Employee Benefits Program
Strategic Employee Benefits Leadership
For a global manufacturer with subsidiaries across the U.S. and Europe, AI-driven product technology, and a workforce that spans manufacturing, engineering, field service, and international operations, the employee benefits program is both a material cost center and a strategic financial lever. It directly impacts EBITDA, talent acquisition, and the retention of the engineering team building the technology BHS competes on. Samantha Bradley manages the program at all three levels simultaneously, aligning cost containment, funding strategy, and operational execution.
What Samantha Delivers for BHS
Samantha delivers disciplined financial stewardship of the employee benefits program. She ensures the plan is structured not only to support the workforce, but to operate as a cost-efficient, strategically aligned component of the enterprise.
Her role extends beyond renewal execution. She aligns plan design, funding strategy, network negotiations, and vendor partnerships with BHS's broader operational and financial objectives. Every decision is evaluated through the lens of cost containment, trend management, and long-term scalability across the parent company and its subsidiaries.
She bridges executive leadership priorities with HR implementation, ensuring that strategic direction translates into measurable financial outcomes. The objective is not simply to maintain coverage. It is to engineer a benefits program that performs efficiently, protects EBITDA, and scales with BHS's continued PE-backed growth.
Proactive Network Advocacy
October 2025
When Regence and Salem Health fell out of their contractual agreement as of January 2025, it left a gap for many employers and their membership. Identifying the need to fill this gap, Samantha's team did not wait to be asked, but rather reacted proactively and created a proprietary direct employer contract for HUB clients to continue to access Salem Health facilities and providers:
When members experience provider disruption, it's important to Samantha to take immediate action to create relationships outside of the traditional network providers, to always put the member and the group health plan first.
Samantha's Team
Team Lead, Account Executive
Malia leads the BHS account team day-to-day, coordinating strategy and execution across plan design, renewals, and the operational complexity that comes with a global manufacturer. As Team Lead, she ensures every decision Samantha makes at the strategic level is implemented cleanly across BHS's multi-state and international workforce.
Account Manager
Jen manages the day-to-day account operations for BHS: enrollment, member communications, carrier coordination, and the administrative load that keeps a multi-subsidiary benefits program running. She is the operational throughline between BHS's HR team and the broader HUB capability behind the program.
Chief Compliance Officer
Liliana oversees compliance for HUB's national EB practice. For BHS, that means active management of multi-state compliance calendars (OR, TN, CA, plus international jurisdictions), ACA reporting, ERISA filings, and the regulatory complexity that comes with operating across multiple subsidiaries on three continents.
Strategic Planning
Samantha's pre-renewal strategic planning for BHS is built around three core priorities, each centered on financial discipline and best-in-class performance. The first is a comprehensive review of the current employee benefits program, particularly relevant given public employee feedback signals about the existing program, to ensure it reflects the same operational excellence that defines BHS's engineering and manufacturing work. Multi-state, multi-subsidiary, PE-backed accountability requires a benefits program that operates at a best-in-class level, both in performance and cost efficiency.
A comprehensive review of BHS's current benefits program (plan design, contribution strategy, network alignment, and cost trend) benchmarked against peer multi-state manufacturers and PE-backed industrial companies. Public employee feedback already flags dissatisfaction with the current program; the objective is to quantify the gap and structure a path to a best-in-class program.
Samantha brings leadership together to help shape the vision of the BHS health and welfare program. By identifying trends, employee engagement opportunities, and financial opportunities within the organization, this allows for strategic planning that begins early and occurs often.
A benefits program architecture built to compete for engineering and R&D talent in the same labor market as Pacific Northwest tech employers, support manufacturing and field service retention, and absorb international and multi-state operational complexity cleanly. Built for where BHS is going: continued PE-backed growth, expanding contracts, an engineering workforce competing for talent against the broader tech sector.
Retirement Strategy
401(k) & Retirement Plan Specialist
For a private-equity-backed manufacturer with 230+ employees across multiple states and a workforce that includes engineers, manufacturing operators, and field service technicians, the retirement plan is a core piece of total compensation strategy. Plan design, fiduciary responsibility, fee benchmarking, and participant outcomes are not afterthoughts. They directly affect recruiting, retention, and the financial discipline PE investors expect.
Retirement Specialty
Nick brings deep specialization in 401(k) and retirement plan design, working directly with plan sponsors, recordkeepers, and investment consultants. His role is to ensure BHS's retirement program is structured, priced, and administered to a standard that matches the operational excellence of the rest of the business.
For BHS specifically, Nick offers fiduciary support, fee benchmarking, plan design optimization, and ongoing participant education. These are the components of a retirement program that protect both the employer and the employees.
Coverage Map
A coordinated read across the six Employee Benefits lines that matter most to a PE-backed, multi-subsidiary manufacturer with a workforce running from manufacturing floors to engineering benches to international project sites.
Benefits Servicing
HUB International Northwest's Benefits Servicing team operates as an embedded partner, not a renewal vendor. For a multi-subsidiary manufacturer like BHS, this means a benefits team that understands manufacturing workforce dynamics, engineering retention competition, multi-state and international compliance calendars, and the operational reality of running open enrollment across a parent company and four subsidiaries on three continents.
