George Danusis doesn't care that he may go broke following a new direction with his business. He's fine with losing a commission if it means a happier client, and he spends 30 minutes at the breakfast table each morning thinking about who he is before he'll step foot in the office. Meet EBA's 2009 Employee Benefit Adviser of the Year.

While most of the Adviser of the Year applicants responded to our question "What do you do?" with "I'm a benefits consultant/broker/adviser/administrator/etc.," Danusis defined himself as an "advocate for change."

Two hours on the phone with him reveals just how much stock Danusis puts in the six-letter word. Change in the way America thinks about health care and health insurance. Change in how to approach employee benefits and financial services. Change from the inside out.

Me time

Danusis wasn't born into employee benefits. He was born to rock. "You're not supposed to know this, but I was a rock-and-roll star in the '60s," he says.

A keyboard player since age 14, Danusis left college after two years when his band, The Fewdal Lords, began to get gigs all around his home state of Indiana and the Midwest. Taking a cue from his father, who taught him early on to pursue his interests, Danusis was ready to hit the road full-time when the band started to get bookings as far away as New York. With a No. 8 hit on the local charts and tour dates piling up, prospects looked good for The Fewdal Lords, who dressed up in "silly" medieval outfits for each show. But, just before they left for the New York tour, the band's guitar player was killed in a car accident.

Danusis returned home to Indiana, where he bartended at a couple of bars owned by his father until a friend from high school found him a job with Prudential in 1973.

Despite having no interest in insurance, Danusis took the position and consoled himself with the fact that it was only a temporary job until he found a "real" position somewhere else.

Much to his surprise, Danusis fell in love with the industry - especially the employee benefits portion - and within six months, he was "the little kid that everybody came to" with their employee benefits needs. Seven years and a promotion to the Chicago office later, Danusis decided to go off on his own, forming Group Employee Marketing Company, or GEMCO, in 1980.

A new approach

After more than 20 years with a standard focus on group benefits, Danusis changed the company name to Integrated Financial Services in 2001 to reflect a new philosophy of helping clients with more than group health insurance.

"I want to leave a legacy, and my legacy is that I'm going to try to help some people in different ways I've never thought of doing before," he says.

Danusis attributes his attitude to his wife of eight years, Beverley, a retired cosmetic company CEO and former business woman of the year, who left corporate America to pursue empowering women. "She's been one of the greatest gifts of my life," says Danusis. "I went from being a business person to a person."

At age 61, Danusis says he's never going to retire. The last third of life is the time to become introspective in life and business, and he won't miss out on the opportunity to get society to truly understand wellness, how to really be happy with money, and what it means to be introspective.

"We've created a complex system, but in reality, it's the simplicity of life that we're missing. That means you eat well, you stay healthy, you exercise, you love people, you love your children, you help people," he says. "And you don't have to help 50. If each person would just help one person get along better in life, we would eliminate all the problems."

It's this "think small" perspective that drives Danusis' desire to work with companies that have an average of 10 to 12 employees. Only a few of his clients cover more than 50 lives.

"I would always go through the battle of trying to explain to a board cost-cutting ideas or progressive ideas," he says. "But when I can sit down with an employer and see that he understands everybody in his firm, when I realize they all really care for each other, then I can say, 'Let's see if we can change the whole culture here. You're spending so many dollars per year, how can you make those dollars more functional?'"

Danusis has made his own business more functional by getting rid of the company Web site. A radical prospect in the age of Web 2.0, but he insists it wasn't doing any good in the first place: "It didn't accomplish anything. We kept watching and watching, and we had the same view as everyone else."

That doesn't mean he's abandoned the Internet altogether. On the contrary, he recently replaced the Integrated Financial Services Web site with a more personal georgedanusis.com that features multiple YouTube videos covering topics from health insurance for small businesses to cash flow issues and Social Security. The videos are then e-blasted to between 150 to 200 clients.

"I believe that small employers are the ones who can solve this [recession]," he says. "That's why I'm trying to teach my smaller clients as much as possible about how to get information to their employees about buying homes, getting out of debt, contributing to their 401(k)s, how to make medical costs tax deductible, and how to get healthy. We have to do this."

