Benefit Hacking to Improve Employee Attraction and Retention with John Millen

<p><strong>Connect with John Millen:</strong></p><p>Website: www.MillenGroup.com</p><p><strong>Lisa Ryan:&nbsp;</strong>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.</p><p>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.</p><p><strong>John Millen:&nbsp;</strong>Great. Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. Absolutely.</p><p><strong>Lisa Ryan:&nbsp;</strong>Share with us a little bit about your background and what led you into employee benefits and particularly your focus on manufacturing.</p><p><strong>John Millen:&nbsp;</strong>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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