IAM2676 – President and Founder Helps Clients Find Best Talents in HR and Payroll

Transcription:

John Bernatovicz 00:00

I would say that the number one thing that I got right by mistake is the culture in my firm. I did not realize how important it was until it was established, and I did not do any of it on purpose. Right, Meaning I didn't put a plan together. I didn't put a culture plan. I didn't, you know, say, I want it to be this when it's done. It just came to be as a result of the people that I hired and the I think the way by which I do business, which, in essence is the way the firm does business.

Gresham Harkless 00:58

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have John Bernatovicz of Willary. John, it's awesome to have you on the show.

John Bernatovicz 01:06

Thank you. We're really looking forward to it.

Gresham Harkless 01:08

Super excited to have you on the show. I wanted to read a little bit more about John so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing and. John is the president and founder of Willary, a staffing and consulting firm solely focused on HR and payroll. The firm helps clients transform their organizations through people, processes and technology. Willary ensures our clients have the best talent in their HR and payroll departments, and their employee lifecycle process is effective and compliant, and they are optimizing their HR technology. With over 22 years of experience within the payroll and HR niche, John is uniquely qualified to drive Willary into a leadership position within the HR and payroll, staffing and consulting spaces. John, are you ready to speak to the I Am CEO community?

John Bernatovicz 01:50

Of course. Yeah. Let's get it on.

Gresham Harkless 01:53

So to kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story and what led you to get started with your business.

John Bernatovicz 01:59

Yeah, so probably about 15 years ago, I was working in corporate America and had aspired, actually, since I was a little kid, to own my own business. Frankly. I grew up in a house. My dad was a CEO of a local hospital. Community. Community hospital. So I got to see all the cool stuff he got to do. I got all the neat stuff, like tickets to Cavs games that were on the, you know, Mid Court and Browns tickets and got to play golf and all this fun stuff. But he worked really, really hard and I took that part, I think, a little bit for granted as a kid and, and then when I got into corporate America, I had a great time. I worked for a company called ADP and learned how to sell and manage with people. But I thought there was something missing, so I aspired to start my own company. As a matter of fact, the first business I started, I still have, it's a waterbending company. We've been doing that for now, 15, 16 years. But my full time focus is on Willery. So nine years ago, after my wife had our second child, I really wanted to work from home and have a business that allowed me to do that. So I figured I'd start a firm that was focused in HR and payroll at the same time, create a virtual work environment for my employees. So I was the first one to do it and then hired two people within about nine months and then it took off from there. So.

Gresham Harkless 03:18

Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate that. Definitely sounds like the entrepreneurship bug is in your, is in your DNA, so to speak. So yeah, it's great to hear how you kind of continue on and, and even, probably even sounds like it's evolved from how to run a business from, you know, when your father was running his business to now being able to have like a virtual team and a virtual organization as well.

John Bernatovicz 03:39

Yeah, no, it sure does. Yeah, he doesn't quite get that part. My dad's been retired for a number of years now and doesn't quite understand like, how do you not go to an you really work, right? Are you employ, how do you know your employees are really working? And so it certainly is unique, the unique dialogue for me. He's a little, I don't want to say old school, but I think I just did traditional, probably the bright way to put it, but he, he totally gets it and supports me. And I, I do agree, like kind of a modern day spin on my dad and same for my mom. My mom was an artist, incredibly creative. So I have a very unique kind of merging of two people to make me and I think I got the best of both worlds with him.

Gresham Harkless 04:15

So yeah, absolutely. Definitely it sounds like. And you need kind of both of those aspects to be able to run a business at times because you have to come up with creative solutions often and you have to kind of tap into that artistry background as well. So I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper, hear a little bit more about Willary. Can you tell us exactly what you do for the clients you're working with.

