There’s a truism in life that you can’t go home again, but whoever coined it obviously hadn’t met Patricia Lyons-Bousquet.
After decades working around the region, Lyons-Bousquet is now ensconced in the East Providence home where she grew up, and where she launched her business, CompLyons HR Consulting LLC, in 2023. “My office is my childhood bedroom,” she said.
CompLyons is a consulting firm that offers full- and part-time services to small and midsize businesses. Among its standard services: human resources compliance and risk management, regulatory reporting, tailored workplace policies, employee handbooks, cost saving, as well as I-9 audits to verify the company is following immigration regulations.
And then there are the less-standard areas: “Now we have to offer guidance on how to prepare for a [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raid,” she said. “Who imagined that?”
Lyons-Bousquet also never imagined a career in HR when she was a kid. After her parents divorced, she grew up with her mom, who was a bookkeeper, and her Italian grandmother. “She always had meals on the table and the house was immaculate,” she said.
At East Providence High School, she was a cheerleader, in the chorus and on the Student Council. “It was a good experience. I have good memories. I had lots of friends, smart friends and jock friends. Of course, we didn’t have social media. It’s different now,” she said.
After high school, Lyons-Bousquet headed to Boston to study criminal justice at Northeastern University, the first in her immediate family to graduate from college. “I remember when I was in second grade, I was arguing with my grandmother and she said, ‘You like to argue, you should be a lawyer,’ ” she said.
About 20 years later, she enrolled in the first evening class division of Roger Williams University Law School and bought a house. She also got married. “I had a lot going on,” she said.
But during law school, she began to realize lawyering was not for her. What she really enjoyed was her side hustle at the time as a payroll and personnel supervisor at a nonprofit, thanks to her mentor in HR.
She was drawn to the complexities of human resources, the core of every company, she says, and to working with people. Her background in law helped with contracts and resolving disputes. She graduated with a law degree from RWU in 1997 and has worked in the field in various aspects, ever since. Her resume includes positions at more than half a dozen companies, including Hilb Group New England, an HR consultant for the insurance broker industry, as well as an HR manager at Westport-based Ralco Electric Inc.
Everything changed in October 2023, however, when her job with an HR consulting firm in Maine was eliminated. She’d known for a while that she wanted to start her own firm but the layoff crystallized that.
“It was time,” she said. “When you work for others, there are constraints. I wanted to be able to support clients the way I wanted to do it. Plus, I had my mom, who’s 91, at home with me and I liked having flexibility to help her.”
Because she’d been in the HR world for roughly three decades, Lyons-Bousquet has been busy. Since COVID-19, companies have realized the importance of having human resources support, especially with more employees working from home. Having a full-time HR professional can cost $100,000 annually, she says. That’s simply unrealistic for small companies, which can hire her firm on a project-by-project basis instead.
Lyons-Bousquet’s staff of six may find themselves handling both proactive and reactive situations with a client roster in 25 states. These small-to-midsize businesses range from Baxter’s Fine Jewelry and a franchisee of Fred Astaire Dance Studios Inc. to Palmer Industries and Phoenix Property Management Inc., all in Rhode Island.
“We have companies who may have received a formal complaint. Maybe it’s a letter from the attorney general related to hiring practices or wage compliance and they need to fix a problem,” she said. “Generally, when people reach out to us, they suspect something needs to be fixed, or they want to make sure everything’s OK.”
Another common HR problem occurs when managers avoid having difficult conversations about job performance. This can lead to bigger problems down the road, ones that could have been turned around earlier.
Her days can be long: up by 6 a.m. when her husband makes her coffee, she may be out the door to make a 7:30 a.m. meeting on-site, checking emails and networking. On weekends, she sometimes works on projects, and she recently graduated from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program in Rhode Island. She calls it transformative. “It gave me the tools, insights and confidence to take my business to the next level,” she said.
Throughout her career, she’s noted various workplace realities, that if you’re working in an HR department, you’re a company employee. As a contractor, she has more freedom. “I can help more businesses. I can do more,” she said. “Our competitors tend to be big and expensive. I’m very customizable.”
