NIC Chats Podcast On the Road with Paul Jarvis

Lisa McCracken 

Welcome everyone. We are back on the road with the NIC Chats Podcast. We are in San Diego at NIC Spring Conference 2025. I’m Lisa McCracken with NIC, the Head of Research and Analytics, and I'm super excited. This is number four, our podcast with ProCare HR, and we're super excited. I sort of feel like you guys are an extension of the NIC family.  

Paul Jarvis 

Thank you.  

Lisa McCracken 

Yep, and I always love getting the updates on all of you and then just chatting from a thought leadership standpoint. You guys are the real deal. So I'm excited to dive into the conversation. But first, before we do that, tell us who ProCare HR is. And then, I'm going to let you introduce yourself and give a little background on your role in the organization and whatever you want our listeners to hear.  

Paul Jarvis 

Perfect. Thank you for having me, Lisa. Great to be back. So ProCare is managed HR services for the senior care industry, and we work with senior living, skilled nursing operators across the spectrum to really support their HR and people functions in service of what are their business goals. And that was a mouthful, so I'll kind of unpack that over the course of our conversation.  

And myself personally. I've been with Procare for about a year now. I'm the executive vice president of sales and marketing. Prior to joining Procare in May of last year, I had started and run a company for five years that did data analytics for senior living owners and operators, where we pulled together data out of different disparate systems and built them kind of analytics and dashboards that provided a view of their business. So I've been coming to NIC for quite some time now and, you know, really enjoying conversations like this.  

Lisa McCracken 

Yeah, well, when I said earlier, you guys are the real deal.  

It's been interesting to watch, even just in the short time of the four episodes that we've done with ProCare, just the evolution of the company, bringing on folks like yourself and, I think, the tech integration, and we're going to talk a little bit about some of that today.  

But I want to start off and I think this will tee up some of these deeper conversations and reflect back on the conversation we had and just for background for people, for listeners, you, obviously we connected prior to talking today and you know, get updates and so forth. And you guys said some very interesting things which really, and I've been in the industry for a long time, not as an HR professional or an expert with what you guys do, but general understanding of operations, the industry and so forth and you have a different view, as we sit here today, of the role of the HR department and I do think the HR functions and role have gotten a little bit turned upside down, I would say post COVID and the workforce pressures and so forth just hey, something's got to change and look different. But I think that the conversation that we had previously was around HR as a function to drive business outcomes, as opposed to it being a call center.  

Paul Jarvis 

Correct.  

Lisa McCracken 

And that's a very different way to think about it. So can you give a backdrop about what you mean by that and we'll do a deeper dive into certain areas. But for me, I have spent time thinking about that and I just want to hear your insights, because you guys are leading the charge with that.  

Paul Jarvis 

Sure. So the traditional model of HR was essentially disparate functions that didn't really connect together, but they kind of kept the lights on right. So you picked a payroll system, you set it up. So, however you set it up, however they advise you to set it up, it probably was a company that didn't have a lot of experience in senior care. You bought insurance from a broker who you have a good relationship with, you picked a scheduler.  

There wasn't a cohesive understanding of how do all of these things tie together. And so if you look at payroll, for example, if you think about senior care specifically, all the different ways that people get paid right, so there's shift differentials, there's different job codes. There's also the question of what do I want to do with all that payroll data? And, given we're in such a people-driven industry, payroll data is really one of the kind of Rosetta Stones to understanding what are my expenses, how is my business operating? And so if you didn't design your initial payroll implementation with a view to how do I understand how much it costs to provide care, or what is the true cost of an hour that's being worked, whether it's full-time employees, agency, overtime, there were bonuses, there were different kind of incentive programs in place.  

It's very difficult to support kind of the business goals and when we talk about the business goals whether it's for-profit, non-profit, large operators, small operators because we serve them all they kind of come into a couple different categories Obviously deliver excellent care, attract and retain a high-quality workforce, be able to scale and grow your business as appropriate and obviously financial business as appropriate and, obviously, financial performance as well.  

