How to Save 27% on Employee Related Expenses | What is a PEO? | PEO Services
In this promotional presentation, Matt Vaadi explains how small businesses can cut employee‑related expenses by an average of 27.3% by partnering with a Professional Employer Organization (PEO). He outlines the challenges small employers face—age‑banded health‑plan pricing, rising healthcare costs, and the administrative burden of HR, payroll, and compliance. Vaadi then details the ROI of a PEO: direct cost savings, 10‑14% lower turnover, and reduced administrative workload. The video introduces Guru’s (formerly ERG Payroll & HR) PEO solution, highlighting its best‑of‑breed carrier network (BlueChoice for health, RiskMD for workers’ comp, Transamerica for retirement, MetLife for ancillary benefits), Fortune‑500‑style benefit packages, transparent pricing, and dedicated support teams. He explains the co‑employment model, how group buying power creates flat‑rate, age‑independent plans, and the suite of services included—paperless payroll, HR administration, compliance protection (including EPLI), workers’ comp, training LMS, and integrations with accounting software. Common myths about PEOs (co‑employment being harmful, high cost, limited options) are addressed and refuted. Vaadi walks through the implementation process: pre‑underwriting eligibility, group formation, and a 30‑day rollout. The video ends with a call to action to schedule a consultation via a provided link.
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Hey there, today I'm going to show you how you can reduce your employee-related expenses by 27%. Sound too good to be true? It's not. Data shows that working with a PEO can help you to reduce your employee-related expenses by 27%, and that's not all. You can attract top talent, retain top talent, and do much more to engage your team by partnering with a PEO. Let's take a look at how that works. So the challenge with being a small business these days is that it's impossible to have a true benefits strategy when you're stuck on the age-banded tiers and solutions that you're offered through the Affordable Care Act and through group benefits plans for small employers. So you combine that with all of your other administrative responsibilities as an employer, and it creates a set of challenges that that are easy to overcome with the right partners, but a huge challenge for most small businesses. The return on investment of using a PEO in cost savings alone is 27.3%, and that does not even account for some of the other things that I've already mentioned when you start to look at increased employee retention, increased employee engagement, the administrative burden removed from you and your team. Let's take a look at some of the pains that we're helping our clients to solve. First and foremost, a big challenge for small businesses is that age banding that I already alluded to. So it can be very cumbersome to try to recruit when you don't know what the cost of your benefits is going to be for an employee. And you know that it's going to change based on their age. Plus, it just looks a little bit hokey when you send somebody the grid of different age-banded plans. Once you get on that age-banded treadmill, the great news is that the high increases just keep on a-coming. So This is a real struggle for most of our clients, or used to be, in that they every year were taking 8 to 10, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13% increases on their healthcare. Just continues to climb, climb, climb. You combine that with benefits and human resources and payroll-related compliance issues, and you've created a real challenging scenario for small business owners. And it's one that's hard to get out of, and it can feel like there's no choices. Well, what we have found through our partnership with Napio is that businesses that work with a PEO actually have 10 to 14% lower turnover. So combine that with your reduced costs and you've got a great solution. So what is a PEO? That's something that we're going to cover on this conversation today. We're going to talk about those ways of how it actually saves you the money, and then what are some of the common myths that people hear and think when they think about a PEO. So why Guru? So if anybody who's watching this that knows me, you might be saying to yourself, "Well, Matt, aren't you a little bit hypocritical? Haven't you kind of railed on PEOs over the years?" Well, yes, I have actually. And typically that's because they have poor networks that are forcing you to get on inferior carriers. They also have super high fees because they're a percentage of payroll and they tend to just not create as much value as other offerings do. So what we've done is we've actually created one of the best offerings on the market. Now we have Blue Choice as our primary healthcare provider and with their nationwide plans. We're partnering with a group called RiskMD to make sure that we're driving down all of the mitigating all the risk related to workers' comp. Transamerica, one of the best providers for our retirement plans, then MetLife for our ancillary benefits. And so we're leveraging all of these best-of-breed providers to put together a Fortune 500-style benefits offering for our clients. So small businesses can now leverage the economies of scale when we group all of these small businesses together and provide these same plans across each group. So why else would you look at us for this type of solution? Well, we've been