Cole Strandberg: Welcome to another episode of the Collision Vision driven by Auto Body News. As always, I’m your host, Kolstramberg. Today we’re kicking off our brand new series titled Safety First Prioritizing Health in the Workplace. In this first episode we’re diving into a critical aspect of workplace health, employee well being and the role of benefits in collision repair businesses. Now, at the time of this recording, I have just landed after a very early morning flight. So it’s fortunate that we have someone who makes the world of employee benefits legitimately interesting and exciting and relevant to your business. Joining us is Richie Seaberry, Vice president of Business development and Enterprise Portfolio Manager at decisely. Richie is here to talk about how offering comprehensive health benefits like medical, dental and vision coverage and much more can have a tremendous impact on both your employees well being and your business. We’ll explore the connection between employee health, workplace performance, recruiting and retention and why investing in benefits can be a game changer for collision repair businesses just like yours. Enjoy the show. This episode is brought to you by Thrive. Ready to hit the gas on growth. Meet Thrive, the Do it all small business software that can save you over 20 hours a week, attract customers, manage day to day tasks and keep communication simple with one powerful tool made for your auto business. Rev up your revenue today and let Thrive save you time so you can get back to doing what you love. Visit thrive.com that’s T H R Y V to schedule a demo today. Richie Seaberry, thank you for joining us here on the Collision Vision.

Ryan Basseri: Thanks for having me. Really happy to be here.

Cole Strandberg: Looking forward to a fun conversation especially because it’s, it’s kind of full circle. You and I first met back in, I think it was August out at the Car ados owners Summit in beautiful Snowbird Resort in Utah. You spoke IM seed and very much enjoyed you had to say so. Look forward to diving into a fair bit of that here on today’s conversation and happy to have you on the show. I’ll start off kind of diving right in. You work very closely with the collision repair industry. Want to talk at a very high level what you do and talk to me a little Bit also about your relationship with scrs?

Ryan Basseri: Yeah, absolutely. To go just a little bit broader, I work for a company called decisely. Decisely is a national based brokerage firm that handles partnering with association groups and franchise groups around the country. So our first real recognizable client that we really brought on board about five or six years ago was the Amazon Delivery Service Partners. And we’ve been working with them ever since. And we built this model that allows us to service these small to medium sized businesses and allow them to offer an employee benefits package that is more comprehensive, richer and more affordable than what they’re able to do out there on their own. About right around that same time we actually partnered with SCRS to begin exploring similar solutions that we could provide to their members. The whole point of what my company does is we partner. So for instance, scrs, the Society of Collision Repair Specialists, the largest collision repair association in the country. We take their membership which when you look at their membership and you look at the amount of employees that they represent, it’s about 60,000 employees. So you’re looking at that, that’s about a Fortune 500 company. When you’re purchasing employee benefits, particularly health insurance at that scale, it’s a significantly different buying experience and also service experience as well. And so what our organization allows an industry group like SCRS to do is for them to build a custom and exclusive employee benefits solution and they’re able to downstream that to their members which ultimately ends up in the hands of their employees. And the whole goal once again is to allow independent collision centers, you know, small to medium sized businesses, the ability to compete with these large multistate organizations for talent. And really at this point in, at this point in the timeline of, you know, you look at collision Centers, you know, 20 years ago you asked a collision center, hey, what do you, what does your employee, what do your employees want? You know, they probably answer, they want more hours, they want more money and health insurance. 401k PTO There are a lot of things that either weren’t offered because you know, the employees were, it wasn’t really coming up as much or they just weren’t easy to offer. You know, it was complicated. Paper technology really hadn’t come into play. But now fast forward to today and you look at your standard technician or even just your standard potential technician, the person coming out of high school looking at what industry they’re going to go into, they’re looking at things like PTO, employee benefits packages. 401k. How am I able to raise a family and provide for them. And not only are you trying to compete for talent against, you know, MSOs and other independent collision centers, you’re competing for talent from construction, hospitality, restaurant, you know, all those different types of industries that have a similar core makeup of the type of work workers that they’re looking to attract.

Cole Strandberg: Love that you hit the nail on the head. There’s so many different components of this conversation. I think one of the most important is certainly benefits as a recruitment and retention tool. And I want to get in there, I want to dive in there. Before we do, I want to zoom, zoom out a little bit. Talk to me about the role of employee benefits, things like health insurance, things like dental vision, in, in generally supporting the well being of technicians and employees within the organizations. From a human perspective, what is it and why is it needed?