Full-service open enrollment coordination including employee communications, multi-state plan presentation materials, on-site or virtual meetings as needed, and bilingual support for diverse workforce communication.
Active management of the OR + TN + CA + international compliance calendar: Oregon Paid Leave, California SDI and PFML, ACA reporting, ERISA filings, COBRA administration, Section 125 plan compliance, and international plan coordination for Nihot and BHS Europe.
Member-level claims support for employees navigating denied claims, network access issues, and complex billing questions. The advocacy team handles the conversations HR doesn't have time for.
Ongoing strategic touchpoints between renewals: regulatory change advisories, plan design discussions, vendor performance reviews, and proactive communication when carrier or network changes affect BHS's program.
The Fit
BHS isn't looking for an order-taker. They need a brokerage that understands industrial manufacturing, project-based work, multi-entity programs, and specialty markets. That's exactly where Team Haugen operates every day.
BHS's original industry was forest products, the same as many of our longest-standing clients. We understand manufacturing operations, mill-type exposures, and heavy equipment risk because we live in it daily. We speak their language from day one.
We work extensively with construction and specialty contractors. BHS's field installation work shares many of the same GL, completed operations, and installation floater exposures. We know how to structure those programs correctly.
HUB's national platform gives access to specialty markets, E&S carriers, and MGUs that a local or regional broker can't access. For a company with as many unique exposures as BHS, market access matters, especially for environmental, AI/tech liability, and international coverage.
Four subsidiaries, three states, international operations. HUB has the structure and resources to coordinate a consolidated program across all entities, something that delivers real value both in coverage quality and administrative efficiency.
BHS is a Eugene company, and so is Team Haugen. That local relationship matters. But when BHS needs carrier leverage or specialty coverage, they get all of HUB International behind that conversation.
BHS prides itself on innovation and engineering excellence. They expect the same from their partners. HUB's risk management approach, including loss analysis and carrier-ready underwriting presentations, aligns with how BHS thinks about long-term performance.
Exposure Map
A coordinated read on where BHS's operation creates meaningful P&C exposure, across core lines, project-based work, and the subsidiary footprint.
How Team Haugen Structures the Program
Five structural challenges, one coordinated program response.
Max-AI's robotic sorters are BHS's flagship IP and primary differentiator. They also introduce product-liability and cyber questions standard industrial manufacturing policies weren't written to answer.
We structure product liability and cyber coverage to account for autonomous equipment as a distinct risk class, not a hardware bolt-on. That means evaluating AI-specific product liability language, sizing cyber limits to the business-interruption footprint at client MRFs, and making sure neither coverage is treated as boilerplate.
BHS is not a single-entity operation. Each subsidiary has its own exposure profile; each geography has its own regulatory and carrier reality.
HUB's national platform coordinates consolidated programs across all entities, delivering both coverage consistency and administrative efficiency. One point of contact. One renewal cycle. Program structures sized to the whole operation, not patched together entity by entity.
Field installation at client facilities is where completed-ops and property-in-transit exposures collide. Underlying limits written for a generic industrial manufacturer often don't reflect BHS's actual contract scale.
We size installation floater and umbrella limits to actual contract values BHS is signing, not industry averages. A $150M MRF contract demands an excess tower that reflects the real underlying exposure, and installation floater coverage that stays active through final acceptance, not just delivery.
Nihot (Amsterdam) and project installations beyond North America create foreign liability, international property, and cargo exposures. U.S. domestic policies typically can't cover those operations without specific structure.
HUB's specialty market access includes international program structures: admitted foreign policies or standalone global programs, sized to BHS's actual footprint. We evaluate whether the operation belongs inside a global master or under country-specific admitted placements, based on where the exposure actually sits.
Zero Waste Energy's core business is converting organic waste to biogas. Methane production and storage create a specific environmental exposure profile, and waste-stream work at the Eugene facility adds its own pollution footprint.
Standard GL excludes pollution. We place dedicated pollution liability for ZWE operations and ensure coverage for site exposure at the Eugene facility. That includes operations-and-products pollution and, where appropriate, site-specific environmental impairment coverage tuned to the actual methane and waste-stream activity on the ground.
The Team Behind the Program
A dedicated commercial practice within HUB International Northwest, serving Oregon's industrial, agricultural, and manufacturing operators from Eugene.
SVP Commercial Lines, Team Haugen Lead
Associate Advisor, Commercial Lines
Associate Advisor, Commercial Lines
Private Client Risk Advisor
Private Client Risk Advisor
Private Client Account Manager
Vice President, Workers' Compensation
Workers' Compensation Claims Analyst
Manager II, Workers' Compensation
Insurance Adjuster
Client Services Advisor
CL Sr. Account Manager
CL Account Manager II
CL Account Manager II
CL Account Manager II
One organization, three programs. Logan, Samantha and Nick are ready to walk through what an integrated P&C + Employee Benefits program could look like for BHS: Eugene-based, engineering-fluent, with full HUB International market access across both pillars.
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