How Do You Sell HR to Owners Who Don’t Think They Need It?

Introduction:

Sandy Kapell knows HR—just not the version most business owners live with. After years leading human resources for corporations, Sandy launched her own business, Trakehner Leadership, to bring that expertise to companies that need help. And she’s quickly found a big opportunity: Most small businesses don’t have HR departments, but they still have all the same HR challenges.

The catch? Sandy has also realized that knowing HR isn’t the same as knowing how owners think about HR. Or how they talk about it. Or what they’re actually willing to pay for it. So for our latest 21 Hats Brainstorm, we brought in a panel of owners to help Sandy pressure test her assumptions, refine her pitch, and figure out what HR looks like in companies where, as one owner puts it, I tell everyone what the plan is, and then I say, “‘If you don’t like it, talk to HR.’ And the joke is, I am HR. I am the owner.”

Along the way, Sandy and the panelists dig into questions like: When does a business really need HR? What does good HR even look like at 10 or 20 employees? And how do you offer structure and support without sounding like the police or, even worse, like an HR person? Because what Sandy is really trying to do is to take a function most owners resist and make it something they actually want.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Chris Hutchinson and his colleague Katie Huey of Trebuchet Group, plus Sandy Kapell of Trakehner Leadership, Kelly Berry of Second Stage Growth, Amy Collins of The Olea Group, Jay Goltz of The Goltz Group, Kate Morgan of Boston Human Capital Partners, Megan Perona of A.R.E. Manufacturing, and Mike Wolf of Delgado Stone Distributors.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Sandy. Sandy is a corporate refugee who recently started her own business—tell me if I’m pronouncing this right—Trakehner Leadership.

Sandy Kapell:
Yes, good job.

Loren Feldman:
All right. She started the business to offer HR guidance to other businesses. She believes businesses of all sizes need professional, skilled advice with things like compensation, employee training, retention, succession planning, change management, but she’s not sure she speaks the language of business owners or fully understands their HR needs. She knows she has the skills, but if she can’t talk about HR in a way that resonates, who’s going to hire her? Is that fair, Sandy?

Sandy Kapell:
Yes, that was an excellent summary.

Loren Feldman:
All right, then, first, tell us briefly about your background. How did you learn HR? What have you done previously?

Sandy Kapell:
So I started in a traditional HR career many years ago, McMillan Publishing, which is long gone, but at the time was owned by Robert Maxwell. And when he died, suddenly, the company was pushed into bankruptcy, and that gave me my first real exposure to change management and change and how to navigate what is happening to employees where you’re trying to run a business, and leadership has been significantly disrupted.

Then, I sort of pursued change opportunities all over the world. I went with MetLife. I was with a broker dealer. I ended up at AIG during the height of the financial crisis, when we owed the government $2 billion, and we were public enemy number one. And then I went to the cable environment, when net neutrality and who was going to be the pipe into the house was the question. I think cable has pretty much ended up on the losing end of that conversation, but it was a very interesting conversation in 2012. And then the family that owned the cable company that I worked for also owns Madison Square Garden, so I went to Madison Square Garden for seven years and was part of the team that built The Sphere from the ground up.

I spent a year at the Metropolitan Opera as the head of HR, and really decided that the right place for me was not working inside of a not-for-profit, but supporting not-for-profits, either in this business or from a board level. And so I decided to try to open my own business, which I love, and I have a partner who’s an expert in employee engagement and writing. But one of the things that we’ve realized is, it’s really my role to help with business development. And a lot of the organizations that really need our help don’t have HR people, or they have HR people who are very operational.

Really, what I want to do is help—well, I want to help the large organizations if they have a specific project. But where there’s a strong need is in these smaller organizations that are really trying to do something unique and different and don’t really have the infrastructure to do it. But I don’t know how to talk to that group.

When I met Loren, I was sort of talking about, like, what is it? We have one of these small groups now as a client, and it’s like, how do the partners get along? How do they scale? What’s their recruiting program? What’s their onboarding program? But I’ve really been challenged by thinking about: What’s the right way to do business development in a world where HR isn’t necessarily where people want to spend their money, but they have problems with people that they don’t know how to solve? And so how I walk over that bridge is really the crux of why I agreed to come into this.

Loren Feldman:
When did you open the business?

Sandy Kapell:
Last May, so we’re just shy of our one-year anniversary.

