Management creates a challenging and unresponsive culture
Pros
Great pay if you’re either gifted with a great territory and/or partners, or willing to work at 300% effort. Your job is secure as long as you don’t challenge or question management, even if you’re nowhere near quota consistently. HI has recruited some of the best people, which makes the trauma bonds that HI creates that much more meaningful and enduring.
Cons
Management. From the top - the CRO is effectively running the entire organization. Their approach was excellent for strongarming our way into a marketplace and building brand recognition, but an organization whose entire priority 10+ years in is entirely new business focused is going to have issues with customer service and client retention. Their retention numbers are misleading, as deconverting a plan is a wildly complicated and lengthy process. For a business which relies on referral partners for 80+% of its new business, there is alarmingly little focus on partner service. If you enjoyed popularity contests and personality cults in high school, you may be happy navigating management at HI, but for a professional organization, it creates a wildly challenging culture to navigate. Less than 25% of PAMs consistently hit revenue quota, but there are 5 or 6 PAMs who consistently hit 500+%, either because they have been gifted with large national partnerships that aren’t accessible to anyone else, are managing territories that are the equivalent of 6-8 ordinary territories, or have been allowed to take and keep partnerships from outside of their territories (though I hear this is finally changing). They’re also nearly doubling the field PAM team, which means many territories which are already taxed will be stretched even thinner. Couple that with a growing trend of large national partners disappearing (Paycor acquired by Paychex, Paylocity partnering with Vestwell to offer “their own” 401(k) product, etc.) and growing alienation of local payroll partners, and opportunity will be stretched even more thinly between even more field PAMs. Automation is a great goal, and works in a limited scope of applications within the admin and compliance functions of a retirement plan. However, an under-focus on having resources to address functions that cannot be automated - or address automation failures - creates a massive amount of tension between partners and HI, and alienates clients. To be clear, the people hired to do the customer service, back office functions, and partner care work are excellent, but they’re poorly tooled, unempowered, and understaffed (an understatement). Did I mention that management is entirely uninterested in feedback or challenges that question their viewpoints on GTM strategy, team culture, territory design, etc.? The fastest way to punch your ticket out at HI is to make the wildly egomaniacal senior management question whether you’ll jump off of a cliff at their command by asking questions or trying to make HI a better place.
