“It was just going to be a little job for a couple of months, when I first came back from overseas”.
14 years ago Karlee Berg began her career with Tribe Workforce Solutions as an Administration Assistant. Today, after performing every role in between (and often more than one at once!), she’s now the General Manager.
“I trained as a beauty therapist and I'd been working overseas, as the day spa manager on cruise ships. It’s a hectic lifestyle and I was pretty burnt out when I got home and needed a break,” Karlee said.
“I think I'd only been back in the country for a month and a friend, who was working with AWX (another of PeopleIN’s brands), said the directors had started this new business, focused on the hospitality sector. They didn’t have admin or account staff, just a general manager, and people from AWX were just jumping in to help where they could.
“I thought it would just be a short-term thing but, here we are 14 years later and I’ve never really had a chance to stop!”
It’s a hallmark of businesses within PeopleIN’s family of brands that people prove themselves in one role, are nurtured towards growing into new opportunities and become long term employees. Karlee’s Tribe story is a great example.
Karlee points out most small business owners don’t decide to open a business simply to employ others.
“They have a dream to create a business doing what they love. Paying staff, managing superannuation, work cover … these things are obviously important but doing them isn’t what they get into business to do,” she said.
“So Tribe positioned itself as a business that could do those things, so the business owner didn’t have to. It’s an offering that is suited to any small to medium business; we’re here for anyone who has employees and needs support to manage the back of office stuff.
“Through referrals and word of mouth, the business started to gain momentum and gave me new opportunities as an Account Manager. We were taking members of our wider HR team to meetings with our clients, and after shadowing at these, I started doing them myself.
“I had my first baby in 2014 and then returned to work. I came back to account management and to good sized team but then the landscape changed and we had to rapidly downsize. In a smaller team I took on further duties and eventually became the Operations Manager.
“Despite some ups and downs, Covid 19 in particular, the business grew and there were just more things to be done. I've always been trusted in the business to keep pushing and getting things done and the results have sort of spoken for themselves over the years.
“Covid created an awful situation for a lot of businesses we work with, and we threw everything we had at supporting them. We had the biggest 12 months in the history of the business, which was a great reward in itself, but I was very proud when Tom Reardon made General Manager of the business.”
The new Tribe Workforce Solutions website was launched just last month and outlines the range of their services from payroll and admin to HR, IR, compliance and more.