Starting this month, Danusis is partnering with payroll firm ADP to sponsor continuing education classes for CPAs. Chip Adams, CPA specialist for ADP, has worked with Danusis for the past year.

"The one phrase I'd use to describe George would really be 'a servant's heart,'" he says. "One of the reasons I really enjoy working with him for our strategic partnerships is because his focus always has been and always will be the final user, which is his client."

As an employer looking for a broker with whom to build a long-lasting partnership, Nick Bond couldn't be happier with Danusis, his broker of nearly 10 years. "It's been a developmental thing between George and I," says Bond, general manager at Russ Moore Transmission in Fort Wayne. "He came in when I was facing an ugly renewal from a fully insured provider here in town. George helped me step sideways and take a look at how money was being spent and how insurance should work in the medical arena ... We've got some problems in society and obviously Washington is carving up a storm about health insurance. George and I feel like we've been quietly winning this war through just some hard work and common sense."

Health care vs. health insurance

As a small business owner himself, Danusis knows just how much the sour economy can affect a company. After a large expansion during the economic boom two years ago, Danusis now has a difficult time getting credit.

"All of a sudden we're looking at the same problem as our clients, which is, how do you get through an economic downturn like this? We decided that rather than put our tail between our legs and run, we'd start creating more education for employers," he says.

Integrated Financial Services began aggressively promoting HRAs and HSAs. "The way we got into that conversation is we said, 'Let's quit discussing health care and let's discuss health insurance,'" says Danusis.

Health care is not all-encompassing, he says, and it's time to return to the days of looking at health insurance as back-to-basic coverage that doesn't cover everything with first dollar coverage. Danusis believes that HSAs and HRAs with built-in incentives toward health and retirement are the way to go. While clients often balk when they hear of a $5,000 or $6,000 deductible with an HSA or HRA, he tries to teach them that although a PPO plan may have a lower deductible, after co-pays, co-insurance and emergency room fees, an average family could end up with several thousand dollars more exposure a year than they would on a CDHP.

"We just have gotten away from selling insurance. We are selling a benefit package and the benefit package is priced too high and it's designed for a very small percentage of the population and we don't do that in any other type of insurance," says Danusis. "You don't do it in auto insurance you don't do it in homeowners insurance. You take on the risk and then you say, 'I'm going to take the rest of the money and I'm going to put it aside for future use.'"

During cash-flow workshops for small employers Danusis talks about the difference between health insurance and health care, and how focusing on wellness can reduce costs. His own hometown recently built two new hospitals, a "failure" in Danusis' eyes that signifies the community isn't getting people healthy. Trying to control costs through PPOs and getting people healthy "by letting them see doctors as much as possible" is not going to work, he says. "You gotta educate people to be healthy, not allow the doctors to do it because they don't have the time," he says.

Danusis has been bringing employers to his in-house conference facility, which holds around 30 people, to do the educating himself. He's built an alliance with a Utah firm offering web-based wellness record keeping and hired a summer intern to talk to clients about getting a wellness program started, one of whom was Bond.

A couple of months ago, all Russ Moore employees started a health profile, and the full wellness program kicked in September 1. "We're not just doing short-term things," says Bond, "this is stuff for people's longer-term lifestyle changes."

Money talks

Northeast Indiana is an area of the country hit hard by the recession. General Motors is the largest employer in Fort Wayne, and the nearby motor home industry has an unemployment rate in the 20th percentile, says Danusis. He's really seeing the effect when laid-off employees can't afford to take the COBRA premium - even with the government subsidy.

"With this economic downturn, it's changing the whole perspective of how employers look at employee benefits, and I think it's going to require us to become educators," says Danusis. "I know that's kind of a scary thing for us because we're sales people, but we have to get proactive."

When Congress announced the first-time homebuyer program, Danusis brought 65-70 employees and their friends in for Wednesday night workshops over a six-week period for seminars on the subject. He explained how owning a home would reduce their cost of living, and how those savings can go straight into a 401(k) account.

