Partner Up for Growth: How Partnerships are Propelling These Companies to Success
Explore the power of partnerships through these mini case examples and start thinking about how you can apply similar strategies to your own business.
Zain Hasan
About Our Guest
Zain Hasan is a 3rd time entrepreneur, having created, grown, scaled and sold his first two companies, both to Private Equity backed platforms.
Zain’s expertise came from CIGNA and Guardian where he created programs for employers with 25 to 1000 employees. As the #2 rep nationally in his 3rd year, he knew he wanted his own consulting firm. Through rapid growth and accolades, he led his firm through being acquired by a Private Equity backed platform with an “integrated” model.
Now as a Founding Partner and CEO at Risk Transfer Advisory Group, Zain is focused on bringing the market leading expertise in every practice area to enable enterprises to reduce their total cost of risk and outsource all risk management activities.
About this Episode
The Zain Hasan Model: Partner, Grow, and Sell to Private Equity
Meet the insurance savant who disrupted America’s health insurance system.
Zain Hasan doesn’t buy businesses; he partners with them instead. By taking the best of the private equity model and incorporating it into his own growth by acquisition strategy, Zain has turned America’s health insurance brokerage model on its head. And it’s working.
To get to this point, Zain experienced an exit that didn’t pan out the way he was expecting. Instead of letting it crush him, he turned around and created a shared equity model that created win-wins for the businesses involved. They get to keep their autonomy while he gets to challenge the status quo. Is this the future of acquisitions? Tune in and find out.
What you will learn in this episode
- The importance of starting your business with an exit in mind
- What you need to know before you enter into negotiations
- How to leverage the growth by acquisition model as a win-win
- The inner workings of private equity (and how to use it to your advantage)
Connect with Zain Hasan
Website: https://risktag.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zainshasan/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZainSHasan
Show Notes
(4:27) From an early age, wherever Zain saw problems, he wondered how he could add value or fix it. Entrepreneurship was in his DNA, from selling ready-made chicken sandwiches as a kid to growing three successful businesses.
(11:47) Zain’s company set out to right some of the wrongs in America’s health insurance system. It wasn’t easy. The first 83 meetings were rejections and 15 months in, there was no revenue.
(17:54) After selling his business to an acquirer that didn’t pan out the way he expected, Zain – again – saw a need in the industry and it got him thinking about better ways to acquire businesses.
(41:00) Zain calls his business model ‘riding the backs of the smartest investors in the world.’ But to get here, the financial value spent was more than any college will ever cost anyone.
(47:13) Using the private equity playbook, Zain brought together eight brokerage firms as strategic partners that he then managed acquisitions for. Here’s his take on how he’s flipped the script on acquisitions.
