The (Other) Best Reason To Run A Business

Ask any entrepreneur, business owner and CEO the primary reason why they’re in business and chances are most of them will give the same natural, logical answer: To make money. Making money, after all, is a necessary part of the equation: We all have to earn a living; we have employees and families to support; we have a company infrastructure to sustain. And we have to make sure the doors stay open tomorrow. All in all, it’s a great reason.

There are some other reasons, though, that are just as good: Doing good and giving back. For a long time now, companies have been focusing on the broader impact of their businesses upon their communities, and the significance of considerations other than just their bottom lines. Businesses are recognizing the power for transformation that accompanies success, and how that power – when properly applied – can not only benefit society, but can enhance their own overall success and prospects for long-term survival. Providing strategically placed support to selected nonprofit organizations and charities can do precisely that.

Trion Solutions is privileged to provide our support for one organization that we consider extraordinarily special, and whose positive impact upon the surrounding community and upon the lives of those it works with seem almost incalculable: Rochester, Michigan’s Dutton Farm.

From the outside, Dutton Farm looks to be a typical traditional American farm. Inside, it is anything but typical. Dutton Farm is working to create opportunities, build skills, and generate acceptance for differently-abled clients by providing them with training and meaningful work, and helping them transition to paying jobs in the community. The Dutton Farm mission is “to celebrate, educate, and employ people with special needs,” which it fulfills by progressing differently-abled individuals through a coordinated five-stage program.

The farm is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, but a business sensibility guides its activities. Individuals with differing mental and physical abilities participate in an ordered series of discrete programs which gradually help them to develop the essential social and practical skills needed to gain and keep meaningful employment, helping them to lead more fulfilled and independent lives.

Dutton Farm’s CEO and Founder Jenny Brown had a highly personal motivation for establishing the organization – her desire to support her older sister with Down syndrome. Through her work with differently-abled people at a variety of area organizations, Brown understood the tremendous need for the services Dutton Farm would provide, and understood the obstacles – logistical, social, and cultural – that stood between differently abled individuals and the jobs, independence, and acceptance they longed for.

Today, Dutton Farm program participants are gainfully employed in area retailers, restaurants, manufacturing facilities and other businesses, as well as on the farm itself. More people are progressing through its programs, preparing to join them. And the Dutton Farm organization is making a substantial impact, not only by changing the lives and fortunes of program participants but by changing attitudes, dismantling prejudices, and opening up new opportunities in the wider world.

Trion Solutions’ support for Dutton Farm may help them, but it likely enriches our company to an equal or greater degree. By applying our resources and efforts on behalf of an organization that is a tremendous force for good, we enhance our own reason for being and increase our own positive impact upon our community and the world. Support for an organization like Dutton Farm enables companies like ours to strengthen our internal culture, and to establish a shared commitment to ensuring that our ultimate impact is a positive, beneficial one.

We are happy to be a “for-profit” organization, but happier still to be “for profit with purpose.” Our good fortune in working with a superb organization like Dutton Farm helps us be just that.

What is a PEO and how does it work?

A PEO stands for a Professional Employer Organization. It exists as a separate, stand-alone organization focused exclusively on managing its clients’ human resource-related functions, including benefits administration, regulatory compliance, workers’ compensation, payroll, taxes, and similar practice areas. It is more than just an extension of your Human Resources department.

A PEO will assume the role of “employer of record” for a company’s employees, taking on the responsibility of administering most or all of the administrative tasks – as well as a fair measure of the risk associated with maintaining a workforce.

In recent years, PEOs have staked out a claim to a growing portion of the HR field, supplementing or eclipsing in-house Human Resources departments in many small to mid-sized companies. Even as the popularity of PEOs have increased, many business owners and C-suite decision makers do not understand how their organizations can benefit from these services. Once they find out more about a Professional Employer Organization, they quickly come to understand that they are fundamentally changing the way American businesses manage interactions between employers and employees.

