An extension of your HR team, not a broker you hear from at renewal.
Independent since 2007. A dedicated team of five on every account.
Small group
No employer mandate yet, but every compliance rule underneath it still applies.
Mid-market
The mandate applies and your claims data finally means something.
Large group
Self-funding, annual stop-loss marketing, multi-state populations.
Enterprise
Carve-outs, captives, and a vendor stack that has to talk to itself.
A 30-person employer and a 400-person employer have almost nothing in common at renewal.
The rules, the funding options and the leverage all change as you grow. Every band above is a different conversation — and a different set of numbers.
Most renewal conversations only cover the first of these four.
Cost
What the renewal asks for, and how much of it is enrollment mix rather than rates.
Plan performance
Whether the design you bought is still matched to how your people use it.
Risk
What you are carrying, what the carrier is carrying, and whether that split still suits you.
Administration
The eligibility file, the eventual audit, and everything nobody quotes on.
Benefits specialists. A compliance bench. One number to call.
Renewal & funding strategy
Fully insured, level-funded and self-funded modeled against each other with your own numbers — so the decision is arithmetic, not a pitch.
Compliance
ACA, ERISA, COBRA, HIPAA, PCORI and Form 5500, with CPAs and attorneys available through the firm when a question warrants it.
Benefits administration
Platform selection, open enrollment build, and the eligibility files between payroll, ben-admin and the carrier that quietly cost employers money.
Claims advocacy
Your people call us, not the carrier. Billing mismatches, denied claims and enrollment problems come off your HR desk and onto ours.
Benchmarking
Your plan measured against our survey of nearly 1,000 employers, so “competitive” is a number you can take to your CFO rather than an adjective.
Multi-state & multinational
Licensed in the states our clients hire into — because a carrier strong in your home market is often thin where you just hired, and that is a plan-design question.
Pharmacy benefit consulting
PBM contract and rebate audits, specialty drug management, and formulary strategy — the line item that now moves faster than medical trend.
Voluntary & ancillary benefits
Dental, vision, life and disability rarely get the scrutiny medical gets, which is how they quietly renew for years at rates nobody has tested.
Wellbeing & population health
Programs chosen against your own claims and biometric data, built toward outcomes rather than participation credits.
Alternative funding & stop-loss
Level-funded, self-funded and captive options modeled side by side, with the stop-loss relationship managed every year after.
Executive benefits
Supplemental life and disability, nonqualified deferred compensation, and key person coverage for the people standard group limits do not reach.
Leave & absence management
FMLA, state paid-leave mandates and disability benefits coordinated on one calendar instead of three that quietly conflict.
ICHRA strategy & support
Modeled against your own census, with class design, compliance and employee transition handled end to end.
PEO advisory
An honest comparison of staying direct versus a professional employer organization, on your actual numbers.
Fiduciary & governance services
Health plan sponsors are ERISA fiduciaries too. We help build the process and the record that shows you met the duty.
FSA & HRA administration
Substantiation, runout periods and nondiscrimination testing handled correctly, so a routine plan never becomes an audit risk.
HSA & consumer-driven health plans
Plan design, HSA vendor selection and the employee education that determines whether the savings actually show up.
COBRA administration
Qualifying event notices, election windows and premium collection, handled on the calendar the law actually requires.
Medicare & retiree benefits guidance
Real guidance for employees turning 65 and for employers who offer retiree coverage, not a pamphlet.
Cost transparency & payment integrity
Claims auditing and real network cost and quality data, so avoidable spend gets found instead of renewed.
Total compensation statements
A personalized statement showing employees what their salary plus benefits are actually worth, delivered at open enrollment.
HR consulting & advisory
The handbook that drifted from practice, the classification question, the policy nobody applied twice the same way — the workforce problems that arrive attached to a benefits question.
Compensation strategy & total rewards
Pay priced against the market rather than set by instinct, and costed as a whole package, because that is what an offer is actually accepted or declined on.
Employee benefits concierge
A quick, correct answer at the hour the question occurs — because most of what an employee needs is not a claim, it is an answer before it becomes one.
Lifestyle & specialty spending accounts
Commuter, dependent care and education accounts: not medical, but carrying the same substantiation rules, and failing the same way when those are skipped.
Where we work
Michigan is home. The work is not.
These are the states where we run benefits programs today. A workforce that crosses state lines stays with the same team, the same analyst and the same service desk.
Employers come to us at one of six moments.
