Gilsbar, LLC has named Colin Shea (pictured) as senior director of employee benefits, elevating the Covington, Louisiana-based consultant who has spent 17 years at the firm. The appointment puts a long-tenured advisor in charge of growth and client strategy for Gilsbar’s Group Benefits division.
Shea joined Gilsbar in 2009 as an account manager and has spent the intervening years building employer-specific benefits strategies across financial analysis, compliance, telemedicine, Rx cost management, and care navigation. He also played a central role in developing Care Advocates, a Gilsbar product that helps employees navigate the healthcare system, into a standalone offering marketed across broker, carrier, and employer channels.
“We are proud of the resources and value that Gilsbar is able to provide our clients through Colin’s dedication, creativity, and leadership,” said Ryan Haun, Gilsbar’s CEO. “With this change, we look forward to Colin making an even greater impact for our clients and our entire Gilsbar group benefits portfolio.”
The promotion comes as employer healthcare budgets are under their most sustained pressure in years. Employer health costs rose 8.8% in 2026 to an average of $14,432 per employee, the fourth consecutive year of near-double-digit increases, according to Aon. The sustained climb has pushed more employers into active management mode. Marsh’s 2026 National Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Plans, published in September and drawing on responses from more than 1,800 employers, projects health benefit costs will rise 8.2% per employee in 2027, the largest increase since 2003. Fifty-nine percent of employers plan to make cost-cutting changes to health benefits that year, including plan design adjustments that would raise employees’ out-of-pocket costs.
That trajectory has sharpened what employers want from advisors. Managing a benefits program has become a year-round discipline rather than an annual renewal exercise, and the advisors gaining traction are those with enough institutional knowledge of a client’s workforce, cost drivers, and plan history to act before costs escalate.
Shea’s profile, with nearly two decades at a single firm spanning both financial and operational dimensions of benefits strategy, fits that model closely. The broader market context reinforces the point: consolidation is concentrating benefits expertise in fewer and larger firms, making advisors with deep, documented client knowledge increasingly scarce and, for employers navigating sustained cost pressure, increasingly valuable.
