Michael VanDervort (00:23)
It’s 6.45 a.m. Your shift supervisor needs to fill a machine operator vacancy. Two employees want it. One has more seniority, but the other has better attendance. Article 12, section three of your union contract says something about seniority shall govern when qualifications are equal. But what does equal actually mean? You’re not sure. Should you call your lawyer? They won’t answer at this hour and the meter will start to run. You can ask chatGPT instead about seniority clause interpretation.

It gives what seems like a pretty solid answer. So here’s what happens. You wing it. You award the position to the employee with stellar attendance. Six months later, you find yourself sitting in arbitration and the arbitrator rules you violated the union contract. Now you’re dealing with back pay fees, total damage, $32,000. Not the best situation. This is what we call advice anxiety. When expert help costs enough that you avoid it until small problems become expensive disasters.

Fortune 500 companies solved this problem decades ago. They had internal labor relations departments and HR departments that handle these daily operational questions, saving their attorneys for actual legal work. But what if you’re not Fortune 500? What if you can’t justify a full-time labor relations director? That’s what we’re going to talk about today, how fractional labor relations gives mid-sized companies the same infrastructure that big companies rely on without the full-time price tag.

I’m Michael VanDervort and I’m here with my co-host, Phil Wilson to talk about why more companies are rethinking how they support their managers when it comes to union relationships and even employee relations. So, hey Phil, welcome to the Left To Boom show. How’s the day?

Phil Wilson (02:03)
Good Michael, although I think I’m sweating after hearing that cold open because that is a nightmare scenario that gets played out every day in unionized operations.

Michael VanDervort (02:15)
Yeah, and as a consulting company, we help people with this kind of stuff. But we started thinking about it, I don’t know if it’s new, but we started thinking about it in terms of fractional labor relations, right? So why don’t you start out and tell us, when we talk about fractional labor relations, what does that mean? And why is this model seemingly more relevant right now, maybe than it was in years past?

Phil Wilson (02:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well, I think it is new. mean, I, yeah, when we, this is, this is obviously work that we’ve done for, years where we’ve, you we help unionized companies. It’s maybe not what we’re best known for, but we work with a lot of unionized companies. and this idea of fractional, you know, fractional HR, fractional marketing, fractional legal, fractional finance, like that. There’s, there’s a lot of different areas where this fractional model.

Michael VanDervort (03:00)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (03:07)
has, has launched, but, I, I haven’t found anywhere that is talking about labor relations in this kind of fractional concept. And the more that we started looking at it, the more sense it made, like this is, this might be the best place in throughout an organization where fractional really makes a lot of sense. It’s super specialized. the.

Michael VanDervort (03:14)
Right.

Phil Wilson (03:32)
The cost of getting the answers wrong are huge and the traditional model for a mid-market company, like we talk a little bit about the Fortune 500, big companies solve this problem. But if you are a mid-sized company or God forbid a smaller employer with a union, then you are really stuck between this rock and hard place of I need advice.

but I never really know for sure when I need it and it’s expensive to ask for it. And so I, I, I will, I will talk myself into, well, this isn’t one of those, this isn’t one those problems. That’s big enough to need to make an appointment with my lawyer and to get that call scheduled and then to, to, for them to go research it. And I think I can just wing this one. And the problem is you’re not a very good judge of when

Michael VanDervort (04:16)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (04:28)
you need legal advice and when you need to have that lawyer on the phone. And so that’s the place where fractional labor relations makes a lot of sense is that you have somebody that you’re not afraid to call. It’s prepaid, so there’s no additional bill. You just call any time that you want to, but that person that you talk to has the expertise to either to just give you the answer, like,

This will solve this issue. This isn’t a legal issue. This is just here’s how to interpret that clause in your contract. It’s an operational question or we need to get the we need to get legal on the phone because this is a legal issue and you’re going to want to get legal advice about this.

Michael VanDervort (05:02)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I I mentioned to you this morning that I didn’t actually realize until last night when I was thinking about this show and getting ready for it, that like 20 years ago, I did Fractional Labor Relations for a year. didn’t, nobody called it that then. I did bargaining. I bargained to collect the bargaining agreement, first time agreement. So back simultaneously with different unions, different units in the same facility. So I was traveling, you every other week or so.

Phil Wilson (05:24)
Mm-hmm.

