Employee benefits, built around the people who stay.
Group health, dental, vision, life, and disability, held by one agent in Fargo who also reads your commercial side.
A year-round process, not a once-a-year event.
Most employers meet their benefits plan once, in a hurry, in the fall. The work that decides what it costs and whether anyone understands it happens the other eleven months.
Before the renewal
Read the plan against the group
Current plan design, contribution structure, and what changed in your workforce this year, reviewed while there is still time to act on it.
During enrollment
Walk the team through it
Options explained in plain language, questions answered, elections collected.
The rest of the year
Stay reachable
New hires, life events, claims questions, and filing deadlines land with one point of contact instead of a service queue.
What the package is made of.
Eight lines, reviewed as one program rather than eight separate purchases.
The plan itself
The center of the package. Plan design, contribution structure, and a renewal that gets read rather than rubber-stamped.
The two benefits employees use every year, added where they fit the rest of the package instead of by default.
What protects the paycheck
Employer-paid and voluntary life, including AD&D, sized to the group and explained so employees know what they hold.
Short-term and long-term income protection, coordinated with workers' compensation so the two do not leave a gap between them.
Critical illness, accident, and hospital benefits paid to the employee, aimed at the out-of-pocket costs a health plan leaves behind.
Running it through the year
Plan selection, employee communication, and elections, run as a scheduled process instead of a scramble in November.
What the law asks of your business, what it does not, and the reporting that follows. Requirements read once, correctly.
The whole package reviewed as one thing: what it costs you, what it does for retention, and what it should look like next year.
Find a specific benefit.
Every benefits coverage on this site, searchable by name or by what it does.
Benefits do not sit apart from the rest of it.
A benefits package is usually bought on its own, from someone who has never seen the commercial policy or the household one. That is how a group plan ends up doing work another policy already does, and how the space between them stops being anyone's job.
Holding all three pillars means the questions get asked once. Where workers' compensation stops and disability begins. What happens to a group life certificate when someone leaves. Whether the owner's own family is covered twice or not quite once.
And who this is not for: an employer who wants the cheapest plan placed and never looked at again. That is a reasonable way to buy benefits. It is simply not what this is.
Where the lines cross
Workers' compensation and disability
One answers for injury on the job, the other for everything else. The line between them is where an employee falls through.
Group life and personal life
A certificate tied to employment ends with the job. Whether that matters depends on what the household already owns.
The owner and the group
Owners sit on the group plan and on their own personal policies at the same time. Somebody should be reading both.
“Employee benefits are not just a cost, they are one of the most effective retention tools a small business owner in ND or MN has.”
Benefits questions from ND and MN employers.
A small group plan can start with one enrolled employee. What carriers set on top of that is a participation requirement, meaning a share of the eligible employees has to enroll before the group is issued. That share is set by the carrier and by state rules, so the honest answer for your group comes out of a look at your census, not out of a rule of thumb.
The ACA employer mandate applies to employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees. Below that line, offering coverage is a choice, and plenty of employers make it anyway, because benefits are how they keep the people they already have. State rules can add requirements of their own, so confirm North Dakota or Minnesota specifics before you decide.
The per-employee number is set by the plan design you choose, the carrier, your group demographics, and how much of the premium you cover as the employer. Contribution structure moves that number as much as plan design does. Any figure quoted before someone has read your census is a guess, so the starting point here is a review of your actual group.
Yes, within limits. You can offer different plans to different classes of employees, full-time against part-time, salaried against hourly, as long as the classes are defined consistently and applied without discriminating. Eligibility rules are worth writing down carefully once, because an inconsistent rule is the kind of thing nobody notices until a claim or an audit finds it.
A benefits package should be built around the people you are trying to keep, not around whatever is easiest to place. Ask who reads the renewal before rates lock, who explains the plan to your employees, and who answers the phone in March when a claim goes sideways. The answers tell you more than any title on a business card.
Start 60 to 90 days before your plan anniversary, or before the November 1 window if that is the one you run on. That leaves room to review the renewal, prepare what your employees actually need to read, and settle compliance questions while there is still time to act on the answers.
Before you compare plans, find out how yours are arranged.
Most coverage problems are not inside one policy. They sit in the space between policies nobody reads together. Eight questions, two minutes.
Build the package around the people.
Employee benefits for ND and MN employers, at whatever size the team is now. Based in Fargo, ND.