In this engaging interview conducted by Lacey Partipilo, we cover the career journey of Brandon Laws, who has been an integral part of Xenium HR for nearly 16 years. Brandon shares his experiences, challenges, and insights as he helped grow Xenium’s brand and discusses the evolving landscape of HR and marketing.
Today you get to be the one getting interviewed this time! So tell me a little bit about your role at Xenium and how long have you been a part of the team?
My role at Xenium by title and function is the Vice President of Marketing and Product. I’ve had a similar job even though the titles have changed for probably four years when I added the product function and joined our senior leadership team, but I’ve mostly just led marketing and supported the sales operations over the years. I’ve been at Xenium 16 years coming up in October and I started in an operations role as the operations administrator in 2008. I got to see how the business ran. I think we were about 25 employees at the time. I recognized that there was a lack of marketing. We outsourced a newsletter and website edits to a freelancer. And so I started grabbing onto various marketing tasks and supported the sales team with whatever they needed. Then digital marketing exploded around 2009 with social media, website technology, and other content distribution channels. It just all got so much more advanced and there was urgency to grow our brand through these channels. And so they moved me into a sales and marketing rep as full time dedicated role. It only expanded from there and I got a front-row seat to watching the Xenium brand grow over the years.
What had you be interested in working for an employer services firm like Xenium?
I didn’t necessarily have the appeal of working for an employer services organization, but I was doing insurance sales right out of college and wanted to make a shift. I was hustling big time—networking, cold calling, website building, and blogging. I stretched myself beyond my comfort zone, but I hated the work. So many sleepless nights.
At the time, I talked to my cousin, Alishia Young, who worked for Xenium. She always spoke so positively about Xenium and the work that they were doing. She just loved her work. So, when I started having those sleepless nights and wanted to move on from my insurance sales job and go to the corporate world, I asked her if any positions were open because I wanted to explore working for Xenium. And luckily there was!
I remember applying and getting an interview with Shanda Nikkel, who was hiring for this position. She gave me a chance, and the rest is history. As I got immersed into this world of employer services work, I love it. We were so mission-driven, and our people were doing great work. It was all about the team approach to helping these businesses focus on their work.
Our clients all do incredible work, and they vary in what they do–trying to cure cancer, running retail stores, recycling plastics, or serving the community as nonprofits. The industries are vast, and it was cool to say that we’re handling the stuff you hate doing so they can focus on fulfilling their mission.
How do you find ways to learn about the clients and connect with the work that the team does?
It’s harder because I’m a layer behind the service team. I’m not directly interacting with clients unless there’s an opportunity to interview a client for a case study. Most of the time, I connect through our recognition program, the WOW Card Program. I’m able to hear about the work that people are doing for their clients and helping them through situations. Sometimes I’m researching what they do, and it helps me connect a little bit better.
But when I go out and actually interview the clients—and I always do the interviews behind the camera—we highlight people like you, Lacey, and several other HR business partners, payroll specialists and benefits team members. When I conduct the interviews, I connect with their mission and how Xenium supports their mission. Our support looks different across all clients, but we have some amazing people who serve our clients the way they need to be supported. It’s apparent that we are truly an extension of our client’s culture.
Has there been anything that’s been surprising that you’ve learned?
Even though every client is so different in what they do, we might have some clients that do similar type of stuff, or maybe even competitors in some respects, but I’ve seen a big variety of the types of businesses that are out there or even nonprofits. And so even though the players are different, the value proposition that we bring is very much the same across everything. They’ve got this administrative burden that they hate, HR benefits, administration, payroll administration and processing. And it’s hard to keep up with the compliance tax laws, benefits, administration is a nuisance and it’s changing all the time with open enrollment and rising prices. Compensation strategies are tough, retention of talent is critical, and attracting people is hard.
These organizations deal with very similar problems, and they look to us as experts to help them. We can be their best friend; we’re like their sidekick. We’re there when they need us, and we have a layer of administrative support that goes deep—we’ve got an HR Business Partner, HR Directors, an Employee Experience Team, generalists, an Employee Relations Department, payroll specialists, and benefits reps. All who support our clients. Seeing how we can rally as a team to help these businesses grow and transform their workplace culture is very rewarding. In the 16 years I’ve worked at Xenium, I’ve seen that story play out repeatedly.