"We're trying to show people how to shift the tax code," says Danusis, who's been a CFP since the '80s. "You have to do it one employer at a time."

Danusis expects the September CPA workshops in partnership with ADP will lead to plenty of new business, as he hopes the CPAs will then prospect for him. Adams sees the benefit for ADP as well. "This is an opportunity for us to really provide an added value and educate them," he says. "That's one of the things I know that George really strives for specifically is educating small business and business people in general with financial literacy."

Danusis expects to make as much revenue in financial education this year as he has typically done with the group market in the past. "It is a huge market ...," he says. "It is a shift. And we'll go back and forth. We don't fear. We just know that employees are broke."

Forgetting the bottom line

Danusis believes the CPA workshops will lead to strong alliances and growth for all parties involved, but he's not looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. "I may go broke doing it," he says. "I gotta tell you, because I know how much commitment this has taken."

Adams is optimistic, as the two have already seen business come in both directions from their relationship. "It's implementing what we've learned from each other to take it to that next step in the future," he says.

Naturally, it was once Danusis' policy to take any client he could get his hands on. But not anymore. "I want to pull in the employers who want to increase their presence with their employees, have a passion with their employees," he says. "That probably limits me to maybe 20 or 30% of the employers out there, but I really like working with those because they never leave you."

Empowering employers who are ready and willing to empower their employees is where Danusis shines, says Adams. "That's where George steps in not only as a benefits person but also as a general business consultant," he says. "That's where I've seen George shine, is to come and help that person look to the future and look to the future of their business."

Danusis admits that business is stagnant right now, down about 30-35%, but he expects the workshops and fall renewal season will put him even with or above last year's revenue by year's end. "I'm not that concerned about it," he says. "We've put all the things in motion. The way you grow a business is you have to have alliances ... and relationships. If we have the alliances we know we'll build the relationships in this fourth quarter with brand new people and that means a great year."

Bond spoke to a group of health providers last year about the quality of the relationship Danusis has with his 38 employees. "It's born of a level of trust. I know George is in this for me and my employees," he says. "George, in promoting some of the products he has, has had to sacrifice his own income because we have reduced the cost of our health insurance premiums over this period of time."

Eighty-four percent of Bond's employees are on the company's HSA, which has contributed to the fact that premiums have gone down in the last five years, but Bond also attributes the reduction to George's ability to show employees how to take on those costs without added hardship.

It's simply the right thing to do, says Danusis. "It's a tough thing because it would be much easier to make a shift and start looking at plan design and not try to educate people, but it's wrong," he says. "We've really got to get back in the insurance business - not in the delivery business. The premium savings employees can save in HSAs or employers can use for HRAs, it just doesn't seem logical to shift money somewhere where we've shifted too much of it already."

Danusis doesn't make these decisions lightly. Each morning over a cup of coffee he revists his actions, asking himself if he's becoming better or worse in the way he runs his life.

"I have to do that," he says. "I can't stay centered if I don't. It always comes back to I'm being called to get out there and get as much information so that we empower people."

It's a fresh perspective on life that the market sorely needs, says Adams, and one that business owners love to see.

He says: "They're looking for something new, they're looking for some[one] that's committed, and those are two things that George really excels in."

Danusis recalls the books that inspired him to be a better broker.

"The 4-Hour Work Week" by Timothy Ferriss

"I'm finishing [it] right now and I'm enjoying it, but it's a little outdated because of the economy. 'The 4-Hour Work Week' is excellent."

"The John Wooden Pyramid of Success" by Neville L. Johnson"

I loved reading John Wooden's biography. He teaches a lot about self-management, which is the biggest issue."

"Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination" by Neal Gabler

"I love Walt Disney. He never thought about how much money he was making, always did projects, and that's the way I try to drive my life. Don't think about the money, think about what you're going to accomplish and teach and hopefully you'll survive through. And if you don't, it doesn't make a difference because it's nothing anyway in the end. We don't get to keep it, so who cares?"

Anything by John Maxwell

"All of John Maxwell's books have been favorite references when I need a pump-up."