In this episode of the A Better HR Business podcast, hosts SPEAKER A and SPEAKER B interview Suzanne Lucas, known as the "Evil HR Lady." Suzanne shares her unconventional path into HR—starting with a political‑science master’s degree, temp‑agency placements, and a metrics role at Wegmans where she was forced to work every store department to understand front‑line realities. She later spent nearly a decade in pharmaceutical HR, focusing on employment‑law compliance, before moving to Switzerland with her family. While in Switzerland she built the Evil HR Lady brand, first as a blog, then as a Facebook group that now hosts over 30,000 HR professionals. She explains how the group grew from a self‑promotion tool into a high‑quality, moderated community, describing the extensive moderation effort and the decision to limit membership to HR practitioners. Suzanne also details her consulting business, which serves U.S. companies remotely despite her Swiss residence, leveraging her U.S.‑focused expertise and a reputation built through writing for CBS News, Inc., and other outlets. A major focus of the conversation is her "Improv Your HR" training, which blends improv comedy techniques with HR learning to improve public‑speaking, rapid thinking, and problem‑solving. She shares examples of improv‑based workshops, the "5 Things" exercise, and how humor and active participation boost retention. Finally, Suzanne outlines upcoming initiatives, including a paid "Evil HR Lady Plus" membership, more keynote work, and continued expansion of her improv‑based training. The interview also touches on the origin of the "Evil HR Lady" name as a tongue‑in‑cheek branding decision to stand out in a conservative pharma environment.
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Welcome to A Better HR Business, the podcast that looks at how HR consultants and HR tech firms grow their businesses and how they help their employers to get the best out of their people. Remember, for show notes and downloads, go to www.getmorehrclients.com/podcast. That's getmorehrclients.com/podcast. Okay, let's get started.
Hello, welcome back to the show. Great to have you along. And I'm really looking forward to today's conversation with the amazing Suzanne Lucas. Suzanne is the Evil HR Lady, which sounds terrifying, but she's a lot of fun and has an amazing wealth of knowledge in the world of HR. So I'm really keen to get into this. So Suzanne, thank you very much for joining me today.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, good to have you along. And you are like me, you're a little bit geographically confused. An American in Switzerland. I'm an Aussie in Ireland. So we're here sharing the joy of HR in Europe. Is that right?
That's right. We've come from far away to help these— that thing.
Yeah, we don't need to go into the history of Swiss chocolate, which is just amazing. But I'm very jealous, very jealous indeed. So there's a lot to cover. You've got an amazing consulting business where you're helping companies, particularly US companies, I believe, in terms of employment law compliance, ChatGPT training for HR. But you've also got a really interesting side to the business which I want to get to in a moment, which is Improv Your HR. And I saw your presentation or keynote on that topic, and it's just kind of really got the mind racing. So I want to get into that second, but do you want to give us the 1-2 minute overview of who you are, your career, so people have context of your HR background?
Well, sure. I started out in HR because I have a couple of degrees in political science which probably not my best choice of things to study.
That's what I did.
But I finished a master's degree in political science and I was like, now what? No one needs me to talk about political philosophy. So I decided that what I wanted to do was train people. And I said, where do you find training jobs in HR? So I went to a temp agency and I said, listen, I will do anything in an HR department. Get me in the new HR department. And they placed me to cover a maternity leave for an administrative assistant in an HR department. I did that. Then they placed me to cover another maternity leave for another assistant in an HR department. And then by that time, I could speak the HR lingo. I had the master's degree and I got a job as an HR metrics specialist because Wow. People don't know this, but in political science there's a lot of statistical analysis.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I could do statistics and I could now speak HR. I didn't know anything, but I could speak the language. And I was very, very lucky. I was hired by a company called Wegmans and your US East Coasters will know this store and the world kind of knows it because they're always in the top 3 on the Fortune Top 100 Companies to Work For.
Nice.
And the reason why they are there is because their HR and their CEO, they're spectacular. They're so good at people. And so I just had this incredible opportunity to be trained by literally the best in the world.
Wow.