What has changed over the years in our field?
Several things. Compliance is an obvious one. Compliance is getting stickier or more abundant at federal, state, and local levels. It’s just complicated. I think that alone is what clients would buy for because they don’t want to get in a sticky situation where they’re fined or have a lawsuit on their hands. Navigating that—we can help them do that. It’s very complex out there, and again, they just want to focus on what they do. The administrative burden of all these things—HR, payroll, taxes, benefits—can be a burden and distract our clients from doing what they do best.
Second, technology has changed and is coming at a rapid pace. I remember a time in HR when there wasn’t much cutting-edge stuff, but all of a sudden, VC money started making its way into these HR people-based tech platforms, and it forced many companies like us to change and the industry to evolve.
What’s happening, too, is that at the consumer level, we all interact with Amazon, Netflix, Google, and AI and have on-demand information at our fingertips. I can do something at the click of a button; I can buy now with one click on Amazon. Consumers are used to that, so that’s pushing the employee experience to a whole other level that we’ve never seen before. It’s forcing employers to grow up to keep up with employee expectations.
Tell me about a project or accomplishment that you’re particularly proud of.
I hesitate to say this, but starting the podcast is something that I’m probably the proudest of over the years. I don’t want it to be the only thing I’m known for because my job is way vaster than what people see in the podcast; there’s so much that I touch and I believe I’ve made a bigger impact than just the podcast. But the podcast is one I’m super proud of. And, Lacey, I appreciate you for helping me launch that by being the first guest.
How it started was that I was a consumer of podcasts before 2012 when I started ours. I was thinking that this is a great way to learn. I would listen to economics, sports, and marketing/business podcasts. A lot of the ones that I loved and wanted to model ours after were expert interviews—asking somebody a bunch of questions on a narrow topic so you could go deep on it, and then the listener can learn along with you. Because I loved consuming that type of content, I thought it would work well for us.
I felt like the HR industry had no content in podcast format, and we needed to provide educational resources to our clients and people. That was something I started, and I was like, “Let’s just try this.” I think I pitched it to you, and you were like, “Yep, let’s do it.” I still needed to run it by Anne, our president, and I remember people kind of looking at me like, “What’s a podcast?” They let me take a chance on it. I bootstrapped this thing—I bought a microphone with my marketing budget, had some free editing software, and I did the full end-to-end production. Then it just took off. Now I have a full production with partners that I use for editing and video production stuff, and I’ve got really good equipment. I just appreciate the investment that we’ve made because it has made an impact. As of the time of this interview, we’re approaching 500 episodes and 1.2 million downloads.
We attracted one of our most amazing employees from it. She moved from Florida to Oregon by listening to the podcast and we, I think we’ve got some clients along the way from it, what it’s doing out there, which I’m most proud of is we’re adding value to people, whether or not they buy from us or love Xenium or follow our brand all the time, we’re adding value to their lives so they can go take those ideas back or maybe leave some behind, but take the ideas that will work for their organization and help create a great workplace. That’s all I cared about. And I think through our content marketing, podcasting being one of them, webinars and other events – all that is to create value to people so they can create a better workplace culture. So I’m most proud of that.
What advice would you give to someone who’s just starting out in marketing?
I was just having a podcast interview with somebody about skills and how there’s a widening gap between experts and novices because of technological barriers. Things are getting so much more advanced, and remote work also has obstacles. Especially in remote work environments, you can’t listen in on somebody doing something or watch them in person.
In marketing, it’s a little easier to cross that barrier because you’ve got vast resources. As a novice, maybe coming from school—maybe you have taken one marketing class in college, like me; I took an advertising class, which is a very narrow area of marketing— but I knew very little about marketing coming into the workforce. Early on, I consumed a lot of YouTube videos and read a ton of books. I literally would read cover to cover like “Excel for Dummies” or “SEO for Dummies” books or “How to Build a Website for Dummies” book. I’d read these cover to cover and do the exercises on the computer as I’m reading it.
