Deanna Shimota (00:00:05) - Welcome to The HR Tech Spotlight podcast. I'm Deanna Shimota, CEO of GrowthMode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded, and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new, innovative solutions available in the market. And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot. Stay tuned for details at the end of the show. Good day. Welcome back to The HR Tech Spotlight podcast. In this episode, we're shining a spotlight on Topia, a global talent mobility platform that enables organizations to deliver mobility as part of a broader talent strategy encompassing all types of employee movement, including remote and distributed workforces, business travel, and more traditional relocations and assignments. The Topia platform automates the entire global talent mobility process, including scenario-based planning, expat payroll tax and immigration compliance reporting, and more.
Deanna Shimota (00:01:21) - Here to talk about Topia, is CEO of the company Bill Mastin. Hello, Bill.
Bill Mastin (00:01:27) - Hello. Good day. Great to meet you. And thanks for having me on your show.
Deanna Shimota (00:01:31) - Yeah, I'm happy to have you on the show. And with the first question, I'm going to jump right in and ask you to tell us about your HR tech background.
Bill Mastin (00:01:39) - Yeah, yeah, Myself, I have worked in air and learning technology companies pretty much my entire career, 25 years. And it's it's spanned learning system companies, cyber software learning and performance learning technologies group. And there was a lot of HR technology technologies that we supported and took to market people fluent net dimensions and then Topia where I sit today, which is a really on one particular part in HR that I'm super excited to share with you today about what we do and how our customers are, you know, using our technology to solve all the problems that they're solving day to day.
Deanna Shimota (00:02:17) - So great. And so I gave obviously a little intro about Topia, but let's give you the opportunity to give us the 32nd elevator pitch.
Bill Mastin (00:02:27) - Yeah.
Bill Mastin (00:02:28) - So the the real quick value proposition that Topia brings to the market is a way to automate and streamline your workflows around global talent management. So assignment management, putting your people in the in in different locations domestically or globally. Business travel compliance helping finance actually report where your people are to do things like state-to-state withholding, international withholding immigration requirements. So pre-trip assessment of can this person go on a trip or not. And we do that all in an automated package without. So we're really disrupting the the services part of the support model for those kinds of functions within H.R. And then and then the third kind of area of our focus is really remote work and hybrid work, which has really exploded since the pandemic, and a lot of companies are having to adapt their whole talent strategies to the new world of work and where the talent sits and wants to work. And so, yeah, just we really cover that in pure technology, helping organizations take the reins themselves and manage and automate and streamline and cut costs with respect to that area of their business.
Deanna Shimota (00:03:41) - And obviously this was a need before Covid. But like you said, when companies suddenly went remote, solutions like Topia probably became even more critical to organizations. What would you tell us is the story behind Topia and how and why it was founded?
Bill Mastin (00:03:59) - Yeah. So Topia actually has had a history. We, you know, five companies came together to make Topia, the first being, move guides, which was a kind of tech enabled, relocation management company. So actually, physically moving boxes for people around the planet. And you're right. Look, global mobility goes back. Ever since the trend of globalization started, that's been a factor of we have some customers that have been using our technologies for 17 years, 18 years to manage their entire assignment population, but that move guides business. Teleport Dawg, which was a bunch of basically an entire data set about cost of living data and trends, like where you could live within a city to get to an office that was remote, a Polaris, which was a technology that was core to global talent, mobility, mobility, business travel compliance, and then Promesa, which are an immigration engine.
Bill Mastin (00:04:57) - So all those companies together, really the inception of the company was around helping streamline and automate for organizations to be able to have a distributed workforce way before distributed workforces were even a thing. Right, that they but there was always a need of we need to get somebody to London to be able to open an office, or we're taking people somewhere overseas to, to start a new manufacturing office. Myself. My own kind of back story with this is I had two global assignments in my life. One, both of them were to Australia. I worked overseas in Australia twice. The first one, we had a great business outcome, met my my wife, started a family, had an amazing adventure and came back home and a promotion and great outcome for the business. The second was a much more complicated situation that had to do with being moved someplace and then having being paid in local currency and having the recession hit, and all of a sudden the currency turns upside down to USD. And anyway, I learned a lot about pay tax.