And that's how I got this HR thing going. I was hired as a metrics specialist, which is, you know, real back office. But what they made me do, which I thought was weird at the time, but now I'm so incredibly grateful for, is they sent me into the grocery stores and I had to work in every department. I had to do seafood, which was terrible because I hate seafood. I had to work in produce. I had to run a cash register. I had to do all of these things. And I learned this real value of understanding what the people are doing. Yeah, because I'm back office, right? I'm doing reports. Here we go. Here's a graph. But the graphs don't mean anything if you can't interpret them and if you can't understand. And one of the things I learned, we had a problem with high turnover in produce. I'm like, what's the deal? Well, I worked 2 days in produce and I'm like, this is why there's high turnover because it is constant on your feet and it is constant interacting and people are super picky about their produce. So when you're working there, people are constantly bombarding you with questions and you're like, I've got to get this done, but there's all these people. It's a really hard job. I would have had no idea. So I was super, super, super lucky to get that training there with this company. Learned all of these great things about managing people. Then I moved on, went into pharma, which is a completely different animal from groceries. Yep. Yeah, completely different. I worked in pharma HR for 8, 9 years, did all the things and ending up focusing on the employment law side of things, which went well with my political science degrees. Then I left that because my husband got a job in Switzerland. So we came here for 2 years and that was 15 years ago. And I had my blog, but then I started really working with that. And from there I built a little empire and doing a lot of training, a lot of writing, a lot of speaking. Keynote speaking is my favorite thing on the planet. So Fabulous. Yes, I would love to come to your conference.
So when you moved in the pharmaceutical sector, and I gather you're there for quite a long time, did they then get you to do further work when you left?
I did a little bit after I left, but not a lot, because what we had decided when I came to Switzerland, first of all, time zones differently and all that. We had two little kids, and so we had decided I'm going to stay home with the little kids because we're only going to be here for two years. And the cost of daycare in Switzerland is right insane. It's insane. I mean, you could expect for a full-time daycare to pay about 25,000 francs a year. Yeah, it's more than your rent.
Wow.
And we had two little kids, so we're talking 50,000 francs a year in daycare costs. Like At some point you're like, that's not worth working.
So hence the blog and the remote sort of stuff. Now the reason I ask that is that a lot of people when they leave the corporate world can get work from their old employer and keep doing some stuff. So I'm curious about how you then got consulting work when you're on another continent because you continue to work to this day, right? For US companies, is that right?
I do. So I kind of took a different route because I really quit and my thing was I'm going to be a stay-at-home mom. So I did a little bit for my company after I left because You know, I had so many years of tenure. Of course, I'm a go-to person for so many things, but just very, very little. And then I was writing my blog, Evil HR Lady, and I got contacted by CBS News in the US and they said, hey, we'd like you to write for us.
Nice.
And we'll pay you. And I was like, what?
How did they find you?
Through my blog. They just were Googling. They were looking for a human resources expert. And they found my blog and I worked for them for a couple of years. And at that point I decided this is what I wanna do. I don't wanna go back corporate, but I still had the two little kids and my husband traveled all of the time. So going back corporate wasn't even a great option just because of the travel stuff. And so I did writing and I, pretty much exclusively writing about HR. Actually, it was exclusively writing. I wasn't talking with anybody. I wasn't, you know, consulting. I wasn't training anybody. I was just writing about HR stuff and started working for Inc. magazine at that time. And then I have several other clients just doing writing. And then when I told you I was an open book, are you prepared for this?
Keep going.
So then I found out that my husband is a complete sleazeball. Oh, and he's been sleeping with all of his coworkers. All of them. Thank you. So not all of them, just more than one. Anyway, so I left him, and now I needed to make real income because doing freelance HR writing is not the way to wealth. I know that's shocking for a lot of people, but it's not the way to wealth. So at that point I was like, well, now I need a real job and I still didn't want to go corporate. My kids are teens, so it's not like that's a huge issue, but I like working for myself. And so I started doing all of this training, um, building the speaking, and I had built a community And I've built name recognition because Evil HR Lady, I can pat myself on the back for coming up with that one.
