Growing An Employee Lifestyle Benefits Platform – with Jordan Peace, CEO & Co-Founder of Fringe

In a recent episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business, Ben and his guest, Jordan Peace, CEO & Co-Founder of Fringe, talk about how to grow an employee lifestyle benefits platform and win more HR clients.

Fringe is an employee experience platform that brings together rewards and recognition, lifestyle and wellbeing benefits, life-event support and gifting, swag management, learning and development, and more—all within one seamless solution. By powering the systems behind exceptional workplace culture, Fringe enables organizations to support their people in meaningful ways, both at work and beyond.

You’ll hear practical strategies for client acquisition, standing out as an HR consultant, and using employee experience to attract and retain corporate customers. Whether you identify as HR, workplace, L&D, OD, recruitment, or people & culture, you’ll discover real stories and actionable advice to find clients, package your consulting offers, and grow your business sustainably.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The mindset shift that helped Fringe win its first corporate contracts
• How to position non-traditional benefits to attract and retain clients
• The story behind Fringe’s early client wins – and the creative ways they gained traction
• Marketing works better when it feels like a conversation, not a campaign.

We also had an interesting conversation about the value of Fringe’s B2B podcast. Jordan discussed:

• Podcasting makes it easier to start conversations with the exact people you want as customers, partners, or investors. Podcast conversations often open doors that cold emails never will. A podcast gives you a reason to reach out that feels generous, not salesy. 
• Long-form conversations build trust faster than ads, posts, or cold outreach. Podcasts reward honesty and stories more than polished messaging.
• You don’t need a complex content plan if you can show up and talk like a real human. Podcasting works best when it reflects how you actually think and speak.
• A show can double as relationship-building, learning, and brand visibility. Being a podcast guest or host positions you as a peer, not a vendor.

Check out our HR business podcast launch service.

• Fringe website: www.fringe.us
• Jordan’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-peace-fringe

Scroll down for the audio version and the transcript.

Ok, onto the show!

Interview – Growing An Employee Lifestyle Benefits Platform – with Jordan Peace, CEO & Co-Founder of Fringe

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You can find the podcast on all the main podcast players.

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About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast

In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.

If you have questions you want to ask me about growing an HR consultancy or marketing for HR tech companies, just let me know or visit the HR marketing services page.

Remember to subscribe to our mailing list to get notified of new episodes.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode Transcript

Episode 299: Growing An Employee Lifestyle Benefits Platform – with Jordan Peace, CEO&Founder of Fringe

Ben [00:00:00]:
Hello, welcome back to the show. Great to have you along. And I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation with Jordan Peace. Jordan is a fabulous guy. He not only is in the world of HR, but he’s also lived in Australia and who knows, we may detect an accent at some point. But we’re going to dive into his life story and Fringe, the business itself. But firstly, Jordan, thanks very much for joining me today.

Jordan Peace [00:00:22]:
Yeah, I’m really excited to be here, Ben, and it was good to catch up with you about the time in Australia and some of the things I learned there. I didn’t really pick up the accent. I tried to mimic it a few times and I was shot down pretty quickly, so I kind of stopped.

Ben [00:00:36]:
Yeah, no, it’s very dangerous territory, and I’m so glad because it’s a legal requirement to adopt an Australian rules football team if you live in Australia for more than three months. I just made that up. By the way, if you’re listening, I believe you went for the Tigers. You’re from Richmond, so yes, the Richmond Tigers. Smart.

Jordan Peace [00:00:52]:
It just fit. And what a sport. Like, what a great game. A little known around the world, sadly, but what a great game. Really enjoyed seeing that.

Ben [00:01:02]:
It’s insane. Good stuff. I really want to learn about Fringe because you guys are doing some amazing things. But for people listening, if you don’t know, Fringe is a lifestyle benefits platform that helps companies attract and retain talent by offering personalized, meaningful perks that go beyond traditional compensation. Obviously such an important area in so many different ways—attraction and retention are key areas, along with engagement and so on. So can I take you back a step?

Can you lead us into the formation—where did the idea come from and what led to the creation of Fringe?

