Six things, done properly, for one kind of client.
We place group health, dental, vision, life and disability for employers. Everything below is what we do with them — cost, plan performance, risk and administration.
The renewal is decided months before the letter arrives.
Reading the plan through the year
Your plan analyst looks at claims as they develop, not in month eleven. A large claimant that surfaces in month four is a problem you can still plan around. The same claimant found at renewal is a number you absorb.
Modeling the funding decision
Fully insured, level-funded and self-funded with stop-loss, priced against your own experience rather than a brochure. The output is arithmetic you can take to a CFO, not a recommendation you have to trust.
Marketing the plan properly
A real market check means going to carriers early enough that they compete for the business. Late submissions get lazy quotes, and lazy quotes make the incumbent look reasonable.
Two- and three-year planning
Plan changes staged over time land better with staff than a single painful year. We build the path rather than reacting to each renewal in isolation.
Self-funding is a decision made once and negotiated every year after.
Level-funded, self-funded and captive arrangements each move risk in a different direction. We model the real numbers before you commit, and manage the stop-loss relationship every year after, not just at the transition.
Funding model analysis
We run fully-insured, level-funded and self-funded numbers side by side against your actual claims history, not a generic industry ratio.
Datum — how we run an account
The five stages every CFH account runs through, every year, and why we reprice on a held census rather than quoting you a change in total premium.
Renewal & funding strategy
An increase is never one number. We take it apart into trend, your own claims and plan change, model the funding alternatives against your census, and work the renewal calendar backwards from the date it has to be signed.
Stop-loss negotiation
We review attachment points, contract-versus-paid basis and lasering language before you sign, and push back on renewal terms that quietly shift risk back to you.
Captive evaluation
For groups where it fits, we evaluate group captive participation as a way to share risk without giving up the savings of self-funding.
Reference-based pricing
What it is, what the published results actually show, and an honest read on whether it fits your group. We advise on it case by case rather than selling it.
Pharmacy is the line item nobody negotiates until it is too late.
Rx trend now outpaces medical trend at almost every group we see, and most PBM contracts are written to make that hard to catch. We read the contract, not just the invoice.
Contract & rebate audits
We review PBM agreements for pass-through pricing, rebate guarantees and the clauses that quietly protect the PBM instead of you.
Specialty drug management
A handful of high-cost specialty claims can move a renewal more than plan design does. We track them and manage the carve-out conversation.
Formulary strategy
We help you decide when a narrower formulary or a carve-out vendor actually saves money, instead of assuming bundled is simpler.
Most claims never get checked. That is where the waste hides.
Medical and pharmacy claims are paid on trust more often than most employers realize. Auditing them, and pushing for real network cost and quality data instead of a marketing brochure, is where a meaningful share of avoidable spend actually gets found.
Claims auditing
We review paid claims for billing errors, duplicate payments and contract-rate mismatches, not just the aggregate loss ratio.
Network cost & quality data
We push carriers and vendors for real cost and quality data by provider, instead of accepting a network’s reputation as the whole story.
Vendor accountability
When an audit finds a pattern, we hold the vendor accountable for it — not just note it for next year’s renewal.
Nobody gets praised for filing on time.
Everyone remembers the year it was late. We keep the calendar so it stays administration rather than a fire drill.
ACA reporting
Employer mandate tracking, 1094-C and 1095-C, and the measurement periods underneath them. This is the one that arrives with penalties attached.
ERISA
Plan documents, summary plan descriptions, Form 5500 and the notice requirements that go with them. Most employers discover a gap here during an audit rather than before one.
COBRA and eligibility
Notices, timelines and the eligibility files that quietly disagree with your payroll system until somebody’s claim is denied.
HIPAA compliance
Privacy and security rules, business associate agreements, and the paper trail that has to exist before a breach, not after one.
Non-discrimination testing
Section 125 and self-funded plan testing that decides whether an executive’s benefit is still tax-favored or has quietly become taxable income.
Dependent eligibility verification
Confirming the spouses and children on your plan are still eligible to be there — the audit most employers skip until a carrier runs it for them.
Clients also reach CPAs and ERISA attorneys through the firm when a question needs more than a broker.
COBRA notices have specific deadlines. Missing one is not a technicality.
COBRA compliance is mostly about paperwork done on time — qualifying event notices, election windows, premium collection — and the penalties for getting it wrong land on the employer, not the administrator who missed the deadline.