Loren Feldman:
And how would you say it’s going so far?

Sandy Kapell:
We feel really positive. We have five or six clients now. We just got inquiries from two more clients. We have clients that run the gamut from a tiny, tiny, tiny, VC-backed restaurant to large, global manufacturers. And the theme is all around change, scaling, consistent alignment of internal and external messaging. So there is a theme, and we’ve been very pleased. With the engagements that have ended, people have come back to us and asked us to extend, so we feel really good about that.

Loren Feldman:
So it sounds like you have at least one fairly small client that probably does not have an HR staff?

Sandy Kapell:
Yes, we have two. We have one tiny, tiny, tiny organization—that’s the restaurant—and then we also have a nonprofit that has a very sophisticated CEO, but no HR staff.

Loren Feldman:
Has anything really surprised you about working with them?

Sandy Kapell:
That’s a great question. Yes, I would say the consistent surprise for both of them is the real lack of process around things like interviewing and recruiting and onboarding and employee handbooks, basic infrastructure just to help them so that when people misbehave—because they just can’t help themselves, people misbehave—the basic blocking and tackling isn’t in place.

It’s not even like there’s something that we can make better. There’s nothing. So that’s been a surprise. And then the other surprise is, in a good way, if we can figure out the right language and the right program, how enthusiastic people are in adapting to change. The smaller organizations have not been resistant at all if we give them the right answer that they can understand.

Loren Feldman:
Chris, do you have any questions before we open it up to the group?

Loren Feldman Voiceover:
At this point, Chris invites the members of the panel to ask Sandy questions about what she’s trying to do. We’re not looking to solve her problems just yet; we’re just trying to understand them. Chris starts with Jay Goltz of Artists Frame Service.

Chris Hutchinson:
Jay, what question do you have for Sandy?

Jay Goltz:
I just would like to say something that many people probably don’t know, that I think is extremely relevant to this: Most companies don’t get to 100 employees, and from what I’ve heard, you really can’t afford an HR person till you get to that number. So that’s the world I’ve lived in, and 99 percent of companies do not have an HR person for that reason. So I just think, for those who don’t know that, I think that’s important—Sandy, are you with me on that? You’re nodding. So I think so, yes.

Sandy Kapell:
That has been our experience in the smaller organizations. I didn’t know that number, but I think that’s right.

Chris Hutchinson:
So thank you, Jay, for sharing your perspective. And Kate, what’s your question? Introduce yourself first.

Kate Morgan:
I’m Kate Morgan. I am the founder of Boston Human Capital Partners. I’m also a best-selling author of CustomFit: A Straight Talking Guide to Hiring Top Talent for small businesses and entrepreneurs. So I guess my question is, what is your thesis when it comes to HR and small businesses?

Sandy Kapell:
That’s a really good question. Maybe this is what I need help with. I think, for me, it’s easier to answer what’s my thesis about HR, and then I would ask all of you to tell me: Does that work for small businesses? And what’s the right language to use for small businesses?

So my thesis and approach to HR has evolved over time into: HR provides the guardrails and the framework to really allow people to discover their full potential every day, whether that’s restroom cleaners at Madison Square Garden to the most sophisticated risk managers in the world at AIG. And really, HR figures out the infrastructure that allows people to be their best and gives you a way of solving problems, of giving feedback, of hiring the best people, of keeping the best people, and figuring out what’s next for people. And it really should be a reflection of the leadership and the CEO’s philosophy and their culture and what they want for their company.

It shouldn’t be on the side, sort of judging. It should be behind, supporting leadership and the business goals. And in my experience over the last couple of years of starting this business and working at the opera—and I had really not been exposed to this for a long time—HR feels more like the police, and I don’t want to deal with it, and it’s bureaucracy, and you’re going to help me fire people. Versus you’re going to help me scale, you’re going to help me make good decisions with my partner. I’m going to make really good financial decisions. I’m going to figure out how to retain my best employees. I’m going to figure out how to get development. And I’m trying to figure out how to say those things and not sound like an HR person.

Chris Hutchinson:
Anything added on about the small business piece, because that was some of Kate’s question? Anything different about small business than essentially what you’ve said?

Sandy Kapell:
I think it’s very owner-dependent in the small business world, around their orientation to human resources and what their personal experience has been. So if they’ve had a bad experience or no experience, it becomes more sort of this police conversation—or: I don’t need that. I’m doing just fine where I am.

