In her own words: Yafa Sakkejha on the art and science of helping small businesses offer benefits to their employees

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Yafa Sakkejha is the CEO of Beneplan, which helps small and mid-size business offer benefits to their employees. But these days, those employees—especially the younger ones—are demanding a very different array of services, including mental health supports. Sakkejha explains, in her own words, why her job is now as much art as it is science.

I’m a huge user of therapy. I use tons of mental health supports. I have a therapist. I have a support group. And I use on-demand mental health through our telemedicine partner, Maple, if I need it. Let’s say it’s Monday morning, and I’m like, You know what? I’m the CEO of this company, but I’m feeling off today, so I’m just going to talk to someone for an hour before I start my day. But therapy is very expensive.

The Beneplan Co-operative is an employee-benefits buying group for small and mid-size businesses in Canada. And even before the pandemic, we had employers calling us, saying, “The next generation are asking openly for mental health supports,” whereas the boomers would never ask. So then the pandemic happens, and we have this surge in need. And that need has not gone away. In fact, I think that as a society, we’ve destigmatized the need.

Mental health supports are just one of the huge new things in demand today. Another is weight loss products—Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and other injectables. People are demanding them. They’re also demanding glucose monitors—even if people don’t have diabetes, they seem to want them.

So, small businesses are under a lot of pressure. They want to offer these benefits, but somebody has to pay the bill. And I feel for them, because when they ask us to price it out, it’s almost like asking us to grab a number from the sky. Typically when we price something out, we have decades of historical data based on population trends. So we can say, “If you’re going to increase your prescription-medicine coverage from 80% to 90%, it’s going to increase your premiums by 12%.” But with weight loss and mental health, it’s a subjective thing. And the data we have is newer, and with shifting populations and demographics, it’s an art, not a science.

So we have to tell employers, “If you want to add something, start with a little less than what you actually want to roll out. Let it run for a year. After that, you can add more. You can always add benefits. It’s really hard to take them away.”

What’s different about us is because we’re a member-owned buying group, our goal is to drive down the cost of insurance as much as possible through group buying power and then trying to reduce the fees as much as possible. And every 12 months, the co-op pays to its members any premiums that didn’t go toward claims, fees, taxes or reserves. Premium refunds—we call them dividends—used to be a very normal part of the insurance process. They’d send you a dividend cheque once a year, because customers used to be owners. But in the 1980s, many insurers started to demutualize. They said, “That’s it. We sell insurance. You pay the premiums, we pay your claims, and everybody goes home.” In 1989, our founder, Mark Faiz, thought, What’s wrong with having the customers get premium refunds? Because there’s so much profit in insurance.

Co-ops are a viable business model. It is very much okay to have a capitalistic model that has social good as well. You can still pay fair market wages and fair market profits. Anybody who’s considering the co-op model for their business should definitely think about having your members be co-owners in the profit, on the board of directors and engaged. It’s amazing. You get a really good balance between people and profit.