Michael VanDervort (05:39)
spending through three days, you know, and we got through the contracts, took several months as those contracts do. And we weren’t even trying to like stall or anything. We were trying to settle it. You know, it was a relatively normal agreement. It wasn’t one we were trying to, you know, slow bargain or any of that kind of stuff. So it still took months. And then I did other project work and I did that for a year, you know, but it was 20 hours, one week, 30 hours in acts, blah, blah, blah. But it really was fractional labor relations.

Phil Wilson (06:01)
Mm.

Michael VanDervort (06:05)
had the company that I did that work on behalf of had to hire a labor attorney to sit up there, it would have been way more. And as it worked out, I was kind of embedded in the team. So it was great. And it was a very effective method for the particular client that I was working with for that one year. And this kind of goes to that, like that, you mentioned the Fortune 500 versus the smaller size organizations, something of an infrastructure gap, right? Resources and all of that. can’t justify

Phil Wilson (06:29)
Mm-hmm.

Michael VanDervort (06:32)
that kind of specialized expertise to be sitting on the payroll for year round, right? So this is great way to kind of get around that, right? So when you talk about that infrastructure gap, what’s missing?

Phil Wilson (06:47)
Well, go back to the example, a Fortune 500 company, have a director of labor relations who has years and years of experience dealing with all aspects of working with a unionized company. They have probably labor relations managers that also have a lot of experience dealing with this. They have in-house legal expertise that also has years of experience dealing with this. And they have outside counsel who will be the best of the best.

who they also can rely on, right? So when a plant manager has that same 6.45 a.m. call that you talked about in the open, they have like an army of people that they can call for advice.

Michael VanDervort (07:29)
There’s a

whole group of people that they can consult with and get an answer pretty quickly,

Phil Wilson (07:35)
Yeah. And most of them are other employees in the company and they, won’t hesitate to call them. Right. So that’s, that model works. That model works great. The problem is if you’re a mid-market company and you only have like one or two or three unionized locations, the, the, the cost of trying to replicate that, I mean, you wouldn’t hire all those people, but the cost of even, even hiring one person who’s got the expertise to be able to

Michael VanDervort (07:42)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (08:04)
to really know cold, you know, the answers to most of the operational questions and then also be able to tell you, this is, this requires legal, that person’s a 200, $250,000, you know, fully loaded salary. And, ⁓ you know, it doesn’t make any sense to even try to find that person. When you found that person, they don’t want your job anyway, right? You don’t have enough work for them to do. like it’s, so that’s why the mid-market companies are stuff.

Michael VanDervort (08:19)
Mm.

Phil Wilson (08:33)
And so what we’re trying to solve is that problem, right? When you have an operational issue related to a collective bargaining agreement or some issue with the steward or, or, or grievance, you know, you can pick up the phone and call any time of day or night. And you’re going to get an expert on the phone who will either be able to answer the question over the, off the top of their head. Cause they’ve dealt with it for, for years and years and years.

Like our consultants have worked inside fortune 500 labor relations departments, right? So, so you’re going to get that answer or they’re going to know immediately. Look, we need to get legal advice on this. And then, and then you, and then you know, like you should be talking to a lawyer that gives you confidence that the answer is always going to be right. You’re going to be using your legal resources when it’s

Michael VanDervort (09:06)
Right.

Phil Wilson (09:30)
you know, judicious to use them and when you need to use them, you’re not going to be over using them. So the other problem that a mid-sized company has, if you don’t have that kind of a resource, you know, and you don’t have anxiety about making that call, you will rack up a lot of legal bills over things that are really operational questions that to be honest, the labor lawyer doesn’t really want to answer either because it’s like it’s not even a legal question. It’s really just more.

Michael VanDervort (09:50)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (10:00)
you know, a run your business type of question and like they’re, they’re going to answer it, but like they have to bill you cause you’re like, you’re, know, that’s it’s time that they otherwise could be spend doing something legal. like it’s, it’s really, it’s, it’s, it’s this in-between spot that is just a gap and it’s, it’s a, it’s a resource gap. Mid-market companies don’t really have access to it. And so this is, this is the problem that, that we’re trying to solve.

Michael VanDervort (10:09)
Mm-hmm.

