Tara Griffin With G&A Partners

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studio in Denver, Colorado. It’s time for Denver Business Radio. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:23] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Denver Business Radio, and this is going to be a fun one today on the show, we have Tara Griffin with G&A Partners. Welcome, Tara.

Tara Griffin: [00:00:34] Thank you very much.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:36] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Gina. How are you serving, folks?

Tara Griffin: [00:00:42] You bet. So Jana Partners is a full service P.O.. The term P.O. stands for Professional Employers organization. And so basically, that means that we work with other businesses and they outsource functions such as HR benefits, administration, payroll and risk management to our teams to help help their businesses grow and be competitive and, you know, help with employee retention and things like that.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:15] So now what types of companies are good fits to have a PPO?

Tara Griffin: [00:01:21] You know, really it isn’t industry specific. It has more to do with kind of the mindset and the desires of the business itself. We work with small, medium and large clients. I’ve got clients that I work with, with five employees. I have clients that I work with, with over 400 and 500 employees, and I know some of my counterparts work with even businesses larger than that. So really, it has more to do with the business’s own goals and how we can bring our expertize to the table to help them fulfill those goals rather than a specific industry. However, I will mention that there is a specific industry that we have recently started working with, and that is the cannabis industry. And in the past there have been some challenges that have now been overcome so that we can really serve those types of clients as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:17] Now the companies that tend to use POS. Is it that they started out maybe trying to do everything themselves and then they realized, Wow, this has a lot more complexity than I anticipated, or I’m not able to offer some of these benefits that my competitors are, and I’d like to get away. Find a way to be able to do that. Like what is typically the reason a company chooses a CEO from however they were doing it originally.

Tara Griffin: [00:02:46] You know, it’s all of the above all those things that you said were all valid reasons. So some people have experience working with the CEO in a in a prior work life. And so in a new work life, they may talk to the other people and say, Hey, let’s explore the options of a CEO. Maybe we can find some expertize there that can really supplement what we’re doing or help us with our employee lifecycle and an employee engagement or others might look at it and say, Hey, you know, benefits are really a tough thing right now. Let’s see what a CEO offering looks like. Some people just find themselves in a scenario like you brought up at the beginning where they say, I’m overwhelmed. I have so much to do to grow my business. And some of these things, like payroll and trying to keep up with the ever changing landscape of employment compliance these days is just too much for me. I need help and they go seek out help.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:39] Now, where does kind of these online payroll places fit into kind of your like what you do? How how is that different? How is it the same?

Tara Griffin: [00:03:52] So when you say online payroll places, give me an example of maybe something

Lee Kantor: [00:03:56] So like somebody goes, you know what? I don’t want to do payroll, so I’m going to just go to one of these, you know, kind of national branded payroll companies. And then they say they take that. Is that also a P.O. or is that they’re just doing kind of one part of what you guys do?

Tara Griffin: [00:04:15] So it depends. So they could go to a national or a local provider, and some of those national and local providers simply do payroll, and it’s a lot of self service. The business owner or whoever at the business can go online and utilize some type of software or system to produce payroll. And they just interact with them like a typical vendor. I’m buying this particular thing from you. I’m using it to produce payroll. It goes out the door. There are some situations like that where it is a P.O. and a P.O. arrangement. The difference between like just simply a payroll situation and a P.O. situation has to do with the term CO employment. And so an RPO situation, a company like GNC Partners actually enters into a contract where they became become a co employer of those employees. And so it kind of expands the scope of the interaction or services that can be offered to a client in that we can be the sponsoring employer for benefit packages and utilize economies of scale to offer more along the lines of a benefit package that a large company could offer and invite a small to medium sized business into our offering and take advantage of some of those economies of scale, if that makes sense. So that’s kind of the difference between maybe just going online and getting some payroll done. Jana Partners really looks for truly partner with our clients, and as much as they invite us to be part of their business and complement their strategy and their goals, we expand into benefits, risk management, HR consulting, you know, lots of things in any area that touches the employment lifecycle.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:13] Well, it sounds like you’re not you don’t really like kind of have a vendor relationship. You have more of a partner relationship that you’re there to be a trusted advisor to help them, whether it’s recruiting new employees, keeping existing employees, just helping them grow their business so they can focus in on their business side. And you’re kind of helping them focus on the people side.

Tara Griffin: [00:06:35] Absolutely. In fact, the team that I lead is one of the teams that is solely focused on that relationship with the client, and we know that it takes some time to build the trust so that we can be perceived and looked at and invited in as a trusted partner. So, you know, really starting with fulfilling the needs and accurately and timely and over time, we start to build trust and our goal is always to be that partner and to be in a consultative role with them and understand truly their needs so we can fulfill them.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:09] Now, a lot of times during a crisis is where some of this trust is built. Can you share how the pandemic, how you were able to help your clients kind of weather that and maybe help them kind of deal with the the post-pandemic issues of these hybrid workplace? Or, you know, some people going all remote, no remote, some remote and kind of navigate those waters because that’s been tough for a lot of folks.

