A growing business that provides transcription services for financial advisors to help them manage processes and satisfy compliance requirements, Mobile Assistant knows the value of quality, innovation and partnerships – their own core values.
Responsible for financial and general operations, Mobile Assistant Chief Operating Officer Stephanie Westphal works with a unique employee base – a combination of salary and paid-per-production employees.
“For four years, we hobbled around doing payroll and taxes ourselves, handling all the state returns manually and managing personnel files on paper,” said Westphal. “To scale our business and to comply with evolving state and federal regulations, we needed to partner with a solution that would keep up with HR regulatory compliance, provide payroll assistance and allow us time to grow the business in other areas.”
“We moved to isolved in 2015 and have grown quite a bit since then. Now, we are just shy of 100 employees nationwide, in 25 states and completely remote. When we first implemented isolved, we had 60 employees in 19 states. Today, we’ve been able to increase our recruiting capacity and increase our employee retention by leveraging isolved products and isolved HR Services.”
Westphal appreciates the innovation and flexibility in their isolved setup which allowed their unique business model to work so efficiently. It’s the service component, however, that they think is a real game-changer.
“isolved HR Services is a hidden gem,” said Westphal. “HR Services puts the ‘pro’ in professional, with their experienced and credentialed HR account managers. We’ve been able to delay the hiring of an HR manager because of our valued partnership with the isolved HR subject matter experts.
“isolved HR Services has also helped us by conducting a high-level assessment of key compliance risks and issues. At one point, 50 percent of our operations was supported by independent contractors. This was a risk for us as we needed to secure dedicated employee resources to sustain our growth. isolved HR Services assisted us in developing our HR policies and employee job descriptions all while leveraging tools within isolved to create efficiencies with onboarding, employee and performance management and reporting.”
isolved HR Services also helps Mobile Assistant by reviewing employee communications and answering general HR and benefit questions that aren’t directed toward the broker but rather specific employee situations.
“I love being able to connect right into isolved with both the solutions and the services,” said Westphal. “I have a dedicated customer success manager who is a strategic partner helping me navigate what’s next.”
In addition to isolved HR Services, Mobile Assistant leverages several solutions within isolved People Cloud such as payroll, time, onboarding, COBRA and more. With these solutions, Mobile Assistant has created efficiencies in several areas including working with isolved to identify automation workflows.
Mobile Assistant uses isolved’s employee onboarding solution, for example, to provide a structured approach to delivering materials to new hires and ensuring nothing is lost or forgotten in the process. They even create mock employees to test their journey to ensure they are welcomed to the business in a positive way. Additional automation workflows they’ve created include paying Internet stipends, creating policy groups with specific corresponding rates applied and tracking overtime automatically.
The partnership between isolved and Mobile Assistant helped create these efficiencies but there was a roadblock initially.
“The only challenging thing that happened in our time with isolved was that the Network partner we worked with was acquired by isolved,” said Westphal. “There were some growing pains because when you rely on your Network partner, you really rely on them. When you’re working directly with isolved, you need to roll up your sleeves and know isolved. I appreciate it now, but it was a bit of a jolt. Becoming a direct customer has increased my knowledge of the setup. Every day I am learning more about the power of what isolved can do!”
“When our team thinks about top advantages of working with isolved, many agree isolved Time is among that list. We had no way of capturing people’s schedules, ensuring compliance against them and tracking PTO,” said Westphal. “PTO, for example, was tracked in spreadsheets and based on an honor system so Time allowed us to have more structure and control over this employee cost.
“The reporting mechanisms are also very valuable. During the height of COVID-19, isolved made it incredibly easy to apply for the Paycheck Protection Program and then apply for forgiveness. That to me was invaluable.”
Mobile Assistant managers also love that they can store documents in one place, confidentially. Prior to isolved, there were electronic or scanned versions of sensitive documents stored locally on computers or in emails. Now they are stored securely and confidentially – in one place.
“With both the solutions and the service, isolved has been a wonderful partner for Mobile Assistant,” said Westphal. “As isolved grows and Mobile Assistant grows too, we feel very confident in a future-proof partnership.”
In addition to benefits like providing a more modern employee experience, Mobile Assistant’s bottom-line impact of isolved People Cloud and isolved HR Services are estimated as the following for 100 employees over a three-year period:
- $120K by avoiding additional headcount
- $36K in HR productivity savings
- $21K reduced payroll administration labor costs
- $9K saved for accelerated onboarding
- $9K savings by avoiding erroneous benefit payments
- $5K saved with simplified compliance