From Health to Wealth: How One Agent Expanded Beyond Medicare

Jim Beran is a self-proclaimed puzzle solver.

But he kept getting stuck. He turned to Senior Market Sales^® (SMS).

Since 2010, Jim has expanded his Chicagoland Medicare business into annuities and wealth planning with great success.

Here’s his story.

Year over year from last year 2024 to 2025. Insurance revenue’s up 42%.

Hi, my name is Jim Beran. I am the owner and founder of Beran Insurance Agency and Beran Wealth Management. I'm out of La Grange Park, Illinois. A lot of what I do pertains to retirees and preretirees, such as helping them make decisions about Medicare, long-term care planning, and retirement income planning.

I really started as a Medicare guy, and with the folks at SMS, they start bringing in and teaching you things. So it really started with Medicare, a little bit of life insurance, but then mainly annuities. And annuities really opened up the door, because it made a lot of sense to go along with the Medicare in the Medicare space. But also it was a great way to diversify my portfolio of offerings. And then over the years, I've just kind of bolted on different things, like under-65 health insurance, life insurance, long-term care annuities, and then the financial planning with Sequent Planning as well.

My thought process around, I guess you would say, the evolution of my insurance business involving SMS?

It's really all the above.

Was I not as challenged? Yes. But did I hit the ceiling on scaling? Yes. Can I help more customers? Can I make more money? Yes. And the answer is all the above. So getting into the Medicare space early on, I mean when I started, I was 26 years old. I'm sitting down at the kitchen table with people that are on Medicare. You got to know your stuff.

Getting my Series 65 was really important, too, because there is a bigger puzzle. Like, selling an annuity is one thing, but it's really part of a bigger piece of their retirement puzzle and their plan.

They look at that Core brochure and that timeline. I mean, Medicare is just one blip on the whole radar, and I'll just pull the thing out and show it to them. Like, this is everything that I help people with. I help people get educated on their core retirement decisions. These are all really, really, really important things that you need to focus on in retirement: long-term care, Social Security, Medicare, retirement income planning. These are all important decisions. And like I said, we have a lot of stuff going through our brains as advisors, as we're out there.

And this thing just kind of boils it down to one, two pages. I handle all these different retirement decisions. What have you done about Social Security yet? What have you done for long-term care planning? If anyone’s had a long-term care event in your family, when are you leaving your employer coverage, or what are you planning on all of these things that you have — all these decisions you have to make in retirement — they're just everywhere.

So I just they just kind of come up in conversation like, “what are we doing?” And I think they're just so relieved to have somebody there that educates them on that topic that they're really, really, really appreciative. Even if you come up to them and say, “hey, what are you doing about your retirement income?”

“Well, I have an advisor.”

Well, then you start going into, “Well, I’m someone that helps preretirees or retirees kind of distribute their wealth as opposed to accumulate their wealth. So here's some things that are important that you should keep an eye on.”

I don't have to hard-close everybody and hard-sell everybody. So even if you don't take their money under management as an advisor with Sequent or whatever it is, having an understanding of all that can help you sell more insurance products. But you’ve got to understand how those weave together and how they play off of each other, and how insurance plays a big role with the overall financial plan.

As a business owner, there's constant problems that I have to solve within my business or outside my business, but if I have a problem in the insurance space and I talk to SMS, SMS has seen it all — there's not a problem that they can't solve.

They have seen it all. So whenever I have a problem, I'm always the guy that's the problem. So they show me how to get out of my own way. And that's what I love about SMS. And they're just a phone call away.”