What is the benefit of using a PEO?

A PEO shifts some essential functions and responsibilities from employees to an experienced, external third party that works with your team. The professional employer organization will assume the role of “employer of record” for a company’s employees, taking on the responsibility of administering most or all of the administrative tasks – as well as a fair measure of the risk – associated with maintaining a workforce.

By engaging with a PEO, client businesses gain a number of significant operational and competitive advantages:

The ability to reallocate both attention and resources from HR functions to core areas of interest and expertise – the making and selling of the company’s product or service.
A measure of insulation and/or indemnification.
The streamlining of human resource functions placed under professional administration.
The ability to leverage economies of scale in securing necessary benefit and insurance programs.
Improved adoption of HR best practices under professional administration.

Is a PEO a staffing agency?

Most PEOs are not staffing agencies, which essentially lease employees to other businesses and remain the sole employer for those workers. PEOs do not generally supply businesses with staff, but instead assume certain responsibilities that make them co-employers with their partner companies.

Is a PEO the same thing as HR outsourcing?

Human resources outsourcing (HRO) is not the same as a PEO, although some PEOs (like Trion Solutions) can meet both needs. A PEO acts as a co-employer, whereas an HRO works with processes that are already established by your organization. PEOs and HROs fulfill different roles as an HR provider.

Working with a PEO can benefit businesses of any size. A PEO is a good choice for organizations looking for a turn-key solution that reduces overall administrative burden in human resources as well as limits your organization’s liability. PEOs offer a more inclusive solution and HROs often provide individual solutions à la carte

What functions does a PEO not do?

While the specific functions of individual PEOs vary from one provider to the next, there are some general functions which you should not expect a PEO to do. Those include:

Influence or define your company culture
Hire and fire your employees
Set workers’ schedules or pay rates
Define your business goals
Participate in marketing your products or business

Is Trion a PEO?

Michigan-based Trion Solutions is among the nation’s Top 10 Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs). Trion relieves the stress and burden of payroll and other HR-related functions for companies – from small to large – so they can remain focused on their core business.Trion’s size provides client employees access to better benefits and HR services available usually to only large corporations – all while taking employer risk and regulatory strain off of partner organizations.

Can my business benefit from a PEO?

The growing popularity of the PEO model is driven to a great degree by the increasing challenges and stressors facing small to medium-sized businesses. An increasingly technology-driven, global marketplace heightens competition and shrinks margins, even as increased regulatory and legal risks impose additional complexity and costs upon HR departments and practitioners. A PEO can deflect risk, contain costs, ensure consistency and predictability in practices, and effectively address complex taxation, insurance, and regulatory issues becomes increasingly valuable to companies operating within this challenging environment.

As your business evolves, chances are that a PEO model can support growth and operational efficiencies for companies in a wide range of industries. The experts working on your behalf as part of the professional employer organization can also deflect risk, contain costs, and ensure consistency and predictability in practices to support the completion of taxes, insurance decisions and other regulatory issues.

See if a PEO would be a value-added service for you by contacting Trion Solutions to speak to one of our experts.

Observe National Ladder Safety Month With These Tips

March is National Ladder Safety Month, an opportunity to review your policies, training, and equipment.

Whether you’re a small service business with a couple of step stools around for lightbulb changes or a large contractor that uses complex climbing equipment, you’ll want to read on for the latest on ladders.

According to OSHA, falls from portable ladders (step-, straight, combination, and extension) are one of the leading causes of occupational fatalities and injuries. Here’s a basic overview of what’s required for all ladders.

