Full Throttle Leaders Podcast- Stephen Hamlet

Hello everybody, I got Stephen Hamlet here. It's— he owns Hamlet HR. He's actually a client of Full Throttle, Falato Lees GT and Full Throttle, and I just want to welcome him to the show, Full Throttle Leaders, today. How you doing, Stephen? Good, how are you?

I'm well, Michael. Thanks for having me.

So tell me, you've been in corporate America for the last, what, 30, 40 years?

Let's go with 20, 30.

It feels—

it makes me feel less old.

So what brought you to the point of starting your own company? And tell me a little about what Hamlet HR does.

No, I appreciate that. So the easy answer is I'm a fractional HR person. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. The fact is, in the past 20, 30 years in leading HR and leading businesses. I'm a turnaround expert. I help companies that are struggling to improve the way they organize, the way they operate, and ultimately how they make money and how they grow. And I've been doing that for large companies, billion-dollar-plus businesses for the past 20 years. And I realized after a number of people that I used to work with started their own business, they reached out to me, you know, Hamlet, hey, you always did this for me. Now that I started my own business, I realized how much, how important it is and how much work goes into it. Can you do that for me now? And so I started Hamlet HR to bring that, that, that corporate level and, and experience and strategy that's pretty much reserved for larger companies to the small, medium-sized businesses that can really benefit from that type of expertise.

What do you think, either starting your own company or in the past, what was the biggest takeaway? Like, wow, I, I was doing something wrong for years and I fixed it, or I was doing— I really figured out something really cool, especially with AI in the last 6 weeks, 6 months, that I could pass on to, to Michael's viewers today?

Yeah, you know, I think the biggest thing is most, most small and medium-sized companies, they they believe they're too small for some of the corporate speak, you know, like a workforce structure or workforce infrastructure. And what I've realized is that when I sit down and I talk to CEOs and I hear about their struggles, that they have turnover and their management team, you know, were sort of homegrown from the ground up. They don't have a lot of management training. And when they have turnover, everything is sort of organically known. So, if someone leaves, they leave with all that knowledge and they have to retrain someone from the very get-go. It's those types of things that I can bring to that company that really help them become more stable and more capable for growth. And that's what I really found is that there's initial resistance when I talk to CEOs who are going, we're kind of small. We don't need all that. But when I start explaining the way it works and how it benefits them, all automatically they begin seeing the return on investment. And I don't mean like 6 months, 12 months down the road. They, they begin seeing the return on investment of very simple processes right away. And that's what's exciting to me.

What's your, what's your typical ideal customer profile for you that you'd want to work with? Maybe certain industries, certain Is it like the CEO and founders who don't have HR team?

Yeah. And a lot of times the best scenario would be that they do have an HR, like a junior HR person, or they may even have a professional employer's organization that's running their payroll. But they don't have anybody really to handle those more complex HR problems. And those complex HR problems end up on the founders' or the CEO's desk every day.

Like what? Like what are those problems that you see?

Problems are— that's a good question. are, you know, one of their top performers, their top manager leaves, gets another job and leaves. And they don't have anybody in succession to fill that role. And so, who has to fill it? The CEO fills it while they're still trying to do their job, while they're still trying to handle all the other problems. Another problem is they have culture issues, right? I was talking with this woman the other day. She's a CEO. And they've been so focused on building the business, just hiring people and bringing in customers. They lost track of their culture. And now, they've got a bunch of people that don't really like working with each other. They don't have the right mindset. They're not good fits with the organization.

What type of organization was that? What did they do?

Manufacturing. This was all manufacturing. And the managers are going crazy because no one really wants to work with each other. And that's why it's so important that when you're— that you have a good idea of what your culture is. And that when you're hiring, you're making sure you're hiring for culture fit as well as talent fit. And it's easy to get away from that.

What would you recommend for someone that, that smaller, that has people working for 'em, but they always have to like fix, fix the issues or they miss something. But if they get rid of them, it's more headache than actually being frustrated and having them on board. Um, because of the time that the things that they know, right? It's like a lot of times to onboard. So what's, what's the Solution there for— there's a lot of companies I know like that.

