Matt Vaadi outlines five red flags that make a prospect a bad fit for Guru's PEO services: unwillingness to use an online portal, treating Guru as a vendor instead of a partner, prioritizing low cost over quality, resisting expert advice, or undervaluing employees. Guru works best with 10-49 person teams in professional services, healthcare, or nonprofits.
Welcome back. Let's face it, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is one of the traps we try to avoid here at Guru, is thinking that everybody watching this video is a fit for our products or services. It's just not true. And we want to make sure that we are a good fit for those we work with and vice versa. It's important to have a successful relationship that we're providing the right solutions for your business and you're the right type of business to work with those solutions. So in this video, I'm going to break down some of the most common things that tell us that it may not be a good fit for us and vice versa. Again, we want to make sure that we're the right fit for you. So who is a bad fit client for Guru? So first of all, if you're not willing to log into an online portal to handle your HR, payroll, benefits information and access it online, then we're not going to be a good fit. We're not somebody where you can just call over and say, send in your hours or, you know, send over emails with hours and all your changes over email. All of your information will be accessed through our top, top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art online technology where you can do everything from new hire onboarding, paperless, get your employees to sign their W-4, I-9, offer letter, etc., all the way through to processing your payroll, benefits administration, and everything in between. So if you don't want to access online technology, if you just want to send in your hours via SmokeSignal or email or what have you, you're probably not a great fit for Guru. Reason number 2, when we typically find folks aren't a good fit for us, they're just looking for a vendor. So they're just looking for somebody that they can, you know, get upset with when things go wrong, that they can, you know, ignore when things are going right. Our job and our mission is to be an extension of your team. So whether we're simply helping with our online payroll processing system or you're on our PEO product where we're your HR department handling your benefits, handling your compliance and all that good stuff. Either way, we want to be an extension of your team and we're going to treat you as a member of our team and our family as well. So it's important that the relationship is bidirectional. If you're just looking for another vendor, maybe you should call one of those 1-800 number guys. They're great. They have great call centers you can call and fuss at their people. Reason number 3 why somebody might not be a good fit for working with Guru is they just are looking for the cheapest service out there. That's definitely not us. Going back to that, uh, bullet number 2 there, we're going to become an extension of your team. This is a high-tech, high-touch environment. When you call our office, when you email our support team, you're going to get a response in less than 2 hours. You're going to speak to the same people over and over again. You're going to get to know us and we're going to get to know you. So if you're just looking for the cheapest service out there, that's much better suited for a call center, online environment. Where they're going to nickel and dime for everything on top of just basic payroll service. We're not that. We're going to be a strategic partner for your organization and we're going to solve problems for you that sometimes you didn't even know existed. So if you're looking for the cheapest service, we ain't that. Bullet number 4, reason number 4 why somebody might not be a good fit working with Guru, you're just not willing to listen to any advice. So whether it's payroll, whether it's HR related and our team, you know, we've got a team full of gurus over here that have served, you know, Oh geez, processed over 100,000 payroll, tax, and HR-related questions at this point. If you've hired us to give you good advice, while you don't have to follow all of it, we can't have constant friction over whether or not, you know, we're steering you in the right direction because ultimately what it does is just ends up wasting a lot of time for both of us. If you say you want to roll out a performance management process and you're on one of our HR support services, We give you 3 options and you go, I don't like any of those. I want to do it this way. And then every project becomes a battle back and forth. We've got great answers for most of your questions. While we don't know everything, and we're not saying you have to take every piece of advice we give, I've found that in the past when relationships have struggled, there's been just kind of a tension where, you know, the client didn't necessarily agree with everything we had to say. And again, you don't have to agree with everything we have to say, but there just was always friction. If you're looking for somebody to help you with your HR support, be open to that support, be open to that guidance. And reason number 5 why somebody might not be a good fit, they think that people are kind of a necessary evil to growing your company. So if you think your team is like, "Ugh, you know, if I could do this without employees, I'd be much better off," then we're just not the right vendor for you. We value our team and our clients' teams very deeply. We believe that employees are the number one asset of any organization. And if you don't share that similar mindset, then there's going to again be friction between our organizations. And, you know, it's going to revert back to that treating somebody like a vendor instead of a strategic business partner, which is not what we're trying to be for you and your team. So those are 5 things I typically run into when we aren't a good fit for an organization. There are also some industries and company sizes that we don't tend to work as well with. So our primary support market is 10 to 49 employees. We definitely do some smaller, we do single member S corps, LLCs, all that stuff, all the way through to, we'll usually do stuff in the low 100 employees if it's payroll and technology only. And sometimes even on our PEO and ASO model. But our sweet spot are professional services, healthcare, and nonprofits in that 10 to 49 employees. That's where we tend to excel. We serve a whole bunch of other things, and if it's a good fit culturally based on some of those things I just laid out before, then we'll absolutely look at working together. We just want to find the right fit for you ultimately. And I'll put a link in my— for my calendar with this video where even if you watch this, you say you guys definitely aren't a good fit, but I'd love some guidance on who to use. I can provide you with some great referrals. There are tons of great payroll and HR providers all around the country. It's a tremendous industry with a lot of great people running great companies. Hopefully we're just trying to be one of them. Thank you for watching this video. Appreciate the opportunity to learn a little bit more about you and your business. Thanks.