Whereas in some of the larger organizations—and of course, I picked bosses who believed in HR—there’s sort of a culture built up, or support, sort of at the at the top and at the bottom, for creating a culture and an environment that allows everybody to thrive, not just survive. So finding the language that speaks to every individual owner is trickier than talking to larger organizations who kind of have language around it already.

Chris Hutchinson:
Megan, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself and ask your question?

Megan Perona:
Hi, I’m Megan Perona from A.R.E. Manufacturing, and we’re a contract CNC machine shop outside of Portland, Oregon. So I was wondering, for your company, is it more of a consultancy? Like you would look at what we have and say, “We’re going to set up a better handbook. We’re going to set up a better process for your interviews,” etc.? Or is it like a vendor relationship, where, like, we have an employee that we need to do orientation with, and you guys are going to do the orientation for us?

Sandy Kapell:
It’s definitely more of a consultancy. So it’s a really good question, and it points to one thing that I should get clearer in the way I talk about it—so I appreciate the question, thank you. It’s definitely a consultancy that can work in one of two ways.

One is, there’s a specific project that you want us to do. This is generally more of a middle-market client that does this—you’ve identified: I want to work on decision making rights. Or, I want to do change-management training. Or, we need a better onboarding program. Or, we want to redesign performance management. And then we figure out how long that’s going to take. And we try to really customize for whoever we’re talking to. So that’s project-based. And then we always include, even in our projects, time so that if there’s a specific thing you need done, we’ve built in a couple of hours to do that specific thing.

And then the other—which, honestly, we have more of—is three- to six-month engagements. And we build an LOI that says: We’re going to do these things every month that build off of each other. And we personally do the training. We will personally help with implementing new programs. But what we try to do is a train-the-trainer model so that you can manage it and scale it on your own. And in those, we also build in a few hours. So one of my clients just had somebody who wasn’t coming back from furlough, like help them just deal with the one-off situation. But we do cap the hours because we’re not in a position to do sort of the fractional work where we can be yours two or three days a week, because thankfully, knock on wood, we have enough clients that that’s not the model we’re pursuing right now.

Chris Hutchinson:
Okay, great. Amy, please introduce yourself and your question.

Amy Collins:
I’m Amy Collins from The Olea Group. We provide underwriting services to community development financial institutions across the U.S. My question for you is, what do you think are the signs that a small business needs HR consulting? Can you identify how a small business owner might come to the conclusion that they should work with you?

Sandy Kapell:
I love this question, and I want to build this into our marketing materials. It’s such a good question. I think there are some obvious things. For example, I’m experiencing a lot of turnover, and that’s something that all small business owners recognize as an issue at a certain point.

So, turnover: I want to expand into a new market, and I don’t know how I’m going to do that, because everything I do is on this tiny software or HR platform that we built for ourselves. And then another—this is our most common new business—new CEO or relatively new leader comes in and says, “I want to change this direction, and the infrastructure to change just doesn’t exist.”

Chris Hutchinson:
Great. What other questions do we have, business/entrepreneurial hats on? It’s easy to get sucked into details of HR, because we all have people. What we’re trying to do is trying to think about Sandy’s work as a business, and what questions do you have about where she’s been successful, what she understands, where are the holes?

Loren Feldman:
I’ll jump in. Sandy, who do you think of as your ideal client?

Sandy Kapell:
I think our ideal client has less to do with size and more to do with type of leader and type of work. My expertise is really around sort of deeply understanding what you’re trying to strategically do and build the infrastructure that can do that, that will grow: build a flexible infrastructure that can grow. And so, working with leaders who are inspiring and do have a vision for the future or partnering with strategic planning, visioning process, but really translating that into: What are the operational pillars that make this happen? And it’s not just conversation and change, and we’re going to talk about change, and nothing changes. And we’ve turned work down when we feel like we’re not going to be able to recommend a solution that will resonate with a client.

Loren Feldman:
Can you give us an example of that?

Sandy Kapell:
Well, we’ve turned down—fractional work is a good example of it. I can give two examples: the fractional work. People aren’t looking to build systems for sustainability. They’re just trying to get through the day, and then they’ll decide. And that’s not our ideal client.

