CUSTOMIZED HR SOLUTIONS

Reducing a Workers’ Comp Claim By 75% for a Recycling Company

The journey, shared by Andy, the owner of a 3rd-generation recycling company, includes the exponential growth of their family-run business. Their story started in the 1950s in a 300 sq ft building, and today their operations fill over 800,000 sq ft of manufacturing and warehousing. DES partnered with their company in 2005 to offer strategic HR services, allowing them to focus exclusively on growing their business.

Reducing a Workers Comp Claim Case Study

It was really a fortuitous phone call that introduced me to DES and how they could help.

It was going well until it wasn’t…

Initially, hiring a PEO wasn’t even on my radar. We basically did it all in-house, tasking a couple of people with various aspects of HR. One person was managing our bookkeeping, while also doing some of the employee files. Our controller at the time would handle workers’ comp issues… We spread the tasks around with a non-formalized management approach.
This approach stopped working when we ran into a larger worker’s comp claim. We tried to navigate it ourselves, and also tried to utilize a third-party group that had been brought in to supposedly help manage some of the claims on our behalf. It became apparent that the claim was not being managed appropriately, and it was getting wildly out of control and costly.

It was really a fortuitous phone call that introduced me to DES and how they could help.

Once we decided to partner with DES, they helped us in a couple of ways.
First, they tackled the workers’ comp claim, sitting down with the group that was supposed to be managing the situation. DES asked the right questions, guiding us toward a much more favorable outcome.

Ultimately DES was able to help us reduce the claim by about 75%.

In the second phase of their assistance, they really stepped in and helped us manage the non-revenue-producing policies and tasks. We were able to reclaim precious time that had been absorbed in busywork before, trying to manage policies and procedures that were outside of what we’re familiar with.

We were spending a lot of time muddling through things, and didn’t know what we were doing.

We were trying to learn on the fly, engaging the wrong folks to help work on our behalf… When DES came in and it was their specialty; that was their business. Once we were able to take that off of our plate and have them manage that, we were then able to work on growing our business and doing what we knew we needed to.
DES has helped us with:

  • Setting up 401Ks (with a high participation rate)

  • Employee hiring and termination

  • Onboarding

  • Tax filing and documentation

  • Benefits

  • Payroll

  • Standardized policies

This has definitely been a fruitful partnership, helping us to stay focused on our business’ growth and operations, all while letting DES do what they’re good at.