Kelly Price - ThriveHR

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom podcast. We have Kelly Price with us. Uh, Kelly is a CEO of a company called Thrive HR. Uh, she's in people operations, total rewards, and people strategy, uh, in Punta Gorda, Florida. So Kelly, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I, um, I own Thrive HR. I've been the founder and CEO of that for about 4.5 years, and I'm really excited to share that we are actually expanding Thrive HR into Thrive Leadership Partners, which means that we will not only be able to help small businesses figure out what HR could and should be doing, but we're also going to be able to pull it through the thread of the organization with operations, executive coaching, employee benefits, M&A, and innovation as well. So with my two new business partners and Thrive Leadership Partners. We're really excited to really get in there and be an embedded partner in small businesses and help the businesses really start to grow and thrive as they intended to when they opened.

And tell me about your career. I think you've spent, what, 20, 30 years in HR?

I have. I started in hospitality and then moved into recruiting. I worked for a staffing agency for a couple of years. And then moved into a corporate setting in the recruiting function. And as many people do after doing recruiting for a while, some people stay in recruiting and that's their path, and then many of us go over to the HR side. And I went and started working for a business who had quite a bit of executive turnover very quickly after I started in the role. And the company was in a major need to be in growth mode. It was very stuck at about 10 locations and about 200 employees. And after 8 years of being there, I certainly didn't do this anywhere close to my— by myself, but with the growth of the right executive team and partnership, we grew up to 33 locations and about 800 employees. And my HR team had 17 people on it, mostly recruiting because it was in the dental industry. And that's a high turnover industry, but was really proud of being able to build that business. And after 8 years, I left and went over to a bank. That was in a somewhat similar situation, that the HR team had been pretty reactive and not strategic in the past. And so they brought in a new HR leader who called me and said, "Come over here with me and help me transform this HR team." And we went from 4 to 2 to 8 over about 4.5 years. And that was over COVID as well. And so we went from about 200 employees to about 500 employees. Over those 4.5 years, and then I decided to go out on my own after that. And that really was a very exciting position because the leadership and the culture there was very entrepreneurial, very "what if we did this" focused, and really expected you to be thinking about what the next thing is on a constant basis. And one of my most proud accomplishments of my team while I was there was for 2020, we won Best Place to Work in Kansas City first place. Which was a huge effort on all of the leadership and the HR team's work and time that they put in making a really, really hard year, one that was really great from a business and employment standpoint for that bank.

And how does a company not break from scaling to 200 to 500 employees, right? Like, that seems crazy.

You have to be very, very intentional. You have to know what you need, when you need it. It's all about having the right people in the right seat at the right time. So everyone has to be having constant conversations about what's next and why is it next. Some of the things that I think we did really well, and we've, we're certainly doing this in our consultancy as well, is having conversations about being intentional. Being very clear about expectations and doing the best onboarding we possibly can. That's something that I see small businesses over and over just completely skipping. It's— or only doing it for maybe a week or two, when in reality, teaching someone— they might have every skill you need, but they've never worked at your company. They've never worked for you before. They've never worked with these coworkers before in this group specifically. So setting expectations about what is needed to be successful in this role at this company at this time is really, really important in helping them understand, if you're a leader, how you manage. You know, when I have somebody start on my team, whether it's in corporate or even now, I, with clients, I tell them, I'm going to be really, really close to you for a while because often I'll come in and I'll be placed in that head of HR role in a temporary/interim basis to help train and guide the HR team to go the direction it should go, or take the— do the job if there's no one there. And I say the thing to the— the same thing to the owners and the office manager, whoever else I'm working with, but I say, I'm going to be really up in your cheese, up in your business, asking lots of questions for a period of time, and I need you to understand that because while I don't want it to feel like I'm trying— I'm saying you're wrong or I'm accusing you of doing something wrong, I'm genuinely just trying to learn. I'm trying to understand why do you do it this way, how do you do it, and what's the result of the business? Because if you didn't, you wouldn't have called me if it was working. Right. So I really, truly want to understand it and understand your business so I can help you come up with a solution that works best. But then when they get to the uncomfortable part and they're saying, you keep asking me these questions, I can reference back to say, remember when I said I was going to ask you all these questions? And I don't think you're doing a bad job. I don't think you're doing this wrong. Or if you are doing it incorrectly, I don't think you're doing it on purpose. I think it's what you were taught or what you know or how you've always done it. So let's talk about how to make it better. And if I need to back off or, or take a different approach, I need that feedback as a leader as well, so I can do a better job to help guiding you to the right, right direction. So that really starts from the very first interview, and teaching leaders about that's been really, really meaningful and really helpful. And again, we did that in corporate, and then, and we do it in our consultancy now. And then continuing that clarity in those conversations through the entire employment journey, so people know, hey, this is happening, this this is what's going on in the business, and do you understand how your role impacts the overall success of the business and your colleagues that you're working with? It, it becomes much clearer and, and more fun when everybody knows what's going on.

