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InFocus Advisors begins operating Patricia D Spencer Agency
CLAY — InFocus Advisors, Inc. brought the operations of Patricia D Spencer Agency under its roof at the beginning of November. “To the best of my knowledge this is pretty unique,” says Dave Lavelle, president of InFocus Advisors and one of the insurance, investment, and group-benefit firm’s five partners. “You used to have a small, […]
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CLAY — InFocus Advisors, Inc. brought the operations of Patricia D Spencer Agency under its roof at the beginning of November.
“To the best of my knowledge this is pretty unique,” says Dave Lavelle, president of InFocus Advisors and one of the insurance, investment, and group-benefit firm’s five partners. “You used to have a small, one-person producer that decided they would join an agency or go from one agency to another. But it’s not as common for entire agencies to do that.”
InFocus Advisors is managing all of the Spencer Agency’s operations under an agency-managing contract. But Patricia Spencer still owns her agency.
The arrangement takes advantage of economies of scale, according to Lavelle. The Spencer Agency no longer has its own location, as all of its operations are being run from InFocus Advisors’ headquarters at 8035 Oswego Road in Clay.
The Spencer Agency closed its former four-person office at 4317 E. Genesee St. in DeWitt at the beginning of November, Lavelle adds. InFocus Advisors added the Spencer Agency’s main service employee, and Spencer Agency clients will be able to buy additional lines of insurance through the agency because of the agreement, Lavelle continues.
“They were mostly what we call in the business a property and casualty shop,” he says. “We also do life and financial, and other aspects as well. Some of the things their clients used to do, they may not have had a market for. We do have a market for them.”
Existing clients should not notice much of a change, according to Lavelle. They will still purchase their insurance coverage through the Spencer Agency, existing as its own company.
The agencies’ managing contract does contain a provision setting up InFocus Advisors to acquire the Spencer Agency’s book of business when Spencer decides to sell it in the future. That clause kicks in after 25 months, meaning Spencer could decide to sell to InFocus Advisors any time after that.
“By that time we think the book will become solidified,” Lavelle says. “Their clients will be used to us and our staff.”
Managing the Spencer Agency is one way InFocus Advisors plans to grow in the future. The Spencer Agency will probably make up 12 percent to 14 percent of InFocus Advisors’ revenue in 2013, Lavelle says. Without the Spencer Agency deal, InFocus Advisors would likely have grown between 10 percent and 13 percent next year, matching its rate of growth in recent years, he says. With the Spencer Agency, Lavelle anticipates InFocus Advisors’ growing revenue by 19 percent to 20 percent.
He declines to share specific revenue totals. He also declines to disclose financial terms of the agency-managing contract.
Adding the Spencer Agency employee brings InFocus Advisors to nine employees. It also has nine independent contractors. The company is headquartered in 3,000 square feet it leases on Oswego Road from landlord James Carroll. InFocus Advisors used to own the building but sold it to Carroll in 2010, according to records from Onondaga County’s Office of Real Property Tax Services.
InFocus Advisors will consider acquiring other insurance agencies in the future, according to Lavelle. It will also be open to more agency-managing contracts.
“We think there are a lot of agencies out there that aren’t willing to sell yet but recognize in this environment the potential for a situation like this,” Lavelle says. “As an agency owner you can actually make more money because you’re not paying the expenses, and because of economies of scale you can serve your clients better.”
In addition to Lavelle, InFocus Advisors’ other partners are Mike Monica, Eric Deuble, its director of operations, Matt Warner, and its CEO, Rick Carlesco.
Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com
Upstate health-benefit costs rose 3.5 percent in 2012
Health-benefit costs increased less in upstate New York than they did nationally in 2012, according to recently released results of a survey from the human-resources consulting firm Mercer. Costs rose 3.5 percent in upstate New York to an average of $9,364 per employee, Mercer found in its National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans 2012, which
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Health-benefit costs increased less in upstate New York than they did nationally in 2012, according to recently released results of a survey from the human-resources consulting firm Mercer.
Costs rose 3.5 percent in upstate New York to an average of $9,364 per employee, Mercer found in its National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans 2012, which it issued Nov. 14. Costs rose slightly more nationwide, climbing 4.1 percent to $10,558 per employee, although that was still the smallest increase measured by Mercer in 15 years.
