Peoplease: Partners for Performance

View This Article in BOSS Magazine

By enabling SMBs to concentrate on their core capacities, Peoplease opens opportunities for resounding success

SMBs face constant pressure and challenges when trying to build and grow their businesses. Finding time to focus on your core businesses becomes more and more difficult in a world where employers need to be become experts in navigating through a maze of laws and regulations, looking at new ways to retain and recruit employees, managing multiple vendors to meet their technology and HR needs all while dealing with the reality of rising costs, lower margins, and pressure from competition. Increasingly SMBs are seeking alternatives to the traditional approach to managing their businesses and looking for ways to control sky-rocketing cost while at the same time not sacrificing quality, performance or reducing staff. Their real question is, “How can we do more for less?” The answer for many is Peoplease (PEO). Peoplease is the leading provider of HR services serving the blue and gray collar market. Peoplease provides its customers with access to risk management services, w/c, payroll and benefits, end-to-end HR administration, employee life cycle management as well as world-class technology all managed through a single platform. By combining these services under one partner, Peoplease customers leverage economies of scales and efficiency to reduce employer related risks, drive operational efficiency, attract, and retain workers and control costs more effectively than their competition.

For 25 years, Peoplease has been leveraging their expert teams and customizable solutions to enable SMBs to reduce risk and save time and money while they focus on growing their businesses. Now owned by a private equity group, Peoplease is reinventing itself as The Peoplease Group (TPG), bringing together a quartet of uniquely positioned PEO brands under one umbrella to become an industry powerhouse.

Each brand has in-depth expertise serving industries such as transportation, construction, manufacturing, and healthcare. In creating a pioneering partnership and co-employer model that understands the needs of industry niches, TPG makes it possible for SMBs to achieve more for less as they work towards achieving their business goals. They provide tailored people-focused solutions including payroll processing, benefits, workers compensation, payroll, tax filings, government compliance, HR competency solutions, and much more.

“Scale matters when we're negotiating contracts,” explained Eric Lynn, General Manager of TPG's Transportation Division/TLC Companies. “Critical mass allows for more bargaining power. That is the case for benefits, workers compensation, technology as well as for the other third-party solutions we provide.” In unifying brands that each have a variety of best in class industry solutions, TPG is significantly expanding its reach to give customers access to the unique solutions and services they need, all in one place.

“Our hope at the end of this is that our client base and future clients are more satisfied given the access they have to all the different solutions from each of these brands,” Lynn added. That increased satisfaction hinges on relevance.

“In a business like ours, which is really driven by recurring revenue and clients staying for a long time, it is very important to have your finger on the pulse of what your customers’ issues are today. By having our finger on their pulse, we can ensure that our products and services meet their current needs but also grow and evolve by offering new services and products as we anticipate future needs,” said Mike Maseda, the company’s president and CEO. To that end, their client service-oriented structure to be close to the customers, understanding the differences between them, and staying ahead of the trends that shape their futures.

It is getting increasingly more difficult for many SMBs to reach their goals when they must invest considerable time and energy dealing with complex and ever-changing issues – such as regulatory compliance – on top of the everyday headaches and liabilities that come with being an employer.

The PEO competitive landscape leverages their capability to serve customers in narrow niches, solving specific customer problems. In unifying the four brands and sharing the bounty of their targeted industry knowledge, TPG is identifying the commonalities across all those niches, building on them, and searching out additional niches to serve.

The TPG model leans into co-employment. In doing so, TPG can aggregate groups of small and medium-sized businesses to appear as one large employer to the government when it comes to paying taxes to insurance carriers and placing insurance to bring the advantages of scale, size, and expertise to SMBs.

“We can access those insurance products in a way that's much more inexpensive,” Maseda said. “The insurance experience can be volatile, but because we have so many clients pulled together and we're large, we take away some of that volatility, which helps them in turn manage their costs in the long term.”

TPG has the purchasing power to invest in world class products that most SMBs could not, such as workers compensation insurance. “We’re able to leverage size and scale,” he continued. “We also leverage expertise and technology to really create a much more efficient and effective model for our customers to build their business upon.” TPG becomes part of a company’s infrastructure. The ability to custom build that essential framework translates into dramatically increased opportunities for success that could not be pursued in its absence.

TPG’s business model is designed for flexibility, and that has come in handy as business environments have changed. Maseda points to healthcare reform as an example. “Our PEO model was one of the few that had payroll information, tax information, and benefits information all in one,” he said.

Firms using different companies for payroll and benefits administration faced the burden of getting everyone working together to pull the data required by the government.

During the pandemic TPG proactively helped their clients with everything they needed to successfully apply for PPP loans. “We have all the information on board,” Maseda added. “We’re not just a product or a service provider.”

As a true partner to their clients, TPG has serious skin in the game. “We share certain liabilities with them, and they become our liabilities,” Maseda stressed. “We are not a third-party administrative provider that does not care. We are not just moving numbers around or doing some administrative service. If our clients do well, we do well, and that is why this model has become been so effective over time.”

As the brands were coming together, CIO John Glomstad got a head start on centralizing the company’s IT. “That allowed us to do some things like standardize infrastructure and security, which was foundational for what we're doing now,” he said. Core infrastructure, operational support, security, communications, and strategy have been unified under one service model.

In terms of the available market, Maseda estimates that the industry has 10-15% penetration, leaving abundant room to grow. “I'm a very big believer that we are in the second inning of this industry, that there is a lot of running room and there are a lot more people that really need to take advantage of this business model and will in the future,” he declared.

“We're not a service provider for our clients. We are a partner, and that means having a sincere interest in watching them thrive and doing everything that we can to make that happen.”