Maintain ladders free of oil, grease, and other slip hazards.
Do not load ladders beyond their maximum intended load or rated capacity.
User ladders only for their designed purpose.
Use ladders only on stable and level surfaces unless secured to prevent accidental movement.
Do not use ladders on slippery surfaces unless secured or provided with slip-resistant feet.
Secure ladders placed in areas such as doorways or passageways or where they can be displaced by workplace activities or traffic. Or, use a barricade to keep traffic or activity away from the ladder.
Keep areas clear around the top and bottom of ladders.
Do not move, shift, or extend ladders while they are in use.
Use ladders equipped with nonconductive side rails if the worker or the ladder could contact exposed, energized electrical equipment.
Face the ladder when moving up or down, and maintain three points of contact—for example, two hands and one foot or two feet and one hand—with the steps, rungs, and/or side rails of the ladder at all times.
Use at least one hand to grasp the ladder when climbing.
Do not carry objects or loads that could cause loss of balance and falling.

Additional OSHA requirements:

Wooden ladders must not be coated with any opaque covering, except for identification or warning labels, which must be placed only on one face of a side rail.
A competent person must inspect ladders for visual defects periodically and after any incident that could affect safety.
Do not use single-rail ladders.
Never use the top or top step of a stepladder as a step.
Portable ladders with structural defects must immediately be marked as defective or tagged with “Do Not Use” or similar wording and taken out of service until they are repaired.
Fixed ladders with structural defects must be taken out of service until they are repaired.
The minimum clear distance between side rails for all portable ladders must be 11.5 inches.
Rungs and steps of portable metal ladders must be corrugated, dimpled, coated, or treated to minimize slipping.
If the total length of the climb on a fixed ladder is 24 ft or greater, the ladders must be equipped with ladder safety devices, self-retracting lifelines, and rest platforms, or a cage or well with multiple ladder sections.
Each step or rung of a fixed ladder must be able to support a load of at least 250 pounds.

The Business Value of Flu Prevention

The flu is nobody’s friend, as anyone who has fallen prey to this annual menace will tell you. Fever, aches, nausea and general debilitation are bad enough to deal with – but there is an economic and business cost as well as general misery.

That cost is considerable. According to the Centers for Disease Control, between five and 20 percent of the U.S. population falls prey to the flu each year; tens of thousands are hospitalized, and thousands die from its effects. The direct medical costs come in at over $10 billion; $16.3 billion are consumed in lost earnings. For companies faced with the absence of critical employees and flu-related loss of productivity, the real cost can be incalculable.

In the case of an individual business, the ramifications of employee illness are fairly easy to foresee: An employee who is absent due to illness is not doing their job, and the work either falls on others’ shoulders – thus impeding their own work, and compromising efficiency – or it doesn’t get done at all. In cases where the illness spreads, the result is multiple absences, and an exponential magnification of this effect. The logical conclusion: Investing in workplace flu prevention measures isn’t just a compassionate gesture towards employees; it’s good business.

So what can you do to help keep employees healthy during flu season? Start by establishing common-sense guidelines and practices for tackling the flu head on:

Let sick employees stay home. Sure, it’s inconvenient when a key employee’s absent – but nowhere near as inconvenient or costly as multiple absences would be.
Maintain Sanitary Conditions. Encouraging employee handwashing, cleaning and disinfecting shared spaces such as restrooms and break areas, and discouraging sharing of high-touch items such as phones reduces the likelihood of contagion.
Encourage vaccination. Even unvaccinated employees have a better chance of staying flu-free if their colleagues are vaccinated – their exposure to the virus is reduced.
Supply hand sanitizers and disinfectant wipes. Hand sanitizers in rest rooms and disinfectant wipes near high-touch equipment such as phones and shared workstations provides active support to employees working to keep themselves and their workplaces disease-free.
Ensure air cleanliness. HVAC equipment can be your enemy when it comes to airborne pathogens and pollutants. Making sure that furnace and air conditioner filtration systems are clean and functioning properly can greatly reduce the spread of flu and other illnesses.

Don’t let the flu put a dent in your productivity or profitability this season. Taking a few simple steps like these can go a long way towards keeping your company and employees flu-free.

For more information, download our “Flu-Free Workplace” newsletter here.