Ryan Basseri: Absolutely. So in this country, the majority of employees are going to obtain their health insurance through their employer. The employer at this day and age has a couple reasons to offer health insurance. Right? So one of those, as you had mentioned, retention and attraction of talent, another one is they actually are mandated to, depending on their size, if they have over 50 employees, they, they’re mandated by the federal government, the ACA guidelines that they have to offer qualified medical plan at a certain price point. But there’s the third reason, which is my most favorite by far, especially because this one is exclude, not exclusive, but very common in the collision industry, especially your independent collision centers. They treat their employees like family. You know, you look at the standard makeup of, you know, an collision center owner, they got maybe, you know, one to three shops and 40 to 50 employees maybe. Right. You know, that’s probably a larger store. But when you look at just the averages across the country, it’s typically what it, what it makes up. You’re looking at anywhere from 20 to 50 employees, couple different locations, and you have employees that have worked with you for 20, 30 years, depending on how long your store has been open. But at the end of the day, it’s a very tight knit group. Everyone typically has access to the owner in one way or the other. And a lot of the times these are family owned and operated businesses. And once again, they treat their employees like that a lot of the time too. And so when you’re looking at this, I want to take care of my employees, you know, it’s such a common quote here. I want to take care of my guys. I want to give my guys the best possible health insurance solution that they can get or the best possible employee benefits package that I can Offer them. And obviously that’s buffered by the, their budget, you know, their overhead. How much can I offer, you know, what can I do? And it’s always they’re looking to be right at that line. I want to do the most amount that I can for my guys and make sure they’re taken care of. And so you think about an employee benefits package. The employee benefits package is everything from medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability coverage to critical illness, accident coverage, hospital indemnity. You know, it’s really the entire gamut of what could happen to me outside of work and how can I be protected and how can my family be protected if, you know, if that does take place. So you think about it from a, you know, I’ll start with, you know, the simpler ones, life insurance and accident insurance and accidental death and dismemberment insurance. You know, all of those things are associated with the worst day of your life. You know, there’s, and if you have a family, probably the worst day of their life too, and in this day in age, it probably costs anywhere from 50 to $100,000 just to have a funeral. I know that’s morbid, but that’s typically, if you really look at the national averages, that’s what it’s going to cost your family to make sure that you have a burial. Well, that’s the most common life insurance policy that employees are, that employers offer is $50,000. And life insurance is one of those things that it’s very affordable and more often than not, a lot of folks don’t offer it because they don’t want to go through the administrative effort to be able to provide it to the employees. I mean, we’re talking for 30 employees, a couple thousand dollars a year, you know, for anywhere from 25 to $50,000. Life insurance policy that they’re able to, you know, offer to their employees and their loved ones and protect them in case of a worst case scenario. And then you think about things like disability, right? In this country, disability, whether it’s short term or long term, and especially short term is state dependent on what you are, on what you’re offering. So like for instance, in California, your short term disability policy that’s offered through the state of California, in other states, you know, Texas, Florida, Georgia, that’s an independent policy that the employer has to choose to offer and want to know what’s tied to disability. Short term disability, maternity leave. So you have an employee spouse or someone who you’re working for, they want to go out and they want to Go on maternity leave. In a lot of parts of the country, that’s tied to the employer offering a short term disability policy. Now, I’m not calling pregnancy a disability, but I’m just saying that’s how it is classified on the insurance side. So, you know, those are two very important big life events that are tied to your employer providing those to you. You know, you can often go purchase these things on your own, but they’re usually double the price where when your employer is offering it to you, it’s a significantly better deal. And then you just get to the basics, right? Medical, dental, vision. You think about, you know, dental insurance or vision insurance. It’s one of those things that it’s so simple that it’s like, why doesn’t everyone do it? And once again, it gets tied back to the, typically the administrative time it takes to do it. And so, you know, I know in your outline, one of the questions that we want to talk about is technology not to get there. But a lot of the reasons we’re able to do what we’re able to do is because of that large, Scott, large size and scale that we have with SCRs, but also the technology that we have available that makes it easy and simple for employees to get enrolled in. And then the medical one, this is by far and away where I pull my soapbox out and I’m really going to drill down into the SCRS employee benefits program and talk about what’s important about what we’re providing.

Cole Strandberg: So, yeah, that’s a big one. That is a huge one.

Ryan Basseri: It’s huge, right? So you think about, you know, broad spectrum health insurance, right? It’s your ability to go see the doctor, it’s your ability to go to the hospital, it’s your ability to get prescription medication filled. It’s your ability to go to urgent care when you know you have to get, your daughter has to get stitches or you know, someone’s got a broken arm, to get X rays, to get blood work. You know, it’s, it’s one of those things that it’s really encompassing the entire holistic approach to your overall ability to seek healthcare and get better. And you think about whenever someone’s using their health insurance, it’s usually not a good, good time. You know, usually you use health insurance out of necessity. Hey, I have something wrong with me and I need to go figure out why and I need to get it taken care of and I need to get better. So that’s really the why behind health insurance. It’s the ability for us to seek care and get better. And since health insurance has been around, you know, it really started kind of in World War II as a way for employers to entice individuals to enroll or just start working at their company. And slowly since then, it’s, it’s progressed. And we’ve seen all these crazy, you know, highs and lows of, you know, what health insurance has been in this country. You know, we had the Affordable Care act with Obamacare. We have had some of the largest spikes in health care premiums in the history of health care in the last two, three years. And what you see now, as I stated earlier, the importance of offering health insurance to your employees has gone from nice to have to have to have. So you have this product that’s going up double digits in price every year, but it’s also going up double digits in desirability of your employees to have. And if you’re an independent collision center owner, you got 15, 20 employees and you don’t offer a health insurance package today, but you’re hearing the feedback that you want to. I mean, you’re basically taking on your number two largest reoccurring operating costs behind payroll right there.

