From PEO to one platform: How MNI manages 400 employees across 10 entities with Miter

Company Overview

MNI Holding Company is a holding company that acquires and operates specialty subcontracting businesses across the United States. Their model is straightforward: find owner-operated shops that are skilled at their craft but light on back-office infrastructure, acquire them, and implement the financial controls and systems that give them real visibility into how their business is actually performing. 

Since launching in 2019, MNI has built a portfolio of 10 companies, delivering quality insulation, gutters, and cabinet installation services for home builders and general contractors across commercial and residential markets. Backed by a mix of private equity and partner ownership, they’ve nearly doubled in size in two years, adding five businesses in a single year. Today MNI manages roughly 400 employees across entities that range from a 10-person crew to teams of over 100.

Key Takeaways

• Doubling in size in two years through five acquisitions created payroll and HR complexity that most systems simply couldn’t handle.
• Their PEO couldn’t support job costing and forced duplicate data entry every pay period, which became a compounding problem as each new entity was onboarded.
• MNI’s portfolio spans union and non-union companies, hourly and piece-rate pay, and businesses from 10 to 100+ employees across multiple states – requiring a single platform capable of handling all of it.
• After switching to Miter, MNI cut payroll data input time by 50%, immediately recovering hours that had been lost to manual workarounds.
• Every new acquisition now comes onto a consistent platform from day one, with clean job costing and payroll established immediately.
• Miter gives branch admins the autonomy to run their own payroll while corporate maintains control over job costing and the Sage Intacct integration, providing the right access at every level.
• Miter now provides the infrastructure MNI needs to scale as fast as they can grow.

The Challenge: A PEO built for a company half their size

MNI hired a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) to manage their payroll and benefits about three years ago. The move made sense for their business: they had 100 to 150 employees and no internal HR team. And with only about 30 employees taking benefits, getting competitive insurance rates independently was nearly impossible. The PEO solved that.

But as MNI kept acquiring businesses, the PEO couldn’t keep up. The PEO couldn’t send payroll data back to their ERP, Sage Intacct, in a way that supported job costing. That meant running payroll in one system, then manually re-entering all the labor cost data in another, for every entity, every pay period. With roughly 350 installers all needing their hours costed to specific jobs, the manual data entry was tedious and time-consuming.

By this point, the PEO’s rigidity was creating friction for the MNI team. Branch admins couldn’t make routine changes without going through the PEO’s processes, so some work sat in accounts payable, outside the job costing picture entirely. Meanwhile, as headcount grew and benefits participation increased, competitive rates became available directly from brokers, making the cost of the PEO difficult to justify on top of everything else.

The Solution: One platform across every entity

Kyle heard about Miter through Alliance Solutions Group, MNI’s VAR partner. After vetting it against their needs, he brought Miter to John Jason, MNI’s CFO, who pulled the trigger on the transition and guided the setup. Kyle and Kat led the implementation from there.

A combination of factors made Miter stand out: a direct Sage Intacct integration that would eliminate double entry, union and non-union payroll in the same system, and a platform flexible enough that on-site admins at each branch could run their own payroll without leaning on corporate.

Today, all of MNI’s entities run on Miter. Admins at each company manage their team’s payroll locally, while John’s team maintains corporate oversight across all entities, with fully burdened labor costs flowing into Sage Intacct and every job costed correctly across the entire portfolio, without navigating ten separate systems or relying on branch-level data entry to get the numbers right. Kat Donaway, MNI’s HR Director, oversees onboarding and compliance across the entire portfolio from Miter.

Outcome #1: Job Costing and Payroll in One Step

For John, clean job costing data is the whole point of MNI’s model. Every acquired business comes in without it and getting it right is what lets MNI see how each company is performing and unlock the full potential of each business. “Part of what I like and get excited about is getting my hands dirty with those guys and getting them some good data about their company that they didn’t previously have, or even know about,” Kyle Wolf says.

Miter makes that possible at scale. Before, every payroll cycle meant running payroll in the PEO and then re-entering all the labor cost data in Sage Intacct. Now it’s one step. Employees log hours against jobs in Miter. At the end of the week, Miter generates a journal entry that pushes fully burdened labor costs into Sage. Labor is costed to jobs, payroll is processed, and the GL is updated, all at once.

For MNI’s two California entities, where installers work under union agreements covering 10 different earning types, Miter handles the same workflow at greater complexity. MNI uploaded their union tables, assigned them to jobs by location and classification, and Miter took over from there. “Miter was able to put all that into a table for us,” says Kyle. “We assign the table to the specific jobs depending on where the job is located. The hours get appropriately costed and allocated and paid, and it books our journal entry so that it accrues our liability to the unions.”

Outcome #2: Onboarding built for a field workforce

MNI’s workforce is mostly field installers, spread across 10 entities, multiple states, and often far from a desk. Getting new employees onboarded quickly was a constant challenge, but Miter has streamlined the process.

Miter’s mobile-friendly onboarding removes most of the friction. MNI’s HR team can send a text link prompting new hires to complete everything on their phone without an office visit or physical paperwork. “Our construction crews don’t have to be tech-savvy to complete their onboarding quickly through their phone,” says Kat.

Kat also stores employee documents in Miter and syncs with Employee Navigator for benefits, with deductions flowing automatically into payroll.

For each entity’s admins, leaving the PEO also meant getting something back: the ability to make routine payroll and employee changes directly, without going through layers of process. Kat hears it from them regularly. “The admins would get kind of frustrated because they weren’t able to go in and make a change they needed without going through a lot of the hoops that come with a PEO,” adds Kat. “They’re a lot happier with Miter.”

Outcome #3: A platform that scales with every acquisition

When a new business joins MNI’s portfolio, it typically has no job costing infrastructure and payroll practices can vary widely. MNI’s team sets the business up in Sage Intacct and Miter, and things change fast: labor costs flow to jobs, payroll runs correctly, compliance gets sorted. And more often than not, the people who built the business stay on to see it through. “It’s nice to work with people who have been at that company for a long time. They’re all pretty great,” adds Kat.

That process works consistently because Miter handles the range of complex scenarios across MNI’s portfolio: union or non-union, 10 employees or 110, hourly or piece rate – it all runs through the same system. They no longer have different tools for different entities or manual processes that can’t scale. When asked what they’d tell other contractors considering Miter, both Kyle and Kat singled out the onboarding support.

The Impact: The infrastructure to keep growing

Miter didn’t just solve MNI’s PEO problem. It became the backbone of MNI’s scaling operating model. Every new entity inherits the same platform and sophisticated job costing infrastructure. Every employee gets paid from the same system and every hour worked flows cleanly into job costs and financials in Sage Intacct.

The finance team spends half the time on payroll data entry that they used to, while Kat’s team quickly onboards new employees across the portfolio. And when the next acquisition closes, there’s already a playbook.

When asked what would happen if Miter disappeared tomorrow, Kyle didn’t pause: “We rely very, very heavily on Miter. We would not be able to pay our union employees, for starters. The last thing I want to do is open up another account with ADP.”

With Miter, MNI has the infrastructure to keep growing and the confidence that every new business will hit the ground running.