Great ideas in the benefits world can die for want of an innovative broker. Fortunately for Esther Cardenas Pipoly, Mollie Lacher, and a lot of employer-plan members, Pipoly and Lacher are well-connected with insightful brokers. As a result, the loss-of-life-advocacy (LOLA) benefit may be the Next Big Thing in plan design.

Pipoly and Lacher both experienced personal losses that led them to launch startup businesses designed to support employees or business leaders who had suffered family deaths. From their own experiences they understood the chaos that can follow a family loss. They also realized how difficult it can be for the survivors to both do their jobs and navigate the many decisions that must be made in the wake of a death.

“So often people at work don't know that a co-worker is struggling not only with grief, but with the settling of a loved one's affairs,” says Lacher. “They don't understand why they are missing work. It's something we just don't talk about. That's why I started my business: to provide a support network so people can get back to their lives instead of trying to figure out how to cancel the cable contract.”

Meeting of the minds

Without a partner in the brokerage business, such a startup might never realize its full potential to help others through a painful time. But both Pripoly and Lacher have broker/angels at their sides willing to include their services in employer-sponsored benefits packages.

Several key brokers are getting behind the benefit. One is Susan L. Combs, Combs & Co. LLC, who predicted last fall that loss of life advocacy would emerge in 2019 as a popular plan add-on.

“I lost my father a few months ago and my weekly schedule has changed immensely to now include managing the family finances, now being the point person for my family's farming operation back in Missouri and working with the Department of Veterans to coordinate all my father's benefits as well as get his service scheduled in Arlington,” Combs says. “From this experience alone I have become a huge believer in this benefit and only wish I had become exposed to it before I handled all of the legwork on my own.”

Combs intends to add the benefit to her employer plan options. “We have been talking to our clients about how to navigate the waters when someone has lost a family member but still needs to remain present at work,” she says. “Loss of life advocacy is the answer.”

Pipoly, founder of Loss of Life Advocates, LLC, in San Antonio, lost her father and her husband within 63 days of each other in 2014. While her father's affairs were in good order, her attorney husband left her with almost no instructions for settling his estate.

“We were married 26 years and had two children. He was 20 years older than me, and he did not want to talk about the business side or end of life issues. I needed Mollie back then to help me get through it,” Pipoly says.

Among her challenges: settling with her husband's life insurance company. With the aid of the Crosley Law Firm in San Antonio, she reached one in 2016. She then decided to use some of the proceeds to launch Loss of Life Advocates. “I had identified the holes in the company insurance plan, and I thought, 'Could I do something to help people like me?'”

How it works

Pipoly offers several service models: a corporate package for employer plans; a smaller business model that focuses on key man replacement; and an individual model to help manage the myriad decisions and often exhausting research a family faces.

The overall goal of the corporate model, she says, is to prevent the organization from losing a valued employee after they suffer a loss. “Productivity is key whenever and however an employee returns to work,” she says.

LOLA provides support for organizations several ways:

It prepares employees beforehand by gathering important information in the event of a life transition;
It offers the HR team and leadership the tools to offboard an employee when a life transition occurs;
It helps with onboarding them back into the organization after a loss.

“By providing guidance and support to an employee who has had a loss, we are able to help avoid presenteeism where employees come back too soon. They still face a mountain of work to close out an estate, and cannot focus on the job.”

Lacher founded of Sunny Care Services in Nashville following the deaths of both her father and brother-in-law. Her dad, an attorney, passed first, and then in 2017, her brother-in-law died during surgery. Settling his affairs was especially difficult. “We should have been more prepared than we were. We never had the critical conversations with him. He had no will, and there were no financial advisors in our family to help us,” she says. “It was a disaster.”

Lacher saw how settling the estates drained her family members. “There really is not a 'navigator' to walk someone through a loss and take on all of the administrative tasks that come with closing out a loved one's life,” she says.

That's when she decided she would be that navigator, someone families and employers could turn to for support in managing the endless details triggered by a death.

She joined the Nashville Entrepreneurs Center, which guided her through the process of launching Sunny Care. “I used the Center to explore this as a business, and I found that no one offers this type of service, especially at an affordable price. There just wasn't anyone out there for average income people.”

She officially hung out her shingle last year, and has been working primarily with families so far. But she has begun marketing to employers and is making headway.

Reaching employers

Both entrepreneurs faced a major hurdle: How to get their products in front of employers? Each had individual clients, but they knew they could help thousands if they could become part of a benefits package.

Lacher has been working with a local insurance broker who has been advising her on marketing to employers. Pipoly's employee benefits background brought her into contact with San Antonio broker Allison De Paoli, who had launched her own agency shortly before LOLA was founded. De Paoli is a huge fan of LOLA's services.

“As a new niche benefit, I think this dovetails well with whole next generation of benefits advisors,” says De Paoli. “It is scalable and can be a compelling benefit for an employee without a huge investment by employer. And what a way to help your employees feel cared for!”

De Paoli says she has just begun to offer it to her corporate clients, and expects it to do well.

One of Pipoly's first clients was the Crosley Law Firm–they very firm whose work on her behalf helped her launch the company. Crosley offers it to clients of the firm as well as to employees. The law firm pays for the benefit as part of its benefits package.

“Esther came to the office and did a three-part series to explain the benefit to us,” says Ruthie Foltz, director of happiness at Crosley. “She provides everyone with a notebook with all the information we will need when the time comes. She mentions things we would never think about, like, 'Do you have a yard man? A cleaner? Who is going to tell them they are no longer working? Who shuts down the credit cards?' It's all in the notebooks. She empowered us to know how to do this for ourselves.”

Foltz likes LOLA so much that she gave it to her father as a Christmas gift. “He's got his notebook all finished,” she says with pride.

Pipoly believes employers will go for LOLA. But the broker's role is critical to making the sale. “The hardest people to get to are the brokers,” she says. “They don't understand the model. They all say, 'We have EAP. We have this covered.' But it isn't. This is kind of like self funding. It is emerging, brokers are beginning to learn why it is an important benefit. Every business will go through this. Loss of life advocacy benefits everyone.”

With high profile brokers like De Paoli and Combs ready to promote LOLA to their clients, the benefit's evolution may soon be on the fast track.

Instant Insights /

Meet LOLA, the next big thing in benefits

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