And what's total rewards?

Total rewards is really the combination of culture, compensation, and benefits. So when you're looking at kind of— they call it the total package also, you know, you could say, what's the total package? So I'm coming in and I have a hybrid work environment. I make X salary. It comes with these benefits that are health benefits. It comes with these fringe benefits. It comes with this bonus plan. That's your total rewards. And then what's the culture on top of it? So what am I getting out of working here? What's my reward and my compensation for being a part of this organization, right?

And you said the culture was entrepreneurial. How do you make that happen? Granted, you give someone golden cuffs, you know, like, it's like a nice salary. Why would they innovate? Why would they go out of their way if everything's given?

Well, it's a balance. It's truly an art. You don't, you don't give them everything. I think the culture of work has changed a tremendous amount. Like, I'm Gen X, so when I started working and my parents were baby boomers, and you went to work and your thank you was a paycheck, right? That's— there just wasn't a whole lot of culture back in the day, right? It's much more focused on what can you do for me and what can I do for you now. And especially these newer generations, thank goodness, are wanting to find value in the things that they're doing and spending their day doing something that actually matters. And I ask founders, CEOs this pretty often when we're engaging. Does every person in your organization understand what they're doing and why they're doing it and how it impacts the overall success of the business? Most of them say no, every single person. Are there people? Yes, often their sales team, their executive team, maybe their manager, frontline managers. But you start to get into those less revenue-driving positions and they might say, you know what, I'm not really sure if they understand that. You can build entrepreneurial spirit and it doesn't have to be innovation. It just has to be caring about what they're doing and caring that it's right because it's the right thing to do for the business and the right thing to do for themselves and for their colleagues that they're working with every every single day. So there's, there's varying levels of entrepreneur— entrepreneurial spirit and buy-in and engagement that you can get in every organization at every level.

And at that specific place, how did you stimulate that entrepreneurial culture? Did you look for founder experience in their CV, or is it just, uh, them constantly asking questions, coming up with solutions, seeing peers do the same? Is it top-down? Does it come from the CEO as well? Tell me a bit more.