And then another example is, I do get a lot of inquiry about executive coaching. And we will certainly do coaching as part of a consultancy, but I’m really clear that I’m not a licensed coach. And it’s not really my expertise. I’m really more of an expert in organizational systems, but we’ve had two conversations that have started with executive coaching and us saying, “That’s not what we do.” And then when we describe our expertise, people saying, “Oh, I think I need that more than I need a coach. What does that conversation look like?”

Chris Hutchinson:
All right, Kelly, if you could introduce yourself and your question? I think we’ll be wrapping up questions here in just a moment.

Kelly Berry:
I just had a quick question, just following up from what Loren was asking. Again, my name is Kelly Berry, and I run a business owner roundtable group. So I work with small businesses consistently. Is there a particular industry or size of business? I mean, it sounds like you can describe your ideal business owner or CEO that you’d like to work with, but I’m just wondering, especially because of your experience in the nonprofit world and some of your other past experience, are there particular industries or are you seeing a sweet spot in a business size where they definitely need more sophisticated help than they can manage on their own?

Sandy Kapell:
We haven’t defined it numerically, and we probably should. What we’re learning over the last year is that the really big companies, they have an HR infrastructure, and if they need us, it’s for a project. It’s not really the consultancy work, and the wheels move slow at a lot of these big companies. And we might be too small and too scrappy for them. But the mid-market and the tiny companies are really good for us, because we get in, and they see results quickly, and success begets success. But we should probably put some work into really defining the ideal target.

Chris Hutchinson:
Jay has a follow-on question, and then we’ll wrap the questions.

Jay Goltz:
All right, I was 100 percent with every single thing you’re saying, but you threw me a boomerang. I think we have a very different definition of what a fractional CFO is. Because I totally think you know what you’re doing with stuff. Every single thing you said resonates with me. I think it’s perfect. But then you said, “Oh, I don’t want to be a fractional.” I think we have a very different definition of what a fractional CFO is. Mine is, meaning it’s not full-time. You come in part-time. What is your definition? Because what you’re describing sounds like a fractional CFO.

Sandy Kapell:
That is such a good question. So yes, we do come in part-time and spend a set number of hours based on the consultancy and based on what you need done. And we get involved. We will meet with employees, we do training, we do follow-up, we do all that. But there’s sort of this trend in HR right now and in finance where you have people who commit to being your fractional HR head for two to three days a week. But it’s more day-to-day-to-day, versus: We have these four things that we’re trying to get done, and we’re going to hyper-concentrate on those four things that we’re getting done.

Jay Goltz:
But to my thinking, that day-to-day-to-day, you’re going to do it better. So that is in your wheelhouse. From the customer side, what you’ve described is a fractional CFO, and what you don’t want to do is not take action. You don’t want to just fill a chair. Okay, I got that. You want to bring positive change to an organization. Okay, I got that. That fits everything you’re saying.

Chris Hutchinson:
Okay, thanks for the clarification, Jay. We’re gonna shift just a little bit now, unless Loren is gonna say something first. Loren?

Loren Feldman:
I’m going to ask one more question. My question is this, Sandy: At the heart of it, why do you want to work with smaller organizations? Your experience is with larger organizations. They have systems that you’re used to dealing with, as opposed to building those systems. The margins are likely to be greater dealing with larger clients. Why are you focused on small clients at all?

Sandy Kapell:
You know, to be honest, it wasn’t how I started. And then when I got into it, I think smaller businesses are doing really interesting work. The people, certainly, who we’ve come in contact with are just exhausted because they’re doing everything, and I feel like we can really help and have a high impact. And it’s put me on this learning curve, which I have loved.

You know, if you take yourself seriously as a change person and take yourself seriously as a scaling person and a process person, going in where there’s green field and building it from scratch is the absolute hardest thing to do. And so I’ve become very, very attracted to it. Plus, I think people who start something new—it’s hard, and I want to be around those people who succeed at it.

Jay Goltz:
Woohoo! [Laughter]

Chris Hutchinson:
Yeah, awesome, awesome. Okay, so Sandy, here’s where we’re going to turn to the virtual dry erase board, which, hopefully, you still have up. Essentially, the idea is you get to pick one of these areas for us to focus on, for this group to help you with a next step, a caution, or success tip. So we have things around: working with smaller organizations. Definition of fractional CHRO. Who do you think is an ideal client? What do you think the signs are that a small business needs HR consulting? Is it, I guess, consultancy or vendor? That was kind of an answer, and you sort of gave your thesis. But looking at all those, what’s the support or the question that you want to ask us as an assembled group, so that we can provide some answers and some ideas to you?

