Alex Jenkins from NestEggs Retirement Plan Services

In this episode, we welcome Alex, a partner at NestEggs, to discuss how their firm supports privately held businesses and trade associations with comprehensive retirement plan solutions. Alex shares his journey from medical device sales to becoming an investment advisor and details NestEggs’ unique approach as one of the last privately held, fully bundled retirement plan providers in America.

 Listeners will learn how NestEggs offers consultative, no-cost reviews of 401k and 403b plans, helps businesses navigate fiduciary responsibilities, and leverages new tax incentives for small businesses. Whether you’re setting up a plan for the first time or looking to optimize your current offering, discover how NestEggs delivers personalized, transparent guidance to help Main Street businesses safeguard their employees’ financial futures and fulfill regulatory obligations—all without commission-based sales tactics. Tune in to find out how a simple consultation could transform your company’s retirement benefits and compliance peace of mind.

About Alex Jenkins

Alex Jenkins is the Chief Revenue Officer at NestEggs Retirement Plan Services, Inc., based in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. With a background in economics from the University of Florida, Alex brings extensive experience in both retirement plan services and the medical device industry, having previously held senior roles at Zimmer Biomet where he earned multiple performance awards. Recognized for his leadership, sales acumen, and commitment to client success, Alex is known for driving growth and delivering tailored retirement solutions to businesses and their employees.

About NestEggs

NestEggs is a transformative provider of retirement plan solutions, specializing in fully integrated 401K, pension, Multiple Employer Plans, and Pooled Employer Plans. As a third-party administrator, open architecture record keeper, and Registered Investment Adviser, NestEggs custom-builds tax-efficient plans tailored to each client’s unique needs. With transparent, commission-free pricing and dedicated consultants, they handle both plan administration and fiduciary investment management, allowing businesses to unburden HR, delegate fiduciary responsibilities, and focus on retirement readiness. NestEggs stands apart from traditional providers by offering bo

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Transcript

Marc: 0:01

I would like to welcome Alex to our podcast. Alex, how are you? I'm doing excellent, Marc. How are you today? Awesome. Now, I want to thank you in advance for coming on. And today we're going to talk about Nest Eggs. And what is this NestEggs? What does it mean for businesses or trade associations that have companies looking for helping their employees in the space of financial . So maybe Alex, the best thing to do is start a little bit, tell us about yourself, your background, what you've grown up with as far as your career wise, and then we'll jump into what is NestEggs and how we can help businesses and employees. Awesome.

Alex: 0:49

I appreciate the time and welcome to everybody joining us today to listen in on the conversation. I hope you find it valuable. So, Alex and NestEggs. So I'm a Florida native born and raised, attended the University of Florida, which is why there's a gator seemingly kind of growing out of the side of my head and got a degree in economics when I was there and got out into the real world and put that degree to use. Not at all. I actually was in medical device sales at the enterprise level for about a decade. before ultimately joining NestEggs in 2016. So now I'm putting that economics degree to work. And since my time at NestEggs, I have gone and gotten sort of the requisite industry designation and educations and sort of acronyms behind my name. I'm an investment advisor representative, which means I hold a series 65 investor license. I'm a certified plan fiduciary advisor and an accredited investment fiduciary. That's a lot of boring stuff, probably not ultimately germane to the individuals listening today. But what it speaks to is the culture of NestEggs. So, okay, who's NestEggs? Well, NestEggs is in our 25th year, actually. Though I did not found NestEggs, I'm a partner of it alongside two other gentlemen, and we're steering NestEggs into its next 25 years. And what we are is one of the last remaining privately held Fully bundled retirement plan providers in America. That's a mouthful. What is relevant about being privately held? Well, who is the predominant member of these trade associations and industry specific associations that exist out there? It's typically privately held businesses, right? Banding together for scale, banding together for thought leadership, for sort of a desire to bring coherence to what it is they're doing on a daily basis. And we think that Main Street America, the privately held world is obviously the core of our GDP and sort of economic vibrance in the country. So again, we're a fully bundled provider of retirement plans. We are what's called a third party administrator. We are an open architecture record keeper, and we are a fee only fiduciary advisor. High level what this means is we partner with businesses from three employees up to 10,000 typically, and build them a turnkey 401k or 403b retirement solution. And in the roles that we serve, we take over little known fiduciary liability that actually exists under ERISA. So the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, is the package of laws that govern company retirement plans. And it's very specific and rather it's very explicit about the liability that a corporation takes on or that a privately held entity takes on when they sponsor a plan. The industry doesn't educate around that. The industry does not typically outsource or take on that liability on behalf of the plan sponsor. NestEggs does. So we're very boutique in that way. and we're very focused on trying to drive retirement for Main Street America, for the privately held businesses that are out there working hard every day to differentiate and compete against of course the big corporate conglomerates.