Notice & election administration
We issue qualifying event notices, track election windows, and manage the paperwork on the calendar it actually requires.
Premium billing & collection
COBRA premium collection is handled so a lapsed payment does not turn into a coverage dispute months later, and we run direct billing for retirees and other continuants outside COBRA the same way.
State mini-COBRA coordination
Some states extend COBRA-style continuation rights beyond federal law, especially for smaller groups. We track which of yours do.
Sponsoring a health plan makes you a fiduciary, whether or not anyone told you that.
ERISA imposes real fiduciary duties on health plan sponsors, not just retirement plan sponsors — and most employers have never had that explained to them. We help you understand the obligation and build a record that shows you met it.
Fiduciary process review
We review how plan decisions get made and documented, and help build a process that would hold up under a Department of Labor inquiry.
Vendor & contract oversight
Fiduciary duty extends to overseeing the vendors you hire. We help evaluate whether fees and services are reasonable, and document that review.
CPA & attorney coordination
For questions that cross into legal or tax territory, we bring in the CPAs and attorneys available through the firm rather than guessing.
The network gets thin the moment you hire outside your home market.
A carrier that is strong in your home market is often thin where you just hired — and a plan that wins on a spreadsheet is the wrong plan if your people cannot reach a doctor on it. We are licensed in the states our clients hire into, with offices in Bloomfield Hills, Colorado Springs and Houston, so the question we answer at renewal is where your employees actually live and work rather than which state line they crossed.
Multi-state populations
One plan, several states, and a network that does not cover your newest hires. It is a solvable problem, but only if someone is looking.
State-level requirements
Mandates and continuation rules differ by state and do not follow your headquarters.
Employees abroad
Expatriate and local-national coverage for employers whose people are not all in the United States.
A defined contribution can replace a group plan — if it is set up correctly.
An Individual Coverage HRA lets an employer fund individual marketplace coverage instead of a group plan. It fits some employers well and badly hurts others, and the difference is almost entirely in how it is modeled and administered.
Fit analysis
We model ICHRA against your current group plan with your own census, so the decision is based on your workforce, not a national average.
Class design & compliance
ICHRA rules require structuring employee classes correctly and meeting notice requirements — we handle both.
Employee transition support
Employees moving from a group plan to individual marketplace coverage need real guidance, not a one-time email. We provide it.
The system is only as good as the file it sends the carrier.
Choosing and running the platform
Enrollment systems are sold on the demo and judged on the eligibility file. A member of your team of five works on benefits technology specifically, because this is where plans break in practice.
Open enrollment as a project
Communications, sessions, and the follow-up for the people who did not open the email. Enrollment is the one moment a year when every employee forms an opinion about their benefits.
One card, one portal
Every pre-tax account — FSA, HRA, HSA and the rest — runs through a single benefits card and a single portal, so employees are not juggling five logins and three cards to use benefits they already have.
One home base for your HR team
Compliance documents, claims analytics, benchmarking data and census information kept in one place your HR team and your account team both use — not scattered across email threads and spreadsheet versions.
A flexible spending account only saves money if the paperwork behind it actually works.
Flexible spending and health reimbursement arrangements are simple in concept and easy to administer badly — missed substantiation deadlines and confusing runout periods are where most employee complaints start.
Plan setup & administration
We set up and administer FSA and HRA plans so substantiation, runout periods and forfeiture rules are handled correctly from day one, including Section 105 HRA arrangements for small-business and farm ownership structures.
Compliance monitoring
Nondiscrimination testing and IRS substantiation rules are easy to get wrong. We track both so a routine plan does not become an audit risk.
Employee support
Employees calling about a denied reimbursement reach someone who can actually explain the rule, not a ticket queue.
A high-deductible plan without HSA education is just a higher deductible.
Moving to a consumer-driven health plan can lower premium cost meaningfully, but only if employees understand how to use the HSA that comes with it. Most of the savings gets left on the table in the education gap.
CDHP plan design
We model high-deductible plan designs against your current plan so the tradeoff between premium and out-of-pocket cost is a real number, not a guess.
HSA vendor selection
We evaluate HSA custodians on fees and investment options, not just whichever one the medical carrier bundles in.
Employee education
The savings in a CDHP come from employees actually using the HSA correctly. We build the education program that makes that happen.
When an employee’s claim is denied, someone has to make the call.
That is the part of this job employees actually see. Your account manager takes the carrier call so your HR team is not translating between a distressed employee and a claims department.
