(0:01 – 0:13): Welcome back to the DI Broker West podcast. I’m Doug Lenhoff and today I’m joined by Brock Falkner, Regional Director of Sales with DI Broker West out of Denver, Colorado. Brock, glad to have you here.

(0:14 – 0:20): Doug, thanks for having me. Good to be on. Brock, you work with producers across the country on disability income sales.

(0:20 – 0:40): What’s the conversation you find yourself having most often? Yeah, it’s usually some version of this, an advisor already placing group disability insurance and they think the job is done. And I have to tell them, in most cases, it’s not. There’s an individual DI opportunity sitting right there, same relationship going unaddressed.

(0:41 – 1:41): So let’s unpack that. Group LTD is a real benefit. Employers offer it, clients have it.

What’s actually missing? Group LTD is genuine value. It’s an important foundation and I don’t want to diminish that. But it’s usually only the beginning of the conversation, not the end.

And when you look closely at what the plan actually does, the gaps become pretty clear. So what kind of gaps are we talking about? A few things consistently come up. First, benefits from employer-paid long-term disability are typically taxable.

So the client is losing a portion of their replacement right off the top. Second, most plans have a monthly benefit cap. So higher wage earners have partial replacement even before taxes.

Social Security, Workers’ Comp and other sources reduce what’s available to them. And furthermore, group long-term disability defines compensation narrowly. Bonuses, commissions, profit sharing, K-1 distributions, those are typically not covered.

(1:41 – 1:55): So the 60% replacement the employee thinks they’re providing might actually be a lot less in practice? Significantly less in many cases. And the employee and their advisor may have no idea. That’s where the individual disability insurance comes in.

(1:55 – 2:43): Exactly. Individual disability can protect more of a client’s real income. Not just their base salary, but their full compensation.

And that actually drives the financial life. It’s portable, so it stays with them regardless of where they work, and it can be designed specifically around the client, their profession, how they’re compensated, and what they need covered. So who is this most relevant for? Executives, business owners, and highly compensated professionals.

Those are typically the clients where the gap between group disability and what they need for protection becomes most evident and is the widest. But it’s not limited to those individuals. Anyone that’s paid commission or paid anything that goes beyond straight base pay has a gap that needs to be covered.

(2:43 – 3:14): I think you mentioned a stat 9.8 out of 10 group LTD caps or cases leave room for an individual DI solution. That’s a pretty striking number. It is.

I agree. And what I want advisors to hear more than anything else is it’s not a niche situation. This is not a rare find.

It’s a repeatable opportunity that’s hiding inside the ordinary group disability conversations that are already happening. You don’t have to go find a new market. It’s already in your book.

(3:15 – 3:36): Well, if the opportunity is that consistent, why aren’t more advisors acting on it? That’s a great question. And the most common thing I hear is that individual disability sounds harder to place than it really is. There’s a perception that the underwriting process is complicated, that it creates friction with the client, and it slows everything down.

(3:36 – 3:49): For some cases, that can be true. But in the right situation, guarantee issue makes the implementation much cleaner than most people expect. Well, explain that for listeners who may not be as familiar with GSI.

(3:49 – 4:24): Guarantee issue means coverage that is issued with very limited and sometimes no individual medical underwriting. Employees in an eligible group can get coverage without going through the full underwriting DI application process. That dramatically then reduces the friction for the advisor, for the employer, and let’s face it, for the employees as well.

It’s one of the reasons that when the case is structured correctly, the path of the conversation to placement is often smoother than advisors anticipate going in. Okay, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about working with DI Broker West.

(4:24 – 4:55): Actually, what’s that look like for a producer who wants to start acting on this? Absolutely. And I can’t emphasize this enough. We should be thought of as an extension of an advisor’s practice.

This means product knowledge, case design, enrollment support, implementation guidance, and ongoing service. The producer stays in the lead as the client’s primary advisor, and that relationship is theirs. We handle the specialized work behind the scenes so that they can walk into the client conversation with confidence.

(4:55 – 5:09): So you’re not stepping in between the advisor and their client? Never. Our model is what we call specialized expertise, producer first execution. The advisor gets the outcome of the credit, and we get the satisfaction of a well-placed case.

(5:10 – 6:16): That’s the arrangement that works for everyone, including the client. Brock, you mentioned reframing the question advisors should be asking. What do you mean by that? The question most advisors ask, do they have group long-term disability insurance? That is the wrong stopping point.

The better question is, does the coverage actually protect the income they depend on? Those are two very different questions, and the second one is where the real planning conversation starts. And for advisors who want to test this with a real client? Bring us into one conversation, one client review, one executive carve-out, one group long-term disability case where income might be underprotected, which should be most. We talked about 9.8 out of 10.

Let us work with you, I think what most advisors find is that the opportunity is closer than they expected, and the process is more manageable than they feared. We’ll help you turn it into a stronger client outcome, a stronger advisory relationship, and probably most importantly, a stronger competitive position for them to be in. Great.

Brock Faulkner from Diabroker West in the Denver area. Thanks for being with us today.

Thank you, Doug. Appreciate it.