And I think in those mid-market companies, leaders like you said, know, somebody gets a call and they got to decide, do I call the lawyer and spend, you know, hundreds of dollars an hour for this call or not? Or I can check with chat GPT, like we said in the example. The tendency is to not, you want to not jump in the deep end if you can. If you think you got it and it makes sense, but that doesn’t always go well.

Phil Wilson (10:35)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Michael VanDervort (10:56)
So there’s, think there’s a built in hesitation when you lack the resources that you’re talking about a Fortune 500 company having. So it’s not bad intent or bad leadership, but hesitation that drives a lot of preventable labor relations problems in these situations, right?

Phil Wilson (11:12)
Yeah. Well, and look, to be clear, this is not about like lawyers are expensive. Yeah, we’re expensive too. Like it’s not like this isn’t a, this isn’t about like, like lawyers are expensive or they charge too much or anything like that. It’s that if, if you know that the meter is going to start running when you make the call, you are having to make a decision at that point about, I, am I going to start the meter running?

Michael VanDervort (11:18)
Right.

Phil Wilson (11:40)
And and then when you’re in that spot, like you’re you’re stuck with having to decide is this big enough? Look, it’s not just about the fees. You’re like, I don’t want to feel like an idiot when I get the lawyer on the phone and they and they like tell me, you know, in two seconds what the answer is and that I feel dumb. Right. Like so. So it’s it’s partially that as well. Like you’re you’re you will talk yourself out of making a call that maybe you should make.

Because you just don’t have enough experience and you don’t have enough knowledge of like where the watchouts and the traps are so that that’s what this is about It’s about trying to take the anxiety of making that call take that away If it’s an operational question and not a legal question it gets answered if it is a legal question It gets elevated and and then you know and we know like this is not a dumb question So that’s that’s what this is about and then at the point that you call the lawyer

Like you should you should happily pay the fees right like they are going to represent you. Well, they are going to litigate your case for you. They’re going to want to make sure that the case is set up properly so that so that you can defend it. Well, that’s so that and that’s the kind of stuff that having an expert helping kind of get you to that point saves a lot of resources saves time and then you’re going to be paying you know fees but

Not they’re going to be way way less than what you would have paid if you let the little issue turn into the giant arbitration case that’s going to cost you a hundred grand

Michael VanDervort (13:17)
And sometimes, like sometimes even even when you have what seems to be like a pretty logical case, not a legal case, but just a logical situation in that you’re trying to make a decision about, say, keeping a plant location open or closed because of the, you know, it’s productive or not. And I remember a specific situation I was dealing with where we had, we were in a multi-employer pension plan and there was pension withdrawal liability and nobody, nobody in the company was thinking about that. and

Phil Wilson (13:30)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Right. Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Michael VanDervort (13:44)
And we talked to an attorney who said, has anybody checked on the withdrawal liability from central state’s pension plan? And we were like, ⁓ no. And he’s like, it could be significant. And it was like $2 million, which, you know, it was a big shift and, and caused us to rethink some of the stuff that they were thinking of.

Phil Wilson (13:51)
Oops.

Mm-hmm.

Yes. I mean, sometimes

it’s a deal killer, right? It’s like, I’ve seen it, I’ve seen it lots and lots of times. And that’s the kind of thing that an expert, they just, they automatically know that, you know, they’ve, they’ve been through enough of these to know like, ⁓ we need to check the contract and look on if there’s a, you know, defined benefit pension plan in there that most other people, especially in mid market businesses, they would never even think about.

Michael VanDervort (14:27)
Right.

Right. And this was actually, this came into the existing organization through an acquisition, right? So they kind of bought, and they didn’t even really find it in their own due diligence. It was kind of thereafter that laying there buried on the ground. So I think, you know, you’ve talked about kind of the human inclination not to want to feel, you know, kind of like stupid, which I don’t, it’s just, don’t want somebody to think you don’t know what’s going on. You also,

Phil Wilson (14:35)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Michael VanDervort (14:52)
as a manager, an operational person, not an HR practitioner, a lot of times you’re budget sensitive and all that sort of thing. And I know we’re not trying to talk about cost, but that kind of, those all enter this equation, right? So what happens or what’s the risk when supervisors try to handle contract interpretation or discipline decisions without having, without.

reaching out to this type of support. I we kind of mentioned a hypothetical, you know, with arbitration payout. What are the other risks?