Cole Strandberg: Well, you hit on so many points that we could dive in on. So many we will. I want to talk some stats and some trends. I’m happy we addressed kind of the human component, the taking care of your people. It seems that’s, that’s number one. I also want to hit on some of the business benefits to doing this. It is a essentially in, in a lot of cases, requirement to attract good young talent. We’re not competing against other single store body shops down the street who aren’t doing this. We’re competing against massive companies both within and outside the collision repair industry. Another point as well. I’d love your input on any examples or qualitative or otherwise on how these benefits impact an employee’s performance and job satisfaction and comfortability in the workplace.

Ryan Basseri: Absolutely. And so think about this, right? Whether it is a family member or your own personal employee, they have an issue, whether it’s mental or physical. Right. And they’re dealing with that issue outside of the workplace. You know, outside of the time and even inside the workplace. But really, they get out of, you know, they clock out and they’re going home and they’re having to deal with whatever that issue is. Right. And a lot of the times healthcare is expensive and scary too. It’s an emotional thing. So if you have a son or a daughter or a spouse going through something, whether it’s anything from a mental health care thing that has been untreated or you’re going through some type of difficult pregnancy. I mean, that topic and that, you know, that scenario is not something that the employee can just put up or pick up and put down, you know, when they clock in and clock out. So when they’re showing up to work, if there’s something going on with themselves or a spouse or a family member with their healthcare journey, that is going to be going through their mind. And a lot of the times it’s, well, how do I get this better? How do I get this to a place of where I feel comfortable and confident that they’re going to be taken care of. So think about this. I’m a technician, I show up to work and I have my employer’s healthcare plan, right? So I’m enrolled in my employer’s healthcare plan. And a lot of the times, especially these younger technicians, they’ve never gone through a health care journey, right. You know, most people in between the ages of 25 and 35, that’s when they’re going to have some type of significant health care event. And that could be anything from pregnancy to, you know, getting a scary mole. Right? You know, all these types of things. That’s, that’s when you’re going to start to realize the value of healthcare. Because up until then you have this mantra of I’ll just rub some dirt on it or I’ll ignore it and I’ll be fine. And most of the time, you know, post 18 to 25, you’re absolutely right, you’re going to be just fine.

Cole Strandberg: About the time we realize we are in fact mortal.

Ryan Basseri: Exactly, exactly. And once you have your first experience with healthcare, and I mean, I can tell you right now, as someone who, you know, went through this, I have three young kids, had my first one at 26 and we had our last one about two years ago. You know, I’m a very high consumer and utilizer of healthcare and I do have, you know, sort of the behind the scenes look at things. Healthcare is confusing and expensive in its traditional state. You have your 25, 26 year old technician who, you know, all of a sudden they’re, they’re going through pregnancy, you know, their spouse is pregnant, they’re going to 15 doctors appointments, they’re getting imaging done, they’re getting blood work done, and that doesn’t even account for the actual big day. And you tie this back to that technician that has their employer’s healthcare. So they’re looking at their Healthcare, but they’re also looking at it a lens is this is what my employer has been, is providing me. This is what, how my employer, whether it’s true or not, feels about me, feels the value of the, of the benefits package that I’m being provided. Well, let’s say every time, you know, I’m going to that doctor’s appointment, I’m spending 150 bucks or I’m spending, you know, even $50 is like a copay for a specialist, right? That’s a lot of money as a young technician that’s about to go and have a kid and then you go through the pregnancy, right? And so let’s say, you know, the pregnancy is super expensive. Once again, all my employers offering me this, wow, that was really expensive. I, you know, this doesn’t seem great. And then you have all the aftercare and everything. So you think about it. The one of the, and I said this, I think at the CAR ADAS event was your employee benefits package is a cultural cornerstone that can be used for or against, you know, the, the employee’s court of opinion on how you value that. And the challenge is, you know, you go talk to a lot of independent collision centers, they’re going, hey, I’m doing everything I can. And they are, you know, to their best knowledge, they have to run their business. They don’t have time to go research healthcare and become experts, right? And so that was one of the things when we partnered with STRs that the board, when we actually set this up, the board of strs, one of the things that they communicated was we want to do something better. We want our members who want independent collision centers to be able to offer something better than they’re able to do out there on their own right now. And we want to make it easy and we want to make it, you know, straightforward for them to be able to do this. And that was really how the SCRS employee benefits program was born, was with this mindset of we have all these collision center owners who are paying an arm and a leg for their guys to have health care and their guys are looking at that healthcare that they’re providing as a non benefit as almost causing more issues than helping issues because it’s health care, right? You’re going to hear about all the bad experiences opposed to the good experiences because the good experiences aren’t, you know, the good experiences are okay, but the bad experiences are, are bad. And so with our program, we wanted to make things extremely simple, user friendly and straightforward for the employees to understand and really allow these owners to turn something that’s quite often looked at as a liability and turning it into an asset that they can use.

