 Aloha and welcome to this week's edition of Business in Hawai'i. I'm Deila Nyonegida and we're broadcasting live from the ThinkTech studios in downtown Honolulu. If you want to tune in live, we are live at www.thinktechhawaii.com. You may all subscribe to our programs and get our mailing list at that site as well. The theme of business in Hawai'i is to share with you stories of successful businesses by local people. Our guests share with us their story, their journey about their inspiration and to share with other entrepreneurs with passion. In the ThinkTech studios today with us is Kora Teyes, president of Sterling Health Services Administration and Gary Asato, Hawai'i sales director. Kora and Gary, thank you so much for joining us. I am so happy to have you on the show. I have to tell you that I've admired you, Kora, for so long and all the things that you've done for Hawai'i and its community and Gary, I know that we've had a long-standing relationship and you've always helped me in so many different ways in the benefit space. I want to start the show by introducing Sterling Health Services Administration, kind of getting an idea and sharing with our viewers about what you do. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for having us. Gary and I are honored to be here today. Why don't I begin by telling you a bit about the Sterling story? I'm a different kind of entrepreneur because I'm an older person. I'm 69 years old and I started this company 14 years ago. Like all entrepreneurs, I was there to solve a problem. The problem that I saw was really how do we bend the cost curve in healthcare? I thought health savings accounts would be one way of doing so. As you know, in Hawai'i, that's not possible, but we do have other products and services like flex, cafeteria plan, HOBRA, health reimbursement arrangements, and all of the things related to healthcare and health benefits. What I find that I hope that your audience will also find inspiration in is, one, you're never too old to start a business. Look at me. Well, you are very young. I'm 69 years old and I must tell you, it was not an easy road. People were not interested in funding an older person in the service business. I wasn't in that sexy hot stuff called technology and I frankly failed miserably in raising money. Well, there you are. You don't look old at all. Well, you're very kind. But it turns out that was a blessing in disguise because it forced us to get to profitability right away. We became profitable three years later. We've been profitable ever since. And frankly, at my age, I can't bear the thought of working for anyone else. So we're an independent company. And in fact, I've started our liquidity, which is a really wonderful thing. I'm going to sell, and we started it already, our company to our employees. I want to know when I exit our company that Gary Asato and his colleagues will have a source of funding. They're highly motivated to take care of our clients and our business partners because they're owners of the company. Now it's a great pleasure for me to tell you how much I've enjoyed working with Gary. Gary and I go back quite a ways. Yes. We've gone back full circle, new core 25 years ago. It's all about relationships and keeping in touch with those relationships there. Not only where you go to high school, but as well as where you go in your business career also. And I think that's a good thing is that you're able to reconnect and know the people in your industry and start it off. So I've been in sales for over 25 years with various health plans throughout Hawaii and have a great institutional knowledge about the history, about the laws, as well as our clients there. And that helps us create a great customer service for us to help hand hold as well as help them through the processes that need to be done in order to start your business as well as looking at different types of ways to help create benefits for your employees there. Well, you two met when Korra, you were at Kaiser Permanente when you headed the Hawaii region. Correct. Tell me about how long ago that all started and... Well, we were much younger then. You could tell, right? 12. Yes, 12. We were 12. Labor laws were really liberal then. But what was terrific for me especially was the opportunity to really be of service in Hawaii. Healthcare at the end of the day is a service and I've never forgotten that. It's about the relationships you have with people. It is helping solve the most intimate of issues, which is healthcare. And it's also giving back. So giving back is an important quality and value for me. Even today I chair a non-profit board in Hawaii, Healthcare Community Alliance. And Gary has been for over 20 years a driver for Meals on Wheels. So a big event for us and a big charitable cause for us is the food bank. We've been supporters of the Hawaii food bank for years. We bag fruit and food at food banks. So it isn't just writing a check, but it's also helping all of us understand that food is a really basic and important need in our community. So we're happy to do that. It's amazing. So tell me about how you decided that Sterling Health Administration was a need in Hawaii. How does that arise? It's a great question because there are already providers here in Hawaii. But at the end of the day this is about relationships. And I chose the name Sterling because it defined for me and for my team the quality of service we wanted to provide. But this would be a