Member Spotlight: HR Allies
Our member spotlight this month is Danielle Verderosa of HR Allies!
Are you a dreamer, risk-taker, or doer?
I feel a little embarrassed admitting this as an entrepreneur, but I’d never call myself a dreamer or a big risk-taker. I’ve always been a pragmatist and a “doer” – so although I certainly have a business goal I’m working toward, my approach is pretty calculated and methodical. After 20+ years in Human Resources management, I left my corporate job as a Vice President of HR to found HR Allies not because I always had a dream to start my own business, but because I believed there was a need in the HR consulting market that wasn’t being filled by any other company yet.
As fellow entrepreneurs, we would love to hear about your business.
HR Allies is a human resources consulting firm that provides companies with expert guidance on handling difficult employee situations. When employees make workplace complaints or accusations of things like discrimination, sexual harassment, or retaliation, there are a lot of employment laws that dictate exactly how employers have to handle those complaints. A lot of companies don’t have their own highly-experienced HR person on staff, so HR Allies navigates them through complying with all those employment laws at a fraction of the price of an employment attorney. When companies engage HR Allies as soon as a complaint is made, they lessen their risk of being sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or the employee’s own attorney. HR Allies also offers risk assessments, action plans, and other expert employee relations advice to employers who don’t have the time desire to deal with employee drama themselves.
Who is your ideal customer?
My ideal customer is the owner, CEO, CFO, or one-person HR department in a company of 50 to 500 employees. A lot of these employment laws don’t affect companies smaller than that, and companies larger than that probably already have a very experienced HR professional on their staff. The clients we help best are those companies that are already capable of doing their own HR functions like hiring, training, and benefits enrollment, but when it comes to handling sensitive employee situations like EEO-type accusations and employment law compliance, they know they need outside expertise from an HR professional who’s already got decades of experience in those areas.
What are your top tips for entrepreneurial success?
My number one tip is: be very curious! One of the things I wasn’t prepared for when I left a corporate job to strike out on my own is that, all of a sudden, I was my own IT and Marketing person. Gosh knows these are skills I never had or ever needed before, but now that I’m relying only on myself to build HR Allies’ infrastructure, I needed to skill-up. Luckily it turned out that I was really interested in learning about building a website with all the bells and whistles or creating an email marketing campaign. Each time I’m curious about whether something can be done or not, I learn how to make it work – so I’ve slowly been able to make steady improvements myself in areas I used to have zero knowledge about.
It also helps to have a sense of humor about setbacks. If I took myself too seriously, I would have hated this journey that’s had plenty of false starts and frustrations and I probably would have given up a few months ago. I know that everything’s fixable and the things that I screw up now are going to be my funny stories when I look back on this year.
Finally, sequester yourself somewhere where you can focus 100% of your attention to your company. I was so fortunate to find Office Evolution in Fairfax a week or so before I started working on HR Allies! Office Evolution’s private office puts me in a business mindset as soon as I walk through the doors, and the membership means that I still have all the business tools I need to launch a successful, professional company.
Learn more about HR Allies:
HR Allies | USA’s leading Employee Relations Advisory Firm
HR Allies: Overview | LinkedIn
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Whether you live in Centreville, Fairfax, Annandale, Oakton, Chantilly, Burke, Vienna, Falls Church, and other communities nearby in Fairfax and Prince William counties, choosing Office Evolution Fairfax in Virginia will help you be more professional, productive, and profitable