Jordan Peace [00:01:34]:
Yeah, of course. So I was working as a financial advisor years ago with a business partner, and Jason—who’s my business partner again this time with Fringe, actually—we ran a fee-based practice where we gave financial advice, whether it was investing, saving, or just having the discipline to sock it away, whatever the case may be, for individuals and couples. Usually they were in their 30s and 40s, so not folks with a lot of money to manage, but folks with income who needed to make plans and have a good strategy around their future.

A couple of things I learned through that: there are certain topics that most people just don’t care about and don’t understand. One of the topics that really jumped off the page to me doing this work and talking to all of our customers was that they really didn’t understand their employee benefits. Some of them were business owners actually supplying employee benefits to others. And it just seemed like benefits—it’s a lot of insurance, a lot of finance, a lot of something that’s written in some sort of alien language that not many of us can speak unless you nerd out on that stuff like I did for a few years and really know your insurance, your definitions of disability, and all this nuance.

So explaining all this to my customers on a one-to-one basis, I often had to wake them up at the end of the meeting. It just was not interesting to them. And I thought, well, if they can have a financial advisor who’s steeped in this stuff explain it one-on-one and it’s still not relevant, still boring, then how much are they really paying attention to their employee benefits?

How much do they really appreciate their employee benefits? And if they don’t, then companies are paying a lot of money every year for something that doesn’t actually engender any goodwill or loyalty or excite anyone or cause anyone to stay or recruit their friends or anything. So what are we doing here?

My theory was, what if we added into this idea of benefits things that were actually beneficial to employees’ daily lives? They wouldn’t have to be sick or dead or disabled or 65 to benefit from their benefits—they could actually benefit now. And that’s where the idea of lifestyle benefits was born.

We decided we wanted to launch a marketplace of lifestyle benefits. We wanted to put the power in the hands of the employee to choose what benefits were most relevant to them and their family. To give you some examples, some of the things I’ve used over the years are a massage membership, or a company called Stitch Fix that packages up clothes and sends them to me to try on. I keep what I like and ship the rest back because A. I don’t have any style, and B. I don’t have any time to shop. So it’s helpful in multiple ways.

That’s what we did at first—we created this lifestyle benefits marketplace to solve this particular problem of employees not really appreciating or understanding their benefits. So let’s give them something tangible, something that’s now, something relatable. They’ll actually go and brag to their friends about it, which they do. And that helps the recruiting effort and the culture-building effort for the companies we work with. So it’s been a journey.

Ben [00:05:00]:
So they’re not all healthcare-related benefits. In fact, that doesn’t sound like they are at all.

Jordan Peace [00:05:06]:
No, we don’t touch traditional benefits. That market is well established. There are plenty of players figuring that piece out. And unfortunately, the cost keeps going up and up and up, which isn’t helping anyone. But it’s not something we ever set out to do. We thought, that’s done. We want to think about how to engage employees with their benefits so they actually feel the impact of them.

And I think on the whole, most people don’t feel the impact of their benefits unless something is going very wrong in their life.

Ben [00:05:38]:
If I switch that to the employer’s perspective, what’s in it for them? Like, they’re thinking, why am I paying for an employee to get clothes shipped out to him?

Jordan Peace [00:05:47]:
Right. They’re keeping their people and they’re keeping their people engaged. It’s the holiday season, right? So let’s think through it that way. If I were to tell my wife, I love you so much, we’ve been married for years, and for Christmas I put no thought into your gift and just put some cash in your stocking—I hope you enjoy it, that could actually do more harm than good to our relationship.

So I think the gift or the benefit or the offering that we give people—what we offer—actually matters. And if it doesn’t feel personalized, if it doesn’t help them feel like they’re understood or seen or really appreciated, again, you can do more harm than good with benefits.

It’s not just how much money you’re delivering to your employee in terms of salary and benefits; it’s how much care and thought was put into what’s being delivered to them. Sometimes you can actually deliver less monetarily but have a much higher perceived value from the employee.

One of the studies I’ll share real quick that inspired us to move forward with this concept back in 2018 was actually done by a competitor. They surveyed a thousand people and asked: would you rather have a job that pays $100,000 with all of these perks and benefits stacked on top, or a job that pays $130,000 with none of that? Over 80 percent of people chose the lower salary with all the added benefits. And I just thought, what? You would think that if you asked someone on the street, they’d say, clearly I’ll take more money.

