Managing employees is one of the biggest challenges facing small businesses, but what if you could offload much of the HR burden while improving employee retention and compliance? That’s where a PEO, a Professional Employer Organization may be the right fit for your small business.

Episode Host: Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of The How of Business podcast show – dedicated to helping you start, run, grow and exit your small business.

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Resources:

Books mentioned in this episode:
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• NAPEO
• Find a PEO

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Transcript:

The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.

Henry Lopez  00:13

Welcome to The How of Business podcast. This is Henry Lopez. My guest today is Casey Clark. Casey, welcome to the show.

 

Casey Clark  00:20

Thanks for having me, Henry. Great to talk to you.

 

Henry Lopez  00:21

Absolutely, looking forward to this. We’ve not had this conversation, have not covered this topic after 10 years and 606 or so episodes. So, Casey Clark is the president and CEO of Napo, which is an organization that represents PEOs, which is professional employer organizations, and he’ll explain a little bit more about what they do for their members and for the industry, but we’re going to talk about how you might be able to, in your small business, leverage a PEO, and when it makes sense, what size, what type of organization do you need to be, or a PEO might be the right way to go, and then how do we select, how do we look for a PEO partner that would work for us that help us reduce time, increase compliance, reduce risks, and allow us as small business owners to focus on what we do best, which is to run and grow our business. You can find all of the resources and the show to space for this episode, as well as my one on one and group coaching program information at The Howa business.com Also, invite you to please consider joining the Howard Business community on Patreon, and subscribe wherever you might be listening, so you don’t miss any new episodes. Let me tell you a little bit more about Casey. Casey Clark is the President and CEO of NAPIO, the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations, that’s what PEO stands for, and they represent the industry that helps small and mid-sized businesses manage HR, payroll, employee benefits, and workforce compliance. Casey personally brings more than 25 years of experience advising businesses, trade associations, and organizations on strategy, communication, and regulatory issues. Before joining Napier, he served in senior leadership roles with the American Gaming Association, FTI Consulting, the US Chamber of Commerce, and other national organizations. So, once again, Casey Clark, welcome to the show.

 

Casey Clark  02:10

Henry, thanks so much for having me. You’re a great advocate already. I don’t even.. I could sit this one out and let you handle it.

 

Henry Lopez  02:15

Absolutely, well, I need to learn about PEOs, because I, and none of my businesses that I’ve had since my first business in 1919 91 have I had a PEO, but I’ve had clients who have had it, and certainly a lot of compelling reasons, but I thought we’d start with just introducing what is a PEO.

 

Casey Clark  02:33

Yeah, and that’s a great way to start. I mean, the PEO, and candidly, before I came here, I wasn’t, I was using a PEO, and didn’t even know it, and so when it works well, employees don’t even notice the difference, other than the fact that they’re well served from an HR and benefits perspective. So, what a PEO does is really enable a small business, a small business, or a small business owner to really focus on why they got into business in the first place. You know, unless you’re starting a PEO, you’re unlikely to be starting a business to focus on HR benefits, regulatory compliance, all the things that really bog down entrepreneurs, and so what a PEOS role fundamentally does is take all of that back-end system and burden away from a new business owner or someone who started another business to really help them focus on the things that that got them in there into that business in the first place, so we handle things like benefits administration, processing payroll, enabling tax remittance, the IRS for payroll taxes, compliance with the really robust and difficult patchwork quilt of regulatory issues across the country, and we’ll get in a little bit more of that, I think, a little bit later, because when you think about, particularly, you know, someone who lives in an area where, you know, I live in Virginia, but work in DC sometimes, and we have employees who live in Maryland and all across the region, when you start a business, you may not think about the fact that you have compliance-related obligations everywhere your employees are, and a fundamental role in a PEO can play is making sure that you’re in compliance all across the board, so we’re excited about the world we play in partnership with small businesses to help take that burden off of their plate, so they can focus on what it is they do best,

 

Henry Lopez  04:13

so it’s, it’s really a way of outsourcing that function, much like has become so much, so common with outsourcing my bookkeeping or having a fractional CMO, outsourced CMO, or an outsourced digital marketing agency. I’m outsourcing that function of my business to the PEO partner, correct?

