A BRIEF HISTORY OF GROUP BENEFIT AGENCY

Jacqueline Burgoa was a young woman with great vision. In 1982, after graduating from U.C. Berkeley, she spent years living overseas and working for small businesses in Asia, South America and eventually the United States. During these years, she developed a desire to create an employee benefits company with a strong focus on service to the customer. Her global and small business experience positioned her to revolutionize the small business group healthcare industry. Burgoa worked for years setting savings aside to start her own insurance agency and right after finishing her M.B.A., and while pregnant with her second child, in 1993 she started her insurance agency. With savings in place, the entrepreneur immediately took action by enrolling small groups working out of her home, the kitchen was the “sales and marketing division” and the bedroom closet was the “equipment room”. Before long, she had assembled a team and moved to her own facilities with customer reps, sales agents, support staff and an entire slew of supporters.

Corporate change came first in early 2000 with the introduction of web technologies and in late 2006 as the industry changed. Jacqueline Burgoa expanded into new markets including corporate wellness programs to combat the ever increasing trend on group health insurance cost and the dangerous impact on small businesses. At the same time, she was personally dealing with the economic impact of these high insurance costs due to medical illness she was confronting at home. The problem wasn’t just what clients were facing, now the pain of the high insurance costs was very personal. This gave Jacqueline a great appreciation for what her clients were going through, causing her to take the high insurance cost problem head-on and develop alternative solutions before the price of inaction severely affected hers and her client’s bottom line.

Jacqueline hit the ground running. Under her watch, Group Benefit Agency took advantage of web technologies and expanded sales to the national marketplace. It differentiated themselves from their competition by providing not only exceptional service to customers but a radical way of thinking how small business with 3 to 100 employees should approach group healthcare benefits. By late 2007 she introduced a unique model of setting up group health care benefits from the wellness perspective instead of the sickness perspective. She figured out that businesses can't control healthcare costs without controlling their employees healthcare first and Healthy Employees <=> Healthy Bu$ine$$ was born -- a one-of-a-kind program that would save small organizations with 3 to 100 employees money, make their employees healthy and increase their performance along with their corporate bottom line. With a comprehensive marketing strategy and a clear and well articulated brand value to customers, by mid 2008 Group Benefit Agency and its new business model hit ground running.