CRW • Corporate Report • Wisconsin's Business Magazine

Unexpected opportunity, vision and a solid work ethic have resulted in success for The Employer Group’s Angela Heim

Though she’s now responsible for a company projecting more than $76 million in revenues for this year, her journey to the top spot at The Employer Group in Verona started in a most unusual way.

“I did something I never did before – I answered a blind ad in the newspaper,” says Heim, who had been then working in the finance department of a large corporation. “I started out in accounts payable. I was there a couple of years when I decided I was not good in the corporate world. I didn’t understand red tape and scheduling a lot of meetings.”

So to the classifieds she went, answering the ad which ended up being for Lifestyle Staffing and The Employer Group, then two separate companies owned by Bob Oyler, now owner of Capital City Harley-Davidson/Buell.

“I picked it over two other job offers because they would be covering 100 percent of my health insurance and I would be doing payroll, which I really enjoyed,” she says of her decision back in 1998.

She also found that she enjoyed working for Oyler, a well-known entrepreneurial figure in the Madison area with a tendency to be a bit “gruff and grumbly.”

“People either love him or hate him,” she laughs. “But working for Bob was really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me: I loved working for him, we hit it off and he really gave me the opportunity to grow.”

That experience, combined with Heim’s own strong work ethic, has resulted in the unmitigated success of The Employer Group, which Heim purchased from Oyler at the age of 36.

“At the time, I’d just had a baby and I was really having a difficult time working for him,” says Heim. “I told him, ‘You need to find someone to do this,’ which he never did, and I finally called him up and said, ‘We’re going to lunch.’”

Heim laid out the hours she needed to work, what she would get paid and how the situation needed to be structured for her to continue managing the business. In response, Oyler said something she wasn’t expecting.

“He said, ‘Okay, why don’t you just buy it from me?’” she remembers. “When I think about it, Bob really saw potential in me way before I did.”

She’d already proven herself to be a hard worker at the company. As a Professional Employer Organization, The Employer Group utilizes a co-employment relationship with clients as a way to provide human resources services and benefits, such as health, dental and vision coverage.

“Using a PEO is a way that small- to mid-sized businesses can control their costs,” she explains. “We’re able to pool and manage benefits among all of our clients, providing them with access they wouldn’t normally get just as a five-person office, for example. If you look at our 401(k) account, we have more than $6 million in assets from numerous clients.”

In addition, as a PEO, The Employer Group gives clients access to staff and resources that they may not have internally, such as an attorney, benefits administrators, a payroll supervisor, payroll tax specialist, controller and human resources manager.

But The Employer Group is still nimble enough to address the specific needs of its clients. One of Heim’s major accomplishments was the development of a sophisticated software package to assist American Family Insurance’s small offices around the country.

“We have a very good relationship with American Family Insurance,” says Heim. “At the time, American Family changed the way in which it was going to finance its agents, and they realized that they also needed an automated software program to take care of the things that had been done manually.”

The program was put out to bid, and The Employer Group won the project. Heim went to work, collaborating with both the company that provided The Employer Group with software and asking questions of American Family.

“I kept asking questions,” she says of the process. “I wasn’t a programmer; I was a numbers person, a human resources person, but I knew we could do it. But because I work with numbers, I knew we could have a solution that was pretty simple.”

The software was first rolled out in 2004 to 2005, right before Heim purchased the business, with the potential to serve 800 American Family agents. It resulted in an increase in 1,500 co-pay employees, almost overnight, which more than doubled The Employer Group’s client base and increased the business by 48 percent in 2006.

The software has been upgraded twice, and is still in use by The Employer Group.

“We currently do business in 23 states, and the software is in use by about 1,300 agents,” she says. “We help their agent offices – typically employing one to two people – with their staff. We provide them with payroll and other benefits.”

That experience has taught Heim the importance of listening to her clients to satisfy their needs.

“That software is only used for American Family agents, but the process pushed us into a whole new ballpark,” she says. “We now know we can do job coding and create customized reports – two important things for many businesses – and that’s something we tell all our new clients.”
Heim believes that one of the main reasons The Employer Group has thrived is simple.

“The owners of very small companies, in particular, can’t spend three days a week of their time dealing with human resources and tax issues,” she says. “One of the biggest reasons clients come to us outside of American Family is because of the benefits. We have the ability to have a large group health plan. Instead of covering five people, we will cover 300 people. If you have one bad claim in a five-person office, your rates will double.”

Another reason is the human resources services The Employer Group provides. “We have a lot of biotech clients – companies that are into computer technology and are very science-based,” she says. “When you start a new company such as that, the owner wants to be out selling his product and doesn’t necessarily have the time to do human resources work.”

The Employer Group provides an entire suite of services to each of its client companies, rather than providing them a la carte. Heim has learned, however, that this structure doesn’t allow her company to help all businesses.

“We have one large workers’ compensation policy and everybody’s on it,” she says as an example. “But if I put a landscape company on it and someone there didn’t know the equipment and had an accident, it would hurt everyone else in the group policy.”

So she decided to open an Administrative Services Only division, where a client is provided with all of the other services The Employer Group provides but is not part of its group policies.

Heim sees her company continue to grow, even in light of today’s poor economy, in large part because the businesses it serves are strong. Many of them are credit unions, insurance companies and biotech companies.
Diversification is also important to Heim, and is fueling the company’s strategic plans for the future.

“Our American Family clients represent about 65 to 70 percent of our workforce,” she notes. “Part of our diversification plan is to get back to our roots, to stay local and help out the small businesses we know are here, like the biotech industry.”

In the future, The Employer Group is also likely to expand its services to include risk management. “It’s a progressive next step for us,” she says. “In business, it’s important to keep looking ahead, to look for opportunities, and that’s what we’re doing.”

But Heim doesn’t forget to take a regular look back, either.

“The staff does tell me that I’m starting to act more and more like Bob Oyler every day,” she laughs. “But that’s a very good thing. He taught me so much; to ask a lot of questions, to be able to think fast and to offer people opportunity.”

That philosophy is something she maintains internally with her staff and externally with the clients.

“I view our work with clients as a partnership,” she says. “It’s never about revenue for me. Maybe it should be, but it’s not. Perhaps that why we have such a high retention rate – more than 90 percent – with our clients.”

Instead she takes a much broader view.

“To me it’s really simple,” she says. “If our clients are successful, we’re successful.”