Discover Better Benefits with a Boutique Employee Benefits Broker

For scaling businesses, it’s essential to have tailored benefits plans that maximize the impact of their benefits investments while minimizing their costs. While larger brokers might work well for enterprise accounts with thousands or tens of thousands of employees, they likely won’t offer the same experience or level of service to small, mid-sized, startups, and growth-stage companies.

Small and mid-sized businesses have a greater need for ongoing support from their broker. Your business is continually changing as you grow, and your needs change too. A boutique broker can help you update your benefits strategy to meet the demands of your scaling business – providing consistent and personalized support through benefits implementation, administration, and maintenance.

Priority Treatment, Not Just Another Account

If you’re a large enterprise company, you might get some personalized attention from a large broker, but growing companies frequently receive the bare minimum. To be fair, not all of this is intentional on the part of the broker. Large, established companies simply operate differently than growing businesses. It’s just a consequence of their size. As such, big-box or global brokers must focus their time and attention on their largest accounts. This is why it’s crucial to find a broker whose size and business model matches your own needs.

Boutique brokers understand the demands of running a growing business and can better identify and meet your unique needs. Like all growing businesses that are trying to disrupt their industry, they tend to offer more innovative solutions and personalized attention to their clients. While large brokerages succeed by acquiring as many accounts as possible, boutique brokers thrive by building long-term, sustainable partnerships with their clients.

The Best Possible Team and Resources

Big brokers tend to put their best people on the big accounts that brought them to where they are. As a result, you end up with a “B-team” that is either filled with junior staff or is responsible for so many accounts that they can’t provide the best resources or hands-on attention to your business.

Because boutique brokers know that every account is vital to their success, they give each client direct access to their best teams and resources. You will often have direct access to industry leaders and key decision makers who can offer unique insights into your benefits and HR challenges and help you develop a proactive and intentional benefits strategy. Boutique brokers serve as benefits advisors who are deeply involved with your business’ success.

Hands-On Employee Education

So many brokers, especially big brokers, are content to “sell” companies a benefits package and then leave them to manage rollout and implementation. That means that their clients miss out on the expertise that brokers can provide. The truth is, benefits can be extremely complicated.

Boutique brokers not only provide you with easy-to-understand educational materials for your employees, but they also work directly with your team to guide them through the benefits enrollment process. Many small brokers will teach your HR team and managers the ins-and-outs of the benefits package and available plans so that they can support the rest of your staff. This more involved approach means that your benefits strategy will be able to more effectively achieve its goals and maximize the impact that your benefits have on talent acquisition and employee retention. 

Proactive Cost Control

Boutique brokers understand the pressure that their clients are under to proactively manage costs. They know that growing businesses need to create financial stability in order to continue to scale. So, while most brokers offer some level of savings, smaller brokers take a much more proactive approach to cost control.

By identifying demonstrated employee needs and considering your benefits goals, boutique brokers can reduce costs by reducing or eliminating benefits spend that does not meet those needs or goals. Because they work so much more closely with you throughout the benefits process, smaller brokers can also help identify and remedy your specific pain points. So, if you are having trouble controlling your costs in specific areas, your boutique broker will be able to craft innovative solutions to better control those expenses.

Custom Solutions Tailored to Your Business

Smaller brokers can be more flexible with the design of your benefits package. The quantity-based business model of large brokers means that they frequently offer their clients cookie-cutter packages. Unfortunately, this one-size-fits-all approach often cannot meet all of the specific pain points of a growing business.

Boutique brokers understand that your needs are unique and that your benefits solutions need to be, too. So they work closely with their clients to craft tailored packages and benefits strategies. The first step that most small brokers will take is to conduct health risk assessments and other employee surveys to determine what benefits matter the most for your team members. They then use that information to guide the benefits strategy that they develop with your leadership and HR team.

This personalized approach doesn’t stop with the initial plan design, either. Small brokers will monitor the performance of your benefits package as well as the changing needs of both your business and its employees, and modify it to support your long-term growth and success.

Dedicated Support Staff Who Know Your Business

Just as smaller brokers are more proactive in reviewing and updating your benefits package, they also provide stronger ongoing support of your benefits administration. Most boutique brokers will assign dedicated account managers and resources to provide continuous support for your benefits needs – offering a genuine relationship that fosters sustainable growth and innovative solutions.

These representatives aren’t just there for you when you ask them. They consistently think about what they can do to better support your goals and help you identify (and solve) issues before you even pick up the phone.

Discover a Boutique Benefits Broker that Does More

At Advantage Benefit Solutions we understand that controlling healthcare costs is a priority for growing businesses. This is why our benefits packages are strategically designed to offer your employees more value and more flexibility – all at the lowest possible cost to your business.