Imagine you’re at a 5-star resort, and all expenses are paid. You step out of your luxurious suite and head to the pool while passing numerous servers offering to carry your bag, bring you a drink, or get anything else you might want. You arrive at your destination…the pool. It turns out, however, you have a choice to make. There are actually two pools on the property. The first has a bit of a green, hazy tint and lots of leaves to go along with hordes of people and screaming children crammed in essentially shoulder to shoulder. The second is around the corner with crystal clear water, plenty of room, a view of the ocean, and a waiter with a tray full of fruity drinks waiting for you as you enter. If you have a choice, it’s not difficult to figure out where you would spend your time.

Surprisingly, many people who could gain access to the clean pool voluntarily choose to swim in the dirty one. Obviously, this is not an illustration about a “chlorine” pool. In the health insurance world, pools are created in a similar fashion where you don’t get to know who is in the pool to begin with or what new risk might be dumped into it by some other company that will enter shortly.

So, the question specific to engineering firms is this: why be punished for others’ poor healthcare performance? Did you know engineers are a statistically healthier industry and have lower healthcare cost on average than the general population? Shouldn’t engineering firms take advantage of that fact?

Recently, we’ve begun to expand our scope by focusing heavily on the ACEC Life/Health Trust program built for engineering firms. As I share more about this program that’s specific to the engineering industry, some of it may sound familiar. This is because Holmes Murphy has been successfully accomplishing this same goal of better healthcare outcomes with self-funded customers of all industries for over a decade. Now there’s an opportunity to double down with engineers. We can bring clinical outcomes concepts to prospective customers who are built into a product that is inherently a “cleaner pool” before we even start. Knowing this history (and some of the elements that make it possible) can be a boost to your own business growth, while also bringing enormous value to the customers you hope to serve.

The foundational medical product is not new. The ACEC Life/Health Trust was established more than 50 years ago through an affiliation with the ACEC national association that’s comprised of consulting engineering firms. The Trust is growing and expanding its scope with the intentional development of products inside the existing population that do the following:

Recently, some of our staff at Holmes Murphy worked with an engineering firm with 80-90 employees. The firm had already decided to make the change from one carrier to another at renewal. The deal was all but signed, sealed, and delivered to move to a new carrier. Our team then helped the firm secure an ACEC Life/Health Trust quote. While an insurance carrier serves as the administrator for the ACEC Life/Health Trust, they don’t carry the risk. That is maintained by the Trust, which means the quote isn’t the same as a traditional quote. The end result in this instance was a 10 percent savings over the best deal on the table, and the new carrier was already set to win. We were going to save our customer money by moving, but by knowing about the ACEC Life/Health Trust, our customer saved an additional $100,000 and gained entry into a cleaner pool than the traditional market would have given them. That cleaner pool becomes a further differentiator at renewal time the next year.

My best suggestion is this: make sure your current and prospective engineering customers know about this opportunity. If you’d like to learn more, you can check out this video. Also, I’m available at any time to go through all your options with you. We’re in this together!