Tara Griffin: [00:07:34] You bet. So if I may, I’ll start at the beginning of the pandemic and answering that question and really one of the most important things that. And reasons why we were able to help our clients so much is that the leadership team at GSA Partners is really built, a solid company where they didn’t have to worry about their own foundation. So we were able to just immediately mobilize and be the type and the quality of the professionals and people who work. Fit and partners mobilized very quickly to understand the laws and the regulations and things like PPP loans that were being thrown at us at lightning speed. And really, you know, work around the clock developing things that would help clients get things like PPP loans. So for example, we had a local community theater and one of our regions that we have an office and they had hundreds of employees and immediately they were out of work. They ended up being one of the very first companies to get a very large PPP loan to keep those employees paid, and we were able to help them get it back quickly because of how fast we mobilized to create the kinds of reports their banking institutions needed to approve such a such a loan. As time moved on again, we just within general partners designated different groups to become experts and to really study each new law or bill that was passed and how it would impact our clients so that we could disseminate that information through our organization and have answers and and help guide our clients with things like employer tax credits and and COVID, sick pay and different state compliance things that rolled out.

Tara Griffin: [00:09:27] For example, I’m in Colorado and Colorado had its own specific requirements in response to some of the COVID needs. You’ve also brought up that, you know, now talking about hybrid workplaces and things like that. And some of the results of the pandemic that we’re currently living and very involved with its client base to address those kinds of issues. How do we talk about employment engagement? What has changed? We’ve kind of changed from monitoring employees to really needing to facilitate a mindset of empowering employees because most of them are working remote. And a lot of our clients find themselves in situations where they would love to return back to the office and and see their teammates and people. They’re working together, but they find themselves in a situation where a lot of employees are saying time out, if you require me to come back to the office, I’m not going to continue to work here because there are other options and they have found working from home to be very beneficial to themselves. On the flip side, there are certainly employees who have been saying, I can’t stand working at home anymore, please send me back to an office and then they return to an office. But yet they’re not really surrounded by their teammates, which is something that feeds them. So there’s a lot of those types of dynamics that we’re hearing about from our clients and our HR professionals really have been working closely with them to help develop the policies that fit their particular need and and workforce.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:09] Now for your new clients, are they typically going from one IPO to a new IPO or are they going from no IPO to your IPO? Are they frustrated by a certain situation? They say, Hey, we need kind of help, like what is usually the spark that triggers a new relationship for you?

Tara Griffin: [00:11:30] That great question, so someone on the sales team may correct me, but from the new client sign ups that my team sees. I would say that probably seventy five percent of them are coming from a different relationship with either a different CEO or an accounting firm that’s been doing their payroll or a payroll relationship with just strictly payroll. I would say the majority of them fall into that category. There’s less of them that fall into the category of they’ve been doing it themselves and realized that in order for them to grow their business, they need to outsource some of these activities.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:15] So now what is what are they frustrated with that solution that they thought they had?

Tara Griffin: [00:12:22] Typically, it’s customer service and the ability to really talk to a specific individual that’s assigned to their account. We’ve seen in, you know, with our competitors and heard a lot of feedback from clients who joined our our company, our team, that the personal touch is starting to go away more and more and that they find themselves for all things, including payroll, having to call a general number. And it could be a different person processing payroll every time that they don’t have anybody direct number as their go to person. And so one of the things that Gina is committed to and continues to be committed to is that there are a couple of very specific points of contact that every client account has. And one of those is somebody for my team, which we would refer to as a client advocate, meaning that your go to person for anything that you don’t really answer to, or if there’s something that needs to be escalated or you feel like you want some additional service or you want to understand what’s available to you at Jana Partners, the people on my team really work at addressing those issues and having a relationship and an understanding of that particular business’s needs so it can translate to all of the specialists within our organization. The other specific contact that they always have by name is a payroll specialist, dedicated payroll specialist who certainly works on other client accounts besides just their own. But that is their go to person, the same person that always will process their payroll. And then the third consistent point of contact is a benefit specialist. If they participate in our benefit programs, they have a dedicated benefit specialist that both they and their employees can reach out to for assistance. For something as simple as getting a medical ID card all the way to, I’m really struggling to have a claim process the correct way. Can you please help me deal with the insurance carrier or make a short term disability claim or something like that? So that’s the big thing that I hear the most from clients who joined Gina and have just left a competitor of sorts.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:38] It’s what what was once old is new again, right? That that level of customer service and customer care is being automated out of everybody’s system to save themselves time and money and people. And that’s what people are hungry for, is that level of care.

Tara Griffin: [00:14:57] They are hungry for a level of care, and at the same time, there’s got to be a balance with those systems systems and some consistency in process, which are cyclical in nature at times, simply because the compliance piece of our world has continued to change and expand and get more complicated, that there are things that are necessary for an audit trail, so to speak, and to see who agreed to what. But you can’t really replace that human aspect where a human who’s got enough business acumen to understand the needs of their clients business and why it would even matter to them to have a competitive benefit strategy and translate that over to how they can fulfill that need and alleviate the time and the burden of that business leader so that they can go and continue to do what they got into business to do in the first place and grow their particular business.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:53] Well, if somebody out there that wants to learn more, what is the website?

Tara Griffin: [00:15:58] It is G and a partners,

Lee Kantor: [00:16:03] And that’s G. The letter n a partner’s

Tara Griffin: [00:16:08] Not as accurate. Correct? Yes.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:10] Well, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You doing important work and we appreciate you.

Tara Griffin: [00:16:16] Well, I appreciate your time, and thanks for inviting me to be here. All right,

Lee Kantor: [00:16:19] This is Lee Kantor will sail next time on Denver Business Radio.