Pat Strube of Preservation Specialists moved HR from a distraction handled ad-hoc to a structured function through ERG. The shift improved team morale, retention, and hiring, while freeing him to focus on client work.
My name is Pat Strube, and I'm the founder and owner of Preservation Specialists. We are a comprehensive retirement planning firm, and we like to say we help take people to and through retirement. We found that so many Baby boomers are kind of saving and investing for retirement, but they don't really know how to do it. How do I actually get there? And so that's been awesome for us over the last 15, 16 years to kind of build up a following of people here in the area. As far as HR, I would say that before ERG, as an owner and as an advisor, anything that's not building my business or helping my clients is kind of a necessary evil. So that's kind of my first thought when I think of HR. But I definitely, after working with ERG for a while, I've learned that there can be real positives to it. It's not just something necessary that has to get done. And what I mean by that is, you know, kind of the building the teamwork and the culture of the company, which I think has been really good for retaining our team, but I think also building them up and hopefully encouraging new people to join the team as well. As far as kind of our— how HR has worked for us, it was kind of cobbled together desperately, last minute, whenever necessary for the longest time. And that's when I started to realize there was so much I needed to be doing, but then so much opportunity in HR. So that was the reason we found ERG, and it's been an awesome process for us. As far as our HR process, the biggest difference is there is one. So there definitely was not one before. And to me, I kind of categorize it as like ERG takes care of the things that I don't want to be spending my time on, like payroll and, you know, handling paid time off and things like that. And then there's all the extras, really helping us learn how to build our culture, the ins and outs of of the answering our questions about if we have a problem between a couple of people in the office, we're thinking of hiring somebody, what are the different ways we can structure that, making sure it's, I think, I don't have any expertise on what's legal and what's not, and then also what is preferable or maybe enticing to an appealing potential hire for us. So those are kind of the two categories I look at as far as what ERG is helping us with right now, and we just want to see that continue into the future as well.
