What Starkel Nutrition Likes about Gusto’s No Hidden Fees and Tailored Insurance Plans

Starkel Nutrition founder Julie Starkel, an advanced-practice Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and Certified Dietitian (RDN/CD), has had a unique career journey. When she was in high school, she found an old book on nutrition on her mom’s kitchen bookshelf, which had belonged to her grandmother. It sparked a lifelong passion for nutrition – even as she started studying marketing and launched a career in international business, she continued reading nutrition textbooks for fun. It wasn’t until she was in her thirties that she decided to make a career pivot, leading her to pursue a master’s of science degree in nutrition. Now, as the founder of Starkel Nutrition, she’s working to help as many people as she can lead healthy lives. 

As a healthcare provider with services covered under multiple employee insurance programs, Julie saw firsthand the impact health insurance can have on the kind of care patients receive. So from the beginning, she wanted to provide her own team with comprehensive health insurance. 

So nearly a decade ago, Julie began looking for benefits packages that could support her small yet mighty team. At that time, she had started using Gusto for payroll, but Gusto hadn’t started offering health insurance yet. She decided to work with a financial planner and insurance broker she had met through a local business networking group. And of course, she wanted to ensure any plan she offered to her employees also included coverage for nutrition.

• “Because I know how much help we can provide, we chose an insurance plan that also enables us to delve into self-care… I’m a better provider for my clients if I can get a massage myself, and my insurance covers it … I wanted to provide that type of care to my employees.”

While she initially had a positive experience with her broker, she found the amount of work required overwhelming. Plus, there were added costs she wasn’t prepared for.

• “As a healthcare services provider, I’m on the other side of insurance. I understood insurance better than the average business owner because I take reimbursement as payment, so I had to understand how it worked … But it’s overwhelming. You have all these plans with all these different options …  It was confusing, but mostly it just was very time-consuming.”

• “Our broker asked for us to pay her the fee since the insurance company was no longer paying her. The fee was higher than what I ended up paying with Gusto.”

When Julie learned that she now had the option to integrate her existing plans with her Gusto account by making Gusto her broker, she knew she wanted to make the switch. By integrating her benefits with Gusto, it was much simpler for her employees to access their plan details and enroll each year. Gusto also took the headache out of their annual renewal. The licensed benefits advisor presented her with options that met her needs and guided her through the experience. 

• “There are so many different options and plans within each insurance company that it was so overwhelming. So I really appreciated that I could put in my parameters and then I’m given four to five plans to look at, which is perfect.” 

How Gusto Gives Starkel Nutrition Peace of Mind – And Time Back – on Health Insurance

In 2020, Julie switched to Gusto for health insurance administration, giving her team a single source of truth for all things payroll and benefits. Julie has never looked back – she’s continued to renew her health insurance plan with Gusto annually for the past four years.

Julie has been able to decrease the time spent every year on managing health insurance benefits by more than 94%. With her past broker, she spent 30 to 45 minutes every month managing benefits and doing the bookkeeping required for her team’s insurance premiums. Now she spends just 20 minutes each year reviewing her plan during renewal time. 

• “The simplicity is the number one thing. I have so much on my plate. I have to think about everything every day. So having this taken care of for 20 minutes once a year – I can't tell you just how awesome it is."

• “It was a pain in the neck to have to do manual deductions every month with the tax implications. I just wanted to have it all in one spot. Combining benefits with payroll through Gusto just makes it easy.”

How Gusto Provides Starkel Nutrition With Support and Compliance 

Along with providing an all-in-one platform that fully integrates her payroll and health insurance, Gusto handles benefits administration and compliance for no extra cost. Plus, Gusto’s licensed benefits advisors have been able to give her the support she needs whenever she has questions. She recently had a question about whether her plan continued to offer vision coverage. 

• “I contacted the benefits person at Gusto and they answered me within 12 hours and said, yes, [vision] is covered under the plan. That was super helpful.” 

In addition, Julie appreciates the level of support she receives for compliance and tax, as her payroll and health insurance deductions are seamless. 

• “We have two classes of employees. We have administration and providers and they have different portions of the premium that they pay … and then the company pays the remainder for both of those. So I'm able to set that up at the beginning of the year through Gusto, using Gusto as our insurance broker, and then that is applied to all the payroll.”

• “[In the past], I never knew about deducting premiums and taking them out pre-tax – what do I take out, and what do I have to do? I’m a nutritionist, not a tax specialist! Using Gusto for payroll is just wonderful because it’s so easy. The same ease that I appreciate about Gusto for payroll is there now with insurance.”