Several years ago, Neil DeLucia gave up the fast-paced, four-season New Yorker lifestyle for the much-mellower and often much-warmer Arizona desert.
He was quite familiar with Arizona before he moved there actually. He used to visit the Phoenix area regularly, including during triple-digit summers, because one of his biggest clients from a previous job was a large hotel chain in the area. He’d come out to Phoenix, but he couldn’t fuhgeddaboudit when he left. He wondered what it would be like to actually live there year-round. Hey, no snow to deal with and a lot less honking, right?
Eventually he did.
The opportunity to put his shovel away and head west came several years later when he got an opportunity to take his HR, benefits and tax experience to work in the land of cacti. At that time, he said goodbye to the Empire State, where he was born and raised. But his career aspirations are just a small part of the reason why he went west and eventually found his way into his new role as the enterprise sales manager for PrismHR Tax.
In fact, there were a whole bunch of things that had to happen first.
That’s the Way They Became …
To understand the full story, you need to go back to about the time Marty McFly was about to take a customized DeLorean back in time. In the mid-’80s, soon after The Brady Brides hit and left the airways, Neil was dating his high school sweetheart, Jennifer. They went steady from the time he was about 16 through graduation. Soon after Pomp and Circumstance played, Neil decided to venture out to Pace University in New York to study marketing. It seemed like there wouldn’t be a happy ending to our story.
But just like The Brady Bunch, things resolved themselves before the episode was over.
After college, Neil and Jennifer both found spouses and started families. Neil has three daughters, and Jennifer has two sons. His daughters, Tina and Amanda, are a banker and high school agriculture teacher, respectively, while his youngest, Jenna, just graduated from Loyola University in New Orleans. His stepsons are Rory and Sean. Rory is a firefighter in the Phoenix area, and we’ll talk more about Sean shortly.
Even though Neil and Jennifer broke up before their post-secondary pursuits, she kept in touch with Neil’s family since she became so close to them during high school. Neil’s dad would tell Neil things like, “‘Look who I got a birthday card from!’ or ‘Look who sent a Christmas card!’”
This was no George Glass situation; it was Jennifer, of course.
After Neil and Jennifer’s first marriages ended, the two high school sweethearts found their way back to each other. “Not quite the Brady Bunch, but almost,” he says.
You see, when Neil’s dad had some health issues and was in the hospital, Neil bumped into Jennifer who was there visiting Neil’s dad. The two started talking again, and eventually they started dating again a year later. In 2018 they decided to get married and unite their Brady-like bunch.
Sometimes in life you just “keep on moving” till you find the right connection—or reconnection in this case.
A Sunshine Day
Besides rekindling his relationship with his former girlfriend, Neil also rediscovered his passion for music. After a 20-year hiatus, Neil became the lead singer of a couple of cover bands in New York, and he’s currently the frontman of a classic rock cover band in the Phoenix area called ROCK R3WIND.
His desire to front a band as a lead singer started when he was kid. He was the youngest of all his cousins, and he remembers watching two of his older cousins who were in a band at the time practice their craft in their basement. Neil was hooked, and he wanted his chance to have his voice heard, too.
And make it heard he has in his professional and private pursuits. In fact, he often ends his sets with the riff-driven rock standard Rockin’ in the Free World, a song written by another guy named Neil—Neil Young, that is.
Self-trained in singing as PrismHR’s Neil is, many people would be terrified getting on stage and belting out tunes. Not Neil DeLucia.
“What people don’t understand,” he says, “is I think it is very relaxing. People ask me: ‘Don’t you get nervous?’ I think it’s the opposite. It kinda calms me down and has me focus on other things for a while.”
To his point, one time after shoulder surgery, he was playing at a club in New York when a patron stumbled on the stage and banged into Neil hard like a football to the nose. Neil went flying, and his guitarist had his brand-new Les Paul guitar scratched in the process.
Instead of singin’ the blues about the experience, Neil used his sense of humor to lighten the mood. “It was fine,” he says, explaining he was more embarrassed than hurt. No laugh track needed there.
When It’s Time to Change
For Neil, whether it’s his professional life or personal life, the song remains the same: Take care of business, find a solution and lead with compassion.
The compassion part comes naturally for him.
During the day he spends his time explaining how PrismHR’s new solution helps HR outsourcers and their clients manage their taxes … in the evening he gets to spend time with his family, especially his stepson, Sean.
Part of the reason Neil and Jennifer wanted to move to Arizona was they thought it would be beneficial for Sean, who has autism. Sean was 18 when they moved to the Grand Canyon State and is now in his mid-20s.
According to one estimate, 1 in 45 adults in the United States have autism, and another study found that 1 in 31 children do.
As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains, treatments for autism spectrum disorder are designed to help “reduce symptoms that interfere with daily functioning and quality of life.”
Sean was first diagnosed with autism when he was 2 years old.
