better employee benefits

How to Give Your Employees Better Benefits While Lowering Costs

Today we are interviewing Josh Miller at Betterfit Benefits. We’ve known Josh for a couple of years now and we think he offers one of the most remarkable services for small businesses. He figures out how to give companies better employee benefits and save them money on their annual benefit costs. More importantly, what he’s really doing is improving employee retention and looking out for thousands of workers across the United States.

I have worked at so many companies where benefits were an afterthought. This is an important topic and if you own a small business, listen up!

– Sean Work

Tell us briefly about what you do and what BetterFit Benefits does for businesses

JM: I’m a benefits analyst here at BetterFit Benefits and we are a boutique benefit firm out of Newport Beach, California. We work primarily with small businesses in the state of California with anywhere between 5 – 250 employees. Really what we specialize in is three things:

  1. Savings – cost savings on your premium
  2. Service – servicing for your company and your employees
  3. Education

Those are the three things that we really hit on, and again, we look to build long-term relationships with our clients where we are able to be more effective in servicing over time.

It’s really important that you take a look at everything having to do with your employee benefits on a yearly basis. Because a lot of the time, people will come to us and they’ll say, “Hey, I’ve got the best benefits possible, and I’m paying the best rate possible”, and they have us take a look at it, and we find out that’s not the case (98 times out of 100 it’s not the case).

What’s the easiest thing a business owner can do to help their team members?

JM: From a business owner’s perspective – is just to ask their employees questions:

  • What are you interested in?
  • What do you want as an employee?

Because ultimately, you don’t know what you don’t know. You may have someone on staff that wants dental or vision insurance, and you may not offer it, and it’s very easy to make that change. My goal is, typically, I’m going to meet with the owner and the HR of the company and structure benefit packages that are going to be most effective for them and their employees, but the ultimate goal with benefits is recruitment and retention.

We try to build a package that incorporates everything: medical, dental, vision, life insurance (the main four), because ultimately, that’s what’s going to set you out as an industry leader in terms of your benefits. Now, it’s not to say that you have to offer all of those but there’s ways that we can get creative on doing that.

For example, when I’m meeting with owners, one of the main things that we do is we ask them, “What’s your budget? What are you looking to spend on a monthly basis for your benefits?” And a lot of the time, people don’t have an answer to that question, and that’s an issue for a couple reasons, the main one being, you’re flying blind if you don’t know. It’s like if you went to visit open houses and you didn’t have a budget in mind for what you’re looking to spend on a house for you and your family. How could you possibly know what your budget is going to look like, and how your dollars are going to line up for the month?

Having a budget is one of the most important things that you could start with. Once we have a budget, we can back into everything, in terms of contributions, in terms of benefits being offered, what have you.

What’s BetterFit Benefits greatest success story?

JM: A couple of things. It really just depends on how you define success. If you’re going simply based on a number standpoint, we actually worked with a three location engineering firm out of California. They have a couple locations in Northern and Southern California. And prior to us, they were paying, I think it was roughly about $62,000 a month for their medical premium alone. After meeting with us, we ended up cutting their bill by $188,000 per year with the same level of benefits which they had prior.

I always tell people that savings is not just a one time thing. You have to pay for benefits on an annual basis. Had they met me five years ago, I could have put just south of a million dollars back in their pocket for their company. But we can’t turn back time. The good news is going forward, for the life of the company, they’ll never have to worry about that again.

Is there ever a case where you’re auditing someone’s health benefits plan and you notice that they could have dental or vision the entire time?

JM: For things that people don’t really fully understand like, ‘Hey, I don’t know if I’m eligible for this or, I don’t know if I can offer this as a company”. Our goal is to create a business model that allows you guys to have those “big company benefits” even from a small business.

We have companies that have two employees, that have medical, dental, vision, life insurance, short term, long term disability, you name it. And there’s a lot of ways that we can get creative structuring packages like that. But one of the biggest misconceptions I come across – small business owners coming to me and saying, “Hey, we’re not big enough to offer these things, or, we’re not going to get approved to offer these things”. And that’s not true.

There are multiple carriers out there that we can write up to two employees. There’s also different ways that we can structure it. Some people like, “Hey, I don’t want to pay for this as a company, but I want to offer it to my employees”. Well, one really cool thing that you can do is called voluntary benefits. You can offer dental, you can offer vision on a voluntary basis, meaning, if employees want it, great, they can, pay the premium through their payroll deductions. If they don’t, they don’t have to, right?

But that way, the company can still say they offer the benefits, but they’re not necessarily coming out of pocket to do it, but they’re still giving their employees access to those plans and rates, which are going to be stronger than what they can get on the individual market if they went out and shopped it themselves.

What type of businesses can benefit from benefit optimization?

SW: What size are we talking about? I think you already covered this, but it can be as little as two employees?

