Verity Group Life Care Planning Business Assessment & Market Analysis Scope

On the workers' comp claim management side, it was like, what, we're, we're kind of maybe focusing on the wrong thing. Is that a fair encapsulation of— Yeah.

I mean, I don't think she was a sales in her prior life. She was familiar with the industry, probably more familiar with permanent placement and what's called like liability reviews. So I think based on that, I think she fell back on what she was familiar with. And then again, as Matt said, that got killed over the summer.

Okay. But so one other thing that I wanted to circle back on there is something that we've also seen in the very cursory diligence on this is for pass-throughs, that it's a very fragmented kind of constellation of independent contractors that are doing these reports. For the most part, and they are kind of serving that expert witness. It looks very similar to kind of that expert witness kind of sector almost.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it seems to be a second career path for registered nurses, but there's another group, I think it's in Texas, out of San Antonio, doctors that are doing it. Yeah.

So, so that was— I think I don't know if I did send that to you the other day, but that was, that was that group out of San Antonio founded by the doctor. They took in private equity money back in '23 for growth cap and have really expanded out since. And it looks very similar to the kind of company that you sent as like a competitor to this.

What's the name of that?

Life Care Planning. Professionals, or like it's something pretty much on the nose. Like, I'll send you the link. And Matt, just so you're like, not to jump totally ahead on this, but part of sources and means, if you will, are kind of what a section on this would be is kind of a competitive landscape analysis where you're, you're finding these other firms that you guys have looked at, and then you're finding the groups behind that and understanding kind of how it gets positioned to that. And it's really, you know, that's, that's kind of going to be a section within this regardless of what direction you all want to take it in. But really just trying to understand who are you up against, because without trying to get like, without trying to form some type of biased opinion, it's like if you just do a, you know, spend 25 minutes looking at the other types of just like positioning. The Verity Group, as it's attached to the Shakelee, it has really solid kind of like presence in terms of like you go there and it's like, oh, this is part of something. It's maybe ahead of even that San Antonio group. But I think the question is— the question still comes back to like it was part of this packet of companies that you acquired in February 2024.

Yeah, it's there was 2 or 3 entities and those names don't exist. It was one called CEC and the other one was called Balacare that got converted into Verity at some point. But that was just a DBA underneath Paramount Preferred Solutions. And then we renamed it, spun it out to Shaklee Verity Group in 2025.

When the company was attached to that other packet of companies, were these, call it, 21 people still— take the salesperson out of it— were the 21 people still largely focused on life care planning, or were they shared amongst kind of these other packet of companies? I guess the question behind the question is trying to understand the the weight inside of that operational piece of it. It's, it's beyond the scope of this.

Maybe if I understand your question, this was a separate business line within that. They, they were never part of the TPA. Okay. That we were looking for. This was kind of a thing that they somehow got into. They probably bought another something and it got thrown in, honestly, and they kind of stuck with it.

Okay.

And they bought somebody in Cleveland or they bought somebody in Philadelphia?

It was Philly. Yeah. James, I can send you the data book from the acquisition so you can see some historicals. We kind of broke it down by different lines of business.

Totally. And we'll follow up kind of with like a request of like a document request list type of stuff. But I think for the purposes of this you know, call. It's trying to really hone in on— it's trying to hone in on exactly what the— what you all want to use this deliverable for.

I guess it's like— deliverable look like.

Yeah, I think the simple thing— and Matt, I'll let you speak as well— is are we going to continue to pursue this or should we kill it? Right. Because the rate we're going, it's profitable.— it's a $4 million business, but a high percentage is with this one law firm. So if he goes away, there's not much of a business that's left. So, you know, it's kind of the decision point of, do we need to really push hard on business development or acquisition or what, right? Kind of roll up some of these owner-operators that might exist out there in the space. So, yeah, I just don't know how big the industry is, right?

So yeah, I would agree with what Brent just said. I think the hard thing we've had to get our hands around is one, I'm not even clear what they do.