Cole Strandberg: And I want to dive into your program and kind of some solutions for body shop owners and operators. Before we do that, though, you know, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of establishing the need. The why you want to include some employee benefits. The last thing you want to do with as challenging of a talent environment as it is is to not be able to hire the best and to not be able to keep the best. Because this is something that so many people and so many families need. You have the cultural component, right? Like, really, I think a great job painting the picture. Talk to me about the environment and the trends that we’ve seen specifically in this industry of adoption of programs like these. I would imagine today is a very different day than 10 years ago, and likely five years from now is going to be crazy different as well. What are you seeing out there in terms of utilization of benefits programs within the collision repair industry?

Ryan Basseri: Absolutely. So SCRS did a survey and they saw that around. It’s probably about 15 to 20% of independent collision centers around the country are offering an employee benefits package to their employees. And that number is expected to grow to anywhere from 30 to 35% over the next five years. I would say I’m more bullish on that number going up. You know, I think we’re seeing this accelerated adoption rate of collision centers. Not only collision centers, but you think about, I work with, you know, collision centers. I work in hospitality, I work in moving and storage logistics. And we are seeing this adoption rate start to rise pretty, pretty significantly. And if you look at your average collision center that’s offering an employee benefits package, you typically expect to see about 40% of those employees are enrolled in your employee benefits package. One of the things that you want to focus on when you’re offering the employee benefits package is the retention difference, the retention rate difference between the employees that are enrolled in your benefits package and the employees that are enrolled in their spouse’s benefits package. And when you actually look and we have this data that we looked at ourselves, and when you look at our SCRS employee benefits program, and we’ll talk a little bit more, I think, about what makes us so great in a minute. But when you look at our SCRS employee benefits package that’s exclusively available through SCRS and offered and built for and by the collision industry, that employee is more likely to stay with you double the amount of time than if they’re not enrolled in your benefits package if they’re enrolled in a, in a competing benefits package. And you know, it was really funny. I had a, I was talking to say that.

Cole Strandberg: I don’t mean to get us off track. Would you say that one more time? Because that is a jarring stat to me that I, I want to make sure we don’t gloss over.

Ryan Basseri: Yeah, yeah. The, the employee who’s enrolled in your benefits package is likely to stay with you twice as long than an employee who is not enrolled in your benefits package.

Cole Strandberg: That is crazy.

Ryan Basseri: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so I’ll give you an example, right? I had an employer. So one of the things that our healthcare program does, and we can talk more about this, but I think this is relevant to the topic at hand. One of the things about our healthcare program is mental health. Clinical mental health is a zero dollar copay for the employees. Mental health care is a weekly appointment. So you and a lot of people think like, oh, mental health care, I’m going to see a psychiatrist or I’m going to therapy, you know, those types of things. What a lot of people don’t think about is things like occupational therapy. So occupational therapy is for really everyone. But where I see it most predominantly applied is to children who are on the autism spectrum. And you think about that autism spectrum, it’s pretty big, you know, so you can think about someone, they just, you know, maybe they. And things like this start to come up when the, when the kids are anywhere from 2 to like 5 years old and even beyond, depending on the severity or where they land on the spectrum. But so I had an owner who called me after they had switched to our employee benefits program. And he had an employee of 25 plus years came into his office essentially like sobbing, like saying, I have to leave because I have to go to another company because their benefits package covers this particular type of therapy that my son is going to need. And if I did it with your benefits package, it would cost me all this money. And this was right when we had switched. So this individual wasn’t fully aware of the new benefits that he had access to. He was really thinking of the same old traditional package that his employer had offered. And I think he was even going to have to change industries. He was going to go to a completely different job because this was the only way that he was going to be able to get his son the care that he needed in which is a weekly hour long appointment. And this owner, because I had brought this up when we actually had you know, discussed moving forward with our benefits package was you think about how good this owner felt, but you think about how much better the employee felt when the owner said, hold on, you need to look at the new benefits package and the mental health care benefits that are available to you. And that employee was able to stay with the company and they were able to access the $0 copay, the free mental health care services that our benefits program offers. And mental health care is one of those things that has been completely, I would say, undervalued as a benefit, as a part of a healthcare program in this country from the individuals that are providing it. So when everyone thinks about health insurance, they think your body, right, they think broken limbs, urgent care, emergency room surgeries, medications. What they’re not thinking about is, well, hey, if someone wants to go sign up for, you know, a big thing too in the collision industry, you know, substance abuse counseling, you know, a lot of people don’t have access to be able to get help. And a lot of that is because in most traditional healthcare programs There is a 50 to $100 weekly co pay that you’d be paying to go get help. And that is a huge barrier of entry for a lot of folks. And when you tell them, hey, it’s a zero dollar copay, when you have someone who’s literally has been wanting to do something about maybe a mental issue in their life for a long period of time but just couldn’t afford it, that you’re giving them that ability to do that. And that’s, that’s been a big deal. That’s, that’s been one one of my favorite things that I’ve seen that this program is made available to folks, man.