Sterling level of service because we like to think we're Sterling people and we want to help people in a very Sterling way. I also want to be able to tell you in all candor and humility that sometimes we are not able to meet the needs of our clients. Their poor communication, something goes wrong. And our ability then to solve that problem, to get back, not to assess blame, but to simply say, how do we make it right for our client? That we have in some ways inconvenience. And that's part of our relationship here is appreciating that we're in the service business. People deliver this service. We're not robots. There are times when they may be disappointments and our ability then to take care of that is really key. Would you agree? Yes. So I would think the main thing is that because we're a small organization, we may be nimbler than other larger companies there. And I think that's our sweet spot there is that if you do have an issue that you may have or question that we're able to resolve it, a lot of times it takes one phone call talking to either the folks in our operations team or even just talking to Cora, can you help fix this or address this for our customers? They need, this is something they would like. And that's something that's being taken care of. A lot of good times of things that we have is the feedback that we get from our customers. We're already getting feedback. And we're able to take that feedback and make those modifications so that not only helps our customer that requested it, but as well as the customers who may not know they need it in the future. So I think that's critical for us that we're able to adapt a little bit more quicker than maybe our competition, but that creates our sweet spot at the same time. So Gary, I know that you touch a lot of businesses in Hawaii here. For those smaller businesses, they may get lost in the acronyms, the FSA, the TPA, the HSA. Tell our small business viewers what they need to know about sterling administration. Well, of course, we're a little bit, we try to handhold in the beginning and make sure that you understand the acronyms as well as the why. Why is it good for you as a business there? And also we try to set you so that you're also using technology to help your business be a little bit more streamlined. And I think that's important because you don't want to do the same processes over and over. Manually, you want to try to develop these processes to study them electronically so that you can do other things than just the current blocking and tackling that you would normally see in any type of business there. So it's a tactical as well as strategic going forward. So how long have you been active in Hawaii sterling health administration? About 10 years. And I will tell you, for other entrepreneurs, you have to have faith that early disappointments won't kill you. But you have to keep it up. And you have to stick with it. I have enormous loyalty to this market and want to grow it. A lot of our viewers are entrepreneurs, startup businesses. And I think there are a lot of questions about, well, why would I need a sterling administration? And do I need one? At what point do you think businesses need to engage in- Well, I do think it's like you're finding out what their needs are and where they want to be, not only now, but as well as five years from now and see if it fits into their model. I think it takes a lot of vision to see what you want to do, not only for now, but as well as for the future there. And I think that's the first question that comes out is what do you want to look like in five years from now? I think the beauty of having a partner in your business to help you manage employee benefits is that the compliance items are forever changing year to year. And there's constant legislation and who knows? Did it pass? Did it not pass? Do I have to do that? What comes up at the end of the year? And that's something that sterling administration takes care of, isn't it? Very much. And we've got a lawyer on staff. Part of what we want to do is provide peace of mind to the employer that we're taking care of business so that they can attend to their strategic mission, whatever that might be. So that's very important to us. You entrust us, and our job is to deliver for you. So what is the smallest business that would join sterling administration? We have companies that we serve from size 2 to 20,000. So we take care of a whole continuum of needs there. Now, the other thing that I know is very important to sterling, as you had mentioned, is the give back to the community. And Kora, I know that your family relocated for a little while, but you are a Hawaii girl. And your commitment to always giving back to Hawaii is amazing. Tell us about some of the things that you folks are involved in. I do know you mentioned the nonprofit. And Gary, you're active in Hawaii Nails for Wheels. Tell me about sterling administration and how it gives back to Hawaii. Go ahead. Go ahead. OK. So like I said before, food banks are really important to us. One of the lessons I've learned growing up poor is that it's really tough to self-actualize when you're hungry. So food is a basic necessity. So we give to food banks. And we volunteer time at food banks. And it's important for people to physically bag food, understand where it comes from, where it goes. And I have bagged everything, carrots, broccoli. The one I don't like are plums. They get really squishy at the end, but it's OK. I'll