A buddy of mine has been out of work for over a year. He’s a plan administrator who worked for several third-party administrators (TPAs) and he let me now that several changes were affecting a TPA I recommended he contact.
I’m the last to know anything and I found out a few months later that this TPA was bought by private equity. How did I find out? The decision-makers there I knew who didn’t own a price of the business were working places elsewhere. You like a TPA because of the people who work there and the first thing that buyers of TPAs do, is run people like that out. They keep the owners in place because of some earn-out/buy-out deal, but the people who didn’t have an equity stake exit stage left. There was a Long Island-based TPA, staffed with so many former co-workers I worked with. Those people they pushed out, the insufferable co-owner that I had a bad interview with so many years ago, well they kept him.
The most valuable asset that a TPA has is their employees and very few TPAs recognize this.