 

Casey Clark  04:33

Yeah, the business model is a little bit different than us than a pure outsourcing play. It’s more of a partnership, so we are, we become really ingrained in the kind of co-employment of your business without taking any of the oversight that you might have as a business owner over business decisions, who to hire, who to fire, what that looks like. We just take on additional risk, take risk off of your plate by eliminating some of the. Was frustrations and concerns,

 

Henry Lopez  05:02

right? Partner is the right term. They’re still.. if I bring on a PEO partner, they’re still my employees. Is that absolutely yes. And so let’s walk through. Maybe we walk through an employee life cycle at a high level when it comes to recruiting and attracting new employees. How might a PEO help with that start of the process.

 

Casey Clark  05:23

We’ve got a lot of research, and I hope that the people watching this today will spend some time looking@abo.org because there’s a lot of good detail in there about the significant benefits that small businesses enjoy when they work with a PEO. You know, we know the complexities, and your listeners know the complexities and the risks of starting a business, right, almost half of them go out of business in the, for in the first five years, but we know that you know with a PEO, you’re 50% less likely to go out of business. We know that you retain your employees 12% longer. We know that your growth potential is exponentially higher, and so we bring a lot of value to the equation that is in these areas that really is costly for a business owner in terms of recruiting and retaining talent, or or even the backend systems that you might be trying to outsource entirely, but can’t let go of. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in partnership with the PEO to drive huge value for small businesses.

 

Henry Lopez  06:17

Okay, I get it. So, so then, as it relates to recruiting and hiring. What are some of the examples there where a P and O can enhance that process or make it better?

 

Casey Clark  06:29

So we would work directly with, with our, with a PEO client to identify the kind of talent pool they’re looking for and help them attract those, those employees as well. But really, there’s a staffing piece to the employee equation that doesn’t always fall inside the PEO, but certainly something that a lot of PEOs have as an auxiliary resource.

 

Henry Lopez  06:49

Okay, and then, of course, there’s compliance components there, making sure that I’m posting the right way and that I’m not not discriminating, and all of those kinds of things, that’s where the compliance piece comes into play, that the PEO organization makes sure that I am in alignment with, in whatever state I am hiring in,

 

Casey Clark  07:10

it absolutely from from the entire lifecycle of the employee engagement, from making sure your hiring practices are accurate to ensuring that you’re offering the right level of benefit based on the jurisdiction that your employee might be in to how you help them through through difficult processes, you know, we’ve, we’ve seen a lot of tech platforms masquerading as PEOs without the comprehensive H and HR that we think that the PEOs bring, that’s a little bit unique to how we engage with our clients in these traditional tech stacks are now starting PEOs because they’re realizing that some of the challenges of dealing with really complex personal and personnel issues require a human engagement, and so how are we going to help your employee through a really difficult medical diagnosis of a dependent? How are we going to help with an employee who has a challenging pregnancy. How are we going to help with any of these kind of employee-related issues? Is a fundamental role that a PEO can play in support of a business without it becoming so distracting to a small business owner that it really takes away from continuing to grow the business.

 

Henry Lopez  08:18

Right, exactly. And also, typically what we’re doing as small business owners is we’re trying to do the best we can. Now, we might search Chat GPT. How do I handle the situation? I might call my attorney. Okay, I’ve got this complexity. What do I do here? What’s my exposure? The PEO is my one point of contact for those types of things in those unique situations with an employee.

 

Casey Clark  08:40

Absolutely, people engage PEOs for a lot of different reasons, right? It might start with remitting payroll, but it might grow into a more complex relationship. I think about, we all think about COVID kind of expanding the use of remote work in a way that we didn’t really appreciate or engage with at least in the United States, as much as maybe some others did, but when your employees scatter, the compliance mandates for every business owner are exponentially larger, and so what a PEO can do throughout the entire process is ensure that you are in compliance where all of your employees reside, you know, there are a lot of states that have auto IRA enrollment, so are you ensuring that your employees live in those jurisdictions are abiding by that? What does it look like for paid family medical leave laws that are evolving all the time? And so when you have a partnership with a PEO, you can rest assured that all those things are covered. So I think there’s a lot of risk mitigation that comes with engaging with the PEO, but also opportunity to ungrow, to unlock significant growth too.

