In transportation and construction, the people who make you money usually aren't W-2. Most agents hear "1099" and stop talking. There's a version of this that works — and it doesn't cost the business a dollar.
A group health plan is built for employees. Your drivers and your subs aren't employees. Most agents leave it right there.
So when a good one asks what you offer, the honest answer is nothing. He goes and prices coverage himself, as an individual, at full retail. For a man in his forties with a family, that number is high enough that he closes the laptop and decides to keep getting away with it.
Then he works hurt, because a week off costs him more than the pain does. He puts off the thing he should have looked at. And eventually he takes a call from an outfit that had something to offer, and you replace a man who knew your job sites, your customers and your equipment with somebody who knows none of it. That is the real cost, and it never appears on a premium invoice.
Hiring in the trades comes down to a short list: what it pays, whether it pays on time, and what comes with it. On the third one you are currently silent — and the company down the road that isn't silent is talking to the same people you are.
A driver or a lead man walking out means lost production, a hiring cycle, and weeks of somebody learning what he already knew. Set that against a program the business doesn't pay for, and the math stops being close.
In these trades the body is the business. A fall, a shoulder, a hand — and a 1099 with no coverage has no income and no cushion behind him. What happens next usually lands on you anyway, as a short crew, an advance, or a truck sitting still.
Experienced drivers and finish-level tradesmen get recruited constantly. Pay is easy for a competitor to match. Being the outfit that actually set something up for its people is considerably harder to copy.
Bought alone, he pays retail. Offered through your business, the same lines are priced as a group.
He enrolls. He pays the premium. The business contributes nothing. The only thing that changed is where the coverage was bought — and for most crews that alone is the difference between a number a man turns down and a number he signs up for.
You tell us the size of the crew, the trades, and the states they work in. We come back with what can be offered and what it would run them.
Each person decides for himself, line by line. Nobody is enrolled in anything by you, and nobody has to take all of it.
The premium is the contractor's. There is no employer contribution to budget and no benefits cost for the business to carry.
Questions, claims problems, new guys, guys who leave. Your crew calls us instead of your office, year-round, same person every time.
Cash paid directly to him — for an ER visit, a night admitted, a broken bone, a serious diagnosis. It arrives while he isn't earning, and he spends it on whatever the emergency actually is: the truck payment, the rent, the deductible.
The lines people use in a normal year, which is exactly why they land. Cleanings, a crown, glasses for the man squinting at a cut list. It's the piece that makes the whole thing feel real to a crew instead of theoretical.
Term life, and income protection for the stretch when he physically cannot work. For a man whose paycheck stops the day his body does, this is the one that keeps a bad month from becoming a lost house.
Nothing in premium. The value to the business is in who stays, not in what it spends.
How many, what trades, which states. That's enough for us to come back with what can actually be offered and what it would cost them — before you commit to anything.
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