Bill Mastin (00:06:08) - Being an expat on assignment. All of those things really are what we help as a company, as a technology, help our customers navigate all that kind of complexity when it relates to immigration and tax and even cost estimates of like, how do how much is it going to cost to put someone on assignment or on ground there? That's a complicated problem that has that we've been able to automate through our technologies, really helping those companies manage either an assignment population or some of the use cases around even domestic business travel. That's really where we focused our energies in the last 3 or 4 years.
Deanna Shimota (00:06:49) - That's really interesting. And I think you bring up a lot of like points that I think people don't necessarily think about. If you go to a different country and you're being paid in U.S. dollars or the cost of living is different, the exchange rate can fluctuate significantly at times. There's all these factors that it's not just a fun adventure to move somewhere else. You're going to learn a lot along the way, and it's important for companies to be able to understand that and help manage those expectations as well.
Bill Mastin (00:07:20) - We do. Every year we run a research study called the Adapt survey. And one of the data points you just mentioned, talking about the fun and interesting opportunity to go on an assignment and take a career path. 66% of our respondents, this last time we ran it last year, said that having a like an assignment, like an overseas assignment, was advantageous to their career. Like they look for that in their career. So it's really fascinating that, like, you're often highest performers are the ones that are asked to do those kinds of assignments. And if you don't manage it correctly, they leave the business and it ends and you've invested in them, You've put them in a location, you've paid a lot of money to move them, and then they leave the business because the actual execution of that didn't work well. And so that's one of the benefits of having a technology that increases employee experience on that whole transaction, that path, but also helps a company manage it much more elegantly.
Deanna Shimota (00:08:29) - Yeah, that makes sense.
Deanna Shimota (00:08:30) - And a lot of times for these individuals, you're not just moving the person, right. They might have a family they're taking with. There's just so much to think about. What would you say. And you've alluded to this a little bit already, but are some of the big challenges or problems that companies face when they have remote employees? They have employees moving across the country, across the world, managing this distributed workforce. That creates a lot more complexities.
Bill Mastin (00:09:04) - Yeah. So I think there's a couple ways to think of it. One is, you know, what is the risk to the kind of the employee themselves and their duty of care that a company has for their employee. And your point about this is so much broader than just the individual. It's one of the few areas in HR that touches more than the actual employee, like when you're talking about putting someone on assignment, for instance, you're talking about their animals and their children and the new schools and how does all that work. So there's a duty of care aspect to it that an organization has an obligation to.
Bill Mastin (00:09:40) - There's also the company itself. How do you protect the company? Because if you move someone and don't consider the immigration, which is changing tax and immigration change, every year we maintain and update a global tax engine and our system that allows you to manage through that complexity and automated fashion and model things out so that as an organization, how much it's going to cost you. For instance, I'll give you a very kind of domestic answer. Somebody working in New York has a very different tax liability personally. And for the company then you do if you work in Florida, for instance. Right. So you've got these very tangible, real world tax profiles of different locations and jurisdictions that if you don't go in with the eyes at wide open, you can be hit with fines and all kinds of things. We've talked to a company’s mining company in Africa, for instance, that left a team in place one week longer than they should have been there because they didn't have a dashboard. They didn't have the data enough to know what the limits were of their stay, and they had $1 million fine.
Bill Mastin (00:10:54) - That they had to pay. So. So some of these fines can be excessive and they can have. And of course, companies don't like to talk about that broadly. They usually just come to us and say, hell, we don't want to ever have this happen again.
Deanna Shimota (00:11:08) - Yeah, that that's not a significant error, right? Like that one had to have hurt. So as companies are looking at their options out in the market and exploring different vendors, how would you say Topia is different and what's your unique point of view in the market compared to some of those other options that might be out there?
Bill Mastin (00:11:28) - I think we what we've built and are innovating on is a comprehensive technology suite, right, that manages the assignment management population to business travel location based, either passive or active, of your entire workforce so that you can actually see that and take action on it. One of the other things we just took to market over the last year and a half is our remote work product, which is really we just want an award for that.