 

Henry Lopez  09:47

That seems like the certainly the most obvious benefit there, but then, of course, there’s the transactional side of it, like running payroll, right. So, what might that look like? Let’s say I’m at the size, I’m a size business where I’ve got. Somebody on staff that’s doing bookkeeping and payroll and the financials. How does then that work when I bring in a PEO to run payroll? What might that look like?

 

Casey Clark  10:11

I’ll give you a terrible answer for a podcast or an interview, which is that it depends, right? You

know, it depends on how big your business is, what your complex needs are. What does your in-house team look like, do you have capabilities that you want to retain internally, or do you want to outsource that function entirely to the PEO? So, there’s a lot of different kinds of PEOs out there. There are large national ones, there are regional ones, there are sector-specific PEOs that help businesses who are in a specific area, and so I think when you’re and the listeners here are looking at PEOs, there’s – it’s not, it’s not a one size fits all, but there’s something for everybody. So encourage people to do their research on what the right fit is. But if I could partner with

 

Henry Lopez  10:52

a PEO that just gives me compliance support, for example, but I continue to do payroll in house, correct?

 

Casey Clark  10:57

You could do that. I think what you find, where people realize the full benefit of engaging with the PEO is when they start to package all of those offerings together and start to realize significant benefits of having all that in one place,

 

Henry Lopez  11:10

and it begins to answer the question I was going to get to, which is at what size or complexity does it start to typically make sense, but I got to think this is one of the components, if I now not just have payroll, but I have benefits that are part of that, have to be managed, and other complex components to those benefits, not just medical, but you know, complex time off or 401 ks, and yes, all of those kind of programs, that that is when it starts to get really hard to handle internally, right?

 

Casey Clark  11:39

I think those are the things that end up really bogging down a business owner, right? When, if you get into offering a particular IT service, or you’re into making a particular product, or you’ve opened a restaurant, or or a garage, you know that, and you’ve got a lot of people to manage, and a lot of customers, then how are you able to focus on why you got into that business in the first place, and you need to offer 401 k or retirement benefits, you need to offer paid leave, you need to offer benefits and payroll services, so that you’re not wondering if payroll is going to be remitted that week, and you also have to make sure that the payroll taxes are being sent to the IRS, and so we play a fundamental role in ensuring that businesses are compliant with the federal and state and local governments that they play in, but also are servicing their employees really well, so the there isn’t a great answer as to what the right size business is. The average size of a PEO client is somewhere around 20, maybe a little bit more, but I’m sorry, 20, about 20 full-time employees, is what is about the average, but what that means is there’s a lot of companies with one to 10, and there are also companies above 100 and so there used to be this sweet spot between 10 and 100 where we were, you saw most of the PEO clients, but as the industry matures and as people get to understand what we offer more often, or more people are understanding the totality of what a PEO can bring to their business and take off their plate. We’re seeing a lot of adoption in the, in the one to 10 employee space, because they just are getting their business off the ground and don’t have time to think about that, or engage in these things. And then we’re seeing companies that scale enjoying the benefits longer in a PEO relationship, rather than bringing all of that in house, which is what the traditional model used,

 

Henry Lopez  13:24

and it could have been. I mean, I could have 10 employees that are all, let’s say, professional level and have complex compensation structures and benefits, or I might have 20 that don’t. So, really, that’s just one of those metrics. But I’m glad you shared the average 20, since we’re on that topic. What else is there? An average revenue size, what else makes up for that typical client or business, rather, that it seems like a PEO is the right fit for.

 

Casey Clark  13:51

I think it’s more head count than it is ready. Okay, that’s where the

 

Henry Lopez  13:55

complexity with HR obviously is, is the number of employees. Yeah,

 

Casey Clark  13:59

that’s right. And so, and a diverse set of employees across multiple geographies, or even in one geography, right, you’ve got different people who require different things, and so that’s true of every business, and a PEO can help scale up or scale down based on the particular needs of that business.