Lisa McCracken 

And again, those are true across the board for-profit, non-profit by size, big picture, organizational stuff we're talking about, right.  

Paul Jarvis 

Exactly. And so when we think about HR at ProCare, what we do is we reimagine all of those things, all of the different pieces payroll benefits, insurance, scheduling, data in service of what the organization is focused on.  

And everyone's focused on different stuff. So, you know, a large non-for-profit affiliation may be saying we want to grow our mission. We want to be in a position where, if someone wants to work with us and they're in a different state, we can say yes to that without having to worry about what are the HR regulations? How are we going to onboard and pay these employees? Or how are we going to onboard and pay these employees? Or an organization may say you know, we're focused on financial performance. Coming out of the pandemic, we want to be able to deeply understand our labor costs and the true cost of every hour worked, and we can't do that with the way our systems are implemented right now because the data doesn't support answering those questions. So what we do at Procare is we build a system that supports the goal of that organization. 

Lisa McCracken 

Yeah, I think about, like the strategic plan. You know, that organization is set and it's assuring that all functions, leadership roles, departments, whatever it may be are rowing in the same direction and have the ability to row in the same direction. Because, as you talked about all those different aspects of the HR function, I think often they don't talk and  on the tech side, the interoperability is a real pain and we've got old systems and so forth. So I think that cohesive piece and I like to think that our sector is moving forward and groups like you are helping us, but I still think we've got a long way to go with that. So if I'm an organization that is, you know, really trying to move towards a greater degree of excellence and recognizing, you know there's a bunch of stuff going on here with HR and probably more stuff.  

I mean there's more responsibilities under HR now than five years ago hands down, so it's not just elevated in importance, it's elevated in importance of tasks, responsibilities and so forth, but what is the starting point in the building blocks of that different mindset of driving business outcomes? Like, what do the building blocks of that look like for that?  

Paul Jarvis 

Yeah, and you're absolutely right that not only the breadth but the complexity has increased and also employees value different things. Now, yeah, so the first step would be working backwards from what is your organization's goal for the next five years. Um, are you growing? Are you trying to maintain the current footprint but optimize for profitability? Are you trying to attract and retain a different type of workforce?  

Paul Jarvis 

Maybe you're expecting some degree of retirements, turnover, transition. So that's the first point is you know what is the plan? Does everybody understand it? How are we going to measure it? How are we going to move towards it and really having that clarity at the executive level? And we find, when we work with organizations, our best customers and our most successful customers are the ones who come to us with that clarity of vision. And if not, you know we'll help you get there. 

Lisa McCracken 

I was going to ask like how many are there versus you’re doing like a mini strategic plan and facilitating that dialogue. That's a foundational piece, like if you don't even I wouldn’t say they don't have a clue what their goals are but like, articulated in that fashion, you play a consulting role with that.  

Paul Jarvis 

I think we fill in the gap between what are your goals and how do you translate that to the department level? I think most organizations have done a pretty good job, or you know when you talk to them. It may not be on paper, but it comes out of their head very fluently and then you work backwards from again the pieces of what is the strategy, people, process, technology. Do you have the people in place who are capable of executing that strategy? Are you checking on it? Are you measuring it, whether you use OKRs or ROCs or whatever system you want to use to communicate that?  

I had a great conversation with a longtime friend of mine this week who is kind of lamenting that in many places she's seen incentives be set up kind of in a way that doesn't reflect the organization's goals, where you're saying you know this person is entirely motivated on move-ins, this person is entirely motivated on move-ins too, so no one's caring about discounting or NOI, and so you don't have these kinds of checks and balances. So those are the types of questions again we start to look on. I'm like what is the strategy? Are they the right people? Is the system in the right place? And then behind that, do you have the data to be able to actually answer those questions? And I would kind of work through it in that sequence almost.  