John Bernatovicz 04:32

Yeah, sure, yeah. So we, we primarily focus, our target market is mid, mid market. So we, we deem that 50 to 100 employees, up to 5,000 employees. And we do three things for them primarily. First is on the people side. We ensure that they have the right people within their HR and payroll team and department. So that can mean direct hire, search based support so they someone leaves the organization or they're adding a new position. So we have the most in depth and deep network of HR and payroll professionals from a search perspective than any company in the country in my opinion, certainly within 500 miles of, of where we are here in Cleveland or just south of Cleveland. So we do great work again, direct hire, full time, however you want to describe it, search based firm as well as we do a contract or temporary support. So we may have a payroll manager, which this has happened a few times, that leaves or has to go on maternity leave or has a surgery and no one else is there, knows how to run the payroll, right. And then all of a sudden you get calls from CFOs, VPs of HR like oh no, I don't know how to do this and no one else does. But people have to get paid, right? So that contract, temporary, short term basis, we've got a very unique network of professionals there. So that's on the people side. And then on the process improvement side, we look at all things application and retirement to make sure our clients are efficient and compliant. And we simply start with asking clients what process within your group could be improved? Where do you have gaps, challenges, where's the bottleneck in your HR process? It can be performance management. It can be most commonly like onboarding or identifying talent. It can be sometimes when you offboard people, you have high turnover, you're not quite sure why. So we focus in on process improvement. We have structure and methodology for doing that very efficiently. And then on the tech side, on the system side, we provide unique services that help clients optimize the HR technology that they're on. So how they pay their people, how they manage performance management, how employees leverage system for like self service, all the tech based stuff, we help them optimize that. And then if they're struggling with optimizing it or they're dissatisfied with the firm that they use, we have a full vendor selection support service that can help them find new tech, which there's about 20,000 HR technologies out there. So it's a pretty intimidating process. And then once they've selected that new vendor. We have what they call activation support. We can do client side implementation support. So project management, change management, functional technical support. The idea of a new HR HCM technology is really great at times, but it's a herculean event to get from A to Z, to purchase it properly, to be prepared for it and then effectively implement it. And I'll end with this. So over the nine years that we've had the firm, we've developed a willery way for how we staff and how we do our projects. We have a very systematic methodology by which we use to help our clients ensure that they get a positive result out of our support. And it really is focused on project planning, communicating change, being honest and truthful about conversation, process orientation, detail oriented. At the same time the people that are doing it, their subject matters, subject matter experts. So that means they have their F HR or term certification or they have their certified payroll professional. So they know what they're doing. And they're not lifetime consultants. They've been in the field as an HR or payroll professional. They know the pain points of our client. So it makes them the combination of our methodology and their experience and the way we do things makes.

A much higher chance for us to have a successful client engagement. So that's a little bit about the specifics of what we do.

Gresham Harkless 08:18

Nice. I definitely appreciate that because I think that, you know, from the people aspect, a lot of people sometimes forget when you peel back the onion of a business, it's made up of people and you got to make sure that you have the people in the right seat, so to speak, so that you can kind of make sure that you be successful. And then of course the processes, the process, the processes make everything flow. So to make sure to have those in place allow you to sometimes even scale if that's the goal for the organization. And then of course technology is literally in every single industry. So you kind of have to make sure that you're tapping into that. And just as you kind of spoke to, you know, a lot of times a shiny box, so to speak, on the store, on the store counter. And you want to buy it and implement it into your organization, but it's not as easy to implement as it looks at looks like on that box. So it's great to be able to that expertise to make that happen.

John Bernatovicz 09:04

Yeah, no, it's interesting in that. So there's a stat out there that says about 50% of technology implementations fail. Right.

So that's like holy cow, like the Half of them Fail. And the other half are. Are normally, they say about 80% of companies think they haven't fully optimized their tool, so they have to get it right. Then you take, you know, four out of five of them, and they don't even think they're leveraging their technology the best way. So we've, we've taken those lessons, learned understanding the method. We know, we know why they fail. Right. There's a number of reasons why they, these projects fail. Unanticipated change that they didn't plan for. They didn't do project planning. They didn't resource the engagement properly with the right people, with the right expertise who had the proper amount of time. So by doing all that and just kind of being systematic, and companies that hire us, they see that as a risk. Right. So they want to mitigate that risk. It's unfortunate the ones that don't hire a firm like ours that at times try to take it on their own, and it's all too much more than often for someone that has a full plate already, right. To implement a new system or improve a process, they just can't get to it,so.

Gresham Harkless 10:08

yeah, that makes perfect sense. And a lot of times it's about not only getting the people on the team in the right place so that they can be successful in their zone of genius, so to speak, but also getting those organizations in the right place. Because if your focus is not to try to implement technology, then you want to focus on the bread and butter, the most core competencies of your business, and not focus, focus on those things and hire experts like yourself to do that.

John Bernatovicz 10:31

Yeah, you got it.

Gresham Harkless 10:32

Nice.

John Bernatovicz 10:33

And I know you need to be salesman for Willy.

Gresham Harkless 10:35

There you go. Well, I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper because you touched on it. I wanted to make sure you covered on it. I usually ask for something called your secret sauce, and you might have already touched on that. It might be the willary way. Was there anything more you wanted to add on what you feel kind of makes you or your organization unique?

