Sponsored by Benefits in a Card
Most staffing firms treat benefits the same way they’ve always treated them: a necessary expense, buried in the back of the onboarding paperwork, presented as a stack of options nobody asked for. The result is low participation, high turnover, and margin left on the table, often without the firm even knowing it.
Carl Stecker has spent more than three decades in this space, and he’s tired of watching it play out. As the owner of Benefits in a Card (BIC), he’s spent years building a different model, one that starts with what workers actually need, strips out the bundled structures that quietly lock 40% of a workforce out of benefits entirely, and uses data and technology to make enrollment feel less like a legal document and more like a conversation.
In this conversation, Carl breaks down why the bundled benefits model is broken, what the exit of a major market provider revealed about the state of the industry, how BIC’s new AI-powered enrollment tool is changing the way staffing firms present plans, and why the first question every staffing owner should be asking right now isn’t about cost, but structure.
Q. Most staffing leaders still treat benefits as a cost center. Why is that mindset outdated?
Carl Stecker: For over a decade, we’ve operated with no fees for our service. In 97% of our clients, benefits are 100% employee-paid. We don’t charge marketing fees or implementation fees. Our API links to 262 providers are all no charge. We built an entire training center (BenefitSync) around cybersecurity training, and that’s free too.
We created an environment where we’re continuously adding value without charging companies for it. We don’t think there’s a need. That’s just how we operate, and it works very well for our clients.
Q. What do most firms misunderstand about benefits structure versus benefits cost?
CS: FreeRx is a good place to start with this, because it shows exactly what’s possible when you design a plan around what people actually need. We created FreeRx four years ago and really launched it into staffing in 2023. We’ve put over 200,000 people through that plan so far.
The plan is $5.99 a week for an individual, $6.99 a week for their entire family. It covers 1,000 medications (130 of them acute) through a 70,000-plus pharmacy network: Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, Publix, Albertsons, all of it.
Then someone on our team asked, what if they don’t have a doctor? So we built virtual urgent care into the plan. For $6.99 a week, a family has urgent care and the medications they need. It’s unheard of. It’s twice that on the public market, but because of the high turnover in staffing, we were able to compress those margins and make it genuinely affordable.
You can also buy up to virtual primary care (a full concierge doctor) for another $5.99 a week. For under $12 a week, you can have the whole package.
Now take that plan and put it inside a bundled model like Essential StaffCare was running before they exited the market earlier this year. If someone came through the door and wanted FreeRx, or additional life insurance, or accident coverage, they couldn’t get it without buying a medical plan first. That’s another $20 or $30 a week just to access a benefit they could have had on its own. You’ve just priced them out.
And here’s the thing, roughly 40% of the people coming through your door are already on spousal coverage or a household medical plan. They don’t need your medical. But in a bundled environment, they have to buy it anyway, or walk away from everything. That’s just bad business.
Q. What’s fundamentally broken about the bundled, tier-locked model in staffing?
CS: If you know that 40% of the people coming through your door are already on a household plan, why would you choose a provider that forces them into medical coverage they don’t need? You’ve got to meet people where they are. Forcing someone to pay $30 more a week for a plan they don’t want, that’s lunch money. Two lunches. That’s real money to these workers, and we need to be thinking that way.
We’re here to serve people. We’re not here to serve the most valuable player. We’re here to help the most vulnerable person.
Q. If it’s this broken, why have bundled models survived this long?
CS: It’s been the dominant product design in this marketplace for 20 years. It gets sold past. Nobody talks about the fine print. Staffing companies have accepted it because it’s what they were handed, and they haven’t had reason to dig deeper.
But here’s what we know from 26 years in this space: people on benefits tend to stay four to five weeks longer than people who aren’t. For a staffing firm, those extra weeks are pure profit. That’s the margin line. If you’re implementing a benefits plan to drive retention and you’re bundling in ways that lock out 40% of your workforce, you’re working against yourself. You just haven’t seen the data yet.
Q. Why is 2026 a turning point?
CS: Enough is enough. Those bundled plans are a scheme that’s been running in this marketplace and it needs to stop. And we want to help make that happen.
Q. When benefits are forced on workers instead of chosen by them, what does that do to behavior and trust?
CS: It pushes people away. Someone comes in wanting to add life insurance for their spouse, a couple dollars a week. Then they find out they have to pay $30 more for a medical plan to get it, so they just leave. You had a person you could have served, made stickier, made them feel cared for, and instead they walked out because the structure didn’t work for them.
Care matters. Stickiness comes from care. And every time we look at why something isn’t working in our model, it usually starts with a moment where we failed to meet someone where they were.
That’s part of what pushed us down the path of building our AI enrollment tool. We have a bilingual call center in Greenville, South Carolina. We’ve had it for 33 years, and about 60% of incoming calls are routine. Someone needs an ID card, they need a doctor in their network, they need their FreeRx card while they’re standing at the pharmacy. Those things can and should be handled instantly. So we started designing an AI layer to handle them, not to replace our team, but to give people immediate answers when they need them.
But in going down that path, we also started looking at how we present benefits at enrollment. Our brochures were 22 pages. Nobody reads 22 pages. And when we looked at our own participation data, the first plan on the list, our Stay Healthy Minimum Essential Coverage (MEC) plan, was getting all the selections. Not because it was the right fit, but because it was first. The MEC plan is a wellness plan. It’s not what most staffing workers need. They need a plan that pays for a doctor’s visit or a hospital stay. So we pushed the MEC plans to the bottom. Our finance team wasn’t happy; we make about 15% more on those products. I told them I don’t care. They’re not the right choice, so we’re not leading with them.