Cole Strandberg: That’S a great example of a real success story and of the impact of what this kind of stuff does for your employees. I want to put a bow on, on this portion of the discussion and get to some more solutions. Kind of dive into the program with scrs. But just to reiterate, so big companies are required to offer this. If someone’s going to go work for Amazon, they’re getting a pretty competitive benefits package. In all likelihood, if they’re going to go work for one of the large collision repairers, they’re going to get a pretty competitive benefits package. So from my perspective, in order to compete with those organizations for talent, this is something that it behooves collision center owners and organizations to invest in doing. Is that fair to say before we move on?

Ryan Basseri: Absolutely. Yeah. No. If any company that has over 50 full time employees is required by the federal government to offer them a health insurance package.

Cole Strandberg: Man. So with that in mind, let’s go ahead. And I want to put my body shop owner hat on and I’m going to ask you to do the same. If you’re sitting there, you might own a single store, you might own two or three stores, but you’re beneath that 50 employee mark. And I’m listening to you speak and I’m saying, man, this is something that I want to do for my people. I think I need to do it for my people. As we continue to grow, where do I start?

Ryan Basseri: So this, you know, this is a really good stat. I would say 80%. So we have over 80 members that have signed up for our employee benefits program in the last two and a half years that it’s been available. 80 to 90%, and I would almost say it might be higher than that, are less than 50 employees. They’re not required to offer health insurance on because of the Affordable Care Act. They are doing it because they’re seeing that they cannot compete for talent without the minimum benefits package, which I would say is medical, dental and vision. But what we’re seeing and what’s a really cool number that I’ve seen go up is the adoption rate of additional ancillary benefits. So for instance, a really great benefit that has no financial burden on, you know, if I have my body shop owner hat on is offering what’s called voluntary life insurance. So voluntary life insurance is the ability for me as the employee to purchase group rated life insurance that I’m paying for and I’m able to do it without having to go through a bunch of medical underwriting hoops. So I can essentially say, hey, I want to buy $50,000 in additional life insurance for myself, but maybe I’m not the most healthy individual or maybe it’s too expensive for me to do this on my own. When you’re doing it through the group policy, you’re guaranteed that you can purchase up to that amount and you’re going to be able to get it at the most affordable rate. One of the things when you look at a group rated plan, like a voluntary life insurance plan that’s group rated, it’s typically half the price of what an employee would be able to go out there and receive on their own. So you’re seeing this and I’m talking about our SCRS employee benefits program. So when they come to us, they’re usually offering some type of medical plan and then probably about 25 to 30% of them are offering dental and vision. And then about 5 to 10% are doing these additional life insurance, voluntary life insurance, disability, these additional products. And so what we can track is when they come to us and then how they grow their employee benefits portfolio that they’re offering. And we’re double digit increase on all lines. So whether it’s medical, we’re seeing more employees enroll in the medical plan, dental and vision, we’re seeing more employers offer dental and vision and even apply some type of employer funding to that line of coverage. And then finally we’re seeing more employers offering these other additional ancillary lines of coverage, the life insurance, the disability, the critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity. And one of the reasons why I can actually attribute those numbers from going up is because one education, you know it’s just the ability to educate an owner in the value of offering those lines of coverage. Ease of administration. So the ability for one point and click to choose that line of coverage without the employer having to go through all these hoops of giving the employees paperwork, faxing it, you know, taking their, you know we like to call them the Swiss army knife of the office. The, the individual that’s doing payroll, front desk hr, you know, all those types of things taking their time to go fax all this paperwork and put all these spreadsheets together. We make it extremely simple from an administration administration perspective and then finally just cost. We have the most affordable policies that they can offer based off the same same reason behind we’re able to do the medical is just the size and the scale that we represent with the society. Collision pair specialists.

