The Welsh Wire: John Barry of Schupan Aluminum & Plastic Sales

Most businesses in Michigan offer some level of health insurance coverage if they want to recruit and retain quality employees. But few go so far as Schupan & Sons in Kalamazoo, which provides its workers with an onsite health center.

Schupan partnered with Fabri-Kal Corporation to open the The Schupan & Fabri-Kal Employee Health Center in the summer of 2018, in partnership with Marathon Health. Services include health assessments, acute care and health coaching.

The company wanted its employees to have access to better, more convenient health care, according to John Barry, president of Schupan Aluminum & Plastic Sales, a division of Schupan & Sons. He recently talked with Sheri Welsh for The Welsh Wire podcast. “The goal really was to have happier employees, have better access to care,” he says. “The disease prevention portion of it was really was really big for us, just because we knew that with the length of the [healthcare] appointments and all the different things that they’d be able to talk about,, hopefully you can catch something that maybe it wouldn’t have before.”

Companies all across Michigan struggle to hire and keep good workers, and a side benefit of the onsite health center is better retention, Barry says. “Retention plays a lot a lot into this. You know  there’s no one silver bullet to retain an employee. People want to go to a place that they actually enjoy going to work. We’ve really worked hard over the years to have a fun environment.” he says.

The Schupan philosophy, when they hire an employee, is for them to have a career at the company. “We want people to own their jobs. One of [Schupan CEO] Marc Schupan’s favorite comments is that no one washes a rental car. We don’t want our employees to have rental jobs, we want them to own them. And I think we’ve done a really good job of that.”

Listen to Sheri’s entire interview with John Barry.

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