Dodging the Hazards of Out-Of-State Expansion

For many successful local businesses, it’s an idea that seems enormously appealing: Build your company by establishing a beachhead in neighboring states. It makes perfect sense on the face of it: If a product or service is a market success in Michigan, for example, it stands to reason that it will fare well in Indiana or Ohio. And there’s seldom a reason why a restaurant chain that’s popular in Florida would fail to gain traction in Georgia.

It makes perfect logical sense – but business is not always logical, particularly not when government regulation is involved. While market conditions may be nearly identical from one state to the next, regulatory and taxation environments usually are not – and those differences can go a long way towards torpedoing the success of an expansion effort, often almost as soon as it begins.

As is often the case when it comes to the hazards facing growing businesses, the biggest problems are caused by the issues you don’t know exist and the hazards you can’t see coming. Unless your company is already a major corporation with an established presence —and on-the-ground expertise—in other states, it is a virtual impossibility that you’ll be fully aware of all of the potentially problematic differences between your new place of business and your home base. That’s a problem.

Taxation and regulation are the first and most obvious pitfalls. Tax and regulatory codes naturally differ from one state to the next; each state has its own centuries-long index of whys and wherefores that have come to constitute its current-day regulatory and taxation environment. In virtually all cases, these are the cumulative end product of decades of capricious governance: Local and state officials, acting in self-interest or in the interest of special interests, enact a welter of tax and regulatory burdens that remain on the books for years and which usually multiply their reach and impact exponentially over time, creating an impenetrable tangle for businesses to wade through. Income tax, sales tax, property tax, workers’ comp, health and safety, environmental issues – the list of distinct areas potentially affecting a would-be new business are endless.

These are sizeable problems in and of themselves – but they are not the only consideration. Laws and regulations don’t exist in a vacuum; rather, they function within the unique local political, legal and social framework. In practical terms, Ohio doesn’t function identically to Michigan, nor Atlanta to Orlando. Each state, county and municipality is subject to its own localized customs, power structures, and idiosyncrasies. Even when a company operates fully within the letter of the law, capricious local officials and arcane provincial practices can draw new businesses into the regulatory quicksand.

Knowing both what and who you need to know to sidestep these pitfalls is essential – and that’s where Trion has proven its worth to many of our growing clients. As an established national PEO with a solid on-the-ground presence and a wealth of localized institutional expertise, we’re able to navigate the payroll tax and regulatory minefields wherever there’s business to be done – and we shield our clients from costly, time-consuming entanglements with local compliance authorities. Clients usually come to us to handle the routine daily hassles that they know and expect, but we often deliver much of our value in dealing with the ones they don’t expect. As many of them will tell you, that can make a big difference – often between success and failure where out-of-state expansions are concerned.

New Overtime Rules Spell Big Challenges For Business

Statistics show that the median salary increase in the US is a rather moderate 3.1% thus far in 2016, but that doesn’t mean that the cost of labor isn’t about to go up for many businesses—way up.

New regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Labor stand to make potentially millions of previously-exempt workers eligible for overtime pay. Personnel previously classed as exempt executive, administrative, and professional (EAP) employees now may qualify for overtime if the terms of their employment don’t meet increasingly stringent requirements.

Perhaps most notably, the salary level at which EAP employees may become exempt from overtime has effectively doubled, jumping from $455 to $913 per week (or from $23,660 to $47,476 annually). In practice, that means that, for example, a midlevel restaurant manager earning a salary in the mid-thirties and working a few hours above the statutory 40 per week just might be about to become quite a bit more costly.

