In this practical episode, DeeAnn Palin, Founder and CEO of ONPOINT Business Solutions, shares why treating HR as pure overhead keeps founders stuck and how to turn people strategy into a real growth lever. If payroll feels like your biggest expense yet you’re still leaking talent and time, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why treating HR as pure expense creates hidden leakage and blocks the next growth stage

- How to know when fractional strategic HR support becomes cheaper than doing nothing

- What the real math of turnover and misallocated rewards is costing you every year

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 4 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

DeeAnn Palin is the Founder and CEO of ONPOINT Business Solutions, where she partners with CEOs and boards to help growth-focused companies navigate critical transitions. With over 20 years of executive leadership experience and more than a decade as a business owner and coach, she brings both strategic insight and operational expertise. Known as the “CEO Whisperer,” DeeAnn helps leaders solve complex HR and organizational challenges while preparing their companies for the next stage of growth.

Want to learn more about DeeAnn Palin's work at ONPOINT Business Solutions? Check out her website at https://onptbiz.com/

Contact DeeAnn Palin directly at https://onptbiz.com/contact-us/

Connect with DeeAnn Palin through her LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/deeannpalin/

Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome once again

to the Start, Scale, and Succeed podcast-the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven levels of your journey as a

founder. I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and way, way too

many founders treat HR like a necessary evil that they can

just hand off to a bookkeeper, or probably more likely just

keep ignoring altogether.

But once you're leading managers, once you've reached a

certain level of success, in particular, the people problems

you've been in ignoring start to compound. The new higher

revolving door-you experienced that yet, or the empty seats

that you just cannot, for the life of you, figure out how to

fill, or or even the key leaders who you don't realize it, but

they're already looking at other job offers. There are some

really big challenges and opportunities all in the world

of HR, which for many founders is brand new territory. So, with

me today, my guest helps founders turn HR from overhead

into a growth engine. Deanne Palin is the founder and CEO of

OnPoint Business Solutions, where she partners with CEOs and

boards to help growth-focused companies navigate critical

transitions. With over 20 years of executive leadership

experience and more than a decade as a business owner and

coach, she brings both strategic insight and operational

expertise. She's known as the CEO Whisperer, and Deann helps

leaders solve complex HR and organizational challenges while

preparing their companies for the next stage of growth. And

she's here with us today, Deanne. Welcome. So excited to

have you here. I want to start off with with you know. I was

telling you when we were starting, I was just having this

conversation with a client, but many of the founders I work with

think HR is just a big waste of money, or even worse, a bad

word. You know, it's like just don't talk about that. It's not

a good thing. Why do you think that HR has such a bad

reputation with so many entrepreneurs?

Oh, we could spend six hours on that, but I'll

start with just a couple of key things. One is it HR doesn't

really show up on the PNL other than like salaries and benefits,

right? And for most companies, when you hit a certain size,

that's their number one, number two, or number three expense

line. So it feels like an expense to companies, but what

we're missing are the opportunities to really create

behaviors in a growth engine for companies. And the other thing

that we're facing is the leakage on the profitability side with

turnover. The things that you mentioned; those are real

problems for companies, and a lot of founders just think they

can, you know, shoulder through the hiring process and the

issues, and just write the check and build it in as an expense

line, and are continually frustrated, feeling like they're

pushing rocks up a hill. It's the place where I see most

founders not be able to graduate to the next level of growth,

whether it's 1 million to 5 million or 5 million to 20

million. If you don't crack this code on people management and

people strategy, it does feel onerous, painful, and like

something you should avoid because most of the time CEOs of

things they've tried aren't working, so it just feels like a

waste of effort. The other thing that I see a lot of times is a

CEO will have their controller, their office manager, their

spouse running HR, and so it feels very tactical,

transactional, and and frankly not fun. You know, a lot of

CEOs, I joke with, gosh, running a company would be fun if we

didn't have to have employees, right? And that's not what you

want for a company. Most CEOs want to build a legacy. They

want to create a lifestyle for people. It's not just about

making the money. It's about building a culture and and

having a really good purpose. And the way HR is run to a

certain level doesn't set it up for that kind of success. And a

lot of times, a person that we've got working on HR in the

company, even that first hire, they they do what I call going

native, where they forget that they're trying to help a CEO

grow a company, or they've never had the skill to do that because

a company can't pay for it, and they end up just being a

tactical person that ends up advocating for employees and

causing more hardship for CEOs rather than not.

