The staff at Polycomp in Woodland Hills is going to help the baby boom generation retire comfortably, but not by making shrewd investment decisions for its clients. Polycomp is a third party administrator for companies. Its services range from administering 401(k) programs or profit sharing arrangements to helping to organize self directed IRAs for its individual clients. The staff of 110 is expert at making sure that these plans meet Internal Revenue Service requirements, and leave the stock picking to the brokers, different from a company like Fidelity that would provide the investments and administration in a retirement plan in one package. Co-owner Harry Veldkamp says Polycomp is most successful selling to businesses with between 100 and 500 employees whose owners want to set aside more for their own retirement. “We’ll get a client that comes from a company like Fidelity who says ‘this is just too expensive for me, can you help me find a better fit?'” said Veldkamp. “We’ll structure a plan to get more coming to the owner and still maintain a benefit for the employees.” Veldkamp said that the company also sells itself heavily to brokers who have business owner customers but do not have the expertise with retirement plan structure laws. “Our pitch to CPAs or broker is, number one, that we make them look good,” said Veldkamp. “Number two, we take this work off their plate. All of this administration work is a really highly technical area, and they can’t keep up to speed.” Over the last few years, Polycomp has also seen a lot of growth in its self-directed IRA plans, which allow individuals to put money into alternative investments, like a limited liability corporation that invests in real estate, rather than the products offered at a brokerage firm. Most people are unfamiliar with retirement plan administrators and the work that they do. In the late 1970s while working for himself after graduating from Long Beach State University, Veldkamp was one of them. “In this type of business, most people get in by accident,” he said. “I started out in 1979 working for the two previous owners as a consultant writing software for them. I was doing custom programming and they turned out to be my largest client. When you write software to perform the functions of a business, you learn a lot about the business. I liked the owners very much, and they liked me and ended up offering me a piece of the company in 1983.” Growing enterprise Two years later, Polycomp purchased a business in Roseville, outside of Sacramento, and the head of that office, Pamela Constantino, also became a minority owner. In 1998, the succession plan kicked in and Veldkamp and Constantino set out to grow the business. By this point Polycomp was running a third office in San Diego. “We were operating almost as three different companies at that point,” said Veldkamp. “My partner Pam and I, one of the very first things we did was make a huge effort to get all three offices on the same page and operating as one company, trying to get a recognizable Polycomp brand.” Finding themselves successful, they decided that a growing company needed to keep its staff as prepared as possible. “In a professional services company, your biggest assets are your people,” said Veldkamp. “We make a big investment in education and training, especially for our middle managers.” When Veldkamp and Constantino took over, there wasn’t a large middle management corps, but Polycomp has more than double its revenue in the past six years to $10 million, and its staff has grown from a total of 70 to 110 people, necessitating that extra level of managers. They preferred to promote from within but found that the best employees are not always prepared to be supervisors. “A lot of managers get into that roll by being good at the day-to-day technical work,” said Veldkamp. “They get promoted to a job where they have the technical side down pat, but the management side needs a little bit of help. We’ve hired a professional training person and have formal training two to three times per year where we get the managers from all three offices together. It’s helped in their growth and helped in our employee retention, which translates directly into helping our client retention, which obviously grows the business.” Loyal employees Paul Elis, owner of PMB Capital Inc, said the company’s staff has been remarkably loyal. “One of the things that amazes me about Polycomp is the number of employees that have been there for 10, 15 years or more, and what that must say about the company,” said Elis. Polycomp has been custodian of Elis and his wife and children’s IRA plans for 25 years, and about 75 of his clients work with Polycomp as well. “I think they’re terrffic,” Elis said. “I wrote an article a few years ago where I said that once a businessperson is no longer concerned or fixated on putting food on the table week after week, after they’ve gotten to the point where they’re operating a successful business, people count their successes by the number of successful, long-term relationships they’ve made.” Elis said that any problems he’s had over the years have always been instantly fixed. “They’ve made clerical mistakes and they’ve always fixed them immediately, their integrity is absolute,” he said. “I wish some of my lawyers would have the same sense of obligation toward their clients.” Veldkamp said it takes about two to three years to bring an employee up to speed. “There’s no major, you can’t go to a university and say ‘I’m going to a be retirement plan administrator,'” Veldkamp said. “There’s industry training, there are different groups that have different designations or credentials that you obtain in a classroom type setting and we promote that a lot through the company.” Retaining good employees is not just a strategy for short-term growth. Like the owners before them, Veldkamp and Constantino have a succession plan in place. “We’re not looking to take the company to our retirement and disband it,” Veldkamp said. “Our goal is to have an ongoing entity, and to do that you need to invest in your people.” Polycomp Woodland Hills Revenues in 1998: $5 million Revenues in 2005: $10 million Employees in 1998: 70 Employees in 2005: 110 Driving Force: Changes in tax laws and the state of the economy, which determine whether businesses keep up their retirement plans.