Leighann Lovely 0:03
Welcome to HRables: HR in Bite-Sized pieces. I’m Leighann Lovely and today we will be talking about what employers can do to increase employee retention. This is employee retention 1.0. Employee retention is a problem. You can get an employee, you can train an employee, and then they leave. Not all companies can offer rich benefits or programs. But there are things that you can do as a company to offer different incentives. So today, as a part of the employee retention series, I am joined by Nick Kavelaris, with Third Coast Advisors, a guardian agency. Nick is a financial representative with Third Coast Advisors. His office is located in Pewaukee, Wisconsin but offers assistance to clients throughout the state and surrounding areas. So welcome. I’m excited to have this conversation with you.
Nick Kavelaris 0:56
Thanks for having me.
Leighann Lovely 0:57
So tell me a little bit about the philosophy behind Third Coast Advisors and what you do.
Nick Kavelaris 1:03
Yeah, in general, people either work for money or for for meaning, and we as advisors want to understand more of their narrative. And so before we make any recommendations, we share our philosophy with a potential client and ask them questions, do some discovery analysis, and really get to know them. Through education, we help people see kind of what the greatest financial asset they truly have is, what the universal threats to their income may be, and what financial stability could look like for them, individually or as a family unit. One misconception that we try to get out of the way early is that financial professionals are really only for people with certain income levels or certain populations. One of the benefits that people see with working with us is that they experience an uncommon approach, which results from more of an organized organization standpoint of clarity, security, confidence, and financial balance. And that’s really where our philosophical understanding starts with is trying to create more of an awareness between potential client ourselves, so we’re working together, there is more than just kind of healthy money management or investment that we focus on, you know, it’s not just the rate of return, you got your money. It’s, it’s more than that. One example is a question we typically ask people is like, what if your paycheck your current paycheck, was your last one? You know, what would you do? How would that affect you have those types of people around you just to get to understand them more, we don’t look at people as just, you know, someone who were going to invest their money or help them with their money, we look at them as someone we’re partnering with for the long term.
Leighann Lovely 3:00
So ultimately, who who is your your, I guess, target person to work with? Or who needs a financial professional?
Nick Kavelaris 3:09
Yeah, so that’s a great question. I think, easiest way to answer that is, you know, if an individual family, if a business files a tax return, I would say that that person would be needing someone like us in their corner to provide support and direction. There are, you know, universal threats to everyone’s financial narrative, whether you work like an hourly rate, or you own a professional sports team, there are universal concepts and threats you have to understand. There are different needs people have, but having someone in their corner is a necessity for for anybody. It’s just the openness that they have to that.
Leighann Lovely 3:50
Excellent. So you have a wide array of people that you serve.
Nick Kavelaris 3:55
Yes, very wide.
Leighann Lovely 3:57
That’s great. That’s great. So how can somebody somebody in your line of work, you know, work with a business owner? And can that be an added benefit to introducing you into a company as kind of that, like I said, the employee retention portion that we’re talking about?
Nick Kavelaris 4:16
Yeah and typically, a business owner is going to be the exact same as an individual with other elements, right? They have other people that they’re responsible for. Our philosophical approach with a business owner is the same, if you own a business or as an individual, there’s just different levels to it. There’s different levels of appropriateness that a business owner may have to address certain issues of their financial narrative, comparatively to just a normal individual. So the process is very the same. The depth is a little different because of the roles of responsibility that the owner has, and also to help people that they’re responsible for such things as overhead expenses, employee retention, you know, financial liquidity, cash flow, benefits, you know, healthcare benefits or benefits the employer may give the employee as far as investments, 401Ks, or other types of retention areas. There’s much more of the, the discussion there. One area that we specifically help with is kind of being the, for lack of a better term, you know, the quarterback of the, the team or the hub on the wheel, where you have a lot of different areas that are dependent upon you to bring in, rarely does a business owner have an accountant, an HR person, an attorney, other financial people in the room at the same time, we can act as a conduit to connect all those and it’s one of the aspects that a normal, maybe, situation may not call for, but for a business owner, we need to have multiple connections there.
Leighann Lovely 6:04
And what about introducing you to their actual employees so that those employees maybe, like you mentioned, some of those hourly employees that don’t necessarily have access to somebody like you. Can that be an added benefit? Is that something that you as a advisor would offer?
Nick Kavelaris 6:24
Yeah, and we’d actually encourage that, because we want to partner with the business owner so that their employees are benefited, right. So, you know, things like key person retention, overall employment retention, you know, benefits, a plan, an education. It’s not just for the owner, it’s also for the business and the people there. Helping improve someone’s life, maybe that you employ is more than just giving them a paycheck, right? It’s helping them on many levels, and a lot of job satisfaction is important, but also when they go home, do they feel as though the job that they’re employed in, are they getting enough? You know, do they have certain coverages that will help them long term? So having a 401k or having an employee be able to understand how to save, you know, what percentage of their income, should they be saving? Where should they put that? The stability that we can offer, an employee will thusly transfer into their overall quality of life, which a happier, healthier, more, less stressed employee can do a better job in their job because of not worrying about the external forces at their job, they can show up to work, focus on their job, go home and feel that security, that confidence and that financial balance. So partnering with an employer to help their employees understand that benefits, understand what they shouldn’t shouldn’t have, is a is a major part of helping that business owner.