The Department of Labor (DOL) has issued its Final Rule for new overtime exemptions, focusing on the “white collar” exemptions (executive, administrative, professional, and certain computer employees. These new rules will:

Raise the minimum annual salary level required for “white collar” exemptions to $47,476 ($913 per week) from the current $23,660 ($455 per week). The salary level test does not apply to doctors, lawyers or teachers, and certain computer employees can be exempt if paid at least $27.63 per hour and meet applicable duties tests.
Allow employers to use non discretionary bonuses and incentive payments (including commissions) to satisfy up to 10% of the standards salary level (up to $91 per week, or $4,732 total annually), provided that these payments are made on a quarterly or more frequent basis. The remaining 90% of the required new salary level is $822 per week, or $42,744 annually. Together, these total $47, 476.
Raise the minimum salary for those covered under the “highly compensated employee” exemption from $100,000 to $134,000 in total compensation annually.
Impose an escalator provision automatically “updating” the above salary levels every three years beginning on January 1, 2020 by tying the levels to certain economic measures.
Impose no changes to the “duties tests.”

Misclassification of salaried-exempt employees is among the fastest growing civil actions in both federal and state courts. With the final rule, the incentive for employees (and/or the DOL) to claim misclassification has increased. We advise clients to begin assessing whether they wish to pay the higher salaries and/or take other measures. We also advise them to review the duties of their employees that are or may be classified as salaried-exempt to ensure that they meet the various duties tests for the white collar exemptions.

The rules’ applicability is extensive: The DOL estimates that 4.2 million currently exempt workers will become eligible for overtime. In addition, overtime protections will be extended for an additional 5.7 million white collar and 3.2 million blue collar workers.

The new regulations’ effect will be profound on many small- to medium-sized businesses, particularly in areas where prevailing compensation levels fall at or below national averages. Employers will have to wrestle with whether to cut hours, reassign work, increase wages, or simply pay overtime to eligible employees.

Despite the stated intention to simplify both the overtime eligibility rules, the newly-issued rules remain highly complex. The new DOL regulations take effect on December 1, 2016. In the meantime, Trion will assist its clients in adapting to a greatly changed overtime landscape – and implementing strategies to help ensure compliance within it.

The Challenge of Seasonal Employees

As the seasons change, many people start to think about vacations and maybe taking things a little easier. For anyone involved in hiring and managing seasonal employees, though, that’s the time that things heat up in more ways than one.

Agricultural concerns, hotels, restaurants, resorts, theme parks, golf courses and a host of other industries depend on a high volume of seasonal labor, most of which must be recruited, on-boarded, trained and deployed anew each year, only to be offloaded a few months later. For managers, recruiters, and in-house HR personnel, it is usually a tiresome, time-consuming and costly annual ritual that becomes a little bit more difficult each year: Changes in local, state, and federal regulations and tax law, in particular, must be reviewed and accommodated. In many cases, the costs of recruitment continually rise, even as the available pool of credible, qualified recruits diminishes. That puts dents in productivity, profitability, and efficiency.

Each new, unproven seasonal employee also poses some significant risks: at the time of hire, ethics and performance are unknowns. To mitigate these effects, companies can be tempted to limit – or eliminate – seasonal staff, or to keep on employees on the payroll after their utility has passed. While a measure of risk may be averted, it’s a virtual certainty that business performance is compromised.

For PEOs, the challenge of seasonal employees is an opportunity to shine. It makes perfect sense: The HR tasks that most companies struggle with are a matter of daily routine to a well-run, high-functioning PEO, and there is little difficulty in administering them for seasonal personnel. As in other industries, HR processes can be managed much more expeditiously and economically by a good PEO.

More and more companies are becoming aware of the PEO’s utility in minimizing the pain of seasonal employment. In particular, the hospitality and resort industries are proving to be especially fertile ground for PEO growth. At Trion, we’ve witnessed the evolution of businesses’ thinking on this issue firsthand: Companies are increasingly realizing that the effort, costs, and risks associated with seasonal hiring can be mitigated with a scalable, pay as you go solution by choosing the right PEO partner to handle it for them.

Not all PEOs have chosen to focus on serving seasonal enterprises – and some haven’t figured out how to do so effectively. For our part, we’ve made seasonal employers a key segment within the industries we serve, and have developed specialized processes suited to their unique needs, and we work collaboratively with clients to develop customized programs aligned with their specific business’s objectives. It’s a formula that has added up to success for many of the companies we work with. We’d be happy to explore your specific seasonal employment needs with you.

