I forgot. I’d asked the new office manager to grab “breakfast” for the VIP meeting. I forgot “breakfast” was code for something different around here.

Even the fancy ben admin tools. Somewhere behind the curtain, someone is downloading a form and forwarding it to a carrier. Often using unsecured email.

I don’t build systems because I’m a genius. I build systems because I’m a dumbass sometimes.

Founders love to say, “But we’re a startup.” Like sloppiness is a badge of honor. It's less cute when it comes up in diligence. Here are three dumb mistakes that could have tanked a deal, and the simple fixes that saved them.

People Ops doesn’t have to be in-house. It doesn’t have to be full time. It doesn’t even have to “feel” like HR. But it does have to be done right.

We knew the compliance risks when we picked the non-Safe Harbor 401k option. We thought we were keeping an eye on it.

"Is this because I said I wasn't pregnant?" He scratched his beard. He was the first non-birth parent to use the policy. And it wasn’t working as planned. And yes, his claim was denied because he wasn't pregnant.

As an HR department of one, she’d created an environment where people loved to work. I was called in because they were having trouble with a few vendors. And as usual, the problem wasn’t the vendors, but how the company was using the tools.