Episode Details

Connect with John Millen:

Website: www.MillenGroup.com

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan, and welcome to the Manufacturers Network podcast, Live Edition, and we're excited to introduce you to our guest today, John Millen. Now, John is a benefit hacker over the last 20 years in the employee benefits industry. He became annoyed and upset that there were not better ideas to contain health care costs and improve benefits for employees, having been a victim of a high deductible medical plan himself. He decided to radically change the way health care plans are presented to employees, to employers.

John is the Millen Group's co-founder, an independent benefit advisory firm located in Richmond, Virginia. And over the past two decades, manufacturing has been the number one industry that they've been able to improve. So, John, welcome to the show.

John Millen: Great. Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Absolutely.

Lisa Ryan: Share with us a little bit about your background and what led you into employee benefits and particularly your focus on manufacturing.

John Millen: Yeah, so absolutely. So my training from college was as an engineer, mechanical engineer. And in that field, you're solving lots of problems. Yes, it's about math and physics and all that stuff. But you're solving problems.

And several years ago, I remember going through the process of open enrollment for myself. I picked a medical plan, which happened to be a very high deductible medical plan, thinking that's all I needed. I didn't have any advice. I just picked it because it was the cheapest and ended up learning the hard way that I picked the wrong plan in that process.

And then, over that period, after that, you have a sting like, oh, my gosh, why didn't anyone tell me that it worked this way? We have provided different types of benefits for almost 20 years to small companies and big companies. I started seeing what was being communicated to employees from the front of the room, and I got irritated, and I got mad. I'm like, why are they not saying this way?

And then not saying this? And it started from that. I wanted to fix the problem. I was tired of seeing other people get burned by different things. And there were some mistruths, not intentional people aren't bad people, but they just didn't know what they didn't know.

After several years of that, seeing companies do things a certain way, we wanted to hack it in a good way. Benefit Hacker. It was very catchy. It gets people's attention, but it's like, hey, there are things you can do that you've been told may not be the right thing, especially over time.

Everyone says, right, right. Who wants to sell insurance? Like I didn't go to college to sell insurance. And I don't love selling insurance. I love solving problems. And insurance is a mechanism. It's a risk mechanism that is always changing. So that's kind of what led me to this industry.

Lisa Ryan: Right. And it's something that with benefits, it's always on our mind. I know for me, with my husband being furloughed last year for ten months, that was the one question that kept popping up is, holy cow, what are we going to do if he gets laid off and we don't have benefits and going to the market or using COBRA or whatever? So from my own experience, thank goodness our Christmas present was that Scott got called back to work in December, and now we don't have to worry about that anymore.

But when companies are thinking about employees and, you think that, OK, well, employees, they're an asset versus a liability. But from our conversation, before we were talking about that, they look at their employees as assets, but they don't generally treat the employee benefits spend that way. So what do you see as far as the investment versus expense? Fascinating.

Joh