Toni L. Richins, Founder & CEO of ConsortHR, has a passion for helping others. She believes helping others is not limited to providing food, shelter, and so forth but includes relieving the primary causes of suffering and offering the basic reasons for happiness. This is at the root of everything she does. You can see it in her vision for ConsortHR, which is founded on helping less-equipped companies have access to strategic services that can allow their businesses to flourish and maintain success. She listens closely to ideas and transforms them into unique solutions. She is a resilient leader who perseveres through every challenge she meets, making her highly effective and valuable to whatever organization she is working with. She’s both strategic and analytical in thought while balancing an empathetic point of view, when necessary, which allows her to provide a broad perspective when consulting on business decisions.

According to Toni, ConsortHR is not merely a consultancy; they become a part of the client’s organization, are engrained in their operations, and are trusted as a resource that balances both company and employee advocacy. “This allows me to position myself as a strategic partner to our clients and through these relationships tear down barriers for myself and for those that will follow me,” says Toni. “I have been fortunate enough throughout my career to grow a network that has provided me with endless opportunities to impact numerous organizations.”

Armed with her skills, Toni is providing opportunities to those female business owners who are scaling their organizations. “For instance, I engaged a new and upcoming recruiting agency started by a strong female leader to help my client with some recruiting needs. The opportunity afforded her a platform to exhibit her and her team’s abilities. She has shown great success, which has allowed her to grow her team. She is now in her second year in business, and she continues to work for the same client and many others.” “I have recently afforded a new female Co-founder in the training space with opportunities to help my clients train their front-line managers, this will be her first engagement for her new company which will provide her with a paying client and product feedback to continue to improve and grow her company”.  Toni continues to pay it forward for other female co-founders and CEO’s.

Inspiration & Success

Toni inspires her team members through modeling an undeniable work ethic, pushing excellence in her team, and grounding her priorities in caring equally for the people and the business. She empowers her team members by acknowledging their strengths and contributions and providing opportunities for professional and personal growth while fostering an environment of transparency. Toni does not allow perfect to get in the way of great and great to get in the way of good. Toni believes there is a measurement to most things; what is important will get measured, which turns into strength and empowerment and yields positive outcomes.

“It took a minimum of 10 years before I could say I truly found success. The advice relevant to my success I would share is to understand and believe in your self-worth. “Believing in it can take time, and trusting it, even more time,” says Toni. “There were times when I felt I wasn’t ready; I wasn’t good enough.

I changed that way of thinking and started telling myself, If not me, who?”

This steadfast leader has learned never to give up on herself, even when the path feels impossible and scary. “I opened the ConsortHR office on April 1, 2019, and my husband unexpectedly passed away 26 days later at the age of 50. What should have been the best time of mine/our lives changed overnight and I found myself a young widow. I had employees and investors I was accountable to; they left other jobs for my company and my investors entrusted me with their money,” elucidates Toni. “My clients still needed the support they had come to expect. I had a very big decision to make. My decision came about 4 am two weeks after my husband’s passing. I was a strong female leader, and it was time to put what I had learned into action and as I like to say “Keep it Moving.” With the support of the team members of ConsortHR, my clients and investors’ patience and understanding, and the help of family and friends, we made it!”

Building A Company

ConsortHR offers a subscription-based, on-demand HR solution; “you can think of us as your dedicated, off-site HR team. Through our subscription model, companies will have an experienced, dedicated HR Director to lead them through the peaks and pitfalls of the ever-changing and complex HR landscape,” explains Toni, who has taken the company to new heights.

She explains that employment-related lawsuits can mean closing the doors for a small or medium-sized business. “Sometimes ‘you don’t know what you don’t know; therefore, we offer expertise backed by decades of HR experience to help businesses craft policies and put best practices in place that will lower their risk for employment law violations they simply are not aware of; we take care of this so they can take care of their business,” adds Toni.

The most significant achievement for the company is the ability to help small and medium-sized companies, who otherwise could not afford an HR team, to have access to a dedicated HR Director with 10+ years of experience to assist them in mitigating risk and increasing their bottom-line profitability. “We bring trust and transparency, a true intentional partnership our clients can count on every day,” says Toni. “For the days to come, we will be offering an HRIS product to support small to medium-sized businesses that is affordable. I have been working on this for the last three years with the help of my development team. We are nearing the finish line to be able to offer our platform to our clients. I am a little biased, but it’s an amazing platform that is completely customizable and intuitive. “It was built by HR; for HR.”