So it lands on you. The hiring, the handbook nobody has read, the conversation you have been putting off for three weeks. I step into that seat one day a week, take it off your desk, and build it so your managers can hold it without me.
A day of my week, inside your business.
Not a policy binder, and not a compliance review that ends with a list of things you are supposed to go fix yourself. I take the work. The offer letter, the onboarding nobody owns, the review cycle you keep meaning to start, the termination you have been rehearsing in the car.
Then I hand it to your managers with the words already written down, because a people function that only works when I am in the building is not a function. It is a dependency.
Owners of businesses with a team, roughly ten to fifty people, where HR is currently whoever has time. If you already have an HR manager and you want a second opinion, that is a different and much smaller conversation, and I will tell you so on the call.
The exposure is almost never the handbook. It is the manager who says one wrong sentence in a termination. It is the complaint that got handled in a hallway and never written down. It is a file that would not survive a lawyer reading it line by line.
I am not a lawyer, and I will tell you plainly the moment you need one. What I do is make sure that by the time you need one, the paperwork is already on your side and your managers already know which sentence not to say.
Most retainers are built to grow. This one is built to shrink.
I am not trying to become the person you cannot operate without. Your managers end up holding this, and my time on your calendar goes down every quarter until you drop a tier, hand it to somebody permanent, or tell me we are done.
Hours run high while we are building and taper once it runs. That is why the tiers step down instead of the invoice staying flat forever.
I am putting the numbers on the page so you can work out whether this is even in range before you spend twenty minutes on a call with me.
A sliding scale, and where you land is about how many days a week you need me. Not how many policies I can produce.
Half a day a week. The conversations you cannot afford to get wrong. A termination that needs to be done properly, an offer that needs to be structured, a complaint that landed this morning and you do not know what step one is.
I take the function. Hiring and onboarding, the documentation, the review cycle nobody runs, and the hard conversations you have been carrying by yourself. Your managers stop guessing, and you stop being the last stop for every people problem in the building.
I run it. The whole people function, through a growth push or a mess you need cleaned up, and straight through to helping you hire the person who eventually takes it from me.
An HR manager is a real hire. Salary, then benefits and payroll taxes on top of it, which is commonly put at somewhere near 1.4 times the salary once you add everything up. Then the months before they know your business. Then the severance conversation if it does not work, which is a particularly uncomfortable one to have with the person who handles severance.
This is a variable cost. You turn it up during a hiring push or a mess, down once it runs, and off when you are done. No headcount to approve, no ramp, no benefits, no severance. That is the trade, and it is a different shape of cost rather than a discount on the same one.
You should be able to tell whether this was worth it before the second invoice.
A wall of client logos. I am early in this on my own, and I would rather you hear that from me than work it out on your own.
What I will tell you is that I have sat on the other side of an investigation, a termination and a layoff. I know what a file needs to look like before a lawyer reads it, and I know the difference between a conversation that solves something and one that just creates a record.
And I run my own business on a system I built myself. Not a demo. The actual thing, live, on the call, with the rough edges still in it. If that is not enough proof for you, I would rather you pass now than be disappointed in month three.
A handful at a time. That is arithmetic and not a sales line: at a day a week each, I run out of week. When I am full I will tell you I am full, and I will tell you roughly when that changes.
Start with the five day audit instead. Fixed scope, fixed price, and you walk away with the written map whether or not we ever work together again. See the audit.
Twenty minutes, no deck. You describe what is stuck, I tell you whether this is a fit and roughly which tier it would be. If I am not the right person for it, I will say so on the call.