“I don’t know how to say this,” Neil says about his autistic stepson, “you want them to be able to enjoy their life as best they can, and we weren’t going to get that where we were.”
To get to where they needed to be in term’s of Sean’s progress, they had to leave New York behind, he said. Queens, he explained, didn’t have the level of services that Sean needed to thrive.
Since moving to Arizona, Neil proudly explains how Sean’s life has improved—and everyone in the family’s has, too. Jennifer, a former second-grade teacher, now spends most of her time taking care of her son. The state of Arizona pays parents through the Department of Developmental Disabilities to take care of their autistic children under the Parents as Paid Caregiver program.
Sean is a creature of habit, and it’s hard for him to deal with change. He needs his Starbucks twice a day, for instance, so when COVID-19 came and much of the world shut down, it hit Sean hard. Even now, just hearing about a store closing makes him remember the time when the world became basically inaccessible to him.
In the past, change could lead to dangerous situations, but not anymore.
“As a young man, when Sean got frustrated, he would literally hurt himself,” Neil says. “It was almost impossible to control him in certain environments,” especially since Sean, at 6-foot-tall, is much bigger than Neil.
By moving to Arizona, Neil and Jennifer were able to get Sean the help he needed to improve his life, and he’s doing great thanks to treatment from an autonomic specialist. Now, Sean is thriving in Arizona and hasn’t had any episodes where he’s attempted to injure himself.
Sean likes to shoot baskets with his stepdad, and he even picked up his stepdad’s love of singing. Bryan Adams’ Summer of ’69 is one of his favorite songs to sing. He also records videos with his mom, and they share them on Instagram and Facebook in hopes of helping others in similar situations.
One Big Happy Family
Just as Neil and his family needed to take a different approach in their personal lives to help Sean, earlier this year Neil was looking to reshape his career path, and he found the perfect fit in a prism—a PrismHR to be exact.
“I was looking for a new role,” Neil says, “and, like a lot of people, you go on LinkedIn and 99% of the time you never hear from anybody.”
That is until he saw a job description he couldn’t believe—one where he seemed to check every box.
“I had to do a double-take,” he says.
The job description asked for ample experience with “tax-related products,” which Neil has plenty of based on his career path. The ad also talked about how the candidate had to be based in Arizona or Massachusetts. Another box checked. And the matchups went on and on. He quickly reached out and was contacted shortly after for an interview.
As Russ Jones, PrismHR’s vice president of sales, explains: “Turns out finding the right person to fit our culture with deep expertise regarding tax processing is really hard. We spent months looking for the right fit. During our initial call with Neil, we knew that we found our unicorn.”
This felt like it was the perfect “marriage” of a man with extensive tax, payroll and Professional Employer Organization (PEO) software experience with an innovative HRO tech company rolling out its first dedicated tax solution.
Neil quickly learned the feeling was mutual and a “connection” was made.
Now that’s he’s here, this “unicorn” won’t be hard to find.
Make Sure You Tune In
So what can PrismHR’s customers expect?
Neil has decades of experience working with tax-related solutions and how they go hand-in-hand with payroll software. In fact, he spent a large part of his career with a Fortune 500 company that offers payroll, HR and tax services.
While there are excellent tax solutions in the PrismHR Marketplace, Neil understands that some customers prefer a closed-loop experience and one that maintains the same look and feel of other HR and payroll solutions on a single platform. It’s also easier that way, he says, in terms of reducing the number of contracts an HR outsourcer would need to sign and manage.
For Neil, he prefers an educational approach when talking with customers and prospects. He has a lot of knowledge to share about the advantages of moving to an automated process for taxes from a manual one, which leads to huge efficiencies and advanced reporting and analytic capabilities.
The bottom line, he says, is a state-of-the-art tax solution can help HROs and their clients stay in compliance with Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA) initiatives, among other tax-related issues. After all, there are several types of compliance penalties from the IRS alone, including accuracy-related penalties that HROs need to be able to help their clients avoid.
“A tax solution is like a bass player,” he says, invoking a music analogy. “You don’t realize the importance of [the bass part], but it keeps the ‘song’ from going off the rails.”
PrismHR Tax can do the same for businesses, he explains.
So, like an episode of The Brady Bunch, we’ll end this on a high note: Neil leads with empathy and compassion in his personal life and for the customers and their clients who need help managing their taxes. Actually, he never misses a beat when discussing PrismHR Tax, which is not-so-taxing for customers and their clients alike.
And, you guessed it: When you work with Neil, you’ll feel like you’re part of one big happy family.
Ready to meet Neil in person and learn more about PrismHR Tax? He’ll be at PrismHR LIVE in Orlando. Make sure to check out his session, “Mastering Tax Complexity: Best Practices for Service Providers” with Scott Guenther, managing shareholder at State Tax Solutions. Can’t make it to LIVE? You can learn more about PrismHR Tax here.
James Tehrani is PrismHR’s content marketing manager. He is an award-winning writer and editor based in the Chicago area.
