COADVANTAGE: A COMPANY ON A MISSION

Bradenton, Florida-based CoAdvantage soon celebrates 30 years in business. The PEO and longtime NAPEO member launched operations in 1997 with a simple, but consequential mission: to help small businesses grow and thrive. While the mission remains the same, the strategy and execution to deliver it have evolved significantly to keep up with a changed PEO industry, advances in technology that have collapsed the difference between B2B and B2C buyer expectations, and an increasingly complex and fragmented regulatory environment.

Success today requires PEOs to be sophisticated, robust and highly attuned to client needs. Technology transformations have upended customer expectations across B2B; most PEO users assume everything will be accessible where and when they want it, via a consumer-grade user experience. Today’s regulatory and legal landscape poses a minefield of compliance risks at every turn. Yet, through all this change, CoAdvantage has grown immensely over the years, serving more and more small businesses. It’s a testament to what can happen when you’re attuned to the needs of your user, hire a team committed to putting the customer first, and are mission-driven.

With a team of experts in their respective fields spread across the country and representing deep experience within and outside of the PEO space, the focus is on balancing taking the work seriously and encouraging experimentation and collaboration across the organization. From the top-down, it’s a culture that embraces the perspective that good ideas can come from anyone, and the best ideas reflect a well-rounded perspective from everyone.

Leading the mission is CEO John Cumbee. He originally joined the company in 2022 as COO, and brings a deep background in the payroll, HCM and healthcare industries. The opportunity to join CoAdvantage was too good to pass up, offering the chance to pair industry experience with a passion for supporting small businesses.

“I grew up in a small business family in the Midwest—where main street USA is really the backbone. That exposure inspired a career geared toward helping small businesses succeed. Every stop along the way has had that purpose-driven focus in common,” Cumbee says.

He firmly believes that partnering with a PEO is the best solution for small businesses hoping to grow and succeed. Cumbee’s excitement and enthusiasm for working with entrepreneurs is palpable.

“While working in a small business early in my career, my responsibilities included managing payroll and insurance. It helped me understand these time-consuming tasks and business challenges can distract from growth. A PEO gives businesses owners freedom to chase their dreams,” Cumbee says.

As CoAdvantage enters its next chapter, this commitment underpins every decision the company makes, from strategic partnerships and acquisitions to technology investments that support innovation in the SMB community.

A SOLUTION FOR EVERY STAGE

As with many players in the HCM industry, a lot of CoAdvantage’s historical growth came through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Now, Cumbee is leading an organic growth approach that has refocused the company’s M&A strategy.

“Our focus now is pulling pieces together to build a complete HCM solution set to support businesses throughout their lifecycle,” Cumbee explains.

PEO is a highly adaptable model, but it does have natural limits to the businesses it can serve. Going forward, CoAdvantage is focused on balancing increasing the value of the products and services it already offers to PEO customers with expanding its overall footprint as an end-to-end HCM solutions provider..

A key part of this strategy is the just-completed merger with PrimePay, a payroll and HCM software platform.

“This is the best of both worlds. We can meet customers where they are from a service and technology standpoint,” Cumbee says.

By offering everything from basic payroll to full-service PEO, CoAdvantage solutions will grow and scale alongside the businesses they serve. Cumbee and the team view the relationship with their customers as going beyond just partnership: they consider themselves an extension of their customers’ own teams.

Of course, technology plays a major part in any customer experience, which is why CoAdvantage made the unheard-of investment to develop its own proprietary HCM platform, including an owned payroll and tax engine within, called CoAdQuantum. It ties directly into CoAdEnroll, the company’s benefits platform.

“It’s so important for us to create our own destiny when it comes to controlling what we deliver to our customers. There’s a lot of great technology available and work being done across the industry, but if we can’t set our own technology and development roadmap, we can’t be confident that we’ll be meeting our customers’ needs,” Cumbee explains.

As customers move between services and add products, creating a seamless user experience is crucial. Cumbee doesn’t want customers to feel like they’ve joined a new company just because their business needs change.

Advances in technology never stop, so it’s a massive undertaking, but one the company is confident in. And the passion for technology innovation extends outside of CoAdvantage. So much so that CoAdvantage now sponsors the Pitchfest prize at HR Techä. The competition aims to spotlight innovative and creative new HR technology ideas from start-ups. It’s a reflection of CoAdvantage’s commitment to support the small business community and do their part to support great ideas. Cumbee truly believes that advances across the HCM and HR tech space raise the standard for all, and the quality delivered to customers.

“I’m so proud of our team here, their expertise and passion drive our business,” Cumbee says, “What we do helps our customers succeed.”

It’s a mission that everyone who works at CoAdvantage champions.