 

Henry Lopez  14:14

Yeah, New York comes to mind, I have a business in New York, and of course, you could be in the city of New York in very different regulations than if you’re in Albany, so even though you’re in the same state, which has its own issues and challenges. Very true. Okay, true, that makes sense. As we kind of continue with the employee life cycle, a PEO can also help with some of the things that are really complicated, and that I have no expertise in, which is like handling unemployment claims, or making sure, again, from a compliance perspective, that I terminate the right way, so I don’t get into trouble there. So that’s another area, of course, at the end of the life cycle, where a PEO comes into play.

 

Casey Clark  14:52

That’s right, it’s it can be everything from comprehensive HR services, like you’re talking about, with helping employee onboarding. Or offboarding and or helping you ensure that when you are doing either of those things that you’re in compliance with the market that you’re hiring or firing in, so there’s a lot of things that a PEO can do to offset the risk that comes with those things, or the risk that comes with doing those things poorly, you know, as, as, as a manager of people you know, and we’ve all probably done both of those, we’ve probably all handled them well and handled them not well. It’s all a learning process, but had we had the expertise of a PEO, could do it a little bit better.

 

Henry Lopez  15:30

Well, it also ties back to the point you made earlier. What I find with those situations is that’s where you need a person to talk to, because every situation is so unique,

 

Casey Clark  15:41

yeah. Look, I think we all are benefiting from more technological applications that are helping to streamline some of our data mining, but it doesn’t replace the need for people to be involved in personal issues, and so when you’re dealing with complex issues that impact people directly and impact people’s lives, and particularly when you’re a small business owner, that’s critically important to you, right. How, how are my employees going to be treated, and how can we ensure that they were not losing something that I would handle for them? As you know, like if you’re handling your business in New York, Henry, and you’ve got 10 people, you know that you have a standard and how you want to engage with them, and you can be sure that a PEO partner is going to be able to live up to that same standard, rather than, you know, outsourcing it to a platform and hope that they get the right answer from a chat bot, which is never the right way to go,

 

Henry Lopez  16:33

right? You mentioned early in the conversation you shared a stat, 50% more likely to survive if I think you said, if they use a PEO, that’s right. Why is that?

 

Casey Clark  16:43

I think because they’re able to focus on the business, you know. I’ve got a relative who started a small business not that long ago, and once she learned about PEOs, her perspective was, I, she thought at first when she heard about it that it would be relative, it’d be so expensive she wouldn’t be able to afford it until she learned about what it was going to save her, and she couldn’t figure out how she could afford not to do it, and that’s a common theme we hear from a lot of our members and our members’ clients when we talk about PEOs and how they engage with these people. The value proposition isn’t just dollar savings, it’s actually return on investment of what am I getting for the money I’m putting into my business, and how can I free up a commodity that we’re all short on, which is time to be able to do the things I really wanted to do. So, I don’t know what your business is in New York, but you had a real passion and a reason to start that business. And so, when you get down to building a business, and you’ve got to do a lot of back, spend your time in the back office doing back-end things rather than enabling the kind of growth that you know you’re capable of, that can be distracting to a small business owner. So, PEO is a great solution provider to that issue. I

 

Henry Lopez  17:47

got to think part of it is also that you’re going to better retain employees who are well served from an HR perspective.

 

Casey Clark  17:56

PEO clients have, based on APO research, we PEO clients have 12% lower turnover, so that means less time you’re spending, less investment you’re making, and finding talent that will fill particular gaps, and less time you’ve got to allocate to retraining people, so the real, you know, again, that comes down to what are you saving in cost versus what are you gaining in time, and all of those things add up to value, and that’s part of the real value proposition of a PEO relationship.

 

Henry Lopez  18:25

All right, but let’s talk about the pricing model that typically is the case here. So, how is this? How do I usually pay for this as a small business owner?

