When Alan Morrison purchased a small 4-vehicle trucking company in 2015, he needed a payroll & HR partner that shared his dedication to service, hard work, and accountability.

The name Trucailber Feirme itself is a deeply personal nod to the owner's family and heritage. Alan explains that it's a blend of Celtic words: "The T-R-U-C stands for truck in Celtic, the A-I-L is Ailán for Alan, and the B-E-R is for my wife, Kimberly. Feirme means farm in Celtic. Funnily enough, my accountant spelled it wrong, so we just left it." The L-T-D, Alan adds, is "like an homage to my Canadian part of the family," reflecting the company's homegrown roots.

His search for a partner began with a suggestion for a national company, but a friend recommended Complete Payroll. Alan's experience with the national firm sealed his decision.

"When I got the price from Complete Payroll, it was hundreds of dollars less than the national company," he recalls. "So when they came back to me and said they could do it for the exact same price as Complete, I felt like I had been used car shopped and really didn't trust them after that."

For the next eight years, as his new company quadrupled their fleet and grew their workforce to over 25 drivers, their relationship with Complete Payroll grew with them. Trucailber became a valued and exemplary citizen of what we call “Payroll Country.”

The relationship between Complete Payroll and Trucailber was put to the test in late 2023. This is the story of what challenged our relationship, how it ended and, ultimately, what paved the road for Trucailber to come back to Payroll Country.

In 2023, we were still at the beginning of the process of migrating our clients to a new software platform, isolved. Great care and planning took place behind the scenes at Complete Payroll to make sure those migrations were planned carefully, executed smoothly, and with as little disruption to our clients as possible. Unfortunately, it wasn’t perfect for every client, and that was especially true in the case of Trucailber Feirme.

"Our switching from evolution over to isolved was a nightmare. Socials were wrong, date of births were wrong, addresses were wrong, everything was incorrect,” says Tina Lookenhouse, manager at Trucailber. “It was like the tower falling down and crashing at our feet."

— Tina Lookenhouse, Manager

With it, the relationship we spent eight years cultivating with Trucailber Feirme began to crash as well. We owned our mistakes and worked quickly to resolve them, but the damage was done. While Tina lobbied to stay a Complete Payroll client, Alan made the decision to find another payroll provider to service them.

The lesson? When trust is lost, it happens that quickly.

Clients being courted by other, larger payroll providers is nothing new for Complete Payroll. So, when Trucailber began looking, they had no shortage of options. Ultimately, they landed with one of the largest payroll providers in the world, and one of our neighbors in Rochester, Paychex.

“They came in promising the moon and stars,” Lookenhouse recalls.

Paychex proposed a comprehensive service package that included 401k, payroll processing, and time management tools, utilizing their own proprietary software platform. This was presented at a seemingly attractive cost with a complimentary integration into their system.

"We were told it was going to be a bundle for everything,” said Lookenhouse. “The integration was going to be free of charge, and they would be in our office doing all of the work!”

“Which was a blatant lie," she adds.

"Integration’ meant me doing five times the work, and Alan paying 10 times the cost.”

- Tina Lookenhouse

In fact, Tina added that Paychex offered a significant “discount” for all of these features and services. But in an apples-to-apples comparison, their fees turned out to still be higher than they ever paid with Complete Payroll, before leaving or after coming back.

The need for a flexible, human-centric payroll partner is especially important for Trucailber, which operates with a unique pay structure. Alan states, "What I think is unique to myself is that I don't sweat the little things in the pay. I pay guys on salary, whether they work a six-hour day, they get paid for their whole day, whether they work an eight-hour, it's the same thing." This kind of customized payroll management proved difficult for the mass-market, national provider.

In addition to employing bait-and-switch tactics to get Trucailber on board, Paychex also revealed significant shortcomings in one area that proved crucial to Tina and Trucailber: communication. Paychex’ “support” channels turned out to be anything but. Lookenhouse recalls three main ways that she was instructed to contact Paychex support: by phone, by email, or by chat.

Their online chat function was “definitely AI,” she says. Support emails would routinely go multiple days without being responded to, and those responses would often provide little or no resolution. Paychex’ phone support proved to be especially unhelpful to Tina.

“I was so discombobulated.” she says. “Often, you never knew who you were going to get, how they were going to come across, or when (or if) they were going to get back to you.”

“You just always felt like it was up in the air.”

“Paychex had me in tears,” Tina said. “Frequently.”

Over the eight weeks Trucailber was with Paychex, Alan saw the toll that unethical sales tactics and unresponsive customer service was taking on Tina, and quickly decided to act. Within two months of the switch, Trucailber found themselves once again looking for another payroll partner. 

The offers from other providers never stopped coming in. And when they were looking, Tina even entertained a few of them.

“I looked at ADP and, you know, people had wonderful things to say about them for a smaller business,” Tina says.

“But like Paychex, they were offering the moon and stars.

I wondered, ‘are we going to be nickel and dimed for everything?’ I’m just not interested.”

In early 2024, Tina reached back out to Kailey, the dedicated Customer Service Representative (CSR) that she worked with during Trucailber’s first stint with Complete Payroll. She expressed an interest in returning, but that was not without concern.

“My anxiety was still high wondering if I was going to have to put everything in again,” said Tina. “I expressed that greatly with Leanne [our trainer] and with Missy and Jennifer [Trucailber’s new CSR’s] and they expressed that they would be working in the background to prevent any of those things from happening.”

Ultimately, all roads led Trucailber back to Complete Payroll. The return to Complete Payroll confirmed the significance of working with a local partner.

"You felt like you could actually say something to them and they're like,

"oh yeah, the cows were walking across the street this morning. I get what you mean..." 

... instead of some national company from, say, New York City that is like, 'What are you talking about?"

What brought Trucailber back to Complete Payroll was the cornerstone of any strong relationship: trust. Paychex lost Tina and Alan’s trust by making promises on which they couldn’t deliver, not taking responsibility for breaking those promises, and for providing unclear channels of communication.

In Payroll Country, those things are fundamental to how we do business. When we reached out to Tina for participation in this case study, the first line of her response was “I love those girls!,” referring to the CSR’s and trainers she has worked with over the years.

Ask yourself: when was the last time you said you loved your payroll company? Can you even name your customer service representative?

Tina Lookenhouse can name every representative she has ever spoken to at Complete Payroll. The same is true for almost all of our other clients. It is a testament to the principles that we operate under. To the “Human Touch” that we practice with every single citizen of Payroll Country.

Trucailber Feirme's journey underscores the enduring value of a reliable and communicative payroll partner, especially when navigating technological transitions and considering alternative software solutions. Their experience with Paychex highlights the potential pitfalls of prioritizing promises over proven reliability and dedicated support.

Their return to Complete Payroll reaffirms the significance of the long-term relationships we cultivate and our unwavering commitment to providing transparent, accurate, and personalized service. We are delighted to have Trucailber Feirme back with us and look forward to continuing our successful partnership, learning from past challenges to ensure an even stronger future together.