do that, too. But I think that's really important. And one of the lessons we've learned is that summer is really hard. Do you know why? Why? Because schools are closed, and children don't get to eat. And so that's when we double up, frankly, our donations is during the summer. When schools are closed and there are fewer opportunities for children to get fed. So that's really important to us. We believe in it. We believe that we have a responsibility to pay back to our community, because it's done a lot for us. And we're part of this community. We're part of the Hawaii family. You not only give back to Hawaii families, but you also give back to families in California. Tell us about those. So we're very active, not just I, but members of our Sterling family in a variety of charities that matter to them. Some are very involved with the aging issues, so dementia care, Alzheimer's, a variety of those. Because we tend to attract people who are interested in health care, we tend to have people who volunteer very zealously for certain events that matter very much to them. I still serve on boards of nonprofit organizations in California. And of course, one I'm really proud of here in Hawaii is the Hawaii Health Care Alliance. Tell me about the Hawaii Health Care Alliance. So this is a nonprofit board, and it holds all of the contracts between community providers, from hospitals to physician groups to trust funds. So we are the shepherds for that. And essentially, we want to make certain that the contracts are what is most useful to the trust fund members, so AFOL and others that could join us. We also want to make sure that we're fair to providers, because we're all in this together. We're all one family here. We're going to go to a short break. But I do know that, Korra, you have taken your passion and Sterling administration and done some other very amazing things. And I'd love for our audience to hear about those opportunities in that journey. So when we come back, we are going to take that short break. This is Business in Hawaii, and we'll see you back here shortly. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. When I was growing up, I was among the one and six American kids who struggle with hunger. And hungry mornings make tired days. Grumpy days. That kind of days. But with the power of breakfast, the kids in your neighborhood can think big and be more. When we're not hungry for breakfast, we're hungry for more. More ideas. More dreams. More fun. When kids aren't hungry for breakfast, they can be hungry for more. Go to hungarees.org and lend your time or your voice to make breakfast happen for kids in your neighborhood. Aloha. I want to invite all of you to talk story with John Wahee every other Monday here at Think Tech Hawaii. And we have special guests like Professor Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii, who joins us from time to time to talk about the political happenings in this state. Please join us every other Monday, Aloha. Welcome back. This is Business in Hawaii. Joining us today are Cora Teyes, President of Sterling Health Services Administration, and Gary Asato, Hawaii Sales Director. When we left, we're talking about Sterling and how it came about, and the wonderful things that Sterling does to give back to the community in Hawaii. But Sterling has also been a springboard, if you will, to some other really great things that you all have been doing. And I know that it's inspired by personal experience and by passion. And to that, I'm speaking about the Amazing Care Network. Can you share with us how that came about? Oh, I'm happy to do that. So the Amazing Care Network, first of all, it's a membership organization. And it's designed to enable us to grow and age independently with as much control as possible. It came out of three problems that I was trying to solve. Let me begin with the first one in my husband. We were married for 42 years, and I lost him a year ago to cancer. When he was going through some really tough medical treatments, I remember asking myself a pretty interesting question at the time. And the question is, who's going to be there for me when it's my turn? And it turned out it was a more profound question than I had initially assumed. You would think that as an older woman, the answer should be my children, my two sons. That's the wrong answer. You know why? They're going to have me plugged to a respirator until I'm a prune before they let me go. So that's not a good question. That's not a good answer. My siblings would be a good solution, but they lived too far away. So the answer became my friends. And when that became the solution, I said, well then, how do I help my friends? And how do I help myself be as informed as I can about all of the issues at the end of life? So that was one problem I was trying to solve. The second has to do with my brother dying nine years ago. And you know, Daelyn, that was my first experience with understanding how costly it is to die in America. I had no idea. My brother had Medicare insurance and long-term care insurance. But there were all kinds of things that neither insurance would cover, transportation, home care giving, a variety of things. So that was a very important lesson. The other was that, frankly, we didn't get along well with his wife. And we were very concerned about his care. And so I, because of my background in medicine, was able to attract many friends, physician friends. And I would call them and say, what