Wonderful. I'll get to that in just a second. But if I just pause there for people listening to this, you started writing and you didn't have to. You could have gone off and enjoyed the Swiss countryside and stuff like that, but you thought, you know, I'm gonna do a bit of both. But you started writing and then CBS contacted you, and then I think maybe Inc. and stuff like that because you were just taking action. I just think that's so clever. And then secondly, I can tell you're a good writer and you find the angles because if I asked someone to write an article on how to incentivize employees on a minimal budget, they might come up with something like that. That would be the title, how to incentivize employees with a small budget. Whereas I saw a piece you did and it was called Mark Cuban and Taylor Swift give millions in bonuses. Here's how you can be just as generous on a budget. Like just, it's very, I don't know, journalistic or clever to find those hooks, those angles. And I think that must come through in the training you do in the way you consult, you find what matters to people and what matters to companies and what matters to HR. Is that a fair call?
Yeah. And I thank you. That's a very kind compliment. But it's really important to understand what people need. And that's the success of a good HR person. And I, you know, attribute this back to my training with Wegmans. The reason why they get in the top 3 places to work with all of the time is because their HR people and all of their corporate people have all been in the store. They all know what the employees need. They all know what the customers need. Every single person in that company, at least when I was there, has dealt face to face with a customer. Everyone has stocked a shelf. Everyone has run a cash register. So there's no question of this is what employees need. This is what customers need. We all knew it. And I've taken that throughout my career. So often you have policies and procedures made at the corporate level and people with degrees and consultants, they come in and they give these great ideas. But they haven't ever been boots on the ground. They have no idea. And, you know, I compare this back to the summer after my first year in college. I worked for a department store in the US called Kmart, and I was a cashier. I stood behind the cash register. Nobody saw my feet, right? I was not on the floor. Nobody saw my feet. We were required to wear hard-soled dress shoes. That's a decision somebody at corporate made who had never stood on their feet for you.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
There's not a soul— ha, that's a good shoe joke— that would have come into the store and said, well, I'm not shopping here because your cashiers are wearing comfortable shoes. Yeah. And that's the type of thing that you see a lot in companies. You see these programs and policies. They come down from above because some consultant who has an MBA from a big name school and who has never done the work comes up with it. And I try to make sure that I see it from the employee's point of view and find out what those people are thinking. One of the ways I do it, again, in supporting HR, I have a Facebook group called Evil HR Lady. We've got 32,000 HR people in there. Nice. And everybody asks their questions and there's big discussion. And I know what the day-to-day problems are. Yeah. You look at a conference list of speakers. Let's talk about the future of work.
Yeah.
Let's not, shall we? Let's talk about, you know, the problems we're having right now. And so many of these people get in their rarefied air and they're like, let's talk about this and this will someday be that. And I'm like, when was the last time you talked with an HR person who has their boots on the ground and who is dealing with the day-to-day. They don't need to worry about, oh, we're going to have this and that. Maybe we will, maybe we won't. But right now, here are the problems that we need to solve.
I love what you were saying about HR people should get onto the shop floor, onto the factory floor, onto the business floor. To do the jobs. I remember in one of my first HR jobs, that's what happened. They sent me out and I had to do all the different stuff because when I came out of college, out of university, I knew everything, which was great. I'd read all the books. I did. Thank you. For example, one of the things was job rotation is excellent because it gives everyone exposure to different jobs and it keeps them fresh because they might get bored of the things they're on. Then when I went into doing these hands-on experience roles, whatever you call it. I'd learned it, so I'm going to implement job rotation. They hated it because everyone was good at different stuff. So if they were driving forklifts and cranes and stuff, I think they enjoyed that. They loved the skills, the mechanics. Others wanted to do the manual stuff because it kept them fit, and they would be racing the people on the next trucks and stuff like that. So you don't learn that stuff if you're not in there. So I love the fact that you had that opportunity, and that gave you that awareness, which then you combine with your— I don't know if that's a strong word— but love of statistics and analysis. So you can use those metrics.
That's a powerful combination, to offer a business. It is, and it's being able to understand what they mean. All right. Because it's a very different problem when you understand what's going on. So you're trying to implement this rotation and people hate it. You need to be able to evaluate why it is that they hate it. Is it, oh, well, we need to revamp the program, or is it because I became a forklift driver because I like driving forklifts and I don't wanna do whatever else it is. Driving a forklift sounds cool. I don't think I could do it though. I'm very bad at spatial awareness.
