We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mary Grothe a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Mary thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

When I began my full-time career at Payroll Network, Inc., a 25-year-old payroll and HR company in Maryland, I knew one of the first projects we needed to tackle was our brand, mission, and positioning in the market. As the Chief Revenue Officer, I created a plan to scale to $50M in 5 years. Step one was to create a brand centered on a mission that was powerful and relevant to our internal team and our clients. Step two was to rebrand, and we did, to PNI•HCM.

Our mission? Creating the experience employees deserve, both our own and our client’s employees.

Human Capital Management (HCM) providers have focused on the payroll and HR administrators for years, but we are taking it to the next level. We’re building our brand’s mission around our clients’ employees and how we help improve attraction, retention, loyalty, engagement, productivity, and overall happiness/wellness.

Those are buzzwords. Suppose I sat down and asked 100 human resource professionals what they do to increase attraction, retention, loyalty, engagement, productivity, and happiness/well-being, and how they do it. In that case, my gut says I’d receive a lot of silence in response. That’s not their fault.

They rely on vendors and partners like HCM, payroll, and outsourced HR companies to help them with these initiatives, but to date, I have yet to see much in the market except for technology that markets itself as a module, not a service.

Today’s worker is more complex than before. Work from home? Hybrid work? 4-day workweeks? Flexible schedules? Or are they skilled labor required to be onsite? Or low-income retail or hospitality workers that employers have a 28-day retention battle?​ Today, employee well-being is top of mind.​

To attract, retain, and optimize your workforce, you must first create the experience they want​ in return.

So what did we do? We carefully curated a list of unique partners who could offer the services we didn’t. Their services will help our client’s employees reach their full potential by:

1. Increasing financial literacy and reducing financial stress.
2. Eradicating the stigma and guilt around outsourced parenting assistance and offering drop-off, pick-up, childcare, and tutoring services for the children of our client’s employees; as an employer-sponsored benefit.
3. Addressing mental health and wellness by teaching our client’s employees breathing, meditation, mindfulness, and communication techniques to help them combat workplace stress and anxiety, which can deepen into serious forms of mental illness if not addressed.
4. Create access to pay cards and on-demand pay for those who need to access their earned wages during a pay period before the pay date.
5. Offer inexpensive paths to two retirement vehicles that allow employers and employees to engage in retirement savings without breaking the bank and as a qualified alternative to the state-mandated auto-IRA many states require.

By focusing on our client’s employee’s experience in the workforce, we can impact American workers in a way that a payroll company hasn’t done at a national level. With our new mission, we can scale revenue and honor the people who are a part of the journey, internally and externally.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

At 22 years old, I began my sales career at a Fortune 1000 payroll company, quickly advancing from an admin role to the number one sales representative. By following my instincts always to put the customers first and listen to their needs, I was able to drive success for my clients and me and brought in millions of dollars in revenue.

Driven to help others succeed, I founded my first company at 28 and became a startup business strategist. Over three years, I helped 36 startups reach profitability. My passion for scaling companies grew, and I founded Sales BQ® to expand my reach from startups to companies with $1 million to $3 million in annual recurring revenue.

I recognized that focusing on the sales process alone was no longer enough to scale a company successfully, so I evolved Sales BQ to House of Revenue® and developed a holistic revenue strategy that integrated sales, marketing, branding, customer success, and revenue operations.

From 2018 to 2023, my team helped multiple second-stage growth companies, between $2 million and $20 million in annual recurring revenue.

On January 30, 2023, I stepped down from the CEO role at House of Revenue and began my new role as the CRO at Payroll Network, Inc., rebranded as PNI•HCM. Six months later, the company was purchased by a passionate entrepreneur who was excited to carry on the mission of the company.

As a faith-based leader, my goal is to inspire and empower others to commit themselves to “Do Remarkable Work,” to structure their lives so that they can truly honor their values, and to ask the question,

“What is most important in my life? Do I want to be successful, or do I want to be significant?”

I am a global keynote speaker on sales, entrepreneurship, and faith-based leadership and am working on two upcoming books to be published under Forbes | Books. Destination; Remarkable. Surviving the Dark Side of Success is available for pre-order now at all major book retailers and will be available on September 19, 2023.

At PNI•HCM, we stand out because of our unwavering dedication to providing the highest level of service to every employee, client, partnership, and community member. Our core values of Excellence, Positivity, Teamwork, Service, Integrity, and Creativity are never compromised. Our actions reflect our values, which is why we don’t just talk about them
– we embody them.

At our core, we are a payroll and human resources company with 25 years of proven excellence. As we look ahead at the next 5 years, we are on a path to nearly triple in size without compromising the well-being of any internal team member or compromising the high level of service we provide to our clients, currently sitting at a 98% new client implementation customer satisfaction rating and an ongoing customer support NPS rating of 87, compared to a range of -16 to positive 10, of most of our national competitors.

We leverage the isolved People Cloud HCM technology and a dozen carefully curated third-party partnerships to create a holistic experience for all aspects of payroll and human resources, covering the entire employee life cycle from recruiting to payroll, benefits, retirement, and more.

We focus on 10 key verticals with employee ranges from 1 – 5,000, but can serve just about any company in the US.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Any who knows me knows that I will do whatever it takes, ethically, to produce a winning result while ensuring everyone involved is taken care of. I have endured a signification amount of hardship and adversity in my life, starting from my childhood, through high school, my early professional years, and just recently while working through the sale of my second company. God created me with the capacity and fearlessness to handle more than most. With those traits, I willingly take on challenges and tackle obstacles that might crumble most. However, some have nearly crumbled me and taken down those around me.

Therefore, I am thrilled to be in a quieter season where I can focus on my role as Chief Revenue Officer at PNI•HCM and build up a winning sales, marketing, and customer success team who achieves our goals while embodying our core values and protecting everyone’s well-being.

As I continue my career as a professional in our community, I commit to following through on my word, helping others on their journey, and creating a winning experience for everyone involved.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Hands down, the most effective strategy for growing our clientele is selling what they want. That’s it. Sounds simple, right? It is. But, it takes patience to continuously conduct market research, secret shopping, voice of the customer surveys, competitive intelligence analyses, and other forms of primary research to ensure our product and service are viewed as relevant and at the price point for the market.

Once our product and service set is ready to sell, we find our clientele where they are. First, we dissect and group our buyers based on their roles, functions, seniority levels, and industries. Then we create messaging on the channels where they spend time and encourage them to learn more about us on our website or with a salesperson. Our website includes unique webpages for each group and type of buyer to ensure their experience is relevant to them and they don’t have to translate what we do. Our salespeople are also trained to have conversations specific to each buyer group. That way, our buyers feel comfortable and confident we know who they are, their problems, and how we can help them.

This process has yet to fail me. We are thrilled to welcome dozens of new clients each month into our service.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.pnihcm.com, www.marygrothe.com
• Instagram: @pnihcm, @marygrothe
• Facebook: /pnihcm
• Linkedin: /pnihcm, /marygrothe
• Twitter: @pnihcm, @marylgrothe

Image Credits
The photo called “Mary Kathy Kelly’ was photographed by Clay Blackmore. We own the rights to the photo.