Well, I'm going to talk about a client instead of that, that organization that I worked for specifically. But we had a client recently that we worked with, and I was there for about 3 years. I came in, they had no HR, they had 200% turnover in their warehouse, 100%— 80% in their office, really, really struggling from an organizational standpoint. And one of the things we started with was how are they hiring and who are they hiring? So we realized the interviews were basically nonexistent. So the expectation setting from the beginning was zero. It was in the warehouse. Do you have a pulse? Yeah, come on over. You can probably figure this out. Bolt was an engineering and manufacturing firm. They needed to read technical drawings and they had to have basic math skills. So we added in those assessments and realized we were weeding out like 90% of the people that we were interviewing. So that was step number 1. Number 2 was the leadership that was in place was completely untrained in any way on how to manage and lead employees or interview. So we'd started doing some training and having them do more in-detail interviews and found and performance management and accountability. And we found that many of those leaders were also not the right fit. So we helped them move on to a position that was going to be a better fit for them outside of the organization. We let them go. And then we started doing incentives and building programs that say, if you'll learn more and do more, you can be paid more. We also, through the onboarding, did 30-60-90 30-day evaluations and had very specific things they had to learn and accomplish to be able to get to the next 30, 60, 90 days. And then as they grew and got more skills, we increased their compensation. And it wasn't a lot. It was maybe a dollar, 50 cents. But they went from making maybe $18, $19 an hour to over $20 fairly quickly because they're learning and meeting the expectation. And from a business standpoint, They went from 100%, they went from, excuse me, 50% shipping, on-time shipping to 100% on-time shipping. They went from errors out the wazoo to almost 100% accuracy. They went from 200% turnover literally to zero in 2 years in a transition. So those people bought in. They were, expectations were set. They were excited. We, we implemented core values in action, which is when you take the core values that the organization already has and then you create action items associated with them. So like, for example, we grow was one of their core values, and it was— we learned the core values in action were: we learn new technology, we're open-minded to new ideas, we take feedback with a positive attitude, and we, and we take accountability for our errors. Well, those are really somewhat obvious things that you expect people to do, but they're also things that you can really point out and say, you're not following this core value. And then we did what we called Bloom Boards because it was a greenhouse organization. So they literally wrote thank yous to each other and called each other out for doing great things. And put them up on a board. And then on a weekly basis, they pulled one of the blooms that somebody wrote, and somebody got like a $5 gas card or a coffee card or something like that. So it created that engagement and that buy-in because everybody wanted to watch each other succeed, and they were making more money by doing more work. So that's not necessarily entrepreneurial spirit in the very traditional sense. It's entrepreneurial spirit, it's buy-in, it's people caring and people highly being highly engaged, which is resulting in, resulted in major business success.

And your clients, where do they come from? How do you generate new business?

Primarily referral at this point. We're really, really expanding via networking referrals, you know, reaching out to the networks that we already have. We don't do a lot of cold email marketing because anybody that's on here and is a founder knows that you get about probably 50 cold emails a day, that half of them are written by AI anyway, so they just get deleted. So we're out there doing a lot of networking. We're trying to— I do a lot of podcasting. I do some blogs. I try to, you know, participate in community events and just get our name out there because like I said, it's the— our biggest goal is to really help those small businesses be successful. It's what myself and my partners really find a ton of joy in is having somebody not watching them beat their head against the wall. That's not the joy part, but taking that stuff that's really making them so stressed and that's so hard and helping them make it a little bit easier so they can go back to doing what they love and why they started the business.

Right. And your ICP, I mean, small businesses is quite broad, right? Like, do you have the specific segment titles that you target? Who's your ideal customer persona?

Yeah, so really anywhere from about 15 to 20 employees up to about 250. We don't really work with municipalities or higher education. None of us have any experience there, but technology, healthcare, professional services, technology— I said technology already, sorry— manufacturing. We're pretty open and industry agnostic because HR is HR, and then From an operational standpoint, our— my business partner is a mechanical engineer. He's done a ton of innovation. He's done a ton of M&A. So our deal clients, honestly, some of the people we're really trying to partner with are those joint venture and PE groups that have multiple small businesses that they need help with. We start every engagement with an audit so we can help them determine what's going well and what isn't. We look at it from a compliance operational efficiency and strategic standpoint to make sure that they're doing everything they should be doing just to stay out of trouble and then really look at how to make it the most efficient and successful business possible.

Interesting. The podcast, how do you find your guests? Right. How do you ask questions? What's your thesis behind it?

So I don't have a podcast. Sorry, I guest. I guest on podcasts.

I thought I had read that you had the podcast here, Triwire Podcast, Perspective and People. Why not start your own is the obvious question.

I don't have the capacity for that right now, but maybe in the future.

Yeah, it's such a great tool, aligns fully with what you do, right? Because conversations with people. Absolutely. Discussing like how they manage HR, people strategies and rewards and benefits. Talking about rewards and benefits, don't you feel that if like entrepreneurship is the DNA of pretty much everyone that's in businesses in the future, don't, don't you feel everyone should have like stake in the pie, like equity?

