Florham Park firm has positioned itself for small businesses
Frank Diassi was working in the venture capital private-equity business in 1982 when he came across a software company that provided human resource solutions.
He decided to become an investor.
“The software business was in its infancy in the early ’80s,” he said. “One of the things you do as a venture capitalist is to look for segments of the industry that have the potential to really grow.”
The company, Unicorn HRO, has proven to be able to do just that.
Unicorn has evolved over the years, including a jump onto the cloud in 2012. Diassi’s son, Executive Vice President and General Manager Tim Diassi, said Unicorn’s aim is to fulfill and automate a company’s HR needs.
“We want to be the central repository for all employee data and transactions,” Tim Diassi said. “And we want to automate the process for the end user.
“We’d like to teach the car to drive itself, but we’re not quite there.”
Tim Diassi, who has been with Unicorn for 22 years, said the company sets itself apart from larger competitors such as ADP by integrating its services on a single platform and providing support.
“We’re a mini-ADP, if you will,” he said.
Frank Diassi, who is the sole stockholder, said the whole idea is to help companies run their HR practices as efficiently as possible.
“Our goal is for a company to just have a vice president of HR who would determine the contracts with unions or what the pay scales are,” he said. “We can do everything else.”
Another thing that differentiates the company from its competitors, according to Diassi, is the fact that it wholly owns the computer code it utilizes.
“We write the code completely; we own the code and that’s a tremendous advantage for us,” he said. “If you think in terms of manufacturing, we’re manufacturing our own product. In this case, it happens to be software.”
The company transferred its services to the cloud in 2012. According to Diassi, it wasn’t simply to follow a technological trend; it also made perfect business sense.
“There’s no need to have things on premise anymore, and it’s much easier to do that because you don’t have to maintain your own hardware,” he said. “We’d previously maintained our own servers, but it’s much cheaper and efficient to go to the cloud.”
The company’s target market is any company that has 50 to “well above” 10,000 employees, Diassi said.
Biz in brief
Company: Unicorn HRO
Executives: Frank Diassi, chairman and CEO; Tim Diassi, executive vice president and general manager; Edward Gettings, senior vice president of product development and operations
Founded: 1982
One last thing: The company recently launched a captive insurance company as a subsidiary with an idea to vertically integrate its services with its existing HR offerings.
“Doing your own HR payroll in-house is getting to be yesterday’s modus operandi,” he said. “It’s so much more efficient to outsource that.”
Diassi, who recognizes ADP as the behemoth in the industry, said Unicorn has more than 300,000 employees of various companies who are paid through his company.
A large portion of those employees are hospital workers, he said. Because of how intricate the workings of a health system are, and the number of employees it takes to operate them, those institutions are a perfect example of how a company such as Unicorn can simplify and streamline those activities.
“Nurses are typically paid the rate for a certain service they do,” he said. “For instance, if they’re in the intensive care unit, they get one rate. If they’re in the operating room, they get another rate.
“They could be getting three different rates on a single eight-hour shift and our software can maintain that.”
The company’s software also takes care of all the tax deductions that are available for the company.
“We do all of that and we guarantee that we will do the tax deductions in accordance with regulations,” Diassi said. “Companies can’t afford to do that.”
He added that the Affordable Care Act is a perfect example of a government regulation that adds complications to the HR functions.
“Companies with more than 50 full-time employees must adhere to and file reports for the ACA,” he said, “and we have a module that does that.”
For Tim Diassi, that’s the simple side of the business.
“Paying people is the easy part,” he said. “We provide actionable data for them to make quick and pointed decisions.”
For instance, the company’s software allows managers to track workers’ hours in instances where exceeding overtime pay is a concern.
“Most companies are cost-sensitive, and everybody’s looking at cost containment,” he said. “So, they want to make sure their overtime doesn’t exceed what they’ve budgeted for.”
So, when a manager logs onto the company’s cloud-based system, he will be able to monitor how close the company is to exceeding that hourly budget.
“Now, that manager needs to manage their staff so they don’t exceed that budget,” Diassi said. “He knows what those numbers are before payroll is run.
“He’s being proactive, and we’re providing that information for them on a real-time basis.”
The software also allows managers to set and track goals for employees to give accountability for both positive and negative performances.
Frank Diassi said how much technology has shaped the company’s offerings in unexpected ways and “continues to evolve every day.” But, at 83, he doesn’t see an end in sight.
“I don’t know what I’d do with all my time,” he said. “I feel good and I enjoy what I’m doing.”
