We’re all born from something, and that something can define the trajectory of our lives. For Ben Fredricks, much of it comes from his bloodline… especially from his dad.
“My dad always worked very, very hard,” says Ben. “I mean he’d be up at 5:00 am, get his workout in, go to the office, and a lot of nights, he’s not back until 6:30 or 7:00 pm. So, we saw that. Whether or not as a little kid really seeing it, I finally put two and two together with my dad. “Oh, he’s working hard,” subconsciously, he was teaching us, “This is what you do. You wake up every day, you go to work, you come home, you provide and you support your family.”
“Then beyond that, my dad is one of the most caring and loyal and generous people that I’ve ever met in my life. There aren’t a lot of people that have had the amount of success career and business-wise, that he has had and that have done it the right way. I’ve seen a lot of my friends’ parents or just people around me in my life that sure, they might have success in their career and their business, but how many bridges did they burn along the way to get there and how many people did they hurt to get there?”
Ben speaks the truth, and he’s bringing that truth to light in his role as a Satellite Division Sales Leader with USHEALTH Advisors. In just a few short years he has personally produced more than $5 million in issued business, and his team is on its way to more than $42 million in production.
Ben has been the maestro of it all, masterfully conducting the orchestra of his success at USHA. And he comes to this naturally. While Ben describes his dad as, “caring, loyal and generous”, his father learned those character attributes from somewhere, and as it turns out that somewhere was from a man who impacted the world.
A cultural icon.
“My great-grandfather is Lawrence Welk,” says Ben. “His parents immigrated here to this country and started our entire family lineage and the legacy that he left on our family and the example that he set for his children – that obviously carried down to my dad and the way that he raised us. It’s certainly been a blessing in my life to be able to have him as an example and somebody to aspire to be even half of the man and half of what he was able to accomplish. Obviously, it was a while ago when he was doing what he was doing, but my knowledge and my understanding of it is he was one of the most prominent people during that time.”
“My great-grandfather had a band and they traveled across the country and played music for a while and then eventually started the TV show, The Lawrence Welk Show. Even during the time I was growing up, it would be on TV, on like PBS on Saturday nights. So, pretty cool that I could say that’s my great-grandfather, but I think the biggest thing that I have taken from what he was able to accomplish and my knowledge of it from my grandma and my dad’s mom, who was Lawrence Welk’s daughter, is he always talked about perseverance and how success is really just a matter of consistently doing something over a long enough period of time and working towards that goal relentlessly until you are able to achieve it.”
And there you have it, the principles of success passed down through the generations. History repeats itself and Ben is fortunate enough to have some solid, world-denting history in his lineage. But, success is not magic for anyone, it takes hard work, massive action and unrelenting faith. This is not the Lawrence Welk story, it’s the Ben Fredrick story, and just because there was prominence and lessons from his family’s roots, doesn’t mean Ben hasn’t had to work for what he’s got, nor has he been able to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous… failure.
After all, this is life folks. No one gets out of here alive and no one builds a great life without pain and suffering.
No human is immune.
For Ben, it was during his teenage yeas, one of the most vulnerable times of anyone’s life, when his world came crashing down around him and his family. Loss was everywhere.
“I would say in terms of my biggest challenge that I’ve faced in my life, I would definitely go back to my high school years,” says Ben. “My parents, they were married for a very long time, we had two very supporting parents. My mom instilled a lot of confidence and belief in all of her kids.”
I have three siblings, so four of us kids total, and my mom always told us we could do whatever we want in life. I’m super grateful to have her as a mother and somebody that believes in me and has always believed in me from the day I was born. And like I said, my dad is one of the hardest working people that I’ve ever met or seen in my life.”
“But, he was working very hard over a very long period of time with his company and what he was doing… and when I was a junior in high school, my parents got divorced. At the same time, I was watching my mom’s life pretty much unravel. She had her three siblings that were blood related. So, her two brothers and her sister all passed away, as well as her father died, all within the span of three or four years. This was as my parents were getting divorced. So, you can imagine me, as one of her sons, I had three other siblings, but I only had one older sibling at that time. He was already off to college. So, I was the oldest in the house.”