Leighann Lovely 7:56
Excellent. So, you know, we work with a lot of small to midsize companies. Some of these companies can’t offer all of those benefits. Can you also make recommendations?
Nick Kavelaris 8:09
Yeah, I mean, so the, a lot of places to have an employee sponsored benefit plan, they may not have the resources that maybe a startup, or just what they have just doesn’t allow that. So what we can do is we can partner with that employer to offer benefits to the individuals maybe instead of an employee sponsored savings or investment type of plan, maybe that’s something that we do where the employer brings us in and individually, we can work with their employees, one on one. So there’s a lot of different things we can do. The question is, what’s the best fit? What’s the level of appropriateness, and that just requires a conversation and openness to dialogue. Again, we can help people in many different ways, the question is just starting those conversations.
Leighann Lovely 8:54
That’s great. That’s excellent. Because like I said, a lot of these companies may not have the resources or may not have the the ability to offer those things. And being able to go to one person and get all of those answers or at least be able to get the right person to answer all of those questions is, is excellent. And being able to go to your employees and say, here’s the right person to talk to is just an amazing thing. And a lot of companies don’t know what to do, because they don’t have the HR person they don’t have, or at this point, you know, if they’re a startup, they don’t have the, you know, the support staff yet. It’s the owner and operations and great.
Nick Kavelaris 9:36
And there’s a lot of assumptions, I think that business owners or managers or employees have on what it require to offer an employee something or to protect an employee something. A key person, you know, needs to be kept around. Well, there’s ways in which to offer them different types of incentives without having to pay them more on the spot. So a lot of different aspects that people, you know that’s not the employers role responsibly to know all that. That’s our responsibility. And so if we can partner with the employer business owner and just offer them advice or offer them ways of education understand that’s a critical element.
Leighann Lovely 10:20
Absolutely, no. Yes, it is. So what have you seen in people related to their financial hopes for the future? Especially, you know, recently?
Nick Kavelaris 10:31
There’s a lot of questions out there. You know, obviously, economically, there’s a lot of questions. There’s a lot of people getting pretty anxious, you know, chasing rates of return and chasing certain philosophies. Not really understanding what are the greatest threats. You know, most people, if you ask them the question, what is their greatest asset that they have, they’re gonna reference, maybe a house or a car, maybe something that has big dollar amount value, but a person’s greatest asset is themselves and their income that they can generate. Most people may not really understand what their income really is valued at, over the course of a year, 10 years, their lifetime. And so just kind of quieting the conversation that has to happen to kind of bring in people back to a planned approach. There’s a lot of different philosophies out there that really made a lot of sense years ago, they may not make as much sense now, just because of the economic environment we’re in. But overall, it’s trying to help just guide people is really the biggest, you know, people are afraid to ask questions, they have a lot of assumptions. So that’s kind of where we see people right now is they they don’t really know what the right questions to ask are. And there’s a lot information spinning around out there, which can create a lot of confusion.
Leighann Lovely 11:58
Well, we’re living in very confusing times.
Nick Kavelaris 12:01
Yeah we are, we are.
Leighann Lovely 12:03
So if somebody wanted to get a hold of you or your company, how would they do that?
Nick Kavelaris 12:09
Easiest is to call or email. We can then set up a call, either a video call or in person meeting. But you know, phone number is 262-424-1436. That’s my direct number. My email will be nick.kavelaris@thirdcoastpdv.com.
Leighann Lovely 12:37
Excellent. You know that you’re going to get inundated now with calls?
Nick Kavelaris 12:41
I hope so, whatever we can do to help people and that’s a big part of kind of our philosophy is, we really want to help people, we want to help them change, you know, the narrative that they have financially, but also just helping to create some more stability for them. However, that is, you know, we don’t want to step on anybody’s toes as far as their current process or people that they have already supporting them. We want to be an added fixture to that. It’s however, we can partner and just aid in education and training and development is what we want to do.
Leighann Lovely 13:17
Great. That’s awesome. Well, my fellow Wisconsinites this is Leighann Lovely with HRables, it’s been a wonderful conversation with Nick. You’re a wealth of information. I thank everyone for tuning in. If you have any comments, or you’d like to join the conversation, please reach out to us on LinkedIn. If you are a company and you would like assistance with your open positions, please reach out we are here to help, or if you are looking for a new position, new employment, please find us on our website at www.sitestaffinginc.com. And finally, again, thank you for tuning in. I’m Leighann Lovely with HRables, and this podcast is for informational purposes only. SITE Staffing is not affiliated with or endorsed by PAS Guardian or Third Coast Advisors and opinions stated are their own. Nick is a financial representative of Guardian Life Insurance Company of America’s Guardian, New York, New York. PAS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian. Third Coast Advisors is not affiliated or subsidiary of PAS or Guardian.