It wouldn’t be quite fair to say that John Phillips was there in the beginning, but as the Group Insurance Trust’s longest-serving member and former Executive Director, he has been intimately involved in the evolution and growth of CalCPA’s insurance program for almost 40 years, including formation of the group health insurance program as a Multiple Employer Welfare Arrangement (MEWA).

Phillips joined CalCPA in 1968 shortly after receiving his CPA license. In 1972 he became a member of the Insurance Committee when Jim Kurtz, the long-time CEO of CalCPA, served as its Secretary. The Committee at that time was charged with overseeing all CalCPA-sponsored insurance plans and the Trust. This area of service also fit well with his professional responsibilities at Coopers & Lybrand in San Francisco where he  had become the first employee in what over many years would become a major human resource advisory group. One might say that Phillips was in the right place at the right time in respect to both his job and volunteer service, but that wouldn’t do justice to his enthusiasm for the work that engaged him over his long career. He has always found, he says, the precision of numbers to be “fun” and looked forward to his work every day—31 years with Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) and 10 years as executive director of the Trust.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962, serving in the military, and entering the workforce, Phillips soon saw, as he puts it, that “the language of business is accounting.” This insight inspired a return to Cal for an MBA with an accounting emphasis, which he earned in 1966, and then a stint at Golden Gate University at night for an MBA in taxation in 1972.

Already employed and trained as a CPA at Coopers & Lybrand, when the opportunity arose to join the actuarial group, he took the leap. He learned, he says, by doing the work in front of him. He took and passed the exams required to became an Enrolled Actuary and became a Member of the American Academy of Actuaries. He became a partner in Coopers & Lybrand in 1974 and built a human resources advisory group that ultimately employed 110 partners and employees in San Francisco and another 70 in Los Angeles. They had among their clients some of the country’s largest companies.

While Phillips’ own practice was “mostly on the pension side,” he managed departments that offered a range of benefit consulting services, including defined benefit plans, defined contribution plans, health care plans, and compensation plans. About the latter he comments with characteristic wry humor, “people think that creating a compensation plan is easy, but it’s trickier than it looks. Without realizing it, you can incentivize the wrong actions. Certainly there has been plenty of evidence corroborating this principle in the last year or so.”

When he became executive director of the Group Insurance Trust after retiring from Coopers & Lybrand in 1997, he made it his chief goal to provide member-owned firms with an economical, competitive, high quality health insurance program. In establishing the new company, he wrote the original policies and procedure manual that created the operating structure for the Group Insurance Trust and comments with pride, “We set up an insurance company. It worked well, and it continues to.” Looking back on his years as Executive Director, he acknowledges that the one area of the job that always felt like a challenge was in sales and marketing. In this regard, he is very pleased that Susan Young, the current ED, and Tom Kowalski, Sales Manager, provide strong leadership in areas where it was most needed.

At present, Phillips continues as a Trustee and as chair of the Finance and Investment Committee. In this capacity he helps monitor the investment portfolio and evaluate the need for change even as the Trust maintains the steady course that he helped create.

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