It turns out it’s not all about the money. It’s about how you make people feel. Do they feel appreciated? Do they feel valued? Do they feel like they belong? I’ve got employees who make $65,000 a year because that’s what their role fetches in the market, and I’ve got employees who make $200,000 a year for the very same reason. Both feel appreciated. Both feel cared for, despite that enormous gap in income.

A lot of that comes down to the benefits and the culture we create for them when they’re here. And I’ve been making this argument for years: it’s not actually all about the money, as long as people are paid fairly. It’s really more about how they feel about working for you.

Ben [00:08:17]:
Yeah, that’s very clever. And I’m just thinking back to a long time ago when I was running HR inside a business and we bought a service—actually from one of the largest employee associations in Australia. They’d banded together and used that mass headcount to create purchasing power, then gone out to vendors to secure discounts. At the end of the day, it became a card that gave discounts across different providers, which was cool. We used it as part of attraction and retention, but it wasn’t very exciting. So how does the platform itself work?

Jordan Peace [00:08:50]:
To go back to the story a little bit, we built the lifestyle benefits marketplace. That was a place where people could actually transact and access services that we thought would enhance their lifestyle—reduce stress, give them time back in their day, or positively impact their family. We had some filters as we thought through what services would be appropriate for the platform.

Then we asked, what are the funding mechanisms for this? Not every company can afford to offer a lifestyle stipend and say, here’s a hundred bucks a month, use it however you want. But they probably already have rewards and recognition programs. They probably have wellness programs. Maybe they run step challenges or birthday rewards. There are all these other pockets of budget and programmatic effort being put toward people and culture.

So we built all of that on top of the lifestyle benefits marketplace. With Fringe in its current state—because what I was describing was seven years ago—it now includes rewards and recognition, challenges, incentives, swag, learning and development. All of that is built right into the platform.

And then that marketplace serves as the ultimate place where I engaged in recognition, or I received recognition, or I completed my challenge and now I’ve got these points, and now I actually have a place to transact and get some of these services.

On top of that—and you mentioned purchasing power—because we similarly have big headcount and we’re able to secure discounts, we pass that value directly to the user, to the employee. They can even spend their own money. So let’s say you want something expensive—like a Peloton, which you can get through Fringe. You’ve got $500 saved up through recognition, incentives, and whatever else your employer has given you, but it costs more than that. You can use your points and then put the rest on a credit card and end up with a heavily subsidized piece of equipment. So there are lots of ways those transactions can take place.

What we’re focused on now, probably even more than lifestyle benefits themselves, is employee experience. How can our tool help employers create a better employee experience? One place to go to participate in challenges, to be recognized, to gift others, to buy company swag—so people can wear their hats on Zoom calls—all of that in one place is really our pursuit and has been our focus for a while now.

And 2026 is going to be even more of that—bringing it all together and becoming the cultural hub for businesses of any size.

Ben [00:11:55]:
I can imagine HR teams and recruiters in large companies would love this because they can use it in employment marketing. Look at the attraction of the benefits we offer, then weave those into interviews and conversations. I’d agree the survey findings are probably accurate—that these little things can outweigh the cost. It’s the cool factor and the fact they can be tailored to what people actually want, not just something handed down from on high.

I remember someone telling me they got a Christmas gift from their corporation: bathrobes with the company logo. And I’m just—you don’t want to imagine your colleagues walking around in bathrobes.

Jordan Peace [00:12:35]:
It’s not too intimate.

Ben [00:12:36]:
Yeah, yeah. Too much. If I turn to the business setup and formation side of things, I’m fascinated because it’s almost like a two-sided marketplace. You’ve got to get vendors to participate, and you’ve got to get companies and employees to use it. Can you give us a bit of flavor for what it took to get it launched?

Jordan Peace [00:12:54]:
Yeah, initially it was mostly begging and pleading. But honestly, these startup stories are funny. Years later, you’re almost embarrassed by what you had to do to get things off the ground—but it is what it is.

