Unleashing HR Strategies for Transformative Growth: Featuring Danielle Laurent

Welcome to the Wisdom of Women Show. We are dedicated to amplifying the voice of women in business.

A new model of leadership is emerging and we are here to amplify the voices of women leading the way. I am your host Coco Salman, five time founder, impact investor and creator of the Force for Good system. Thank you so much for joining us today as we illuminate the path to unlocking opportunities and prosperity for women led organizations. So today we have such a great topic and a wonderful founder here to join us. We have with us today Danielle Runt. She is a trailblazing HR leader.

This is so important because people are our most important asset. And she has over two decades of expertise in transforming startups and tech firms throughout through strategic HR solutions. Danielle's experience spans from shaping thriving cultures to spearheading intricate talent acquisitions. She's a confidant to executive teams, architects, scalable strategies, designs comprehensive benefit frameworks and ensures seamless integrations during acquisitions.

As the CEO of Founders HR Lab, Danielle is driven by leveraging data driven HR analytics. I love that. And technology to fuel peak performance while empowering organizations to achieve sustainable growth. I'm so happy you're here Danielle. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much Coco. I appreciate that introduction. Yeah, glad you're here. I always like to ask the question, what's a book written by a woman that is significantly influenced your life? Yeah, absolutely.

First things first, I love women Empowering other women. When I was about mid career, I read Secrets of Six Figure Women by Barbara Stani. While that does not sound like a big deal now, back then I think that six figure mark was a huge deal. I wanted to see how do I get to that next level in my career. And what I really took from that book was she interviewed six, several six figure women. It was almost like they didn't see that it was a big deal.

They had worked hard and they were like, oh, I'm just doing the thing. I've taken opportunities, I've worked hard and this is where I am today. What I took from that was that there was no secret barrier to entry. It really was to take the opportunities, work hard, be focused on where you want to be and visualize your career goals. It really stuck with me. A lot of people might say six figures.

I don't know what that next milestone is, but it really is something emotional that says hey, I made it. And what I loved was in that book you get to really think about how far you've come and where you are today. I think that's important for all of us to do on a regular basis anyways. Love that Danielle. I'm a big fan of Barbara Stani and I've read Secrets of Six Figure Women. I did a year long course with her. She is amazing and highly recommend Secrets of Six Figure Women.

She gives you a lot of practical advice about how to put your financial self in order and puts it in the context of your values and your desires. Six figures, just a placeholder for your dreams. Right? You could be thinking seven figure, eight figure, whatever it is or doesn't even matter. It's about taking your power back with numbers and money and wealth and putting yourself in a place where you can achieve whatever goals you have with your prosperity. I love it. What a great recommendation.

Thanks for bringing Barbara back into my mind. I gotta check out this workshop. That sounds awesome. Well, let's get to you Danielle. I'm excited because I just sold my healthcare company we had was a nursing company. So our value was the people. And we had over 300 nurses that were out in the field doing great work. HR was a big, big strategic part of my company. So tell us about Founders HR Lab. What is your vision for it? What do you want to create through your company? Absolutely, I agree.

People are the most important resource. Once you are a founder and you're at a place where you're hiring people, you've reached a certain level of success. If you're employing people, it's a huge accomplishment. You're at the point where you need to take care of that investment, take care of the people that work for you who are going to help you grow your business. When I decided to found Founders HR Lab, it was because I wanted to empower founders who are growing their business.

They were starting to hire people and scale, really helping them build out that Runway. So they didn't come to a place where, okay, I have these folks, they've done such great work for me. Now they're disgruntled, now they're unhappy, now they're leaving. And now I may end up in a situation where I'm having to start over again. I want founders to be excited about their business, doing the things they're smart about.

The reason they started their business it was not to learn hr, but what it is is to grow their businesses in the way into, in their own vision and then help to give their employees opportunities and to have their employees help them grow their business. So my vision is really to empower that by creating people strategies and solutions that are really going to be enablers to all of that.

Before we started our interview here, we were talking about how sometimes when you're starting a company and you're getting off the ground and you hire your first few people, you and I had had this experience where I didn't have HR experience. We were learning as we went and boy, there's a lot to the HR function. There's a lot of risk, there's a lot of opportunity, there's so many things never think of. And so having some help there is really valuable.

