Powerful New Business Management Software Made Especially for HR Consultants

In a recent episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business, Ben and his guest, Dominic Le Fort, explore how to run a profitable HR consulting business with powerful new software made for HR consultants.

Dominic Le Fort is Co-Founder & CEO of Shrlock, a CRM software purpose-built for HR consultants.

Dominic is passionate about helping HR consultants scale efficiently by solving compliance, billing, and organizational pain points.

Ben and Dominic discuss the unique challenges HR consultants face, from multi-state compliance and time tracking to managing client relationships and scaling a consulting business.

You’ll hear practical strategies for running a workplace consulting business, leveraging business growth strategies for consultants, and using technology to attract more high-value HR consulting clients.

Whether you work in the generalist HR space, workplace consulting, L&D, OD, recruitment, or people & culture, you’ll discover real stories and actionable advice to attract clients, win contracts, and grow sustainably.

Special Offer: Enter this code to get 15% off an annual plan at Shrlock: GMHC15

Visit Shrlock.

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What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How to streamline your HR consulting business with client management and compliance tools.
• Niche insights on solving regulatory and employee-facing challenges unique to HR consulting.
• How to increase profits for your HR consulting business, improve organization, and free up time for business growth.

Resources & Links Mentioned:

• SPECIAL OFFER: Enter this code to get 15% off an annual plan at Shrlock: GMHC15
• Shrlock website: www.shrlock.com
• Dominic’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dominiclefort

Scroll down for the video version, audio version, summary notes, and transcript.

Ok, onto the show!

Video Version – Episode 292: Powerful New Business Management Software Made For HR Consultants with Dominic Le Fort from Shrlock

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Special Offer

SPECIAL OFFER: Enter this code to get 15% an annual plan at Shrlock: GMHC15

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Audio Version – Episode 292: Powerful New Business Management Software Made For HR Consultants with Dominic Le Fort from Shrlock

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You can find the podcast on all the main podcast players.

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About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast

In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.

If you have questions you want to ask me about growing an HR consultancy or marketing for HR tech companies, just let me know or visit the HR marketing services page.

Remember to subscribe to our mailing list to get notified of new episodes.

Enjoy the show!

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Episode Transcript

Episode 292 – Powerful New Business Management Software Made For HR Consultants with Dominic Le Fort from Shrlock

Ben [00:00]:
Hello, welcome back to the show. Great to have you along. And today I’m really looking forward to having an in depth conversation with Dominic Le Fort. Dominic is the Co-Founder and CEO of a very cool company designed especially for HR consultants, called Shrlock. And we’re going to get into it in just a moment. But firstly, Dominic, thank you very much for joining me today.

Dominic Le Fort [00:20]:
Of course, thanks for having me, Ben.

Ben [00:22]:
So yeah, I’m really looking forward to this because it’s making life easier for HR consultants. And you know, Shrlock is built as helping HR consultants run more efficient, profitable businesses, making fractional HR support more accessible to the companies that need it the most. And I want to get into the features and the benefits and all that sort of stuff. But firstly, can I ask you to start by explaining what are the kinds of problems that Shrlock solves for consultants?

Dominic Le Fort [00:44]:
There’s a number of problems I think every consultant faces. I think that HR consultants have a unique extra layer of issues that they face. When you think about some of like the more general problems, every consultant generally has some struggle with finding and securing new clients. I know, you know this one, you’ve built an entire business around that. And on the sales side, a lot of consultants, especially when they go from in house, struggle with how to sell their services because essentially it also feels like selling yourself and your expertise. And so I would say those are two general problems that we’ve, we’ve landed on there. When you look at HR consulting specific issues, I think the big one that stands out is compliance.

Dominic Le Fort [01:28]:
When you’re working with a typical book of business, let’s call it six to eight clients, if each of those clients is in a unique regulatory environment, that could be 12 to 18 jurisdictions that you, the consultant needs to keep track of. And this is where it gets pretty unwieldy. We do see consultants who’ll typically reach their maximum capacity around that six to eight client mark. Because if you take on too many clients past that and you don’t have the tools to accurately track and make sure everyone’s compliant, you’re really compromising the outcomes of your client.

And so we’ve been focused on how do we address that unique nuance of HR consulting and help consultants have a better system for managing multi state compliance across all their client accounts. One other issue I would add to that is employees. When you’re an HR consultant, especially if you’re working on a fractional basis, you aren’t just interacting with the client, you’re interacting with the client’s staff and that adds an extra layer of complexity.

When you think about an average business consultant, you might be interacting with the leadership at the company, maybe it’s five or six individuals. When you’re an HR consultant and you’re employee facing that could be 20, 50, 100 people who now have your phone number, your email, you now need to know who’s on a leave of absence, who just got written up, and it really can become unwieldy.

