PEOs and Sharing Plans with Accelerated Consulting Group's John Iorillo

0:00
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And with us right now, we've got john Iorillo and john you're the your partner at Accelerated Consulting Group. You're found on the web at AccelCG.com that's A C C E L C G.com. And you provide services to small, medium, large, sized businesses, a lot of VCFO type services, consulting insurance Healthcare consulting as well. And you've gone through a lot of growth over the past few years. So first off, congratulations. And thank you. Welcome to the show.

1:10
Thank you. Thank you for having us.

1:12
So give us a quick overview of what accelerated does.

1:15
So we kind of four different types of business activities at accelerate. One is our executive consulting division, where we'll come in and act as the CFO or chief operating officer of small, smaller based companies, either on a project based scenario or we'll stay there and continue to engage with the client for the long term. I'm a CPA, one of our other partners as a CPA as well, and other portions of our business, our software development primarily in the worker's compensation space. We've had a couple clients for over 17 years and we have a team of software developers that have managed Dells relationships for that long and then we've added a couple of other clients as well from that relationship, and then a bulk of our businesses In the workers compensation space primarily in the PEO arrangement, which is a professional employer organization where we work with clients and agents or brokers in the marketplace to help their clients secure workers compensation in those industries that find it very difficult to secure coverage. For instance, temporary staffing, entities have a large challenge, you know, securing those type of coverages, so we help them with that. And that's primarily in the California marketplace, although we do have customers all throughout the country. And from that, you know, our clients were asking for a life and health opportunity or solution that was not the traditional life and health type products that you're buying in the marketplace through yoga, and United's of the world because they continue to increase in cost. The benefits continue to do becomes an unaffordable challenge for them. So we we went out and secured you know, relationships with virtual primary care entities and a medical cost sharing entity as well to really provide alternative solutions to our clients, so we've been focused on that and some of our clients encompass, you know, three or four of our divisions and some, you know, we just do, you know, one of the our core focuses record competencies with those clients.

3:21
So, john, how does someone know if they are ready? If I'm a business owner? How do I know I'd be ready to or what reasons might I want to look into a PEO? And can you kind of explain a little bit more how that works?

3:34
Now, a PEO allows an organization to really focus on what they do well making their products selling their products to their customer base and alleviating them of the ministry, administrative burden of, you know, processing payroll, filing the payroll tax returns on a daily, quarterly monthly basis, whatever it may be, and then, you know, ensuring that they're compliant with all state laws. Things of that nature that change dramatically, all the time, because governments get involved in a lot of those resources. So what we do is we will place our clients with a PEO relationship so they can focus really on their core business. And we can provide all those ancillary services to them, whether it's health insurance workers compensation, payroll administration, HR type compliance services. So that allows, you know, our clients to, like I said, focus on what they do best is, you know, making their products or providing their services to their core customer base.

4:34
Yeah, yeah. So, um, and so one thing, obviously, so let's say that someone's listening and they say, Well, you know, I've, you know, we're up to the point now, where we've got, you know, three, four w two employees, we haven't offered health care because it's just so expensive. I don't he wouldn't even know how to do that. You know, we have a lot of freelancers, a lot of independent contractors, but you know, what What would be a good entry? Like if they're saying listen, I'd like to be able to provide something for my employees here, but I don't know what that first step would be. Obviously you work with health sharing plans which personally I've been using, you know, when our health care costs when we had to go into the open market. We had a grandfathered plan which is really nice. We were paying about $450 a month for my family. And you know, we had a pretty high deductible. You know, when you're self employed, you just have to kind of play that game there. And but we got kicked off and we can no longer had that had to go into the open market. Our health care costs went from $450 No, I'm sorry $650 to over 1600 dollars a month, when we lost our grandfather plan and had to go into the into Obamacare into the you know, in To the exchanges and that sort of thing. So thankfully, we had found a health sharing plan. And that reduced our costs from 1600. dollars a month, down to 450. And at the time now, $500 a month. And you know, it's a little bit different healthcare plans. If you're not familiar, it's a little bit different. And thankfully, you know, things like, pre pre existing conditions, you know, thankfully, my family and I were all pretty healthy. So we're able to kind of get coverage for pretty much everything. But can you kind of just give a quick overview on how health sharing plans work? And who that would be a good fit for?

6:39
Yes, no problem. So medical cost sharing is a great alternative to the traditional healthcare plans that you see out there not only from a cost savings perspective, but from a freedom of choice perspective. So there are no networks in medical cost sharing, you're able to go see any doctor that you prefer, you know, you can go to the Mayo Clinic, you go to the Cleveland Clinic or whatever. Whatever it may be, but there are some limitations. It's not for all individuals. It does have some limitations as a relates to pre existing conditions in the first three years that you're on. You're with the medical cost sharing program and what's unique about medical cost sharing, you're really sharing in the medical expenses of the community. So you're contributing on a monthly basis, what they call a member share. And when you do have a medical need, as they call it, once you've met your initial uninsurable amount, which is like a deductible, though, we don't like to use the word deductible because right not health insurance, or traditional health insurance that's overseen by a Department of Insurance is medical cost sharing. Once you've met that obligation, the community all the members within that health sharing program will share in your medical expenses until you're released from care from that one particular need. For example, if you were, you know, on the weekend, you're playing soccer with your child and you broke your ankle. From the time he went to the emergency room had surgery had, you know, any drugs that you had to take during the rehab because subsequent physical therapy would all be covered once you've met that initial insurable amount. So it's a great program. And the great thing about it is they're really looking after the needs of the community. So that you know, the one medical cost sharing program that we utilize uses something called second MD. So they'll go out and ensure that if you if you need surgery, they'll go out to the community, make sure that that surgery is the proper protocol for you, based upon the injury or the sickness that you've had. And sometimes you'll a lot of these doctors are conducting unnecessary surgeries, putting you through a lot of pain and suffering when rehab might be the best solution for you. And then they also do a lot of cost negotiations on your behalf because they're trying to work on behalf of the community. It's amazing what some of these costs or medical bills are reduced to through negotiating negotiations with the hospital groups of physicians or what have you.

