Project Brilliant, an Indianapolis-based consulting firm specializing in Agile training, has come a long way since its two-person start in 2012. Today, their team of 15 helps CIOs move faster and stay adaptable—but as they expanded coast-to-coast, they realized their own benefits weren't nearly as flexible as the Agile transformations they preach. With a team at every stage of life, they needed coverage that could actually keep up, and they found it with ICHRA.
Kristen Kopel joined Project Brilliant in 2017 as the Vice President of Engagement Planning, working alongside her husband and CEO, Aaron. While her expertise lies in sales and marketing rather than HR, she’s like many small business leaders who wear multiple hats, which means the responsibility of managing employee benefits falls to her.
I don’t have an HR background or any training in benefits management, but I want to provide a great environment for our employees.
The struggle of being small in the Indiana group market
For years, Project Brilliant offered a traditional small-group health plan, but it never quite felt like enough. Having come from a large company with incredible benefits, Kristen found it disheartening to realize she no longer had the "big company" leverage to pick truly great options for her team. Instead, they were stuck with just two choices—one with an HSA and one without—both of which were frustratingly expensive, saddling employees with high premiums and heavy out-of-pocket costs. It wasn’t a great fit for anyone, but for those with families to support, the financial strain was especially tough to swallow.
I wanted to find something that gave us flexibility and more options at Project Brilliant.
Kristen found the Indiana health insurance market frustratingly limited and expensive, but the challenge didn't stop at the state line. With a team spread across Indiana, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the needs were as varied as the locations. Her employees ran the gamut from single individuals and empty nesters to large families with young children. From an administrative standpoint, trying to juggle multiple group plans across different states was a nightmare, and finding a single "one-size-fits-all" plan that actually worked for such a diverse workforce felt like an impossible mountain to climb.
The discovery that changed everything
With the current benefits proving unsustainable for everyone involved, Kristen knew they had to find a better way. The spark actually came from one of her own employees—a father with a large family who found the group plan particularly burdensome. He mentioned a friend who used marketplace insurance and asked if the company would consider reimbursing him if he opted out of the group plan.
Intrigued, Kristen began digging. She stumbled upon an article from a technology council she belongs to that introduced a concept she’d never heard of: the Individual Coverage HRA (ICHRA). When she reached out to her payroll provider, Gusto, they pointed her toward Take Command. After diving into their educational resources and connecting with their team, she knew she’d found the right partner. The ICHRA model seemed almost too good to be true. So simple, in fact, that Kristen found herself wondering if she was missing something since she had no prior training in employee benefits. But the more she learned, the more she realized this was exactly the solution they had been searching for.
One of my last questions before we signed up was What am I not asking? What am I missing? Now I’ve realized it's really that easy.
The unanimous "yes."
Before making the leap to an ICHRA, the leadership team at Project Brilliant wanted to ensure this was a move their employees would actually value. Kristen decided to lay it all out for the team, showing them the reality of their limited group plan options—with those sky-high premiums and deductibles—alongside the alternative: the Individual Coverage HRA. The feedback was unanimous. Everyone agreed that an ICHRA was clearly the best path forward for themselves and their families.
Employee benefits that meet you where you are
The onboarding process turned out to be incredibly smooth for the whole team. Each employee worked with Take Command’s dedicated enrollment specialists to explore plans available in their specific region and enroll in the coverage that perfectly fit their individual needs.
Everybody on the Take Command team was so awesome.
The benefits pivot that stood the test of time
The impact of the switch has been lasting. They recently brought on a new hire who was thrilled to find out he could keep the insurance plan he already had and liked, only now he’s getting reimbursed for it. Not surprisingly, he’s a huge fan. Project Brilliant checks in with the team every year, and the results speak for themselves: this is the fourth year in a row that employees have overwhelmingly voted "yes" when asked if they prefer their ICHRA over the old group health plan.
