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Few small businesses have the capability to scale their benefits and HR services to match their ambitious growth plans. By providing such growth-enabling services to this market, HR technology company Namely hopes to make a name for itself.
In fact, the company has most recently become a licensed broker in all 50 states as part of its efforts to become "an end-to-end HR technology platform for small- to mid-size businesses," according to founder and CEO Matt Straz.
"We want to give them the tools and technologies that Fortune 500 businesses have had for years. We want to provide them with a lightweight configurable product, but give them all the data they need to compete against larger companies," he says.
The company's benefits offering launched in March and includes medical, dental, life and some ancillary benefits. Founded in 2012, Straz says Namely didn't set out to be a brokerage from the get-go, but customer demand has helped shape the company's product.
HR solution
In fact, it was Straz's own desire for an easy-to-use HR solution that prompted the idea for Namely.
In the early 2000s, while working at WPP Digital, which acquired his first startup, a digital marketing agency, Straz says the idea for Namely started to crystallize.
"I'm not an HR person. I didn't come at it from the HR or benefits angle originally. I had been in environments working with small- to mid-size businesses, where as an employee and as a manager I didn't have access to people data. That data existed in benefits systems. It existed in payroll systems. But mostly, it existed in spreadsheets," he says. "That always seemed strange to me. I didn't see why there wasn't an easy way to do staff allocations and have access to key data."
In 2010, Straz's second startup company was acquired by AOL and, he says, he noticed the same thing happening there.
"Here was another creative business with lots of different subsidiaries or teams and still, no real quick and easy way to access data. This was important to these types of businesses, because they were very creative, they were growing fast, and people had lots of different skill sets. But as an employee, I was still logging in to maybe four...