5 Stones Benefits Group and Supplemental Insurance
Vetcelerator has extensive experience supporting veterinary practice growth, and truly sustainable growth depends on having the right people in place. Independent veterinary practices need to attract and retain great employees if they want to grow.
Matt Barnett from 5 Stones Benefits Group shares how supplemental employee benefits can help veterinary practices compete for talent, improve employee retention, and provide vet clinic teams with additional financial protection without requiring the resources of a large corporate group.
Employee Benefits Can Be a Powerful Veterinary Recruitment and Retention Tool
Veterinary practice owners know how disruptive employee turnover can be. Losing a team member can mean recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, training, and waiting for a new employee to become fully productive.
For a veterinary practice, there can be another consequence: losing the capacity to see patients while the position remains vacant.
Employee retention is a business issue as much as a staffing issue. Employee benefits are one way independent veterinary practices can differentiate themselves in a competitive employment market.
Compensation will always matter, but prospective employees are evaluating what comes with the job, too. Making additional benefits available gives veterinary practices another way to demonstrate the value of joining (and staying with) their team.
For smaller practices, however, offering competitive veterinary employee benefits can feel like something reserved for much larger employers. It doesn’t necessarily have to be.
Small Independent Veterinary Practices Can Access Group Supplemental Benefits
One of the biggest misconceptions surrounding employee benefits is that meaningful group options require a large workforce.
5 Stones Benefits Group focuses on supplemental benefits rather than major medical insurance. Its carrier relationships allow the group to offer certain group supplemental benefit options to businesses with as few as two eligible participants.
A low participant threshold can be particularly significant for independent veterinary practices, where teams may be considerably smaller than those of corporate organizations.
What Supplemental Benefits Includes
Coverage available through 5 Stones can include:
- Short-Term Disability
- Long-Term Disability (for Vets)
- Accident
- Critical Illness
- Hospital Coverage
- Life Insurance
- Dental and Vision
- Other Supplemental Benefits
Because 5 Stones is carrier-agnostic, the group can work across multiple carriers to identify options for an employer rather than representing only one carrier. This gives veterinary practice owners an opportunity to build a more competitive benefits offering without needing the size or infrastructure of a corporate organization.
Of course, access is only one consideration. For many independent practice owners, the next question is what offering those benefits will cost.
Offering Employee Benefits Doesn't Necessarily Mean Paying for Everything
Supplemental benefit programs can be structured in different ways depending on the veterinary clinc’s goals and budget. Some practice owners choose to cover a specific benefit, while others provide employees with a defined contribution toward their benefits.
A veterinary practice can make certain supplemental benefits available while employees pay for the coverage themselves, too.
“They don't have to make a contribution to make this available to their staff.”
A veterinary practice owner may want to strengthen the benefits available to employees but not currently have the budget to fund an extensive package. Providing access can still give employees options they wouldn’t otherwise have through their workplace. Other practices may choose to contribute toward the cost as part of their overall compensation and employee retention strategy.
The goal isn’t necessarily to create the largest benefits package. It’s to have an offering that makes sense for the business while providing meaningful value to employees. And that value becomes clearest when an employee actually needs the protection.
Supplemental Benefits Are Financial Protection When Life Happens
Supplemental benefits serve a different purpose from major medical insurance. Rather than replacing medical coverage, they are an additional layer of financial protection for qualifying events. Depending on the policy, supplemental insurance can provide benefits associated with accidents, hospitalization, critical illness, disability, and other covered circumstances.
Consider a situation especially relevant to veterinary medicine: an employee gets badly scratched or bitten by a cat and requires medical attention. An eligible employee with accident coverage uses that policy following the injury.
It’s an everyday vet med example of a larger point. Unexpected events can create unexpected expenses, and supplemental benefits give employees another form of protection when those situations arise.
For employees to appreciate that protection, however, they first need to understand what they’re being offered.
Benefits Are More Valuable When Your Veterinary Team Understands Them
“The biggest part to this is the education. We are a 'Paideia Partner.' Paideia is a Greek word for education. Benefits educated are more appreciated, more understood, and better utilized.”
Making veterinary employee benefits available is only the first step. Employees need to understand what their benefits are, what they cover, and when they might use them.
