Roundstone Uses Ninety to Cover Clients’ Needs | Case Study

Empowering Growth Through Ninety

Founded in 2003, Roundstone Insurance has a mission of creating a better alternative for small and midsize businesses to manage their health benefits. This led to creating an innovative approach to self-funding and the first medical group captive of its kind. The model allows smaller businesses (25-1,000 employees) to take advantage of the benefits of self-funded insurance that previously only larger enterprises could enjoy: flexibility, control, transparency, and savings. Today, Roundstone is a thriving company with more than 1,000 employers participating in its Group Medical Captive. 

How Ninety Keeps Growing Teams Aligned with Clarity and Control

Roundstone runs EOS Powered by Ninety to keep everyone aligned. 

Chris Zirke, General Counsel for Roundstone, had previous experience running EOS in a law firm and noted that upon joining Roundstone, the meetings were just “different” than the L10s he used to facilitate. When Roundstone adopted EOS Powered by Ninety in 2021, things clicked. Zirke notes that Ninety has been a game-changer as Roundstone grew from 50 employees to more than 180 employees today. 

“Before Ninety [from a previous experience], keeping track of issues was always a challenge. The Scorecard was also a challenge. Could you do them? Yes, but Ninety made it significantly easier. [Without Ninety] there is no way to do this with a company as large as ours. Ninety gets us aligned from top to bottom. When you grow like we do, that is invaluable.”

Aligning the Organization Around a Shared Vision

Director of HR and Strategic Operations Scott Miker also points to the invaluable V/TO capabilities in Ninety, which enable transparency for the whole company in ways older methods simply cannot. Both Miker and Zirke agreed that a V/TO contained in a Word doc might be reviewed once… then forgotten or ignored thereafter. 

Miker further explained how the V/TO in Ninety makes a difference. 

“It gives full transparency to the leadership goals and initiatives… so the whole company is exposed to it. We started making all the departments take part in their own departmental V/TOs, and that, to me, has been huge. That gets them [departments] thinking more strategic, [the ability] to switch between leadership and your team.” 

Miker goes on to say that the V/TO helps departments ensure they’re aligned with that leadership vision. It also helps them examine the steps needed to evolve and grow as a department. 

Company-wide Consistency and Transparency

Roundstone essentially has 100% adoption of Ninety in their company, and that has enabled everyone to speak the same language. This is critical to supporting the employers who rely so heavily on Roundstone’s efficient operations for their insurance needs, a point Miker is quick to acknowledge. 

“Everything is consistent, so I think that is really important. You don’t want to have to constantly translate those things to people who aren’t involved. The other thing I see is transparency… and I think it’s transparency up and down… so that your organization has access to where we are going, what are the Core Values, [and] what are the goals for the organization. That way, not only are staff members in the loop, but they don’t feel surprised or caught off guard by some of these things,” Miker said. 

“Bottom-up transparency is really important as well. Mike Schroeder [Roundstone’s Founder and President] doesn’t have to attend every single L10, but he does get an email after every L10 is complete of what was talked about, and what the scores were. He can look at the data and the scorecards. It allows transparency within the teams and [helps] identify problems early.”