What we’re building now is an AI-powered enrollment guide called Sky. When workers log into our platform through Avionté or any of our partners, Sky asks them a few real life questions: Are you married? Do you have kids? What do you already have? And it recommends the plans that actually fit their situation, with a clear view of the financial impact. It’s consultative. It’s designed to make sure people are getting what they need, not just clicking whatever’s at the top of a list.
Q. How are bundled models eroding margin in ways operators might not even be measuring?
CS: Look at your benefits participation rate. If you’re at 10% or 15%, you could probably be at 25% or 30% without bundling.
Here’s a real data point: I called our team one morning about a year ago and asked for a 40-week look-back. How many people per week were electing just one plan? Just FreeRx, just life insurance, just one thing? It ran between 9% and 11% every week. That’s people who were served only because we gave them the option to buy one thing.
In a bundled environment, you’re missing every single one of them. That’s a floor, not a ceiling, on what you’re losing.
Q. How should a CEO be framing benefits in terms of profit per placement?
CS: Apply that same number to profitability. In an unbundled environment, with data secured through API so you’re not carrying cyber breach risk, look at it as a 10% increase in margin. That 10%, by going unbundled, increases retention by 10%. Those people stay because you cared enough to give them what they actually needed.
Q. How do weekly deductions influence redeployment rates and assignment stickiness?
CS: The staffing industry designed benefits this way for a reason. Workers go in and out of assignment constantly. What our clients told us was, “We need a solution that doesn’t disrupt coverage every time someone rolls off.”
So we built in a standard four-week grace window. If someone goes off assignment, they can call our call center, make a manual payment, and keep their coverage live. If they go off for a full month, it triggers a COBRA notice. But if they come back to the firm, they just re-enroll. It’s designed to keep people connected without penalties for the natural rhythm of staffing work.
Q. How important is that flexibility in a staffing environment specifically?
CS: It’s non-negotiable. Any HR person reading this will laugh if you try to put a monthly billing cycle into a staffing environment. You have to manage benefits on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. It has to sync with payroll. If it doesn’t, you have no business being in staffing.
Q. What does the operational side of that alignment look like in practice?
CS: We have our own proprietary platform called the Benefits Wizard. Any of our clients can log in on any given Sunday and see exactly how their plan is performing: how many people are enrolled by branch, what they’re signed up for, who’s actively participating. Everything except claims data, which is HIPAA-protected.
That visibility is something most firms don’t have easy access to with other providers. We open the entire back end to our clients and their brokers, because they need it to run their business. The word that keeps coming up as we build out our new platform is consumable. Is this information getting to people when they need it, in a way they can actually use?
Q. If a firm wants to know whether their current benefits structure is working, what should they be tracking?
CS: Start with the basics: how many people you’re hiring per week, how many are signing up for benefits, and what your penetration rate is. That number will tell you a lot.
Beyond that, our team can go into the back end and build analysis for clients on a more customized basis. Because every firm looks at this a little differently, and the metrics that matter can vary.
The invitation is open. Let’s talk through it and figure out what measurement looks like for your specific operation.
Q. When firms make the shift to a more flexible, unbundled model, how fast do the numbers move?
CS: You’ll see it within 90 to 120 days. Most of our integrations are already built, so implementation is faster than people expect. My honest advice is to establish your baseline today. Then give us 90 days and look back. You’re not going to see a downward spiral, I can promise you that.
Q. When a major provider exited the market earlier this year, you talked with a lot of firms in transition. What did that moment reveal about the state of staffing benefits?
CS: It revealed that the bundled plans were not working. It revealed that ICHRA was not working. It gave me a rare chance to have very candid conversations with a lot of people who were anxious and had their guard down.
When the exit happened, I told our sales team to stand down. I didn’t want us making outbound calls. Everyone I spoke to had already been bombarded. That felt predatory to me, and that’s not what we’re about.
And what I kept hearing confirmed what we’d suspected: the integrations that had been sold and marketed for 15 or 20 years weren’t real. They were flat files flying back and forth. CSV files. Payroll data traveling over Wi-Fi in Excel. Payroll for entire staffing companies sitting exposed. When I saw that, I thought, this is nuts. Somebody has to protect this.
We spent a couple million dollars in 2024 and more in 2025 to build out 262-plus true API integrations. We doubled the size of our IT department. That was a deliberate decision to protect the industry’s data infrastructure, not just our clients’. That’s why we partnered with the American Staffing Association. This industry has done a lot for a lot of people, me included. I want to do right by it.
Q. What’s separating the firms that have adopted a modernized benefits approach from the ones that haven’t?
CS: Honestly, I don’t think anybody’s struggling to adopt. I think it’s a matter of awareness. Once people actually look at their plans, the reaction is usually, “You’re kidding me.” Every staffing company I’ve worked with over 33 years is full of people who genuinely care about doing right by their workers.
They’re not slow to act because they don’t care. They just haven’t seen the data yet. When they do, they move.
What’s competing for attention right now is everything else on their plate, especially AI, which is the wild west. I’ve personally walked away from four or five vendors in the last few years that looked polished and delivered nothing. It’s a legitimate distraction. But the benefits conversation is worth having alongside all of it.
Q. If you’re advising a staffing owner today, what’s the first question they should be asking about their current benefits model?
CS: Is it bundled or unbundled? Start there and really look at it.
But I’ll go further. Stop treating benefits as an afterthought. Make your benefits package (unbundled, day-one eligible, with a two-year rate lock) the hero of your marketing. Talk about FreeRx. Market what you’re doing for your people. We’re happy to build co-branded materials to help clients do exactly that. Because if you’re with us, you have something not everybody has. Tout it.
This shouldn’t just be a recruiting tool for prospects. It should be a retention tool for your associates. Your people need to know their company is looking out for them. That’s the whole point.
Learn more about modernizing benefits in our on-demand webinar with Benefits in a Card.
