The Fidewell Method
Not a sales pitch. A trusted-advisor process where you do the talking, the first step is never a quote, and every stage creates value whether or not you ever hire us.
Earn the right → take the plan apart → put it back together → make it real → make it compound.
The One Non-Negotiable Rule
The traditional bid process keeps the incumbent roughly nine times out of ten, because everyone's quoting the same black box. It compares brokers. It never examines the plan. So we don't start there. No Blueprint without an analysis. No quote without a Blueprint.
The Five Stages
A 15-to-20-minute conversation to see if there's a fit. Nothing more.
We don't come in assuming it makes sense to work together, and we're not there to quote your insurance. You talk; we listen. We'll show you how reactive plans and high-performing plans behave differently, and ask one question almost no one can answer: what process gives you confidence you're getting the best deal possible?
The Benefits Performance Score™ session, where your plan gets taken apart.
Sixty to ninety minutes with the people who own the outcome. We benchmark your plan across six domains (cost, contracts, pharmacy, compliance, administration, and employee experience) and dig into what you want to see happen and which frustrations you want gone. We recommend nothing in this room. That discipline is the point.
The Benefits Blueprint™: your plan, put back together the right way.
Within weeks you hold a prioritized, board-ready roadmap: the risks in the plan as it stands, the opportunities inside it, the strengths worth protecting, and a simple action plan in order. Every item traces to something you told us or something your data showed us.
Once you decide to move forward: visibility first, then the wins.
The first months are about building visibility and momentum. We work to secure your data rights, review contracts and agreements, improving them as they come up for negotiation, and press every vendor toward the disclosure standard we hold ourselves to: our compensation is in writing before we start. Then the action plan's first wave begins in the order you approved: contract improvements, pharmacy review, early savings opportunities. Governance starts on day one, and decisions go in the file.
The operating rhythm, where the savings layer and the score rises.
Quarterly reviews of cost trends, utilization, pharmacy performance, and roadmap progress. Vendors held to guarantees and measured on results, not relationships. And every year, we re-run your Score, the number that holds us accountable and proves to your board that this is working.
The Fiduciary Defense
Two decades of retirement-plan litigation established one standard, and since December 2025 it has arrived at health plans: a documented, independent, repeatable decision process. Courts consistently favor documented process over outcomes, and “our broker handled it” is now Exhibit A, not a defense.
Fidewell is not a law firm and this isn't legal advice. It's simpler than that: when the question is “can you show how you decided?”, a Framework client opens the file.
Why This Process Works
We don't start any work on your plan until the process runs its course: Analyze through discovery, then we come back together and present your Benefits Blueprint™. Only then do you decide whether to hire us to Activate and Advance the plan. Every stage up to that decision produces something you keep: your Score, your Blueprint, your file. If you never hire us, you'll still know more about your plan than you've ever known. Most people find that tells them everything about how we operate.
The process is built around your goals, your frustrations, and your data, not our products. We lead to our tools, never with them.
The Score costs nothing. The Blueprint is yours to keep. We'd rather introduce ourselves with our best work than with a bid.
The annual re-score means every year of our engagement is earned by a measurable result, the same standard we hold your vendors to.
Stage One Starts Here
The first step is a conversation, and the working session that follows will tell you more about your plan than the last five renewals combined.
Get Your Benefits Performance Score™