August 25, 2025

00:20:41

Understanding Payroll and Hiring Decisions: Strategies for Your Business - E115

Show Notes

Welcome to What Counts, the podcast where we decode the complexities of information governance and spotlight the strategies that drive operational maturity. In this episode, we’re diving into the foundational—but often overlooked—pillars of business success: payroll and human resources. From navigating payroll taxes and compliance to designing benefits that serve both your team and your bottom line, we’ll explore how intentional HR planning can protect your business, fuel growth, and create a resilient workplace culture. Whether you're scaling a startup or refining enterprise operations, this episode offers actionable insights to help you hire smarter, report cleaner, and build stronger Episode length: 00:20:41
View Full Transcript

Episode Transcript

[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, a podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information management challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you. This is Lee. And in this episode, more. And I will talk about something every business leader needs to prioritize before the storm hits. That's hiring employees. Yes, I know, not exactly a glamorous topic again, but this one, this one's a big one. This can make or break your company. So we have some experiences to share in that area. Some. A lot of founders slip up in this area. So don't hire reactive. Reactively. That's one key piece. Plan it kind of schedules planet. [00:01:13] Speaker B: And yet you feel under the gun. Yeah. So, yeah, there's. This is hard. This is actually a hard topic because. And I'm thinking about different experiences I've had, both as a business owner, as an employee, as an employee who was kind of moving up into more senior ranks in big companies and small companies, and all of the different approaches that I have experienced throughout my career that are good and bad. And as a consultant, you might sometimes hear people say, people are the most important resource today in the world of AI, and especially agentic AI. There's, there's pushback on that and even going back a little farther into keyword searches, because I'm coming from the library science perspective here, that a lot of people think you can replace the work of indexing, of deciding the category of your information and filing it and tagging it, that you could be replace that with just a keyword search, a relevancy search, that kind of thing. And you, and in my opinion, you cannot, you cannot replace people with agentic AI, and you cannot replace tagging and indexing with relevancy searches and keyword searches, but you can use those things and. Whereas this is an information governance podcast and you can use those things to make life easier to make, to make, to automate and routinize some of the more mundane parts of your job. I know that's not the topic you wanted to talk about, but. [00:03:04] Speaker A: I do want to know where you want to go. Do you want to go into the benefits and compensation before you hire an employee, or do you want to go into the interviewing process, which would fit more nicely into what you were saying? Because you can add questions to your upwork or I can't think of the system. Indeed, you can add to your profile, you can add specific questions that are related to your company before you even talk to somebody that, that a potential employee has to answer. And that's kind of going off the keywords and so forth. [00:03:40] Speaker B: Right. So I think we have to go back and forth between the two, between the benefits and comp approach, the benefits and comp questions and the interview approach. And I think we need to step back and say, okay, for any company, but for ours, since that's the one we know, what's the goal? So why are we hiring more people? Presumably if we're talking about hiring, it's more. It might be more from zero because. [00:04:07] Speaker A: Right, well, even hiring your first employee. [00:04:10] Speaker B: Your first employee. Exactly. You're starting from nothing, starting from scratch. You have yourself. In our case, we had the two of us. How do we decide? How should we. How did we. So let's talk about how did we. We did make decisions. And were our decisions based on the goal of providing top level information governance support to clients in the most cost effective way for our company? [00:04:43] Speaker A: No, that wasn't our half of that. Right. [00:04:47] Speaker B: We got half of that. Right. We wanted to provide high quality information governance services. And we had a secondary goal when we started the company to keep the team together. Because we had a team, we had an existing team from a bigger company, from in fact from two bigger companies. We had already made one move as a group and we wanted to keep us together because we were a high functioning team, a very high functioning team. And we worked together for many, many years. And so we knew that was the way to deliver the high quality services that we wanted to deliver and to focus on the things that we thought were important. And the reasons we were leaving the big companies is we wanted to really focus on the information governance aspects, not as an afterthought to an IT project, but as the focus of our business. And our team was a big part of that. So we focused on make them happy, make the team happy, make them want to come, make them want to take a risk with us and come and provide the high quality services. So those were two goals. The goal that we didn't have was cost effective. And at the time. [00:06:08] Speaker A: Because we were. [00:06:09] Speaker B: A spinoff, because we were a spinoff, because we were a little team that had existed that inside of these two big companies and we had successfully moved from company one to company two, we thought we knew a lot of things. Turns out we didn't know a lot of things. A lot of things we thought we knew we didn't. We