Megan Frank studied forensic science at Southeast Missouri State University and graduated 10 years ago with a degree in chemistry, which eventually led her to a career in human resources.

Wait. What?

"It took a lot of finding out what I liked and what I was good at to get to where I'm at today," said Frank, the chief operations officer at OnBoard, a human-resources consulting firm in Cape Girardeau.

Frank founded OnBoard early last year after spending the better part of a decade in various jobs ranging from land surveying, real estate and chemical engineering to financial service marketing and medical lab work.

But it was as a teenager in Springfield, Illinois, when Frank had her first "human resources" assignment.

"My dad owned a land surveying company there and that's where I started my HR career," she explained. "It was him and a couple of guys. I was the first female to work there, so I had to write a sexual-harassment policy because there was no need for it before then."

While still in high school, she started helping her father with the company's payroll duties and developed a set of office policies and company procedures.

"I also helped him with hirings, watched him do firings and things like that," she said.

'I fell in love with Cape'

After comparing several universities, Frank chose to enroll at Southeast Missouri State University in 2006, intending to study business, but then found herself drawn to chemistry.

"I was good at it, it was easy for me, so I switched to forensic science and thought about going into the FBI or something like that," she said.

Not only was Frank drawn to chemistry, she was also drawn to Cape Girardeau.

"I fell in love with Cape," she said, "and knew this was where I wanted to eventually wanted to come back to, but you don't always get what you want right out of school."

Frank returned to the family land surveying business until she found a chemistry position at Archer Daniels Midland.

"We did quality assurance testing, and if products didn't meet guidelines, sometimes we would have to tell very angry managers they had to shut the entire plant down, drain the tanks and redo it," Frank said. "So I learned a lot of management skills there."

After six months at ADM, Frank went back to the family business.

"I was drawn back to the business side of things, so I started to go back to school for land surveying with the intention of taking over the company," she said.

"I worked for my dad for two years, but about a year-and-a-half into it, I realized my passion just wasn't there for surveying. I loved being trained to be a business owner and having clients, but I couldn't allow myself to take over something he had built up if I didn't have the passion there that he had. Also, I wanted to move back to Cape."

Once back in Missouri, Frank took a quality-assurance position with QC Corp. in Cape Girardeau. That was followed by a couple years in the Saint Francis Healthcare System's regional laboratory while also working part time in the real-estate industry.

After a couple of years with Saint Francis, Frank accepted the position of HR director and marketing coordinator for Credit Bureau Services, a position that fit better into her family schedule (by this time she had two young sons).

Working at Credit Bureau, doing things such as writing and implementing employee policies, affirmed Frank's decision to focus on a career in human resources. It didn't take long before her work caught the attention of others who encouraged her to start her own HR business.

"Their input and support gave me the confidence to do it," Frank said of the encouragement she received to start OnBoard in the spring of 2019. Several local business persons are working with Frank as "investors and advisers," including Greg Vaughn of Media Leaf, who serves as OnBoard's chief marketing officer and shares Codefi office space with Frank in Cape Girardeau's Marquette Tower.

From hiring to firing

OnBoard, Frank says, fills a niche for small-to-medium-size businesses that need human-resources services, but can't afford a full-time HR department. And while there are web-based platforms that offer certain human-resources services such as payroll and pre-employment screenings, she says there are very few operations like hers in this region that provide "in-person" HR solutions.

"I do everything from the beginning of hiring all the way to beyond terminations and unemployment claims," she said. "I have some (clients) that are all-inclusive, where I am their HR department, and I have others that I just do hiring for them."

Some of the businesses she works with need help creating employee handbooks and company policies.

"The way I see it, if you don't have a handbook, you don't have policies," Frank said. "If you don't have it in writing, then it doesn't exist. Just saying, 'Oh, well, this is just what we do,' when it comes time for a government agency to do an audit, or when you have an unemployment claim or discrimination suit, if you don't have those policies, then it's not a policy."

Human resources consulting is also a big part of what Frank does.

"That's a big plus for my clients that have an all-inclusive package, because they can call me up and say, 'Hey, we've got this or that going on, what do you think?'" she said. "I'm pretty much on call as much as they need me."

But beyond policies and procedures, hirings and firings, Frank says her role as an HR professional often involves "keeping everyone on the same page, making sure the hierarchy of the office is being maintained as far as who reports to who, who's doing which job descriptions and so on."

Frank also helps clients focus on building and maintaining employee morale and direction, using everything from motivational programs to "stress pineapples" and a "drama llama," a small stuffed animal she loans to clients.

"Instead of telling your drama to a co-worker, you tell your drama to the drama lama," she quipped.

Pandemic challenges

Since starting OnBoard last year, Frank has developed a portfolio of clients, mostly in the Cape Girardeau and Jackson area, and has an eye on expanding into other parts of Southeast Missouri and possibly Southern Illinois. Her current clients are mostly in the food service, construction trades and health care sectors.

Frank admits its been a struggle to establish OnBoard.

"If I were to say it wasn't a struggle, I'd be kidding myself," she said. "But it's building, and if I took on three or four more clients, I'd probably need to hire somebody to come in and help me. I'm getting to that point."

The "struggle" Frank referred to has been made even more challenging this year by the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It was mass panic when everything shut down," she said. "The majority of my clients employ essential workers. Fortunately, we did not have to face layoffs, although we discussed it, we made it work and didn't have to do layoffs."

While her clients — and their employees — have weathered the coronavirus storm fairly well, they still had to deal with a variety of matters such as teleworking, schedule adjustments and child-care issues.

"It wasn't really the business owners that were in a panic," Frank said. "It was their employees. There was so much uncertainty."

For the first two or three weeks of the pandemic, Frank remembers being on the phone from sunup until late each night working through coronavirus-related issues.

"I think we've got everything under control now," she said. "We've dealt with everything at this point I think we need to deal with, including people faking that they have coronavirus symptoms so they could stay home, and we've worked with people who didn't have any child care, even months and months into it after things have opened back up. We've put procedures in place to help employees feel safe and we've added work-at-home processes for those employees that can work from home, so if they get quarantined, it's not a problem."

As businesses reopened and the area economy began getting back to normal, Frank said many of her clients faced a new challenge.

"It's starting to get better than it was a month ago, but hiring is almost impossible," she said. "There is a massive amount of people who have been on unemployment, and because of the stimulus, they refused to go back to work. But it's building back up and I've noticed more people who are ready to go back."

Be a 'good human'

Although the pandemic has been a challenge for all businesses, Frank says there are always going to be human resources issues and obstacles that confront businesses on a daily basis.

Frank discusses many of these on her blog, www.hrhappens.blogspot.com, and on the OnBoard Facebook site.

"The important thing is, be a 'human resource,' be someone your employees are comfortable coming to when they have other things going on. If they trust you with the little things, then they'll trust you with the big things," she said. "Be a good human. Have grace, give grace."

To learn more about OnBoard, visit www.onboardhro.com.

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