Denied claims and appeals
We take the file, find out what actually happened, and pursue it. Many denials are coding or eligibility, not coverage.
Billing disputes
Carrier invoices disagree with enrollment more often than anyone expects. We reconcile rather than forward.
A chatbot at 2am
Employees ask benefits questions at inconvenient hours. Ours answers around the clock, and escalates to a person when it should.
Claims & stop-loss reporting
Claims, pharmacy and stop-loss data pulled into one branded report instead of three separate carrier logins, with the high-cost outliers flagged before the renewal conversation instead of during it.
Employees do not read benefit guides. They ask questions.
Most of what employees need is not a claims dispute — it is a quick, correct answer about what is covered, before a small question turns into a bigger problem. That is different from claims advocacy, and it has to be available when employees actually have the question, not just during open enrollment.
Day-to-day coverage questions
Employees get a straight answer about what is covered before a question becomes a claim, or a claim becomes a dispute.
24/7 access
Support is not limited to business hours — employees can get an answer through our always-on chat access whenever the question comes up.
Enrollment support
Real-time help during open enrollment, when the volume of questions is highest and the deadline is least forgiving.
Not every benefit is medical. The paperwork still has to be right.
Commuter accounts, dependent care, education assistance, financial wellness and giving programs all run on the same pre-tax logic as an FSA — and break the same way when nobody owns the administration.
Commuter & parking
Pre-tax transit and parking accounts set up and administered so the monthly limits and eligible expenses stay correct.
Dependent care & family support
Dependent care FSAs and family or emergency assistance accounts, administered with the same discipline as a medical FSA.
Education, giving & financial wellness
Tuition and education assistance, charitable-giving accounts, and financial wellness programs — specialty accounts that round out a total rewards package without adding headcount to run them.
Professional & business expense accounts
Uniforms and work-required clothing, home-office setup, travel and meals, and professional development — reimbursement accounts administered with receipts and limits tracked, not an expense report nobody reconciles.
The people you most need to keep are covered by the same plan as everyone else.
Standard group coverage caps out well below what a senior leader or key employee actually needs, especially on life and disability. Executive benefits close that gap without restructuring the entire plan.
Supplemental life & disability
Coverage layered on top of the base plan for executives and other key employees whose income replacement needs exceed standard group limits.
Nonqualified deferred compensation
Structuring plans that let key employees defer income beyond qualified plan limits, coordinated with your CPA and legal counsel.
Key person & buy-sell funding
Insurance structured around a specific business need — protecting against the loss of a key employee or funding a buy-sell agreement between owners.
FMLA, state leave and short-term disability rarely run on the same calendar.
An employee out on leave can be touching three or four different clocks at once — federal FMLA, a state paid-leave law, short-term disability, and workers’ comp — and getting the coordination wrong creates real liability.
Leave policy design
Building a leave policy that actually coordinates FMLA, state-mandated leave and disability benefits, instead of three separate policies that quietly conflict.
Multi-state leave compliance
Tracking which of your states carry their own paid-leave mandates on top of federal law, so HR is not learning about a new obligation from an employee.
Disability plan coordination
Aligning short- and long-term disability plan design with your leave policy so an employee’s income does not have gaps between programs.
Benefits continuation on leave
Medical, dental and vision stay active and the employee’s share of premium is billed and collected while someone is out — the same discipline as retiree or COBRA billing, applied to an active leave instead of a departure.
Most employees have no idea what their benefits are actually worth.
Salary is the number an employee sees. Health coverage, employer HSA contributions, disability, life insurance and everything else in the package rarely gets added up anywhere — so employees systematically underestimate what they are actually paid.
Personalized statements
We build a statement for each employee showing the real dollar value of salary plus every benefit, not just a plan summary.
Open enrollment integration
Delivered alongside open enrollment, so the value of the package is in front of employees at the exact moment they are deciding what to elect.
Retention messaging
For employers competing on total package rather than base salary alone, this is the document that makes the comparison honest.
Benefits are one part of running a workforce. The questions do not stop there.
A policy that needs updating, a termination that needs to be handled correctly, a wage-and-hour question nobody in the building can answer with confidence — these land on the same desk as benefits, and most employers have nowhere reliable to take them.
Employee handbooks & policy
We build and update handbooks so policy keeps pace with changing state and federal employment law, not last decade’s version.
