Mount Pleasant Magazine Nov/Dec 2019

39 www.MountPleasantMagazine.com | www.BestOfMP.com | www.ReadMPM.com feature H e’ll tell you he’s a volunteer. And by the way he walks around the lobby and hallways of the new Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital, greeting the nurses, construction workers and other staff members, you wouldn’t think anything different. He stopped and spoke to almost everyone we passed along the tour of this brand new 11-story children’s hospital, complimenting construction workers who were making finishing touches, and always asking if he was in their way. “No, Mr. Jenkins, not at all,” they would reply. If you didn’t already know this down-to-earth former owner and CEO of Benefitfocus, who donated $25 million to the construction of this new hospital, you would have no idea that it was Shawn Jenkins himself walking around and touring the hospital – something that he said he “loves to do every chance he gets.” Retired from Benefitfocus in the spring of 2018, he is now a volunteer/donor for a children’s hospital that is sure to offer the most state-of-the-art, innovative and quality care to youngsters that not only South Carolina, but the entire region and possibly the country, have ever seen. A Mount Pleasant resident and father of five children, ages ranging from 27 to 4-year-old twins, Jenkins empathizes with the parents who will bring their children to this new hospital, for he himself dealt with that when his second child was just a baby. His now 24-year-old daughter, Olivia, was born in 1995 with torticollis, a fairly common, but alarming condition in which the child’s neck tilts to one side. “At the time, I was a young guy trying to pay hospital bills for my child,” he recalled. “I was struggling selling cars and copiers. I would work nights and weekends developing a database for my friend Mason Holland, who was working in retirement planning.” Holland would later become Jenkins’ partner at Benefitfocus. He said that even as a child he always wanted to start his own business. “It was something I always wanted to do and that was why we started Benefitfocus. I wanted to make benefits easier for people to understand and easier for companies to manage. I knew firsthand how confusing it all could be.” But how did Jenkins end up in the Charleston area to begin with? He grew up in Daytona Beach with a BY THERESA STRATFORD Photo by Thomas Runion. The Face Behind the Donation AVery Proud Shawn Jenkins