Going from 0 employees to 300 in a very short period of time. I totally value what you do.

So maybe can you share a specific example of a complex HR challenge that you helped a company overcome and what were the strategies or what were you thinking about to bring the company through that challenge? Sure. Well, first, there's three categories of situations that companies I've worked for, company clients that I currently have, have run into. So you either get the new one scrappy and we have to just kind of do it ourselves. We've been employees before, so we could probably figure it out.

They are going to hire somebody right off who is more of a junior HR person because they're inexpensive, which work may work fine for a time, but then that company can't scale because that junior HR person doesn't have the strategic knowledge or support to help the business scale. So that's one group of folks that I like to help. Then there's also the bucket where a startup may have just got funding.

They're going to hire executive HR leaders because they know they need that expertise, but the business may not be financially ready for that investment. Or you have startups who go for a very long time and don't hire anyone in HR and then they run into those blockers in these three different buckets. I realize the fractional part time HR executive can really come in and be the best of both worlds.

You're going to give expert level advice and advisory services, but you're also going to be a fraction of the cost and fraction of the investments. As far as how I've helped other companies, say the larger company, around 300 employees. I had a client who had a very junior level HR person and they acquired several different companies. So they grew quickly to 300 employees without any HR infrastructure whatsoever.

I came in and I was able to build the infrastructure, get the policies in place, get the technology in place, get the buy in from the employee population, the excitement around the employee population. You build out compensation strategies which eventually could cause you lots of money in the future. Compensation philosophies, who are we? How do we pay our people? What will that look like in the future? What benefits do we have that really represent who we are?

And again, how is this going to be scalable in the future? So really building it out for companies who have been well established for a while, as well as smaller companies. I have clients who are at 15 employees and they've said, hey, we've done this for as long as we can on our own and everything is hard now. Now the founder has said, hey, I'm in the weeds too much with HR and I don't know what I don't know at this point. So they're growing in other states.

I've come in, build them out automation, which I love. If I go win the lottery one day, they can still onboard their employees, they can still take good care of their employees. Those are examples of how I help clients. I love it. For anybody who's listening, if you're a founder and you have a team, I don't care if you have three employees, people that you are paying, it's important to have at least some advice coming to you about hr. Early in my career, I made mistakes.

I got in trouble because I wasn't paying somebody as a W2, I was paying them as a 1099 and I had given them a computer they could use. I had to pay all kinds of fees. It was a lesson I learned really early on that even if you have somebody working very part time for you, if you don't know the rules and you don't know the basic structure and you don't start just getting those pieces in place, it can be a big deal.

If you have somebody that's a HR expert like you, like Danielle here, you cannot have those worries right then as you grow. We used to hire 15 nurses a month. Think about that recruiting funnel the onboarding and the 90 days. You don't want to hire somebody and then lose them five minutes later. And yeah, I have one client that I just built out automated onboarding for it. It took them two weeks to onboard one employee. Yesterday we onboarded nine people in no time.

Because you build out that infrastructure up first and then it saves everyone time and that experience it provides to those employees, they're like, wow, I'm so taken care of. They've really thought about me. And to your point too, a good HR leader will come in immediately and say, hey, these people are not properly categorized. I did a large assessment for one of my clients and found that they were not paying State taxes in a new remote environment. Of course they didn't get in trouble.

Nothing happened. We prevented it and they're fine now. You just don't want to get to a place where you run into those. Rules and laws change all the time. I'm in New York and we just. This year doesn't matter if you hire one person or a thousand. You have to pay the PTO sick leaves and it's no longer a threshold. If you don't know that and you're not paying attention, you could have somebody come after you because you're not paying them pto.

Just having somebody who's there for you and can help you navigate those little things that are coming up is really important. You've mentioned it, and I want to go a little further because I'm a big fan of systems. It takes effort and energy to set systems up, whether it's physical systems or technology systems. But over time, it just starts to really seed itself. How can HR analytics and technology be leveraged to drive performance and growth? Absolutely.

It is in every single element of the employee experience from the day that they are interviewed. That's through an applicant tracking system, potentially. How quickly are you able to get back to candidates? What kind of experience are you providing to them? How does that help you integrate quicker? How do you know you're having the same type of conversations with each candidate? You're not in the position of discrimination at all. Right from the start to the finish.