And I think as an organization, if you go through that and you think about that on the HR side, you'll pretty quickly arrive at an understanding of are they the right people that I have in place today? Do they understand the mission? How are we measuring it? Do we have a roadmap, and can we actually support and analyze that with the information we receive?  

Lisa McCracken 

We're going to spend a little more time in a few minutes on the people piece, because alignment we've talked about that too with what people have in terms of background, skill sets, expertise and what you need. So we're going to talk a little bit about that, but I'd love for you to give me some tangible examples and connect the dots between the business outcomes and different functions of HR. So, if we think about payroll as an example, what would be an example of how that particular function has the potential to drive a business outcome? Give me some numbers, examples, vignettes from clients. We'd love to have you educate us on that. And then we're going to go through a couple others too.  

Paul Jarvis 

Perfect.  

I was speaking with a group where they said, essentially, several years ago they worked with a large, big-name payroll company to implement their payroll system.  

It wasn't done very well and they weren't trained on it and it wasn't set up in a way that actually reflects how they pay staff.  

And so they live in this kind of strange reality where they always have to go back and do manual corrections to the payroll system to get it to actually match what is being done. And so they're in a position where doing that on an ongoing basis is probably easier than re-implementing your payroll system and, frankly, they don't have the expertise to be able to re-implement a payroll system and it's kind of like does everybody really want to go through that one more time? And so they're in this position where, from a business goal perspective, their business goal is understanding their financial performance. They're not able to do that because the payroll system that was implemented was done by a partner that doesn't understand senior care and set it up in a way so that they can't see the actual reality of what hours are being worked and what is being paid for each of those hours and the reports that they get out, without a lot of manual correction and adjustment.  

Lisa McCracken 

I hear that there's the emerging role in our sector of like, you know, not just a data analyst, but business intelligence folks like that, and I've had conversations with those folks that come in and they're like sometimes they're looking at certain systems, they're like this data is meaningless because you know whether it's a payroll system or whatever, and it's a little bit of the junk in, junk out or it's just not who we are.  

Maybe you're like lumped into a hospital system or forced into something that does not accurately reflect your hands are tied with that. So okay, labor management is another one, and tell me how you define labor management. Number one and then number two examples of how that can drive business outcomes and where you commonly see some opportunities there.  

Paul Jarvis 

Yep. So I would define labor management as getting the right number of hours for the care that you need to provide at the optimal price, and the system of that. And I think every organization has a philosophy, whether it's HPRD or staffing ratios or a way that they want to approach it. Labor management is can we get as close to that in fact as possible? And obviously stuff happens. People are sick, there's unexpected absences, you have to fill a shift one way or another. But the goal of labor management is to get the reality of how you're staffing as close to the theory of how you should be staffing as possible.  

Lisa McCracken 

Yeah, very interesting. That sounds like a big, complicated algorithm. But, it's interesting when you think about different approaches. I often think of different levers to pull around that, and then recruitment and development, which that's sort of like two in one, but examples around the business outcomes related to those two.  

Paul Jarvis 

Yep, and we can actually tie this one back to labor management, because I think it's a good example where many organizations, without an understanding of the data and kind of a deep grasp around what are the hours being worked, what are the hours being needed? When it comes to recruitment, you may say, oh, we're opening a job description because someone retired or someone left the organization, when the way we would encourage you to approach it would be let's look at the labor data, let's figure out what are the hours that are being worked and what are the actual needs. Do you really need another person or could you rearrange the schedule so that you don't need that? When it comes to the hiring, the way we often encourage people to approach it is let's look at the labor information. What does the data tell us around? What are the hardest shifts to fill?  

