Keep the PEO. Lose the ticket queue.

PEOs solve a real problem. Pooled purchasing gets a 40-person company benefits pricing it could never negotiate alone, and the payroll and tax administration genuinely comes off your plate.

What tends not to work is the HR service. Co-employment brings an HR helpline attached, and a helpline is staffed like a helpline — a queue, a ticket, and a representative who doesn’t know your business, your managers, or why this particular employee situation is delicate.

So the pricing stays worth it and the service becomes something you route around. Most companies we meet in this position have quietly stopped calling.

We sit in between

You keep the PEO. You keep the benefits pricing that justified it. We become the HR function on top — the people who know your business, handle the situations that need judgment, and manage the PEO relationship rather than queueing in it.

That means we handle the employee matters directly and go to the PEO for what the PEO is genuinely good at. It also means somebody is watching the relationship: what you’re paying for, what you’re using, whether the administrative fee still makes sense against what you actually get.

And we know when it’s time to leave

Companies outgrow PEOs. It usually happens somewhere past a hundred employees, when the per-employee administrative charge stops looking like a bargain and the co-employment constraints start getting in the way.

We’ve taken clients both directions — onto a PEO and off one. The exit is the harder journey, and it is genuinely involved: your own state tax accounts, workers’ compensation coverage, benefits placed directly with a broker, payroll stood up independently, and all of it sequenced so nobody’s coverage lapses on the changeover.

The decision itself deserves more rigor than it usually gets. The administrative fee is the obvious number. The one that matters is what the same benefits cost placed directly, plus what you’d spend running the administration yourself, against what the PEO charges. Sometimes that favors leaving. Sometimes it doesn’t, and we’ll tell you that too.

Benefits, whether or not there’s a PEO involved

Where you have a broker, we work with them. They place and service the coverage; we handle the employee-facing side, which is where most of the friction lives.

Open enrollment is the obvious one. It arrives annually, it’s time-boxed, it generates more employee questions than anything else in the year, and it lands on whoever is least equipped to answer them. We run it — communications, sessions, the individual questions, the person who missed the deadline.

Then the rest of the year: life events, qualifying changes, the employee who doesn’t understand their deductible, the leave that interacts with coverage continuation, COBRA administration at 20 employees and above.

What’s included

• Day-to-day PEO relationship management, so your team isn’t in the queue
• Employee-facing benefits support: enrollment, life events, coverage questions
• Open enrollment, run end to end
• Coordination with your broker and carriers
• PEO evaluation — genuine cost comparison, not a sales-led one
• PEO onboarding or exit, sequenced so coverage never lapses
• COBRA administration

Where we stop

We’re not a broker. We don’t place coverage — where you have a broker, that’s their work and we keep them in the loop rather than around them.

We’re also not your benefits attorney. ERISA and plan document questions go to counsel.