I don't necessarily feel that way across the board.

Then that makes them not fully entrepreneurial, right?

Well, again, I think you're hanging on to that word from a traditional sense. I think entrepreneurial spirit is really important in the correct positions. I think buy-in and engagement is incredibly important in every position. So let me rephrase that. Entrepreneurial spirit doesn't belong in every single role. If you're doing data entry, you can't have a lot of entrepreneurial spirit.

But can't an AI do that? Can't an AI agent do that? Like in the future, I don't think there'll be any humans with like robotic roles, right?

Possibly. Yeah, AI definitely could do that. I think that the future of work is going to be much more thought leadership, much more trade-focused as well. But yes, but my point is there still are lots and lots of businesses out there that are not rushing to have AI replace their employees either. So that's pretty far in advance, in my opinion, especially when you're looking at the small business market. I have lots of clients, Charles, that still are on paper. They don't even have electronic systems. So the thought for them to think about having AI replace one of their employees is like they wouldn't even consider it. Not that it's not something they should think about and something that we're talking to them about, about how can you become more efficient by using AI appropriately. But there are still, like I said, many, many businesses out there who aren't, aren't ready to take that step. And you still want those people who are doing those highly administrative tasks to care, right?

I saw that you're a Chiefs fan as well. Like, any football analogies to running a business?

Yes, it's not from the Chiefs, but it's my favorite quote from Remember the Titans. It's when they're on the bus and, or actually they might be in the locker room, but they're talking about how one of the, the captain is just not being a good leader. And his non-buddy at the time says, attitude reflects leadership. So he says, why don't you care? Why don't you, why aren't you doing what you're supposed to be doing? And he says, attitude reflects leadership. And that cannot be more accurate if you have an executive team or a leadership team or an owner that just doesn't treat people respectfully, doesn't care, is the type of person that says, do as I say, not as I do, you're going to have a whole bunch of people on your team and that are working with you that do the exact same thing.

Right. Yeah. I can't help but think of Patrick Mahomes, which I think is a great leader, great quarterback. The Chiefs, didn't they win the Super Bowl a couple of years ago? What, what was the outcome of that?

Yes, they've been to the Super Bowl 4 or 5 times and they've won 3. Oh my God, they've been 5 times and they've won 3. Yes.

And the Chiefs coach— who's the Chiefs coach again? He's a legend, right?

Andy Reid. He is, he is a major legend. He was with the Eagles for a long time and now he's with the Chiefs. He's wonderful.

So hard to win in the NFL, then doing it 5 years like that, winning 3, is this craziness. Um, any great leaders that you're studying nowadays? Who do you learn from?

Oh gosh, honestly, I learn from everyone. I mean, even the people who— not even, but even my clients that come to me, they come to me because they need structure. They don't always need leadership. I met with a client a couple of days ago who we were doing the core values exercise. They're in paper. We're moving them to an HR system. We're getting them all structured from that standpoint. But we were doing the core values in action, and one of the owners came in and sat down and just dropped this, like, beautiful core values in action bomb. And I said, "I don't even think you should pay me for this meeting. You just said everything that I would have said." It was so beautiful. So I think that, not to dodge your question, but I think you can learn from every single person that you talk to. I mean, I certainly You know, I follow Brené Brown. I think she's really wonderful. I think Abby Wambach, her books are absolutely fabulous. I love the soccer analogies that she uses. I'm not even a soccer fan, but, you know, just the fact that she's been through so much in her life and really come through with this just incredible mindset of growth and innovation for herself and for her life. I just, I really, I really love watching other people be successful and learning from what they've done and what they've, what they've done not well and they're willing to share.

There you go, Kelly. Thanks for being on. Where can people find out more about you?

Right now we are getting ready to launch our new website. So ThriveLP.com, ThriveLP.com will be live in the next week. So hang tight with me there. I'm also on LinkedIn, Kelly Price. And, uh, kelly.price@thriveLP.com. You can email me as well.

There you go. So that was Kelly and Charles Cormier for another founder