How are you offboarding employees? Right. Did you make sure that they're getting their final pay for the state that they're in? Are they getting their final benefits? So really, systems are from every stage. And that analytics piece, Right. If you're doing employee engagement surveys, pulse check strategies, performance management tracking, when you have great systems in place, it can help you determine where you're going to spend your money and efforts in your people. Strategies for the future.

Right? So if you don't know what your employees care about, if you don't know what areas are making the greatest impact, how do you know where to spend money? How do you know where to spend your resources? You could think, oh, I think this is what the population cares about. I think this is what benefits they want. You put them in place and then they end up underutilized, you're wasting money and then you have to start all over again.

So where that data really comes from, you can say, what we're having issues with is maybe manager training. Let's invest in our managers, let's develop them. I see that we're having an issue with employees feeling engaged, feeling like they know what's going on in the company. Let's work on transparent communications and creating programs and tools that will help us better communicate with our employees. Everybody hates the performance management system.

It feels cumbersome, it burns a lot of calories. Let's create one that is really for our employees and that represents our culture. The data analytics help where to take your people strategies and make the most impact. I'm thinking about all the different ways that what you are saying really applies and how often. It's easy to not do the net report of promoter scores. It's easy to not take all the steps, but when you do, it makes a big difference.

When you're first starting out, it's hard to get the best talent. You can't always give them the best benefits. You can't always pay them as much as else might be able to pay them. So you need to create a really great culture, a place where you love working. You feel like you've got the best boss in the world. If you don't have those systems in place and you're not tracking it, you're going to lose people because somebody else is going to just dangle a little more money in front of them.

But they'll stay if it's the right fit. Do you see that happening? Oh, absolutely. I just had one client.

Employees complained about the fact that there was no career pathing. It's a small company. They basically have to wait for someone to die to get promoted. Right. What I did was create an entire career pathing system. You don't have to ascend upwards, but you can and get increases in pay and things like that. They can't pay the largest salaries, but the recruiter was able to tell them, hey, we have career pathing. We have codified ways to get promoted in our company.

And that was a huge selling point for them. They were able to say, hey, we're practicing what we preach. There are ways to grow in this company. Danielle, I love what you're saying and I hope that every founder is listening. What your ears might be hearing is, well, I don't know what I'm going to do with these people. I don't know how I'm going to grow them. I have no way to do that. Actually, you do. Right? There's lots of ways to grow them and you can do it very inexpensively.

You can align your goals and give them perks along the way and so it doesn't have to break the bank to put in these kinds of structures. And back to your point about data finding out what they really care about. One company I implemented, all the employees wanted was to be recognized. Yeah. And celebrate each other. So I implemented a recognition tool. And this, they were just like, this is the best thing. They were so excited. And it didn't cost a lot. It was, oh, I'm energized.

I'm excited about what we're doing and I love getting recognized, you know, so they're. There's so many different ways to exact do exactly what you said. Get people excited and feel like they're being taken care of and appreciated. I love that.

So when you're working with a founder and a team and you're looking at their internal culture and what it feels like, how do you support a structure or a team that maybe doesn't have as much trust and transparency in place? I've worked with a lot of founders over the years and sometimes, sometimes we do everything ourselves and think that we should and that others maybe shouldn't know about the details of the business.

How do you help transform a culture that is not as open or transparent and what are the lessons you've seen from that? Yeah, I think that falls into organizational development and accountability. Let's really look at how the organization is structured. We make sure that the founder is not bearing the full load because most likely they have people who want to take on some responsibility and have some autonomy.

So let's reorganize the structure of the company to make sure you have the right people in the right places. And then let's create a process of accountability. Identify the goals of the business and how each person person is part of that puzzle piece and communicate that everybody wants to know how they're making a contribution. Most people don't want to just come to work and collect a paycheck. They want to know how they're affecting the business.

Founders could really do this by creating that system and process of accountability. So establishing goals, working with a leadership team to help organize that systems in place to track those goals and that accountability, and then also providing visibility for the entire company. If I am a brand new employee and I can see all the way up to how I'm helping the founder of the company, that's huge. Right. And it builds morale and it gets people excited and motivated. You mentioned this before.

