About

I built an HR department from nothing. I still run it.

I’m Shannon Cate. Since 2007 I’ve been the Human Resources Director at The Varsity in Atlanta. Before that, HR manager at The Home Depot, and eleven years with a Burger King franchisee before that, where I did everything from the register to payroll to building the training program.

Master of Science in Human Resource Development from Georgia State. Bachelor’s in French from West Georgia, which surprises people and has been more useful than you’d think.

Illustrated portrait of Shannon Cate

SLC-HR is my own practice and it’s entirely independent of my employer. The work described on this page is my professional experience. It’s not a client list, and nothing here is offered on my employer’s behalf.

What nineteen years actually looks like

When I started there was no framework. No standard process, no consistent files, no system. I built the department, and then I ran it through everything the last two decades have thrown at a high-volume restaurant business.

  • Workers’ compensation, end to end. Investigation, assessment, documentation, audit, and representing the company in legal proceedings for employee injuries. Plus the safety training meant to stop the next one.
  • Agencies. DOL investigations, responses and hearings across five metro counties. Records and responses for every EEOC hearing and investigation. Direct contact for outside counsel on employment matters.
  • I-9 and E-Verify across the corporation and all of its subsidiaries, plus employment file audits for record retention, hiring and termination law.
  • ACA compliance across the business and its subsidiaries — avoiding penalties, holding affordability, keeping minimum coverage where it belongs. And ADA compliance for facilities, tools and how we deal with staff.
  • Systems. The company’s ADP expert — Workforce Now, Time and Attendance, electronic I-9 management, recruiting, Smart Compliance. I put in the HRIS that let location managers stop tracking people on paper.
  • A workforce more than half Spanish-speaking. That’s not a footnote. It changes how you write a policy, how you run a training, and how you investigate a complaint — and getting it wrong is how good companies end up with bad outcomes.
  • 2020. I wrote and rolled out COVID policy in real time for a business that couldn’t send everybody home, then steered the CARES Act work — PPP applications and full forgiveness, Restaurant Revitalization funds, employee retention credits.

Why I started this

Because there are a lot of small operators in this town carrying risk they can’t see.

Not because anybody’s careless. Because the owner is also the buyer, the scheduler, the fill-in cook and the person who answers the phone at nine at night, and HR is the thing that gets handled when it becomes an emergency. The I-9 binder is a mess because nobody’s ever had ninety uninterrupted minutes to look at it. That’s the whole story, almost every time.

I’ve got those ninety minutes. And I’ve already made most of these mistakes on somebody else’s dime, which is the actual product here.

How I work

Plain English, always. If a policy needs a lawyer to read it, your shift manager at ten on a Saturday night isn’t going to follow it, and a policy nobody follows is worse than no policy at all.

I’ll tell you what I actually think. If the thing you asked me to do isn’t the thing that’ll help, I’ll say so before I invoice you for it.

And I document everything, because the file you build on a quiet Tuesday is the file that saves you on a very bad Thursday.

Come tell me what’s going on.

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