BCBusiness
The acquisition is a major milestone for McNeill, one of our former 30 Under 30 winners
Things are about to get a lot bigger for Beth McNeill—not that she’s ever had a problem rising to opportunities.
McNeill announced today that MB Pension and Benefits Group, the B Corp-certified, female and employee-owned employee benefits brokerage company she founded in 2017, has been acquired by Sterling Brokers. Sterling is the largest independently owned employee-benefits brokerage in Canada .It has made 12 acquisitions since 2019.
McNeill, who led St. Francis Xavier’s women’s rugby team to national championships in 2010 and 2012, and was featured in BCBusiness’s 30 Under 30 program in 2020, is excited about the partnership.
“Sterling is the perfect dance partner first and foremost because of how they championed employee culture, and how our values aligned with this,” she says. The two companies had been in talks for around two years and MB, which mostly helps small- and medium-sized business customers in B.C. and Alberta, wanted to be on the right side of the growing role technology is playing in the benefits space.
“We’ve always seen another level for MB. But we realized we needed a partner to find that 1+1=5 equation. They have proprietary technology that will allow us to bring enterprise-level benefits to areas of the market often left ignored.”
MB will retain its team of four led by McNeill as managing director and founding team member Anna Borecka as senior director of account management. The only change customers might notice is that the company will have “powered by Sterling” in the fine print.
As for the process, McNeill calls it “intense. “Nothing can prepare you for working through a transaction like this with the time constraints we were under, but we worked with the cohesiveness and resiliency we’d built as a team to do our part in getting this through.”
Andrew Blanchard, CEO of Sterling was impressed with the company’s growth in the small amount of time it’s been in business. “After just seven years of business, MB demonstrated revenues similar to firms that have been in employee benefits for significantly longer periods of time,” Blanchard said in a release. “The bulk of advisors in the space have been doing this for 20-plus years. Given how young the MB team is, it makes their growth and success to date remarkable.”
In the end, McNeill thinks that the acquisition will bolster the company’s main value proposition, which is aligning with the mental health needs of its customers and not adopting a one-size-fits-all approach.
“The average age of a broker in Canada is over 50,” she says. The average age of our shareholders at the time of the sale was 30. And we know that women and men make different decisions about their health—you see it reflected in insurance rates. Women pay more premiums and we claim more. There are four generations in the workforce today. That’s four different lenses on how people view their health. The industry has become stuck in a very concentrated demographic and hasn’t taken a full look at this canvas.”