had to learn them really fast. But we'd already made decisions. We already made decisions about what we were going to offer in terms of. Now this is where we jumped to that compensation package side of things. Right. We had made decisions that we were going to offer very high quality benefits matching those big companies and in fact paying for more than those big companies paid for us because we started out paying for 100% of the employees medical insurance, for example. And so we made that decision and. And we made a decision to put most of the comp. All of the comp into salary. [00:07:14] Speaker A: Yep. I was just going to say that. Yep. [00:07:17] Speaker B: Instead of into a bonus that varied based on how well the company did. And we did that because having come out of the places we came out of, we thought that was the right thing. Because in the end we don't need excuses. [00:07:35] Speaker A: We did right. We don't need excuses. [00:07:36] Speaker B: We did it because we thought it was the right thing. Like we did it because we wanted to treat people that way. We wanted to pay for the medical insurance. We wanted to offer the high quality medical insurance and we wanted to put the money up front to tell. To give the people a reason to come with us because we valued them. I think we gave everybody a raise from the place that we came. Yeah. [00:08:03] Speaker A: And. [00:08:05] Speaker B: And we, we could afford it for the first few years because we had a back. We had a bulk book of work that came with us. But then we got into a harder time where projects were ending and our project. And we knew this, we knew this, that our project life cycle was about two to three years and that it took about a year to get another one of that size. Like to sell another one of that size. I think the thing that we didn't know that we should have but didn't is of our team who was going to be helpful in getting that next piece of work or even growing an existing piece of work from year one to year three. [00:08:52] Speaker A: And all individuals, as Maura said, were great at what they did for the team. [00:08:57] Speaker B: Yes. [00:08:58] Speaker A: It's just not everybody, not everybody was skilled at growing the business. [00:09:04] Speaker B: And then we get into okay, again, think back to what our goals were. Provide high quality service and keep our people happy and treat them well. And what does that result in? Was both of us. But I'm going to say especially me because I was on the front lines working extra hard, working a billion hours with every client in multiple states, like all over the Place and producing a lot of the work, like not the drafts, but reviewing every single thing. We used to joke about could anybody produce a deliverable that I wasn't going to mark up and wasn't going to bleed all over with the red ink or then the red lining? And we had one person who made it through that, that challenge one time didn't get anything marked up, but that's not sustainable. And so when we got to a really hard point where I was out of the flow for good reason, working on a client, but physically away in another country, which meant physically hard to come back and fly in for a meeting someplace, physically hard to even have a phone call because the time difference, things started to slow down significantly and we hit a low but a low point in the work, which meant we had to make decisions around the employees. And all the things that we decided up front that were important a little bit came back to bite us because we put all the comp into salary, which meant our obligations were very high. And when we tried to change them, understandably people didn't like it and I don't blame them. It was, it was awful. It was awful to do and it was awful to be on the receiving end. The alternative from what? [00:11:09] Speaker A: Well, I was going to say so. [00:11:10] Speaker B: Well, I was going to before we go to. So the alternative would have been we let people go sooner, which also seemed awful. Like really it was just awful on everything. [00:11:21] Speaker A: Fought so hard to get this team to stay together. And now. Yeah, and now. [00:11:25] Speaker B: And now we'd failed. We'd failed them. We'd failed together. But we for sure, you and I felt like we'd failed them. So now thinking back and thinking about our next moves, would we do. What would we do differently? And I know you have lots of thoughts on this, so your turn. [00:11:43] Speaker A: Well, I'm not. But I'm not gonna give our thoughts on this. It's. The key piece is to design a compensation package with benefits that benefits your company first and the employees. Right. So you don't want to get stuck with high price salaries that are over year over year going to increase, possibly increase. Unless you have a dedicated evaluation process for the employee so that you know exactly what this looks like and what it looks like in five years out type type of thing and what you're paying for in five years for this type of employee. What the. You know, maybe it's better to have health care and less pto. Or maybe it's. You can juggle with health care and more pto. I mean it totally Depends on what industry you're in, what company you have. But you have to align these, these benefits so that it benefits you and your company employee. [00:12:50] Speaker B: It's a balance. Like you, you said take care of the company first, but then you saw, you backed off it almost immediately in. Halfway through your sentence. And I think that's right because we've said employees are important, people are important to our business. People are important to every business. If you have a store, a retail operation, you have to have reliable people who can cover all the hours you want to be open. Otherwise you end up being open so few hours that nobody can ever find you. There is a knitting store near me that I would love to go to and I can't ever get there because it is never open. [00:13:25] Speaker A: I got some comments