were looking for, then follow up with them and give them a proposal for your services. Once you have signed an agreement with them, it will be time to move forward with the HRA and wellness programming services. You are now on your way to being a successful broker for corporate wellness programs.
Tags: wellness programming, fitness center, wellness programs, broker will, budget wellness, budget wellness programming