Paul Jarvis 

As well as you know where are we spending the most on overtime or agency. Let's focus our talent acquisition on that specific shift rather than posting you know every job opening at the company. Let's get that one filled with the right person, get them deployed and then let's go on to the next one. So instead of playing kind of whack-a-mole, you're taking a more strategic approach to. This was the most expensive position. We focused all of our recruiting here because the data showed us that that is the right place to prioritize. And then we go back to the next one and I think all of these things the work never ends right. It's such a dynamic industry. Labor needs change, as well as from the demand side. You know your occupancy changes, and not just occupancy but acuity changes, and so the staffing that you need to provide is always in flux. So there's kind of a, it's almost how close can you get to the asymptote right, like how close can you get again to the theory of perfect labor staffing?  

Lisa McCracken 

I think about it as like sort of dynamic pricing models. It's the dynamics that you've got to constantly be looking at it and what's the information showing you the data and pivoting.  

Paul Jarvis 

Exactly.  

Lisa McCracken 

Because you're right, because this organization today is not the same organization a year from now or a year ago. Yeah, so that's, you've mentioned data a lot. Clearly, that's the underpinning of this and I feel like we could talk about that a lot. You obviously can only change, particularly under this, driving business outcomes. Change what you can measure.  

Paul Jarvis 

Yep.  

Lisa McCracken 

So what insights do you have in terms of guidance for folks when they say what are the key things I should be measuring? So maybe I'm not there yet, you know we aspire for ProCare in six months or whatever, but we need to do some foundational stuff now. So are there certain data points or metrics that you say like these are sort of the key things that we look at and I'm sure there's dozens, but are there any that sort of percolate to the top that you see as key ones to take a look at?  

Paul Jarvis 

Well, I would say one of the first places for organizations to start is does everybody agree on the same definition of the metric? It seems simple, but one of the... 

Lisa McCracken 

And how you calculate it.  

Paul Jarvis 

Exactly. So one of the things that comes up most often in HR is you know we have a great retention rate. So it's like over what time period, what positions are you talking about? Are corporate staff included in that? Is that just front-time roles? Do you say if people make it past 28 days, we have a great retention rate. So there's always, the first step again is clarity and agreement. So I often say let's build a data dictionary. So we're all talking about the same stuff. And then, when it comes to the labor management piece, there's a couple key areas. Obviously, everybody focuses on agency and overtime, but there's a lot of other buckets underneath the surface. If you start looking at kind of clock creep, utilization of employees on a full-time basis, there's lots of places where you could keep going to try and become more efficient.  

Lisa McCracken 

I appreciate the different approaches to tracking and measuring things and turnovers. One of them, I will tell you, you know we get asked often, what's an average turnover? Boy, that sounds like a simple question, but it's not answered many ways and calculated many ways and well, it depends, and so forth.  

So I'm just curious, you know, how do you guys look at that? Do you see that, as you know, you got to go into it with some flexibility, or do you have certain things where, like you know, yeah, that can be measured a couple of different ways depending on what you're looking at, versus we take a hard position on it. I'm just curious. Again, it can be complicated.  

Paul Jarvis 

The first. You know, I always flip the question back to people. It's like well, what do you actually want to know, right? What are you actually concerned about? Is it your frontline employees? Is it a certain department? Because we could cut it lots of different ways.  

So typically we present multiple different views to clients in the regular reporting that we do. So it's turnover after a certain time period, it's retention of brand new hires by position, by community. There's also things that, when you look at it, are not necessarily intuitive from the data. It may be that obviously, being staffed on certain shifts is more difficult for people's lives than others. It may be that you get staffed with a coworker who you really don't like and that's a reason why there's a lot of turnover in certain places. So there's different ways where what we're starting to do.  

For example, one metric that we kind of look at on the labor management side, which is a little bit unrelated but kind of tangential, is reliability. Right, are there people who consistently call out with very little notice, and so it's not quite turnover, but it contributes to the same thing, which is what can I expect from my workforce? How much predictability is there? Because that allows me to plan ahead for the future. And again, like, this is a people-driven business and so there's never going to be perfect predictability, but if you know, within a certain degree, like this schedule has a, you know, reasonable percent chance of surviving from you know when we built it now to two weeks when it's actually going to be worked, you can plan better. And that's the kind of stuff we're helping our clients really plan ahead for the future.  