Phil Wilson (15:21)
Mm hmm. Well, and by the way, in addition to kind of like, I don’t want to feel dumb. It’s also like, I don’t want to feel like I’m wasting this lawyer’s time. Like this lawyer’s got a bunch of other clients. it usually takes a little time to like get them on the phone because they’re really, really busy. And like, yeah, so that’s another reason that you might not make the call. And so yes, there’s all kinds of costs to these decisions. The problem is it’s not obvious.

Michael VanDervort (15:30)
Great. Great.

Phil Wilson (15:50)
Like which one is a potential really big expense and which one’s not and winging it you get away with like enough of the time you get away with it enough of the time that you you you can’t really discern like with like which one should I call about which one I shouldn’t shouldn’t call about so so obviously like arbitration cases that’s a that’s a really big one and those have dollars attached to them so if you get into a grievance

Michael VanDervort (15:58)
A lot of the time, yeah.

Phil Wilson (16:17)
And you’ve already like violated the contract and it’s clear. You know, you’re either going to have to settle that grievance for, for, for something, or if you continue to fight it, then you’re rolling the dice on getting in front of an arbitrator and that’s got legal fees. That’s got whatever the arbitrator awards. So that’s, that’s one big expense. The other expenses that may not be quite as obvious are, you know, you can erode your own contract. You know, you can.

things that you have argued hard and bargained hard for to get into your agreement can end up like going away because you weren’t kind of paying attention to, past practice, you know, termination decisions might not even go to arbitration. You can, you terminate somebody that might, that might go to the EEOC or might, you know, it can go like outside of your organization and there’s fees and costs associated with those decisions as well. and then just like the organizational

Michael VanDervort (17:02)
Hmm.

Phil Wilson (17:12)
You can get, we just talked about, you can have a deal that you’ve spent a lot of time on and then there’s like, ⁓ this giant deal breaking poison pill that’s in there that you never knew about that if you had known about, either just would have not spent all the time and effort going through the deal or that would have at least been part of the calculation. So that’s another place that that happens. Those are some of the ones that ⁓ sort of immediately leap to mind.

Michael VanDervort (17:38)
Yeah, yeah, makes sense. So we’ve kind of talked around it, but let’s talk for a second specifically how a fractional labor relations model works. So walk us through what a company gets with fractional labor relations if they come to us for that type of service or someone else, and why is unlimited access such a critical feature?

Phil Wilson (17:45)
Mm.

Yeah, so we have tiers based on, and it makes sense, right? Some people have a lower amount of need. They’ve had a union for a long time. They already have a team that handle the contract negotiations, so they don’t need somebody to negotiate their contract. But what they really need is this expert that they can call all the time. So that’s tier one. And that basically is just, we are your phone a friend on any

labor relations issue that comes up and then we help you triage the, we help you either answer things or we help you triage the things that need to go up to legal. So that’s, ⁓ that’s kind of tier one. So tier two company is somebody that is a smaller, maybe only has one to maybe three unions and also might have, so their, needs are higher. They’re going to have more grievances to look at. They’re going to have, you know, more, ⁓

You know, other issues to discuss. So that’s sort of a middle tier organization that could include assistance during collective bargaining negotiations, whether we are advising the team that’s bargaining or potentially even helping you bargain the contract as a first chair. And then there’s tier three organizations that are, they’re probably on the cusp of being able to bring in house some, some talent you might actually have.

You know, like a labor relations manager or somebody, cause you have maybe, maybe you have like six or 10 unionized locations and that, we are, you know, we might bargain a handful of those contracts. We, so those are, those are like the tiers that we have. The thing that’s common to all the tiers is unlimited access. That’s what gets you out of the health trap or the advice anxiety, you know, so you feel comfortable at any point.

to call us and to ask for advice and we’re always there to give it to you. That’s what’s common and that is what the Fortune 500 have all the time.

Michael VanDervort (20:03)
And I think, we’re not, mean, in a lot of companies will say, we have a labor, have a labor lawyer, have an employment lawyer, whatever. We’re not really trying to replace that labor lawyer, nor steal their…

Phil Wilson (20:09)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

You have

to have them like it’s, you know, absolutely like, you know, we, you, you probably, if you have us, engage as a, as a fractional labor relations expert, you probably end up having more calls with your lawyer, but your overall legal expense is not going to be as much because you’re not, you’re, you’re going to be calling, you’re going to be calling early and you’re going to be calling at a point where, look, this case might

Michael VanDervort (20:18)
Right.

