The 5 Must-Know Steps To Win the Great Resignation & Retain Top Talent

The great resignation is all most people can talk about when it comes to human resources right now and with good reason. As an employer and business owner, if you aren’t taking the necessary steps to insulate and protect your business you run the risk of losing great people. Our special guest, Eric Torigian with CHRO Solutions, is going to share “The 5 Must-Know Steps To Win the Great Resignation & Retain Top Talent.”

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The 5 Must-Know Steps To Win the Great Resignation & Retain Top Talent

Tim Fitzpatrick: The Great Resignation is all that most people can talk about when it comes to human resources right now and with good reason. As an employer and a business owner, if you aren't taking the necessary steps to insulate your business and protect your business, you run the risk of losing great people. Our special guest today is going to share the five must-know steps to win the great resignation and retain top talent. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Eric Torigian from CHRO Solutions with me today. Eric, welcome, and thanks for being here.

Eric Torigian: Well, thanks, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here. I love the concept of what you guys are doing at Rialto Marketing, and it's a pleasure to be here.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, we're going to have a good conversation. Obviously, the Great Resignation has been a topic for a while now. We can't neglect it. Right. Employees are a huge asset in all of our organizations, and we got to pay attention to it.

Eric Torigian: Yeah, it's an interesting time right now. I know we're going to get into this in a lot more detail, but that relationship between the employee and the employer has fundamentally shifted, and the organizations that get it and manage it are going to be the ones who win.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. I'm excited to talk about this, but before we dig into it, I want to ask you some rapid-fire questions. Just help us get to know you a little bit. You ready to rock and roll?

Eric Torigian: Let's go.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay. Let's do it. When you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Eric Torigian: So I have a six-year-old who turns six on Tuesday and a seven-year-old. So I spend most of my time with them. So we do all kinds of great stuff together. And whether it's bike riding or standing in the street so they can ride their bikes and have fun or electronics downstairs at our workbench and our maker space or crawl around on the floor, just being a dad. So that's my number one passion.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Now. Are they twelve to 18 months apart? How far apart are they?

Eric Torigian: They're 19 months apart.

Tim Fitzpatrick: 19. okay.

Eric Torigian: Which sounded really easy at the time. And I think it's really easy at some point in time. It was a struggle, a challenge for my wife, as well as she's a stay at home mom who works two jobs, basically. And yeah, I remember the day we brought my son home and we sat there and it was the very first time we went home. We're like, how the hell are we going to get both these kids to sleep at the same time?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. So my wife and I have two girls 18 months apart.

Eric Torigian: Okay.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I know exactly what you're going through. What's your hidden talent?

Eric Torigian: My hidden talent is this passion for getting people to bloom. So I love to get people to do better than they even believe they can do at something. And I love to just show them I show them how they're valued. I show them how they fit into whatever the solution is or whatever the problem is. And then I give them the tools to get out of their way. And it works at work, in a Church or wherever. It just always is a proven formula.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Eric Torigian: Well, I've been given so much and so much, but the best piece of advice ever was if you want to make all of your dreams come true, make everyone else's come true. And I truly believe if we set out to help others first, we will get taken care of.

Tim Fitzpatrick: It's naturally going to follow, isn't it?

Eric Torigian: It sure does. It always seems to.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's one thing about you that surprises people?

Eric Torigian: I used to perform stand up comedy. I was with Second City and did a bunch of work there. And I think it always surprises people that I love to do that kind of stuff.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I would not have guessed that. That's pretty cool.

Eric Torigian: In improv, you learn a very important lesson. And it goes back to our last comment. It's not about making yourself look funny. It's about making your troop look funny. And it's. Yes. And so if you take anything someone does and agree with it and then add to it, that's how things work, and that's where authenticity comes from, and that's where realism comes from. Boy, isn't that life? Isn't life, there's an exercise and yes and.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well it's what's funny you say that because I was just reading something and they were talking about how successful business people steal from other industries and apply what they've learned from other industries into their business. And I was going to say, gosh, there's got to be tons of things that you learn in stand up comedy that you can apply in other aspects of your life. And that is a great one. Yes and. I love that I wrote that down in quotes. What does success mean to you?

Eric Torigian: Success means to me that I'm helping a lot of people. And I'll go back to my last comment, but I just want to help as many people, and I want to improve the world. And I say that and people are like, oh, yeah, that sounds great. But everything I do, I want to improve the world. Like, look, I bought this new house. I bought a new house. I want to improve my street. That means I'm going to tear out old bushes, I'm going to clean up the grass. I'm going to paint the house. Like I want the neighborhood to be better because I'm here, not worse. If I go support a business, when I go in on a project, I want them to be better as a result of me having been there. Everything we do, I want to just make incremental improvement.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Where's your happy place?

Eric Torigian: Oh, Jeez, my happy place. It used to be a place down in Florida that was called Sailfish Marina. And it's not anything special, and it's not anything fancy, and it's just a place where it was very peaceful. Go down there, we can sit and have a couple of drinks and some fish and chips. And it was always just a nice place to reset.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Where is that in Florida?

Eric Torigian: So it's on the east side. My parents used to live in West Palm Beach, so this is kind of up in the Palm Beach area.

Tim Fitzpatrick: And what was it called again?

Eric Torigian: Sailfish Marina.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Sailfish Marina.

Eric Torigian: Actually, behind me is two pictures of Sailfish Marina. Okay. I had to make sure to find out.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?

Eric Torigian: Authenticity. So I don't like fake people. Just be yourself. Unless you're a jerk, then be someone else. But be yourself.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. Awesome. Well, the inquisition is over. I want to give you an opportunity to tell us a little bit more about what you're doing with CHRO Solutions. How are you helping businesses? Who are you working with?

Eric Torigian: I've had this transformational HR career for the past 30 years now. So I've had a chance to work and lead some of the biggest, most complex HR systems in the world. Ford, Pepsi, Comcast, NBC Universal. I have had the chance to do transformational work that no one else did. I always took the assignments that no one wanted. But then I was getting experiences that no one else was ever going to get. So I did a bankruptcy where I was a bankruptcy restructuring HR officer and shut down a business. I did a massive restructuring where I took a company from 1.2 billion in revenue to 200 million in revenue and took out 70% of the SG and A cost and restructured the entire US. And then I've done the opposite side too. I took one company from 2400 domestic employees to 8000 global employees in eleven months during COVID. And it's just you can scale systems. And it's just for me has been this great career and a lot of M and A work and a lot of work with private equity and venture capital. So I got to this point where I said, well, what do I really want to do? What's kind of next for me? I said, Well, I want to take all of this experience I've gained and add value with it to as many people as possible. And I thought the route to do that the best would be this advisory work. So I tend to be that, I hate the terminology now, but I tend to be that trusted adviser to the trusted advisors. So I'm the person that the CEO can come and talk to when they have no one else to turn to. I'm the one who can take a new CHRO to help them be successful. I'm the one who could take a look at your systems and rebuild them from a process six Sigma perspective. One of my other hidden talents that no one knows about me is I'm a software developer as a hobby. Right. So I sit and learn new programming languages, and I learn analytical skills, but I can bring that to bear to help HR systems improve.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. And for those that don't know, CRHO, Chief Human Resources Officer.

Eric Torigian: Chief Human Resource Officer. So CHRO Solutions. And we really have a couple of different focuses, Tim. The first is fractional and interim HR work. Right. So this is taking the smaller businesses who need sophisticated HR strategy but can't and shouldn't hire the level of HR that they need to do it. So what my model says is bring in a fractional leader. So we'll come in some businesses, we come in, we're there one day a month, sometimes we're there one day a quarter. And we put billing rates that make sense for the businesses, but we'll build out the strategy, we'll build out the system and the structure, and you've let your local teams implement them and run them, and then they'll have me on call to back them up. So it gives you a Fortune 50 HR system that works for a non Fortune or a Fortune 1000 companies. So I'm really excited about that vertical. The other place is we do a lot of that M and a work, due diligence work, helping people come in and clean up something. So reboot my talent acquisition function or rebuild my training function, build me a leadership training program, and then a lot of succession planning, org, health work, and then placements, that kind of work.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. So let's dig into HR here. I know there's a lot of things going on in the market. How's the relationship between the employee and employer changing over time?

Eric Torigian: So this is the hottest topic. I think right now.

Tim Fitzpatrick: This is pretty broad question.

Eric Torigian: Yeah. This relationship has been evolving for a number of years. Everyone wants to blame COVID, but COVID is not the Nexus of this change. What COVID did was accelerated it and made it real. So this change was happening. People are demanding a different relationship with their employer. In March, we sent everybody home March of 2020, and it was life or death, and we got it done. We didn't do focus groups. We didn't do studies. There was no test program. We literally packed people's cars with computers and they drove home and set them up. But what it proved was this world can work remotely. Now, I think what 2021 showed us was it can't work remotely exclusively. So we're going to have to figure out some kind of a hybrid work modality that gives you the best of the best. So people need that latitude and flexibility to be home and to work. And if they can be effective, why do you care? But they also need that time. They need that interactive time with each other. You need to go to lunch. You need to laugh about stuff. Someone needs to knock the box of Donuts off the table. And everyone has to have the stories. And those things are important, too. So HR has to find some way to create this new modality that gives sort of the best of the best. What I think is interesting is now we're going to be in an economic cycle with a lot of uncertainty, and we have everyone's talking about the yield curves and the inversions. And there's enough factors pointing to a potential recession coming, and there is some kind of an economic situation coming, but we're going to do it in an employee market. So there's going to be a job market that's going to be very employee rich. So this is going to be a much different recession than we've ever seen before. And how are you going to fix this? How are you going to work through this? So what are you going to do to make your team strong? And that's why I love the concept of today's discussion is how are you going to win in this might not be the Great Recession, but how are you going to win now when the game changes?

Tim Fitzpatrick: There's a couple of things that are coming to mind as you've touched on this. What I'm pulling out of this is as an employer, the owner of a business, you got to have flexibility and you need to be open minded. Right. And I don't know if it was in the last week or two some news clip about Elon Musk demanding Tesla employees get back into the office. He may be able to get away with that, but I think the vast majority of businesses, if they take that approach without having very strong reasons for why do you need people to get back into the office if there's not really strong reasons for that? I don't think most employees are going to put up with that kind of crap.

Eric Torigian: You got to have a business reason. And I think in today's to the point of the question, the relationship now says you got to help people understand how they fit in and why what you're doing matters. And for those of us who started working a while back, I remember where you just went to work and you didn't say anything, right. You just did what you told and you kept your nose down and you did what you told. You stay out of trouble. And that's how you came up. But that's not the world that we live in. And I'm glad of that, because I think we have more creative outlets now. We have more mechanisms to come up with things like Tesla's. Now, Elon Musk, I kind of applaud what he did. Now, I don't think that it's the right decision, but he did it in a way that was authentic to who he is.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.

Eric Torigian: He did it with clarity and he communicated.

Tim Fitzpatrick: He didn't beat around the bush.

Eric Torigian: Right. Beat the Bush, owned the message, did it with clarity, communicated very clearly what he wants and what he believes the outcome will be and why he believes it will be beneficial. That's all you could ask for in a leader. I choose to turn this into a positive and show it as a strength of leadership. We'll see if it works out or not.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Well, I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking this, but I think there are times when some larger companies can get away with that kind of stuff. But just because they can get away with it doesn't mean that somebody that's in a smaller or medium sized business should do that.

Eric Torigian: And people are look, the world's made up of a lot of different people. People have to find situations that fit them. So if the bigger organizations want to make a change and want to be 100% in office, and if there's someone who that doesn't work for, then I'm going to applaud the companies that go after that group of the population and say, if you still want to do this type of work and you want to do it in this type of work modality, come work for us.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. I think there's a huge opportunity for people, for business owners that embrace the change to find a ton of great people. Because all of a sudden, if you were prior to COVID, a lot of businesses were stuck trying to recruit in a very small geographic area. And now if you're open to remote or hybrids of some type, all of a sudden you open up your talent pool, ten hundred X, whatever the number is, it's significantly greater than what it was.

Eric Torigian: And you open up your diversity, you open up your inclusion, you open up everything. Because it's no longer here's, my sort of counsel to people. Right. Leadership is hard. Remote leadership is very hard. So if you do this and if it's right for you, do it. But then be very ready to lead at a very high level. We have a tendency going back to this relationship, we have a tendency to put management people into charge, like give them their first job as a manager, and we don't train them. We never teach them what it means to be a leader. What does it mean to support people? What does it mean to lead? And it's no longer this. It used to mean, go make sure everyone's sitting in their chair at 07:00 A.m. And make sure no one leaves until six. And I knew a lot of people at Ford who I worked with who are sitting at their desk all day long and they were playing Solitaire on the computer and they were getting top achievers because everyone said, look how hard he's working. Look how hard she's working. She's all the time. All the time. All the time. Well, wait a minute. Is that really how you want to measure talent? Yeah. Or do you want to say, look how effective this person is? That's hard to do. And you're asking people to make a very hard step so you have to support them and give them the tools they need.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Now, I know there's been a recent spike in layoffs. We've seen news announcements about some of this stuff. How do you think that's going to impact the job market, or do you.

Eric Torigian: Think it's going to this is fascinating to me because look at where you're seeing these layoffs and a lot of the recent ones, they're coming out of the tech spaces, and you didn't traditionally see this kind of activity in that space. So I'll just step back one little bit on this question. There's really four different ways to run a company. Right. You could be a public company. You could be a privately held company. You could be a private equity held company, or you can be a venture capital backed company. This broad strokes, but those are kind of the four approaches. Okay. Well, public company, you are there to drive shareholder value. So you see things like layoffs and plant closures and pullbacks in manufacturing footprint as a way to drive shareholder value, drive EBITDA. It's a very finance driven decision. It's very public. Makes sense. Privately held company, they're a little bit more protective of their manufacturing footprint because they were there and they built it. Maybe Grandpa John bought that building and put the first automatic screw machine in there. And you have a little bit more of a vested feel of the business. So you're a little bit slower on that uptake. Private equity is probably even faster on the uptake for that. Right. Because it's all about how do I maximize my return on the investment and it's dollars and cents games. But here's where I wanted to get to with this. When you think about venture capital, that's not what venture capital is about. When venture capital has never been about expenses, they've always kind of laughed about expense ratios because they're just about there's more money to be made and how do we scale to a billion? How do we scale to a billion? But to see a lot of these kind of big tech companies who are venture capital back now start to say I have to pull back and I'm going to make layoffs and I'm taking out expenses. This is a big shift in where we're at, and people are starting to use this term VC winter and VC winter, there's a lot of slowdown in the angel funds and in the venture capital funds. This is of a concern to me. I think where we're going to see the job market start to shift is you're going to start to see private equity and public companies into this distressed asset mode, where they're going to start figuring out how do we carve out expenses and how do we fix things, which doesn't necessarily mean you reduce heads, but you might realign heads and move heads around. I think you're going to see start a bigger growth again in this privately held 5 million, 10 million and below, which is sort of duplicative of what happened in 2008, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Well, time will tell, right?

Eric Torigian: Exactly. We'll let the economists figure that out and we'll just figure out how to help the people through it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So before we jumped on air, I know we started to work through these five steps. Honestly, I kind of see it as a framework of how to think about human resources. Let's run through these five steps because I think there's a lot of gold in here.

Eric Torigian: Yeah. So this is where, like we talked about offline. I said, I think you smile serendipitously as we have a connection here, because to me, it's all about marketing and sales. Right. So HR is a sales function, and it takes a lot of explaining. So I like to start with a quote. It's one of my favorite quotes. I learned it very early in my career. Early in my career, I was actually selling medical billing computers, and I was listening to Zig Ziglar on cassette tapes in my car. But this is one of my favorite quotes of all time. If people like you, they'll listen to you, but when they trust you, they'll do business with you. So HR is about getting trust. And how do you get trust? You get trust through repeatability. You get trust through consistency. You get trust through authentic engagement. This is solution selling. HR needs to be in this business of getting out, understanding what our business partners needs are. Do problem assessments, understand their needs, and then put solutions together that address those needs. We can't be in the business of a solution in search of a problem anymore. So we have a tendency to come up with these grand programs and then try to force the organization to utilize them. So I see that as a huge ground shift, but that's a bigger topic than what we're talking about. So what I like to think about is, okay, as a sales organization, who's my marketing arm? Well, my marketing arm is talented acquisition you as a company, then you know, who is your customer? Why would anyone even want to work for you? And how do you share all of that with the world? So let me just walk through them with a little bit more detail, if that's okay, Tim.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Eric, can you go through those one more time? Because you cut out for a minute.

Eric Torigian: Okay. So who are they as employees?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay.

Eric Torigian: Who are you as a company? Who is your customer? Why would anyone even want to work here? And how do you tell the world?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Got it. Those are five steps.

Eric Torigian: Who are they as employees? What skills do you need? What special certifications? What work modality? What things excite and drive people? What makes people successful in your organization? And then almost as importantly, what has made people not successful? So when you have someone who fails, do that post mortem and understand why did they fail? What drove the failure? And is there something in there that you should know about yourself? Right. Does the jar know what the label says?

Tim Fitzpatrick: You talked about this being sales and marketing. I want to tie this back to marketing because when you look at who are your people, it's no different than talking about on the marketing side, focusing on do you understand who your ideal clients are? And can we paint the picture of what attributes do our ideal team members actually have? Because if we don't outline those, how do we know to look for those in the process of talent acquisition?

Eric Torigian: And when people read my full material and you can go on to my YouTube channel, I have videos on this. I do a lot of training on this. I actually go even one step further. You need to build an avatar, so you need to have a target of who you talk to. So I have my avatar right here. This is who I talk to every day. I stole this from Christian Lego box. I love it. This man stands right here on my monitor and I look at him all day long. So when I'm doing something, don't talk to the bastards. Talk to your target. So if you want to go hire people who are going to be successful in your organization, don't talk to the whole world. Talk to the people who will be successful in your organization and focus your messaging. That's why knowing who they are as employees is critical.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. Love it. So then who you are as a company is the next step.

Eric Torigian: So what are you going to bring them into? What are you even asking people to join? What's the culture? What's it like at work? What's your work modality? What style work? Where do you work? How do you work? When do you work? If you can't answer those questions and if you don't understand those answers to those questions, how are you convincing anyone to join your organization?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I love it.

Eric Torigian: This ties back to the changing relationship. It used to be you went and got hired by Ford or Pepsi, and then you became an FP and a specialist. Now you are an Fpna or accounting specialist who is choosing to do your work at Pepsi or Ford. That's how this relationship has shifted.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So the third step.

Eric Torigian: Third step is one that a lot of people in HR miss.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I would guess that.

Eric Torigian: Customer and I'm talking about penetrate through the veil and know who are you providing service for? So I always like to tell people this is my teaching tool. Pepsi does not sell a Cola flavored beverage because if they sold a Cola flavored beverage, who would they compete with him? They would compete with Cokes, RC Cola, they would compete with water. They would compete with lemonade, with root beer. That's not what they're trying to sell. What does Pepsi sell? Pepsi sells you membership in a new generation. They sell you coolness, come drink Pepsi and be part of this revolution in the world. Be part of be one of the cool kids, be part of the new generation. That's the secret. You've got to convince people how they can come to your organization and do something meaningful for a customer. So if my customer buys my product to build ambulances, to get people to hospitals to save lives, then when I'm recruiting employees, I want people who are motivated to help the community. And I think this is a big step away from where we've ever taught people to think about talent acquisition.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Okay. So I want to make sure I get this right because this is really fascinating because like you said, I honestly have never heard anybody in HR talk about, hey, it's super important for you to know about who you're serving, who the customer is. If I keep that top of mind, as I hire team members, I'm looking for people that care about those people that we're serving. Did I get that right?

Eric Torigian: Yeah, absolutely. You nailed it. Spot on. Okay, so if my agenda is to go out and create the next generation green, renewable energy source and I go hire people who are not really impassioned to make that impact, are they going to really have passion for doing the work to exclude anybody? But I'm saying that you've got to be really thoughtful and put people in opportunities to be successful and find people who fit very well there.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love that. So four step why work here?

Eric Torigian: So what happens to me as a result of working in this organization? I'll tell you, we used to spend a lot of time on this topic talking about pay and benefits and we would produce these really glossy benefit guides and send them out to people. Paying benefits is now table stakes. All that does is get you to the game that is not going to differentiate you any longer. We have to start talking about things like what is your PTO look like? So what is your work life balance look like? How does your life integrate into this job? What's your development look like? So if you choose to come and apply your skills here with me, what's going to be different about you five years from today? How am I going to help you grow? How am I going to engage you, turn you into someone different? Like what is that development path look like, how are you impacting the environment, the community? I never got more questions about this kind of concept. And again, going back to Pepsi, we would hire a lot of people. And the first question would be, tell me about your clean water initiatives.So this was very important to people was the world has to have clean water and what was our initiatives? How are we going to drive clean water? And like you sit in these interviews and these are the conversations you're having, they're miles away from the conversations we used to have.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Interesting. And fifth step.

Eric Torigian: This is the passion one. Right? How do you tell the world? So now that you've got all this, now you've got this unique value proposition, now you have this employment brand, how do you get it out there? How do you share it with the world? How do you get in front of as many candidates as possible? There's a tool that I really like. It's called when it's sort of LinkedIn turned around, where you can build out your employment brand and candidates can go on there and build their candidate brand. And it's about connecting people get on social media, get on LinkedIn, get on Instagram. I'm being coached even to get on TikTok. And first I have to understand it and then I'll get on it. But the world has shifted tremendously. The barriers to access are gone. How you tell your story is much different than it ever used to be. And again, these are all high level. And I go into these in a lot more detail. But this is what I believe is the five step plan to really differentiate and leverage your brand and win in the market.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, man, I love it. It's super easy for people to miss this. But you said this twice in your most recent comments here where you talked about your employment brand, which really goes right back to what you said in the beginning, that HR is a sales function. Talent acquisition is the marketing arm of that. Man, HR, it's sales and marketing. You're building a brand just like you are building a brand on the front side of your company.

Eric Torigian: Absolutely. And then think about this. How would you do your job differently if your business partner had another option? So what if your business partner could come to you for HR support or if they could go to another person for HR support? Where would they go and why?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, quite fascinating.

Eric Torigian: It's hard to think this way. So this is they call it entrepreneurial ship, or you could call it there's so many different terms for it. But people are not taught to think this way. And I think this is where we have to make the shift, going right back to the top as this employer employee relationship has shifted, we all now need to start thinking more in these types of terms. How do I provide solutions. What makes me effective? How am I rewarded?

Tim Fitzpatrick: Eric, you touched on this a bit in the beginning, but I want to make sure we don't miss this. You talked about fractional human resources and why people should care. Let's just touch up. Let's end with this. I want to make sure people don't miss this because there's a lot of people out there. We experience this on the marketing side of things, too, because we get involved in fractional chief marketing officer work. And I think there's a lot of business owners that don't realize you can hire people. You don't have to hire a high level executive full time when you're not ready.

Eric Torigian: Correct. And I would counsel you not to go hire someone. You do not need a giant salary because that would be an administrative burden on the organization. But you do need to protect yourself on these issues. HR mistakes, I think you and I had this conversation at one point. But HR mistakes are what I call too common mistakes because when you start to make mistakes, the costs can be in the millions very quickly. I have counseled small businesses on things like one hired a CTO to work out of Canada on a US based business, but paid him in India and Rupees. You can't do that. I appreciate the creativity. You can't do that. Now, what you want can be solved. And I can come up with a solution. And I did come up with a solution and I implemented for them. But you can't just go do what you want. Sometimes you got to be careful. I know another business I was supporting, they never made their 401K deposits. And you don't think about the ramifications of that stuff. But these are major compliance issues. So what fractional HR is meant to say is if you're a small growing company, if you're a startup, if you are really just starting to build out or you're building out your organization, you've got enough people now, bring us in. We will go through your business. I have an HR blueprint that I use. We answer things it takes about 1520 minutes. We go through it, it comes up with a score for whatever that's worth. And then at the end of it, we come out with a plan and the plan will be an HR implementation plan. You also want to take a succession plan. You need to understand, no matter how big or small you are, what roles do you have, what people do you have and how do those overlap with each other? Do you have all your key people in key roles? Do you have any roles that are critical to the company that have at risk people in them? What are your development plans? What are your retention plans? These are all things that you need to look at, no matter the size of your organization. And this is where fractional HR we can come in and help you. Sometimes it's one day a month, sometimes it's one day a quarter. I've got some where we spend a few days a week in there helping the business, and we can make things work. But don't just take this for granted. Everyone thinks they can do HR. It's not always the case. A lot of times you have the people. Sometimes HR ends up by default and it ends up under finance, or it ends up with an admin, or it ends up in some corner, which is fine, it can stay there, but you need someone to have oversight of it. And that's where the fractional model can really help you and save you a lot of heartache.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So you can get the experience that you need without the overhead or at a fraction of the cost, because you can't. We see this in marketing, too. The owner brings in a marketing coordinator or human resources coordinator or whatever they call it in human resources. And they expect those people that are used to doing the work. Right, doing the tactical work to be strategic. That's not their role.

Eric Torigian: And there's a lot of things around, like payroll and compliance. I hate to waive the compliance flag all the time, but there are things that can trip you up. But then what is your vision and where do you want to go and what your people plan to get there? You can't ask it's just not fair. Same as a marketing plan. You can't ask a marketing coordinator to come up with what's my five year strategy to transform the brand? I mean, it's just not fair.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. They don't have the experience or expertise to do it.

Eric Torigian: But I can engage you to do that, and then you can come back and give me a meaningful tactical action plans to take. Well, this is the same what we're doing with fractional HR. We'll come in there understand. Where do you want the business to go? What's your vision for it? What are your goals for it? If your goal is to sell it in three years and we do things differently than if your goal is to double in size in five years. If your goal is to bring in the next generation and get your three nephews ready to run the business, whatever those are, we'll understand those first. Then we'll understand your organization. And I'll give you very tactical steps that you can take with your existing team to be successful.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Eric, any last minute thoughts you want to leave us with? This has been a fantastic conversation. I love the five step framework. Honestly, if people just write down the framework and reach out to Eric if you need help with it. But there's some gold in there. So what thoughts do you want to leave us with?

Eric Torigian: Well, that was a really good wrap up, Tim. I couldn't do much better. I will say this, my HR blueprinting questionnaire, if you want a copy of it, I'll mail it to you. It's on survey monkey. You answer it. It's about 60 questions. It takes ten to 15 minutes. When you're done with it, I can give you a pretty good idea of what do you need and where do you need to go. And listen, if Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple are not a lesson to everybody right now in the shifting relationship between the employee and the employer, then you're missing this. And we could do a whole another show on unionization and what's happening. But what's driving the Union is not all of a sudden people want this third party there. It's that they're dissatisfied with what they're getting from their employer. And you don't have to be Starbucks to have this happening. And if it's happening at a 20 person company, It's just as harmful as at a 20,000 person company.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So if people want to get an access to that assessment, best place. Connect with you on LinkedIn?

Eric Torigian: Connect on LinkedIn. I'll send you the link. Right now. The tool is on survey monkey. It's a very easy to take tool and when you're done with it, I'll go through do the analysis and we'll have a 30 minutes or so session. So you invest about an hour in it and it's the best step you'll take towards improving your team.

Tim Fitzpatrick: And I can attest to that. I went through it. It did not take me very long to answer the questions. So well worth it. Connect with Eric over on LinkedIn, we'll make sure that his URL for LinkedIn is in the show notes, but it's at LinkedIn.Com/in/eric-torigian. This has been a great conversation, man. I appreciate you taking the time. I was feverishly taking notes here. Honestly, I had a lot of takeaways, but the one that really stuck with me, that's super simple was yes and I love that. So thank you so much. I appreciate you being here. Those of you that are watching listening, I appreciate you as well. If you guys need some help, you're struggling with clarity on what your next step should be for your marketing, you can connect with us over on our website at rialtomarketing.com. It's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing.com. The other place you can connect with us is [email protected] at growthmarketingplan.com. You will find our 90 day marketing plan template. It's the template we use for our business, our clients, all the video instructions, sample plans, the template itself are there so that you can start working on putting your plan together and getting results today. Thanks so much for tuning in. Till next time, take care.

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