Top 10 Things We Love About Compliance

I know what you’re thinking. Regulatory compliance—what’s not to love? How in the world could anyone boil it down to just ten things?

Okay, so maybe that’s a bit optimistic, especially if you haven’t worked with us before. After all, many businesses and nonprofits find us after they’ve hit a wall with a filing or license application. By then love is generally not the feeling they’re experiencing.

But once they work with us, we like to think we win them over, not just to our services and software, but to the value of compliance itself. To us, compliance is a sure foundation, a growth enabler, a reputation builder. It’s a solid financial investment and a safeguard against disruption. And we get a lot of joy from it. (One employee actually called corporate filings addictive).

So it did take some distilling to cut the list down to just ten things we love about licensing and corporate filings.

Are any of our items on your list? If not, maybe you should give us a call!

#10 – The Neverending Discovery

When it comes to licenses and state filings, there is no such thing as routine paperwork. Just when we think we’ve seen it all, someone discovers an unwritten stapling rule or a secret fax line that no one had encountered before.

While these little nuances can be frustrating to someone navigating a jurisdiction on their own, for our Fulfillment teams, it just makes things interesting. Basically, they’re regulatory sharpshooters. When states move the target now and then, it keeps them on their toes.

And whenever we add a new discovery to the collective wisdom of the team, there’s a very satisfying sense that we’re one step closer to uncovering the full mysteries of the inner workings of state agencies.

#9 Decennial Filings

You have to love an agency that collects periodic reports once every ten years. (The deadline in Pennsylvania, our home state, is coming up in 2021!) How do they staff for that? Do they spend the next decade sorting through them?

#8 – The Lightbulb Moments

With every client, there’s a lightbulb moment when they realize they don’t ever have to deal with state filings again if they don’t want to. The relief is palpable. Most of our clients never realized there were companies handling all of these things. In fact, there aren’t any handling them quite like we do!

#7 – Creating Order From Chaos

Have you ever spent an entire weekend organizing the garage? There’s a weird satisfaction that comes from sorting out all those underused sporting goods and surplus shoes. So imagine how satisfying it would be to wrangle the assorted forms and processes of more than 150,000 regulatory jurisdictions into a massive database of requirements connected to a uniform, manageable set of workflows and events.

It took years of research, compiling thousands of data sets, and building a custom platform to interface with them, but we did just that. And the outcome is pretty neat: our software. It turns those endless forms and requirements into a sweet little dashboard with orderly tabs that you can manage with the press of a button. What’s not to love?

(If you haven’t toured our software, schedule a demo today!)

#6 – Getting Love From State Agencies

Staff members in state agencies are usually up to their necks in paperwork, much of it not prepared according to their specs. So when you get praise for adding to the pile, you know you’re doing something exceptional.

We were proud when the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office emailed to say how much they like working us because “everything’s always in order” and we make their job “a piece of cake.” They even included a smiley face 🙂

Just recently, the State of Florida called a client to remind them about an upcoming renewal. When our client said they were working with us, the official said, “Oh, never mind then. You’re in good hands.”

That truly makes our day!

#5 – Sending It Right Back at Them

This goes hand in hand with #6, but many hard-working people in regulatory agencies don’t get enough thanks for the work they do. Over the years, we’ve built up good working relationships with them by taking time to ask how they’re doing and simply say thanks. When we need a hand, they’re there for us. Sometimes they even ask our specialists for input on their processes. It’s a nice feeling.

#4 – Sharing What We Learn

From the beginning, we’ve been driven by a belief that compliance is should be accessible to organizations of all sizes. So at every step of our journey, as we amassed more and more data and knowledge about requirements to guide our work, we shared it all on the web.

Today, our Information Center houses more than 4,000 pages of compliance resources, arranged to allow users to find answers to just about any question they might have in a couple of clicks. Education is deep in our corporate DNA, and with compliance, there’s always more to learn and share.

#3 – The Name Game

In most states, an engineering firm license is called a certificate of authorization, and a certificate of authority is a corporate registration document issued by the secretary of state (SOS). Yet in Mississippi, a certificate of authority is an engineering firm license, and a certificate of existence is the SOS document. In Montana, both are called certificates of authority. Sometimes, even the regulators get them mixed up. Good times.

#2 – Compluzzles

We love puzzles. We even make up compliance puzzles for employee training, fondly dubbed Compluzzles. So we have to admit to a certain joy that comes from massive projects with a lot of moving parts, like navigating ownership requirements for a professional firm nationwide. Getting them done under time pressure just adds to the adventure. We’ve had projects so complex and so tightly scheduled that it took a team of seven or eight specialists in a highly orchestrated campaign to pull it off. It can be a little hair-raising at times, but when it’s all said and done, the teams are always pumped. Honestly, it’s better than Sudoku.

#1 – Our Clients

Our clients are doing amazing things: restoring wetlands, building bridges, saving endangered species, providing after-school programs, combating drug shortages. We’re so proud of our clients that we’re creating a wall of stories in our new building to remind us of the good work our work enables. It’s our way of reminding ourselves that compliance is so much more than paperwork.

And it’s not just the work our clients do, it’s the people. We truly work with some of the nicest people on the planet, which is its own reward.

Not Feeling the Love?

If you’re not finding much to love about regulatory compliance these days, maybe we can help. Let us give you a tour of our software, or tell you about our specialized compliance teams, or walk you through our many different managed service options. We want compliance to put a smile on your face.

Looking for Love?

If you’re a regulatory wonk or legal eagle looking to work with some seriously driven people who love what they do, give us a call! We’re always on the hunt for our next compliance compatriot (complatriot?). Check out our Careers page, and get in touch.