Lisa McCracken 

I think about when you go to buy, like an airline ticket. They say the percentage of time, like they're on time. There's like this, reliability, it's the same thing. You can start to predict some of that, and I would think there's opportunity too if there's certain individuals you could flag. You know there's always a performance, but then there's the what's going on with that person. I think it lends itself to be a little proactive and say, okay, you know they've got a young child or they have transportation issues, because you know there's real world issues with a lot of the direct caregiving staff too.  

Paul Jarvis 

Yeah, and this is where you know the goal is not to produce a dashboard and say here's just the dashboard you figured out. It's say here's what the data tells us, have a conversation with someone who deeply understands it, and so, to your point, you may have a great employee who's not being reliable because there's something in their personal life.  

Lisa McCracken 

Right.  

Paul Jarvis 

And the answer isn't let go of that employee. It's have a conversation and say would there be a different shift that fits your life better?  

Lisa McCracken 

Right. So I do want to just talk a little bit about that next step. So we've talked about what's the data to track, how you calculate all those metrics, and so forth, but there is that big piece of, okay, what is it telling us? So dashboards can be great and so forth, but how does that fit into, again, the package, the support you guys provide and providing that assistance of all right? Okay, so the system generates a dashboard, but here's what you do with it, Because I do think sometimes that’s where it falls apart. We're probably better at collecting data, whether it's good data or whatever, but I think we fall apart with the interpretation and what we do with it. So how do you guys approach that?  

Paul Jarvis 

So one of the things I love about working at Procare is we have a really great group of people with deep industry experience. The guy who runs the labor management function used to be the COO of a large skilled operator, and so there it's coaching, right, and he has a great metaphor. His name is Matt Uh, he has a great metaphor where he says, you know there's a difference between buying a gym membership and a personal trainer, right, and it's accountability, and so you could go to the gym, you know you can take a couple of sips of water like you can walk around all the machines and say, geez, that looks hard, but like, yeah, I'm tired just from looking at that, or you could have someone yell at you to do more push-ups.  

And like you know, I guarantee you're going to get better at doing push-ups with the accountability piece, and so it's the combination and kind of that we talk about internally, about the power of the bundle, and what that is you know, technology and process, data and coaching, and coaching from people who understand the industry and can say hey, I've been in your shoes, I've operated a similar building, have you thought about doing this or that?  

Lisa McCracken 

Yeah, I would think that brings you guys a lot of clout, I think, in the industry, having people that have been boots on the ground which I've been in your shoes I understand and I think that that's fantastic. So you talked earlier about people and I know we've spent time talking about hiring the right people and spent time talking with Brett, your CEO, about this and he's got it, I felt like I was listening to a PhD dissertation on the hiring process. I was like, wow, he knows this stuff. But talk to me again about the importance of the hiring process,  in all of this and you know, if that involves alignment of back to probably the goals, so what we talked about and the ability of that person to bring to the table what is needed maybe at the time. So how do you guys look at the hiring process and what thoughts would you share on that one?  

Paul Jarvis 

So the both internally and how we approach it with our clients. There's a lot of rigor in the hiring process, and so it begins with what we call a job scorecard, which is different than a job description. A job description would be kind of here are all the duties that need to be formed. A job scorecard would say what does good look like in this performance.  

Lisa McCracken 

It's almost like performance goal, like a melding, maybe, of a job description and like performance goal way.  

Paul Jarvis 

Yeah, interesting, okay, you know if you hired this person to perform these job duties, what would average, good and great look like in each of those areas and what are the attributes that you need to be successful in those areas? So you know, if you were hiring a sales leader, you would talk about, you know, uh, extraversion being outgoing, being willing to deal with rejection as important parts of that job scorecard. So you define the job scorecard. So you define the job scorecard and you kind of work backwards from there, which is, how would we build an interview process that is actually going to uncover the things that we talked about? And so, internally and with executive director and other kind of more senior positions of clients, we use this philosophy called top grading, which is essentially going through a very detailed resume review and asking about all of the different positions that a client, that a candidate, worked at and understanding their motivations for why did you join that company?  

