CBC runs one channel with full instrumentation: Costco’s group-health marketplace. CBC runs a second channel in the dark: independent producers. Same company. Two channels. Two levels of visibility.
The producers you already paid to appoint are the cheapest premium you will ever write. This is about turning the dark channel on.
You have written about PBM opacity: margins that move where nobody can see them. The same kind of opacity sits one layer up, in the producer channel.
Independent producers hold 10 to 50 carrier appointments each. They sell what’s easiest first. A new appointment goes to the back of the queue unless something pulls it forward. Most newly appointed producers write nothing in their first 90 days. That is queue management, not laziness.
You already track this for Costco: conversion rate, time in stage, win-loss. The producer channel has none of it. No real-time view, no cohort behavior, no signal until commission statements arrive 60 to 90 days late.
If you appointed 100 producers last year and even 30 sat dormant, at a conservative first-year premium each, that is a block of premium that never entered the system. Swap in your real counts and these become a recoverable dollar figure. The diagnostic does exactly that.
The call before the diagnostic is free. If the six questions show the money isn’t leaving through the producer channel, we say so and you pay nothing. We don’t take your $7,500 to confirm a problem you don’t have.
You stop flying blind on the producer channel. You start seeing activation the way you already see Costco conversion. Here is the mechanism.
CSV exports from DataSource with Brandon Russell’s permission. No live integration.
The diagnostic costs $7,500. If it surfaces even one cohort of dormant producers worth recovering, it pays for itself before Phase 2 is scoped. For the record, that is about 60 to 80 hours of work, roughly $94 to $125 per hour effective depending on actual hours, below market because CBC is our first major customer.
Two of those five findings, we don’t sell. If it’s a wallet-share or onboarding problem, we point you to Vertafore or AgentSync and walk away. We only build what we are actually the right fix for.
$5,000 build kickoff + $3,000/month + your direct vendor costs (about $896/month, paid by CBC to each vendor, never marked up). 6-month minimum with a 30-day kill-for-any-reason carve-out, then month-to-month. Year-2 renewal capped at CPI+3%, or terminate at year-end with a 60-day wind-down at the year-1 rate.
Phase 2 also includes a 60-day recruiter-adoption program (weekly 15-minute check-ins, a claim-rate target written into the agreement) and a joint-quality clause: if reply rate sits below 2% at Month 4, both sides run a 30-day optimization sprint before anyone can cancel on reply-rate grounds.
This year-1 figure assumes a Texas-only launch. A second state (for example Florida) adds a one-time ~$5,000 regulatory-counsel opinion plus about $300 to $600/month incremental pass-through. The $896/month pass-through is the v1 email-only stack; if SMS is added in a later phase it rises by about $100/month. CBC pays vendors direct, never marked up.
No specific number of producers. You own the close. No day-1 deliverability parity with a 15-year incumbent sender. A new sending domain runs about 30% below a 10+ year domain at the start, so reply rates land near 3 to 4% in Month 2, roughly 4 to 5% by Month 6, and 5 to 6% only in the Month 6 to 12 window. Reply rate is not inbox placement. We will not conflate them, and we will not pretend the gap closes overnight. No SMS and no AI voice in version 1: the federal consent and AI-voice rules carry exposure we will not underwrite at this scope.
NewCo carries $1M E&O from day one, committed to $2M aggregate with CBC named as additional insured by Month 12.
CBC is our first major customer, and the credential is mutually valuable. In exchange for the pricing, we ask CBC to commit to:
If the Costco MSA prohibits any of this, we fall back to anonymized metrics and a generic “major group-health broker” framing. If CBC won’t be a public reference at all, we re-price to market. We will also cover up to $5,000 for an independent attorney to review the master services agreement before you sign.
Does the Costco MSA require disclosure of third-party data processors, and if so, what is the process? This answer determines the pricing path. If the MSA blocks public reference, we fall back to anonymized framing or re-price to market, no drama either way. A five-minute answer that prevents months of rework. We ask it before any pricing is locked.
A 30-minute call with Robin and Ken to ask six questions about your producer channel. The questions confirm whether the diagnostic is even the right thing to scope. Optional: invite Brandon Russell for the technical-fit portion. And if the answers say the producer channel isn’t where the money is leaving, we’ll tell you that, and we won’t take your $7,500.