Tref Farmer, Shareholder
The founders of Farmer and Betts met while in college and created a thriving business in the three states that they live and work in; Washington, Oregon, and Colorado. Now, through a national sales force, their business is growing from Illinois to Florida and the challenges keep coming.
Jessica Schick, Manager of Operations, is charged with ensuring that this growing element of the workforce is on the same page. She has been with the company for almost 20 years and has seen challenging times, especially in the 2009 crash. But now, with national expansion, she sees a different challenge: “Balancing the number of sales with the number of administrators. One of the questions we ponder is how far do we stretch our team before adding more?”
Remote employees are a hot topic and a possible solution to expanding sales; however, two of the challenges that come with remote employees are oversight and uniformity. Schick knew that moving to PensionPro to help increase uniformity was going to be met with some resistance. “People probably felt like it was a waste of time—they didn’t have to do it before, why should they do it now?”
Now, three years in, there is a true sense of not turning back. “PensionPro passes on wisdom and guides new employees, ensuring they are doing things thoroughly,” says Schick. PensionPro helps with a less obvious benefit of having standardized and unified processes through training. Each new person that comes into the firm can be trained using PensionPro projects as work guides.
The future plan for Farmer and Betts is definitely more growth. Shareholder Tref Farmer states, “Our mission is to expand the number of employers who maintain a quality retirement plan. Don’t bank on social security, get your retirement going now. We are really invested in our employees. Giving them more opportunities is a large part of what drives our growth.”
