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Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I am delighted to have with me someone who is going to help us have I don’t know, an easy conversation about difficult conversations and other things. Her name is Allyns, Allyns, ah, see, I knew I was going to mess this up, Allyns Melendez, the CEO of HR Transformed.

I was thinking about it too much, Allyns, I, I, I need to just stop thinking, right? I mean, that’s, that’s the advice I’m sure you give all your clients, just stop thinking, just do. Yes. Yes. No, I think that’s probably not the advice you would, you would give as an HR expert because it’s, it’s really important to think through what you’re going to do when you’re talking to employees and making sure that you’re crossing your T’s, dotting your I’s and all that.

But before we dive into some of the substance of today’s conversation, why don’t you just share a little bit with our listeners about yourself?

Allyns Melendez: Sure. Thank you, Chip. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I have 26 years of HR experience. And some people say to me, you know, how did you know you wanted to be in HR?

And I’ll tell you that from a super very young age, I mean, like nursery, elementary school level, I always put myself in the other person’s shoes. I’d always be in this super empathetic position of where does everyone stand here? I sympathize with the adults. I sympathize with the children around me. I, I put myself in their shoes and think about how are my words going to land if I need to say something to them, either a positive thing or something that is more constructive.

So HR for me has always been a journey of, of my life. And I built a business around HR and specifically agencies. I think that the agency model is so complex and so dynamic. That there’s less time to work around the people because they’re always looking to collaborate for their clients. And sometimes, you know, we kind of leave people behind.

So HR is just something that I love to do. Anything complex that has to do with people and their behaviors in the workplace is a, is a big love of mine. So that’s why I built a company around HR.

Chip Griffin: Well, and, and as you note, HR is so important in the agency world. Talent is the main thing that agencies have to sell.

A lot of times, agency owners sort of pay lip service to this by saying, oh, yeah, it’s, our team is our differentiator, which is one of my least favorite things to hear because it’s not a differentiator if every agency owner says the same thing. But because the team is so important, it means that the HR function, whether you have a, a full-time HR person, HR consultant, You’re listening to this podcast to get your HR advice, however it is you need to make sure that you are thinking intelligently and acting appropriately in order to get the most from that resource.

Allyns Melendez: And I think that there’s a lot of compliance out there and to grow an agency to do a service or creative ideas and kind of put people to work for your clients in that way. You forget about all the compliance things and having a really strong HR function, whether it be a consultant or an HR services company or an in house HR person, you don’t have time to worry about all the fine details there because again, your clients are going at a million miles per hour, whatever your agency’s set up is. And so having an eye on compliance and having an eye on handling things before they become this bigger, greater thing that takes up so much time.

And then the business owners or the leadership in the company gets resentful of their talent. So they’re sort of talking for both ends. Our people or our talent is our, is our vehicle to provide a great service for you. And yet the time it takes is ignored. And then it just kind of blows up. And then I talk to business owners all the time and they’re telling me the amount of time that I’m taking is all day.

I can’t sell. I can’t get in touch with our clients because I’m handling HR issues all day long. So I’m there to alleviate that. Um, in, in a greater sense, because one, that is my business, but two, I got into business for that purpose. And that’s a huge, huge benefit for the companies that I work with.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

And I’m a huge advocate of, uh, particularly small agencies working with HR consultants. Uh, in fact, I, I always encourage my clients to find an HR consultant that they can trust and work with and build a relationship with to help them with the compliance issues, because frankly, a lot of agency owners don’t know anything about the sort of the procedural side of running businesses, whether that’s tax accounting, HR, etc.

And they need to surround themselves with people who can frankly help to take the headache away, both in the short term of of the compliance and the long term of failing to comply. And so I think having You know, folks who can help you to navigate those waters is important, but it’s not just about the compliance.

I mean, I think that’s that’s the that’s the table stakes, the minimum thing that you need to do. You need to make sure that you are, you know, h