Sandy Kapell:
Well, I think the one that answers all of the other questions, if I got it right, is: What do I think the signs are that a small business needs HR consulting? But I also feel like I don’t know what I don’t know. And if somebody really strongly felt that I’m picking the wrong answer, I’d like to know that—or the wrong question.

Chris Hutchinson:
Perfect. So we’re going to focus on, what do you think are the signs a small business needs HR consulting? So the idea is, actually, for a few moments, we want to just kind of capture some ideas. Go ahead and type in a success tip, a caution, or a next step for Sandy, based on the idea that we’re talking about: What do you think the signs are that a small business needs HR consulting? So I’ll be quiet for about two minutes here, and then we’ll open it back up to start hearing these questions.

Loren Feldman Voiceover:
So, at this point, everyone in the Brainstorm attempts to formulate a success tip, a caution, or a next step. The participants type their thoughts into the software program that Chris uses, which allows everyone to see the suggestions and to “like” the ones they favor. The suggestions that get the most likes rise to the top of the list. When everyone is ready, Chris asks the authors of the most-liked recommendations to explain their thinking to Sandy. We start with Amy Collins of The Olea Group, who suggests that a lot of entrepreneurs would prefer not to even think about HR.

Amy Collins:
Yeah, I wrote that because I think it’s how I feel. It’s how a lot of people feel. We have an inside joke at my company. I might be the only one who thinks it’s funny, but thankfully, there’s no HR department for people to complain to. And the joke is, I’ll tell everyone, “Here’s what’s going on, here’s what we’re doing here, here’s what’s moving over here.” And then I say, “If you don’t like it, talk to HR.” And the joke is, I am HR. [Laughter] I am the owner. There’s no HR, right? So it kind of feels fun, at least for me, because nobody can—why is it fun? Because there’s no police. Like, we’re in the Wild, Wild West, and that means we can break rules. That means we can do whatever makes sense. And so I think a lot of small businesses have that ethos. And if you want to target small businesses, you need to reach those people who feel that way.

Chris Hutchinson:
Amy, could you share the last sentence? Since the audience can’t see it, read the last sentence of your tip.

Amy Collins:
“If you want to work with very small businesses, you need to market yourself as the fun, anti-HR HR person.”

Chris Hutchinson:
Great. Thank you for that. All right, we have some ties. We’ll go with “Business size is a good indicator.” Who wrote that?

Kelly Berry:
That was me. This is Kelly.

Chris Hutchinson:
Kelly, introduce yourself.

Kelly Berry:
Yes. Kelly Berry, like I mentioned before, I work with small businesses as a roundtable group facilitator. So I see, personally, as these businesses reach different sizes, that they have milestones, and they start to become overwhelmed, where they can’t make these decisions themselves. It’s one thing to handle the hiring and firing. And then, I had someone in my group who came into the group one time and said, “My administrative assistant is pregnant.” And we’re like, “Okay, well, what’s your maternity leave policy?” “Uhhh… we don’t have one.”

So the idea is that you’re going to hit a certain point where you have to make some of these decisions, and that’s when you’re going to need to bring somebody in. So can you fine-tune or pinpoint what’s the ideal size of that business? And again, it doesn’t mean you’re not going to do work with other businesses of different sizes, but if you’re going to reach out to people, you need to think about what their pain points are, and when is it going to be painful enough to want someone else to be taking that problem over?

Chris Hutchinson:
Excellent. I see Sandy taking notes. The next one is—I’ll read it clearly: “State the problem you’re solving. What’s the benefit to CEO or owner?” Who wrote that?

Mike Wolf:
That was me, Mike Wolf, CEO of Delgado Stone Distributors. I’m probably one of the few non-owner CEOs here. So for me, it’s understanding what problems are you solving. And we’ve grown from, when I first got here, it was about 26 employees, to over 50. And when you hit that 50 threshold, there are some rules, certainly in Connecticut, that come into place.

But for me, when I’m listening or having a conversation, I want to know, “Well, what’s being taken off my plate? What is this investment going to do to solve the problems that we’re having and help us achieve the next level?” Especially, as you mentioned, scaling up to get to that tier. So it’s nice, okay, there’s HR, yeah, it’s fun. But I think systems are a good point and processes. But really, it’s about, what are you alleviating from this owner or CEO who now has more than maybe they anticipated when they started the business?

