Best Places to Work Honoree 2022
Organization Name: Brabo Benefits
We train every week.
We are very proud of the flexibility of career growth we have, but we also acknowledge that someday other opportunities may arise where their careers take them elsewhere. As a leader, my promise to each of my colleagues is to help them build their careers as best I can within Brabo, and hopefully they stay. If they choose to move on, it would be for the right reason for them and their families. Someone can always offer more money, but we try and offer the best combination of career growth, great pay, stress free environment and work life balance.
We look everywhere!
We are very proud that each employee decides the hours they want to work. Many employee started at 10-20 hours per week and have chosen to add hours as their work life balance has allowed. Today we have most of our employees working remotely and a few on 4 day work weeks. We have also found incredible success hiring women in particular who have been out of the workforce fro a number of years. We get A+ talent understanding that as they transition to a full time work environment, they need flexibility.
We help employers with their health insurance and provide concierge service to employees who need help navigating the healthcare system. Here is a great example of how we help!
We had a employee of a client whose 14 year old son was working on his mental health and had built a great relationship with his therapist. Six months after the employer renewed their health plan the office the therapist worked in decided to leave the insurance company's network. Jenn Deegan from Brabo contacted the therapist and the insurance company and single handedly negotiated a "one off" contract enabling the young man to continue his therapy. That success felt great for Jenn, the employee, the employer and most importantly the young man!
We do our best! We utilize a lot of technology combined with one, "mostly mandatory", team meeting.
We also communicate quarterly on the overall health of the company. As the owner I share our Profit and Loss statements quarterly and discuss positive and negative trends we are seeing . We talk about wins and losses at our Tuesday meeting and we use Zoom for quick internal meetings. We use SLACK and color coding to coordinate trackable tasks.
But most importantly we have respect for each other and we try and understand each others' strengths and find ways to utilize those strengths for the good of our clients and our company. Twice a year we do management reviews where the team can bring what they like and don't like about their jobs. I am very proud of the candor that comes in those meeting.
Relentlessly.
We budget for thousands of dollars a year in donations and we offer our time and resources constantly. Our office is used as a venue for events, we have our big events at creative places like the Pilgrim Hall Museum and Plymouth Art Guild, and we access our insurance company partners to contribute directly to the community as well. Scott Hokanson, our president, is on numerous charitable boards and was named the 2020 Plymouth Chamber Businessperson of the Year mostly due to his involvement in the community.
Our best example of helping the community came in the Spring of 2020. The world was changing and all of the Brabo companies learned quickly on how to navigate the PPP Loan system at the start of the pandemic. We did it for us and realized our clients and community needed help. We held a number of free, open online seminars that companies attended from all over the country. We were especially proud that many local bankers attended as they found our seminars easier to understand than some of the training they had received. We are confident a number of businesses stayed in business due to our help at that time.