Bill Mastin (00:11:55) - super excited about that product as well. But what I would say is our unique differentiator is, is really a focus on the technology and the solution itself. We are an innovative platform that is the only kind of technology, only solution in the market that doesn't bundle services in and things like that. And, and I think that's something that over time, as you look at how the trends occur with different parts of HR over the years from like applicant tracking systems to learning systems like that, evolution like eventually technology wins because there's costs, there's automation, there's time saving, there's all these factors that drive to technology solutions. And I think we're really squarely that is our focus. Topia is to be the global talent, mobility and distributed workforce platform the best in the world. So that's our mission.
Deanna Shimota (00:12:54) - So you mentioned the remote work piece of it. Tell us a little more about that.
Bill Mastin (00:13:00) - Yeah. So definitely during Covid, we started to see organizations coming to us and saying all of a sudden we've got employees that are popping up working like we're finding out kind of Sherlock Holmes.
Bill Mastin (00:13:13) - Like we find out that all of a sudden this person's working in Paris and it's wait a second, like, we're not authorized to have employees in Paris, like, how is this happening? How is this possible? So we really started to think about, like, how could we help organizations do this? I mean, we already had the core platform in place which allowed for policies. If you can create a remote work policy based on your HR profile, your legal, for instance, your visas or your passports where you're allowed to work. The business structure that organizations have in those countries so that through one kind of simple map kind of interface, an employee can go in and find where they're allowed to work. For instance, they may not be allowed to work in North Korea, but they could work in London, right, for two weeks of a year. Whatever your policy is, you can easily kind of display that and show that to your employees and manage it in a compliant way, right? It's already happening.
Bill Mastin (00:14:13) - Most of these HR groups are managing remote work request, but they're doing it on Google Sheets or Excel. Requests are coming in and they're having to just oh God. Bill wants to work from London for two weeks because he's got a sick parent. They're like, let's just manage that. So it's a bunch of and there's not really an automated system of record and tracking system for that before what we've developed. That's one aspect of it. The other thing that happened in Covid was the and I'll give you a great example for this, companies that operate in New York but aren't incorporated in New York get hit with what they call unincorporated business tax. So we were helping many organizations in kind of that area where they sent 90% of their workforce to other states, right. How do you have and maintain an auditable system of record of where people are actually doing the work so that you can pay the right tax in the right jurisdiction? And in some cases, we help those organizations save significant tax. That was just not it wouldn't have been correct for them to pay tax when these people were working all of a sudden from Florida to wherever.
Bill Mastin (00:15:29) - So the top off, some of these things that either put further risk on an organization or further opportunity for an organization for cost savings or accessing talent in different locations as well, in a whole different way. It really changed the game and kind of the genie's out of the bottle and you can't get it back in, and that's exciting in a lot of ways. But it's also companies are still in transformation. That's the other thing that I would say. These companies are not complete with the transition. Most of them don't have fully baked remote work policies built. So they come to us and they're saying, what's the best practices? Like how are, you know, how are people using what's right? Because should we allow people to work out of state or out of country? So we're helping them navigate policy decisions along with like technology implementations.
Deanna Shimota (00:16:25) - That makes sense. I think back to when Covid happened in all these individuals were working remotely for maybe the first time in their career, and a lot of people thought that meant that they literally could work anywhere, right? As long as they were getting their work done.
Deanna Shimota (00:16:40) - And to a degree, yes. But they didn't realize sometimes that there were implications to the choices they were making. For example, I know someone who was a financial advisor up here in Minnesota where I am. He has a vacation home down in Florida. He decided he was going to go to Florida for a couple of months. Needless to say, his employer called him and they're like, you legally can't do the work in Florida because your license is up here. And he went to thought twice about it. Had they not called that? And I think there were probably a lot of instances of that where people are like, I can go to Mexico, I can go to Paris, I can go to Florida as long as I'm doing my work. And sure. But there are implications for employers.
Bill Mastin (00:17:22) - Our data from our Adapt survey says that 91% of employees, like count work flexibility as a key thing of their. You know, they believe basically they should be able to do their work anywhere as long as they get their work done.