Chris Hutchinson:
Great. Thank you, Mike. How about the next one? What I’m seeing is, “It’s hard for small business owners to hire people with niche specialties, especially as outside vendors and consultants. We hire generalists, people who can solve many problems at once.”

Amy Collins:
Sorry, that was me.

Loren Feldman:
No apologies necessary.

Chris Hutchinson:
That’s all right, Amy. So anything you’d want to add to that to help flesh it out for Sandy as a tip or a caution or a success idea?

Amy Collins:
Well, when you were speaking earlier, Sandy, I heard you make a distinction several times that sounded to me like, “We do this, not this. We look for this type of project, not that type of project.” And I think that will limit the number of small business owners you can likely work with, if that’s how you present yourself. Because I, as a small business owner, need someone who can just kind of jump in and take things, run with things, someone who’s an expert and is able to provide solutions in many different areas of their area of expertise.

Chris Hutchinson:
I see Sandy absorbing things intensely that we’re sharing here. How about the next one? We have, “Reframe fractional CHRO.” Who was the author for that one?

Mike Wolf:
That was me, Mike, again, from Delgado Stone. And I think Jay mentioned this just before we jumped into this part of the process, so obviously I’m on the right track if Jay mentioned it. [Laughter]

Jay Goltz:
You’re the best.

Mike Wolf:
We brought in a fractional CHRO, really, to specifically design systems and help us with the growth of our sales team. So I think to say we don’t want to fall into that category, because we don’t want to just do ad hoc or certain pieces of things, I think reframing it, or maybe understanding how the small business owners are defining the fractional CHRO versus how you’re defining it, because maybe there’s just a misalignment there. Because I do think they can help design systems, and then there may be even more business. And that’s how we started. We worked with the fractional CHRO, and then as our team grew and the processes were in place, we were able to give them more business. So that was one way that it worked out for us, and I think it’s worth exploring.

Chris Hutchinson:
Thanks. Now, I’ll actually add on to that, because I think this is something that happens, especially between different sizes of businesses or different levels of expertise. Jargon tends to be packed information, and so the more that it’s a jargon word or even an acronym, the likelihood of somebody in a small business understanding that goes down, because they’re just not exposed to that. So unpacking jargon, I think, is an important part of any time we communicate. We use it with teams.

Oh, we all understand what integrity means. Actually, it means radically different things. We need to put it on the table, figure out what that is, then we can move forward. So I think as you’re working on this, unpacking jargon will help you communicate those same skills and abilities to people who don’t know the word and would otherwise get shut out. So, let’s see. We’ve got two more that are kind of fleshed out here: “I think there are 10 areas that all businesses have to deal with.” And who is the author for that?

Jay Goltz:
It’s me, Jay.

Chris Hutchinson:
That’s Jay Goltz. Jay, fill us in.

Jay Goltz:
There isn’t one on that list that couldn’t cost them tens of thousands of dollars a year. So I think this is an extremely ripe audience to go after, because they don’t know what they don’t know. And unfortunately, the running joke is with HR: Well, that’s big business stuff. It has nothing to do with small business.

My argument is there’s two kinds of HR: There’s good HR and there’s dangerous HR. There’s no such thing as no HR. If you have one employee, you’ve got HR. And people don’t think about that. All you need is one lawsuit from someone who said, “Oh, she fired me because I got pregnant and blah, blah, blah.” It’s extremely dangerous and expensive. And I think that’s what the selling pitch is, that they don’t know what they don’t know. And I think everyone needs this.

Chris Hutchinson:
Well said, Jay, well said. So our last one that we’ll bring up here is, “Look for companies that have production systems in place.” Who wrote that? And please flesh it out for us.

Megan Perona:
Well, this is Megan. So, because we’re a machine shop, and we make parts on big mills and lathes, and that’s the thing that we started with. We had a lathe and a garage, and we made parts, and that’s what we’re really good at. And a lot of times we focus on the shop floor, because that’s where we make money. Like, the spindles have to turn, but we forget about everything else. So everything else is secondary to what happens on the shop floor. We’ve done a ton with lean manufacturing principles, and so our shop floor runs really efficiently. There are processes. Everything has been digitized. And then you come up front and it’s like 1985 up here sometimes.