And we have this either, Matt, we.

Have this salesperson who's kind of running around trying to get these little deals. And I look at it as we have a law firm, this guy out of Naples, Florida, was in Philadelphia, who's sending 60% of the business So he's sending $2.4 million a year. I don't understand why we're not calling these plaintiff attorneys right across the country and trying to replicate what they're doing. But they're— but the folks that are running the business are telling us, well, he's a special case. He— nobody else does it like him. I know everywhere I go there's plaintiff attorney billboards everywhere. So, right, we ought to be calling on these guys and see what they need. I just think there's some confusion around. So I guess my, I guess my thing is, I don't— what's the attorney's name again, Brent?

Simon. Simon and Simon.

Yeah, Simon. So I mean, is Simon like 3% of the attorney market, or is he 50? You know what I mean? Like, right, I just think there's a big market out there that we're somehow missing.

And we've done business with, you know, the bigger players— Morgan and Morgan, Elk and Elk— but it seems to be more ad hoc. Right. And that might be the fact that we're not pursuing it and someone just through networking found us. I'm not sure, but— Okay.

So I want to try and take what I heard in that and feed it back to you.

So I guess what I would say we're looking for is like maybe if there's other competitors out there, it looks like you found one in San Antonio. Is there a market for this? Like, you know, this guy's sending $2.4 million worth of business. Is there a way we find, you know, 4 more of those guys? And also we have a $10 million business that would be putting off probably, what, $2 or $3 million, Brent?

And yeah, I mean, it's given this T&M, it's 50% of what we make. And then you obviously have some overhead for back office stuff.

You know, it could be a nice profitable business. We could.

Grow.

If we just kind of, if we kind of could figure out what it is.

So I think what I'm hearing and what I want to try and just give back to y'all to make sure that if we give, if this is in there, this is helpful to you because the document is not going to be is an opinion on how the operations are structured or like how we don't— it's not for us. But what I heard there is like, what is the total addressable market of this sector? And then almost like, what are the— what are the people in this sector engaged in? How do they deliver? What is the service delivery vehicle that they are— that we're charging for almost? And then within that total addressable market is maybe you know, how are you— how did— because we have gone and looked at a bunch. I've gone and looked at a bunch of these personal injury firms, and they all— a lot of them have a life care planning section on it. So I think it's talking to different personal injury firms. I have a couple of friends that are— they have some big firms, one of them out of Arizona, and just understand how they think about life care planning and what are the needle movers for them and who they go with. Is it a credibility thing? Is it a price thing? Is it some mix of both? And getting as big of a sample size as we can kind of feasibly get on understanding that from what we see, very— for a very cursory look at this, as a two-sided market, you have your personal injury kind of plaintiff's attorney side, and then you have your insurance defense side where you might have two life care player life care planners going against each other on the same court case. And I think understanding whether or not the firm needs to specialize in either plaintiffs or insurance, that's a help. That would be a helpful question for me, or if it can still serve both masters there, because the, the customer concentration risk that you're talking about with Simon Simon is considerable. But Matt, I agree, it seems like if there's a use, it doesn't seem like that should be a one-off, but I think that's what we need to go figure out, like what it is.

It was my understanding that he uses an outside firm because if he goes to court tomorrow, the first question the other attorney is going to ask is, well, how did you come up with this life care planning thing? Oh, well, Jane in my office did it. Well, yeah, well, that's not, that's not like a third-party independent And she's a.

CRNA, like she's just a nurse assistant or like.

Right.

But it's not— but it's not a third-party review.

It's his review.

Right.

So that's why I was— my understanding of why they did it, why they did it this way.

So I think it's getting the answer to that question is like, why are— it's maybe even trying to talk to Simon Simon if you are comfortable with that, or just like getting a list of questions that are approved to ask. We don't have to do that. But I think like if, if Simon Simon is at risk for whatever reason, like it's trying to understand what keeps him coming back, because it's not like you'll have a.