do you really think is going on with my brother? That helped me immeasurably. I would put this physician on speakerphone so my siblings and I could ask all kinds of questions. So that helped me a lot. So a clinical expert at our side to help us was key. Then the third one, the third story that started Amazing Care is one I leave for last, because it's the very best story. For a time, here in Hawaii, I was a hospice volunteer. And my last patient was Iva Del. She was 75 years old when she moved to Hawaii, knowing no one. Imagine that. 75, no family, no connection whatsoever to Hawaii. And yet when she died a year later, I would see her for the last time. I could only see her for 30 minutes. You know why? She had grown her network to such an extent that I had to put my name on an Excel spreadsheet maintained by the United Airline Flight Attendant in her apartment building. What did Iva Del teach you? She taught me that at any age, you could develop a network. And that aging well, really, is a group sport that in the company of family and friends, you really are able to do so much more. So those are the three stories. And this is what Amazing Care is trying to solve for. It's a membership organization. It tries to expand your network. One of the lessons you're going to learn, you're very young, Daylan, so you won't know this yet. But particularly when you retire. And as you get older, your network will shrink. They will shrink because your friends die, they move away, or you get, unfortunately, rather, comogyny and less patient with your friends. So it's really important that you expand your network, like Iva Del. It's important that you have a segregated asset, a fund for long-term care for you and of life care for you and members of your family in the way that would have solved the problem for my brother. And it's very helpful to have a background, not background, but a network of clinicians. And so we've attracted a number of retired physicians who act as physician friends of the family, as well as clinical pharmacists who can advise us. Boy, they were really helpful when Pablo was dying. He had terrible complications from chemotherapy and it helped to have a physician talk to us. It helped to have pharmacists tell us, here are the complications, here are all of the side effects, and this is what you could do about it. And in Hawaii, remember the job is to expand your network to get you better informed, to have a safe place, to have a difficult conversation about end of life care or about issues about caring for someone. We hold four events, always a tea from two to four PM at the Oahu Country Club, and we always bring in speakers. So the idea is meet people, expand your network and bring speakers. We brought in lots of speakers. Gary has attended all of them. Gary, do you recall who was your favorite speaker? Actually, my favorite speaker was a panel of speakers, was a panel of physicians talking about end of life care. Something that we really don't want to talk about. It's always kind of a taboo in certain cultures here in Hawaii, but I think it's when you have that difficult conversation or bring it out and discuss, these are the options for, not only for yourself, but as well as your loved ones, to find out what are the options, so you can kind of think them through and just kind of feel what needs to be done, especially with you as well as your family there, because it's just not one person making a decision. It's normally just a joint description there. The other pieces of meetings that we've had that I especially was attracted to was decluttering. Decluttering your home in Hawaii. We like to save all these little things here. Those Royal Stamp gold leaf cups and plates and... Liberty House boxes. Exactly there. You never know. And all these towels that you keep, that you've taken from the hotels, those are things that you never want to depart from, but eventually when your loved ones pass away, they're going to have to be departed with, and those are things there that, what are the things that are really necessary in life that you want to keep and enjoy as momentals versus just keeping things around the house there? And I think for all of us it's just getting to have, being prepared to have that difficult conversation, especially for someone like me who's in the sandwich generation with kids as well as older parents, how do you have that difficult conversation? How do you say to your parents, you know, dad, mom, I really don't want your Noritake China set or your coin collection. You know, those are things there that may sound funny, but at the same time it's very serious because there's an emotional attachment to each person that has a different meaning to it at all. You know what we're also learning, David, is that employers are really interested in amazing care. Do you know why? One out of every five employees today is a caregiver, and a caregiver is a distracted employee. So to the extent an employer can extend amazing care services to them, it helps. It helps the employee, it gives them support, and it affirms for that employer that they are a caring employer. I think it's amazing that the amazing care network brings about an opportunity to talk about a topic that's very, like you said, uncomfortable, but also makes it very candid. We get busy planning to grow our families, to go to college, but we never have products or an opportunity to talk about that stage of life. That obviously what you're teaching us through amazing care is that it needs care and preparation just as much as planning your family or planning for college or anything like that, and I think that opportunity to have that conversation and that conversation being okay as part of your everyday planning is an amazing tool. I would love to hear about how employers are integrating amazing care network into their employee benefit offerings. And of course, if amazing care network is available to individuals who may have already separated from employment, but now in retirement, they're having to think about, well, I'm healthy now and I'm traveling and I'm enjoying retirement, but there's also something else that I have to talk about. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Right now, 50% of our membership comes through employers and 50% are individuals and they can sign up amazingcarenetwork.com. Takes five minutes to sign up. My 82 year old brother did this to test drive my app, so he says it works. The thing that I find interesting about employers, particularly in Hawaii, is how generous they are. We have an employer who wrote me and said, I used amazing care as a vehicle to encourage our employees to help someone and it had to do with a fellow, an employee who was going through a hard time. And they used amazing care because with amazing care, they could give to that employee anonymously or directly. And that enabled this employer to encourage gift giving and we don't charge extra for that, it's part of the service. I used it. One of my employees two years ago, father died suddenly. There was a lot of expenses as you can imagine, transportation, et cetera. And I wrote a letter to all of my employees, Gary included. I said, if the spirit moves you, now's the time to help. Here's her amazing care account number. And you know two weeks later, we get this phenomenal thank you letter. She didn't know whom to thank. Apparently quite a number of us gave anonymously. So this is a vehicle that employers prefer over having employees give up their PTO hours or doing other things that are much more complicated. So Gary, is this becoming a more common part of an employee benefits package? It's starting to be, I think the key piece that every employer asks is how am I gonna fund this? How am I gonna pay for this right here? And the answer is it could be done individually so that the employee does it on their own, put money aside to save money. At the same time, employers can also, what we call repurpose or reuse money, monies that are used for generally for like any type of wellness programs as incentives, monetary incentives there. It could be put in their account instead of a gift card or the fact that monies could be repurposed if there are leftover monies from certain initiatives or leftover monies that are defaulted back to the organization. That money can be repurposed towards setting up a amazing care account or even setting up a small amount so that they can start savings as an incentive for them to go forward. You know, we learned about forfeited flex money. You know, when funds are not spent, are not exhausted, they go back to the employer. And now we're finding employers are willing to take that money and give it to the amazing care accounts of their employees. It's not a terrific way to do it. That is amazing. I think it would be a great opportunity for employees often as benefits professionals. We pull our employees to see what types of benefits they want. If they become fluid enough to start talking about, I want a vehicle in which I can save for that other stage in my life that's forthcoming. Are these monies only able to be used for yourself or can they be used? No, so these are after-tax accounts, which means they can be spent for any purpose. We obviously want you to save it for a particular reason, but you could use it to pay for someone else's care or in the case of our employee, it was used to pay for a plane ticket. A lot of times our list with tests for employees says that you remember those Christmas Club accounts? Back in the day, there were always a purpose for saving for Christmas. The amazing care account is saving for caregiving and I think that's where it resolutes to employees that there's a purpose for what I'm putting aside this money for. The stories were amazing, very touching, very passionate. What Sterling Administration does for Hawaii is done for me personally and of course the amazing care network and the opportunity that it's giving the local people of Hawaii to think about their futures and what comes next. We are out of time, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to tell our audience where they can find you. Sure, you can look us up at www.sterlingadministration.com or you can check us out at www.amazingcarennetwork.com. Fantastic, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. I hope to see you back again because we'd love to have you. There are so many other things that we could talk about in terms of amazing care network and of course how Sterling helps employers here in Hawaii. So I hope that you'll be a guest again. Thank you, Deidre. All right, we are out of time, but I wanted to thank Cora and Gary again for joining us and a huge thank you to the great production staff here in the studio. If you would like to be a guest on the show, please email your information to shows at thinkcheckhawaii.com. Business in Hawaii airs every Thursday and we look forward to seeing you here next week.