How Capital Benefit Group Brought Every Office, Every Producer, and Every Commission Onto One Platform

Overview

Capital Benefit Group is a true family of companies — including Capital Benefit Services, Pro Benefits of WA, EPK Benefits, Puget Sound Benefit Services, Cathy Merz Insurance, and their newly acquired Essential Benefits. Each member company brings its own client base, its own team, and its own history. CBG has continued to grow through acquisition.

Before BenefitsGuide, each company had its own way of doing things. Renewals were tracked in individual spreadsheets and notebooks. Commission reconciliation depended on waiting for another party to finish their work before the CBG team could finish theirs. And every new company that joined the family added another set of processes to manage.

By using BenefitsGuide — the business operating system built on the Salesforce Platform — Capital Benefit Group brought every company in the family onto one system, took full control of their commission process, and built a foundation that makes every new acquisition easier than the last.

Challenge: Running a Family of Companies on One Process

1. A Commission Process They Didn't Control

Every month, the team was stuck waiting. Commission statements had to be uploaded and processed before the CBG team could reconcile anything, and that piece of the work was not in their hands. When things slipped, the whole month slipped with it. Producers might not get paid on time. Reconciliations ran long. And the team had no way to see where things stood.

2. Commission Splits Managed Account by Account

On top of the reconciliation headache, commission splits had to be managed one client account at a time. Every time a producer's arrangement changed, someone had to touch every affected account to keep things accurate. With 70 people and thousands of groups across the family of companies, that approach doesn't scale.

3. Renewals Tracked in Frankenstein Spreadsheets

Every account manager had their own way of tracking renewals. Some used spreadsheets. Some used notebooks. Some used a mix of both. There was no single place to see who was working on what.

"It's hard to give you a quantifiable number of hours that was spent managing renewals because it was all done in individual people's spreadsheets outside of the system," said Samantha Baechle. "Everybody was doing their own thing. We had no line of sight into that other than the very end game of receiving an automatic renewal email from the carrier saying, 'this group has been renewed.'"

4. A Platform That Could Scale With Acquisitions

As CBG continued to grow the family of companies, they needed a platform that could absorb each new acquisition quickly — bringing every team onto one consistent process without months of chaos. Renewal management in particular is notoriously disorganized across the employee benefits industry, and CBG wanted a system that gave the whole team real-time visibility no matter which member company they worked for.

Solution: One Platform for Commissions, Renewals, and Growth

1. A Commission Process the Team Owns End-to-End

With BenefitsGuide and our robots, Capital Benefit Group took control of the commission process. Statements download automatically. Line items are tagged to the right producer. Nothing sits in a "mystery pot" of unassigned dollars, because the system won't let a statement move forward until every line item is assigned.

"Anytime you upload a statement, either that line item has already been tagged to something — and if it's missing a tag, you cannot proceed to the next step until it's attached to something," said Christian. "We're not receiving a whole bunch of money in this mystery pot trying to go backwards in time and figure out where it belongs. We're actually assigning it on the front end."

2. Rules-Based Commission Split Assignment

Instead of managing splits account by account, Capital Benefit Group sets the rules once at the producer level — and every future commission flows to the right place automatically.

3. Renewals Managed Through Tickets

BenefitsGuide's Tickets system replaced the Frankenstein spreadsheets. Each renewal now lives as a ticket on the account — created 90 days in advance — with each step automatically assigned to the right person. When person A finishes their work, the ticket falls off their list and shows up on person B's list. No Teams messages. No games of telephone. No missed handoffs.

"Person A does their work, checks it off in the renewal ticket," said Samantha. "Because of the way that we set up lists and reporting, it automatically falls off of person A's list. Person B sees it pop up on their list, and they know that they're ready to go. They don't need to talk, they don't need to communicate, it's automatically done."

4. One System for Every Member Company

Every company in the CBG family runs on the same platform. Teams across Bellevue and Oregon see the same data, follow the same renewal workflow, and track their work the same way — regardless of which member company they sit in.

"We have a group of people down in Oregon," Samantha said. "They've just said, this is so much easier. They used to be making copies and printing out papers. We fully got them up to speed with the 21st century."

Impact: Hours Saved, Visibility Gained, Family Aligned

Capital Benefit Group's results speak for themselves — across commissions, renewals, and the way every member company works together.

"We're saving more than 80% of the time that we were spending on actually managing the process because we're not waiting and we're not constantly having to check in," Christian said.

"What would normally take two to three hours to manage a group at renewal — just from the process of trying to find the policies and managing the data — has gone from two to three hours to an hour or 30 minutes," he added. "It's saving 60% of my time, 50% of my time."

The visibility benefits extend to every client interaction. "When they have a question about something, they'll just say, 'I have a question about this group. It's ticket 124. Can you give me a call?'" Samantha said. "I pull up the ticket, I see what the renewal is, I know what policies they're looking at. We're cutting out conversation that would have happened in the past because it's all right there."

"If I pick up a call for somebody else's group, I'm probably able to answer their question because I can see their business, I can see the logged emails, I can see if there are renewals coming up, who manages the group — all that information is right there."

Conclusion: A Platform Built to Grow With You

Capital Benefit Group's journey shows what happens when a family of companies puts every office, every producer, and every process on one shared platform.

Commissions get reconciled on time. Splits get assigned automatically at the producer level. Renewals have full visibility from 90 days out. New acquisitions join the family on the same system from day one. And the team gets their time back to focus on clients and growth — instead of chasing spreadsheets and waiting on someone else's work.

"You guys talk about work velocity. Work velocity only happens if we're not adding work by process design on the people's plates," Christian said. "We have created something that is simple, it is quicker, it is more intuitive than anything that we ever had in the past. And so that just makes people better."

BenefitsGuide is not just a system; it's the catalyst for a transformative change of any insurance brokerage — including the ones that are growing fast and acquiring along the way.