Cole Strandberg: First of all what, what the heck is a fax? Just kidding, just kidding. But I do want to dive into some of the options. So I imagine there are a ton of options that enough to make our body shop owner hat wearing selves head spin. How do you evaluate that? What are some examples of the option and then eventually in this conversation would love to get at a very high level at least start to talk some numbers as well.

Ryan Basseri: Sure. So there, I mean you can look at an employee benefit as any item that’s there to benefit the employees as an individual if you’re looking at it. So there’s two kind of splits. You have your commercial insurance policies like workers compensation liability, those types of things that’s really designed to protect the business where the employee benefits side is really, they’re designed to protect the employees. And so you can think about that in a number of ways. You know they have everything from 401k they have, you know, pet insurance and then you have all the other traditional lines of coverage that I had mentioned. You know, your medical, dental, vision, life, disability and what we call worksite. Worksite products are things like accident, critical illness and hospital indemnity. All of these tools are designed to help the employee deal with these types of events from a financial perspective. So you think about it, you know, life insurance, that’s a financial benefit, medical insurance, it’s really designed to be a financial benefit. If you ever, if you’ve ever tried to go utilize healthcare without insurance, you quickly see that simple things cost thousands of dollars. You look at disability, that’s designed to supplement income while you’re out and disabled, whether it’s a short term or a long term disability. And then you have those worksite products that are mentioned which are once again a financial mechanism designed to make sure employees are receiving some type of financial compensation for an event that’s occurring in their life. You know, hospital indemnity, it’s a long term hospital stay critical illness, those are things like developing ms, getting cancer, you know, those are very serious illnesses and those cost money. And then accident coverage, you have an accident, you break your arm, you break a finger, you tear an acl, you know, these are all accidents that can occur. Once again, that policy is designed to supplement that employee’s income and make sure that they are able to keep themselves afloat. One of the things that makes a health insurance policy a true health insurance policy is what’s called an out of pocket maximum. So an out of pocket maximum is the maximum amount of money that you would expect to pay out of pocket for a plan year. So these are the things that statistically you’re never going to hit your out of pocket maximum. You know, whether it’s 5,000, $10,000. Right. So most of the population is not going to deal with ever having to hit their out of pocket maximum, which is great. You know, it means hey, you rolled the dice and you won. But a significant portion of the population is going to hit their out of pocket maximum and they are going to hit it multiple times, year over year. You know, you think about someone developing, know some type of end stage renal cancer, right? That’s multiple years of living, but still spending millions of dollars from a healthcare perspective on health insurance. Well, without or sorry, on healthcare services and without health insurance, without that out of pocket limit. Out of pocket limit, that’s millions of dollars that you are in charge of paying for where with the health insurance it’s limiting you to that out of pocket maximum. And so when you’re looking at it from an owner’s perspective, what you’re really doing is you’re giving the ability for that employee to go through these types of catastrophic events and come out on the other side without being bankrupt or, or maintaining their best quality of life. Because one of the things if you’ve ever gone through a major medical event, if you’re ever talking to a doctor about, well, hey, what’s the most affordable treatment plan that you can provide me, A doctor’s gonna laugh at you. They’re gonna say you should not. I mean, practically speaking, they understand. But from their perspective, it’s whatever we’re going to do is going to be the best thing that’s going to have the best outcome for you and your quality of life. From a physical perspective, it’s not about what’s going to be the best quality for your bank account because they’re just trying to make you well, they’re not financial advisors trying to make sure that you keep your bank account healthy. So one of the things that you also want to think about is your average American doesn’t have over. Gosh, I know this sounds crazy, but I want to say the stat is about $500 that they could have in disposable income to pay for an unexpected medical procedure. So what most people are doing when they have something like a big surgery or something unexpected come up is they’re putting that on their credit card or even worse, they’re not paying it at all and it’s getting sent to collections and messing with their credit. I mean, a huge portion of the reason why Americans are going bankrupt today is because of healthcare costs and going through something that they can’t afford. So to circle back you as an employer are giving the ability by offering and keep in mind, right, all health insurance plans are not created equal. I mean, there is a hierarchy of good, bad and just plain awful health insurance. And a lot of that has to do with the expected costs that an employee would pay out of pocket in a given plan year that out of pocket maximum. So yeah, you’re, you’re not only protecting their health and their ability to show up to work, but I mean, you’re protecting their ability to feed their families.

Cole Strandberg: Important, extremely important and good examples helping us visualize kind of the stakes that we’re talking about here. It’s no joke from a decisely SCRS perspective. Walk me through kind of the options that shop owners have if they want to go ahead and participate. Is this a Good, better, best type scenario? Is it one cookie cutter scenario and do what we can to ballpark kind of what that investment might look like?