Contract there, right? Um, no, when we bought it, they were— I don't know if they weren't— they were gonna lose it, but they were way behind. We got in there and found out, you know, he had like 100 cases in the queue and they were like 4 or 5 months behind. So we obviously went in and, you know, you guys got to speed this up, go find some people or whatever. So I don't— he must like that. He must like Dina or somebody for some— there's a lady who runs it, kind of something he likes, something— there's something there he likes.

I don't know what. Okay, so that brings up kind of a different question as as we kind of thought about this is like, what are the key person risks that are inherent in both Verity Group? And it seems like there would be key person risk just in general in any of these businesses. But, you know, that's, that's, I guess, to be determined. But as you all look at it, it doesn't sound like it's the salesperson, whatever person you just referenced, that might be some type of.

Key person risk. I think she's the key person. Wes, what would you— because, Brian, it's my understanding all the life care planners work for her, up through her. Who's that, Megan or Dina? Dina. Megan's— I thought Megan was kind of over on this other little thing that.

Was kind of— Megan's the one in Cleveland.

Right? Correct.

Yeah.

Um, yeah, I mean, Dina, this is her only job. She's been there for 20-some years, right? She started, I think, as an admin and kind of worked her way to leading operations. I mean, James, I guess my take on it, I'm not discounting the importance of that, but I don't know in this engagement I'd spend much effort on that. I'd go more external, and then we can circle back and assess the key person.

So I think the only reason why I bring it up, I'm surprised to hear it's kind of an internal piece because I would— when I think about this business, I almost think about it like you need as deep of a roster or a bench of like life care planners, or like the wider of reach you have with these kind of contractor life care planners, the greater kind of audience you have potential to reach because they're bringing that business in. And it kind of gets to one of the other pieces of it, which is getting to that external pieces. Is it— would it be helpful to more or less have almost like a quick and dirty M&A pipeline of just like if you were going to go roll up a bunch or like tuck in or pull in a bunch of these kind of single shingle type sole proprietors, like trying to understand how to approach or think about those. Like we'd like to talk to some of those one-off people just about the industry and their— what matters to them.

Yeah, we actually had a lady, I'll have to dig it up, that we were maybe 6 months removed from the close date when we acquired this. And she had her own book of business. I think she did like $275,000 a year in revenue or something. She maybe had 1 or 2 clients and she wanted to come on short-term, but bring her book, kind of us acquire it. And then she was going to do something out with the Sunset. So we actually kind of had discussions with her and she threw out some like ridiculous numbers. She wanted like $900 grand plus like a guaranteed salary for like 3 years. And I'm like, if you can get that somewhere, go for it. Um, we're not interested. But yeah, I mean, one point on the, the resources, I kind of use the analogy of a business I was in where there was a very limited supply of these people, right? Because that's the key thing. These people are kind of critical, the life care planners, right? These nurses. What we actually did is created like somewhat of a training recruiting program of, hey, if you're a nurse, come on, second career, you can make a shit ton of money and we'll get you certified, right? Which is great, um, outside of the fact we don't have the spigot, you know, for the volume. For them to handle, right? That's the other piece that's missing. If we can figure out that there's another Simon or two more Simons and Simons, then I think we can pursue kind of this greenfield approach to get more resources on the roster.

So, right. So, but that would be almost like setting up a new product there that you're like, if— I don't want to say if, and if— I don't want to make this per se an if-then statement, but What you're saying is if you had the demand that was fed by either the insurance companies or kind of that personal injury attorney route, then you could theoretically set up this other product where nurses are actually paying to get this certification and you're getting that type of stuff through that, or— I'm.

Going to go there, but sure. I was more of a way to get the resources on board, right? So assuming there was volume there to be worked.

But well, the other, the other interesting thing I always think about, if there's, if there's single practitioners out there, is there a way we could fold them in, take care of their billing, you know, take a bunch of their admin.

