The Growth-Ready Contractor’s Playbook: HR, Payroll, and Performance That Scale

Contractors know the pain of a chaotic back office. Between recruiting, onboarding, payroll, and compliance, it’s easy for things to spiral into a full-blown admin dumpster fire. In the next episode of the Mastering ServiceTitan podcast, Miter CEO and Co-founder Connor Watumull shows you how to douse those flames forever. 

Learn how Miter’s integration with ServiceTitan helps contractors modernize their operations, reduce manual tasks, and build stronger, more loyal teams. Watumull explains why onboarding is the most important loyalty test, how to turn your hiring process into a recruiting advantage, and what the most successful contractors are doing to scale without drowning in paperwork.

What is Miter?

Miter is a workforce management platform built to help growing contractors recruit and build amazing teams while also simplifying the manual workload in the back office. 

Offering a suite of HR, payroll, and benefits tools, Miter integrates with the most popular business management platforms including Sage, Acumatica, Procore, NetSuite, ServiceTitan, and more.

“We were very familiar with the challenges that contractors face when doing job costing, when hiring new people, when dealing with compliance requirements. And we felt like we could build a new kind of platform, one that caters to contractors and solves a lot of those problems,” Watumull says.

Miter helps service or construction contractors of all sizes, from small shops with 15 employees to larger ones with 1,000 to 2,000 employees.

“Where we really shine, though, is a growing contractor,” he says.

Contractors trying to scale their business need to hire new recruits, manage new-hire paperwork and documentation, and conduct training and onboarding — all of which compounds the complexity of your back office operations.

Miter also specializes in helping multi-entity contractors or businesses that grow through acquisition.

“If you're hiring lots more employees, if you’re acquiring a lot of new businesses, the reporting requirements get more complex. Transferring employees between different entities gets more complex. Doing job costing or keeping track of your revenue and costs gets a lot more complex,” Watumull explains.

For contractors who do a mix of residential, commercial, and construction work, Miter’s full-service payroll platform helps you manage different requirements for reporting, compliance, and the way your business operates.

“Miter was really built with those situations and scenarios in mind,” Watumull says.

Ditch the Old Ways for a Growth-Ready Playbook 

The old way of building teams, running operations, and completing daily tasks typically comes in three flavors for contractors in the trades, Watumull says.

The most common old way is using an HR, payroll, benefits, and timekeeping platform that wasn’t specifically designed for contractors.

“QuickBooks, ADP, Paychex, those are phenomenal platforms, but they were not built for the nuances of running a contracting business,” he says. “They usually don't integrate all that well. They don't understand the nuances of job costing. They don't have all the reports you need.”

The second flavor of the old way typically involves using manual processes for everything, from running payroll and filing taxes to creating a benefits package for employees. While most contractors today utilize accounting systems for payroll and taxes, many rely on third-party brokers to help them create a benefits package or they do it themselves.

“Any growing contractor knows that the benefit package you offer your team is really important in attracting great talent, retaining great talent, and rewarding great talent,” Watumull says. “We automate a lot of the benefits administration process, things like recruiting, applicant tracking, performance reviews, and feedback cycles.”

Lastly, contractors also tend to use a legacy, on-premise platform to run payroll, HR, and the employee onboarding experience.

“This is most common among commercial contractors and construction contractors, where they're often running payroll out of their old-school accounting system that runs on their desktop,” Watumull explains. “The value of moving to Miter is, you're getting an extremely modern, cloud-based solution that was really built for contractors.”

Hiring the wrong team or operating with back-office inefficiencies can also result in high costs for your business.

“Your team is everything,” Watumull says. “People are the most important part of your business. Who you hire, who you retain, that matters more than anything for the quality of the service you deliver to your customers.

“And once you reach a certain level of scale as a contractor, you don't want to be hiring an additional back office administrator. For every unit of growth, you need to start building operational leverage,” he adds.

Recruiting with Miter 

To help contractors feel like they can attract, hire, and retain great people to work in their business, Miter begins the process by focusing on recruiting. This involves building a consistent employer brand and explaining why new recruits will want to join your team.

“How do you find those people? How do you get on their radar? How do you make it easy for them to apply? How do you assess whether they're a good fit for your open role?” says Watumull. “We’ve built a suite of tools that helps contractors do just that.”

With Miter, you can:

• Set up all open roles across your business in one platform

• Create AI-generated job descriptions

• Set up screening questions for candidates

• Set up job qualifications for candidates

• Post jobs and manage applicants on a variety of platforms, including LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and more

• Communicate with job candidates via SMS

• Create and host a careers page for all open roles on your website

• Send candidates a job offer and allow them to sign it directly within Miter

“We want to help contractors build their brand, make sure open roles get seen by the right people, and then also select and hire the people who can really move your business forward,” Watumull says. “We're seeing a ton of demand. This is a part of our platform that launched about a year ago, and it's been one of the fastest growing modules we've ever launched.”

