How a national title and escrow provider went from an $8k-a-week overtime problem to a fully wired people operation in eight weeks — after a stalled HRIS implementation was handed to People Street to finish.
| Sector | Title, escrow, and national lender services |
| Size | ~60 employees across three legal entities |
| Footprint | Headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in Irvine, CA and Dallas, TX; payroll obligations in eight states |
| Engagement | Implementation rescue → Managed People Ops |
| Timeline | Eight weeks from takeover to complete; now on an ongoing retainer |
The situation
A privately held title and escrow business — three entities, roughly sixty people, teams organized by lending client — had bought a modern HRIS several months earlier and gotten almost nowhere with it.
Payroll had been run, so the platform was technically "live." Nothing else was. Benefits had not been configured. Two of the three entities were missing the IRS documentation required to complete tax setup. There was no onboarding workflow, no offboarding workflow, and no functioning I-9 process. The company had no HR department at all — the work was being carried by an accounting manager alongside his actual job, with an outside benefits partner who had not delivered.
Three months of effort had not yet reached the starting line.
Underneath the configuration problems sat a much more expensive one. Nobody could see overtime. There was no report, no threshold, no alert, and no approval gate. Time corrections could be made after the fact with nothing to check them against.
The first week People Street measured it, the company had spent $7k on roughly 200 hours of overtime — in one week. Individual employees were logging 23 and 26 hours of overtime in a single week.
Nobody at the company had ever been shown that number. Not the President, and not his managers.
What we found
A module-by-module audit in week one turned up:
- Benefits: nothing configured. No plans selected, no carriers loaded, no deductions mapped.
- Tax and entity setup: EIN letters and Articles of Organization missing for two of three entities. Broken or missing state accounts in Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania — plus a phantom Michigan unemployment account for a state where the company had never had an employee.
- I-9s: no owner, no process, and no organizational sign-off on the forms that did exist.
- Employment paperwork: employment agreements being sent out labeled as offer letters, with salaried roles marked non-exempt.
- Org data: employees with no titles, departments named "Team 3" and "Team 5," undefined reporting lines, and one Director of Operations carrying sixteen direct reports.
- Onboarding and offboarding: neither existed as a process. Email setup, system access, equipment, and key cards were tracked in people's heads.
- Time and attendance: employees were clocking in and out, but with no shift structure, no daily or weekly thresholds, and no reporting.
Exposure on the I-9 gap alone runs into the thousands of dollars per employee. At sixty employees, that is not a paperwork problem.
What we did
1. Made overtime visible before trying to change it
Week one, we built a weekly overtime report broken out by department, then person, then date — hours and dollars, with California's 1.5x rate applied correctly. We put it in front of the President and, critically, in front of the two Directors of Operations who actually control the schedule.
Then we automated it: a daily overtime report to those three, and a weekly rollup. We added a morning alert so that any employee with a discrepancy on the prior day is prompted to raise it with their manager before the day starts — which removed the "I'll fix my time later" loophole entirely. Alert thresholds were set at 8 hours a day and 45 hours a week.
The report was later redesigned to show hours over eight per day rather than total hours, with cost per person, so a manager could scan it in fifteen seconds.
2. Put structure behind the visibility
Reporting on its own would have created noise. We paired it with:
- Scheduling, licensed and rolled out across the company, with shift templates matched to how the business actually runs — one client wants everyone 9-to-5, another wants staggered starts from 6:00 a.m. onward. Unscheduled hours now surface automatically.
- Manager accountability. The President began holding managers responsible for their teams' overtime, using a report he could point at.
- Policy, not just configuration. Overtime rules, approval expectations, and a progressive discipline path, so the system had something to enforce.
This was not a comfortable change internally. Employees had come to treat unlimited overtime as a standing entitlement, and the first few weeks were genuinely contentious. The President handled it directly, and the system gave him the facts to handle it with.
3. Rebuilt benefits from zero
We took benefits administration in-house rather than waiting on it: plan design, carrier loading, enrollment, and automated payroll deductions. Medical through CalChoice and Health Net for California employees, Anthem Silver PPO for out-of-state staff, Guardian for dental, vision, life and AD&D. COBRA moved onto payroll. An interim manual process covered new hires and terminations during the build so nobody fell through the gap.