 

Casey Clark  18:34

It really depends, because it depends on how complex the needs are, how many employees we’re talking about. What does

 

Henry Lopez  18:39

a typical model look like? So, let’s say I am a business that has 15 employees, and I’m looking outsourcing, you know, all of it, the payroll, the benefits management. I’m not looking for a number, I’m looking for how, what is the structure? How is it? How is it prices that, depending on number of employees, or how is it typically based?

 

Casey Clark  18:59

It’s based on number of employees and the complexity of the relationship, so what are the kind of health benefits we want to engage with? What are the kind of retirement plans we’re going to help support? What are the other services that you’re going to engage through that PEO? And so, as I mentioned, some PEOs are doing this nationwide at a massive scale, and some are doing it small, you know, in a re more regional capacity, so I’d encourage anyone looking at a PEO to not just shop on cost but look at the value derived from the complete from the breadth of that relationship, and so,

 

Henry Lopez  19:34

and then what you mean there is, of course, I’m going to have, I’m going to pay, but I’m also going to save, it might just be resources that I no longer have to have with staff, right, or may not be that I’m going to get rid of anybody, but I can grow without having to grow my HR department, so I got to look at that exchange of value as well, is what you’re saying. Yes, that’s

 

Casey Clark  19:55

right, that’s right, and and the and you’re eliminating costly risk of. Not being in compliance with federal and state statute, and you’re, you know, the challenges that come with having payroll issues, the challenges that come with, you know, having the wrong benefit administrator. So, I think the opportunity return on investment is significant, and sometimes hard to quantify in the abstract, but certainly each PEO would be able to detail that for every company that’s looking to engage with them,

 

Henry Lopez  20:22

and usually the PEO partners, the way that they offer this is in a way, maybe not a la carte is not the right term, but in packages, depending on what services I want or don’t want, is that correct?

 

Casey Clark  20:33

Yeah, the real value comes when you’re bundling it, so when you’re getting comprehensive services through a PEO, but every PEO will be able to offer things a little bit differently for each of their clients, so encourage you to talk to more than one, so you can see what’s really going to work best for you.

 

Henry Lopez  20:48

All right, so let’s go on that point. How do you suggest to a small business owner that they go about finding the right peo partner for them?

 

Casey Clark  20:57

So the easiest way is to go to napier.org/find a peo, and it can list peos that service businesses in your market, and then you can search for specific sectors and other things that you might need to help narrow the window down of available peo partners, and then you’ll be able to make some some quick phone calls to folks, and they’d love to work with you, I’m sure. So, not every resource

 

Henry Lopez  21:23

serves every state as a state registration type of thing, or what? How is it that that works? Yeah,

 

Casey Clark  21:28

there’s a lot of state registrations for PEOs, but there’s also a lot of nationwide PEOs, and so what I find is that a lot of PEOs, even the regional ones, or even ones that were regional before COVID had clients with employees that scattered, and so most of the PEOs that I’m aware of and work with every day are servicing clients across the country and employees of clients across the country, so there’s a different breadth of service from say AP Total Source or a Paychex or an insperity or adjust works, the these are doing that at scale to smaller regional players like Sindio in Wichita, Kansas, you know, and so that there’s a lot of different options for people based on what they’re looking for.

 

Henry Lopez  22:15

All right, so, so obviously the location and geography that’s covered, or that I need, what else service, and then, of course, what I’m looking for, but what else do you recommend that people look for?

 

Casey Clark  22:27

I think you’re looking for the right fit. So, how do you, you know, when, like you would any service provider, you want to make sure that your partner is going to be the right one for your business, and these are folks who are going to interact with your employees in really meaningful times in your employees’ time with your business, and so I think it’s about finding the right partner for you in this time for your business, and and looking for someone who’s going to help you scale the way you want to.