HR compliance audits
Wage-and-hour review, worker classification review and general HR practice audits, done before a regulator or a lawsuit finds the gap.
HR support on demand
A resource to call with the day-to-day HR questions that do not wait for the next renewal cycle.
Compliance updates before they are deadlines
Federal and state employment-law changes tracked and turned into plain-language guidance and ready-to-use policy language sized to your state and headcount, before a deadline turns into a scramble.
HR & payroll systems consulting
We advise on HR information system and payroll system selection and implementation, not just the benefits-enrollment platform, so the technology decision gets made before a vendor contract is signed, not after.
Most companies set pay by instinct, not by data.
Benefits are half of total rewards. The other half — how pay decisions actually get made — is usually undocumented, inconsistent between managers, and disconnected from what the company is already spending on benefits.
Pay philosophy & structure
We help define how pay decisions get made and build salary ranges and structures tied to real market data, not guesswork.
Market pricing & benchmarking
Roles priced against real market data, so offers and raises are grounded in evidence rather than instinct.
Incentive plan design
Bonus and incentive plans structured to support retention, built alongside the benefits investment rather than separate from it.
“Are we competitive?” deserves a better answer than a national average.
Against employers like you
Our benchmarking survey covers nearly a thousand employers. Size, region and industry matter far more than a headline figure, and that is the comparison we build.
The comparisons that mean something
Contribution strategy and out-of-pocket exposure tell you more about whether staff will value the plan than the premium does. Those are the numbers we lead with.
Data-driven population insights
Claims and pharmacy analytics, gaps-in-care tracking and risk prediction, rolled into an executive dashboard so a benchmark number comes with the data behind it.
A plan score for the renewal meeting
Medical and ancillary coverage scored pillar-by-pillar against employers who match on size, industry and region, with the gaps actually driving cost called out before you decide what to change.
The benefits nobody budgets for are often the ones employees remember.
Dental, vision, life, disability and the rest of the voluntary lineup rarely move the renewal number, but they move retention. We treat them as part of the strategy, not an afterthought bolted onto open enrollment.
Core ancillary lines
Dental, vision, basic life and short- and long-term disability, placed and reviewed on the same schedule as medical, not forgotten between renewals.
Voluntary worksite benefits
Accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity and similar coverages, chosen for what your workforce actually values rather than a standard carrier bundle.
Enrollment positioning
We help you decide what to make voluntary versus employer-paid, and how to present it so employees actually understand what they are getting.
Long-term care insurance
A voluntary long-term care option, priced and enrolled alongside the rest of your ancillary lineup for employees who want to plan ahead.
A wellness program nobody uses is not a benefit. It is a line item.
Most wellbeing spend gets measured by whether a vendor was purchased, not by whether claims moved. We look at your population’s actual health data and build toward outcomes, not participation credits.
Population health review
We look at your claims and biometric data, where available, to find out what is actually driving cost before recommending a program.
Program selection
We vet wellbeing and disease-management vendors against your population, not a generic list, and say no to the ones that will not move the needle.
Engagement strategy
A program only works if people use it. We help design the communication and incentive structure that gets it opened, not just purchased.
A PEO changes who your employees work for on paper. Choosing the wrong one changes what they actually get.
A professional employer organization can solve real problems for a growing employer — payroll, HR administration, sometimes lower-cost benefits. It can also lock you into a bundle that is expensive to leave. We help employers evaluate PEOs the way we evaluate any other funding decision.
PEO vs. direct comparison
We model what you would pay and get inside a PEO against staying direct with your own benefits program, on your actual numbers.
PEO benefits review
For employers already in a PEO, we review what the bundled benefits plan actually covers and how it compares to the open market.
Transition planning
Moving into or out of a PEO has real timing and compliance implications. We plan the transition instead of leaving you to figure it out at renewal.
An employee turning 65 needs a decision made correctly, not a pamphlet.
The choice between staying on an employer plan, moving to Medicare, or coordinating both has real financial consequences and strict enrollment deadlines. Most employees are left to figure it out alone.
Medicare coordination guidance
We help employees and HR understand how group coverage interacts with Medicare Parts A, B and D, so nobody misses an enrollment window.
Retiree benefits strategy
For employers who offer retiree coverage, we help design and administer it as its own program, not an afterthought bolted onto active employee benefits.
COBRA-to-Medicare transitions
We help departing employees understand whether COBRA or Medicare is the right next step, and when.
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