2310 - Reimagining Employee Benefits with Fringe's Jordan Peace

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Jordan Peace. Jordan, you are the co-founder and CEO of Fringe. You're found on the web at fringe.us. Also, I happen to host a podcast called How People Work. And so to our friend that's listening, you can search in your podcast app and you can find that. Jordan, it's great to have you. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks, Josh. Yes, absolutely. Hey, before we talk about Fringe and what you do, which I love, by the way, and I'm excited to talk about this. You always love finding out what entrepreneurial leaders are passionate about or kind of geeking out on or into when they're not at work.

1:35What say you? What have you been into lately? Oh, man, I like to escape. I like to play a good video game, you know, and my boys are into it now. I got five kids, by the way. So I get to play with my kids, which is really a lot of fun. And the other thing I've been doing is just getting out in the yard and building stuff, just working with my hands and actually using my body to accomplish something, which is not what a tech entrepreneur usually gets to do. So it's been great. You know, it's really interesting. I was just talking with someone recently about this. I think, you know, stages of life, you know, there's the stage of life where you can't wait to get out of doing that kind of work so you can kind of do your career stuff.

2:16And then after a while of doing your career stuff, you're like, man, I cannot wait to get out in that yard you know laces you do some pruning or whatever like my brother like i've got the herb garden i've got citrus trees all over the place and that is my happy that's my happy spot i was trimming palm leaves yesterday and i'm like man i love getting exercise you know just all that stuff that you know kind of very functional type stuff a lot of fun hey i want to ask you um what games are you playing do you guys do you play on the switch with your kids or what what console or PC games or mostly with the switch with the kids.

2:52And I also have a PlayStation four. I think it is where I play something called destiny, which is like a, Hey, kind of like a halo. If you remember, yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you play on the switch with your kids? We play a lot of Mario stuff. And then we'll be really into lately is Zelda. The Zelda is very like open world, like big now, like breath of the wild. Those guys, super fun. I can get lost in Hyrule for hours on end. I got to be careful with it. My wife and I, you know, she's we're each, you know, just around 50 years old. But man, I'll tell you what, you come play with us Mario Party and Mario Party is that is our jam.

3:33I mean, we play that, I would say, close to once a week. We'll get a good Mario Party throw down. That's awesome. Yeah, so much fun. Awesome. Well, Jordan, tell us about Fringe. Yeah, so Fringe is a company I started back in 2018. I actually started with three of my college roommates, believe it or not, which is really fun and rare. It's a lifestyle benefits platform. So we facilitate everything from rewards of recognition to wellness programs to swag, really all the people programs consolidated into one single tool. Yeah, and why is that so badly needed today? Well, I mean, I think for one, consolidation is very much needed.

4:19I think the HR tech stack has gotten really bloated for most companies. They're tired of the vendor management. They're tired of asking their people to log into seven, eight different platforms. And it's hard to communicate. It's hard to communicate all of these benefits and offerings that are given and for employees to even be aware of what they are and what it means and how to utilize it and how to access it. And so we just wanted to build a platform that really brought all of that together into a single, simple experience, which reduces the administrative load on the HR folks, of course, but then also just gives this way better employee experience.

4:57And I think that's the overarching goal. So if you explain, so as I understand how this works, right, is, again, you get to kind of pick the programs that you want. As the employer, you can fund, you know, kind of, I guess, credits then that you could use, that employees can use within the platform, and they can apply that to some of the programs that are included in the network. Sorry, I should have just let you explain the whole thing. That's my understanding. No, I think you did a nice job. So let me strip all the jargon out of it. What employers are looking to do is to have their employees engage with benefits that actually matter, right?

5:43That employees actually care about. You don't have to be sick or dead or disabled or 65 years old to benefit from your benefits. And that's kind of the issue with traditional benefits. And so what we said is, hey, let's let's do lifestyle benefits. Let's do benefits like a massage membership or a streaming service or child care or something that I can actually experience some pun intended benefit from in my daily life. And so we put all of these things into a marketplace together and said, hey, here's what we're going to do. You're going to fund your people's accounts with something called a fringe point or fringe points.

6:20And they're going to use those points to purchase the services, products, experiences that are most relevant to their individual lives and to the lives of their families. So for me, I enjoy getting a massage membership. I use Stitch Fix. I don't know if you've ever used Stitch Fix to get your clothes shipped to the house. Love that. Saves me time. I also don't have a great sense of style, so it's useful to have a stylist do that and help me with that. And so the individual employee really gets to customize exactly which types of services are most impactful to their lives. And what that yields, I think, is employees feeling seen and cared about, valued by their employer, which is the entire point of the benefits to begin with.

7:07And so that's really what we're focused on and kind of how we're proud to serve the market. Yeah. Do you mind rattling off a list of like some of the, I guess, the offers, the brands that are included? Yeah. Oh, of course. So some popular ones would be DoorDash, Airbnb, Spotify, Uber, several airlines. You're down in Orlando. Disney would be another one as well. hand in stone. I mean, there's hundreds of them, hundreds of them. But yeah, just services that meet certain needs and kind of make an impact in daily life. Things that you're going to purchase anyway, probably. Yeah. How do you decide what you have available?