JM: Yes, as little as two. And again, you don’t have to be a big company to have a really solid benefits package. I would say our sweet spot, like I mentioned earlier, is about five to 250 employees. I love working with small businesses because for small businesses, every dollar really matters that much more. And when you save money on your benefits, everything goes back to the bottom line. Typically what we’ll see is it’s a combination of contribution structure for the employer. Sometimes they’re doing a 50/50 split – meaning that savings, part of that’s going to go back to the employer, Part of that’s going to go back to the employee.

Let’s say an employee, spends – let’s call it 1000 bucks per year on just their medical insurance alone. If their portions are 50% of that, well, that’s 500 bucks a year that they get back in their pocket that they can use for a variety of things: groceries, child care, investing, what have you.

There’s so many different ways that they can use that money, and our goal is simply just to make sure that we put as much money back in the pocket of the employer and the employee as possible, while increasing their benefits or keeping the same level of benefits for them. Because what I always say is anyone can reduce your benefits to save you money. There’s nothing creative about that.

Our goal is always to add more right to provide value where you didn’t have it otherwise, right? So, whether that be a stronger medical plan for less expensive or an upgraded life benefit that you didn’t have before, or dental and vision insurance comparatively to what you were paying prior. Again, the goal is always to add, not to take away.

SW: I think if a company can show they’re actually increasing the value of the benefits every year, if possible – that sends a really strong signal and message to the employees that they know they’re cared for and it’s a good reason to stay.

JM: One of the biggest things that I see small businesses doing wrong is – and just businesses in general, is a lack of education for their employees.

You may have a very robust, great benefits package that you offer as a company, but it doesn’t do you any good if your employees don’t understand the benefits and if they don’t know what’s being offered to them. You may have a solid medical plan, but what happens if that employee just enrolls blindly and they don’t know what happens if they end up in the emergency room or the hospital? How much am I gonna pay out of pocket? What happens if I have a pregnancy? Right? So again, a big piece of what we’d use the education.

We sit down with the employees, we coach them through the plans and options so they understand the benefits, they understand the cost, they understand the doctor networks, and they now feel comfortable with their benefits to the point where, “Hey, I know if I end up in the emergency room, I’m going to pay X amount. This is my deductible. This is my out of pocket limit for the year”. And they can start to speak the language versus just seeing the jargon of health insurance, which most people see. Most of the time, they look at them and they get stressed out, and they just throw the packet away.

The biggest thing that you can do is make sure you have someone that you work with that educates your employees, because the more information you have, the more you know, kind of knowledge that you can put under your tool belt, that will give you relief in terms of not having to worry about pricing or benefits for you and your family. You know kind of what to expect.

Do you come in and do in-person training or virtual training?

JM: We can do both. We’ll come out, we’ll bring lunch, we’ll sit down with the employees. We can do it one-on-one. We can do groups. Again, we really try to structure it based on the company, whatever they prefer the most. Because at the end of the day, what I always tell people is, I will never know your company as well as you do. So for some people, in person is really effective. For some people, virtual is really effective.

The cool thing with the virtual is, if we did virtual, what we can do is we can actually record the session. That way you have that file on file for any new hires that come up throughout the year. Let’s say you bring someone in mid-year and they ask, “Hey, what are the benefits?” (and normally they’re out of luck because they weren’t at open enrollment). But if they have that open enrollment seminar recorded, they can reference that throughout the year. So again, you don’t have to basically be on the team at the time of open enrollment to understand your benefits. You get that access throughout the entire year for every employee that you bring on.

What’s your offer to whoever sees this video?

JM: My offer for whoever sees this video is just to set up a call with myself and I will do a benefits audit of your current benefits package. Because what I always tell people is, there’s no harm in taking a look at it. View it as a second look. Most of the people I meet with, there’s always something that we can do, whether that be better service, better education, rates, better benefits.

We can review your company’s benefits, we can review your setup, and again, I’ll audit it and see how much money you’re leaving on the table. And then again, work with you to implement those changes to, you know, get money back in the pocket of you and the employees.

What geographical service area do you service?

JM: We mostly focus on California based businesses, because again, I like to have a personal relationship with my clients. I can travel out to meet them face to face and meet the employees. However, we do work in multiple states. Right now, we’re working in about 12 different states across the US.

How much does your service cost?

JM: One thing that a lot of people don’t realize is, whether you have a broker or not, that fee is actually bundled into your monthly premium regardless. So it always benefits you to use a broker. You just want to use one that’s not going to charge you any fees above and beyond what you’re already paying. They’re also going to provide resources and services above and beyond what you’re getting from going to the carrier directly.

The really cool thing about our business is we charge no fees, no percent of savings, no monthly admin fee. We simply get paid on the back end by the insurance carrier, kind of like a regular broker would. I always tell people is we’re more or less a free service for you guys to utilize. Bring us in as your in house insurance consultants, and your bill will not change. If anything, it’s going to save you money.

Contact Josh at Betterfit Benefits for a free audit of your employee benefits!

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