It’s Not Just Tax Season – It’s Deadline Season

Tax season isn’t really anybody’s favorite time of year – not even the legions of accountants and preparers who earn their living by working inhuman hours for a month or more in the run up to April 18.

If anyone has a reason to complain about the Ides of April, though, it is small business owners. April 18 is the deadline for filing personal income taxes, which of course is a hassle enough on its own – but it also falls on, before, and after a succession of other tax and reporting deadlines. Taken together, they are enough to cause plenty of headaches, consume a lot of time and energy, and increase the likelihood of mistakes on the part of business owners.

Small businesses’ employees probably aren’t aware of it, but March 15 is actually the tax filing deadline for corporations and S corporations, a full month before personal taxes are due (sole proprietorships and single-member LLCs still file on April 18). The March 15 deadline falls just before two headaches facing almost every small business owner four times per year: Quarterly SUTA filings and payment and FUTA payments.

SUTA (State Unemployment Tax Act) and FUTA (Federal Unemployment Tax Act) reporting requirements and payments are no joke. By the end of April, businesses need to submit in-depth documentation along with an amount equivalent to a substantial percentage of every employee’s earnings to date. Federal rates come out to 0.60% to over 2% on each employee’s first $7,000 in earnings. SUTA rates are variable, based on employer experience from under 1% to over 12% depending on your location.

For most businesses, unemployment taxes are a lot to pay out in a single quarterly payment. As part of our services to our clients, Trion enables a more balance sheet-friendly “pay as you go” process, allowing payments to be evenly prorated throughout the year. Along with handling the onerous reporting requirements, this takes a significant strain off of companies who’ve got still more deadlines to worry about.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was enough to worry about – but these are tax issues we are talking about, so of course there’s much more. Somewhat helpfully, the IRS has published a tax calendar for employers. While not especially easy to understand or user-friendly, it does provide a reliable resource for many of the deadlines most smaller companies are likely to face throughout the course of a year.

Trion’s clients frequently find the range of deadlines, obligations, and due dates to be challenging under the best of circumstances – and in a changing regulatory environment, that effect is intensified. Successfully managing to meet IRS and state requirements demands constant vigilance, lots of planning – and a good deal of knowledge and experience doesn’t hurt, either. We do our best to put our knowledge to work for our clients in any way we can; we can’t take on all their tax issues, but handling SUTA, FUTA, local municipal income taxes, and other complex payroll task tasks, we can make the deadline relay race a lot easier.

OUTSOURCING’S EXPENSIVE ALTERNATIVES: Why The PEO Model Is Gaining Ground

Throughout the last half of the 20^th century and the first part of this one, we had the opportunity to learn the same lesson over and over: For business, “business as usual” wasn’t working – at least not as well as it needed to or should. Traditional models of ownership, management, investment, employment, marketing and distribution all underwent repeated phases of major disruption as technology, demographics, wealth distribution and market demand experienced major change. With each upheaval, the choice was stark: Adapt or perish.

Sure, you could try to stick with the way you’d always done things – but chances were that there would be a new, aggressive upstart ready and waiting to eat your lunch. The rise of the Japanese auto industry, Chinese consumer goods, and Silicon Valley tech startups were all made possible by seismic changes in old-guard industries. Smarter companies adapted, evolved, and survived; those who didn’t disappeared. RIP, Packard. RIP, Howard Johnson’s. RIP Union Carbide.

One upheaval that hasn’t been broadly addressed: The slow, steady decline of the old employment model. American business still maintains hundreds of thousands of atomized individual HR departments, doing what HR departments have always done: reviewing resumes, managing paperwork, negotiating contracts, and administering benefits. While practices have remained largely the same, though, costs have not: Estimates have shown that the average company now spends $5,000 per year per employee on HR administration expense alone. In an era of narrow margins and savage competition, such nonproductive capital expenses seem not only unjustifiable, but unsustainable.