You know, it sounds very simple, but it's not as easy as it sounds. And that's called accountability, right? Is building the accountability and discipline within each position that they know what they're responsible for, they take accountability for it, and they get it done. And that's one of the things that I see, especially in small, particularly small businesses, but small businesses that are trying to grow. There's this mindset that everybody's responsible for everything. And that works when you're really little. But as you begin to get like 20, 30 people and everybody's trying to be responsible for everything and nobody's responsible for anything, things begin to fall through the cracks. And that's what I see a lot of times is that, especially when I'm in meetings and I hear, well, no, John was responsible for that. And that's not my role. That was yours. You always did that.

Yeah.

And it's those type discussions that you just have to clarify that. And again, It sounds very corporate speak, but building very clear job profiles of who's responsible and accountable for what, using a RASCI method to make sure you let people know who's accountable for each process and that they know they're the belly button to see that through and to make it work. And what that does is once you teach a CEO how to administer that and teach their leaders to hold themselves accountable and hold their teams accountable, then the CEO can actually go to run the business like they're supposed to instead of being pulled in the day-to-day fires And what, um, how do people engage with you?

Are they doing a retainer, hourly? Are they usually with you for 6 months, 12 months? Tell me about your, your approach and what your, what your, a good engagement is that's kind of a win-win for both sides.

Yeah, that's a good question, Michael. What I found is, so you have, you have agencies such as Bamboo or Professional Employers Organization, Paychex. They do a lot of task stuff on the front end, and then you have consultants on the back end that'll come in and do the do projects works. What I do is I actually execute for you. And so, most companies that work with me pull me on a monthly retainer. They hire me to be their HR director and to lead their HR. And so, I take all those HR issues off their plate and I manage it for them. And what that does is it frees— not only frees them up to really focus on the business, but then I can focus on developing the key areas that they want to work on. It may be creating a stronger talent acquisition process and maybe handling all their employee relations and building a performance management process within their organization. But what those things do is they build the infrastructure for that business, and I build that for them.

I, I could see also there's a lot of legalities, rules, HR employment laws, HIPAA laws, whatever it is, that they're operating in a vacuum and they could be setting themselves up for something that they get sued for. How do you kind of rectify that concern?

No, it's— I have an audit that I use. I have— I've got 10 different audits that I use, different structures. And for one like that, I mean, you're there. There's so many different rules out there. I wish I had it handy with me right now, but it's about 10 pages. I created a comprehensive compliance audit that covers everything from EEOC to Fair Labor Standards Act and, and FMLA and leaves and everything. And so I can go through that with the employer and make sure they're, they're, they're compliant on those lines. But one of the best things about having me as a, as your, as your HR partner is, and this happened to me with another client I was talking with about, we were doing an offer letter and the HR person said, well, I've got to put this language in there. So, well, why are you putting that language in there? And I found out that they were actually Doing a, doing an illegal process, and they didn't even know they were doing it. And so it's an opportunity for me to step in and talk with the controller and the owner and say, I understand why you're doing this, but you can't do that.

Because you mentioned what it was.

Yeah, it was a, uh, they, they were, um, uh, they were giving employee, actual employees, a W-9 And, and paying them without taking the taxes out.

Yes.

Which is illegal.

Yeah. That's a—

it's a tax violation.

That's—

and even though there's a way I could probably— you could do that legally from the Department of Labor standpoint, you're still going to get in trouble with the tax, with the IRS. So, you know, and those are things that businesses just don't know.

Yeah. So to get your— get you on a call, get you on a meeting, join a podcast you're going to produce or roundtable, what's the best way of reaching you? We have your email on the screen here. It's steven@hamlethr.com. Do you want to give out your phone number?

Sure. So, you can reach me by email at steven@hamlethr.com. Phone number is 603-550-3222. And then, of course, you can always go to my website, which is hamlethr.com. And, um, that's got my contact information there as well.

Well, thanks for being on the show today.

I appreciate it, Michael. Thank you for having me.

Bye, Stephen.