Dominic Le Fort [02:58]:
And yes, there’s the challenges every consultant faces, but there’s also some pretty unique quirks of being an HR consultant that just, it really adds to the complexity there.

Ben [03:09]:
Absolutely, yeah. I think that’s such a powerful thing to focus on and offering for support for consultants because as an HR consultant myself, I had to work across different regulatory situations across Australia, where I’m from. So we have different states and so on. Then you have the national, the federal systems and then international stuff like Indonesia, Singapore, across Europe, UK and some state. But I like to joke with my US clients that, you know, every 10 minutes there’s a new law introduced somewhere in California related to employment and that’s just one state. So, yeah, I think that’s excellent.

What exactly does Shrlock do? Because got the compliance side, but you’ve also got, it’s just running a good, efficient, pain free business as a consultant. So can you talk us through what it does?

Dominic Le Fort [03:52]:
Absolutely. So we launched Shrlock with the goal of addressing some of the business critical functions for an HR consultant before tackling some of the HR consulting specific needs. And that includes just client management, keeping track of your projects and tasks, tracking your time, which is a big one. And in creating invoices. You don’t get to run a consulting business without performing some of those tasks.

Something that we saw quite frequently is HR consultants not tracking their time, but working on an hourly basis. And it was a pretty big, you know, disconnect there with consultants doing this gut check of, I think I worked about 10 hours this month. But if you press them on it, they’re almost always gut checking down, which means they’re under billing the client. Because HR people are nice, right? They like to help their service, you know, mindset.

Dominic Le Fort [04:44]:
And so, we focused on building a system that allows them to account for every billable minute and get paid for it. And to that end, let’s say you’re working a client who’s on a 10 hour a month retainer. We’ll help you keep track of whether or not you’re having an overage. And if you’re consistently going over your retainer budget, have a conversation with the client about increasing that retainer amount. So you, a consultant running a business, can manage your time and your book more effectively.

Ben [05:14]:
Yeah, I think that’s so powerful. And it works both ways. One is it can increase your billing if you’re underestimating your hours. So just in that sense. And then from the other perspective, if you have an ongoing monthly retainer, let’s say it will help you analyze your time so that you think, well, I could probably be more efficient, or maybe it’s time to start using AI a bit more in the way I deliver my services. Under the hood, let’s say. So still bill at the same rate. But maybe I can get my margins up, improve my efficiencies.

Ben [05:38]:
And I think that will help you do that in keeping that tracking. And you’ve got different components or modules almost you’ve got the client management projects and tasks. So the billing and invoices part is just so helpful. I think it’s so important because I do find in some, probably about 20, 30% of consultants, certainly new ones, they’re shy to invoice. So if it’s organized, I find that it just happens.

A little tip for consultants is sometimes they wait for good news or something good to happen in the business, or if they’ve had a bad meeting with a hiring manager or something like that, or they’re not invoiced because they’re upset with me, and so stuff can get delayed. So I think that’s really an important part of what Shrlock offers, is that invoicing and billing. But can you just talk a little bit about the client management, the projects and tasks side of things?

Dominic Le Fort [06:19]:
Yeah. So, as you’re building a HR consulting business, you’re going to encounter a number of different people. So we have certainly the ability to keep track of prospects, which is incredibly valuable, keeping track of information you learned about the prospect. Even if they don’t convert right away, it could take months before the person you talk to is actually ready to become a client. But you don’t want to lose that information. And it’s also valuable to create tasks for yourself to follow up with that lead. We see follow up as a really big struggle for consultants.

Dominic Le Fort [06:49]:
Feeling nervous about, you know, I don’t know what to say. Just schedule it out and come up with something. Maybe you use our, compliance tracking system. To reach out to the client and say, hey, I noticed that California heat illness prevention law just went into effect in your state. Have you tackled this in your business yet or do you need help implementing this change? So trying to provide tools that help them on the prospecting side. Once that client converts, now they’re an active client and you absolutely need information about them. We’ve definitely got a lot of robust tools for keeping track of relevant client information. Something that, we’re really excited about too is making sure the consultant has access to all of the work locations. Because again, compliance by nature does depend on location.

Dominic Le Fort [07:34]:
And so when we have a client account where you have a list of staff members, we now know the headcount and we know the work locations, we can help the consultant understand what are the unique compliance requirements behind this business and surface those which, you know, if you’re a consultant, you’re looking for these things anyways. But maybe you’re subscribed to a compliance newsletter and you see a change that, that happens. But you, the consultant have to remember this impacts so and so and so and so. We’ll help you just flag those immediately, save you the mental energy of having to remember.

