For the entrepreneur who finds human resources regulations are beginning to erode his ability to focus on his profitability, or the HR director who is so covered with transactional duties that he doesn’t have time to strategize, an HR outsourcing firm with its roots in Oklahoma might offer a solution.

Dallas-based Staff One Inc., founded in 1988 in Durant by Dell Wood while the professional employer organization concept was in its infancy, teams with its client companies to offer “big company” benefits and HR compliance and administration.

“It’s centered around a management strategy called co-employment,” said Curt Matlach, business development executive at the Tulsa office, 9726 E. 42nd St., Suite 200. “We become employer on record for certain things, and the client company is employer on record for other things.”

For example, health insurance. Staff One has a national Aetna plan, and its client companies can choose to enter into that plan if they want, he said.

“We are one of the few PEOs that says, ‘Let’s make decisions that are 100 percent in your interest,’” Matlach said. “If the national Aetna plan is not what you feel is best for you or not what we recommend, then you can go out there and be the employer on record for any plan that you want.”

Staff One’s services fall into four distinct “buckets” that comprise the overall HR function of any organization, said Jon Scoggins, business development director at the Tulsa office. The categories are transactional and strategic HR management, employee benefits and benefit administration, workers’ compensation insurance and risk management, and payroll and tax administration.

Staff One serves about 4,800 employees and about 180 client companies in 48 states, Matlach said.

He said the company has kept itself small by design, accepting only “best-in-class employers.”

“While we’ll look across the country at maybe 10 deals a month per local market, we may only let one or two or three through,” he said. “It has to be a great fit for our client company, but it also has to be a great fit for Staff One because we have a fiduciary responsibility to protect our other client companies.”

Client companies typically have 30 to 80 employees, but “if it’s a good fit, we will even roll in a three-man plumbing group if they have a passion for serving people and doing their job and they don’t want to worry about all the new HR laws,” Matlach said. “We just converted and signed on a company that does a $1 billion a year in oil and energy, so we can run the whole gamut.”

Once a company hits 30 employees, almost every major federal labor law applies, he said. At 50, every law applies.

“You begin to say, ‘OK, do we hire an HR person at $40, $50, $60 thousand a year, or do we go out and hire Staff One for half that, transfer a lot of liability, mitigate a lot of risk and probably see some economies of scale?’” he said.

Staff One has the employees and accreditation, including Employer Services Assurance Corp., Workers’ Compensation and Risk Management by the Certification Institute and SAS 70 information security and privacy, to handle the new laws and regulations in the HR industry, Matlach said.

“The new HR laws and changes are driving interest into the PEO marketplace because people who have suffered layoffs are trying to figure out an out-of-the-box solution to help them maintain or increase their revenue stream and increase their profitability,” he said.

In many cases, their HR director may be left doing payroll, transactional HR as well as strategic HR, and possibly even handling workers’ compensation and benefits renewals.

“If you do all those things, you become a transactional entity, and you don’t have time to be strategic for your company,” he said. “By doing this, we immediately take all the transactional items off the plate for the HR director, and then that person can be truly strategic for that company.”