Still fun though.
I can't parallel park to save my soul, so I'd probably be a terrible forklift driver. If you don't understand what's underlying with the people, your statistics don't mean anything. Yeah.
Can I ask you about the Evil HR Lady Facebook group? So it's over 30,000 members, I believe, and an amazing group. So many good discussions and topics and support, advice, the works. But at one point it didn't exist. Can you tell me about what was going through your mind and then to start it, and then how did you grow it to such a powerful group?
Well, I started it for purely selfish reasons. Because I had a page, an Evil HR Lady page, and I would post my articles that I wrote. But Facebook started suppressing pages. Yeah, they want— if you're a page, they want you to buy advertising.
Yeah.
And so I had 2,000 or 3,000 followers. I'd post something, I'd get 100 views. I'm like, not worth it. This is not worth the effort. And so I switched to a group. Purely to get more eyeballs on my stuff.
Yeah.
And then as people started joining and asking questions and people started giving good answers, it started to grow. And at that point, I had a decision to make. Do I just treat this as this side thing where the purpose of it is for me to post my articles every day to get eyeballs on it, and I don't care what the rest of you do. Or do I turn this into the best place on the internet for HR? And I decided I want this to be the best place on the internet for HR. And not to brag, but I think it is. I am member of many other forums. And I don't know one that's better. If you have one that's better, let me know. I will join it. But the thing that people don't understand about a group this size and what made it grow is the amount of effort that I and a moderator team have put into it. My moderator team is spectacular. We come from a variety of backgrounds. We have a labor relations specialist, Michael Vandervoort. We have a benefits and policy expert, Sarah Hudson. We have an HR generalist to the max, like she does everything, Marie Lobedoux. She's currently an HR manager in Antarctica. Isn't that crazy?
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
You don't think about that.
I saw that. I saw the pictures of the penguins. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, she's there. And then Nina Sulu, she comes from the beauty pageant world.
Wow.
And she does HR for beauty pageants. Isn't that weird?
That's a nice niche. Yeah.
And then she also has a consulting business. So we have these really wild, crazy different backgrounds so we can see things from different sides. Yeah. And we run that group. We run a tight ship, man. We do not put up with any crap. We do not tolerate bad behavior. We will ban your little behind and we won't feel bad about it for one minute. We are picky about the questions that we post. If you can solve your problem in a 30-second Google search, no, it's not coming up. And we work really hard to keep that quality there. And because of that, we are able to attract people. We limit membership. When I first started, I was like, anybody join, anybody join, because my goal was eyeballs on me. Now my goal is the best HR group on the internet. And so if you are somebody that just wants to ask your HR questions, but you're not an HR person, you're not admitted. We don't let you in because there's other places for that., and people keep saying, when are you gonna start a group for regular people? And I'm like, when are you gonna pay me to start a group?
Yeah. Yeah. They don't realize what goes on in the background, that's for sure.
Yeah. Because it's a zillion hours of work to do this. And if you had asked me before I started this group, should I put my page moderation on my resume? I would've been like, no, that's a dumb thing. And now I'm like, yes, you should. Because it is, yeah, real live management skills. It's real life conflict escalation. You should see my inbox when people get their knickers all twisted because we didn't publish their post or because we took down one of their comments because it was rude. I did have one woman, she kept marking posts as offensive and just repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. And so I reached out to her and I'm like, listen, this has all been through moderation. Please stop this. And so then she made a new Facebook page called Evil HR Lady that had a picture of a woman in lingerie and like with my name underneath it.
Oh, wow.
And quite frankly, the woman in lingerie looked a lot better than I would look in lingerie. So I'm like, ooh. And then she would like post all of these horrible things.
Ugh.
And Facebook is like, well. She's not using your picture, so clearly it's not you, but I was able to get them to take it down because she was using my logo. But it really is a tremendous amount of work because it's like controlling a small workplace. I was gonna say a small workplace. There's 30,000 people in there and we really have to be careful. And when I say there's 30,000 people in there, we have generally 26,000 different people on the page every month. So the vast majority of people didn't just join and go away. The vast majority are there at least once a month, which is huge, right?
