How a distributed marketing agency paying people across four countries through four different systems consolidated onto one platform — and then built the performance, hiring, and compliance layer it had never had.
| Sector | Digital marketing agency serving home-services contractors |
| Size | ~17 people at kickoff — 4 U.S. employees and 13 contractors across four countries |
| Footprint | Florida-based, distributed team spanning the U.S., Germany, India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines |
| Engagement | HRIS Implementation → Managed People Ops (ongoing retainer) |
| Timeline | Live payroll seven weeks from kickoff; relationship ongoing |
The situation
A profitable, deliberately lean marketing agency had built a genuinely global team without ever building the infrastructure to support one.
Paying that team took four systems. U.S. employees ran through ADP Run. Contractors tracked time in Hubstaff. International payments went out through Wise — except for the team member in Bangladesh, where Wise doesn't work, so those went through Payoneer instead. Each of those was a separate login, a separate reconciliation, and in the case of the international rails, a separate bank account to fund.
Every cycle required assembling hours from one system, calculating in another, funding two more, and running the whole thing twice. Contractors invoiced manually on top of that — extra work on both sides for information the system should already have had.
Time tracking wasn't earning its keep either. Hubstaff captured hours but not context — its task dropdown carried no client or project detail, which left the one question leadership actually wanted answered unanswered: which clients are consuming our support hours, and are we staffed correctly against them?
And beyond payroll, there was nothing. No performance management. No review cycle. No applicant tracking. No provisioning process — every new hire meant someone manually creating accounts across Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, RingCentral, Asana, and a dozen other tools, from memory.
What we did
1. Collapsed four payment rails into one
We ran a full evaluation against the incumbent stack, negotiated commercial terms, and moved the company onto a single platform for U.S. employees and global contractors alike: bi-weekly W-2 payroll and monthly global contractor payroll, from one system, funded once.
The migration included historical payroll import from ADP, contractor KYC verification, workers' compensation, multi-state registration, and a quarterly tax and compliance filing cadence. Go-live and first successful payroll came seven weeks after kickoff. ADP and Hubstaff were decommissioned in the weeks that followed.
2. Made time tracking answer a business question
Time tracking moved onto the same platform at a lower per-seat cost than the tool it replaced — and, more importantly, structured so hours roll up by client and by task. That turned a payroll input into a staffing and profitability input.
3. Wired identity, access, and equipment into onboarding
We inventoried the entire software estate and connected the systems that matter to the HRIS: Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, RingCentral via SCIM for phone provisioning, Mailchimp, and QuickBooks — plus device provisioning, with approved laptop options selectable by the new hire during onboarding.
The goal was explicit and it was met: nobody should have to remember to provision access. New hire, one action, day-one access by role. Offboarding runs the same path in reverse.
4. Built performance management from nothing
Quarterly review cycles with self-review and manager review, drawing on 1:1 notes and goal data already captured in the system, consolidated into a single performance packet per employee rather than three disconnected documents.
The cycle feeds compensation directly — review outcomes determine raise eligibility, and bonuses are reviewed on the same quarterly rhythm against published internal compensation bands. Managers were trained on the 1:1 cadence and now own reviews for their own teams.
5. Stood up a hiring engine
A full recruiting stack: applicant tracking, one-way video screening (used deliberately to surface AI-generated candidate answers), scheduling integration, structured assessments, and the workflows connecting them — delivered as a fixed-fee build with defined tooling costs.
The first role run through it produced 178 candidate applications in the first stretch of the search, with structured assessments completed and the President reviewing shortlists in-platform rather than in an inbox.
6. Closed a misclassification exposure
Reviewing hours across the contractor base, we found international contractors working full-time schedules — some already receiving PTO. That is a classification problem in any jurisdiction and a serious one in several.
We modeled the exposure, negotiated employer-of-record pricing at a 30% discount in two of the three countries, and began converting long-tenured contractors into properly employed staff with real benefits, real notice periods, and real termination protections. The first conversion — Germany, on an 18-month fixed-term contract — is executed. India is in flight. Each remaining country is being evaluated on cost before commitment rather than converted wholesale.
7. Gave HR an actual front door
Requests used to arrive as one-off direct messages to whoever seemed likely to know. We stood up a dedicated HR inbox and ticketing workflow connected to the company's chat tool, plus a monthly HR report covering headcount composition, departures and turnover, performance review completion, time off, benefits enrollment, and compliance training scores.
8. Everything underneath
Benefits (medical, dental, vision, life — dental, vision and life fully employer-paid), a 401(k) with a 4% safe harbor match and automatic enrollment, HSA guidance, open enrollment, background checks integrated into onboarding, the employee handbook, PTO policy, country-specific leave policies for international staff, workers' compensation, and multi-state registration as the U.S. team grew.
Results
| Payment rails | 4 → 1 (ADP Run, Hubstaff, Wise, Payoneer → one platform) |
| Payroll runs per cycle | 2 → 1 |
| Time to live payroll | 7 weeks from kickoff |
| Time tracking cost | 20% lower per seat, with client-level and task-level reporting the old tool couldn't produce |
| Performance management | 0 → quarterly cycles tied to compensation decisions |
| Applicant tracking | 0 → 178 applications on the first engineered role |
| Classification risk | Full-time contractors converting to employment via EOR, starting with Germany |
| Relationship | Client-initiated move to a monthly retainer |
The qualitative result matters as much as the numbers: payroll stopped being a project. What used to be assembled by hand across four systems now runs from one, in a fraction of the time.
Why this one mattered
Small distributed companies get told they don't need HR infrastructure until they're bigger. That advice is backwards. A 17-person company operating in four countries has more compliance surface area than a 100-person company in one state — and far less margin for a payroll error, a misclassified contractor, or a hire who spends their first week without access to anything.
This engagement didn't start with a headcount problem. It started with a President who was spending his own time reconciling four payment systems, and who wanted to know which clients were eating his team's hours. Consolidating payroll answered the first question. Structuring time tracking answered the second. Everything after that — performance, hiring, provisioning, classification — became possible only because the foundation stopped consuming the attention.
We implement HRIS. Then we run it.