Both the regional and national increases are lower than estimates from earlier this year. Preliminary polling showed health-benefit costs would rise nationally by 6.5 percent, Mercer reported in September.
Upstate’s health-care landscape helped hold down its cost increases in 2012, according to Thomas Flynn, a principal at Mercer’s Rochester office, which covers the upstate area.
“We’re at a little bit of an advantage,” Flynn says. “The cost of living and the overall costs have really started at a lower point.”
The region’s employers also boosted their consumer-directed health plan (CDHP) offerings, he adds. CDHPs are typically high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) paired with employee-directed spending accounts such as health-savings accounts or health-reimbursement arrangements.
CDHPs were offered by 44 percent of upstate employers in 2012, Mercer found. That’s twice the national CDHP offer rate and is up from 32 percent in 2011.
“Every year, we’ve said that upstate New York employers planned to look at these CDHPs at a much higher rate than anywhere else in the country — it was a running joke,” Flynn says. “This year, what we saw was the adoption rate of these CDHPs certainly accelerated.”
Upstate employee participation in CDHPs swelled to 16 percent this year, up from 13 percent last year. The national participation rate in the plans is also 16 percent.
Preferred-provider organizations (PPO) and point-of-service plans (POS) were still the most popular among upstate employees. PPO/POS plans covered 65 percent of workers in survey respondents’ health plans. HMOs covered 17 percent, and traditional indemnity plans covered 2 percent.
2013 costs
Survey respondents in upstate New York said they expect to limit cost increases in 2013 to 3.7 percent. In large part, that’s because they anticipate making changes to their plan designs or vendors.
More than half of upstate survey respondents, 54 percent, said they will shift costs to their employees. Examples of cost-shifting strategies include raising deductibles, boosting co-pays, raising out-of-pocket maximums, and increasing employees’ share of premium contributions. Without any plan changes, health-benefit costs would rise 6.7 percent next year, upstate companies predicted in the survey.
Large upstate employers, those with 500 or more workers, were not as optimistic about holding down health-benefit costs in 2013. They predicted that benefit costs would rise 5.9 percent if they did not make plan changes but believe they will hold costs to 4.2 percent by making modifications.
Many large employers seem to think they have exhausted their options for curtailing costs, Flynn says.
“What we’re seeing is they feel they’ve done so much already,” he says. “They’ve created incentives, they’ve attracted people to health management, they’ve attracted people to the HDHPs.”
Most survey respondents aren’t considering eliminating health-insurance coverage for their employees, Mercer found. Just 10 percent of upstate respondents said they are likely to terminate medical plans within the next five years, after state insurance exchanges are up and running. The portion is even lower among large upstate employers — 6 percent.
Mercer conducted its national survey in the late summer by polling public and private employers with at least 10 workers. This year, 2,809 employers completed the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
In upstate New York, 54 employers completed the survey. A majority of those employers, 36, were large companies with at least 500 workers.
Mercer, which has 20,000 employees in more than 40 countries, is a wholly owned subsidiary of New York City–based Marsh & McLennan Cos., Inc (NYSE: MMC).
Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com
Michigan firm expands into New York with merger
CANTON — C2AE, an architectural, engineering, and planning firm based in Lansing, Mich., has merged with engineering firm Burley-Guminiak & Associates, Consulting Engineers, P.L.L.C. (BGA)
Motherhood, apple pie, and school staffing
Growing up, I was taught that two things were sacrosanct — motherhood and apple pie. Education has added a third item: ever expanding, K-12 public-school staffing. In 1950, I was in the seventh grade when the clamor began to increase the number of teachers and reduce the ratio of pupils to teachers. The teaching “professionals”
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Growing up, I was taught that two things were sacrosanct — motherhood and apple pie. Education has added a third item: ever expanding, K-12 public-school staffing.
In 1950, I was in the seventh grade when the clamor began to increase the number of teachers and reduce the ratio of pupils to teachers. The teaching “professionals” convinced us that more teachers and smaller classes would generate better educated students, who would then go on to compete in a global economy.