 

Henry Lopez  22:52

When you see small businesses that are doing it right, quote unquote, in other words, leveraging that PEO partnership, what are some of the things that maybe we haven’t talked about that that looks like? What does that look like, for example? And it seems like you might be hinting at that typically it works best if you leverage that partner for not just one piece of it, but for a package of those HR responsibilities. Maybe I misunderstood that, but anyway, what I’m asking is, what does it look like when it works well? Typically, it

 

Casey Clark  23:23

looks like you have a comprehensive HR solutions partner, and so that means helping you with everything from onboarding employees to processing payroll to paying your taxes to administering 401 k or other retirement programs to other benefits programs that help people ensure that that your employees are well taken care of and the business is primed for growth, so that’s exactly the kind of fundamental opportunity that exists when companies engage with the PEO, and those that are doing it well are using their partners in a comprehensive way like that. I

 

Henry Lopez  23:57

would suggest a great thanks for clarifying. I think the, I guess, the other point you had mentioned earlier that I would look for is these are people I’m going to, or my my staff members are going to be in contact with, so I want to look at what, how am I going to get that support? Who are these people that are going to support me, right? How responsive are they? Probably I would want to, as you said, I would want to probably talk to a reference or two. Is is that typical in common? Yeah, okay, yeah,

 

Casey Clark  24:20

absolutely, and I think that every one of them would give you a great opportunity to see how they work in practice, and to really feel what that’ll feel like for your business when you engage with them, so you know this is it’s not one size fits all, but there is something for everybody, and the opportunity that exists for kicking a lot of tires to find the right partner for you is certainly there, so you know people could, could pick up or adopt a PEO, could adopt a new client tomorrow, or it could take several weeks of a cycle to get people comfortable with, with onboarding a process for figuring out what it is that’s right for you, and you know, scaling the offering to meet your business where. You are

 

Henry Lopez  25:00

on the flip side of what works well. What are you seeing that we haven’t talked about before that are some common either mistakes or misunderstandings or misconceptions about PEOs from from a small business owner’s perspective? The

 

Casey Clark  25:13

biggest misperception that we hear about is that there’s some some fear that they’re going to cede control over a business decision, or a hiring or firing decision, or that there’s going to be some loss of control over their business rather than the partnership that they’re engaging with with the PEO. So, the biggest misperception is that they’re not going to be in control of their business anymore. So, that’s not really it. And so, when I think when it goes poorly, and we talked a little bit about this, it’s not unlike any other service where people often look for the cheapest option, right? Like, how would they shop based on price? But realistically, you might have built a really strong relationship with a service provider, and the value of that, and them understanding your business and being immersed in it, is not a no, it’s not something you can put a number to, but really has immense value for you and your employees. So, I think it’s about making sure you’re finding the right partner and that it’s working for you and that you’re getting the right kind of attention and service, and that’s true not just for PEOS, but any vendor you might engage with as a business.

 

Henry Lopez  26:16

Clarification, back to, you know, the typical client, you know that 20 employee or so, and then also to the point of the goal here is me as the owner taking this off of my plate, so that I can, me and my operations team can focus on our business. Do you find though that typically that those organizations nonetheless have like an HR manager, director, whatever we might call them, that manages that relationship with the PEO. Is that still what that typically looks like in a lot? Some do,

 

Casey Clark  26:49

and some do, and some don’t. Some totally outsource the entire process. In other words, it could be

 

Henry Lopez  26:55

that your HR contact to my employees is Susie at the PEO, or it could be that it’s Jack internally, and then

 

Speaker 4  27:03

yes,

 

Henry Lopez  27:04

yeah, so it just depends.

 

Casey Clark  27:05

I’ll give you a real example of what we do at Napier, so you know, our, we have one person here who manages our PEO relationship, but if we have, there are, you know, like any other vendor, there’s probably someone who manages that relationship internally, but it might be the business owner, it might be somebody else, depending on where that is, but where I think you see tremendous value is not having to spend much of your time thinking about, are we doing this right, or what are we missing, or what are the complexities that might fall through the cracks if we don’t have someone as a full-time eye on these sorts of things, so I think the opportunity exists to really help businesses of all sizes. You know, you might have a really ambitious business owner who’s got five employees who just says, I need to make sure that they get paid, that they’re well taken care of, that their benefits are administered the right way, that I’m not thinking about the IRS is going to come breathing down our neck because of payroll tax issues, and they don’t want to, they don’t want that burden, they want to really run, and so that’s an opportunity where a PEO comes in really, really handy for them.