Ryan Basseri: Yeah, absolutely. So healthcare is regional and it is dependent a lot on the size of the organization because different size groups have different priorities. As I had mentioned earlier, if you have 50 more employees, there are certain rules and guidelines that you have to follow. When you’re under 50 employees, it’s a little bit easier. And then when you’re under 10 employees too, a lot of the times you might not need a full blown employee benefits package. And when I say that, I mean you might not need to add on an extremely high reoccurring operating cost at this stage because maybe you do have younger employees who are still on their parents plan or maybe you have a couple veterans that are still getting their, their insurance through the va or you know, you’re just trying to focus on growing your business. And one of the things that you very quickly realize as a shop owner, not that I can say that I am one, but just talking to enough of them is you have to take care of yourself and your business before you can begin to help your employees. You have to make sure that you can grow and you can provide something quality and not go bankrupt. So you know, I see this all the time. You know, I have a, someone who just opened up their collision center, five employees. Like I want to offer the best plan that you have available and I want to do all these things and I really start to get into the weeds with them. I’m like, all right, why do you want to do this? Who’s this impacting? How are your employees getting coverage today? How long you been in business? What are your goals? You know, all these types of things and a lot of times it comes out to hey, you don’t need to do this massive platinum level plan that you’re going to pay an arm and a leg for. This will suffice based off the feedback that you’ve given me. So you want to make sure that you have a couple different products that are available on behalf of your program. You’ll notice we don’t call it the SCRS health insurance plan. We call it the SRS Employee Benefits program. And a program implies that we have multiple products to feed to fit the needs of the very diverse group of collision center owners that we have in this country. So we have our primary products that typically focus on that zero dollar copay. So that zero dollar copay, what I was mentioning earlier where for things like urgent care visits, mental Health care, doctor’s appointments, generic drugs, they all have this zero dollar copay associated with it. And that’s our, we have a couple different primary products that offer that zero dollar copay. My favorite thing about the zero dollar copay is employees are so conditioned to paying money out of their paycheck every pay period and then going to use it at a doctor’s appointment or urgent care visit and then they pay more money. And so the first time that they use this zero dollar co pay, it’s like a light bulb went off and they’re like, wait, I don’t owe anything. I don’t. I am supposed to pay 20, $30 for this. Nope, you’re good to go. So the zero dollar copay was something that we really wanted to make sure that we kept available for all of our primary group health insurance products that we have available to our members. For those, for those folks out there, I would say anywhere between, you know, 10 to 15 plus full time employees. That’s where we’re going to typically employ the primary group health insurance product that I just spoke about. And that goes all the way up to 500,000 employees. I mean we have clients that are utilizing the similar structure that we have available that have 1,000 plus employees. So that’s one of the really nice things about our program is extremely scalable. And one of the things that I know about the collision industry, if you typically own two or three collision centers, you’re always on the lookout to get that fourth or fifth one. You know, everyone’s looking to grow and everyone’s hungry for, you know, new new locations.

Cole Strandberg: I can speak to that. Absolutely, absolutely. From an investment perspective for, for body shop owners. And I know we can’t get too into the weeds because there’s all sorts of variables here. But to paint a picture, what, what am I expecting to pay per employee per 10 employees? How does that work?

Ryan Basseri: Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, one of the things about healthcare is the costs vary widely depending on where you’re located. You know, you look at California and Texas, it’s two of the most expensive states for healthcare. You look at, you know, your Georgia’s, your Carolinas, you know, even your Oklahoma’s, it’s little bit more affordable and a lot of this has to do with demographics. So basically the healthiness of a population and also what the local and regional hospitals are charging. So we’re doing a very comprehensive underwriting process for all the groups that come through to make sure that they’re priced appropriately based off their demographics and where they’re located. If you look at industry averages, you would probably say an individual employee. And keep in mind this is talking anywhere from 25 to 65, you’d probably say anywhere between 500 to $700. And this is just speaking generally as industry averages are concerned. And that’s for a mid tier level type of a plan. Keep in mind, you know, healthcare is evaluated on overall risk of the population. And so that can, depending on who you are, that can fluctuate pretty, pretty considerably. However, what I think the most interesting stat that I have to speak about our program is on average when a group is offering a health insurance plan to their employees and they move or they receive a quote from our program, on average we’re about 5 to 10% under what their current rates look like. And usually they’re shopping for health insurance at their renewal time. And at a renewal you can typically expect a 5 to 10% increase. So we’re, you know, you just add that to whatever percentage we’re under. And not only are we offering a 5 to 10% reduction in what they’re currently paying, we’re also improving the richness of the benefits package that they’re offering to their employees. You know, I spoke a lot about those $0 co pays. You don’t see those out there on the marketplace very often. In fact, I’ve really never even come across these zero dollar co pays. And we’re offering typically a much larger network, meaning much more access to doctors and hospitals, facilities and pharmacies that these employers are able to offer. So I call this the golden rule of employee benefits. You’re able to increase the level of benefits that the employer is able to offer to their employees while decreasing the price. And we see that, as I said, you know, 10% on average. We’re doing that for all of our employers.