Marc: 4:36

So can you walk us through the journey of a business sees NestEggs in the master marketplace for Concourse Benefits and they're interested. What would the journey kind of look like from next steps and timelines?

Alex: 4:53

Sure. We are highly consultative. So a retirement plan is not a commodity. A 401k plan is not a commodity. And unfortunately, they're sold that way. The market over the 80s and the 90s sort of integrated, just like we're seeing buyouts occur across industries sort of nationally. The 401k industry used to be this ultra sophisticated sort of white collar place. And then it got purchased by all the huge corporate insurance providers and brokerages and what we call wire houses, custodians. And they stripped what makes 401 so special out of it. And we are sort of the 401k of yesterday. And in that regard, we're going to provide a really robust upfront consultation to businesses that are interested in either sponsoring a plan for the first time, or they're interested in perhaps a second set of eyes to look at the plan that they have today and to advise them on potential alternatives, enhancements, optimizations, potentially cost cutting measures that could improve their existing plan. So if someone finds us through the marketplace and they reach out and say, Hey, we're interested, They're going to get introduced to a plan consultant, perhaps me, perhaps one of my colleagues, and we're going to get under the hood and say, you know, Marc, what are you looking for in a 401k plan if you don't have one today? Marc, are you aware of the robust tax mitigation available to you as an entrepreneur via the 401k? And we're going to provide them, after gathering some necessary sort of intake paperwork, we're going to provide them a tax focused qualified retirement plan design that shows them a multitude of different options. Marc, you could do it this way and it would save you this amount in tax. Marc, you could do it that way and it would save you that amount in tax. It's really critical for everyone to know in 2019 and 2022, Congress updated for the first time that package of laws that I referenced earlier, ERISA. And when they updated it, they added really robust tax credits, incentives, for small businesses to sponsor 401k plans for the first time. These incentives can grow to 40, 50, $60,000 a year for the first five years that a business sponsors a 401k plan for the first time. So we're going to provide that level of consultation. You know, if you go get a 401k plan really anywhere else in America, it's a sushi menu exercise. That's what I call it. They slide a sheet of paper across the table to you. They ask you, Marc, how long do you want people to have to wait before they can enter the plan? Marc, how much do you think you want to match them? And you start checking boxes without fully appreciating what is it I'm getting, right? Like what's in the dragon roll? What's in the kamikaze roll? They just tell you there's a roll. There's six pieces. What are the ingredients? What's it going to taste like? You know, how does this work? We're going to provide you a in depth budgetary insight. inclusive of all the tax credits now available to you under the new laws and including all the tax deductions available to you. They've always been available. And we're going to let you pick your best outcome. And we're going to consider the cultural tugs of war that might occur too, right? There might be cultural goals that you have for certain classifications of employees, certain people within your rank and file. But the point is, what's it like to find NestEggs in the marketplace and to engage us for a conversation, it's going to be consultative. We don't have a product to sell. We have an education we'd like to provide to plan sponsors to empower them towards a well-fitting 401k for them. And again, the same is true on the takeover or existing plan conversation. If you have a plan today, Do you know whether or not you're being served in a fiduciary capacity by your current service providers? Do you know whether there's revenue sharing or commissions built into the investments of your plant? Are you serving in administrative roles where you're doing things like track eligibility of new hires or facilitating payroll data from one pay period to the next, getting the payroll data out of your HCM platform and over to your 401k record keeper? Are you approving any of the distributions or loan requests or hardship requests from your employees? Are you signing that pesky form 5500 every year? Are you confused by what that is? If you have over 100 employees with a balance in the plan, are you having to facilitate that annual audit with the CPA each year? Okay, if you answered yes to some or none or all of those questions, let's have a conversation about what it could look like to de-risk your plan So what are the tasks and the roles that you're serving today that you shouldn't be, that are causing liability for you personally, that you may not be aware of? What are the opportunities to reduce the costs that your participants are paying today? Are your investments performing in line with their peers? Let's look at all that. And we'll do all of this consultation at no charge, Marc, for the plan sponsors, these HR representatives, these CFOs, whoever's in the driver's seat of this. We're going to give you a no charge consultative look at your plan, show you things that no one's likely ever educated you on before so that you have an eyes wide open sort of view. And it's up to you if you engage us for that next conversation. Our value is that we're going to give the insight, the free advice away. And that's an investment into a potential partnership. We hope that, and anecdotally, we know that you will hear and see things that are new. And in many cases they're not necessarily good things. And the, the Concourse Platform 401k platform powered by NestEggs, it can solve for all of the issues that exist everywhere in the 401k marketplace. And if an individual, whether it's starting a plan for the first time or, or looking at a conversion of their plan onto the concourse platform powered by NestEggs, it's a six week process. We're going to hold your hand from start to finish. We're going to work on behalf of you with your prior providers, with your payroll company, with your participants. Our job is to pull you out of it, right? Get you out of the middle. You don't manage 401k s for a living. So you shouldn't have to bear the burdens of the setup process if it's a new plan or the conversion process if it's an existing plan.