on that. Flower store, right? A flower store. Why aren't they open before work and after work, not during work hours? How do you get there? [00:13:35] Speaker B: Right. Anyway, florists during like. Yes, it seems like evening would be a perfect time. Knitting stores. How about on the weekend? But regardless, the people are the element there. And so I think we would keep that goal. We want to make our people happy. And I think that that's a fair goal. But I think what we would also do is say what's reasonable, what's cost effective, what's possible. [00:14:06] Speaker A: Yeah. A company first mindset doesn't mean neglecting your people. [00:14:12] Speaker B: I'm just not comfortable with the company first. I'm trying to go with the balance. [00:14:16] Speaker A: Okay, fine. A balance perspective doesn't mean neglecting people. [00:14:21] Speaker B: Right. Unless you don't need people. I mean, really, if you are a one person operation, then this is not a problem for you. But, but. Okay, so if we're looking at this balanced mindset, then one of the things, one of the lessons we learned is don't put all the money into a requirement like guaranteed compensation, which is what a salary is. Put some of it into a bonus structure. A bonus structure that depends both on individual performance and company performance, which is in fact what those big companies that we worked for did. They didn't explain it exactly that way. And they were also able to pay higher salaries because they were bigger, they had more volume, they had bigger contracts, they had things that we didn't have that we were trying to pretend we had, trying to act like we had. And when they did badly, they didn't give out the bonuses and they also cut down the raises. And it was all predefined and it didn't feel, it didn't feel so personal, generally. As it does in a small company. So if we had laid that out differently in advance, I think that would have made a difference for us when we hit our low Point in 2018. And I think the other alternative that has really become a more available alternative in the past couple years is the, the contract employee. We had the op, we used temporary employees going through a temp agency at different points when we had to surge up and surge down. That's extremely expensive. But it doesn't give you any obligation beyond Today, tomorrow hiring 10 people to box things up or go through boxes or whatever we were hiring them to do. But the contract employee, the gig worker is really a whole new world of compensation and planning that, that I don't think that was available to us 10 years ago as the way it is now. [00:16:28] Speaker A: Not the way it is now. Correct. I do want to add a piece that is don't shy away from talking to your employees, doing the evaluation and even disciplinary actions if necessary. Jump on top of the situation as quickly as possible. Right. Cut your losses without saying it. Cut your losses if you need to. [00:16:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, I think if you all, you've all been listening to the two of us talk for three years. If you don't know that we are, that we will tend to hurt ourselves before we will tell anybody something is wrong. Now. You know, like our approach to employee evaluation was supportive and helping people understand how they could grow and failing on the okay, but you didn't meet that requirement. You didn't do what we needed you to do. And the impact on the business of you not doing what we needed you to do is X. And so you're going to have to suffer that with everybody else or more than everybody else, depending on the level and what the, what the, you know, what the responsibility was supposed to be. We didn't do that very well at all. [00:17:50] Speaker A: But we learned, but we learned that's key. So plan wisely, be intentional. Build for scale, not just survival. I think that's key too. [00:18:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. And it's something that we're thinking about now a lot anyway because I once had a former client tell me that consulting is not a safe bet because you always have to keep scaling up and you have to keep building the pyramid that has the gray haired consultant at the top that knows everything and the army of brand new college grads at the bottom that are eager and enthusiastic and have a lot of energy but don't have any knowledge and, and that everybody wants the gray haired guy at the top and not not the new ones at the bottom. Even though they're the ones that we want to put on projects so they can learn things. That's how we learned things. But it's a challenge. And so scalability and consulting is hard. Scalability in some other operations might be easier. I don't know. I don't know about them. Maybe it's hard in every operation, but. But trying to think about that, at least at the beginning, is important. And then sustain sustainable growth, I think is really a goal. So I don't want to back away from we picked the best people we knew for delivering the high quality services. That's still a goal. And when we have the opportunity to pick people now, we do that too. But I do think we've learned more about the guaranteed comp versus the variable comp and about clear feed, clear direction, clearly laid out responsibilities and clear feedback and action. I think we've learned about that. I hope we have. [00:19:53] Speaker A: I hope we have. Yes. So if you have any questions, please send us an email at [email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. also, take a look at Trailblazer learningacademy.com for coaching and classes that may help you out. Thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode. If you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network by liking and forwarding or whatever else you could do on social media. As always, we appreciate you the listeners. Special thanks goes to. Jason Blake created our music. [00:20:35] Speaker B: Thank you everyone. Have a great week.

Other Episodes