Challenge

FinFit Life is a financial wellness company that has experienced a surge of growth since its founding in 2019, quickly becoming one of the nation’s leading networks of independent contractors who promote 'financial fitness' as a pillar of health and wellness.

The company trains its producers (called "Financial Fitness Associates") in a marketing system designed to build independent sales offices— and serve a wide customer demographic. The company offers John Hancock Vitality ™ as a program to help customers improve their physical fitness together with financial fitness."

Sam Griffin, VP of Operations, has been with the company for 5 years and was tasked with finding ways to make the business more efficient and profitable. He didn’t have to look very far.

"I immediately saw an opportunity to streamline our back office,” he recalls. “There were too many manual processes to scale with our continued growth.” 

The company was using one system to process ACH, another to calculate commissions, and another to process 1099s for its contractors. "These systems weren't talking to one another and were making things needlessly complicated,” he said. The disjoined patchwork of tech was slowing the company down and preventing it from growing faster and delivering a differentiated contractor experience.

Solution

For its agents, one of the selling points of working with FinFit Life was that commissions were paid weekly. This was something Griffin and his team knew they couldn't compromise on. "We needed a partner that could reliably handle weekly commissions while helping us calculate complex commissions and ensure payments went out fast and accurately."

"Our 1099 situation was antiquated,” Griffin explains. “We were filing them manually on paper, which took a ton of time and usually ended up with a ton of errors.”

Given the importance of agents to their business, Griffin and FinFit Life Founder Howard Sharfman, also recognized an opportunity to better support their workers with health and financial wellness benefits. 

It wasn't long after he started searching for new tech partners that Griffin and Sharfman, who had spent nearly 40 years working for one of the biggest insurance and financial services companies in the country, NFP, got a call from one of his former colleagues. It turns out NFP was using Wingspan itself to manage hundreds of its own 1099 insurance agents and was very pleased with the reliability of the platform.

After doing his own diligence, Griffin was intrigued because of the platform's ability to support their complex payroll needs while also handling 1099 filing.

"Wingspan essentially allowed us to get everything on one system," he said. "Now the person calculating commissions can upload that to Wingspan, get the figure validated, and then trigger the payment to the agent, without having to involve the bank."

Griffin was also impressed with the company’s suite of contractor tools and services. The Wingspan wallet could provide agents with their own business bank account, a debit card, and other bookkeeping services. The service also included tax withholding and access to big-company health benefits, which turned out to be the deciding factor. “Access to automatic tax withholding and health benefits would be life-changing for many of our agents," Griffin says.

Even though Wingspan would ultimately prove more expensive than the company's existing tech stack, Griffin and the FinFit Life executive team viewed this as an investment in its foundational infrastructure that could have a transformative impact on its back office as well as the lives of its agents. 

 Results 

The integration of payroll, commissions calculations and 1099 filing for FinFit Life validated Griffin's original thesis.

“It’s such a time saver and has been so much easier to use than our previous workflow,” he exclaimed.

The consolidation of critical back office workflows into one system has helped the company save hundreds of hours and reduce the burden on internal staff. “The platform has been fantastic,” Griffin adds. The results of the transformation caught the attention of Griffin’s boss and the rest of the executive team: 

• 90% reduction in support inquiries from agents related to the status of their form and/or discrepancies with their tax information 
• 70+ hours saved during tax season by offloading 1099 filing and eliminating the need to manually track and retrieve 1099 forms 
• 40+ hours saved monthly by eliminating manual onboarding and payment processes and simplifying commission calculation and validation 

For one of FinFit Life’s agents, John Soo Hoo, the access to health care proved far more valuable than anything Griffin could’ve imagined.

“Wingspan was a game-changer,” said Soo Hoo. “If it wasn’t for Wingspan and Meridio, I wouldn’t be getting the treatment I am getting today.”

Soo Hoo was immunocompromised and wasn’t able to afford the proper health coverage without bankrupting his family due to a mediocre health insurance plan. He was rapidly losing weight and after two scans covered by his previous insurance, couldn’t afford the eye-popping $10k for each additional scan. 

When he learned of the healthcare offerings through FinFit Life and Meridio, a leading provider of affordable health care options for small businesses, he was initially skeptical.

“When I heard that everyone qualified, even with pre-existing conditions, I thought it was too good to be true or that my prayers had finally been answered. It turned out to be the latter.” 

Soo Hoo has been able to see the right doctors using his new insurance and not only has regained the weight he lost as well as his health, but was recently recognized as one of the company’s top performers. For Griffin and his team, this was the perfect manifestation of the company’s ethos.

“John’s story is the epitome of what we stand for at FinFit Life,” he said. “Our mission is about helping people lead healthier lives, and that starts with our agents. John’s story is something we can all be proud of.”