 

Henry Lopez  28:11

All right, so tell me a little bit more. What is the mission, briefly, of Napier?

 

Casey Clark  28:15

So, Napier is a national trade association, which represents the interests of the PEO industry writ large, so that means we specific questions about our benefits or other things, we go right to our PEO. So they’re businesses that service the PEO industry, so anybody from benefits providers to 401 k providers and others, and we represent those interests in kind of helping advance and protect the PEO model to ensure that we can continue to accelerate growth for small businesses across the country, so that means we do a lot of advocacy in state capitals and in Washington to ensure that the PEO model can continue to grow and thrive and service businesses of all levels. It means that we do a lot in talking about what a PEO can do for small businesses, so that we can help accelerate sector and industry growth for the PEOs, while also enabling continued expansion of small business opportunity.

 

Henry Lopez  29:13

Why is it just high level, generally speaking? Why is it that different government agencies, state level, federal level. What is it that they might have as an issue, potentially with PEOs? What is the problem, perhaps sometimes from their perspective?

 

Casey Clark  29:31

What’s interesting, Henry, that I found is that most people don’t have a problem, they just have a misperception, and so often, oftentimes, you know, would be helping regulators who think they’re helping are oftentimes creating obstacles to our ability to best serve the small businesses and markets across the country, and so we find ourselves re-educating policymakers and regulators a lot, we find ourselves having to get in the way of bad policy that would have a. An adverse effect on the small business market, so that we can continue to provide the benefits that enable the growth that we’ve talked a lot about, so it’s not about them having an issue with our model, it’s about them not really understanding, misunderstanding how we go, how we help our clients.

 

Henry Lopez  30:16

Okay, there was one question I want to come back to. There was, there was a bit more detail that I forgot, because I thought that one of the PEO benefits potentially could be as well is perhaps better leveraged access to health care benefits. That do I misunderstand that, or is there some opportunity there?

 

Casey Clark  30:35

No, not at all. I mean, I think one of the one of the ways that small businesses benefit from their PEO relationship is that we can offer Fortune 500 level benefits to small employers who would know, who would never have access to that. How does that work? We do that by bundling many small businesses together under one PEO relationship, and then being able to go get benefits at scale, and so then we are able to pass that savings off onto offer our clients,

 

Henry Lopez  31:03

when that’s huge. It could be potentially huge, especially again if I go back with the example I had a client I had worked with who were talking about highly compensated engineers, small firm, but the staffing is, you know, has the compensation back, and they expect those types of benefits,

 

Speaker 4  31:21

right,

 

Henry Lopez  31:22

but for that small engineering firm to pay that is can be cost prohibitive.

 

Casey Clark  31:27

Absolutely, and it’s, and it’s one of the attractive options for engaging with a PEO. So, not only are you ensuring all the other things that we’ve talked a lot about, you’re also expanding access to better and more comprehensive benefits, often at a much lower cost,

 

Henry Lopez  31:41

alright. If I am listening, and I’m thinking, hmm, I need to start thinking about, or considering, or exploring a PEO. Like, you mentioned a starting point at the website slash find a PEO, but.. but tell us, where to go. And the website is full of resources. How do I leverage an APO to learn about what a PEO is, and how to find potentially PEOs to talk to.

 

Casey Clark  32:03

There’s great content on our website. I’m not just saying that because it’s self-serving. There really is tremendous content that explains the relationship that a small business will have with their PEO partner and the benefits that they’ll get from it, as well as pointing you exactly how to find one that will fit your business specifically. So you can learn about the model, you can learn about the benefits, and you can find one that will fit your needs all in one place.

 

Henry Lopez  32:27

And what was that link again, Casey? For the find a PEO,

 

Casey Clark  32:30

so it’s napier.org and a peo.org/find a PEO.

 

Henry Lopez  32:37

Excellent, I’ll have that link on the show notes page for this episode as well at the Howard business.com Is there anything I didn’t ask you about that you thought he should have asked me about this?