Yeah, well, it's it's interesting because

there's a certain extent to where a CEO needs the skill of

picking the right person, but needs to have you know hopefully

not experience the wrong person, but like needs to have

experience to be able to do that. And so it's a little

chicken and the egg to some extent. Like, how do you know

what the right person is? How do you help folks to recognize?

Let's start just with. The opportunity of what a great HR

leader would do for their organization.

Yeah, I'll start off by saying, a strategic HR

leader isn't usually the first hire a CEO should make on an

executive team because, frankly, they're too expensive, and if

you don't have 200 employees, it's a hard position to

rationalize, right? Usually, companies that are at this

growth stage need every nickel they've got to invest in the

business. So, oftentimes, we serve as a fractional support to

help them build the right executive team in the right

order, and fractional support is a huge way to do that on

marketing, on HR, on finance, oftentimes. But what we can do

with and for a CEO is really help them build the correct

strategy. And if they've already got a great business strategy,

align an HR strategy around it. And that means what's your

workforce plan? What kind of skill sets do you need to have

to build your company? You talked about it, Scott, with the

different layers of leadership. When is it the right time to add

a person or a function or a skill? And I use tools. I've

used DISC, Predictive Index, Culture Index. I am 100% aligned

around Aptiv Index. I've become a national reseller for them.

It's an index tool that helps a CEO know that they've got the

right people in the right seat. It DNA maps the skill sets to

make sure people are equipped to do the jobs that you're hiring

for or need. A lot of what CEOs are scared to hire around is,

what if I fail? What if I hire the wrong person? What if they

don't achieve what they need to to achieve? It's expensive, and

so doing everything we can on the front end to make sure we

define the role clearly, we understand what the success

factors are, we know the types of skills and behaviors, and and

frankly, like DNA personality assessment to have the right

person in the right job, and then onboard correctly. Those

are really really important, and most CEOs don't have the skills

or the experience to do that.

Yeah, DeeAnn, one of the things that you've

words that you've used quite frequently, and and I think for

good reason, is that this is expensive. And not only is it

expensive, but it feels expensive. Payroll can be one of

the biggest expenses in on a PNL, but for a lot of founders,

hiring the the right people to help make the most of that

payroll feels even more expensive. How do you help folks

figure out when when it's the right time to start bringing in

some outside help?

So the first thing I will tell you is if you've got

if a CEO's got more than 20 employees, they're going to need

some level of HR, administrative, tactical support

somebody to process payroll somebody to help them with the

benefits enrollment somebody to help onboarding employees hiring

that kind of thing that's a very different role than changing HR

into a strategic lever if that makes sense so there's part of

the blocking and tackling of HR to create a legally sound team

to make sure you're fully staffed to execute the day to

day. When it becomes an expense that is not smart anymore is

when you get to an employee size where you're not leveraging your

total rewards package, meaning all of your payroll, your perks,

your compensation plans, your benefit plans. If you're not

100% that sure that that's driving growth for your company

and altering behaviors. If you're just writing a check

because you were given a 20% or 14 or 30% increase on your

benefit plan, and you feel backed into a corner, and you

haven't looked at the strategy and haven't looked at your

workforce to say who do I need to attract, what what matters to

them, how do I execute high performance here? What

compensation plan will attract the best people and help us

retain and drive productivity? If you're not having those

thoughts and you've got an HR person, then your HR function is

tactical and it's an expense center. And I'll give you an

example. We had a company that we just went into not too long

ago. 85 employees, manufacturing organization, and like any

company I've been in, and I've been in 25 different industries,

their payroll and comp and perks were one of the top two expenses

in the company. We got in, looked at their benefit plan

immediately, and they wrote a check to have us come in.

Obviously, we we come in as an advisor and support to them.

Within 30 days, we found $500,000 of misallocated benefit

design, and you think about that from an organization and their

profitability. 500,000 can hit really, really hard on the PNL,

but it wouldn't show up as leakage, right? It shows up as

an expense, and that's why I'm saying you got to look at it

bigger than an expense. What is our strategy? What behaviors is

it driving? What's the best model to deliver what we need,

and even on compensation, you know, a lot of CEOs think of it

as I have to pay at market for every position, or way over, or

they don't even know what market rate is for a position. And

having someone who's got the experience and the background

and the tools to go do comp analysis and really look at your

turnover, look at your higher challenges to identify which

jobs are key jobs that we need to overpay to get the best there

are, versus which are the jobs where we either have great

retention, steady hands, they're not as critical. You know where

can we, where should we leverage our comp and and build plans to

drive behaviors and really leverage and harness our key

talent? So it's those kinds of thinking and decisions that

matter a lot. And and I'll give you just another example. I just

presented to a Vistage group last week about the math

equation of people issues, and if I had a CEO who was working

70 hours a week, and I know this is a lot of these founders,

they're working 70 hours a week, and they don't know how not to.