Work off of them?

And, you know, you mean maybe if they got— if she had $275,000 of billing, maybe we guarantee her $140,000 and we take the other, you know, I.

Don'T Yeah, I mean, we kind of worked on that math too, because at the end of the day, she's making $275,000, but then she's doing all this shit herself. She's limited how much she could grow the $275,000. So, you know, net, she's netting X, right?

So, yeah. I think a third lens you could throw in on that that I'd like to run down is these websites for like— or these websites, these infomercials or commercials you see for it's like, have you or a loved one been affected by mesothelioma or asbestos or something. Those aren't law firms per se, they're just aggregators of claims that they then sell to the different law firms or whatever. And I think when I think about these sole proprietors, I think about these people that are just eating what they kill. And so wondering if there's not a way to— if we're about to go try to really focus on what is the addressable market here, how do you build a lead gen engine for that? You know, is there not an opportunity to potentially do that anyway? Because your, your, your life care planners seem like contractors. So it seems like your life care planners can scale with your demand without necessarily having to take on a lot of that stuff. I think that's an assumption we'd like to go validate. But that would be another way is just you're a demand aggregator that's kind of building it out that way.

Yeah.

So there's a total addressable market, there's a kind of what is the primary service delivery vehicles or products, there's a competitive analysis. I think it'd be helpful for us as part of that, what does the service delivery vehicles look like, really understand kind of pricing and margin. So try to do a pricing and margin audit as well as a pricing and margin benchmark. Cool. Thanks. As just like an understanding, part of that, both how are we doing this and who are we doing it up against? Where do we stand in relation to those? I think understanding, like, you know, with artificial intelligence accelerating as quickly as it can, is this something that has the potential for being disrupted or displaced? Just getting an understanding on— no one knows the future, but just is there— are there products that are— that we can have line of sight to that can potentially either displace or help this business unit to call that kind of a regulatory or a tech scan, if you will. Yeah. I don't— I don't think you guys are looking for like a SWOT here on the Verity Group, are you? Like, you're not looking for what is the Verity Group's right to win in the life— life care planning sector, it's truly more higher level of what is this thing. So it's less about the Verity Group maybe as a standalone and more about the life care planning sector and the forces that feed into it and the customers that it serves. Is that, is that a closer approximation to what you guys are looking for?

Because I mean, if you come back and say, hey, the whole industry is worth $10 million, you guys have 40% of it. It would be like, oh, we're kind of screwed. This isn't a great business to be in. Yeah, right.

I mean, I mean, just even from a cursory— I mean, as we go, as I've gone through the associations that exist around associations in general, just says this is an industry like it's not a $10 million industry. It has two conferences, two associations that have merged, and it has a seemingly pretty like a triple digit at least phone book of practitioners that are paying to be featured in this phone book. So I would— I think it's just really trying to understand that. Maybe the pieces of it that we would want to tailor specifically to the Verity Group are things like, sure, the competitive benchmarking, but the competitive benchmarking as it relates to, you know, service services, but also pricing and pricing. I don't know if we're going to get margin, but I think at a minimum pricing is probably helpful. But I guess the one point I want to really try to emphasize here is that we're not doing an analysis on the Verity Group. It's really about trying to contextualize the broader sector that it operates in and leave it to you guys to infer what you will out of that. I think there's that, and then there's the kind of how does— how do firms grow? How do firms grow? How do firms that exist in this sector grow or acquire customers or scale to whatever that is, to whatever meaning that has to the businesses? Is that pretty— is that what we're looking for?

Sounds good.

Okay. All right. So and then I think, Brent, you were looking for kind of a sources and means understanding around that.

And so what's that?

And efforts.