Bill Mastin (00:17:37) - And that is logical. You think of that way, right? But then and then you take it down another level that 45% are actually looking, you know, when return to work mandates happened, those that group of employees actually started looking for other jobs that allowed work from home or hybrid work arrangements that were more flexible. So that's the other thing companies are going to be struggling with in the future and can have and continue is hiring. Somebody isn't in their market, in their location. They may not find the talent pool they need. Broadening it is helpful. But then how do you navigate that? You hire and move? Is that party even want to move? Can you offer that in a remote kind of hybrid work where it's three days in, two days out and there's no cut and paste? I don't think either. I think every company has got to find their own. Like this is what works for us.
Deanna Shimota (00:18:36) - Yeah for sure. So what type of companies would you say are a perfect fit for Topia?
Bill Mastin (00:18:43) - So we have worked quite a bit in financial services.
Bill Mastin (00:18:47) - We have a lot of from banks to smaller fund companies that have worked in and used our business travel compliance solution any. It's really not verticalized, right? Like any company that's got organization that's traveling and distributed horizontally like that, it's a fit for we have a strong kind of footprint in the tech sector, but entertainment is an organization that uses our assignment management product to put production teams overseas when they're filming movies and things like that. So everything from that, like how do you manage that process and bulk elegant way. So it's definitely not verticalized, but we have made inroads in into specific verticals where we've been we've gotten a lot of traction and success.
Deanna Shimota (00:19:35) - And is there a particular size of company that you work with or is it across the board?
Bill Mastin (00:19:41) - Yeah, I think that the best way to answer that is for our global, for our assignment management, global talent mobility product. It's organizations that have programs that are above 100 assignees. The reason why is because what we found is that organizations that have less than 100 assignees, they're just they're still in that mode of operating almost on a more transactional, basis of, okay, we need Bill to be in Florida for six months or something or on in that office.
Bill Mastin (00:20:17) - So let's do a short-term assignment or there's a one way transfer. So we're going to do that. We have gone down to as low as programs of size of 50. But a lot of the times those organizations aren't ready for technology until they get definitely above 50. So there's some organizations, you might say that 10% of their population is on assignment, or maybe it's 5%. Employee count wise isn't as important to us as what the profile of the business is and how many people they're trying to put on assignment. That typically is the tipping point. And then on the other side, business travel compliance. We've got some organizations we work with, super large enterprise that go all the way up to 20,000, 30,000 employees with, you know, certain assignment populations all the way down to some organizations have an asset management company that's travels considerably and needs to be able to track for tax compliance reasons. Five people. Right. So it is a huge range of like size of employees, depending on the use case that they're looking for help from Topia.
Deanna Shimota (00:21:26) - Okay. So what impact have you seen organizations that have worked with Topia experience.
Bill Mastin (00:21:33) - Sizable from the use case? I was talking about the kind of local tax jurisdiction use case. We've had some companies save millions in tax liability. That's a financial ROI that makes considerable sense to a CFO. Right. So all of a sudden they're like, oh yeah, why am I paying tax on people that I don't need to pay tax on? I need to, so that one's a real simple one. Up to millions of dollars of ROI savings there. Then there's other cases with global mobility. When you start to look at the impact, not only financial streamlining and automation impact, but you're also able to manage the duty of care and the employee experience significantly greater. And if you look at all the data, I'm sure you probably have better data on this than me. But replacing someone usually is 1 to 1 and a half times annual salary of lost productivity and all those things. And I can give you one example.
Bill Mastin (00:22:28) - We talked to a bank in Africa a couple of years ago, and they had a program that when they took their highest potentials and put them on assignment, they had a rate of, I think 40% attrition once they made the move within the first-year post assignment. And so that you think about that, you take your highest potential employees and then you give them an opportunity to have a global assignment. You put them on site. But the experience was so bad. And the tax implications and all the things that you have to have tightened up and buttoned up, if you miss on that, they get frustrated and say, I don't need this, I can go find a job someplace else. And so getting it wrong has high consequences. And so ROI on that front is there's a lot of cost savings and automation and workflow improvements, compliance and risk improvements, for sure. But you also have the people side of it is that if you get that wrong, if my company messes up my move, my wife is going to not be happy about it, right?