I remember we got our very first customer when we didn’t even have a product yet. We had a website, some marketing, and people found us and wanted it. We said, sure, we’ll figure it out—even though we didn’t have the platform built. Thankfully, that first customer was local. So what we did was have all their employees come out, and we threw a party for them.

We threw a launch party for them. We printed menus of benefits and gave them purple Sharpies—because that’s our company color—and they just X’d off or circled the things they wanted. We fed them pizza and beer, they went home, and then we got on our laptops, went to all these websites, and signed them up for everything they chose. We sent things to their email addresses or to their houses, whether it was physical or virtual.

That’s how we did our first customer. Then we built our first platform. After that, we worked with third-party gift code vendors and similar partners so we could offer what we needed before we had direct relationships with the brands themselves. Over the years, it’s been a process of building more and more direct relationships, relying less on aggregators, growing our user base, and using that scale to negotiate better rates.

It’s been this incremental growth toward offering something that’s genuinely, intrinsically valuable. Now, when you get on Fringe for the first time, you can get DashPass for free—that’s something all of our users can access. That’s built directly into our negotiation with DoorDash. But that took years. Years of proving we could send them real business.

Ben [00:14:59]:
I’ve spoken to so many founders of large consulting firms and tech firms, and in every case, what we see on the outside now is this beautiful, shining business. But they all tell me, yeah, it was just grinding it out. Trading the pavement. Even Virgin Airlines started with Richard Branson walking up and down with a cardboard sign saying flights to London for £200 or something. And Airbnb, I believe, started with an Excel spreadsheet and worked it out from there.

That’s fabulous. I know you’re a fellow podcaster—can you tell us about the podcast? Why did you do it? Do you enjoy it? Do you see any benefit?

Jordan Peace [00:15:34]:
Yeah, thanks for the plug. I really enjoy it, honestly. I prefer being a guest, though. I’m not a very organized person—and by that, I mean I’m a terribly disorganized person. Hosting is a little harder for me because I get caught up in the conversation and then think, oh, I’m supposed to ask a question.

I’m usually the one who needs to be prompted. But I do really enjoy it. Most of the episodes I do with my co-founder, Jason, who I mentioned earlier. This is our second business together. It tends to be long-form. We’ll break it up sometimes when we publish it, but in truth, we’ll sit down for three hours and just talk.

The reason we called it How People Work is because it’s a bit of a double entendre. It’s about how people work—how they do their jobs—but also how they work internally: how they think, who they are, what motivates them, the intricacies of being human. I’ve gotten to interview people like a cultural anthropologist who explained a bunch of fascinating things about mankind and society.

And so you learn a lot doing a podcast, which is really fun. It’s like everything I’m passionate about—I’ve given myself an excuse to talk about it regularly and routinely with a friend, and you just press record before you do it. So I love podcasting for that reason, because I feel like I’m just having a conversation with a friend or with someone I’m meeting for the first time. I don’t pay all that much attention to the fact that the camera’s on or that the mic is hot, honestly.

Ben [00:17:08]:
And with your business hat on, would you say that it’s good for the business?

Jordan Peace [00:17:11]:
Yeah, it is good for the business, particularly because you can ask whoever you want to be your guest, and people feel honored by that. So if it’s a prospective customer, a partner, an investor—whoever—I get yes nine times out of ten when I ask someone to be a guest on a podcast. It’s a fantastic way to get the right people in the room—the people you want to talk to anyway. So I think it’s a wonderful strategy from a business standpoint as well.

Ben [00:17:41]:
And you talking about just talking with a friend, sharing stories, and the fact that Fringe is on the benefits side—it actually triggered two memories. One was back in the oil and gas boom days a decade or more ago. I remember one company giving out really fancy bottles of French wine as employee benefits. Like, really nice. And staff started complaining because it was the wrong vintage.

Jordan Peace [00:18:03]:
Oh, come on.

Ben [00:18:04]:
That’s where personalization in benefits helps. And then there was another time in a heavily unionized manufacturing business—100 percent unionized. I was a junior HR guy and did the monthly newsletter. In my first one, I listed birthdays—who was having a birthday and on what day. On Wednesday, it was her birthday. She came into my office utterly furious. And I thought, but I didn’t reveal your age or anything. She said, no—I was planning to take the day off and call in sick, but now everyone knows why. These are the things you learn.