John Bernatovicz 10:51

Yeah, sure. No, thanks. We work really hard on that. So. Because I feel like as an entrepreneur and a business owner, I don't necessarily want to do the same thing or copycat. Right. That doesn't feel good. And there's no way to distinguish yourself in the marketplace. And people are not attracted to that as well. They're not attracted to the same. They're attracted to different and better. So first and foremost is our niche. So we just focus in HR and payroll. That is a starting point. Makes us very unique. The focus on hr, maybe there's others that do that, but when you combine that with payroll, certainly distinguish ourselves in that regard. So that's one main, unique, distinguished fact. So then in addition to that, we have methodologies and processes that I mentioned that work. They're tried and true. We've learned through the years and leveraged the experiences that our consultants have. So we've developed a way to do a vendor selection from A to Z. Right. And we have a methodology and a process that we follow. So that's the secondary piece.

Gresham Harkless 11:49

Nice. Well, I definitely appreciate that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this could be like an app, a book, one of the books you mentioned, or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

John Bernatovicz 12:02

So again, to be transparent, I know sometimes in these types of podcasts it's helpful. So we had great success in our firm over the last eight plus years. And when I first started it in 2010, we went through hyper growth. Right? Zero to wherever you go is, can be hyper growth. And we received a lot of rewards, awards and rewards and recognition for that. And as it relates to it, we reached this point to where, hey, we've got something really cool that is speaking to the market. People are buying it, they're paying money for it. We're making a good impact. And I, as the CEO, realized that if I continue to grow this at the rate that I'd grown up to this point, I would not be able to sustain, understand it as a human being. Right. It was one of those startup, 16, 18 hour, you know, a day type of jobs, just working my tail off to make this thing work. Right. I had obligations with my family and wanted to take care of my, my two little ones @ the time. And my wife trusted me to start this business kind of right at the tail end of a recession, so I couldn't fail. So, so, but once we'd grown and had some success, I realized there was something else more there. So what we did is we took a, I call it like two major, three major steps back. We still continued to grow, but our pace slowed. But we built this foundation around people, process and technology, which is at the cornerstone of our business. So we developed the management team, we put some additional technologies in place that make accountability more evident to people, how they're doing at a. At their Fingertip.

Gresham Harkless 13:36

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you sharing that with us. Now, I wanted to ask you What I call a C O nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice or if you can hop into a time machine, what would you tell your younger business Self?

John Bernatovicz 13:48

Yeah, I probably would have read the book sooner. Right. And that, that, that's too easy of an answer to your question. I, I, I would say that the number one thing that, that, that I got right by mistake is the culture in my firm. I did not realize how important it was until it was established. And I did not do any of it on purpose. Right. Meaning I didn't put a plan together. I didn't put a culture plan. I didn't, you know, say I want it to be this when it's done. It just came to be as a result of the people that I hired and the, I think the way by which I do business, which in essence is the way the firm does.

Gresham Harkless 14:25

Business. Yeah, absolutely. That makes perfect sense. And that brings me to my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different CEOs on this show. So John, what does being a CEO mean to You?

John Bernatovicz 14:38

The CEO sets the standard, as we talked about before, he or she's a visionary as to where the firm or company is going. So you set the stage, you make sure you have the right people in place to execute where that vision is. And to me, a CEO is to treat people the right way. Right. CEO is no different than any other person on your team, any other customer, any other individual, whether they're, they're making minimum wage or they're a multi million dollar successful salaried Employee.

Gresham Harkless 15:06

I definitely appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more, John. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let the readers and listeners know. And then of course, how best.

Gresham Harkless 15:15

People can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you guys are doing.

John Bernatovicz 15:19

Yeah, sure. So I would say the one really unique thing we have going on right now is out of our process improvement practice, we developed something called Houzzmyhr. You can learn about that on our website. So Houze H o w posture es myhr in essence, it's a 40, 30 to 40 minute survey that you can take an individual that's not in HR or preferably someone in human resources, and in that quick 30 to 40 minutes you can figure out how we, well, your HR department is doing for its employees from everything from application to retirement. So you can learn about that@willery.com our website w-I l l https://www.google.com/search?q=O-R-Y.com and forward slash hows myhr we also have howsmyhhttps://www.google.com/search?q=r.com so h O-W-S-M y h https://www.google.com/search?q=r.com and so you can find me on Twitter at John Bernatovicz last name is B E R N A T O V I C Z. You can find Willary on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, everywhere else. Marketing has a we're willary one w I l l o r y the number one and Willery comes from I have a Will, my 11 year old son. I have a nine year old daughter Mallory. So Will, Will and Mallory combined as Will that usually a unique way for people to remember.

Gresham Harkless 16:36

Nice. So I definitely appreciate that. And we'll make sure to have all those links in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you and check out everything you guys are doing. But thank you so much again and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the Day.

John Bernatovicz 16:47

Thank you.