You are hiring against companies ten times your size.
Engineering, environmental, laboratories, software, consulting, accounting and legal. Your candidates compare plan design line by line against employers with a benefits department, and half your hires may not live in your carrier’s strongest network.
Benefits are a recruiting instrument here, and priced like an afterthought.
What is actually true in professional and technical services
- Benefits are a recruiting instrument here in a way they are not in every industry — candidates read the deductible before they read the job description.
- Remote and multi-state hiring puts employees outside the network your rates were built on.
- Growth changes applicable-large-employer status a year before the obligation lands, because it is measured on the prior calendar year.
- Wages are high enough that account-based plans genuinely work here, which is not true everywhere and is why copying another industry’s design fails.
What CFH does about it
- Benchmarks your design against what your actual competitors for talent are offering, not a national average.
- Tests network adequacy where your people live before the renewal, not after the complaints.
- Flags the applicable-large-employer threshold in the year you cross it rather than the year it bites.
- Models account-based designs on your own numbers, and says so when they do not pay off.
Four sizes, four different problems.
Find your headcount. What changes at that size in this industry, and what we do about it.
One principal’s family can move the rate, and candidates still compare your plan to an employer with a benefits department.
What we do about it: Benchmarks the design against the firms you actually lose candidates to, and prices the market rather than renewing on a phone call.
The first year over fifty brings applicable-large-employer status and 1095-C reporting, and it usually arrives in the same year the firm started hiring outside the state.
What we do about it: Handles the threshold and the multi-state question as one problem, because they arrive together.
Claims are finally credible, and a professional workforce’s spend concentrates in specialty pharmacy and behavioral health rather than injury.
What we do about it: Models funding on your own claims and puts pharmacy under its own terms instead of inside the medical renewal.
Multiple offices and a remote population mean the network map, not the plan design, is what most employees actually experience.
What we do about it: Tests network adequacy office by office and runs the carve-outs as one program on one renewal calendar.
The three things employers in this sector ask us first.
How does our plan compare to the firms we lose candidates to?
Against employers in your discipline and your markets, not a national average — a national average is not who is taking your candidates.
We hired in three states this year — what breaks?
Network adequacy usually breaks first, then the reporting. We check where the new employees actually live before the renewal rather than after the complaints.
Is an HSA plan right for us, or just cheaper for us?
We model it on your own claims and contribution levels. At professional wage levels it often genuinely works, and we say so 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
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