doing this for over 7 years. If you go to check out our Google reviews, you'll see Guru, formerly ERG Payroll and HR, still same ownership, still same team, still same everything, just a new name. You'll see that we've earned the trust and respect not only our clients but our community because we are community-focused. And we actually give 5% of our business away to charity because we know it's the responsibility of small businesses to help to make improvements in our community. We have a 97% satisfaction rate with our clients, and we've answered more than 50,000 HR questions since, at the time of filming this video. So we've laid the foundation for your success, and we've got the experience and the proven roadmap to help you to execute your benefits, payroll, and HR strategy. So what do we actually do? So we combine employees from many companies into a single group to reduce healthcare prices, create access to benefits and perks, and streamline compliance. So basically, we take all these small employers and make one really big employer and create economies of scale so that we can go out and buy these things and create a better experience for you and your clients. What is a PEO? So PEO creates big company benefits by leveraging our group buying power to help you provide a more attractive benefits package to your current and potential employees. We also provide comprehensive HR. So that means HR is entirely taken off your plate. We shoulder all of your HR-related responsibilities so you can focus on growing your business. And we provide compliance protection, not only when it comes to the unlimited access to HR professionals, but we even combine that with employee employment practice liability insurance, EPLI, to help protect your business from other employment-related risks. We combine that with our best-of-breed, in-house-created, paperless payroll and HR software. Our flexible and scalable solution grows with you as you continue to grow. Most of our clients are growing. They're looking for ways to continue to scale. So our transparent pricing model combined with our proprietary HR platform allows you to continue to grow with ease. And even if you outgrow the PEO model, we've got other models that you can scale into in more of a tech, uh, SaaS environment and not have to stay in the PEO if you outgrow it. It's also a huge time saver. So with payroll, HR, and benefits off your plate, you know, what else are you going to do? Oh yeah, you might actually focus on something mission critical instead of answering 100 emails every day about how much PTO do I have and where do I find my pay stub and I forgot my login and oh, what's this rule, what's that rule. We got you covered. So how does all this equate into cash savings, right? So you saw that 27.3%, and if you hung in here, you wanted to know, how are you going to save me money? Well, we've already talked about group buying power. So we're going to leverage those economies of scale to purchase benefits and perks. We're going to look at efficiency. So less vendors, less systems, less hands in the pot. That means that people are going to operate more efficiently. We're going to save labor costs. We're going to save time. We're going to save money working with different vendors. When you start to add those things up, they become, you know, the shavings make a pile, as my former boss used to say. And then we've got the established processes. So once again, this is kind of a build it or buy it type of scenario. Why would you build something that we've spent the last 7 years building? And we've got streamlined HR processes and workflows right off the rack for everything from hiring processes, performance management, performance conversations, benefits, everything you can want as a small business we've created and we've got available for you. So those are some of the ways that this is going to help to create that cost savings. But there are some myths about PEOs that I'd like to cover. So first is that co-employment is bad. Well, understanding what co-employment is, is going to help you determine whether or not co-employment is actually bad. The PEO becomes the employer of record as it relates to payroll and payroll tax compliance, workers' comp, healthcare, Ben Admin, and other HR-related tasks. But that's it. Your company remains the worksite employer and maintains day-to-day control and direction of worksite employees. Another myth about PEOs is they're too expensive. Well, heck, a lot of them are. So this is actually a pretty good myth because some of the major providers actually provide a percentage of payroll that their own sales reps can't even figure out. And if you have highly paid employees, like many of our clients do, then a percentage of payroll just keeps creeping up, creeping up, creeping up as you add more employees that are higher paid. So the value is in the administrative support and operational efficiency that we provide. You need the HR infrastructure. Why would you not work with somebody who's already established that for you, but do so in a fully transparent pricing model that, you know, every time you add an employee, what your incremental investment will be, and there's no mystery behind the cost structure. So some of the challenges people have when they look at a PEO is there's just some of that uncertainty and complexity. We're happy to walk through some of those elements with you in more detail because we know that it can be different than how you're doing things today