Cole Strandberg: Fantastic. That’s very helpful. And one other thing I want to tee you up for before I let you go. You’ve been very generous with your time today. Is you mentioned kind of at the outset that there’s, there’s a price component to working with you. There’s also a service component. We talked about even some technology components as it relates to that. Talk to me about the service experience and what the benefits are of being a part of a larger group like that compared to, hey, maybe I’m Joe’s body Shop trying to go it alone. Paint that picture for me as well.

Ryan Basseri: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that you find in the healthcare space is you’re usually Working with, you know, your, your local regional broker and your service that you receive for them is really dependent upon their sophistication. And also too, a lot of this is devoted to how much commission they’re making off your account. You know, the way brokers, health insurance brokers make money in this country is they receive a percentage of the overall commission that is associated with your firm. So it’s a bell curve, right? You know, there’s, there’s really good brokers, there’s some not so good ones, but most people are going to come in the middle. And what most people do is they divide their limited time to who’s giving them the largest income stream and a lot of the resources that they have available are devoted to their largest clients. Well, when you look at your independent collision centers, you’re think you’re talking 15 to 30 employees on average in most cases. That does not equate to being the largest client. And usually they do a couple things throughout the year and usually one of those is doing open enrollment meetings. And that’s usually a lot of times the only time that they interface with their broker. Beyond your, you know, one off there was a challenge here. I need your help. And most of the time the employees are going to the owner or the HR administrator that Swiss army knife that I mentioned earlier and saying, hey, I lost my ID card, I can’t find a doctor, I got a weird bill in the mail, I need help. You need to help educate me on how this benefits package is going to impact my family. You know, these are all questions that that owner or you know, that Swiss army knife in the office. You know, they might have some tribal knowledge on it, but a lot of the times they are not going to be insurance experts. So one of the things that we did is we stood up an entire employee level service team that’s available by phone, email and we have a chat functionality. So whenever your employees have questions, they just call us. And one of the best parts are we speak multi languages. So whether you’re English, Spanish, you want to talk to someone in the language that you’re most comfortable, we are able to supply that and we’re able to take a significant amount of the burden off of the employer from a employee support perspective by just offering this team. Another big one is we have an online benefits administration platform that does things like integrates into your payroll platform. It’s integrated into our carrier partners. So you’re not having, and I know you said fax machine earlier, you’d be surprised. There are still A lot of people using fax machines in this day and age and they’re, they’re using whiteout, they’re writing things in. It’s, it’s baffling. So love that we have. So I did a enrollment for a collision center. They have 150 employees. They use their cell phones to enroll. Our platform is mobile friendly and they were able to log on and they were able to pick their benefits and do everything on their mobile phone in the break room, even on the shop floor. They were just finishing it and hey, get this done now. And they were able to get it done. So a people component is always going to be extremely important in health insurance because it’s personal. Employees are always going to have questions and they’re going to need help and they’re going to want to talk to someone. We supply that. But also too, we are taking the manual administrative headache that is running an employee benefits package and we put it online digitally and make it extremely simple to manage and eliminate a lot of the redundancy and you know, paper pushing, user friendly.

Cole Strandberg: I love it and I do partially joke on the facts. I had to fax something just last week for the first time in what felt like a very long time, but I should throw that out there so nobody gets mad at me. But Richie, man, you’ve been so generous with your time. A really, really quality overview, I think extremely helpful to our listeners. Where can people A get in touch with you and B, learn more about the program?

Ryan Basseri: Absolutely. So if you go to the scrs benefitscenter.com you’ll get to our website. If you fill out the information there, come see what a no obligation quote looks like for you and your employees. Fourth quarter is here. This is the time when people are thinking about this the most. So if you’re ever looking to help improve your benefits package, get some relief on your overhead. Come check us out. That’s the best way to find us on that website. We’re also going to be at sema, so if you come stop by the SCRS booth, we’ll be there too. So we’re happy to chat and look forward to hearing from your listeners.

Cole Strandberg: Fantastic. Richie Seaberry, thank you so much for joining us on the Collision Vision. Really enjoyed it.

Ryan Basseri: Thanks Cole. You have a good one.

Cole Strandberg: That is all for today’s episode of the Collision Vision. I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Richie Seaberry about the vital role of employee health benefits in collision repair businesses. If you found today’s discussion valuable and you like the rest of the content, we’re putting out, please be sure to hit that follow button wherever you enjoy your podcast or on YouTube where the collision Vision lives in video form. We’d also love to hear your feedback. Leave us a review and don’t forget to share the podcast with your network. We greatly appreciate it and on behalf of the Auto Body News Team and myself, thank you for coming along for the ride.

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