That is impressive.
It's a huge community and I bust my buns for it and I love it and I love that it helps people. It really truly helps people and I love that. I didn't, It didn't start out that way. It didn't start out altruistic, but now it is a little bit more.
Kudos to you and to the team there that your colleagues, because it's an amazing place to be for HR people from, I guess, two main directions. One is learning stuff, getting answers to stuff. I've got a question, I've got to hire someone, offboard someone, all sorts of stuff. And they are getting answers to those sort of questions. But secondly, there's a level of support that people need because it's a tough job. HR people kind of forget that.
It is so tough. And there's so many companies that have HR departments of 1 or 2, and they don't typically pay a lot. So they're generally headed up by early career people. And, you know, I come from big companies. And so all of my jobs in big companies were I do this one thing.
Yeah.
And when you're HR in a small company, you do all the things and you don't have that training.
Yes.
And so I feel like we are your HR department.
Yeah. In a big company also, they would pay for lawyers and training programs and subscriptions for legal guides and stuff like that. But often the smaller companies where it is just the solo person, they don't have that. They can't just call the lawyer or get the books out because they don't have all of those things. So it's great that you've got that resource. I want to make sure I get to ask you about you and your services, because I think what you're doing is so fabulous. I mentioned that you're consulting mostly to US companies around employment law compliance and stuff like that, ChatGPT training for HR, and also the Improv Your HR. So firstly, how is it that you get US work when you're in Switzerland? And then secondly, please tell us about Improv Your HR, because I think it sounds amazing.
Well, how I get US work is because most people think I'm in the US. My LinkedIn profile says Basel, Switzerland. I'm very open about it. My I regularly, I should say regularly, I used to regularly, I haven't for a while done what these posts I call Swiss Saturday posts. Well, I'll just not HR related. I'll just write something about the weirdness of living in Switzerland. Most people think I'm in the US. My expertise is in the US. I write from a US perspective. So if you were just reading my column in Inc., you have no reason to think that I live anywhere other than the US.
Got it.
And people are often shocked, like you said, oh, I thought you were in Pennsylvania. And I talk like an American. I write like an American. I talk about US subjects. So people think I'm in the US and I do mostly training. That's where the bulk of my income comes from is doing training. And this is one thing that I'm grateful for on the pandemic because pre-pandemic people only wanted in-person training.
Yes.
Yes.
And in-person training is better. It is better, but remote training is almost as good. And if you get remote training from me, it's better than a lot of in-person training from other people.
And I'm guessing that's because of your improv skills. Is that right? So tell us about Improv Your HR.
So improv comedy is my love and my passion. And I started doing improv a few years ago. As part of the trauma from the dumb divorce. And like, I need to do something different. And so I started doing improv comedy, and it turns out I love it. You might tell by the way I talk and go from subject to subject, I'm a little bit ADD. So improv comedy works really well with that because it's all about making fast connections, right? And your brain has to go fast, and your brain needs to go faster than your mouth so that you know what you're saying. And as I started doing improv comedy, I was taking classes and meeting people and doing improv shows in these little tiny bars because I'm in Switzerland. So we're English-speaking improv. It's tiny anyway, but a little tiny Irish pub, and we'd have an audience of like 3 people when we started.
A lot.
It's really hard. Now we do some corporate events and we've grown, but you gotta start, you gotta learn those things. And I started realizing, oh my gosh, all of this applies to leadership, to HR, to development. And I started teaching the improv classes and I would ask my students, why are you taking this class? And they were like, I am terrified of public speaking. I thought this would help. I have to do a lot of presentations at work. I get really nervous. I thought this would help. Like they had self-selected into it. They weren't taking it because my dream is to be an improv comedy star. You know, I'd get a couple of people that are like, I wanna be a comedian. I wanna do standup. I thought this would help. And it will, it will help you be a better standup person. But a lot of people were self-selecting in there because they wanted to work on their business skills. So I was like, well, yeah, there we go. And I started developing content and training programs that incorporate these principles in common into what you need to be a good HR person. And of course, it applies outside of HR as well. But of course, my focus is with other human resources people. And talking with people about those things. And the thing with improv is it stretches your brain.
