By Joseph Campagna, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, founder of My Virtual HR Director. In HR since 1996, including time inside a large PEO. Updated October 2026.
There are two big claims that I make about my career and my expertise. The first, is that I have exponential experience in HR. 600 years to be exact. How can I say that? because early in my career, I cut my teeth on HR by working for a Professional Employer Organization. PEOs were so new back then, that nobody knew what they were. I had to explain my job and how the industry worked to just about everybody in my life.
I was a newly minted HR professional with a business degree and a lot of ambition. But I realized quicklu that college does not actually prepare most people for the day-to-day practical knowledge of a profession. I graduated knowing 3 different kinds of project management systems and TQM (Total Quality Management… Yes, I am that old). What I didn’t know was how to fill out an I-9 form, or what one was for that matter.
I was hired by a young PEO called EMI. I was lowballed on my salary. They wouldn’t budge even though I had already had two HR jobs prior. But it was an exciting opportunity, so I took it. I would be their one and only HR Field Representative. To this day, it was the least amount of pay I ever made for the most amount of work I have ever done (as someone else’s employee).
So where does 600 years of experience come from? Well, for the three years that I worked at the PEO before they made me supervisor of the department, I was the direct HR rep for about 200 companies. Most HR professionals woek for one company at a time. They gain the experience that comes along with doing HR in that industry under that company’s management and policies and for that specific employee population. Maybe the company has 30 employees, or 100, or 1000.
Being the HR professional in a PEO gave me the experience of dozens of industries, hundreds of company structures and policies and management philosophies, and upwards of 12,000 3mployees. So, 200 companies x 3 years of direct support = 600 years of a normal HRT person’s experience.
The second big claim that I make is that the prevelence of HR as a function of modern PEOs can be traced back to me. That is right. I take credit for PEOs marketing, selling, and providing HR services as an integral part of their service package.
This is the history of how HR went from an afterthought to a product the whole industry copied, told by someone who was there. It is also why my team knows where a PEO exit gets stuck.
Long before the big players like ADP and Paychex dove into the PEO world, I was working for that PEO named EMI, Employee Management, Inc. When I was hired as an HR Field Representative, my job was to go and visit our clients on a rotating basis. The main goal of my position was to keep clients out of HR trouble. Which really meant keeping us out of HR trouble.
In reality, the HR Field rep was a proactive customer support role but within a risk management framework. You see, there were not many established rules for PEOs at the time since the industry was new and regulation was thin if it existed at all. Most regulation came from lawsuits and we didn’t want to be the ones making the headlines. It was kind of like the Wild West, but with group benefit plans instead of saloons.
Because the PEO is a co-employer, it takes on liability along with the small company that is their client. So, to keep from getting sued, the PEO sent me out to visit them and uncover any liabilities that could sink them. It was effective in that I am an awesome customer service provider and the clients saw my visits as a real service from a PEO they otherwise rarely heard from.
But soon, I was inundated with compliance work as I uncovered mounds of risk in nearly every client visit. In an age of office work where PCs were a fairly new addition and e-mail was a rarely used enigma (“Why would I need electronic mail when I can just call them?”) I was a tech geek who loved experimenting with new technologies. Knowing enough about Word and Excel templates to be dangerous, I began making myself primordial automations. Think of it as AI without the “A”.
The templates I made allowed me to multiply my and my colleague’s work capacity. I could handle many requests for administrative and compliance work by simply changing the variables and ensuring the boilerplate was compliant. My clients loved it.
But I noticed that when I got to a newly signed client, they didn’t know who I was or why I was bothering them at their worksite. The sales people were obsessed with selling insurance plans and completely ignored HR. Actually, none of them really even understood HR. None of the salespeople mentioned I would be coming out to meet the client. But I realized that a PEO needs HR to survive and to satisfy its co-employer responsibilities. So, I started meeting with the salespeople and explaining the competitive advantage that they were missing. I showed them that they could add HR into their offering without increasing the cost at all and getting their prospects over the finish line with the HR compliance value-add. Prospective clients understood it right away and recognized the value.
When the VP of Sales got wind of the large list of template deliverables I had created, she was ecstatic and made HR a large part of the marketing and selling process at EMI. Marketing collateral was printed about the HR offering and added to the sales pitch. We hired 3 more field reps. Guess who recruited, trained, and supervised them. Yes, me!
From there, EMI merged with a company in Florida called PTI. I forget exactly what that stood for, but likely Payroll Technology or something else uninspired. The point is, the PEO doubled in size and the merged company became EPiX. I went down to Florida to hire two more HR reps based out of the Tampa office, thus expanding the trend down there. That added two more to my team. I trained and supervised them as well.
With the merger momentum and good leadership, EPiX grew quickly and its HR function was arguably the leading reason for its growth. Other PEOs had to come up with HR offerings in order to compete. This sent HR into the spotlight as a valued service of Professional Employer Organizations.
Eventually, I left EPiX for a Fortune 100 company. The CEO of EPiX sold the company (not because I left… he got rich and I didn’t. He is a business genius, I cannot deny that.) EPiX was acquired by one of the largest national PEOs: Staff Leasing. And the acquisition transformed both companies into Gevity HR. You read that right… Gevity *HR*. Not ‘Gevity Management’ or ‘Gevity Benefits’, or ‘Gevity PEO’… HR! That is why I can say that the HR function was arguably the biggest reason for EPiX’s growth. HR that had actively been ignored by the PEO industry when I started, was now a name-branded feature.
The icing on the cake: in 2009, Gevity HR was acquired by TriNet Group. If you are here reading this article, you may today be a customer of TriNet.
So there it is. To all the employees of TriNet (and Gevity before it)… You are welcome.
How this experience helps you leave your PEO
Most HR consultants that help with a PEO exit have only seen a PEO from the outside. I spent years inside one. So we know what a PEO actually does for you behind the contract, including the pros, cons, and caveats.
It also means we know where exits stall. We put the steps in the right order, as laid out in our PEO exit checklist, so nothing falls between the cracks of the old arrangement and the new one.
And we do the work with you. We guide the process, connect you with trusted partners for insurance and retirement, back up your records, and then take care of your HR and payroll. You become the only employer again with no co-employment, and the hidden costs the PEO was charging are no longer a persistent enigma.
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This page provides general information, not legal, tax, or benefits advice. Every PEO contract and plan is different. Review yours with qualified advisors before acting.