It takes some work up front, but if you have somebody like myself who will come in and help run the process and just work with the founder to say, how does this feel does this feel like this is speaking to your vision and then really building off of that? And everyone else can build toward that as well. They can bring their expertise in and help the organization, and that's really one of the main ways to scale a business. I completely agree with you.

And I do think that sometimes as founders, we get in our own way and having somebody from the outside help us sort of take all that's in our little heads about how we're growing and what our goals are, and putting it out into the world and to our teams in a structured and clear and concise and fun way empowers them. Now they can finally do all the things you wish they were doing all along, but they couldn't read your mind. Right. And there wasn't a system in place that they could use to do it.

You do it in little bits at a time. Right. It doesn't have to be boil the ocean and over tip the apple cart all at once. Let's get our goals in place. And how does everybody in the organization align with that goal? It's such a great opportunity for people to learn. We had this leadership meeting and these things came out of it. That leader gets to go and have the same type of meeting with their team and strategize, and the people on their team get to learn. I'm so excited.

This is how I'm going to contribute to that. And then having those company meetings where everybody can share what the goals of the company are, how far we come, the successes, it really builds that transparent culture. It takes a lot of the burden off of the founder to say, okay, I get to focus on why I started this business in the first place. Yeah. And just as someone who just exited, you have to have this in place if you ever want to exit.

You ever want to sell your company, you have to have all these pieces in place. It will totally free you up if you have these systems in place. Because now you're not trying to do everything. You really have a system to step back and there's accountability for all the goals. Things are happening whether you're pushing them along or not. And so really want to hear from your heart and your soul about the wisdom that you've learned and gathered over your career as a person, as a woman, as a leader.

What is it that you have learned and what would you like to share with us as your wisdom for today? Sure, there's a few things, but I think one of the main things is to be clear on your vision. Of course, we all have our self doubts. But be clear on your vision and take steps toward it. Especially if you are a founder or looking to start your own business. You're already taking steps that many people want to do and maybe have been a little too fearful to do and you're already doing that.

So believe in your vision, stay on the path. If you backslide, get back on, forgive yourself and continue on. And I think always celebrating how far you've come, which I have to remind myself to do a lot. We just sometimes think we've arrived where we were and forget all that it took to get there.

So taking time to be proud of yourself and really reflecting on, wow, I really have come very far. And then I think from an HR perspective, if you have employees, just remember how lucky you are to be able to affect so many people's lives and to invest in other people. It's really a gift and I think that's important, an important thing to remember. That message is so deeply valuable to remember. Right. To be remember that it's a gift. It's a huge opportunity too.

In a world that can be so unfair and without values. You get to create the community, the culture that you wish were the world. Right? Right. And so you can rewire how people interact with each other and create a better system for creating goodness in the world through your team. Just think of giving an offer to somebody. What did that trigger for them in their lives? They probably celebrated with their family, called their mom. You maybe thought, oh, I needed somebody to do this role.

But you hiring somebody was such a gift to them and triggered something so important in their life. So to be in a position where your business is able to hire people is such a gift and shouldn't be taken for granted and should really be celebrated as well. That is beautiful. Oh wow. Thank you. I really appreciate that. Sometimes in the ins and outs of the days we forget that. I think that's a a brilliant reminder. Deep wisdom. Thank you Danielle for joining us today. Absolutely.

Coco. Thank you for being on the wisdom of women and for illuminating the path to unlocking opportunities, growth and prosperity for women led enterprises. We value your experience and wisdom. For those listening, if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out Danielle's website foundershrlab.com you can also email her directly at danielle@founderslab hr foundershrlab.com and you can work with her.

She does fractional chro work so you can hire her to be her fractional part time Chief Human resources Executive officer. You can also hire her for projects. Maybe you need to set up an onboarding system or get your employee manual up and running or have a performance appraisal system. You can also get her for an hour. You can do an advisory session with her. Especially if you're new and you're not ready for a fractional C H R O then that would also be a good idea.

She also does a great job, a 90 day training program, an HR ramp up program. So check it out, learn more and be sure to follow Danielle on LinkedIn and continue to learn from her. And be sure to like follow and share the wisdom of women. Show on whatever your favorite listening or viewing platform is and to infuse more of your wisdom into your business.

Be sure to take the Growth Readiness assessment and you can do that at a forceforgood biz quids and you can uncover specific areas where your insight is most needed. The world is made better by women led business so let's go make the world. Thank you.