Home / About
One broker, seventeen years, one county.
Michelle Hames has held a California insurance license continuously since October 2009, and has run Strategy Matters as an independent brokerage since 2019.
How this practice got here.
The license was issued in October 2009 and the first nine years were spent at Aflac as a District Sales Coordinator, working worksite and supplemental benefits with employers across East County. That is a specific education. It is time spent in break rooms and shop floors rather than boardrooms, explaining coverage to people who were skeptical of it, on their break, and who would not sign up for anything they did not understand.
Strategy Matters opened in 2019 as an independent brokerage with its own carrier appointments. The reason for going independent was straightforward: representing one company means recommending one company's answer, and by then it was obvious that the right answer for a given employer was frequently somewhere else.
Authenticity, transparency, strategy.
These have been the three words on the door since the beginning. Here is what each is supposed to mean in practice, so you can hold the work to them.
Authenticity
- You get the same person and the same answer whether you employ four people or forty. Nobody is passed to a service desk after the sale, because there is no service desk to pass them to.
Transparency
- What a plan does not cover gets said out loud, before it is bought. Where a product is a poor fit, that gets said too, including when saying so ends the sale.
Strategy
- A quote is not a strategy. What the plan costs in year three, what happens when headcount moves, and what the company does at the next renewal are the actual questions.
The licenses, and what they mean.
There are two license numbers on this site and they are not two people. 0G78983 is Michelle's individual producer license, issued October 23, 2009. 0M97810 is the organization license held by Strategy Matters Insurance Solutions, issued May 14, 2019. Michelle is the only agent endorsed under it.
Both carry Life, and Accident and Health or Sickness authority. Neither carries property or casualty authority, which is deliberate rather than an oversight. Benefits, Medicare and worksite are enough of a specialty to occupy one person properly, and anything requiring a property and casualty license gets referred to someone who holds one.
Both licenses are public record. You can verify them yourself through the California Department of Insurance, and you are encouraged to do that with any broker you are considering, including this one.
Easiest way to start is a phone call.
Whether it is a renewal you are dreading, a birthday coming up, or just a question you have been meaning to ask somebody, the number goes straight to Michelle during business hours.