Introduction

Christopher Tipper isn’t your ordinary TPA. 401(k) administration wasn’t exactly on his list of “Top 10 Jobs” in the 1980s. Instead, he was on the managerial track at a major Seattle company when he was unceremoniously fired. It was December 1989. Christmas was around the corner, and he needed a job—badly. Thinking about his next steps, he recalled a conversation he had had with one of his neighbors—and  winced. It had gone well until she started droning on about a 5500. Mid-sentence… his head dropped. Out cold.

Putting the incident aside, Tipper picked up the phone. “What is it you do again?” he asked. “And are they hiring?” Desperate, he convinced the office manager that plan administration was his life’s calling.

His first day on the job was far from ordinary. Instead of attending the usual onboarding orientation, he reverse-engineered the annual administration of a profit sharing plan—and never looked back. Fixing broken plans became his specialty.

Company Overview

Name:

Hunter Benefits Consulting Group, Inc.

Type of Company:

Boutique TPA (Third Party Administrator)

Locations:

Palatine (Chicago), IL

Lakewood (Denver), CO

Spokane, WA

Seattle-Tacoma, WA

Services Offered:

Technical guidance, plan design, and administrative support; accurate, timely compliance reporting; a “hospital” for plans in need of fixing

Goals:

• Serve plans with complex problems, bringing them into compliance

• Deliver cost effective, comprehensive services

• Guide plan sponsors through plan design decisions

• Create superior value for both plan sponsors and participants

• Embrace innovative technologies to improve service outcomes

A Company Called Hunter

A couple of hops, skips, and jobs later, it’s 1999. Tipper is launching his own business. It was to be a boutique TPA firm—one focused on complex cases with an emphasis on compliance.

But first things first: a company name. Tipper didn’t especially want to use his own, then thought of one that sounded established and evoked the old English watercolor hunt scenes he admired. Hunter it would be.

To run smoothly, though, the company needed a good CRM. Tipper made several attempts to adapt existing tools like PensionPro and ASC—but none quite fit. Eventually he wrote his own, bringing a developer in to help, going through three versions of his custom CRM—Telemetry—between 2007 and early 2025.

Tipper had grown accustomed to doing things his own way. He stuck with his in-house CRM, resisting off-the-shelf products—until Stax.ai’s came along. “Five minutes—no, five seconds—into the presentation of what would become CX, Telemetry is dead,” Tipper said. “We’re going to be using this puppy.”

It was a match made in Middle Earth.

Lord of the Rings

Like many in the 401(k) world, Tipper didn’t plan to end up there—he just fell into it. It’s also rare for someone looking to buy a business to deliberately choose one in the retirement industry.

“And then Naru (Naru Muraleedharan, CEO of Stax.ai) did it on purpose, which I still don’t understand!” Tipper laughed. “But I do know where Naru wants to end up—he’s building the One Ring to rule them all. I like that.”

Over the years Tipper has worked with admin systems that ran the gamut—from a clunky DOS-based product to a Windows program that didn’t do well across multiple locations to a web-based platform. Now he’s using a cutting-edge product built specifically for TPAs—from the ground up—that’s AI-powered. Now that’s exciting!

Meeting the Wizard

Tipper’s wife Katherine—president, CFO, and head of HR (“all the stuff you don’t want me doing”)—faced a major challenge: it took her a long—long—time to manage the hundreds... and hundreds… and hundreds of pieces of paper that flood their office every month. Each one insists it’s “just a couple of pieces”—yeah, times hundreds!

They learned about Stax.ai in 2023 and first used its trust accounting (TA) platform during that year’s compliance cycle. They liked what they saw there—especially the “heavy” AI used to reconcile brokerage statements.

Problem solved? Well… “kind of,” Tipper grinned. It still takes a human to open the envelopes, remove the staples, and set the scanner to double-sided before the statements can even get into the TA.

Then about a year ago, Katherine told Tipper Stax.ai was developing an AI-powered CRM—and that he needed to talk to them. He did. Even though the platform was still “under construction,” Hunter signed on as an early adopter for a very specific reason: they knew they’d have more say in how the new platform evolved.

The next biggest problem at Hunter is payroll—it’s a bear!—one CX is designed to solve using its portal as well as facilitating file sharing and document requests. Thanks to the CX portal, Hunter was the first TPA to have all their December 2024 annual requests processed through the portal at once.

Tipper’s early attempt to jury-rig a CRM out of a client and task manager system hadn’t panned out—but the experience taught him a lot. So when Stax.ai approached him and asked if he would share his custom CRM with them, he replied absolutely. It was the first time he met Naru. During his presentation, Tipper brought insight from years of building and refining his own system, walking them through his file structure, database design, and how everything connected behind the scenes.

“Naru started to chuckle,” Tipper recalled. “And told me, ‘We’re looking at somebody else’s system. Your layout is essentially the same as ours, and it also looks a lot easier to use than any of the off-the-shelf ones we’re looking at trying to figure out how to use.’” Tipper got a walk-through of CX a week later and agreed, with Katherine, to help, later joined by their son and three of their employees. “Katherine and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary last fall with a long trip,” he added. “The only call I took that week was from Naru.”

Molding the Ring

Tipper is not looking for much, if any, of an ROI for this year. He knows from experience that you can’t just go from one vendor to another and keep the same processes. You have to change how you do things. So he knew the conversion from his old CRM was going to be time-consuming and that it would take a while to get the full benefits out of the new one.

The payroll integrations also helped Hunter get censuses from plan sponsors more quickly. It’s also figuring out processes, how to take manual processes and turn them into automated ones. There’s nothing else out there with this level of automation—never mind the AI.

“Making full use of CX is going to be like painting the Golden Gate Bridge,” Tipper said. "We’re never done.”

Stax.ai is constantly adding features such as a sales funnel to replace the current commercial one, while also refining communication templates and AI-generated content for client interactions—using active instead of passive voice—and gradually improving ROI as processes are optimized. And something Tipper’s excited about is the addition of 3(16) fiduciary services capability later this year. He had tried to add a 3(16) department in Hunter three or four years ago but wasn’t able to make it work because of payroll file limitations. Now that will be a lot easier because of the tools that come standard inside CX.

“You know,” he mused. “A lot of people my age have succession plans, or their success plan has been triggered and they’re spending all their time on the golf course. I’m trying to figure out how to help somebody develop a new product.”

Tipper’s not retiring to the golf course just yet—he’s helping build what’s next. And he’s excited to see where the next leg of the journey takes him… and Stax.ai.

About Stax.ai

Stax.ai was built specifically for the retirement industry to modernize and automate the way TPAs manage their operations. Their AI-powered platform streamlines compliance, client communication, trust accounting, and workflow automation – eliminating inefficiencies and empowering TPAs to scale. Today, Stax.ai serves leading TPAs nationwide, helping them increase productivity, reduce costs, and deliver superior service to plan sponsors and participants.