Not an industry list. These are the situations that actually send an employer looking for a different benefits consultant — and the ones we handle most.
Offering benefits for the first time
No history, no benchmark, no idea what is normal. We build the first plan and the budget around it, and set the expectations your staff will hold you to for years.
A renewal that came back in double digits
Before you accept it or move the whole plan, someone should be able to tell you which part is your own claims, which part is trend, and which part is still negotiable.
Just crossed fifty employees
The employer mandate applies, 1094-C and 1095-C reporting starts, and funding options that were closed to you are suddenly open. Most service models do not change to match.
Growing across state lines
One carrier, several states, and a network that gets thin the moment you hire outside the home market. We are licensed in the states our clients hire into, and build for that.
An HR team of one
Benefits sit alongside recruiting, payroll, onboarding and everything else. We take ACA reporting, COBRA and eligibility-file problems off that desk entirely.
Changing carriers mid-stream
A move between carriers is where deductibles reset, eligibility files break and employees lose confidence. It is a project, and it needs running as one.
You don’t call a broker. You call your dedicated team of five.
Five people assigned to your account, drawn from a team of benefits professionals. Nobody goes on holiday and takes your renewal with them.
Account executive
Owns the strategy and the carrier relationship.
Account manager
Runs the day-to-day and the renewal calendar.
Plan analyst
Reads the claims through the year, not at renewal.
Customer service
Takes your employees’ calls so your HR team doesn’t.
IT
Owns eligibility files, payroll integration and the ben-admin platform — the seat most brokers don’t have.
What it looks like when it goes right.
“In those 3 years we have not had a rate increase on any of our benefits.”
“We began offering employee benefits with CFH’s help when we had eight employees. In three years we’ve grown to have employees in seven states, and two countries… CFH has guided us through every step and we know whenever we have a question or our employees do, they have answers.”
“They make us feel like we are their only client.”
“We always felt comfortable with our old broker and we had been with them for over ten years without a hiccup, but we never felt special… For many of our employees English is a second language. CFH makes sure that those employees get multi-lingual access and explanations of the programs that we offer, there is no drop off because of language barrier.”
We do not go to market to find out what your plan should cost. We go to confirm it.
Marketing a plan is one instrument. Which instrument to use, and whether to use it at all this year, is the part that decides your cost.
The number is set before the market sets it
Your renewal is taken apart before anyone is asked to quote: how much is trend, how much is your own claims experience, how much is simply who joined and who left. Measured against filed rates where they exist and against your own history where they do not. That number is what every proposal then gets held to.
Whether to go out is part of the advice
Going to market every year is not automatically in your interest. A plan with credible experience and a carrier pricing it fairly is sometimes better renegotiated than moved, and disruption has a cost that never appears on a rate sheet. Telling you which year is which is the job.
Comparable, not merely collected
When we do go out, every proposal is restated against the same enrolled count and the same benefit volumes. A carrier can beat your current plan on every per-unit rate and still cost more, because it priced on its own estimate of your payroll and lives. We have seen exactly that, and it is invisible until the volumes are normalized.
You get an answer, not a comparison to interpret
Which option to take, what it costs to take it, and what you give up if you do. Plan design, administration and disruption weighed against price, because the cheapest quote and the right decision are frequently not the same quote.
The questions employers ask us most, answered in full.
Written for the person who has to present the decision internally, not for a search engine.
Self-funded or fully insured?
What actually changes when you take on the claims risk — cash flow, stop-loss, and the point at which the arithmetic starts to favor one over the other.
The ERISA compliance checklist
Plan documents, summary plan descriptions, Form 5500 and the notices with deadlines attached. What is required, who it applies to, and when.
What benchmarking actually tells you
Comparing your plan to employers your size is only useful if you know which comparisons mean something. These are the ones that do.
Reference-based pricing, without the sales pitch
What it is, what the published research actually shows, and an honest read on when it fits a group and when it does not.
Send us your renewal.
We’ll tell you whether it looks competitive, where we see opportunity, and the five questions we’d put to your carrier. No cost, and no obligation to move anything.
The renewal letter
Your current plan summary
Contribution split by tier
Enrolled counts by tier
Four documents — two more if your group is 50 or more. Nothing else; every extra one is a reason to postpone.
An independent employee benefits consulting firm. We look at the entire benefits program — cost, plan performance, risk and administration.
Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304
248.370.8853
Colorado Springs, CO 80921
719.425.2649
Houston, TX 77084
281.404.5670