Scaling success with a strong company culture

Building a strong culture across a fast-growing pharmacy company

With Insperity supporting its human resources administration, Advantage Healthcare Services’ leaders spend their time on the people and culture that drive the business.

Advantage Healthcare Services is a behavioral health pharmacy company based in Huntington Beach, California. Its pharmacies serve people living with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and substance use disorder, and its teams deliver medications to patients at home, in shelters and in other community settings. The company’s mission is to change lives by improving mental health.

Advantage has grown from 116 employees to more than 400 and from 11 pharmacies to 25 across four states, largely through acquisitions. Each pharmacy joined with its own team, routines and culture already in place. Michael Zeglinski joined as Chief Executive Officer during that expansion, with a clear priority: bring those teams together under a strong culture and one set of people practices while the company kept growing.

Zeglinski made a deliberate choice about how to resource that work. Rather than build an in-house human resources (HR) team to keep pace with the acquisitions, he brought in Insperity to help carry the HR administrative load, freeing him and his leaders to focus on culture and people.

The challenge

Every acquisition adds more HR work

Each new pharmacy brought more work: payroll, benefits, onboarding and multi-state HR compliance. The more Advantage acquired, the more of this administration there was to manage. In many growing companies, the leaders who should be shaping culture and strategy are the ones who end up handling it. Advantage had a choice: put leadership’s hours into that administration, or into the people work that would keep its pharmacies operating as one company.

Advantage chose the people work. It had grown by bringing established pharmacies under one name, and each one already had its own staff, routines and culture. About 80% of the company’s people work in the pharmacies; the rest are in corporate or remote roles. Uniting those teams under one mission, while respecting what each pharmacy had already built, was the work that mattered most, and it needed leadership’s full attention, not whatever time was left after the administration.

The solution

Get support for HR administration, invest in the people

Advantage brought on the Insperity® HR360 solution, one of Insperity’s professional employer organization (PEO) offerings. Through a co-employment relationship, Insperity takes on many day-to-day, employer-related HR responsibilities while Advantage keeps control of its own business decisions. Insperity processes payroll and provides employees with access to Insperity-sponsored benefits plans. It also helps Advantage manage HR compliance across the states where it operates, and supports the routine work of onboarding, leaves and employee questions.

With Insperity’s support with HR, Zeglinski and his leaders got the time back. The company estimates its executives now spend significantly less time on tactical, HR administrative tasks. For a company adding pharmacies across state lines, that recovered time is what makes the people work possible.

The partnership

Building a strong culture with strategic HR support

Advantage relied on Insperity HR360 for more than HR. In Zeglinski’s first months, the leadership team worked with an Insperity specialist to run an offsite that defined the company’s mission, vision and values. It followed with an employee engagement survey to learn what employees valued and where the company could do better.

Dana St. Pierre-Cabrera, the company’s Vice President of People, built on that foundation. She gathered input from employees through roundtables and feedback sessions, then used their own words to write an employee value proposition, a plain statement of what people can expect from working at Advantage. Working with Insperity, the team also defined its values in action, spelling out what each value looks like in how leaders and employees behave day to day, and built recognition, manager training and development into the company’s regular routines.

Insperity’s support extended to developing future leaders. Advantage promotes from within where it can, so it worked with Insperity on succession planning for its pharmacists in charge, the licensed pharmacists who run each location, to keep qualified people ready to lead as it opened and acquired more pharmacies.

Zeglinski also stays close to the work himself. He visits the pharmacies and asks employees what makes their day harder, then makes sure the small, recurring problems get fixed. Each quarter, the company tells employees which of their concerns it acted on and what it changed.

The results

An engaged, aligned workforce

The culture work produced measurable results. On its most recent employee engagement survey, Advantage scored 76% favorability, meaning 76% of employee responses were positive. Its biggest improvement over the prior year was in one area: the number of employees who said they had someone at work who cared about them.

Three-quarters of employees said they identified with the company’s P.E.A.C.E. values: passion, empathy, advocacy, creativity and expertise. For a company assembled from separately run pharmacies, that shared identity is the clearest sign the teams now see themselves as one company rather than a set of acquisitions.

The support shows up in everyday moments, too. Employees have singled out the company’s leave-of-absence process, describing it as simple and low-stress at a time that is often neither.

Looking ahead

Built to keep growing

Advantage plans to keep expanding into new states and growing its workforce, and its people foundation is built to scale with it. Insperity HR360 continues to support HR administration that each new state and acquisition brings, and helps Advantage manage the related HR compliance. That keeps the leadership team free for the work only it can do: folding each new pharmacy into the same culture and continuing to develop its people.

Advantage’s work with Insperity has grown along the way. What began as support for HR administration now extends into strategic work: quarterly leadership alignment sessions and expanded help with performance management and compensation, as the company leans on Insperity for more of its people strategy.

Business leaders facing the same multi-state HR pressures can start with a free consultation with an Insperity Business Performance Consultant.