Johnston Group moves into new space

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This article was published 04/09/2018 (2785 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Johnston Group, one of the largest group benefit plan administrators in the country, has long prided itself in being good at what it does.

Among other things, that means processing more than 3,000 health and dental claims in a typical day and making sure all sorts of wellness benefits are available to its customers across the country.

Now, the company can also boast nice new digs for its roughly 250 Winnipeg employees.

On Tuesday night, the family-owned business opened its new 70,000-square-foot headquarters at 1051 King Edward St. — more than twice the size of its previous Winnipeg head office — to about 600 friends and family.

While business owner David Johnston may shy away from the media spotlight, the company is perennially included on best-managed-companies lists and has long been in the top tier of corporate support of community endeavours alongside companies ten times its size.

“We have three legs of the stool that are important for us,” Johnston said. “One is our customers, obviously. Another is culture, which is really important to us, and the other is our community.”

As one of the largest (maybe the largest) third-party benefit administrators in the country, Johnston Group now has close to $600 million in annual premiums that it administers. Johnston Group is not an insurance company and does not take on any risk, but it does many of the same things that the insurance company will do when it comes to administering the group benefit plans — plan, design and administer the benefits, provide all the billings and customer service, offer insured and self-funded program options and provide access to pay-direct prescription drug cards.

As Johnston put it, “We have to be better than the insurance companies or there is no reason for us to be here. Our job is to provide better service.”

It also has to do it in a cost-competitive way while still building in enough margin to keep growing.

Its sweet spot is to provide the group insurance benefits to small and medium-sized enterprises. Its largest customer has 10,000 employees, but the company is very connected to chambers of commerce throughout the country and helps companies’ employees access all the same kinds of services and supports for their group benefits plans that much larger companies do.

Johnston is also a partner in the Winnipeg payroll company Payworks, and as sister companies, the two recently launched a product called Tandem that can simplify the costs and time to process benefits with the industry’s first real-time integration of payroll and employee benefit platforms.

The company must be doing a good job because it’s adding about 4,000 new groups every year to the close to 34,000 it already has on the books. Last year, Johnston said the company grew by about nine per cent.

In addition to not being worried about getting its name out there — other than for its community support work — the company is not really that interested in what the competition is doing either.

“We have no intention on selling… ever,” he said.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca