By Deborah Rutledge
It’s fitting that Sheakley is the title sponsor of the 2016 Brewers Philanthropy Award, an honor given in November to a local brewer by The Cincinnati Community ToolBank.
Like the brewers nominated for this award, Sheakley is a philanthropic force in its community who serves its own clients a tailor-made blend of what it knows best. In this case, HR solutions.
Unlike a mass-produced, watered down brew—or siloed offerings of HR services where clients
feel more like a nameless number—“we’ve handcrafted, by seasoned experts, the right blends of all our risk management and HR solutions for clients,” says Jeff Andrews, vice president of corporate growth for Sheakley.
Those solutions include Sheakley’s legacy business of managing employers’ Workers’ Compensation activities, from providing training to minimize claims to getting injured workers the care they need to recuperate and return to work.
Add to that its HR services like payroll, tax filing, time and labor management, and even HR outsourcing, and you’ve got the kind of full-service help that lets companies like longtime client Funky’s Catering concentrate on what they want to concentrate on: delivering their own services and growing their business.
To that end, Sheakley also offers a PEO (professional employer organization), a rapidly growing business model in which clients’ employees become co-employees of Sheakley, but only in an HR sense.
The model is enticing to smaller and midsize employers because it pools a PEO’s collective population of employees together, and that larger number lets PEOs negotiate better rates for benefits and insurance than the small, single employer could do on its own. It also gives these companies access to a full line of HR services and a complete team of HR experts.
This may help smaller companies attract and keep high quality employees.
PEOs appear to have that positive effect, and more, on companies who use them. Studies find that partnering with a PEO both reduces employee turnover and the chances of going out of business, while it bolsters a company’s growth—likely because of the time it frees up not having to manage HR administrative duties and deal with ever-complex regulations.
But Sheakley further appeals to clients because of its personal touch, Andrews says, citing its practice of providing dedicated account managers to take care of clients.
“Our clients get a name, a person they can call and talk to—not a call center,” he says.
Its clients have some recognizable names, including The University of Cincinnati, The Cincinnati Ballet, Miami University, St. Vincent de Paul, Lighthouse Youth Services and Choremonster.