Okay, and they feel like they can't afford a new person or

some help, whether it's an EA or you know a next in command,

whatever that that next biggest function is, and I'll have them

really, really, really identify what's the highest and best use

of me, whether it's biz dev, whether it's product

development, whatever the industry and the expertise that

CEO has, and then I'll say, "What was your take-home pay

last year? Write it down. Write that number down. Okay, now

divide that by 2080, and that's how many hours in a given year

for a 40-hour work week. And we know they're not working 40

hours; they're working 70, right? But you say, okay, look

at your calendar last week. How many of those hours were not on

your highest and best use?

Right, and one example that just sticks out of my mind:

I had a construction CEO, and he had grown up in the ranks as a

project manager, and then you know ran the operation. He's now

the owner, and he had spent time moving trucks from one project

to the other. Right? Sounds reasonable. Sounds logical.

Sounds appropriate. I said, "How long did that take you? An hour

and 45 minutes, because it was across town, and I said,

"Remember that hourly rate you gave me? And I said, "So that

equated to $325 for an hour and a half. I said, "What employee

in your company would you pay 125 or $325 to move a truck? And

he threw down his pen and uttered some choice words and

had a very different perspective from there about whoa you know

where should I invest money and I can give you math equations

across benefits like I just described across turnover the

cost of turnover for an hourly employee to lose one employee is

point seven five times their base salary. So you, if you have

100 employees and 30% turnover, do the math on that. For a

$60,000 employee, that's over $1.5 million a year in lost

revenue and leakage. That doesn't show up on a P and L. So

these are the things that we help CEOs see. If you can fix

your turnover by even 20% by hiring a manager to lead that

team and do better onboarding, you've saved yourself $700,000.

It's an investment in cost savings, and that's per year. So

those are just a couple of the math equations that CEOs don't

think a bout and don't know to think about.

Yeah, totally. DeeAnn, there's this question

because I could talk about this for a very long time, but I want

to get to this question because it's one that I ask all my

guests. I'm very. Interested to see what you have to say, and

the question is this: What is the biggest secret you wish

wasn't a secret at all? What's that one thing you wish every

founder watching or listening today?

Oh gosh! After coaching hundreds of CEOs through growth

and sale, I would say the number one thing is don't feel like

you're the only one that doesn't know everything about how to run

a company. We do not need imposter syndrome as CEOs. Every

single CEO, myself included, running a outsourced HR company,

know that you cannot be good at everything. Find the things

you're not good at and get help, and do that proudly. That is

that humility is the success quotient for CEOs. The ones that

think they have to figure everything out and they're

pushing rocks up a hill and they're spending hours trying to

crack a code that somebody else could do in 15 minutes is the

worst cost savings and brain damage a CEO can have, and it's

it's a soul killer, let alone a financial killer.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Deanne,

there's folks listening to this, and they're like, "Yep, made

that mistake. Made that mistake. Felt like that was expensive.

There, there's got to be a better way. How how can they

reach out to you? How can they find more about the work that

you and your team do?

Probably the best places on our website. It's On

Point Biz, so it's O N P T B I z.com, and there's a contact us

button. You'll get right to my direct email. We'd love to talk

to you. I've got some tools that we can help CEOs with. I've got

an Aptiv Index personality assessment that I'd offer to any

executive team free. Really diagnostic about the skills that

someone has, and we have an X-ray that allows an

organization to look at what they're great at and the stage

that they're in and help them prepare for growth. So I'd be

happy to share either of those.

Brilliant, brilliant. Head on over. We'll

put all of that in the show notes, so you can click or tap

directly to it. You don't have to go searching for it. Deanne,

it was fantastic having you here. Thank you so much for

coming on the show and sharing with us today. I really

appreciate it. And for those of you watching and listening, you

know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you

got as much out of this conversation as I know I did,

and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care. Hey

everyone, Scott Ritzheimer here. Thank you so much for listening

to the Start Scale and Succeed podcast. I hope this episode

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