My client Gigamon was a small company when we first took them as a client. They were probably under 100 lives, and they were growing fast. They were trying to offer a competitive employee benefit package for their employees. The benefits they had were very complex, and it was hard to educate their employees on how to use them. It was a creative plan, but it just did not work for their environment. They needed a competitive benefits package as well as big help in human resources to assist them.
Gigamon is a group of 100, but they were more than 50, so they were in small markets because they were growing so fast. They needed to offer a competitive benefit and get out of that small group market with age bands. They also needed a benefit that was easy to communicate to their employees. There was one person handling a very fast growing company, and he needed help to make sure he was in compliance and that he felt confident in communicating a very competitive package to people he was interviewing. A competitive package was important. It was important to make sure he was in compliance and that everything was managed appropriately because they were growing from 50 to 100 to 200 and needed to keep up with various compliance requirements based on their size.
We moved this group out of the small business health insurance market and put them into the mid market so they no longer had those age band rates or composite rates. This shift made it much easier for them to come up with the contributions. The strategy was much simpler than what they were doing. The package was competitive and offered more benefits to the employees. They had only been offering one plan, and now they were offering three different plans. We added in disability coverage, short-term disability, long-term disability and a much more enhanced life insurance benefit. We did all those things and kept the rates at a single digit renewal increase.