So if I’m telling the younger person who was me then, I’d say do what I did, which is tinker with stuff, consume content, and then apply it and see if it works for what you’re trying to do. Try and fail and learn from that. You can only learn by doing. If you sit and watch people too long, you’re going to be paralyzed and not take action.
I’ve always prided myself on taking action and executing. It’s because I’m doing the work, tinkering, and being curious. There are many different marketing methods, and the tools are rapidly evolving. I mean, I could give you examples of what I had back in 2009 and now, and it’s wildly different.
What’s your best memory of engaging with a client? Maybe one of your case studies that you’ve had opportunity to do.
The one that comes to mind is I’ve had opportunities to golf in golf tournaments that we sponsor or networking events and getting paired up with the Stevens brothers for a golf tournament. Those guys are great, and they’re a great story. It was a family-owned business, and they grew it, and they had Xenium by their side, and they had such a deep relationship with us. By the way, we did a client story with them too.
They’re fantastic. We helped them through the pandemic. They love Xenium and its people, and they always spoke highly of us. Then they got to a level where they’re ready to retire, and they were probably presented with an opportunity to sell the business and couldn’t say no to it. So that’s a heck of a success story—to connect deeply with them and then just to see their success in the end. That, to me, is rewarding.
How do you see your role evolving in the future? What goals do you have?
This is multi-layered for me. I see myself being a growth and marketing leader, no doubt. This is my passion, and every business needs that—you need growth, you need a great, strong brand to attract clients and talent. So I think I’ve got that pretty dialed in and want to continue on that path. I’ll have to continue to evolve with the times, no doubt, because so much is changing.
The other side is that I’m a technologist at heart, so I love to tinker with technology and try new things. When AI first rolled out, I was trying to find as many use cases as possible for not only my work life but also my personal life. I’m still immersed in that. I’m going to have a cross-functional AI think tank group that I’ll lead at Xenium, and we’ll find different ways of doing things.
I love automating things that are super manual and repeatable. I feel like the second chapter of my work at Xenium is probably meant to help continue to push us forward in technology and teaching others how to use it. I love to teach. Actually, I went to school to become a teacher and baseball coach, and I transitioned to business, but still love to teach.
This is where the teacher in me comes out: I love learning something and then being able to record a video and share it with somebody or walk them through it on a live call. For example, when we rolled out our knowledge base technology last year, I led that with Dena Laws, my sister-in-law, and Xenium’s Director of Operations. We partnered on that, and we agreed that I would do all the training. I love it. I love teaching people how to use things, and I love being able to project my excitement around these things because if you can figure out a way to do your work differently, that saves you time so you can focus on the most important stuff—how empowering is that? So I love to teach people things that I learn.
Okay, last question. What do you wish more people knew about working in our industry?
So much regulation—we’re helping people navigate through regulation. It’s complex, no doubt. I think it takes a special person to work in the HR industry—payroll, tax, all that. It’s super complicated. HR, payroll, and benefits are very different skill sets too.
You’ve got to love people, no doubt, because people are at the forefront and at the core of everything that we do. Consider that like the North Star—that’s your vision. How do you create the best workplace possible to maximize your people’s impact? You empower them, you create a safe workplace for them, and you might unlock something because you made a great employee experience and a psychologically safe work environment. You could unlock something that was never there before because you created that workplace.
I believe that’s what people in this industry are really trying to do—unlock something extra in people. Empower your people. Give them autonomy. Give them the tools, the resources, the guardrails, and the training, and let them do their thing. If they need coaching along the way because they’re making mistakes, that’s what we HR leaders are here for, too.
I think anybody who’s either stepping into the industry or doesn’t know this industry but wants to know more—if you love people and you love making workplaces better—this industry is for you. But it is complex and ever evolving, and sometimes there are sleepless nights and burnout, but you’ve got to love it.
It’s true.
I love my work, and I’m in marketing, but I work for an HR company. I see my colleagues and the ebbs and flows that go with their HR work, and I have so much compassion for them and what they do. I love it here. I love this industry. I love what I do, and I love being able to help transform workplaces.