 

Casey Clark  32:47

No, look, I think this is a really important conversation. I’m glad that you had me on to talk about it, because you know when we, when we talk to PEO clients, they can’t figure out why they didn’t do it sooner, and and PEOs are wondering why other small businesses, you know, aren’t finding them, and the opportunities that exist here are really tremendous. So, anything we can do to get the word out about how small businesses can, can accelerate their own growth, can retain their employees longer, can, you know, can do all the things that they got in a business to do without the pain points of all the backend processes that really bog business down, the better, so you know we’re we’re in the business of giving small business opportunities and enabling that kind of growth, and that should be an exciting proposition for everybody. So I hope that that your listeners will be able to spend a little time digging around and finding a right partner.

 

Henry Lopez  33:34

Absolutely, Casey, I think the thing that holds people back is I think we, we feel like, oh, that’s not for me. I’m not big enough. It’s going to be too. I can’t afford it. And no, those are probably the two things that probably have held people back from even looking to see if this is an option for them.

 

Casey Clark  33:51

Well, I’d encourage everybody to take a look, because it’s, it’s not, it’s not very expensive, and the value that you generate from from being able to focus entirely on growing your businesses is tremendous, so I would encourage everybody to say to think about that, you know, that we all make investments in our business that are that have returns, some of them are monetary and some of them are production, right, some of it is quality of output, and so it’s not just about the return on an investment directly in dollars, but it can also mean what are we doing more for our business or our community or our people, and a PEO relationship accelerates all of that, right?

 

Henry Lopez  34:30

And our people is our most valuable asset and becoming more and more the hardest asset to attract and retain, so yes, so we’re investing in them, and therefore hopefully they will see the benefit of staying with

 

Casey Clark  34:45

us, and anybody who’s run a business knows how costly and painful it is to find and retain really good talent, and so the opportunity to to mitigate some of that risk in a high performing relationship. Partnership, like with a PEO, it’s a no-brainer for me.

 

Henry Lopez  35:04

Casey, I’m always looking for a book recommendation. Is there a book that comes to mind that you would recommend?

 

Casey Clark  35:08

Well, listen, it’s interesting that when you become a leader, people send you a lot of leadership books, and so I’ve been blessed to get a lot of good reading material in my tenure here at Napier, but the one that really stands out for me is a book called The Captain Class by Sam Walker. He tells an interesting story about how to build high-performing teams by evaluating the success of sports teams throughout time and across the globe and finding the commonalities between them and what made them so successful. So highly encourage people to check out the Captain class.

 

Henry Lopez  35:41

Yeah, thanks for that recommendation. I had not read it, I hadn’t even heard about it, but it sounds like the type of book I would enjoy reading. So, thanks for that. Yeah,

 

Casey Clark  35:47

you bet.

 

Henry Lopez  35:48

All right, we’ll wrap it up. Give me briefly one thing you want us to take away from this conversation we had about PEOs for small business owners.

 

Casey Clark  35:56

We’re small business enablers. We help small businesses grow exponentially faster, retain employees longer, and find a way to focus entirely on why they got in business in the first place. And so the opportunities that a PEO partnership produced for small businesses are huge. And I’d really encourage everyone to check it out

 

Henry Lopez  36:15

and tell us again where to go to learn more.

 

Casey Clark  36:18

Go to napo.org to look for everything you need to know about PEOs, and learn where you might find a PEO to be a good partner for you and your market.

 

Henry Lopez  36:25

Excellent, great conversation, Casey. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Thanks for all the work that you guys do at NAPO. You know, I think a big takeaway for me is I think most of us assume that this is for much larger organizations, and so I think that we need to explore it and consider it a lot earlier than I would have prior, so that’s a key takeaway for me. But thanks for taking the time to be with me today.

 

Casey Clark  36:47

Thank you, Henry. It’s great to talk to you.

 

Henry Lopez  36:48

This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for joining us for this episode of The Howard Business. My guest again today, Casey Clark. I release episodes every Monday morning. You can find the show anywhere you listen to podcasts, including The Howard Business YouTube channel and my website, the How of business.com Thanks for listening.