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Founders & growth-stage companies · St. Louis
You didn’t start your company to manage HR.
But we did. Simploy runs payroll, HR, workers’ compensation and benefits for St. Louis founders from the first hire onward, so the back office never becomes the thing that slows the company down.
What headcount actually costs you
Every few hires switches something on.
Headcount isn’t only a number on the cap table. Each threshold below turns on a new set of legal obligations, and nobody sends you a letter when you cross one.
At 1
Payroll tax registration, I-9, FLSA, USERRA, unemployment insurance
At 5
Workers’ compensation required (one employee if you’re in construction)
At 20
Age discrimination law, and continuation coverage for leavers
At 50
Family and medical leave, and the employer health mandate
Federal thresholds, counted by headcount or full-time equivalents depending on the rule. State requirements vary, and Missouri sets workers’ compensation at five employees, or at one for construction. Simploy tracks which of these apply to you as the number moves.
What actually breaks
None of it is why you raised the money.
Your first hire is a legal event, not a task
An offer letter is the easy part. Behind it sit payroll tax registration, an I-9 completed within three days, state withholding accounts, unemployment insurance and a workers’ comp policy. Miss one and you find out at an audit rather than at the time.
Offer · I-9 · W-4 · state registration · comp policyPaying yourself is its own question
Founders put themselves on payroll later than they should, usually because nobody has told them what reasonable compensation looks like or how it interacts with their entity. We’ll tell you plainly, and run it correctly once you decide.
Founder payroll · entity structure · reasonable compensationOne remote hire creates an entire new state
Hire an engineer in another state and you’ve acquired a registration, a withholding account, an unemployment account and a new set of leave rules. Three remote hires in three states is three of everything.
Multi-state registration · withholding · SUTA · leave lawBenefits are the hiring lever you can’t pull at twelve people
You’re competing for the same engineer as companies with a thousand employees and a benefits budget. Through co-employment your team is rated inside a pool of thousands of people, which is usually the only way a company your size offers a plan that competes.
Medical · dental · vision · 401(k) · lifeAll-inclusive, in five parts
Everything an employer has to do, handled in one place.
Human ResourcesHandbook, onboarding, performance, and the conversations nobody wants.
PayrollMulti-state, multi-entity, founder comp and bonuses included.
Workers’ CompCoverage and claims, even for a team that works from laptops.
BenefitsMedical, dental, vision and 401(k), rated in a pool far bigger than you.
TechnologyOne system, so nobody on your team becomes the HR admin by accident.
Pricing
Priced per person, not per payroll.
Startups feel this difference more than anyone, because your salaries are high. A percentage-of-payroll fee charges far more to administer one senior engineer than one coordinator, for work that is identical either way.
Percent of payroll
Your fee scales with salary
Every raise, every senior hire and every equity-replacing cash offer lifts the fee alongside it. The better you pay, the more the back office costs you.
Simploy · per employee, per month
Your fee scales with headcount
One rate per employee, per month, whatever they earn. You can model it in a hiring plan a year out and be right, and when the team shrinks the bill shrinks with it.
Your proposal shows our fee on its own line, separate from wages, taxes, workers’ comp premium and benefit costs, so you can see what Simploy costs and what is simply passed through.
Why us, specifically
Small enough to answer. Big enough to matter.
A twelve-person company gets the benefits economics of a far larger one, because your team is rated inside our whole client base rather than on its own. That pooling is the entire mechanism, and it’s the one thing you cannot build yourself at your size.
Serving St. Louis since 2004. There is no headcount minimum, and shrinking is not a problem.
“I can’t imagine spending any amount of time on the HR functions that Simploy does. It would be a huge suck of time.”Tim Hudson, Founder · Campus Pro Events
He raised a round, then needed three salespeople.
Tim is a former C-level executive at a Seattle tech company who came back to St. Louis to build his next one. He knew what hiring would require: postings, a handbook, applicant tracking, payroll, workers’ comp and multi-state compliance for the people he’d hire outside Missouri. He also knew what he wasn’t willing to do about it.
“When I was bringing on salespeople, I did not want to hire an HR function. Didn’t have the capital to really do that, or expertise, or time to find that right person.”
He screened vendors by St. Louis presence first. Three hires was not too few, and he said so up front.
“There’s no request I had that they weren’t able to meet. I’m only hiring three people, they said that’s fine. And I might not have three a year from now, and that’s fine too.”
How it starts
Fifteen minutes, then real numbers.
- 01
A fifteen-minute call
What you’re building, who you’re about to hire, and which states they’ll sit in. If we’re not a fit, we’ll say so on that call rather than three meetings later.
- 02
Your team and your plan
Current roster, the roles you expect to fill over the next year, and whatever benefits you offer today. For a first-time employer that’s a short conversation, not a document request.
- 03
A proposal built on your actual numbers
Real salaries, real plan designs, real state registrations, with our fee shown as its own line so you can see exactly what you’re paying us for.
Free · no call required
The founder’s first-hire checklist.
Everything that has to be true before someone’s first day, in the order it has to happen, including the items that have legal deadlines attached. Written for founders, not for HR departments.
Your checklist is on its way.
It should reach your inbox within a minute. Don’t want to wait? Open the checklist now (PDF) →
If it hasn’t arrived, look for a message from Lewis Marty at Simploy in your junk folder.
We send the checklist and follow up once. No newsletter, no drip you can’t get out of, and we don’t share your information with anyone.
Questions founders ask
We’re only three people. Are we too small?
No, and that’s the question we hear most. Tim Hudson came to us with three hires and told us the number might go down. That was fine then and it’s fine now. There’s no headcount minimum.
We just hired someone in another state. What happens now?
That state needs a registration, a withholding account and an unemployment account, and its own leave and pay rules now apply to that person. We set all of it up and maintain it. Multi-state is one of the most common reasons founders call us in the first place.
Can I put myself on payroll?
Usually yes, and often you should. The right answer depends on your entity and what counts as reasonable compensation for your role, so we’ll talk it through with you and your accountant rather than guess.
What about equity?
Your cap table stays with you and your attorney. We handle the cash side: salary, payroll taxes, W-2 reporting and the compensation that runs through payroll.
How is this different from a national PEO platform?
Mostly in who picks up the phone. We’re a St. Louis company and you get a named person rather than a ticket queue. It’s why our clients quote the line back to us: we’re 314, not 1-800.
What if we shrink?
The fee is per employee per month, so it falls with your headcount. No penalty, no minimum to backfill.
Do we lose control of hiring and firing?
No. You decide who joins, what they’re paid and whether they stay. Co-employment moves the employer-of-record paperwork, the compliance exposure and the benefits machinery to us. The team is still yours.