Jay Goltz:
‘85 was a good year. [Laughter]

Megan Perona:
I did get rid of the typewriter. [Laughter]

Jay Goltz:
Was it a Selectric?

Megan Perona:
I don’t know. It’s upstairs. I wasn’t allowed to fully get rid of it. [Laughter]

Chris Hutchinson:
You might need it.

Jay Goltz:
It’s good for shipping labels, actually.

Megan Perona:
But a lot of times, I think, at least in our small business—and I think this does apply to a lot—is the thing that you started the business with, that actually makes the money in the business is the thing that you’re really good at, and that’s where the focus goes. And the HR, all the other things, you just kind of make them run so they’re good enough. And so I think that’s something where your consultancy—that would be perfect for a company that really could strengthen those other processes to be just as strong as their main processes.

Chris Hutchinson:
Now, Sandy, you’ve got lots of information, an embarrassment of riches of lots of great advice. Loren, do you get to ask the question, or do I get this question?

Loren Feldman:
You get to ask the question.

Chris Hutchinson:
So, Sandy, which do you think, “I want to put this into place?” Because you’ve got a whole bunch of folks here who would be willing to positively hold you accountable so that you can make the progress and help businesses out there. What do you want to act on?

Sandy Kapell:
I’m going to combine a couple of things. I would say the things that really resonated with me—first of all, it all resonated with me, and I took a lot of notes. So, thank you to everybody for really thoughtful responses. The “fun, anti-HR HR” I personally love, and I think I would love to really think about how to think about that. I mean, part of the problem with HR is there are rules, but I definitely don’t want to be the police. I’ve never wanted to be the police. It’s not really how I think about HR, so I love that language.

The other language that I liked was this concept of: Where’s the tipping point of something becoming painful enough that you want someone else to do it? And I think that dovetails really smoothly with what Mike was saying around what’s going to be taken off my plate. Like, those two things to me are sort of two sides of the coin: This is causing me so much pain, and I don’t want to deal with it anymore. Who’s going to do that? And this is on my plate and distracting me from, like, what Megan was saying, what I’m really good at and where I make money. But I know I need it, and if I want to go from 50 to 100 and 100 to 300 and then 300 to 1,000 because my product’s doing that well—is good enough really going to get you there?

And I really appreciate the conversation around fractional CHRO. It’s become kind of a lingo thing, and I should figure out the right language to talk about it without saying we don’t want to do it. Because I hear the point you guys are making, and the work you’re talking about is the work we like to do and are good at. And it’s very project-specific and takes X amount of time during the week. And if people think about that as a fractional anything, then I don’t know why I care. And then I am sort of curious about Jay’s comment that there are 10 areas that all business leaders have to deal with, like what they are. I mean, I could make up the list.

Jay Goltz:
No, I put it in the thing.

Sandy Kapell:
Oh, it’s in the chat. I haven’t seen it yet.

Jay Goltz:
Yeah, you know, from hiring, firing, workman’s comp, all that stuff. I have one other question: The name of your company is extremely hard to remember.

Kate Morgan:
No, it isn’t , Jay. She’s an equestrian, like I am. So, we know.

Jay Goltz:
Okay, so everyone who’s an equestrian will be into it. Okay, here’s my name: HRtogrow.com. I just don’t think people can remember that. I’ll bet you right now, most of you can’t spell what the name of the company is, and I think that’s a problem.

Sandy Kapell:
Yeah, you’re not the first person who has given me that feedback.

Chris Hutchinson:
That’s what DBAs are for. So you can have your name over here and do business as whatever. Sandy, thank you so much, and I’m going to thank the other people who participated before I hand this right over to Loren. You did a great job conforming gently to the process and keeping it open until we could provide some great advice. So Loren, take it away.

Loren Feldman:
Sandy, any last thoughts?

Sandy Kapell:
No other than thank you. Thank you, Loren. Thank you, Chris. Thank you to all of you for so much to think about. And I really, really appreciate the candor and the interest and the support.

Jay Goltz:
The world needs what you’re doing, and I’m extremely confident you’re going to do extremely well with this, because every entrepreneur needs this.

Sandy Kapell:
Thank you.

Loren Feldman:
And I’ll thank everybody as well, especially Sandy Kapell and our facilitator, Chris Hutchinson, and of course, all of you who pitched in to try to help. And a special thanks again to our terrific sponsors, New Bridge Studios and Grasshopper Bank.