Phil Wilson (20:43)
go a little bit down the road for, you know, for legal issue. But if we had waited, it would have been a giant arbitration case. Right. So, so there, it’s not that you don’t talk to your lawyer. You talk to your lawyer every time that you have a legal issue. Like that’s what, that’s what you should be doing. so it’s, it’s absolutely not in any way like a replacement for your labor lawyer. If anything, you’re going to utilize them more. but

Michael VanDervort (20:51)
Right.

Phil Wilson (21:10)
you’re going to be utilizing them for proactive advice at early stages in things. Exactly right.

Michael VanDervort (21:14)
more effectively, hopefully.

Yeah. The fractional LR support kind of is, it augments the lack of infrastructure that a Fortune 500 company has built in because of the resource. So we, don’t need 40 hours a week, but you might need 15 or 20. We’re that 15 or 20 hour bridge, I guess, is how I think of it. We’re gonna release a white paper soon, very soon, I guess.

Phil Wilson (21:27)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Michael VanDervort (21:44)
And in the white paper, you lay out a cost comparison that we’re releasing on the topic. Why does this model make financial and strategic sense for smaller mid-sized companies?

Phil Wilson (21:55)
Well, for most companies and, we’re actually, we’re also simultaneous to this, you know, we’re running a benchmarking, a labor benchmarking, study, but the, you know, the, the research suggests, first of all, that companies, know, mid market companies are spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to manage this area with, and that they could be spending

You know, a fraction of that, if you do the fractional model and again, that reduction in expense is basically stopping the blow up things that become really expensive. Like most, most arbitration cases aren’t, you know, a hundred grand, but if, the, but the right case could be that or, or way more than that. So, you know, avoiding, avoiding those, for a, you know, small amount of money.

Michael VanDervort (22:32)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (22:49)
is going to pay off like wildly. you know, the return on investment, I think for most companies and look, fractional doesn’t make sense for every company. So you can actually go in. have like an ROI tool and this benchmarking data. Like you can figure out based on this is how much we spend. This is what our grievances look like. This is how many arbitrations that we’ve had. You can do the math for your own company.

Michael VanDervort (22:59)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (23:14)
and you can decide, maybe this is something we should take a look at or nah, this isn’t really a fit. Like it’s, that is knowable.

Michael VanDervort (23:23)
Well, and like, you you talk about costs, like you said, like, you know, back payment or an arbitration back pay or whatever. when you say you have a ULP over a termination or, whatever goes to hearing and got all the legal that you start adding up the legal fees, the remedies, if you lose, cetera, that that becomes a big nut, which could perhaps been avoided had you had in-house talent or a fractional person who kind of knew enough to keep you out of trouble in the first place, which is basically what we’re trying to do, I think. ⁓

Phil Wilson (23:32)
Mm-hmm.

And

it’s not just the dollars, right? It’s also the amount of time and headache and hours that you could spend doing something productive when you’re helping gather documents and all the stuff that goes along with a legal case. So it’s not even just like a straight up dollars and cents issue. And if you have somebody who’s a labor relations expert who’s seen a whole lot

of situations go down, you know, they can help you find things that, well, if we did the thing that you want to do, if we did it the way that you’re suggesting, that is for sure not going to work. You’re going to have an arbitration case. You’re probably never going to accomplish what you’re going to do. But hey, what I have seen work is why don’t we try something like this? So it’s, it’s not just keep you out of jail, but it’s also accomplished the business thing that you want to accomplish.

Michael VanDervort (24:36)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (24:47)
without creating a labor relations nightmare.

Michael VanDervort (24:50)
Right, because the more you can keep things level and the better off you are in your relationship. You’re not stirring angst with the union. I think that kind of answered the question I was going to ask beyond cost, what changes immediately when supervisors know they can call early instead of guessing or kind of winging it, as you said earlier. Is there anything else that comes to mind related to that question that you would mention?

Phil Wilson (24:56)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, right.

