Meet Hemploy: Q&A with Bill Federhofer

Bill Federhofer has been a mainstay in the cannabis industry in Missouri, offering help and advice to businesses while most were still getting their sea legs. A friendly face, a firm handshake, and a jovial laugh that lights up a room – Federhofer is one of the most frequently seen faces at industry events.

Federhofer serves as President of Simploy of Mid-America, the parent company to Hemploy – a quickly emerging leader in the cannabis industry offering Professional Employer Organization (PEO) services specifically to cannabis clients.

PEOs provide human resources services for their business clients, generally small to mid-sized companies – or start-ups, often by handling the administrative roles and tasks of multiple employees, paying wages and taxes and administrating benefits. Most PEOs even offer assistance with employee-related compliance, creation of resource materials such as employee handbooks or codes of conduct. Freeing up time and resources that would otherwise be dedicated to full-time HR staff.

Generally speaking, PEOs serve as professional employers of their client’s employees. What this means is that the client company reports its wages under the PEO’s federal employer identification number which shifts employee liability to the PEO. This in turn means that each employee from every client served by a single PEO are considered as one group. This enables the client companies to offer benefits, services, and pricing, that would not be feasible without the economies of scale.

While the existence of PEOs may be news to some, the business model has been around for decades and Fedehoffer himself has been serving businesses working in the Professional Employee Organization and Insurance industry for over 20 years

Greenway asked Federhofer to tell us a bit about Hemploy and why they’re currently making waves in Missouri’s cannabis industry.

Can you give us a bit of background about Simploy and Hemploy?

Hemploy, is a subsidiary, born to create a degree of separation between Simploy (our PEO serving non-cannabis entities) and our cannabis-facing efforts.

Whereas Hemploy is a new entity, operating since 2019, Simploy has been a PEO for a considerably longer amount of time, originally operating as The Varsity Group, since 1990, before a rebrand in the mid-2000s.

How did you Simploy enter into the cannabis industry?

   

Several years ago, a senior member of Simploy’s management team had a health challenge and found that cannabis proved to be extremely beneficial in aiding their recovery. Ever since, internally, we have had an appreciation for the plant and the accompanying industry surrounding it. Then, following the passing of Missouri legislation creating a medicinal cannabis industry within the state, Simploy recognized an opportunity to serve an emerging industry and provide a PEO offering to those in need – new business founders/owners. And so, Hemploy was born.

What makes Hemploy unique in this space?

Hemploy’s unique advantages are twofold:

• Our Simploy heritage/genesis story, results in us having a vast degree of experience and knowledge related to the services we provide and the tasks that we inherit from the client. Alternative providers aka. our competition cannot trace their lineage back anywhere near as far. Instead, many serving the cannabis space are newly formed entities that have not had the 25+ years it takes to forge the team we have, develop the understanding we have and create a way of doing business that dramatically benefits the client.
• At the same time, relative to the big players in our industry (publicly traded giants like ADP, Insperity, etc.), our service offering is relatively high-touch in nature. We do not have 1-800 numbers, call centers, etc. Instead, we connect with the client on an intimate level, serving them with dedicated members of staff, and ultimately delivering a level of service that a large provider would deem too costly and time-consuming.

What services does Hemploy offer to customers?

As a full-service PEO, Hemploy offers an all-inclusive outsourcing partnership that sees Hemploy inherit the administration of: Payroll, HR, Benefits, Workers Comp/Employee Safety. The individual functions that we perform within each of these categories are near endless. After all, cannabis business owners didn’t start their company to deal with payroll problems or HR headaches. We did.

What is the biggest obstacle for most of the companies you service or have worked with, and where do you see companies struggle that you can help?

The largest challenges impacting those we serve concern banking and staffing. Unfortunately, until the Federal view of cannabis evolves to match the current times, many operating in the cannabis space struggle to see their cash reach a bank. As such, paying employees electronically can also be a challenge. We’re glad to implement solutions to see them modernize their payroll processing.

Additionally, like many industries across the country, sourcing and retaining quality staff is a challenge. We are fortunate to have a huge array of employee benefit solutions that will keep an employee around without coming close to breaking the bank, and should they leave, our HR department will ensure the vacancy is filled with quality staff in a timely manner.