“My other two siblings were a lot younger. So, my mom was not going to be talking to them about what’s going on with that situation in her life and her struggles there, but I definitely felt like it was my responsibility to step up and be there for her because she didn’t have a whole lot of other people around her to support her during that time. There were a lot of nights her and I would be talking until midnight and I was just there to help support her, but it taught me a lot about the struggles and things you go through in your lifetime. Obviously, I was upset that my two uncles and my aunt all passed away within a pretty short period of time, as well as my grandfather, it was a lot.”
“That was a struggle for me personally, but it can’t compare to what my mom went through. Just to see how she bounced back from that and the resilience that she had during that time, it really showed me a lot of character in her. It also taught me a lot about life struggles and things that can happen in life that may not seem like there’s any good reason for it, but in the long run, there’s a reason that everything happens in life. So, having a strong belief in God and having a strong faith has always been important to me in understanding that there’s a bigger picture, that God has a bigger plan for all of us in our lives.”
When there’s pain you’ve got two options, you can go through it, or you can grow through it. The latter builds scars that change you and change the world. While Ben and his family were suffering from personal losses that seemed to never end, he used sports to turn his pain into perseverance and possibility.
“One of my biggest accomplishments, is what I was able to do as a lacrosse player,” says Ben. “Growing up, I was All-American in high school for lacrosse, first team All-State. I was the captain of my high school lacrosse team, MVP. My senior year we won the championship. I was able to get recruited to play Division I, which was always my goal during that time of struggle with seeing what my mom was going through.”
“There were a lot of accomplishments and just personal growth and development that I went through being a part of a team – it’s all about teamwork – you’ve got to be able to communicate with other people on the team and work together to achieve a bigger goal. So, it was a really cool experience actually playing lacrosse in college.”
Ben grew up in California, and went to college in the northeast, but said there was no way he was going to stay there… “too cold” he says, so Ben ended up in Nashville.
But was it just by chance, or… destiny?
“I talked to my godfather who was pretty big in the music business, says Ben. “And he spent a lot of time in Nashville during his early years and his early business career with the music industry that he was involved with. He was like, “You should check out Nashville.” He’s like, “You would love it.” I knew no one in Nashville at the time, just made a decision, picked up and moved down to Nashville after college.”
It seemed to make sense, whether Ben realized or not at the time with a little bit of that Lawerence Welk music heritage pulsating through his veins, why not give Music City a shot? It ended up changing his life and all because of one moment in time.
“I studied undergrad business management in college and so when I moved down to Nashville right out of school, I was interviewing for few different jobs, mostly in business. I was actually on the elevator, going to the sixth floor of our office building where we work from now to interview for a different company.”
“There was this guy in the elevator, Alec Hellein, who in 2019, was one of the top agents at our company, (USHA), which I didn’t realize at that time. I just met him in the elevator, but he was dressed super nice. I could tell he was probably a year older than me. So, he was a younger guy, dressed nice, looked like he was doing well for himself.”
“Alec stopped me in the elevator. He said, “Hey, what’s going on? How are you doing?” I said, “Oh, I’m just going up for this interview on the sixth floor.” He said, “Oh, well, after you’re done with that interview, you should come up to the seventh floor and talk to us. We do health insurance and we help people with health and life benefits, so you should come up and talk to us after you’re done with that.”
“So I was in that interview on the sixth floor and all I could think about was going up to the seventh floor right after it. That’s exactly what I did. I finished the interview, went up to the seventh floor, and then interviewed with Alec, and Daniel and Shelby Benz. Shelby helped me out a lot with setting up the contracting and everything at that point, but I just contracted right there after Daniel showed me everything. I was like, “I’m in, let’s do it. This is exactly what I’m looking for.” So it’s funny how I stumbled into this job. I didn’t get recruited from a jobs board, I didn’t have a friend that was doing it. I literally met someone in an elevator as I was going in for a different job interview.”
