Lori Cotner runs the office at Arbiser Machine, a job-shop manufacturer in Atlanta that’s been building parts — everything from medical instrumentation to Department of Defense components — since 1967. She’s also been the one person fielding every HR question, every benefits call, and every piece of paper that crosses that company’s desk for over […]

Lisa Guadalupe Clark started ATL Search Group with $325 and a mission: help the Latino community access better job opportunities in a staffing industry that wasn’t serving them. Six years later, her firm has grown from roughly 80% one demographic to 90% Latino clients and become one of Georgia’s leading staffing companies for that community. […]

Beth Miller has been with Medical Air Systems — a Colorado company that supplies and services the medical gas equipment hospitals depend on, from vacuum pumps to the outlets in a patient’s room — for 33 years. Today she’s a partner and owner. When I first met her, she was the company’s accounting and HR […]

Kim Marinucci has spent 26 years in HR, 16 of them working inside the PEO space as a senior-level consultant across dozens of industries and company sizes. I asked her about something that’s been true her entire career but has accelerated dramatically since COVID: the sheer pace of new employment legislation. The Legislative Landscape Changed […]

Rachel Collier is the CEO of Total Employee Benefits, a health insurance brokerage in Georgia. She sells benefits for a living. And her own firm has been in a PEO relationship for years — including a transition I helped her through from one large PEO to another. I wanted to know why someone who could […]

Blanca Abbud — known in the industry as “the PEO lady” — has spent 11 years building a specialty most PEO reps don’t touch: blue-collar and gray-collar businesses, from restaurant groups and food truck operators to warehousing, distribution, and government contractors. I wanted to talk with her about why that niche needs a different playbook […]

If you’ve shopped PEOs for more than five minutes, you’ve probably heard some version of this: Insperity is a fantastic company, but they’re going to cost more than the alternatives. I sat down with my longtime Insperity rep — coming up on seven years with the company himself, which tells you something about their retention […]

I sat down with a workers’ comp expert from BBSI (Barrett Business Services Inc.) — a PEO that’s been in business for 70 years and works with roughly 8,500 companies nationally — after a conversation we’d had about a client with 10 W-2 employees and 100 independent contractors. That ratio should make any business owner […]

Brian Smith has spent over 25 years as a commercial insurance broker, and for a large chunk of that career he’s worked almost exclusively with government defense contractors. I asked him to walk through what’s different about insurance — and PEO fit — for a business that does work under a government contract. The Insurance […]

Evan Collart co-founded PEO Advisors out of Tampa Bay in 2010, after starting in the PEO business at 20 years old. His firm’s specialty is narrow and specific: businesses with workers’ comp problems bad enough that standard-market insurance agents can’t place them anymore. I wanted to understand what happens to a company once it hits […]

I’ve been in the PEO industry for over 16 years, and a few years ago I made the decision to go out on my own instead of staying captive to a single PEO company. I want to explain why, because it’s the whole reason my business exists the way it does. The Problem With Working […]

I recently sat down with Daryl, an insurance advisor I partner with regularly, so he could ask me the questions he hears most often from the employers he works with directly. If you’ve ever wondered why a business would go through a PEO instead of just buying benefits straight from a carrier, this is for […]

I want to walk through a real case, because “bundled pricing” is one of those phrases that sounds harmless until you see what it can hide. The Setup A 65-employee staffing company came to me using what’s called an EOR — employer of record — model, not true co-employment. That distinction matters: an EOR is […]