#HRTechChat: John Dnyprowsky & Ryan Shapiro on Why PEO Buyers Need a Translator

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In this episode of #HRTechChat, Nicole Roberts (Director & Principal Analyst, 3Sixty Insights) is joined by John Dnyprowsky—SVP of National Partnerships at Vensure Employer Solutions—and Ryan Shapiro—President & Founder of PEOMG and founder of the PEO Brokers Collective—for a conversation about a layer of the HR ecosystem most HR leaders don’t know exists: the PEO broker.

Ryan sorts buyers into five stages, from PEO-unaware to PEO-active, and puts roughly 60% of his own customers in the first two categories alone. That gap persists, he argues, because evaluating a PEO properly means running underwriting, tech demos, benefit-alignment calls, and financial reviews — and doing that credibly, more than once, isn’t realistic for someone also running an HR department. A broker’s job sits at the intersection of translation and validation: make a genuinely complex, under-understood category legible, then bring back options an employer can trust weren’t shaped by whoever pays the best commission.

That trust question gets a concrete answer in how PEOMG is built. Every match runs through a two-step process — a human evaluation against PEOMG’s roster of 16 vetted PEOs, then a proprietary AI model that scores the same match across 36 points of alignment — with the human read winning out more often than the algorithm. To take compensation out of the equation entirely, PEOMG caps what it earns from any single PEO and donates everything above that cap to charity in the client’s name, audited quarterly by a CPA.

John and Ryan trace how fast the category around that trust problem has grown: PEO penetration into the SMB market has gone from roughly 1.5% in 2012 to 15% today — growth John pegs at 15x — while the broker channel serving it has grown by 50x on his estimate, a shift visible in the 38 brokers and 9 PEOs who gathered under one roof at the PEO Brokers Collective’s first Convergence event. The Collective, which Ryan founded to give a fast-growing and previously disconnected community a shared home, now counts around 140 members and is preparing to launch an accreditation program built around ethical brokering standards. Their advice to any HR leader weighing a PEO: come to a broker with real transparency about what you don’t yet understand, and get clear on your actual “why” before comparing providers — because if cost is the only reason, John warns, you’re buying into a relationship that isn’t easy to unwind.

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