When you’re looking at the best insurance benefits small businesses can offer, the approach varies depending on how long a business has been in existence. Consider a brand new business. The owner is bringing their dream to life. They’ve got employees they want to keep. They also need to attract good employees. So they start thinking about health insurance, dental and vision insurance. How do they get started?
That’s where an insurance consultant like myself can really come in handy. We can help you map out your future benefit offerings.
The Pyramid of Employer-Offered Insurance Benefits
We can look at the benefits an employer offers as a pyramid with health insurance benefits at the top. When you’re hiring, you’ll quite frequently be asked about these benefits. Depending on the carrier and their options, it might be possible to offer more than one choice. Or to possibly add a Health Savings Account option for employees, which gives them more choices.
It would be great if you could also add a dental and a vision plan. The premiums are typically reasonable when offered through group insurance. If the employer can contribute to that benefit, it’s possible to offer dental plans to an employee for $15 or $20 a month, which is perhaps half of what is possible on the individual market.
It’s the same with coverage for vision and life insurance. If you offer an employee a $25,000 life plan that you cover one hundred percent, that is something your employee can give to the beneficiary of their choice. That’s a great security blanket to offer.
After that comes supplemental benefits. Employees don’t have to pay anything for these supplemental plans such as accident plans or cancer care plans. But when they are available, employees like to take advantage of these choices. Who hasn’t been touched by these issues at some point in their lives? It’s great to be able to offer these options.
Important: Work Out the Right Employer Contribution and Timing
When sorting through all the choices, there is also the point of how much the employer wants to contribute. Does the employer want to cover just the employee or also their dependents? It’s important to take all these factors into account upfront so you can develop a plan to add benefits at the right pace and the right time.
You never want to start offering benefit packages too quickly and then have to withdraw them later. You always want to build toward increasing benefits.
Start with medical and then work with an expert to decide what else you can offer and when. That’s a service that we offer many small businesses. We can help business owners offer the right benefits at the right time. If you’re considering benefits for your small business, call us at 314-544-5400.
