Who we serve
Texas employers with roughly 10 to 500 employees. Serving employers across Katy, Houston, and the Brazos Valley. The problems below are the ones we hear most often in each industry, written specifically rather than generically, because a restaurant and an engineering firm do not have the same benefits problem.
Construction and trades
Crews spread across job sites, a workforce that turns over faster than the office does, and a benefits plan nobody in the field has ever had explained to them in person.
Turnover makes the waiting period a real cost
You pay to enroll someone who leaves in four months, then pay the administrative cost of unwinding it. Waiting period design and plan choice matter far more here than they do in an office environment.
Field workers never see HR
Open enrollment happens in an office your crews do not visit. Elections default, nobody understands the plan, and then a claim gets denied and the trust is gone. Meetings have to happen where the work is, often in Spanish.
Prevailing wage and fringe benefits get tangled
On public work, how you credit fringe benefits against the wage determination changes both your bid and your compliance position. Getting it wrong is expensive in two directions at once.
Manufacturing
Shift work, an older and more tenured workforce than most industries, and claims experience that shows up directly in the renewal.
An aging workforce drives claims that nobody discusses
Tenure is a strength and a cost. A stable workforce means more predictable but higher utilization, and if you are fully insured you get the bill without ever seeing the data behind it.
Shift coverage makes enrollment meetings hard
Second and third shift get the leftover meeting slot or a packet in a break room. Enrollment quality drops, and so does the perceived value of what you are paying for.
Work-related injuries blur into the health plan
What workers compensation covers and what the group plan covers gets confused at the point of care, and employees end up with bills nobody prepared them for.
Professional services
Engineering, accounting, legal, architecture, and consulting firms where benefits are a recruiting instrument as much as a cost line.
You are competing for people against much larger firms
A 40 person firm is hiring against a 4,000 person one. The plan does not have to be better than theirs, but it has to be explicable, and right now most candidates cannot compare the two.
Partner and staff needs pull in opposite directions
Owners often want a richer plan, while associates want lower payroll deductions. A single plan design serves neither well. Multiple options or a different contribution approach usually serves both better.
Growth outpaces the administration
You hired 12 people this year and the same office manager still handles benefits between everything else. The system that worked at 25 employees quietly stopped working at 60.
Restaurants and hospitality
Variable hours, high turnover, thin margins, and the hardest ACA tracking obligation of any industry.
Variable hours make ACA eligibility genuinely difficult
Who counts as full time depends on measurement periods, look-back methods, and hours you may not be tracking cleanly. Employers in this industry cross 50 full-time equivalents without realizing it more often than any other.
Turnover makes traditional enrollment nearly pointless
By the time a waiting period ends, a meaningful share of the cohort has left. Plan structure and eligibility design have to account for that rather than pretend otherwise.
Margins leave no room for a bad renewal
A 12 percent increase in an industry with single digit margins is not an inconvenience, it is a decision about whether to keep offering coverage at all. This is where funding alternatives usually earn their keep.
Dealerships and franchises
Multiple locations, multiple entities, commission-heavy pay structures, and sometimes a franchisor with opinions about your benefits.
Multiple entities fragment your buying power
Three locations under three EINs are often quoted as three small groups instead of one larger one. Controlled group rules may let you be treated as a single employer, which changes both your pricing and your ACA obligations.
Commission pay makes affordability testing tricky
ACA affordability is tested against wages, and wages that swing month to month make the safe harbor choice consequential. The wrong safe harbor produces penalties that surface two years later.
Inconsistency across locations
One store enrolls well, another does not, and nobody can explain the difference. Usually it is a manager who understands the plan at one location and one who does not at the other.
Nonprofits
Mission-driven staff, board oversight of every dollar, grant restrictions on what you can spend, and salaries that cannot compete on cash alone.
Benefits are your main retention tool
You cannot outbid the private sector on salary, so the plan carries real weight in keeping people. That makes a cost-driven cut more expensive than it looks on the budget line.
Grant funding restricts how costs can be allocated
Indirect cost rates and grant terms constrain what portion of benefits cost can go where. Plan changes need to be checked against those terms before they are made, not after.
The board needs to see the reasoning
A finance committee that asks why costs rose deserves an answer better than a carrier letter. The written report we produce is built to be handed to a board directly.
By company size
Headcount changes which rules apply to you and which options are open. Here is what changes at each band.
10 to 50 employees
The size where a small change is proportionally the biggest.
Below 50 you are outside the ACA employer mandate, which gives you more freedom than you probably realize. The tradeoff is that carriers quote you from a pool rather than from your own experience, so plan design, contribution strategy, and eligibility rules are the levers that actually move your number. Level-funded carriers now write groups this size regularly, and ICHRA has no floor at all.
Worth watching: Watch your full-time equivalent count as you grow. Crossing 50 is based on the prior year and on hours, not headcount, so it happens before anyone notices.
50 to 150 employees
Where the obligations arrive and the data becomes worth having.
The ACA employer mandate applies, 1094-C and 1095-C filings are required, and FMLA obligations begin. At the same time you are now big enough that carriers will look at your own claims experience, which means a healthy group can stop subsidizing everyone else. This is the band where level-funding most often changes the math, and where the gap between good and bad administration gets expensive.
Worth watching: Affordability testing and the safe harbor you choose matter here. So does having ACA hours data you trust, which is a payroll question before it is a compliance question.
150 to 500 employees
Big enough to shape the plan around your own people.
At this size your claims experience is credible, so self-funding with stop-loss becomes genuinely worth modeling and your negotiating position is real. You can run multiple plan options, add meaningful voluntary benefits, and build eligibility rules around how your business actually operates. The complexity is now in administration and communication rather than in pricing.
Worth watching: The risk shifts from cost to coordination. With this many people, a broken link between enrollment and payroll is no longer a small reconciliation problem.
See what your benefits should cost.
Thirty minutes on the phone, a couple of documents, and a written report you keep. If we cannot find anything worth changing, we will tell you that and you will have it in writing.