Yeah.
It makes you think in a way that you wouldn't otherwise think.
Yeah.
And this is something that's very apropos for HR because you can plan out your whole day. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And then I'm going to go home at 5 o'clock. And by 8:30, you have someone in your office crying. Yeah. And then you find out that somebody has been a no-call, no-show for 4 days, but nobody mentioned it to you in that time.
Someone swore at the boss and—
No one swore at the boss. You know, something broke or there's a fight about food in the kitchen because for some reason HR is the mom and has to deal with that. Your day is never what it is. It's everything coming at you just like an improv. I love it.
Years ago, there was a company that was underperforming, and so I got together with the CFO to train the frontline leaders because, you know, costs needed to streamline stuff and things were falling through the cracks. So let's improve processes and stuff. And so we wanted to educate them about profit and loss and cash flow management, stuff like that. But when the CFO said, well, let's do a PowerPoint presentation, I'll explain what a P&L is and we'll go through the line items, I went, oh my goodness, put me to sleep, please. So we kind of developed along the lines of ImprovHR where we said we got them in groups and they had to present back some sort of component from the learning, but they had to do it in a fun way. And so some did game shows, others did rap songs talking about cash flow. But I've had people coming back to me years later saying, I still remember the learnings from that session because it was fun, it was improv, or it was because we didn't get along. I just think that you helping HR teams and helping organizations through this medium of improv, I see it really working.
It works so well. Like you said, people remember.
Yeah.
Because they're laughing.
Yeah.
And when you are laughing, you are learning. When you are just sitting there listening, some of it's going in, but when you are participating and when you are using your brain, one of the things that they've studied is taking a practice test Actually helps you do better on the real test, even if you don't do any studying in between, because that act of taking that test forces you to think, and then you have your—
strengthen those synapses, whatever. Yeah.
Strengthen those things. Yeah. The same thing happens when you're doing a workshop using these techniques because you're forced to stretch. Your brain. And I want people to stretch their brains. One of the exercises that I have done in a couple of keynotes is I've dragged people up on stage. I bring Swiss chocolate to get people to come because that's smart. It's amazing what people will do for Swiss chocolate, right? And we play a game called 5 Things, and we have some problem and you have to come up with 5 solutions. So you do your first one and then the whole audience says, 1, and you give your second one, and the whole audience says 2. So you've got this real responsive energy. Energy. And one of the most important rules of 5 Things is anything you say is right.
Got it.
Okay. So it could be, give me 5, you know, 5 ways to handle an employee who's late. And you could be like, take him out back and beat him with a stick, and everyone will go 1, and everybody will clap. Now, you know that that's not actually going to be a practice.
Some places that's not legal, Suzanne.
It's not some places. Ireland though, I've heard.
Yeah, no problem.
Australia, you guys are sending out kangaroos. When you see the responses that people come, sometimes 1 is their best response. Sometimes 5 is, sometimes 4 is, but the same thing happens with everybody is that they can do the first one, they can do the second one. By the third and fourth, they have never had a thought. Like, it's like, oh my God, can't come up with anything else. Really? And then they're about to die when they get their fifth one. And often the fifth one is the best idea because we've stretched and come up with something new. And unlike brainstorming where you're just supposed to give endless ideas, yeah, we've put a limit on it. So you only have to come up with 5. But you get this huge positive response to every idea. So when you're brainstorming and someone's just writing on the whiteboard, do, do, do, do, do, and you know, and you say, take him out back and beat him with a stick. Everyone goes, ah, yeah, that's a dumb thing. That's illegal. You can't do that. But when you're playing this, everyone goes, one. And it's like this positive burst and it really helps you to stress and you don't have to worry, I've got to come up with 20 ideas. I have to come up with 5. That's it, 5, and I get rewarded for every idea. It works a treat. Everybody finds it really helpful and they go back and they implement it into their departments.
I love it. And you contrast that with, you know, the classic stereotype, the manager who says, all right, give me some ideas. They want no, No one. No. Next. No. And so that kills the energy, it kills the motivation, etc.
So this is such a clever— most of the ideas aren't going to work, but we're going to celebrate coming up with them anyway.