It’s been said that one conversation, one idea, one chance encounter can change your whole life. Ben lived that moment. It’s not a coincidence, it’s just God being anonymous.
“I mean, I’ve even thought about it,” says Ben. “If I was two minutes earlier to that interview or two minutes later, I wouldn’t have been in the elevator with Alec, wouldn’t have found this job. My life would be so much different than it is today. So, it is definitely interesting how life can work sometimes.”
And life works if you do. So Ben got right to work when he joined USHEALTH Advisors, killing it right out of the gate!
“I first moved down to Nashville towards the end of May in 2019. So, I contracted with them, got the pre-licensing course, studied and passed my tests seven days later. I wanted to get my personal business off the ground as quickly as possible. I was working under Alec, who was my FTA, and again, he was the number seven agent in the entire company. So, he was the best guy to learn from at the time. I was super lucky to have him as an FTA right off the bat.”
“I was setting up my business to where I was licensed in 12 or 13 different states right from the beginning. July is when I wrote my first new business. I believe it was July 11th. Then on July 27th, I hit my 100k milestone in production So, I hit my 100k in 18 days, which was incredibly quick.”
It’s also been a quick ascension for Ben, from agent to Field Training Agent to Field Sales Leader to the position he currently holds, Satellite Division Sales Leader. And Ben says as he has changed levels of leadership, his responsibilities and focus on service have shifted as well.
“Obviously, back when I was just personally producing and when I was an FTA and even as an FSL, the majority of my day was taken up with running appointments and being on the phone with leads, closing deals for my personal business. Now, I try to keep an open schedule throughout the majority of my day. So, that way, if an agent has a question or somebody needs a transfer done, I’m available to be able to do that with them. We as satellites and the FSLs in our office, we have our own individual offices that you can go in and do an interview in there, close the door, and you have your personal space.”
“But I’ve made it a point to spend as little time in that office as possible. I pretty much just put myself right out in the middle of the floor and in the middle of all of the agents on our team. So, that way, I’m available to them when they have a question. They may be on the phone with a lead. They need to know the answer in order to close the deal or put the application in. So, I try to make myself available. Pretty much just the majority of my day, I’m fielding questions all day long.”
And not only has Ben discovered he can build a great business at USHA, he’s also discovered a new beginning in relationships. Ben and his current girlfriend, Libby Mynatt met at the USHA office in Nashville.
“Libby has been such a light and a positive person to have in my life,” he says. “I respect her ability to consistently work, but also produce at a very high level and show other people how to do it now that she’s building her team, her FTA team, it’s been pretty awesome to see that she’s now able to show other people how to do what she’s done, because obviously, her results are very difficult to achieve.”
“I mean, I think she’s done over 2 million in production and done that in the span of less than a year. She’s absolutely crushing it, but obviously, it takes a lot of hard work to do what she’s doing. So, her goal now is teach that and replicate that success in other people as well, but yeah, we did meet in the company. We officially started dating in November, so we took some time in the beginning there. I never want to rush into anything.”
No rushing into anything for Ben, but he knows there’s definitely a sense of urgency in his life, especially after witnessing all his mom went through some years ago… life can be short, taken from you at any moment, so now’s the time to share and show how others can enjoy the same success he does. He’s even sharing his success now with his brother Oliver, who recently joined USHA as well!
“I would say the biggest thing that I would want to get across to people is one thing, consistency. I’ve always been very consistent and I’ve always been able to accomplish, I think, what I’ve accomplished in my life based on my discipline, my work ethic, and my consistency in all of that. So, that part of my life has been huge to my success and I think any success in life. I’ve always been big on consistency. Everybody around me always says that about me and it’s the biggest factor of the success that I’ve had. I believe it’s due to consistency. It’s how I’ve lived my entire life.”
It’s that commitment to being consistent which has served Ben so well, much like a musician striking all the right cords to create beautiful music in his life, just like his great grandfather, Lawrence Welk did so many years ago.
For Ben it’s a true symphony of success.
Until next time, thanks for taking the time.
Your Storyteller,
Mark Brodinsky