when you go into more of a group environment. Big corporations that sort of dominate this space for years, they, they've got terrible support, they've got terrible software, they just have really been— there's, there's only 700 PEO companies in the country compared to 16,000 companies that process payroll. So your options are kind of limited when you look at PEOs. And that's where we thought this was a great opportunity to come in and take our best-of-breed software with our awesome client support and provide a unique solution for small businesses. Age-banded plans, it's going to be really hard to get off this treadmill any other way. So really exciting to be able to give you access to great plans with flat rates. And lack of access to good carriers. If you go to other PEOs, you're going to very rarely find anybody who's got access to Blue as their primary carrier. They're typically trying to shove some of these other less, less established carriers, especially if you're here in good old South Carolina, down your throat as the best option, even though they're really not. And that percentage of payroll we just talked about, I mean, that's not good for you. You're going to pay too much. It's going to be impossible to figure out your invoices. They're going to be basically billing you back your payroll These are all challenges you're going to face whether you try to do this yourself, whether you try to work with another PEO. These are things that we see out in the market. So it gives you choices. So you can either do it the old-fashioned way. You can get your payroll from one spot. You can try to do HR in-house. You can get your benefits from an agent who really is just looking for the plan that they make the best commission on, and they put you on an age-banded plan. Or you can partner with experts, people that have built out the entire process for you and established a great offering with the best carriers to help you to grow and focus on your business. So what does the package actually include? What does the PEO include? Well, it includes the payroll and HR processing. So once again, that's our online payroll system, all 50 states, HR administration and processing, everything from paperless employee onboarding and timekeeping to benefits administration and everything in between. We give you great benefits plans and options. You can actually offer 2 different plans to your employee base. So maybe you want to offer a high deductible plan with a buy-up plan that's a little bit nicer, or excuse me, not nicer, but just different for your folks that have different benefits needs. If you have more than 10 employees, you probably have people that need multiple plans inside of your group. And so it's awesome to be able to offer multiple plans. We offer you HR compliance support. So every HR question you have, you can pick up the phone and call your dedicated HR business partner. We even offer you HR automation, so that gives you the opportunity to automate all of these different workflows inside your business. The solution includes workers' compensation as well. So once again, it gives you great efficiency in the fact that you can work with one company to handle all your employment-related needs. We even included training and education modules. So everything from sexual harassment training all the way through to how to conduct great workplace meetings. We've got hundreds of trainings inside of our learning management system. We integrate with your favorite solutions like QuickBooks and other accounting platforms to make sure that we fit inside of your daily workflow. And we handle all the benefits administration and even the COBRA. So think about that, where your employees just have one place to call, whether they have that question about where to find their pay stub or whether they have a claim or whether they have, you know, a question about the handbook. They can, they can call us for everything. So creates a ton of efficiency for you as an employer. So why us? Well, we've got that dedicated support. We're going to give you your own dedicated team of folks, a dedicated payroll specialist, a dedicated HR specialist, and then a help desk for your team. We've got access to the best network in the PEO game with BlueChoice as our primary carrier. And then that fully transparent pricing is going to help you to predict and model your costs over time. So what's next? Go ahead and book a time below and let's talk about this and see if you're your team is eligible. So one of the things that we do in this is we actually pre-underwrite everybody so that we can create a great group that you make sure that you're actually getting into a group that's going to maintain cost integrity. And so that means that we're going to help to make sure that we manage the group to ensure that rates stay low and to be careful about what we do to control costs over time. Uh, so once we determine whether or not you're eligible, we can actually then start to select some plans that make the most sense for your group. We can get this whole solution up and running in 30 days or less. So if you're interested, please just check out that link on the screen. That'll be ergparole.com/peoservices, um, ergparole.com. That'll redirect to Guru pretty soon. We're in the process of rebranding, but check us out. Let's see if you qualify and let's identify if we can help you to drive 27% of your labor costs out the window. Thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate your time.