Why did you stay? Why did you leave? What would your manager say about you? And you kind of just keep picking below the surface and you uncover some really interesting things by asking you know, what was your greatest accomplishment? How did you fail in that role? What would your manager reflect on you? Why did you decide to move on? And so by really, really and this can be like a four or five hour interview, so like yeah, it's a commitment, but those are important positions.  

Lisa McCracken 

I mean, you know, sometimes the community can live or die, based on the ED.  

Paul Jarvis 

Exactly so I wouldn't recommend this for every role. You know sometimes it's not appropriate, but for positions where you're handing a lot of responsibility to someone you know you want to make sure that you really get to know them. So again, it kind of goes from what is the goal? How would we assess it? How do we actually evaluate that during the interview process? And what I've seen as well at other companies that I worked at where we did a lot of interviewing, was breaking it out into. Some people are better at evaluating certain things during interviews than others. If you're not very good at something, you're going to have a hard time assessing the ability of someone else to do it well. Or if something is so intuitive for you that you can't really explain why you're good at it, again you may have a hard time evaluating someone else's skill. So, there's a little bit of designing an interview process to actually be fair to the candidate. But to understand, am I going to come away from this with the information I need to make a high-confidence decision?  

Lisa McCracken 

Do you do testing at all? The scorecard sounds brilliant, but do you rely at all on any testing? There's different theories about that. I'm curious to know yours.  

Paul Jarvis 

We use the DISC personality assessment. So we actually ran the whole company through it, starting with our executive team, with candidates that we have to join ProCare. Once they reach, kind of the hiring manager interview, we ask them to go through it as well. And then we've started to do it with clients as well, where we'll work with them and say for certain positions, is there an attribute that makes a certain? Are there a set of attributes or a set of profiles that we think successful EDs generally fall into and so that's kind of early stages. But there's some interesting things there where clients are saying this profile, this one, works really well for us.  

Lisa McCracken 

Well, and I think that's important too, because I think you can be a very good ED here and go over here and it's a very different type of either market type of community, size of community and that may not always translate exactly so should you do that scorecard for all positions?  

Paul Jarvis 

Internally, we do them for what we define as key seats okay, which are kind of positions of significant responsibility and then with clients. Similarly, key seats, executive director, department heads, if the client wants to go through that, which many of saying you know, we want to see if there is something here.  

Lisa McCracken 

Right, right, because I do think about you know, I think so much of the frontline staff and the caregiving and that's a long process. I mean it would be great if you could do that for everybody.  

But also you know there's so much of the speed with those folks. You've got to respond right away, and have the interview and so it's a little bit of a different dynamic on that front. So you've also mentioned in prior conversations you know the role of HR. You know we talked about all these different functions but in quality outcomes and you know, the more I thought about, I'm like, okay, you know some of that makes sense, but I would not necessarily think of that as HR. I would think of that as the clinical folks and so forth. So connect the dots for me around the HR function and quality outcomes.  

Paul Jarvis 

Yep, great question. So there's a couple ways that that ties together. So one is continuity of staffing. So obviously if you have long-tenured employees who are with your organization and if they feel valued, they're compensated correctly. The benefits package works for them. They get to know the residents better and they get to understand the needs of the residents in a deeper way than agency or outside help or people who have only been with the organization for a short amount of time, so to me that's probably the clearest one is having tenured staff who are connected to the mission.  

Again, the question around labor management, like how close can you get to the theoretical goal of labor if you have staffing ratios or HPRD metrics? That's another place where, again, the allocation of people towards care outcomes is very important and making sure that you're connecting those two correctly.  