Many companies have tried to blunt the impact of this inefficiency and expense by turning to temp agencies. Companies that once were called on to provide only short-term or ad hoc personnel now are called on to handle a significant portion, if not all, of many businesses’ staffing needs. While this can be a valuable short-term solution, it probably isn’t the best way to address all long-term needs..

Over time, cost and consistency can emerge as issues. Temp agencies depend upon the availability of a steady supply of skilled personnel willing to work in a temporary capacity. In an economic downturn, that doesn’t pose a tremendous challenge as the labor supply rises; in a tightening labor market, though, it becomes a bigger problem as temp workers find long term or permanent employment, or create their own businesses or individual consultancies. The continuing need for new recruits, and to handle the associated paperwork, adds to infrastructure costs which are passed on to clients.

Traditional employment models are becoming less suited to many of today’s efficiency-driven, stability-seeking businesses. That’s why Professional Employer Organizations (or PEO) like Trion Solutions have prospered. The ability to provide a high-quality, stable, and affordable labor pool while containing costs has become a pivotal competitive advantage—and one that more and more forward looking businesses are finding impossible to ignore. There will always be temp agencies, of course, and there will always be companies that insist upon maintaining their own extensive HR infrastructure—but as labor and administration costs rise and as a technology-empowered workforce becomes ever more mobile, these will become more challenging to sustain.

Doing Workers’ Comp Insurance Right

Recently, Trion Solutions renewed our agreements with 2 major insurance companies to continue obtaining Workers’ Compensation insurance through their firms. In both cases, it marks the third successive annual renewal.

That may not sound like a big deal – but it is. Here’s why.

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you already know about the risk and expense that Workers’ Compensation insurance and claims can pose to your company. Unless you have incredibly deep pockets, claims mean trouble – usually in the form of skyrocketing premiums, and sometimes the inability to obtain affordable coverage, or even any coverage at all.

Considering that the cost of almost all types of insurance is steadily and dramatically rising, it is especially striking that Workers’ Comp insurance remains a dominant concern among business owners and management. Health care, liability, property and other insurance rates have gone through the roof for many businesses, but none of these pose the direct existential threat that workers’ comp often entails. When it comes to worker’s comp, companies need predictability, stability, and a reasonable cost structure—not to mention an appropriate level of coverage. More and more often, they’re finding that these aren’t easy to come by, even when they’re working with a PEO.

Unfortunately, most PEOs haven’t been successful in truly stabilizing the insurance environment for their clients. As with other companies, the volatility of the workers’ comp landscape finds many PEOs scrambling every year to secure affordable, reliable coverage. Even when they find it, switching between providers causes confusion and disruption, contributing nothing positive to their clients’ comfort levels.

Trion Solutions is proud to be an exception to this rule. Thanks in large measure to the best practices processes we’ve put into place, our strong track record in effective Workers’ Compensation management, and the leverage afforded to us by our size, we have been able to forge enduring, sustainable relationships with our insurance providers. These days, it’s pretty much unheard of for a company of our type to maintain positive successive multi-year relationships with insurers, but once again we’ve managed to pull it off.

So far as our clients are concerned, that means a lot. It means that they will continue to enjoy the same high level of protection, the same manageable costs, and the same processes that they’ve gotten used to. It means that for another year, Workers’ Compensation insurance is something they don’t have to think about or worry about, and they can focus on other, more productive aspects of their businesses. And they can be confident in knowing that any concerns are being capably, effectively, professionally handled by people who know what they’re doing and who can be counted on to act in their interest.

We’re glad to be working once again with some of the most reputable, solid companies in the Workers’ Comp insurance industry, and we are pleased to be able to say that at Trion, we’ve built the strong, enduring relationships it takes to do it right. We’re betting that our clients are pretty happy about that too.