Marc: 11:33

Great job, Alex. My takeaway from this is 401k of yesterday, old school, take care of the customer type of relationship building. And there's so many things in your world that if you're a company with a 401k plan, and you miss something, it can have serious impact. I wasn't fully aware of that. So the call to action or the value proposition to members of Concourse Benefits platform is just reach out to Alex and his team, get a consultation. The worst thing that'll happen is you'll probably learn something new and you might end up with a better long-term relationship for managing your employee 401ks. Great job, Alex. That was awesome. Is there anything else that you'd like to add before we conclude?

Alex: 12:28

No, I would just pile on to sort of, you nailed it. You know, the call to action is that you have a highly technical expert now, you know, on staff via this Concourse Platform, willing and able and excited to provide you a consultative view of your plan. We are the highest level of fiduciary under the law. We are obligated by that law to place your interests ahead of our own. So you're going to get the insider baseball, the inside scoop, a real look, sunlight on your plan that you've likely never had before. And we're not allowed to fudge that. So if there's great aspects to your plan, we're going to tell you that too. If you have a great investment lineup, that's ultra low cost, that's performing just like its peer group, we're going to tell you. If you're being served by a fiduciary already, we're going to tell you that. But if you're not, we're going to tell you that as well. And so there really is no risk to this. We're not going to charge for the exercise. You know, there's a half dozen documents, Marc, that we gather from the plan sponsors to conduct these types of reviews. We'll even hop on a screen share with you to log into your administrator portal if you already have a plan. We'll show you what documents we need to get to comb that out and give you a review. And I'll end with this. The Department of Labor actually recommends that plan sponsors, as fiduciaries, Benchmark their plan every three to five years. It's a rhetorical question, but to the audience listening today, when's the last time you had a disinterested third party provide a benchmark or review of your plan? It's totally different than getting a annual review from the guy serving the plan who's apt to tell you he's doing a wonderful job. Getting that third party in there, and that's the value of this Concourse Platform, right, is we've been hired to provide this value up front, whether or not the plan sponsor initiates a relationship with us after the fact. So it's a wonderful benefit. And again, you're going to fulfill a fiduciary obligation that the Department of Labor says, do this every three to five years, and we're going to hand you a report. You can set it on your desk. And if the DOL ever knocks on your door and says, when's the last time you looked at your plan? You can say, oh, yeah, you know what? We did do that. Here you go. Check it out. We've fulfilled our duty. So it's a wonderful value add. You know, we are not like the big financial institutions that employ salespeople. In fact, we don't have a single commission-based employee at NestEggs, not in our 25-year history, mind you. We're consultants. And so we're here to help. And we're really hopeful that the message I've delivered today adds value for the Concourse Members. And we hope that, you know, the phone rings. We'd love to help anyone that we can.

Marc: 15:12

So guys, if you're listening to this, in Concourse Benefits, just trigger a request for a consultation and that will set the things in motion for you to get connected with Alex or somebody from his team. Alex, thank you so much for your insight. I'm actually blown away on the amount of things that companies need to be aware of. And again, I thank you for being such a valued partner in the Concourse Benefits ecosystem.

Alex: 15:38

I appreciate all of your kind words, Marc, everybody out there listening today. We hope we get to meet you somewhere along the way. We're here to help. And yeah, I hope everyone is blessed and well in the back half of the year.

Marc: 15:50

Thanks.