Yeah, it's the muscle memory. It's working on it so that maybe the next one that comes along, you'll have gotten better at thinking of solutions or finding new ways to come up with them. Or maybe you combine a few of those bad ideas together and suddenly, well, what if we take them out and have a private conversation? Maybe it's not out back and we do it in a different way where it's actually enjoyable. And so, yeah, anything can happen. I think that's brilliant and it's a new way of learning and you can deliver that remotely as well. Is that right?
I can. It works better in person, of course, but absolutely we can do anything remotely these days.
Brilliant. So last two questions then is what does the future hold for you? You know, what do you see coming down the line? And then lastly, how did you come up with Evil HR Lady?
I don't know what the future has. Because heaven knows I was wrong in the past about what the future held. But I hope that the future holds a lot more keynote speeches, a lot more, um, Improv Your HR training and development. We are launching in the next few weeks an Evil HR Lady Plus, which will be a paid group that in addition to the camaraderie that we have at the Evil HR Lady Facebook group will offer webinars. And some other things that, well, we can relate to the people.
Good.
And so that is what is coming up. And how I came up with Evil HR Lady is not very exciting, but I'm still so pleased I came up with it. I was working in pharma. I wanted to do a blog. And pharma is a very conservative industry. And this was 2006. Back in the dark ages, right? And social media wasn't a thing yet. Blogs were where it's at. All the cool people had blogs. But I knew I couldn't write under my own name because I'm in this very conservative industry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I was pretty sure my direct boss would be okay with it, but I knew that there were HR leaders that would not. Be okay with it at all. And so I was like, well, what embodies HR? And here's the question: if you get called into your boss's office and the HR person is sitting there, just how is that conversation going to go, right? You know it's going to be bad because people associate HR with the bad things. We didn't cause that, but we are there to deliver the bad news. And we deal with discipline. People get upset because, oh, HR is so dumb. They're making me fill out this paperwork. We don't want you to fill out the paperwork either. We don't want to fill out the paperwork. Talk to the government. They're the ones that are coming up with this crap that we have to comply with. So shut up and fill out your paperwork. And so people have a lot of negative attitudes. So I thought that that fit and it was a decision I made in maybe 3 minutes. And I told you I'm terrible at marketing and I am, but that was the best marketing decision I could have ever made.
It's a brilliant one.
Because if I had done Suzanne Lucas's HR advice, who would remember that?
A dime a dozen.
Yeah. Yeah. But Evil HR Lady, dude, you remember that?
Yeah. No, that's fantastic. Just for a little side note for people listening to this. So some people are in HR roles and maybe one day thinking about going out and starting their own HR-related business. Sometimes that's what I recommend to them is if you're not ready to leave your corporate job yet or you don't want to tell your boss, that sort of thing, I usually say do try to tell them soon because you might even be encouraged and be supported as you plan for that. But sometimes we do set up anonymous or branded blogs or websites and things like that where you can build up a reputation for the business itself or build up a mailing list so that when you're ready to launch, you've got that. So in this case, Suzanne Lucas, smart to create this brand that's separate to it for the— in your particular case, maybe there were managers, bosses who would not be happy with that. So we have separate branding and it keeps it separate from your day-to-day job. So there's a little tip for people. So I love it. Wonderful stuff. You've got some amazing services and a great background and built a wonderful community. And so I wish you the best with the plus version of the Evil HR Lady Facebook group and also with the keynotes and the Improv Your HR and your services. So for people listening, you've heard what Suzanne can do and can offer. So if you know of companies or people who would be interested in what she offers, definitely put them in touch. So Suzanne, you've shared so much great stuff. I really wanna thank you for all you've done today. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for having me. It's been delightful.
And I'll see you in Switzerland sometime for some chocolate.
All right. Yeah, come on over and we'll hook you up with some chocolate. Brilliant.
Thank you then.
Thanks for joining us today on A Better HR Business, the podcast that explores the world of HR consulting and HR tech businesses. For show notes and downloads, go to www.a better hr business. Getmorehrclients.com/podcast. That's getmorehrclients.com/podcast. Remember to subscribe and share the show with any friends who are busy growing a HR business. Thanks and see you next time.