Yeah. So I think from a, from a lot of what we were just talking about, where we think about competitive benchmarking, that's sifting through these associations that we found, sifting through, sifting through the individuals themselves, like the individual practitioners in the space and cataloging them, trying to assign some set of criteria to them based off— is it a single shingle? Is it part of some larger group? Is it a sponsor-backed platform? Of which we think we can point at 2 so far. You might be the only theoretical strategic in the place, but I think understanding how that is— so that's, that's just good old-fashioned researching. I think on the industry and sector kind of analysis, it's understanding— I mean, that's looking— that's where a decent amount of any fees associated with this will go to, it's to getting access to databases that give us broader industry and sector data and trends for the last 5 to 7 years and any kind of forward-looking trends that those will have and being able to include that as part of a deliverable so that we're taking the headlines or like what we think the relevant pieces but you still have that. You have the document, the broader document that it's coming from to dive deeper into if you so choose. So competitive analysis is more of the two of us just scraping and scanning. That industry piece is us scouring databases and pulling what we think are relevant or pertinent insights out into kind of a more synthesized and distilled section of a document that still gives you the ability to dive deeper. I think when you get to the customer piece of it, that's where it really is not able to be AI. I'd like to go talk to some, some law firms and I'd like to talk to— I mean, we've got insurance carriers and brokers out the wazoo that we have a pretty good relationship with that we just like to talk to on the side and just figure out how we can kind of get to those— I don't want to say decision makers, but ultimately the end users of the, of the service and just try to understand and get to what drives the needle here. Is it price? Is it credibility? If it is some mix of both, then you're talking about this subjective spectrum that it falls on and you'll have your B-rate insurance carriers running on price and your D-list bus stop personal injury attorneys also focusing on price, you know. So it's really— it's trying to stratify and grade, get to some type of stratification and grading of potential customers. That's all predicated on there being this kind of validation that these are our customers and this is able to be bought. So that's— I don't, I don't think we're going to find a lot of data. I guess there's no databases, I think, that are going to really help spell that out and tell us this is what matters to these decision makers. And beyond that, I think there's just this kind of like what's happening in the industry. Is there a regular— what regulatory matters potentially are headwinds and tailwinds? What kind of tech platforms are already at play? What are potentially on the horizon? You do an AI red flag, red flag review from an AI standpoint because who the fuck knows? Excuse me, but just like, who knows how fast that will get there to be able to replace this kind of like constellation of contractors? So that would be our— JD, feel free, by the way, to color anything else in there.

I mean, I think, yeah, the only piece that I think we would— I wonder if we want to flesh out more is like if we've identified who the customers are and what is the main drivers for the decision-making, like any sort of like strategic, uh, I guess, how would we go after those customers? Because if we're talking about those law firms, what's the— is it a business development representative? Is it PPC, SEO? Like, is there a play there where we can just get a bigger piece of the market just by getting the.

Verity Group out there?

Um, I don't know.

Are we, are we having Matt become a keynote speaker at the Personal Injury Attorneys Association conference in Topeka?

Right.

Where he's doing a keynote on life care planning.

I don't know if that's the scope of this, but it's more like once we've identified like how we believe the customers that we ultimately want to target make the decisions, is there another step where it's like, well, here are these avenues and here's like the projected ROI even. We can continue to just go deeper and deeper as we identify those parts.

I would call that a phase 2. Yeah, I would say like that's probably a phase 2 where right now it feels like what we really need is just understand what is this thing and like kind of where are the levers, what avenues are available to us. And I think like, I guess like, I don't know that that's what you're talking about there is personally within my skillset. Like it'd be like, okay, find a PPC agency or find something like that.

But it's like, I think it's not even like a PPC agency. It's like, here are the— we— you can do the, uh, there's a dime a dozen of people who will give you like a keyword analysis and what the potential cost is and the potential like click-through rates and the ROIs. And if we know what our costs are and what our like potential revenue is, we can get that LTV customer acquisition cost calculation going and figure out.

If that is an avenue we want to explore. I like— I actually kind of like that. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. We should do that regardless, right? I mean, that's part of it.