So, “How are we doing?” to borrow a phrase from former New York City mayor Ed Koch. Six decades later, the number of K-12 students in the U.S. increased 96 percent. Full-time school employees (FTEs) increased 386 percent, a four-fold surge. Of that total, teachers saw a 252 percent increase, while non-teaching staff — administrators, support staff, clerical staff, etc. — exploded by 702 percent. The national pattern held true in 48 states, including nine that actually experienced a decline in student enrollment. In just the last two decades, New York State K-12, public-school enrollment increased only 3.7 percent while total staff rose 26.5 percent.
The corollary of hiring more public-school staff was a 60-year decline from 19.3 students per public-school employee to 7.8 students per public-school employee. In the case of the pupil-teacher ratio, the numbers dropped from 27.5 to 1 in 1950 to 15.4 to 1 in 2009.
Was there a return on the investment for taxpayers and for the country?
In 2009, a sample of K-12 students from 34 countries, which formed the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) along with 31 other nations and provinces, took the international exam called PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment). The U.S. Department of Education summarized the math scores: 17 countries had higher average scores, while five had lower scores. Eleven others had scores similar to U.S. students.
Our mediocre performance was achieved even though the U.S. spent more money per K-12 student than all but two other OECD countries.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is another yardstick for measuring student performance. The exams are given on various subjects when the students are 9, 13, and 17 years of age. Since 1992, reading scores have declined slightly while math scores have remained flat.
U.S. public high-school graduation rates have declined for the past three decades with only a recent, slight uptick. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, on-time, public high-school graduation rates have remained below 75 percent for the past 20 years. The rate has actually declined over a 40-year span, and the gap between minority and majority graduation rates have not converged at all over the last 35 years. Also, the decline of graduation rates is growing among young males, exacerbating a corresponding gender gap in college attendance with increasing numbers of women attending colleges and universities.
At this point, defenders of school staffing will respond that much of the problem is tied to federal legislation, specifically No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB did require reporting and testing, but the rate of hiring since the program’s inception has only slowed to the point where teacher and non-teacher hiring are even. “Kids are harder to teach today,” is the next defense. Actually, today’s parents, on the whole, are more affluent, better educated, and have smaller families than when I went to public school, all predictors of improved student achievement that more than offsets the growth of family breakdown.
What’s missing in this rush to drive up the quantity of teachers and bureaucrats is a concern for quality. You don’t have to be a professional educator to recognize that teacher effectiveness is the most critical component in education. This relentless focus on putting teachers in the classroom hasn’t been accompanied by a concern to hire and retain outstanding teachers. Moreover, the explosion of bureaucracy has hampered teacher performance rather than enhanced it.
So who has benefitted from six decades of rising school staffing? Clearly the unions have, by increasing their membership and income. Parents of children with special needs have undoubtedly benefitted from programs and personal attention. But the taxpayers and the commonweal have not reaped a reward from the massive investment. Our graduates, on the whole, are not better educated than they were in 1950 and not competitive with OECD countries, which on average, spend 72 percent less of their operating budgets on non-teaching staff while pumping nearly 10 percent more money directly into the classroom.
Only a monopoly can operate for six decades, spending ever-increasing sums without any tangible return. A 2012 poll by the Fordham Institute found that 69 percent of the adults surveyed favored a reduction in the number of bureaucrats in the public school and 73 percent of respondents would prefer larger classes for their children if taught by an effective teacher.
It seems that the public is well ahead of the politicians. Change, however, will only come when the public-school monopoly is broken and parents have real choice. Then we can return to what’s truly sacred — motherhood and apple pie.
Norman Poltenson is publisher of The Mohawk Valley Business Journal. Contact him at npoltenson@tmvbj.com
First Niagara hires new chief information officer
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Downtown Ithaca energy study moves forward
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New executive director takes helm at UVANY
The Upstate Venture Association of New York, Inc. (UVANY) has a new executive director. The group announced the appointment of Samuel Ticknor to the post
Excellus repays $3.1 million following claim-denial glitch
Excellus BlueCross BlueShield has repaid plan members and providers after a fall 2011 computer error caused it to deny claims made by individuals who had
Bar leaders outline spending cut worries
The New York State Bar Association and 15 local bar associations around the state sent a letter to lawmakers detailing their concerns over the automatic
Decker School of Nursing receives training grant
VESTAL — The Decker School of Nursing at Binghamton University received a two-year, $757,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health
Stay up-to-date on the companies, people and issues that impact businesses in Syracuse, Central New York and beyond.