7:57I mean, obviously, the employer can choose from among them, but I would imagine you have vendors who might be reaching out and say, hey, how do we get on your platform? Yes, very much so. So we kind of have to filter a bit. Here's the way we look at it. And it's, you know, it's not terribly narrow, but we don't want to just offer everything either. We don't want to just be Amazon, right? So we look at it and go, is this a benefit that's going to give somebody some time back in their day? Is this something that's going to reduce stress in their life? So you think we have therapy and fitness and those sorts of things or childcare.

8:36Is this something that's going to positively impact the family of my individual employee? Is their family going to be helped in some way? Or is this just going to spark joy? And what we mean by that is, is this going to give my employee an experience where they're going to think, man, my employer is providing me with something that actually makes me genuinely happy. You know, that's given me a moment. And now I'm associating the best moments of my life with my employer, you know, and that's, that's really kind of the strategy. So those are our four filters and the way we kind of look when those inbound requests come in, the, Hey, can we be on the platform?

9:15We go, are you doing any of these four things? Yeah. Jordan, talk about ROI from an employer standpoint compared to, okay, so I can either spend three grand a month through the platform, or I could just spread$3 ,000 in cash, you know, throughout my monthly payroll to employees and just they can use that money however they want without the, you know, having to jump through hoops to pick some of the perks or whatever that we provide. Yeah, I think I think a big thing is the engagement, right? So when you're on a platform like ours, not only do individuals have their fringe points that they can use to make purchases, but they also have recognition points.

9:58So they're sending points to one another and sending messages. Hey, Josh, thanks for helping me out on that project. You were really awesome in that meeting the other day. Here's 50 points. And then other people on the team, they pile on and go, yeah, I'm going to add some points to that comment as well. And so it creates this flywheel of engagement. And then the other thing is, I think you get a lot of data on what your employees are interested in. So when you just give them money and the paycheck, who knows what they're going to spend it on? We have no data, no idea, but we can kind of get a sense for what people are interested in.

10:34And that helps our strategy in terms of what we roll out next or what we gift them with or what we, you know, what we share about or how we build product or any number of things. And, and I think the other piece too, I always like, I always, you know, cause when I first was raising money for this back in 2018, we did a pitch first pitch we ever did. This guy raised his hand and he goes, why don't they just give their employees more cash? And I went, and I said, sir, why don't you give your wife cash in her stocking for Christmas? You know? And he said, because she'd probably killed me. And I said, there you go.

11:11Yeah, because it's impersonal. It's it's it doesn't really mean anything. It's one size fits all. It's hey here. Here's here's some money. Right. It's sort of dismissive in a way. And so I think benefits in general and much more so fringe benefits that communicate this curated, personalized experience that, hey, we see you. We know you. We're trying to put things in front of you that will really improve your life. And so we've given you these points and this ability to choose instead of just, hey, here's an Amazon card. Good luck to you. I don't care what you buy. Yeah. No, you make good points.

11:54Jordan. It's cold. What types of companies are using fringe? Like, are you super large enterprise companies? Is this appropriate for SMBs? Yes to both. So I think we solved two different problems. So for an SMB, often the issue is, hey, we want to offer these, like, Google-level benefits, but we're not going to be able to afford a personal chef to come to our headquarters of our 15 people. It's not in the cards, right? So we're trying to up-level our benefits offerings, and we also don't want to manage 27 different vendors. So can you give us a consolidated platform that does a lot for us and gives a great employee experience?

12:35Whereas when you move up market, their problem is they have 27 different vendors, and they wish they didn't. And the load of the vendor management and just the mental load for employees to remember where all of this stuff is, is a big problem. And so it really comes down to simplification for the large enterprise customer. But we do serve both well. Yeah. Okay. So fringe.us, our friend who's listening to us right now, they go there. What do they do? What do they do? They get on a demo call. One of our lovely salespeople will walk them through the platform, talk about their goals, talk about what they're trying to accomplish from a culture building, from an employee experience building standpoint.

13:21And basically, they choose their funding. They choose the type of program or programs they want to get started with. And we get going. It takes a couple of weeks to launch, and away we go. Typically, what I always recommend for people when they're getting started with something like this, is just start with what you're already doing. If you're already giving birthday gifts, if you're already doing milestone anniversaries, If you're already sending a little gift card because someone got engaged or married or had a baby, let's just do that. Let's take that budget, apply it to Fringe, and then we'll work on the next thing.

13:57Then we'll work on maybe a well-being program or we'll orchestrate your company swag through Fringe. But because we do so much, it can be a challenge for people to know where to start. So my advice, start with what you're already doing and we'll build on top of that. I love it. All right. So fringe.us, click on the purple button that says get a demo. You can also, of course, kind of browse around the website. You've got a great blog, your great social media follow. And also we'd mentioned the podcast, How People Work. So again, Jordan Peace, co-founder and CEO, thank you so much for joining us.

14:32I appreciate the conversation. Absolutely, Josh. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me today.

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