Jordan Peace [00:18:34]:
No good deed goes unpunished.

Ben [00:18:36]:
Exactly. Jordan, for people listening, who would be the ideal customers or clients for Fringe—whether they might be customers themselves or refer others?

Jordan Peace [00:18:47]:
Our typical customers, size-wise, are in the 100 to 1,000 range, but we’ve got some that are 50 and some that are 20,000 and beyond. I don’t think size is the most important thing. I think it’s more about what I call high-culture companies—companies that don’t just pay lip service to caring about people or try to move recruiting and retention metrics, but have leadership that actually cares.

We challenge our customers to go above and beyond what their peers are doing—or at least beyond them strategically. We challenge them to think through: how are you building a culture where people want to stay? Not just delivering benefits or throwing platforms and programs at people, but asking: what’s your plan, your strategy, your vision for the culture of this company?

Leaders who think that way enjoy working with us and enjoy the process of figuring out programs—what comes first, second, and third. You just have to find people who care. We’ve looked at geography, industry, size, and the only consistent thread is leaders who care. Thankfully, those leaders tend to make themselves known—they do podcasts, they share, they post. And as a result, they usually have a good time recruiting and retaining. We help with that.

Ben [00:20:37]:
They’re the people you want to work with. We all know the ones on the other side who maybe don’t care as much. It’s great when you meet leaders who want to make work life better for everyone. To finish up—having run two businesses now, you’ve made mistakes and done things well. Any marketing advice for people trying to choose from a hundred different marketing methods, especially in the HR space?

Jordan Peace [00:21:05]:
I think we have to be honest these days. We live in an attention economy. Everything is vying for our attention all the time. Because of that, a lot of tactics that once worked don’t anymore—people are inundated, sick of it, don’t want more emails in their inbox, and won’t always engage in long, deep, nuanced content.

The one thing that always works—and always will—is being authentic and telling stories. Stories are the heartbeat of how human beings communicate. They always have been, even before written language. Stories passed down orally shaped societies and formed the core narratives of humanity. I don’t think technology or cultural change can engineer that out of us.

I think that’s a permanent fixture in mankind. So I believe being authentic and telling stories is really the way to go. And it’s actually not that hard. You tell the truth. You share what’s happened inside your company or how customers are experiencing it. You admit mistakes, show faults, and be vulnerable—all the personally and emotionally hard stuff. That’s what I see rewarded in marketing, thought leadership, and the influencer space.

It’s really just about who’s real. That’s what I try to do. I don’t even know if you’d call it a strategy—it’s more a way I’ve chosen to be. I’m not going to filter myself. I’m not going to be a different person on camera or in front of someone else. And I think that’s rewarded.

Ben [00:22:59]:
That’s excellent. It’s rewarded, but it’s also easier. It’s more enjoyable too, right?

Jordan Peace [00:23:02]:
Yeah, it is—unless you’re trying to hide things. You know what I mean? If you’ve built something you’re proud of, you’re working with integrity and high character, and you’ve got nothing to hide, it’s very easy.

Ben [00:23:15]:
I think people want that. They see it. They feel it.

Jordan Peace [00:23:20]:
They do.

Ben [00:23:20]:
Jordan, you’ve shared so many great stories and insights. I really appreciate it. If people want to learn more about Fringe, what should they do next?

Jordan Peace [00:23:28]:
I’d say jump on LinkedIn and give me a follow. I post more than just Fringe content—it’s broader, more about people and the future of work. It’s not all product-heavy. So give me a follow, and if you’re interested, shoot me a DM and we’ll chat.

Ben [00:23:49]:
Excellent.

Jordan Peace [00:23:49]:
Yeah.

Ben [00:23:50]:
If you’re listening on the go, check the show notes. We’ll have Jordan’s LinkedIn there and also Fringe.us. Jordan, thank you very much—and I’ll keep you posted on how the Richmond Tigers are going in the AFL.

Jordan Peace [00:24:02]:
Thanks for that, Ben. I really enjoyed being here.

Topics covered: how to find consulting clients, how to win corporate contracts, HR consultants, consulting business growth, employee lifestyle benefits, stand out as a consultant

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