After 4 decades of selling health insurance, Randy Pifer retires from Active Insurance Solutions

Tim Harty, The Business Times

Randy Pifer has had a foot out the door the past few years at Active Insurance Solutions, where he has worked the past 40 years, owning it for the first 39 of those years.

Retirement loomed, but each year that he said might be his last passed with him still in his office at 940 Colorado Ave. in downtown Grand Junction, ready for another year of selling health insurance.

With the close of 2025, however, the talk turned into a walk. The second foot crossed the threshold. Retirement is officially here for the 68-year-old who spent 41 years overall in insurance.

The reason Pifer could bid adieu after 2025 is because he had the successor he required, the person he trusted to continue the good work that Active Insurance Solutions has long offered its customers. Active Insurance Solutions employee CJ Rhyne took ownership on Jan. 1, 2025, and Pifer stuck around for the year to help him transition into the role.

Now, Pifer is walking away from what he deems a successful run, and being able to say that is a blessing from God.

“God’s kind of been in the forefront of everything for me,” Pifer said. “That’s what’s blessed my business, just having that relationship there and knowing that God’s guiding my path. That was really a critical component for me.”

Then, he made sure to add his wife of 45 years, Beth, made a lot of things possible. For example, as an accountant, she provided complimentary bookkeeping to her husband’s business when it desperately needed it.

“I credit her for hanging in there, particularly in the early years,” Pifer said, adding the business then known as Employee Benefits Consulting Group “literally started from the carpet up. And those early years were just terrible.”

Pifer knocked on doors of businesses and individuals, trying to sell them health insurance. Even during the difficult early years, he resisted the temptation to expand into other lines of insurance.

“I didn’t want to be the jack of all trades and master of none. That was not me,” he said. “I just wanted to be the master of one. … People that are trying to do it all end up, a lot of times, not doing it well. And I just, I never wanted to be that.”

He said Beth had a good job, which helped pay the bills at home while Employee Benefits Consulting slowly built a customer base and gradually became more profitable.

Pifer reiterated, “Those early years were just brutal,” but, “Like I said, God and family and friends got us through a lot of those early times.”

Eventually Employee Benefits Consulting established a solid customer base, and things got even better around the time Pifer changed the business name to Active Insurance Solutions in January 2012. That was in the midst of the Affordable Care Act being implemented, and Pifer said it was a boon for his business.

People who tried to sign up for the Affordable Care Act online would get routed to a local agency that could help them, an agency like Active Insurance Solutions. As a result, Pifer’s agency added a lot of new customers to the long-term customers that had buoyed his business.

Well, now it’s Rhyne’s business, and Pifer is glad a mutual friend sent Rhyne his way.

Rhyne has worked at Active Insurance Solutions since August 2021, and when Pifer hired him, it was with the expectation – Pifer laughs about it now, acknowledging it was more of a threat – that Rhyne learn the business and become capable of taking over Active Insurance Solutions.

“And he has,” Pifer said.

Throughout the past year Pifer said he has been introducing Rhyne to customers as the new owner, and he’s been telling those customers, “Look, I would have never transferred this business over to him if I didn’t trust him explicitly to take care of my clients the way I have in the past.”

Pifer walks away confident Active Insurance Solutions and its customers are in good hands, but it’s still hard to leave a business he said has treated him extremely well.

He said he’s been receiving well-wishes from customers and colleagues in recent weeks.

“Oh my gosh, it’s been incredibly humbling,” he said.

Pifer mentioned hearing from two men who work in agencies that do property and casualty insurance, but not health insurance, so they have to refer customers looking for health insurance to a different agency.

Pifer said they told him, “We’ve always sent people over to you, and without fail they’ve always come back and said, ‘Oh man, that guy did a really good job for me over there.’ And so that’s always been important to me.”

Pifer said many of his clients have become personal friends. So, when he deems his career a success, it’s as much personal as financial,

“The insurance business is incredibly personal, and it’s deeply personal to me,” he said. “A lot of the people, I see them on the streets. I’ve been through so many traumatic times with people with cancer issues, heart issues, you know, devastating family injuries. And I’m the guy that sold him the policy that’s going to keep him out of bankruptcy. And so it’s always been a big deal to me.”

Now, as Pifer looks back at the past 41 years in insurance, he says, “I couldn’t imagine anything better that I could have done with my life. … It’s been a blast. It really has.

“And I think – there’s so many of these sayings – the one I always liked, though, is: If you love what you do, you’ll never really work a day in your life. And that’s kind of the way I felt about the insurance business. I’ve loved doing this. It’s been a blessing.”

Too much to do to be bored

With his retirement from Active Insurance Solutions, Randy Pifer has free time to fill.

The suggestion that some people get bored in retirement and go back to work drew a chuckle, and Pifer responded, “I promised my wife that was not going to happen.”

Instead, he said, “We’re gonna do a whole lot of traveling and hopefully going around seeing family and friends. … We have a cabin outside of Montrose, so we’re going to spend a lot more time down there, for sure.”

Pifer plans to do more volunteer work, which led him to quip, “I’ve never met a food bank that I don’t like.” He also hopes to help with natural-disaster responses, as he said, “When I see people out there doing that work, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘I’m physically fit enough and able bodied enough to go help do that stuff.’”

He sees more trail hiking in his future along with a sport many seniors gravitate toward: pickleball.

“I haven’t taken up pickleball yet, but that’s on my list of things to do,” Pifer said. “I used to play tennis, so it can’t be too far out to play pickleball.”

New owner grateful for opportunity

CJ Rhyne’s route to owning an insurance agency defies convention. A former general manager at the Golf Club at Redlands Mesa, where he worked for 15 years, Rhyne left there to work at the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce, focused on business retention and expansion.

Insurance entered the picture unexpectedly via a mutual friend of Rhyne and Pifer, and it led to Rhyne joining Active Insurance Solutions in August 2021. There, Pifer immediately put Rhyne on the path to ownership, and Rhyne met the challenge. He said he signed the papers to purchase Active Insurance Solutions on Christmas Eve 2024, and he assumed ownership on Jan. 1, 2025.

A year later, Rhyne expressed gratitude to Pifer, who stayed with Active Insurance Solutions until the end of 2025 to help Rhyne with the transition.

“I think that’s very rare for two guys that haven’t known each other previously to work together for two or three years and then have this relationship where he trusts me enough to take over the company,” Rhyne said. “I just know that I’m never gonna forget that.

“I just can’t reiterate enough how important it was for me to meet someone like Randy and to mutually trust each other to the level that we have in the amount of time that it’s been, because that doesn’t happen.”