“Working With Total HR Saves This Company Money.”

A Cost-Effective Choice For Penguin Natural Foods

“The Decision Was Easy Because It Makes Total Sense.”

As the President of Penguin Natural Foods and the brother of the owner of the company, Ken Nairne is not going to do anything to risk the future prosperity of his business. A classic numbers guy with a mathematics background, Ken appreciates the hands-on approach of Total HR. However, it clearly is not the basis of his choice to work with Total HR. When it comes to business, Ken crunches the numbers and the numbers do the talking.

Penguin Natural Foods manufactures and packages products that are labeled with well-known brand names like Trader Joes, Whole Foods, Target and Costco. As a fast growing food manufacturing firm, Penguin Natural Foods needed the human resources expertise of a Fortune 500 company without the expense of an internal department.

Total HR works with the Penguin management team to enhance performance and build a strong business culture with a stable human resources base. When the economy changed and Ken put everything on the table at Penguin Natural Foods, the working relationship with Total HR survived the economic cutbacks. Why? Once crunched, the numbers spoke for themselves and the decision was easy. Total HR saves Penguin Natural Foods money. In his interview, Ken described this process in detail and the mechanics behind his decision.

KEN NAIRNE (President of Penguin Natural Foods) —

When I came to Penguin, the company had been working with Total HR for quite a while. When I arrived, everything was put on the table in order to make things more efficient and increase our profit margins. Naturally, I took a close look at the expense of working with Total HR. From a cost effective point of view, continuing to work with Total HR made sense. If we had brought in our own person, we would not have had the years of expertise and experience, we still would have had to pay a third party for Payroll Services and our benefits would have been diminished greatly. We simply could not have found the same cost-effective benefit premiums that are offered by Total HR. The decision was easy because it makes total sense for us.

Before working here, I worked for a company that was 12 or 14 times bigger than this company. We had an internal HR department that handled everything that Total HR handles for us. What I find so surprising is that I receive and have access to more comprehensive HR resources by outsourcing to Total HR than I ever did at the much larger company.

My cost-effective analysis was to compare all the fees I pay in a year to Total HR to the cost of bringing in an internal HR person, paying an outside company to do the payroll, paying for legal consultation in regards to Workers’ Compensation and the hours of extra internal leg work that could be spent on doing work that actually benefits the company. It wasn’t a break-even situation. In fact, it wasn’t even close. It was a pretty easy analysis to do.

From a strictly cash point of view, the decision for a company to work with Total HR is easy. The cost makes financial sense across the board because it improves the ease factor. Working with Total HR saves this company money. In addition, I have been very happy with the timeliness of their responses and the focused attention. When we had an employee death, Total HR was right there by our side throughout a difficult process. I have the cell phone numbers of my representative: it does not feel like they are an external company, but rather an integral part of my office.