I mean, you just mentioned, but the relationship with the union, right? Like they also don’t like being surprised, you know, having like supervisors make stupid decisions that they then have to go, you know, listen to their member come up and then they’re going to have to file a grievance. like that’s, you know, the more time they spend dealing with that stuff, you know, that’s a pain for them as well. Having somebody who knows what they’re doing, who cares about the relationship, uh,

Michael VanDervort (25:16)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (25:42)
Yeah, we, you know, we want to have a good relationship with the union. And if they know they’re dealing with someone who’s an expert now, you know, your mileage may vary and your union may vary. So, so not every union is as invested in this idea. like if you, if you, but, but most of them are right. Like they would rather, they would rather their expert talk to your expert and try to like work. there a way that we could work this out without having to have a big, you know, legal case about it? And

Michael VanDervort (26:11)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (26:11)
Most

of the time you can get that worked out, but you want to have somebody there that like they respect that they know has, you know, seen this movie before and knows how it works like that. So that’s another big advantage is it helps your day to day relationship with your business partner. This union it helps in that relationship as well.

Michael VanDervort (26:33)
Yeah, so you mentioned some of the tools about trying to decide if this makes sense and kind of the assessment you can do off the website. Well, let’s talk about fit and implementation for a minute and then we’ll wrap up. a couple of combined things. What indicators tell a company that they’re a strong candidate for fractional LR support? And then assuming that somebody says, yeah, we want this.

Phil Wilson (26:39)
Mm-hmm.

Michael VanDervort (26:59)
What does that look like in actuality? Do we provide an individual? it a, so kind of explain that for what people would expect to receive if they signed on board to be a client.

Phil Wilson (27:05)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. yeah. So, so, you know, first of all, the, the, companies that are good candidates are companies that are spending a lot of money in this area. And that could be over, you know, a lot of different things. So either you’re, you have, you know, you might have labor relations talent that just isn’t very good at this, right. Or that could use this extra support. you have legal fees, you have your experience with arbitrations and.

Michael VanDervort (27:32)
Mm.

Phil Wilson (27:39)
grievances. So, so like you add up how much money are we spending in either FTEs or outside expenses outside experts? How much, how much money are we spending every year on that? Okay. So that is, that’s, that’s the number one way to know whether this is going to be a value to you because fractional a relations is if it is like a fraction of the amount that you are spending, that spend should come down.

And depending on how much you’re spending, it may come down dramatically. So that’s, that’s number one. The, the, the other side of that is just your results. So like, are you, are you having, are you losing a lot of arbitration cases? Do you have a lot of grievances? So, so those are the kinds of things that if you have an expert that’s there that can deal with the union and the union knows that they know what they’re doing, you know, that you can get to a point where it’s like, look guys, before you file that first step,

Michael VanDervort (28:09)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (28:36)
call me and let’s try to figure out if we can figure, you know, let’s figure out a way if we can just avoid the grievance in the first place. So your, your number of grievances should go down. The number of those grievances that go to arbitration should go down. When you go to arbitration, you should win. like those are the, those are the kind of big numbers that you should be looking at to know if this is a fit for you or not. And then just if dealing with the union is a pain, you know, for you, a pain point for you.

Michael VanDervort (28:37)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (29:04)
That’s another sign that like this could be useful and look, you don’t have to do it forever, right? You could try it, you know, do a year and see if the results are, you know, how, like, how is it? Is your life better? Are you spending less money? it’s, you know, that is, that’s knowable. will, and again, we’ve got a tool that lets, tells you the answer, right? And we’re not, you know, there’s a lot of companies that if you come to us and go like, well,

Yeah, this is a bit, this is our spend and we’ll say, well, yeah, you’re not, you’re not a fit for this. Like you’ll spend more with us than what you’re spending right now. So whatever you’re doing, just keep doing that. so that, that’s sort of like who it’s a fit for. And then, you know, if you say, yes, okay, I want to do this. Like what, what does that look like? Well, we onboard you. So it starts off with a very kind of in-depth couple of week process of

Michael VanDervort (29:37)
Mm-hmm.