9:05
So as an employer, I could offer a health sharing plan to my employees. Now granted, again, if they have pre existing conditions, that's going to be kind of a bummer for them, because that's not going to help with that, right?

9:18
Correct. Now, for instance, if you do have a pre existing condition, say you had heart heart surgery, you know, two or three years ago, but you're kind of on maintenance, and you're all you're doing is really going to have an annual checkup to make sure that everything is working. The way it should be, it's still might be a viable solution for you. It's just going to be limited in the in what it will cover in the first three years. But if you're stable or what have you, it may still be a good solution, because the cost savings are dramatic. As you mentioned earlier, from 1600 down to 500. You can pay for a lot of office visits with an 1100 dollar a month savings. Yeah. So we do that. And companies that do adopted even though they may have some pre existing knowing after three years, that pre existing limitation is gone. And in the second year, you do have $25,000 worth of coverage for any of that pre existing conditions in year two, and increases the 50,000 in year three.

10:19
Wow. So as an employer, I could pay $5,500 a month or so per employee to be able to offer this and as a benefit,

10:30
but for point B less than amount. Okay, you're you're imagining 5000 probably for your family coverage, I believe.

10:38
Oh, right. Right, right. Exactly.

10:40
Yeah. So your employer coverage, it depending on the age and what what initial insurable amount that they select. I mean, for example, the premiums can be as low as 169, all the way up to $800 depending on how old you are, and that's, you know, going from an 18 year old all the way up to a 64 year old and then once you hit Medicare medical condition wouldn't apply. So

11:00
yeah, right. Very, very cool. And so in terms of so aside from that, you know, we talked about peos, we talked about being able to offer, you know, help share plan, where else does accelerated come in and and help.

11:15
What we really do is we work with whether it's an individual or a company owner, we really try to help them navigate based upon their needs, and their budgets as well. So it depends on what you're looking for as a business owner or an individual and ensuring it meets your budgetary needs. Because I'm a CPA by trade, I understand the financial impact of every decision a business owner has to make and where, you know, the opportunity for cost savings are so we really work with them to provide something that they really want to we can, we can offer united healthcare plan or one of the you know, quote unquote bukas. But we typically try to look at some of the alternatives because, you know, with out of pocket expenses and deductibles increasing every year Some of our employees cannot utilize the health care plans that are being provided by their employees because they just can't they don't have that much money sitting in a bank account to address their needs. And it's, it's a sad situation, it's not gonna be fixed anytime soon.

12:14
I mean, as an employer for me to I that would be really expensive for me to pay another 1600 dollars a month for my employees. So, I mean that I don't know where that money the money comes from money that I would not pay them. Right doesn't come out of thin air.

12:36
So I think there's a lot of opportunities to really work with our potential clients and and our clients to provide a plan that really works within, you know, their budgetary needs and what they're trying to achieve as a business as well. Now,

12:50
how else have you gone into a company and help them increase profitability?

12:56
Well, I mean, a lot A lot of what we do on the consumer Things that we might go in and do system implementations to really streamline their business processes where you can either eliminate personnel or reallocate personnel to more productive means within the organization. So we do a lot of that on our consulting side. And then obviously, on both our workers compensation our life and health side, we're really working with our clients to perform really well. And then we work with our other partners that we're placing that business with to drive cost savings based upon good performance. For example, we have a large temporary staffing company that has a great year from a claims perspective on the Workers Compensation Program. We'll work with our PTO partners to get decreases in subsequent year so we're always working on behalf of our clients to drive savings throughout their you know, their business model or what have you. So that's really what we focus on.

13:54
Terrific. And john, how have you guys been able to grow so quickly, or have you been able to grow such Good book of business. What do you do?

14:01
Yeah, I think a lot of it because we're very well known in the PEO space, we, you know, Tom and I used to own a PEO that we sold about five years ago. And we're still partners with them, we bring business to them. So a lot of its reputation, you know, and as any good business does, you know, your clients refer you to new opportunities. We don't do a whole lot of advertising, or anything like that. It's really word of mouth and reputation. And we try to do what's right for our clients and try to treat them with respect, and hopefully we get the same respect back from them. And I think it's worked very well for us. And you know, we're a small company, but we've been fortunate enough to grow and our partners are very involved in every deal. We don't have a bunch of clients support people that are that we put on these people off to me and our three other partners know almost every client individually as well. So I'm on vacation or not available. And one of the other partners just pick up the call and, you know, make sure that the client is taken care of in a timely fashion. We might not be the smartest but we're the most responsive people out there. So that's what we pride ourselves on.

15:06
Great John Iorillo you're a partner at Accelerated Consulting Group. Again, you're found on the web at AccelCG.com that's A C C E L C G.com You and I are going to have a chat about health sharing and you know, kind of looking down at our future just to see if that might be an option for our team. So if they're listening, hooray for them. All right for all of us. And so John, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

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