PEOPLEASE is Leading Corporate Civic Engagement in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

By: Sam Rossa

PEOPLEASE is Leading Corporate Civic Engagement in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

This column, “PEOs in the Community,” explores how PEOs are developing and nurturing relationships in their communities. Being embedded in the small business world, PEOs are uniquely positioned to lend their time and expertise to serving their communities, while at the same time enhancing industry visibility. This month, Sam Rossa of PEOPLEASE shares how his company engages its employees and clients in community outreach.

PEOPLEASE truly does ease the burden of others by not only providing solution-minded services to our clients, but by also offering fun and philanthropic initiatives to our team members, within our community, and within the communities of the clients we serve.

The correlation between community and wellness program efforts manifests benefits in a host of ways, including parallels between community engagement and employee retention, productivity, and overall bottom-line benefits. In short, businesses that do good, do well. In this article, I will share just a few ways PEOPLEASE is engaging in outreach with our communities and staff.

Clients

Through the P.E.T.S. (PEOPLEASE Expert Trucking Solutions) program, PEOPLEASE thanks and welcomes new clients by contributing to a charity of the clients’ choice upon their joining the PEOPLEASE family. Our clients are our business, so we make it our business to invest in what matters to them. Through the P.E.T.S. program, PEOPLEASE has donated hundreds of dollars to numerous and varying charities, including City of Hope, a cancer research hospital, and the May Institute, a nonprofit organization that provides educational, rehabilitative, and behavioral healthcare services to individuals with autism spectrum disorder and other developmental disabilities.

Employees

Culture is key at PEOPLEASE, and the company is perpetually engaging with and celebrating our team through regular events such as kickball games, bowling night, hotdogs for all on National Hotdog Day, and ongoing fitness challenges. To promote wellness, a cause of paramount importance to me as a triathlete, PEOPLEASE has launched the PeopleFIT program, which rewards employees with cash, prizes, and even travel for a myriad of healthy choices including physical activity, wellness visits, and smoking cessation programs. The company even provides fitness tracking devices for employees and recently held a three-week fitness challenge where all employees, including members of the board of directors, competed in teams to see who could get the most steps in. Over the course of 19 days, the PEOPLEASE team stepped more than 7.7 million steps, or more than 3,700 miles.

Extended Family

When presented with an opportunity to help outside of our growing family, there are no bad ideas at PEOPLEASE. Over the past year, the company has contributed to the ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) Association via the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, Naval Special Warfare Kids (which provides educational and enrichment resources for children in the Navy SEAL community), The Rosie Network (a network of military family-owned businesses across America), the Max McGee National Center for Juvenile Diabetes, Dragon Boat for Cancer Survivors, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, and Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Every role and relationship at PEOPLEASE is injected with our core values of integrity, collaboration, quality, accountability, and solution mindedness. It’s these principles, woven into our unparal-leled culture, that drive business and allow for a thriving company and community.