Ben [08:08]:
That’s really powerful. And from a marketing perspective, people should go back and listen to an episode on the bend and snap. That’s where you take your service and then you bend and snap off some small piece of it. Imagine you’ve got your compliance tracking in place through Shrlock. So you’ve got these alerts and you can do that client by client. You may then bend and snap off a particular piece such as I’m going to deliver a little workshop or a one hour work session for the leadership group of businesses. You could charge for that, you could run it for free, or you could do a little briefing document and send that to people free or charging for it again. But such a powerful way just to open the door to either sales leads or if you have an existing client who’s only doing a couple of hours a month or a small retainer or a small project thing, that that’s a way of stepping it up and you know, upselling.

Ben [08:55]:
So it’s not quite would you like fries with that? But it’s adding more value to your clients. So I think that’s just such a powerful way.

Dominic Le Fort [09:01]:
Absolutely, yeah. We encountered an HR consultant who like many HR consultants, start to build their HR consulting business while they’re still in house. So they have a healthy launch pad. This particular consultant I met with, what she did is she launched a compliance newsletter while working in house, and she just reached out to a bunch of business owners and every month she would send relevant compliance updates for that business, just segmenting by state. And by the time she was ready to launch her business, she had about, like, three to 4,000 people subscribed to this newsletter. And then she just started adding a CTA at the bottom of the emails. Have an HR question, set up a consultation, and, if even a handful of those subscribers turn into clients, she’s not having to run cold calls, she’s not having to do the scary first consultation and try and sell them. These people are sort of pre sold because they’ve been getting value from the consultant.

Ben [09:56]:
Yeah, genius approach. And interestingly, I’ve done that a few times with clients where they’re not ready to leave their jobs yet. So that example you described. Yeah, she’s still in a job, she can’t tell her boss, I’m leaving to start another business because she’ll get fired, or, you know, breach of contract or something like that. However, a newsletter, it’s a very proactive movement. I think that’s smart. So what does she do? She used the information from Shrlock and sort of tracked it that way. Is that right?

Dominic Le Fort [10:18]:
She actually, she did this strategy many years ago, before Shrlock existed. But I think that strategy is such a great example of how a consultant could use Shrlock today. You have a prospect in there, we’ve got compliance alerts, use them.

Ben [10:31]:
Yeah, that’s smart. Any other aspects of Shrlock that people should be aware of, whether it be the product and, or the resources side of things?

Dominic Le Fort [10:38]:
I think the biggest thing I would say people should be aware of is, yes, Shrlock is an operating system today where the consultant can get business critical tools, increase their client capacity, boost efficiency. I think the direction of Shrlock is what a lot of our users are really excited about. I think I touched on this earlier, where getting new clients is very top of mind for consultants, especially newer consultants who don’t have marketing expertise or even a network they didn’t know how to leverage. And so our goal is to sell Shrlock to a huge network of consultants here in the States. We’ve got consultants in Canada, the UK. I talked to someone in New Zealand, which is getting closer to Australia.

Ben [11:19]:
Excellent.

Dominic Le Fort [11:20]:
Take this large network of fractional HR experts and then start marketing directly to business owners and so our users can create profiles if they’re looking for new clients. And we can help make connections for them there. So I think that future version of Shrlock is really going to address the other side of the consultants pain points, which isn’t managing the business, it’s growing.

Ben [11:41]:
As we’re talking, it kind of triggered a memory of a book I read, “The E-Myth”, which a lot of entrepreneurs and startup people have read. But one of the things in there is when you’re starting out is to plan ahead and think of yourself as a proper business. Even do an org chart with all the different roles or functions that are going. And yes, unfortunately, probably your hat or your name is going to be in every box for a while. But the analogy from that is that when you start out doing your consulting business, you’re probably going to use Trello Boards or Mondays and Google Docs or Outlook files and folders and this stuff is everywhere. And in theory that works. You know, a messy system. But start with the end in mind.

Ben [12:18]:
I quite like the idea of, of getting set up, having your processes, your documentation, your clients ready to roll through a system like Shrlock. And that can scale with you because that way you’re not worried about losing things. And yes, it’s easy when you first start, you got your first client, maybe your second client, but the moment you get your third and fourth, suddenly cracks appear, the first couple aren’t so happy, your referral rate drops, all that kind of stuff and you’ve got a lot of things on your plate.

My advice would be look at a system like this, that helps keep you organized and makes you look really professional because that’s how you get more referrals, that’s how you scale up. Maybe you don’t necessarily want to grow to a huge multi person organization or anything, but it means you can get more profitable, you can watch your margins and just generally enjoy life a bit more. Is that a fair summary, Dominic?

Dominic Le Fort [13:00]:
You’re spot on. I think the only thing I could add to that is having everything in one place does make it easier to scale. I know a lot of solo consultants who, they do run their businesses with sticky notes and spreadsheets. It’s a headache, they know it. The next layer up from that is to run your business with five or six different technology systems, which is messy in a different way and oftentimes quite expensive.