Phil Wilson (29:57)
We get to know you, we look at your labor agreements, we get to know your leadership team. Ideally, we also come out and ⁓ conduct managing a union shop training with your leaders. A big challenge a lot of companies have is they don’t spend any time or energy training their supervisors and training their management team on dealing with the union and working in a unionized represented environment. So if you don’t train them on that,

then yeah, of course you’re gonna have a lot of problems. So that helps us get to know you really well. It helps us get to know your team and your supervisors. So that’s the onboarding process. And then you are typically assigned one person who’s gonna be your key contact, and that is who your first call will go to. But we’re fortunate. We have a number of super talented, again, like former,

way higher up than fortune 500, labor folks that have done this for years and years and years, those, those, you know, that team can also sort of jump in. like, if the person that you want to talk to is, is in bargaining, there’s still somebody who has, you know, decades of experience in this that can take that call and can kind of get you at least far enough through that situation until the person who really knows you, you know, inside and out can get to. So we, we kind of have,

Constructed this fortune 500 labor relations department that we just rent to you instead of you having to like Buy it for a full price

Michael VanDervort (31:29)
Right. Which, by the way, is a very frequent occurrence when you have a regular labor lawyer or employment lawyer who is often in bargaining with another client and you have a, you have a, you know, you have something going on. I just had a decent petition drop at my location for the first time in my life. I need to talk to somebody. They have a colleague call. So there’s a backup. So we have, we have backup. Right. So to.

Phil Wilson (31:39)
Exactly.

Yeah. And I mean, and the

challenge with that is like a lot of times in that situation, the backup is, a, you know, is an associate who might not have very much experience. It depends obviously, or, mean, you could get another partner, but like the partners tend to, mean, labor law partners are really busy. like, so you, you, yeah, you, you’re, you, again, that just comes down to like, you have to, and it goes into that decision calculus, right? That’s the help trap is well, you know,

Who am I going to talk to? How long is it going to take me to talk to him? All that sort of stuff. So that’s our solve. We are, you know, we’re dedicated to getting answers back to you as soon as possible. We’re, we’re really making every effort to kind of, like I said, give you the, the fortune 500 labor relations department that mid market companies just don’t have access to.

Michael VanDervort (32:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So we’ve alluded to a white paper coming out soon. We’re doing this podcast, which will probably drop next week. I know that it’s like we’re recording it now, but it’ll drop soon. We have a landing page dedicated to FractionalLR. We don’t need to the URL or you don’t need to spout that out because I’ll put it in the notes. what else? What else has come in? What else should people be thinking about? You mentioned the benchmark survey that we’re doing. You might want to highlight that a little bit more.

Phil Wilson (32:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think the number one thing is that benchmark survey. So if you are a unionized company and you’re listening to the podcast, please contribute to the benchmark, ⁓ survey. There’s, ⁓ the it’s, it’s, takes about seven minutes to fill it out, but your data gets, it’s anonymized. So no, no one knows like who said what on the survey, but it compare it lets us compare all unionized companies that participate in the survey.

You can compare to people in your industry. You compare to people who have the same union that you have. And it allows us to really, for the first time ever have just a robust database of what are the experiences of all the companies that have unions. And, and that will only grow if, if we get as many people to participate in it as we can. We just launched the survey. We’ve already had like really.

you know, really good experience with people taking it. ⁓ but yeah, if you see this, please take the benchmarking survey. And, there’s, we’ve got a couple bribes in there for participating, but you’ll get a copy of our, you know, managing in a union shop toolkit. if you want a copy of my book, managing the union shop, I’ll sign it for you and send it to you for free. so if you just participate in that, we really appreciate it. It’s good for the community. And then, once we have.

robust enough data set, anybody that participates, you’re going to get an individualized report that says this is how you compare to the benchmark data. So that’s a great value. And then we’re going to be repeating that survey yearly going forward. But yeah, if you could participate in the benchmark survey, that would be great. We also have this ROI tool. So when we post the webinar, we’ll put in the notes a place where if you want to go see

you know, kick the tires a little bit and see if fractional labor relations is a fit for your company. You can, you can take a look at that too.

Michael VanDervort (35:05)
All right, I think that wraps us up, unless you had anything else you wanted to add as final thought.

Phil Wilson (35:11)
no, I just, we’re really excited to, you know, again, this isn’t, it’s, it’s not like we haven’t been doing this, but really thinking about sort of how this relates to kind of this fractional thing that, that is kind of happening across, you know, pretty much all the other pieces of organizations, but this part hasn’t really been serviced, properly or service this well. So I’m excited that we’re able to.

offer this to the companies that it’s a fit for, I think it’s really a game changer.

Michael VanDervort (35:45)
thanks, Phil. We’ll chat again soon. Take care.

Phil Wilson (35:48)
Yeah, thanks, Michael.