And staffing not just to how many people do we have in the building, but what are the needs of those people. And so you think about staffing a little bit differently. If you say you know these folks have recently increased their acuity, we should shift a little bit more time here. If we do that, do we need to rebalance? And I think it provides like a much more holistic view of the building when operators are aware of all of those pieces and how they connect to each other yeah, it's very interesting.  

Lisa McCracken 

I mean, you obviously know that that resident-staff relationship is incredibly important, so turnover can be very disruptive. Have you, and I'm just asking this, this is one of these wing-in type of questions, have you been able to look at or correlate okay, you know, better health outcome, you know fewer ER visits, you know, or heading out to the hospital or whatever it might be connected to staffing levels or staffing satisfaction? I mean, have you looked at any of those sort of staffing level metrics and correlated with some of these health outcomes or resident outcomes?  

Paul Jarvis 

Definitely anecdotally.  

Lisa McCracken 

Yeah.  

Paul Jarvis 

The actual kind of clinical data lives outside of our world.  

Lisa McCracken 

So I don't have anything that ties together perfectly, Right? Yeah, I think about that. So you know, I also want to talk about financial outcomes. You know, at the end of the day, you got to get to a point where, when you're operating at that level the vision that all of you have put forth and I think is the right model for an HR entity you often need to make up, potentially, an upfront investment. It's sort of like what you put into it you're going to get out of it, and so forth. So, above and beyond. Well, so let's just talk about what type of capital you put in human capital, financial capital. What does it take to sort of get to this sort of optimal level of functioning for an HR department? What's the investment needed?  

Paul Jarvis 

Yep. So first there's a commitment to hey, you know, I have a current traditional model HR, or again, you know, maybe my HR director retired. The first step is the commitment to I actually want to change this function and I want to line it up with my goals, and that's cultural. There's the strategic planning work of well, what are those goals? There's also the kind of technology and fundamental systems implementation. So that takes time.  

And then there's a little bit of time at the beginning, usually a couple of months, when you're waiting to see the results, right, and so there's a little bit of, Brett uses an analogy of labor is the tree that you never chop down. So you get started and you start looking at it and you say, you know, where's the agency? Ok, maybe you don't have any agency. Where's the overtime? Let's go after that. Where are the open positions that we need to fill? But then you suddenly get three months down the road and you're like, oh man, that looks really different than it used to and we're a lot tighter than we used to be. And I think that's kind of the aha moment where people say, you know, to be honest, like implementing a new payroll system is nobody's idea of a good time right. Like there's a lot of work there and we're honest with people, like it can be painful, we'll surge you know 40-50 people from our team to do all this work for you, but we're going to have a lot of questions and you're going to need to spend some time with us right.  

Um, you may need to get you know re-enroll in benefits. That'll take some time for your employees, but you will get to a point. There'll be kind of this like valley at the beginning where you're like, geez, this is a lot of work and I don't quite see it. And then you get to this point and you're like it's clicking, I don't have to do it anymore, the data is coming to me correctly. I can see the impact in the financials. The employees when they have questions they used to be a little bit worried about, well, I don't have to walk. You know there's no more HR person to walk down the hall to. But now they call us and someone picks up in two seconds and answers the question on the first time and they better.  

Lisa McCracken 

It turns into a flywheel and self-perpetuating thing. So we're wrapping up and I just want to hear final comments in terms of sort of where you guys are going. I always like to see sort of what's your vision for where the company's moving and what can we look at coming out of ProCare over the next year.  

Paul Jarvis 

So, I think the first 10 years of the company were how do we do the HR fundamentals really really well? And now where the company is going to is how do we reimagine HR in service of business outcomes.  

So, it's no longer how can we do this, you know, at a super high level of execution. It's how do we reinvent HR in service of those business goals.  

Lisa McCracken 

Awesome. Thanks again for being here. It's always a pleasure and we appreciate all of you listening. So, check out ProCareHR and you can check out the nic.org website for additional podcasts. Thank you for listening.