About the business

The 2045 Collective is a Canadian digital advertising and marketing agency that partners with corporate brands, agencies and PR firms across Canada and the United States to drive measurable growth through smarter, full-funnel campaigns.

Over the past seven years, the agency has built a reputation for performance-led advertising—combining media strategy, omni-channel planning, programmatic buying, retail media, search, and social into integrated solutions that maximize return on ad spend.

Operating with a lean, high-impact team of 15, and with key hires on the horizon, The 2045 Collective is engineered for speed, precision and scale. The agency’s approach is rooted in data science and hands-on optimization, ensuring every campaign is continuously refined for stronger outcomes.

For brands seeking a strategic partner rather than just a media vendor, The 2045 Collective offers the agility of a boutique shop with the rigor and results of a larger firm, delivering enterprise-grade performance without the bloat.

Ana S. is the company’s accountant, reporting directly to CEO and co-founder and plays a central role in managing the operational and financial backbone of the business, including HR administration and benefits.

The challenge

After several years of having to work with multiple platforms for holiday tracking, expense management, performance reviews, recruitment etc., The 2045 Collective reached a breaking point across multiple vendors, where pricing was a key challenge.  Managing multiple platforms had left the team and the management frustrated and the decision to explore a single platform that can stitch all the pieces together was imperative.

The core issues ran deeper than features or price. What eroded confidence most was the quality of support or the lack of it.

“We would just reach out to people and we couldn’t tell if these were automated bots that were getting back to us or if they were human people sitting behind those emails responding to us. It just wasn’t the best of help when it came to questions.” – Ana

Beyond support, the previous platform’s fragmented structure created real operational friction. Onboarding a new employee required the coordination of three separate people — the HR manager, the CEO and the accountant, each handling a different piece of the puzzle. Benefits were managed through yet another external vendor, with no way to reconcile whether the insurance provider ever had accurate employee information on file. The result was a process that was time-consuming, error-prone and impossible to verify.

For a company preparing to grow, that was not a foundation worth building on.

The solution

After evaluating multiple vendors, The 2045 Collective chose Employment Hero. Two things stood out immediately: the interface and the people behind it.

Where the previous platform felt dated and siloed, Employment Hero’s dashboard was dynamic, interconnected and immediately intuitive. Modules flowed through each other naturally – HR, expenses, holiday management, benefits — all accessible from a single centralized view without having to navigate back to a main menu to get from one place to another.

“It’s the small details that make life easier – that make you want to go back. It’s like having a preferred coffee spot. Coffee [is] everywhere, but you go to the same spot because there’s something about it that makes you want to come back.” – Ana

But the interface was only part of it. From the very first conversations with the Employment Hero team, something felt different and it has stayed that way.

“Most of the time, the impression is that we are dealing with a non-human entity. But with Employment Hero, that hasn’t been the case at all. That’s the impression we got originally and months down the line, that’s the same impression that sits with me.”

Key features driving The 2045 Collective’s day-to-day operations:

• Integrated onboarding: Offer letters, benefits enrollment and employee information all handled within one platform. What used to be a multi-person, multi-system coordination exercise now happens in a single connected flow.
• Benefits management: Employment Hero took over as the company’s benefits management partner, giving Ana and the team a direct line of sight into employee data and insurance provider records for the first time, with a formal audit at transition to confirm everything was accurate from day one.
• Centralized HR documentation: Employee records, contracts and HR information consolidated into one place, replacing the back-and-forth of multiple disconnected systems.
• Consolidated tech: Modules that flow into each other, a dashboard that lets you act from wherever you are without navigating back to a main menu and a design that feels current, not like it was built a decade ago.

The wins

For a lean team of 15, every hour spent on administrative overhead is an hour taken away from client work and Employment Hero has already started giving those hours back.

• Onboarding simplified: Onboarding used to mean the HR manager, the CEO and the accountant each playing a different role in the same task. That coordination overhead is gone — and with it, the risk of things falling through the cracks when someone is unavailable.
• No more flying blind on compliance: There was previously no way to confirm whether the insurance provider ever had accurate employee data on file. That reconciliation gap is now closed and with everything centralized, it stays closed automatically going forward.
• Adoption that happened without being pushed: When employees received access, they picked it up the same day. A modern, intuitive interface meant the team didn’t need hand-holding — it just worked.
• Support that feels human: Three months in, the quality of support Ana and the team receive from their account manager remains consistent. For a company that made its last platform switch partly because of poor support, that continuity matters.
• One less bill to pay: Consolidating onto Employment Hero meant cancelling a separate performance review tool entirely – a small but concrete cost saving that reflects a broader simplification of how the business operates.

“You’ve made our life easier and given the growth we’re anticipating, I can only see this making our life even more easier.”

Why it matters

For a lean, fast-moving company like The 2045 Collective, the cost of a bad software platform goes beyond the price of the contract. It shows up in the hours spent chasing support, in the gaps between systems that no one has visibility into and in the administrative drag that pulls people away from the work that actually grows the business.

Employment Hero removed that drag. By consolidating HR, benefits and documentation into one platform, backed by support from real people who are available when needed, The 2045 Collective now has the operational foundation to grow without the administrative overhead growing alongside it.