Behind the Desk: Entrepreneurial spirit led woman to CEO chair

By: EDMOND JACOBY - Staff Writer | Wednesday, December 8, 2004 9:34 PM PST ∞

VISTA ---- It may not have seemed an auspicious beginning back in 1989. The day Jody Dietel, a transplant to North County from Minneapolis, picked to launch her consulting company, Creative Benefits Inc., was April Fools' Day.

She had been working for a small company that taught its clients how to manage employee benefits programs, but she suspected, correctly as it turned out, that the company's business plan had a fatal flaw: It only wanted clients with 50,000 or more employees.

"You know, 95 percent of all businesses are small businesses," Dietel explained.

"It was kind of an accident that I wound up with my own business," she said. "I proposed a different business plan because I thought theirs was not viable. When they didn't like my idea, I impulsively said 'let me out of the noncompetition agreement' that I had signed, and they agreed.

"I thought working with companies of any size was a better idea," she said.

Like her former employer, Dietel's start-up was a consulting firm, but she quickly realized that she would be better off doing the things she was teaching her clients how to do.

"A consulting assignment is a project; it ends. Administering the account is a continuing assignment, month after month," she said.

So, by 1991, she began to grow her company, running the benefits programs for clients, moving the office out of her home and into the Oakridge Business Park.

Privately held Creative Benefits handles health claims for Flexible Spending Accounts and Cobra health insurance filed by employees of the firms that are her clients. Beginning next month, the company will also manage Health Savings Accounts. Its clients are to be found in 38 states, Puerto Rico and Guam, Dietel said, and to accommodate a growing work force, she recently moved the company into a 28,000-square-foot building on Vale Terrace Drive in Vista.

She doesn't spend as much time in her custom Vista home as she might like, she said, because she is in the office about 65 hours per week.

"I think I used to put in a lot more time, but even now ... I don't have a family, so I put in that much time because I can," she said.

"I like to let my employees know that we're all in it together. I don't want people coming to work at 6:30 and seeing me drift in at 9, and I don't want the ones who start at 9:30 seeing me knock off at 3:30, so I put in long days," she said.

She also encourages a casual feel around the office, where visitors must be accompanied wherever they go because of federal privacy laws governing health insurance information. So her employees are encouraged to buy office attire from casual clothing retailer Land's End and have the company logo emblazoned on it. If they do, the company subsidizes half of the purchase price.

Dietel's most time-consuming extracurricular activity is her involvement in a business owners group at Emmanuel Faith Community Church in Escondido. She doesn't come across as overtly religious, but her connection to her church and to her evangelical Christian faith become clear after just a few minutes of conversation.

She grew up a Lutheran, "Missouri Synod," she is quick to point out as a way of clarifying that she was raised in a religiously conservative environment.

"When I was a senior in high school, I was exposed to a personal relationship that would transform my life and give it meaning," she said, and she applies that transformation to everything she does.

"All of my life, both my personal life and my business life, my highest goal has been to be a good steward of whatever I've been given," she said.

That goal helped her grow Creative Benefits from her initial $2,000 investment to one with 55 employees and $4.4 million in revenues handling about $85 million in FSA and Cobra claims every year.

It also helps her stage company Christmas parties at which a variety of gifts are raffled. The raffle is free, she explained; it's just a way of deciding which employee gets which gift. Some of the gifts go beyond what most people expect from their employers, such as a digital camera or a DVD player. The whole office will shut down for a couple of hours in the middle of the day for that party.

Dietel is a voracious reader, she said, especially of work by John Maxwell, whom she described as "the Christian leadership guru," and fiction about early America. She also likes to go to movies as a relaxing way to end the work week, though she is picky about which movies she sees.

"I try to be careful ---- there's not a lot that's wholesome out there," said Dietel, who turns 47 Friday. She is a collector of Disney movies and Precious Moments figurines.

She also collects family photos, which she displays on a bookcase in her office. They are her extended family, though ---- employees and their children.

Contact staff writer Edmond Jacoby at (760) 739-6675 or ejacoby@nctimes.com.

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