From "no plans selected" to fully implemented with automated deductions took roughly two weeks.
4. Launched a 401(k)
Automatic enrollment at 3% with 1% annual escalation, Traditional and Roth options, integrated to payroll. Two employee education sessions, recorded and distributed to everyone who couldn't attend. First payroll deduction landed on schedule, about eight weeks after we started.
5. Closed the compliance gaps
- Three-entity tax setup completed — EIN letters and Articles obtained, tax sections finished for all three entities.
- Five-state account remediation: Colorado (including FAMLI), Montana registered from scratch, North Carolina SUI and withholding, Massachusetts authorization, Pennsylvania local EIT/LST.
- The Michigan account killed. The platform issued a final notice demanding third-party access to a Michigan unemployment account or it would stop filing. We traced it: the account had never been fully established, had no activity, no balance, and no penalties — because the company had never employed anyone in Michigan. We filed the notice of change to close it and pushed back on the vendor, who conceded no filing obligation existed. Resolved ahead of the deadline.
- Background checks wired into onboarding so the disclosure and authorization are signed up front and the check fires automatically at hire.
- I-9 remediation. We audited every file with the accounting manager and found the forms were done incorrectly — no organizational sign-off on any of them. Rather than reconstruct broken records, we ran a company-wide re-verification of all active employees: a one-page employee guide, a verification toolkit for the internal owner, an authorized-representative model so remote and multi-office staff could complete Section 2 in person, and a hard deadline.
- Employee handbook ported into a compliance platform that auto-updates against changing law, and rewritten to reference the actual workflows in the HRIS.
- Exempt and non-exempt employment agreement templates rebuilt, auto-populating title, base pay, and bonus or commission terms.
6. Built onboarding and offboarding as one-click processes
Onboarding now fires in synchronization from a single hire action: employment agreement on the correct exempt or non-exempt template, arbitration agreement, handbook acknowledgment, W-4, I-9, and background check. Redundant forms — direct deposit acknowledgments, state forms already native to the platform — were deleted rather than digitized.
Offboarding was built to the President's own spec: email shut off, production system access revoked, key card returned, equipment recovered, removed from payroll — each a check, each with a notification to the person who owns it, nothing left to memory. An automated exit survey was added on top.
7. Fixed the org data underneath all of it
Titles assigned, departments named for what they are, reporting lines defined, time-off approvals routed to actual managers. We also flagged span of control — a single director with sixteen direct reports is a bottleneck, not a structure — and put an org redesign on the roadmap.
8. Connected payroll to accounting
The general ledger integration was mapped and completed across all three entities, phased smallest-first to contain risk.
Results
| Overtime spend | ~$8k/week → under $1k/week |
| Reduction | ~90% |
| Annualized | ~$364k–$390k |
| Time to complete | 8 weeks from takeover |
| Benefits | Zero configuration → fully implemented with automated deductions in ~2 weeks |
| 401(k) | Launched with auto-enrollment; first deductions ~8 weeks in |
| Compliance | 3 entities' tax setup completed, 5 states remediated, 1 phantom state account closed, company-wide I-9 re-verification launched |
| Outcome | Converted to an ongoing managed people ops retainer |
Two months in, the weekly overtime report read 28 hours at roughly $1k — against the ~$8k a week it had been running when we arrived.
Why this one mattered
Two things made this work.
The first is that an implementation is not a software installation. The platform had been sold, configured in part, and declared live. What was missing was everything that makes an HRIS actually run a company: the rules, the reports, the approvals, the owners, and the policies behind them. That is not vendor work. It is operator work.
The second is that the expensive problem was not the one they hired us to solve. They brought us in to finish an implementation. The $360k-plus sitting in unmanaged overtime only became visible because we built the report in week one — and it became fixable because we paired the report with scheduling, thresholds, alerts, policy, and a manager cadence.
We implement HRIS. Then we run it.