Insurance terminology can quickly become overwhelming. Handing a veterinary clinic employee a packet of policy information and asking them to make decisions may technically provide access, but it doesn’t necessarily provide understanding.
Supplemental Benefits Education
Whenever possible, 5 Stones Benefits Group walks veterinary teams through their options, explains the different types of coverage, and gives employees an opportunity to understand what they are accepting or declining.
Education benefits the practice, too. If employee benefits are intended to strengthen the overall employment experience, employees need to recognize the value of what’s being offered. Once employees understand their options, the next challenge is making those benefits easy for the team and the practice owner to manage.
Making Veterinary Employee Benefits Easier to Manage and Use
For a busy veterinary practice owner or manager, adding another administrative responsibility can make even a valuable employee program less attractive. Benefits administration therefore needs to work behind the scenes without creating an unnecessary burden for the practice.
Simple Benefits Administration
Enrollment for 5 Stones Benefits Group clients is managed through Employee Navigator, a benefits administration platform that communicates enrollment changes with participating carriers.
Employees receive access to a customized electronic benefits center where they can find benefit guides and information about filing claims.
Help for Employees Navigating Claims
When one of your veterinary practice’s employees files an insurance claim for the first time, 5 Stones Benefits Group is available to walk them through the process so they understand what documentation is required and how to submit it.
The objective is to make benefits easier to understand when employees are choosing them and easier to navigate when they need them. And in some cases, the value of those benefits can extend beyond an employee’s time with the practice.
Portable Benefits Provide Value Beyond Employment
Certain supplemental benefits provide employees with value that isn’t necessarily tied permanently to their current job.
Depending on the policy, coverage other than disability can be portable, meaning an employee who leaves the veterinary practice may be able to take certain accident, critical illness, or hospital coverage with them.
“Turnover costs are ridiculously high. Then there’s the training. Then there’s the recruiting and the marketing, which all lumps into the cost.”
The goal of offering employee benefits includes improving retention. Such an employee-centered approach as being able to offer portable benefits is part of a larger opportunity for independent veterinary practices: competing for talent by creating an employment experience people genuinely value.
Competing for Veterinary Talent as an Independent Practice
Independent veterinary practices compete with larger organizations for many of the same veterinarians, veterinary technicians, assistants, managers, and support staff. Larger employers naturally have advantages that come with scale, but being smaller doesn’t mean an independent veterinary practice can’t create a compelling employee experience.
Benefits are one part of that equation.
By giving employees access to supplemental coverage and deciding how much, if anything, the practice wants to contribute, smaller veterinary clinics can strengthen their employee benefits offering without trying to replicate the infrastructure of a national organization.
The bigger opportunity is to think about benefits as part of the practice’s overall employee value proposition.
Salary matters. Culture matters. Leadership matters. Growth opportunities matter. Benefits matter, too. When those pieces work together, an independent veterinary practice has more ways to show employees why working there is valuable and why staying there can be valuable as well.
Be a Veterinary Practice Where Employees Want to Stay
Recruiting veterinary professionals is difficult (Vetcelerator can help with that). Replacing good employees is expensive. For smaller practices, turnover can quickly affect the rest of the team and practice growth.
Supplemental employee benefits won’t solve every veterinary staffing challenge, but they can give practice owners another tool for supporting their teams and competing for veterinary talent. Through Vetcelerator’s partnership with 5 Stones Benefits Group, veterinary practice owners can explore supplemental benefit options and determine what makes sense for their employees, budget, and business.
Sustainable veterinary practice growth means building a business where great people want to work and giving them meaningful reasons to stay.
About Matt Barnett and 5 Stones Benefits Group
I’m Matt Barnett with 5 Stones Benefits Group.
5 Stones is a small, carrier-agnostic benefits group that was started in 2026 by five leaders, and they asked me and about forteen other veteran agents across the state to be a part of it. What we have the opportunity to do as a carrier-agnostic group is shop multiple group benefit carriers. We’re breaking down barriers because group benefits are typically designed for companies with 100 employees or more. I can bring group benefits that are much more cost-friendly, yet have higher benefit payout, all the way down to as few as two people.
I just love talking to people, giving them opportunities/education about what we do, and then letting them make informed decisions. That’s my job. And then I’m gonna service the heck out of you.
