QUITE A BIT has happened since we first featured Corby Dall as a TAPO in November 2018. His firm, 401k Advisors Intermountain, which was affiliated with high-profile aggregator Resources Investment Advisors, was one of eight acquired by OneDigital in early 2020.
Just as significant, The National Association of Plan Advisors welcomed Corby Dall as its 2022-2023 president, and he spoke at the opening session of the 2022 NAPA 401(k) Summit in Tampa in April.
Now senior vice president of the Retirement + Wealth division specializing in retirement plan consulting, he leads a team in Utah, and both his practice and his industry advocacy are going well, to say the least.
The soft-spoken Dall nevertheless has an irreverent streak, which was on display when we spoke back in 2018.
“We’re not normal!” was the firm’s tongue-in-cheek tagline at the time.
“But we are much more than that; we’re extraordinary, innovative, and passionate with a mission to help as many people as possible retire with dignity,” Dall diplomatically hedged.
It was (and is) reflective of the firm, its employees, and its philosophy.
“We’ve really had success in starting from the top down,” Dall explained at the time. “We originally went through the human resources departments when focusing on financial wellness before it was such a buzzword, but HR always had specific bandwidth and were a little bit overworked and a little bit understaffed.”
To get better buy-in, they convinced HR staff to immediately involve the CEO.
“We try to get them to come up with some sort of internal branding,” added partner Brady Dall. “Whether it’s wealth and health, retire ready or a thousand others, it helps to all use the same vernacular when pushing towards similar goals. We’ll get the CEO to make an announcement to kick off the program that will keep the HR team accountable and let employees know that it’s important enough that they’re hearing it directly from the top. So, starting there, we try to then be more prescriptive.”
Case study
Corby pointed to one particular client as emblematic of successful outcomes.
It was a company with 1,500 employees and is extremely diverse, which he claimed was a good barometer for the things the firm was doing. It had a good mix of employees from a language and income perspective and all-around multicultural background.
“They’ve got a little bit of everything,” Brady noted. “We’ve had a full financial wellness program in place with them for two years and pretty progressive plan design. It’s culminated in a nearly 100 percent participation rate with an average account balance of $128,000.”
A key was segmentation by age bracket.
“We might have done really well with the millennial bracket through plan design and by focusing on keeping them invested, avoiding 401k loans, and staying out of debt, but that might skew the results because they’ve got enough time to save.”
Older populations require something different; again, a more prescriptive approach.
“For the 35 to 50-year-old age bracket, we focus on (among other things) getting them to enter outside accounts. That might be a big quarterly push for us, because obviously someone that age is more likely to have outside assets, and we can therefore better measure retirement readiness. If we can’t measure that, it really skews the outcome numbers, so it’s incredibly important.”