But when you look at what does it mean to bring on a team member to collaborate with you on new client accounts, certainly sticky notes and spreadsheets don’t make that easy. And then if you need to invite Someone to all of these scattered systems, it’s also, you know, quite difficult.

Dominic Le Fort [13:38]:
And so with a platform like Shrlock, it makes it really easy to share client context in a very organized manner. You know, all I would need to do is invite you to a client. You would easily see all of the notes that have been taken about this client, their staff lists, past projects I’ve worked on. And so we recently rolled out a feature for consulting teams, and it’s flying off the shelves right now because there hasn’t really been a good way to share so much robust client context that is really unique to the HR space.

Ben [14:09]:
Yeah. What’s the feature?

Dominic Le Fort [14:10]:
Being able to invite team members to Shrlock. We originally launched best support for a solo consultant, and now we’re bringing on teams all the time who have, you know, either a team of two and they’re passing clients back and forth all the way up to a team of 15, where you’ve got hierarchical structures, managers, contributors, and you need to assign multiple people to client accounts and need to know who’s working on what for who. So a lot of extra complexity there. But keeping it all in one place has been a huge quality of life.

Ben [14:37]:
Improvement for them and so much more important things. The world has gone hybrid or remote, perhaps years gone by. You’re all in one office, one room or something even, but not anymore. So I think that’s such a powerful thing. So, yeah, in terms of summarizing Shrlock, I just love all the benefits. So it keeps you organized, which gives you that peace of mind. From a financial perspective, it encourages you to basically earn more. So you get your invoicing happening in a seamless way, which takes some of the headaches out.

Ben [15:03]:
It helps you improve your margins. So from a financial perspective, it’s good on that side. And then from a business operation and marketing perspective, you look better to your clients, they’re more impressed because it’s organized and seamless, if you like, which always encourages them to refer you business. So it increases your referral rate, which means you get more business in, gives it that viral factor. Just when you look more professional, they appreciate that, which I think is so important. You’ve got a demo that people can check out, is that right? How does that work?

Dominic Le Fort [15:31]:
Yeah. So we have an interactive demo available online if you’re not ready to talk to a member of the team. So on our website, www.shrlock.com, you can go to view the demo and click around to sort of see the product and how it works. If you’re ready for a demo, you can always schedule with a member of the team. We love talking to new consultants and showcasing how we help them grow the business. As you were talking about some of the benefits, I like to talk about one of our earlier users who came into Shrlock. She was very much a sticky notes and spreadsheets consultant. And she reached out saying that she was able to bill one client $900 more in just one month of using Shrlock because she was actually tracking her time and billing for it effectively.

Dominic Le Fort [16:16]:
And I think it really just stands out, like the benefits that can happen when you do operationalize the business a bit more. She feels better about it. She’s getting paid what she’s owed, and with the billing process already all built in, being able to transfer those timesheets directly to an invoice, that saved her about 30 minutes per invoice. And she’s using that time now to do prospecting, to connect with new clients. And so there’s the revenue boost, but there’s also just giving her more free time to scale.

Ben [16:47]:
That’s fabulous. Yes. I mean, it’s already reasonably priced Shrlock, but if you can get just one new client from being more efficient or organized, then it more than pays for itself. Or if it’s means that they refer you in one new client, you’re more than paying for it. So I think that’s such a powerful ROI, for sure. If people want to learn more, are they just ready to sign up? Because I think, yeah, I need this. What should they do next?

Dominic Le Fort [17:10]:
Yeah, so visit us online. You can poke around the demo. If you’re ready to get started right away, they can select the <Grow my HR business> and it’ll drop you right into the platform. We do have a number of users who, you know, they’ve been looking for a software like this. There’s no other client management systems built specifically for HR consultants. We’ve got a lot of people who just find us online, get started right away. We’ve been really cognizant about making sure people can get set up using the platform in just a few hours. Right.

Dominic Le Fort [17:38]:
We don’t want some crazy onboarding process and anything like that. So it’s a pretty easy flow there. And then once you’ve got your clients added, you start creating some projects, you can start tracking time immediately.

Ben [17:50]:
Fantastic. Yeah. So if you’re listening to this, I say go for it. I mean it. It makes your life easier, less stress, you’re more organized, probably going to make you more money, I suspect. And yeah, I think it’s just such a powerful system. And thank you for doing four HR Consultants. Thank you for putting this together and making it available to them.

Dominic Le Fort [18:07]:
Of course. Happy to do it. This community has been needing some TLC for a while now.

Ben [18:12]:
Love it. Dominic, thank you very much for joining me today. I wish you all the best with Shrlock, and I look forward to seeing what comes out in the future.

Dominic Le Fort [18:19]:
Thank you. Appreciate it, Ben.

Topics covered: running a workplace consulting business, HR consultants, business growth strategies for consultants, how to attract consulting clients, using AI in consulting, consulting business software

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