Target Industries

This week we are talking about the deep blue ocean of opportunities in target industries. Every employee benefits advisor out there has a strategy. Most of the time, it's a strategy to tackle the major medical market or what many people call the fully insured marketplace.

We found an opportunity in the marketplace that helps out with some of the employer mandates for smaller target industries.

You could have a small group, you could have a large group, you could have some of the self-funded and level-funded and some of the hybrid plans in between. Then, of course, you could have the whole world of ancillary, worksite, and voluntary benefits.

With Evolved Benefits, we found an opportunity out in the marketplace that really helps out with some of the employer mandates that are out there.

You've got some states that enforce the individual mandate, and then on a federal level (which every state is subject to), you've got an Employer Mandate A and an Employer Mandate B. If an employer has 50 or more employees, they're considered an Applicable Large Employer and they're subject to ACA filing and reporting.

Our current presidential administration has given funding to the IRS, and they are hiring thousands of auditors to audit all of these Applicable Large Employers. What I have here is our target industries, and they happen to be the low-hanging fruit that the IRS is looking at to target first because they know that most of these companies are out of compliance. They also know that most companies don't even realize they're out of compliance.

Let's talk about why.

First of all, there are numerous companies: security guard companies, hospitality companies, landscaping, staffing, trucking, assisted living facilities, construction, manufacturing, plumbing, restaurants, grocery stores, home health care, housekeeping, janitorial, agricultural and ranching, and even cannabis companies. Those are just a shortlist of all the types of companies out there that have large populations of part-time, seasonal, and variable hour employees. Since most of them have never offered benefits to a majority of the staff, they don't realize that they're out of compliance.

When the benefits advisors that I talk to analyze their book of business, they see that they have many of these companies on the books. Still, they're used to maybe having 10, 11, or 12 of the core staff on a major medical plan, and the 137 of the others that are part-time or variable hours don't ever get offered anything.

One thing that I think a lot of employee benefits advisers fall short on is helping the company look at their roster and run their entire roster through an FTE calculator - that's a Full-Time Eligible calculator - to find out how many actual FTEs they have and make sure that they're offering at least minimum essential coverage to 95% of the FTE.

Again, there's a whole ocean of opportunity out here that the IRS is looking at. These are the ones that are going to get the penalty letters first. Still, these are the types of companies that even the incumbent broker doesn't realize can cast a net over the entire population of employees and help all these part-time and variable hour employees that work for these companies.

Every single person deserves access to affordable health care. That's why Evolved Benefits was created. We provide ACA-compliant health plans. They are restricted health plans, but they're very robust. Evolved Benefits gives a lot of access to all the acute services that everyone needs and we also have voluntary benefits and worksite benefits to help marry up and supplement and do the best job of keeping the cost down for these employees while giving them what they need in order to keep some financial wind in their sails if they have any major medical issues happen to them and their paychecks get interrupted.

If you'd like to learn more about this deep blue ocean, not just about the ocean itself, and if you'd like to learn how to prospect, I have a fantastic system that I've developed. It works masterfully. You could use this to prospect any potential clients or even your existing clients.