The Clearwater, Florida firm founded in August 1997 continues to run HR administration, payroll, benefits and HCM technology for midsize employers, with founder Norman LeClair arguing that much of what the market calls HR outsourcing does not actually remove the work.
-- Corban OneSource, a managed service provider that takes over HR administration, payroll, benefits administration and HR technology for midsize employers across the United States and Canada, has entered its thirtieth year of operation. The company was founded on August 14, 1997 by Norman LeClair, who leads it today as Chief Stewardship Officer. It works with clients across 22 industries.
Few companies get that far. Of the private sector establishments that opened in the year ending March 1994, 13.1 percent were still operating three decades later, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics survival data.
Corban OneSource runs a fully managed model rather than an advisory or software one. It delivers HR outsourcing as one coordinated function instead of a set of separately purchased modular pieces, including managed payroll and HCM technology management on platforms such as ADP Workforce Now and Paylocity. Client companies stay the employer of record, and the arrangement carries no co-employment.
The company describes itself in two ways that it treats as inseparable. It is a human resources outsourcer, or HRO. It runs on a managed service provider model, or MSP, a term borrowed from IT services, where a provider operates a function on the client's behalf rather than handing over tools or staff for the client to direct.
The name is the argument. One source for HR, payroll, benefits and the HCM platform, instead of four vendors and an internal employee coordinating between them.
LeClair said that distinction gets blurred more often than the industry admits.
"A great deal of what gets sold as HR outsourcing is not true outsourcing but rather staff augmentation with a generic name," LeClair said. "Someone sends you people, or someone sends you a platform, and the work still sits with your HR director at seven o'clock on a Thursday night. Moving the paperwork to a different desk in the same building is not outsourcing it. No process improvement, no proactive approach to making things better, just a semi-anonymous body in a seat somewhere in the world doing what they were told and nothing more."
The other place the work fails to move, LeClair said, is technology. Midsize employers commonly license a human capital management platform, complete the implementation, and then find that owning the software and running it are separate jobs. Corban OneSource administers ADP Workforce Now and Paylocity for its clients directly, including day-to-day configuration and employee support, rather than handing over access and a help desk number.
"Every HR leader I meet can name the least strategic and most time consuming tasks on their plate in about four seconds," LeClair said. "What most of them cannot explain is why they are still holding onto it. Twenty-nine years in, that is still the first conversation we have."
The company points to one engagement as an illustration. A company backed by private equity, preparing to double in size through acquisition, had a capable HCM platform that had been implemented poorly. Onboarding new employees ran as long as two weeks, candidates accepted other offers before the paperwork cleared, and some employees started work before their benefits were set up. Corban OneSource re-implemented the system, consolidated vendors and rebuilt the onboarding, screening and compliance workflows. Onboarding dropped to 48 hours.
"The tail was wagging the dog," LeClair said of that engagement. "They had manipulated the business to fit the software instead of configuring the software to serve the business."
The circumstances that bring companies in are consistent, according to the company: a business scaling up or down quickly, a change of benefits administrator, payroll errors that reached employees, or an HR team that has lost people and cannot absorb the work. The trigger is operational rather than strategic, which is part of why the buying conversation almost always involves the HR leader and the finance leader together.
United States based teams handle support. The company does not offshore its employee call function, and the same teams that answer benefits and payroll questions also handle HCM platform support requests.
Corban OneSource reports a 95 percent client retention rate and, on its own site, savings of up to 32 percent against the cost of an internal team. Since 2006 its clients have included the Major League Baseball Players Association, Star-Kist Tuna and Courtyard by Marriott.
The company serves organizations in manufacturing, healthcare, real estate, nonprofit, energy and government.
"I did not pick the title Chief Stewardship Officer to be different," LeClair said. "Every email I send closes with 'not a vendor, a trusted partner.' A steward is responsible for something that belongs to someone else and yes, the money, benefits and people belong to our clients but we are still called to be good stewards of it."
LeClair founded the company in 1997 after concluding that mid-market employers had no good option between running every HR function internally and handing the employment relationship to a third party. The structure has changed since then, and the platforms certainly have, but the company says the underlying problem it was built to solve has not.
"The solutions we implemented in 1997 have not changed. The tools have," LeClair said. "Every few years a new platform arrives that is supposed to fix HR. Every few years somebody still has to actually run it and help people."
The company administers payroll and benefits in Canada today and says it is building toward payroll services in 29 countries.
About Corban OneSource
Corban OneSource is a United States based managed service provider for HR, delivering fully managed HR administration, payroll, benefits administration and HCM technology management to midsize and mid-market employers across the United States and Canada. Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Clearwater, Florida, the company works with clients across 22 industries with support teams based in the United States and no offshore operations. Corban OneSource is not a professional employer organization and does not enter co-employment relationships with its clients.
Contact Info:
Name: Jacob Biss
Email: Send Email
Organization: Corban OneSource
Address: 13577 Feather Sound Drive, Building II, Suite 450, Clearwater, FL 33762
Phone: (727) 803-1800
Website: https://corbanone.com/
Release ID: 89203989
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