Yeah. Like, that's just an idea of if we determine, like, there are— there's this much volume for people searching for these services that we ultimately could turn into customers, like, what is the investment worth there?

So I'll take— I'll make a note on that. So I guess from that, that's kind of our— that's— these are the sections. This is kind of how we would kind go about doing it. I think your third question— yeah, one other piece.

You mentioned an M&A pipeline. Like, is that, is that something that we want to build? Is there like a financial model or something we want to look at with some scenario analysis just to kind of understand like what is the potential payoff for investing in the Verity Group here? Like, if we're— if we, if we can put some numbers on like what does it ultimately mean, I don't know if that's something that's worth it to you guys, or if it's— that's too.

Far down the line. I feel like that's another phase 2 thing. I think at the higher level we can keep it of just like if we bookend it as like this is what this sector does and like maybe we have line of sight to, but I don't think like building out a pro forma based around that because that's going to take us into the operations, it's going to have opinions required based off of the kind of economies of scale that can be achieved. And I think I don't, I don't want to call this like this is, this is not going to be like a quick and dirty type of document. This will be, you know, substantive.

Yeah, but like it is— well, I'm a hammer.

Everything's a nail for everything. I was going to say, you know, we're trying to tax-free reorg the planet over here, but like, yeah, I would— I don't know, JD, but Brent, Matt, let's kick it to y'all for that. But it doesn't sound like that's where we're at.

Yeah, I would keep, I would keep this pretty simple. Whatever you are able to get access to and kind of summarize for us on the landscape of this industry, that would be helpful. And we kind of figure out what additional questions we have, where do we want to.

Dive deeper.

So, okay. And then effort, I mean, the question of effort is a question of timing, timeline for deliverable. It doesn't feel like this is a.

Like next week thing. I mean, sooner than later, we probably should have done this in '24, right? And I pursued a couple of people that didn't really get anywhere and then it just kind of lost steam on it. So yeah, I mean, effort for me, James, is obviously you both have a full-time job. Right. And then just from a cost perspective, right, I told you what the guy quoted me. So I mean, I know JD's got a 529 plan. He's got.

To get open. I think what we can do after this call is digest, regroup, drop everything kind of in an email back to you guys, drop some like basic— drop the documents that we would want to see from you guys in that, and then give you kind of what we feel is a baseline timeline for being able to produce a deliverable with costs that has some visibility into kind of the database Because that's what I was telling you, like, a lot of the cost is going to go into securing access and licenses to some of the databases provided we're able to— provided we're able to verify. So cost is— cost can be kind of two things here. It's either a cost-plus model or it's just a flat fee and we work it that way.

Well, why don't you come up with.

An estimate first and then we can discuss.

$59,999. I'm out.

Focus on— but, but only 5 months retainer.

Yeah.

No, like, I think, yeah, we're— I think we have a good, a better sense on kind of what you guys are looking for.

I sent you both a couple docs that go back to like 2023, 2024. A little bit more perspective on things, at least how it was presented to us.

So. Okay, cool. Okay. Beyond that, is there anything that— any other questions or I guess anything we.

Can.

Answer for you? No, no, I don't think so. You call Greg and see if he wants to invest in.

The.

Business. Yes. Yeah. And JD, if you put anything together, I want to see a cash flow statement. I don't want to just do operating margin.

Okay. Got it.

High net income business. All right, guys. Yeah, just keep us posted. I don't want to waste your time, so dip your toe, come back with, okay, we do have a clear path. If there isn't a clear path and this is going to be a tremendous amount of effort to maybe nowhere, then we can make a decision from there.

I think we can probably get you at least a scope of work and kind of a scope of work and cost structure document by.

Early next week. Yeah.

Um, that will have kind of like an outline of what we discussed, and you guys can.

Decide from there. Perfect. Cool. All right, all right.

Thanks, guys.

Have a good weekend.