Deanna Shimota (00:23:41) - Right.
Deanna Shimota (00:23:42) - There's so many implications to those kind of programs. Right?
Bill Mastin (00:23:47) - Right.
Deanna Shimota (00:23:49) - So, Bill, what is your future vision for Topia?
Bill Mastin (00:23:54) - So when I think about the opportunity of what's going on today and in these disruptive technologies, we're continuing to innovate. And every, you know, month we're launching next generation features on our platform, Topia one, and we're adding AI. We're adding things to it to help smart use of that. Not just rapping or just putting, but just taking our time to consider how do we add these things in that really gives a practitioner like a dashboard of data and decisions, the ability to make decisions about what's in the best interest of their organization. Right? Like how do we do this? Mitigate risk, be compliant and give them the help in doing that in a smart, intelligent systems. So that's one area of focus for sure, adding the increasing variance of distributed work to our solutions, so giving more flexibility to companies using our products to to manage the shifting landscape, quite frankly.
Bill Mastin (00:25:06) - Tax and immigration is not going to get simpler from here. It's continued to get more complicated. Every year it gets further complicated. You go look at the number of audits that have been over the years and for New York State, for instance. And it's skyrocketing and it's skyrocketing for a variety of reasons. But part of the tax base leaving the state and or lower tax base and all those kind of implications, these different jurisdictions, these different government with locations are looking for new ways to generate revenue. So helping practitioners be able to give a line of business-like real data about, okay, if we do, that doesn't make more sense for you to hire or to transfer. Does it make more sense for you to do a short term move versus a one-way transfer? What are the implications of that, allowing even the line manager to have access to that modeling tool. And that's what we've done in our platform already. And I just think you'll see that that kind of continue over time as we continue to we integrate more AI, more smart intelligence into the products, more integration capabilities.
Bill Mastin (00:26:22) - I mean, we've got off the shelf integration connectors with all of the with workday and with SAP. And that kind of rapid deployment capability is also a huge help for our customers.
Deanna Shimota (00:26:37) - What final thoughts as we wrap up our conversation, do you want to leave our audience with?
Bill Mastin (00:26:43) - I just think that it's I'm a technologist at heart, and I've always been very positive about the opportunity that the, the technology brings to kind of evolution of our corporate entities in the world and globalization. And I think it's fascinating what's going on right now with AI and with some of the other and also the global macro economic and geopolitical changes that are occurring and how to organizations navigate all that. And like I said earlier, I just don't think there's a cut and paste for the future of and have and being having tools that actually help you navigate that is paramount. But doing it in a way that just allows you to be more effective and adaptive and agile in the world as it is today. In the future world is going to be what determines companies that are able to navigate and manage the choppy waters right, that are ahead.
Bill Mastin (00:27:45) - So being able to be that flexible and work using a tool versus throwing people at a problem, all of those things help you as a company, stay competitive. when the talent war do all those things that and so to me it's always an exciting time and I'm always like, what's going to happen next? What's happening? And that's what we're doing. Topia is just trying to make sure that we're ready to help our customers navigate those complicated waters that are ahead of us.
Deanna Shimota (00:28:14) - Excellent. So where can our listeners go to learn more about Topia?
Bill Mastin (00:28:18) - Topia.com is probably the best landing place, and when you get there, there's links to be able to log in and download our Adapt survey, which I think is a great tool for someone to look at the trends of what's happening and what we're seeing and use that data. Please access it and use it however you would like to. And going out and talking with your leadership about the trends that are happening and how your companies have to adapt to them. So I think that's a great resource for the for your listeners.
Deanna Shimota (00:28:50) - Awesome. Thanks for that information, Bill, and thank you for coming on the HR Tech Spotlight podcast to talk about.
Bill Mastin (00:28:57) - My pleasure talking about Topia. Thank you for having me.
Deanna Shimota (00:29:04) - Thanks for listening to this episode of The HR Tech Spotlight podcast, where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market. If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be considered for a guest spot on this program, Please contact me via GrowthModeMarketing.Com or reach out to me, Deanna Shimota, on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative, subscribe. Connect with us on social media and leave a review. This is Deanna with GrowthMode Marketing signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.