Contractors often make two big mistakes with recruiting:

1. Not investing in the right technology to see candidates at scale

2. Not doing the pre-recruiting work, such as creating a great website, building a story about your business, or communicating the why behind what you do.

Training & Onboarding with Miter

What’s the biggest mistake contractors make when training and onboarding new employees?

“A lot of contractors simply don’t do it,” Watumull says, explaining how many will offer the required compliance training, but not much else.

“People want to join your company because they believe in what you do, but they also want to believe that it's going to send their career forward. Training your employees is one of the best ways to communicate, ‘We are going to invest in you. This is going to be a place where you can build your career.’”

The best contractors invest in a detailed onboarding program for new employees, which includes signing your offer letter, enrolling in benefits, adding bank account information for direct deposit, and filling out other forms—but also training them on the values of your organization:

• Here’s why we exist

• Here’s who we serve

• Here’s how we do the job

Offering a very structured, tech-enabled recruiting experience helps contractors prove themselves as a strong and reliable company to work for, and also earn their employees’ loyalty.

“I would encourage employers to overinvest in that onboarding experience and then measure your retention. Because if you can retain that employee, the onboarding is worth it,” Watumull says. 

Creating a Benefits Package with Miter

Offering the right benefits package can be a huge lever for contractors to drive retention and attract the right talent. But it can also be a hassle and a costly proposition if you don’t know how to do it.

Miter recently launched its Benefits Consulting service, an open-enrollment platform where in-house benefits brokers only work with trade contractors to design benefits plans for their employees. The Miter benefits brokers focus on understanding:

• What is the profile of your average employee?

• What kind of benefits would they appreciate?

• What’s your budget for benefits plans?

• How do you want to share costs with employees?

• What’s your return on investment if you choose to sponsor more of your employee benefits?

Leveraging the right benefits package is how you compete for new hires, but you also need to be smart.

“Benefits costs for most owners and businesses are skyrocketing. So it's important to be rational and think through the ROI of investing in certain types of benefits packages,” he says.

Typically, contractors spend too much time trying to manage their employees’ benefits packages in-house, or they’ve been working with the same broker for 10 to 20 years and simply renew the same plan each year without asking questions, such as:

• Do employees like the benefits?

• Do they have issues with using the benefits?

• Are they seeing the doctors they prefer?

• Do they want company-sponsored life insurance?

“Survey your employees,” Watumull says. “We do this for all of our customers’ employees for free. We ask them, ‘Tell us about your benefits. Do you know what benefits you have? Would you like this type of benefit?’ And we basically build a profile of what your employees actually want.”

HR with Miter

Human Resources, or HR, can refer to many different things. At Miter, it means managing the entire employee life cycle and serving as the system of record for all of your employee data.

Take payroll, for instance. A great automated payroll system takes tax compliance off your plate by automatically managing quarterly tax payments, benefits deductions, garnishments, etc. It can also help you set up complex pay rates and commission structures for employees, depending on the type of work they do.

“Miter was really built to automate all of that,” Watumull says. “You load in your configurations and how you want compensation and pay rates to work for your employees, and let Miter handle the rest.”

And if your payroll system doesn’t integrate with your other business tools, getting data out of your time-tracking system into payroll often turns into a mess. That’s why Miter partnered with ServiceTitan for a seamless workflow between technician time-tracking and payroll.

“All of that data syncs directly into Miter. So, all your team needs to do is go into Miter, review the payroll, and click approve. And then Miter will handle all the direct deposits and tax processing. That saves an immense amount of time,” Watumull says. “Then on the backend, Miter is deeply integrated with all accounting systems that contractors use, whether that's QuickBooks, Sage, Acumatica, NetSuite, etc.”

Miter also retains all of your job costing information in ServiceTitan, which can be really helpful when you need complex reporting based on department or business unit.

“One of my other favorite parts about the integration is when you hire someone in Miter, we'll set them up in ServiceTitan. They get a text saying, ‘Hey, your offer letter is ready to sign.’ They log into Miter, they sign their offer letter, they enroll in benefits, they add all their information, and then optionally, Miter can also set them up in ServiceTitan,” he says.

A Final Thought

One final thing contractors can learn from software companies, Watumull says, is to not be afraid to invest in your employees. While the costs of not doing so are difficult to quantify, the benefits of doing so often pay off in dividends.

“The best contractors are over-investing in training and safety and the employee experience,” he says. “And the cost of recruiting great people is really high. Someone who's really good at their job can often deliver two times as much. 

“So, I'd encourage contractors to maybe think through that and not overthink investing in the employee experience, because I think the benefits are there.”

You can find this interview and many more by subscribing to Mastering ServiceTitan on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or here.

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