A senior people leader embedded in your business, days a week — running HR like an owner, not answering tickets like a vendor.
People-ops auditCompliance without theaterManager coachingComp & levelingA handbook people actually read
Fractional people operations
People leadership,planted right beside you.
Gardeners plant marigolds next to their crops because the whole bed gets healthier. We do that for companies — senior people leaders, embedded in your business, doing the work. Not advising it from a deck.
Fractional HRRecruitingChange managementPeople strategyComp & levelingLeadership coaching
Why we exist
What we do
Four ways we dig in.
Every engagement is senior-led and retainer-based. No juniors learning on your dime, no surprise hourly invoices.
Your 12–18 month growth plan translated into a people plan: who to hire, when, what it costs, and what it returns.
Workforce planningOrg designP&L-tied people budgetSuccession mapping
Full-cycle searches run by people who have owned a headcount line — not an agency chasing a placement fee.
Embedded recruitersHiring-manager trainingOffer strategy90-day onboarding plans
Restructures, leadership transitions, rapid growth. We plan it, we write the comms, and we stay in the room while it lands.
Org restructuringCommunication planningLeadership transitionsPost-change pulse checks
Who we serve
Built for businesses where people are the product.
01
Construction & trades
Field and office can feel like two companies. We make them one.
02
Family offices
Professional people operations behind very private doors.
03
Tech & IT services
Retention and clear growth paths your engineers actually believe in.
04
Professional services
When the path to partner is unclear, good people leave. We fix the path.
05
Architecture & engineering
Project-based staffing that flexes without burning out the studio.
The problem
The HR you inherited.
Somewhere along the way, HR became the department of no — paperwork in, momentum out. We keep a list of everything we refuse to be.
- Policy for policy’s sake.
- Compliance as theater.
- Process that slows good people down.
- A handbook nobody has opened since 2019.
- An annual review everyone dreads.
- HR as the department of “no.”
You don’t need more HR. You need people leadership that does the work.
The method
Companion planting, for companies.
A marigold doesn’t fix a garden by consulting on it. It gets planted, takes root, and changes the conditions around it. Same playbook here — four moves, in order, on repeat.
01 — Weeks 1–2
Take root
Strategic kickoff. We read your P&L line by line — the people costs and the people revenue — and sit down with every leader who owns headcount.
02 — Days 30–60
Tend
An operating rhythm goes live: hiring pipeline, manager one-on-ones, comp guardrails, and the meeting cadence that actually moves things.
03 — Ongoing
Prune
The hard calls — underperformance, restructures, the role that shouldn’t exist. Said kindly. Handled completely.
04 — Quarterly
Bloom
People planning tied to your growth targets, every quarter. The org chart starts arriving before the growth does — not after.
An honest 30 seconds
How’s your garden, really?
Tap what’s genuinely working at your company today. Watch what blooms — and what doesn’t.
0 / 6 in bloom
Bare soil. The good news: everything we plant from here is upside.
A quick gut-check, not a diagnosis — the real read comes from a proper conversation.
Outcomes
We measure what HR usually won’t.
87%
offer acceptance across embedded searches
21 days
shaved off average time-to-hire
94%
team retention 12 months post-restructure
40+
founders and managers coached this year
Blended across recent engagements. We’ll walk you through how each number is measured on our first call.
The people people
Leaders first. HR second.
Nobody here grew up in a corporate HR tower. Everyone here has run a team, owned a number, and made the hard call.
D / I
I / D
C / D
S / C01
People first. Profit follows.
Every people decision is a business decision. We refuse to pretend otherwise — in either direction.
02
Say the hard thing, kindly.
Honest counsel is the whole job. We’d rather lose a comfortable meeting than let you lose a good person.
03
Leaders first, HR second.
Everyone here has run a team and owned a number. The credential came after the scar tissue.
04
Do the work.
We don’t leave you a deck. We sit in the room, send the email, run the meeting, and stay until it lands.
Engagements
Retainers, not hourly meters.
You should never hesitate to call your people partner because the clock is running. Three ways in — all flat, all senior-led.
Embedded
Your fractional people leader, one to three days a week, on a monthly retainer.
$6,500/ month, from*
- Senior partner in your business weekly
- Full people-ops ownership
- Quarterly planning included
- Slack/phone access between visits
Project
A restructure, a comp overhaul, a leadership search — scoped, priced, delivered.
$12,000/ engagement, from*
- Fixed scope & timeline
- Senior-led, always
- Comms and rollout included
- Post-project pulse check
Advisory
A direct line to senior counsel for founders and people leads who mostly need a sparring partner.
$1,800/ month, from*
- Monthly working session
- On-call for the hard weeks
- Document & policy review
- Annual people-plan refresh
Starting points, not a rate card. Every engagement is scoped to your goals — we’ll land on the right shape and number together.
How it starts
Your first ninety days.
Week 0
The conversation
Thirty minutes. You talk, we listen, we both decide if this is a fit.
Weeks 1–2
Kickoff & P&L review
Goals for the next 12–18 months, and a line-by-line read of people costs and people revenue.
Week 4
People roadmap
A sequenced plan — hires, fixes, rituals — tied to the numbers it moves.
Day 45
Rhythm goes live
Pipelines running, managers meeting, the first hard call already handled.
Day 90
First quarterly
We measure, adjust, and plan the next quarter. Then we keep going.
Questions
Asked, answered.
The five questions every founder asks in the first call — answered the way we’d answer them across the table.
It means we show up — physically or on your daily stack — on a fixed weekly rhythm, with our own seat in your leadership conversations. Your team knows our names. Candidates think we work for you, because functionally, we do.
Probably — and your office manager will likely be the first person to thank you. We take the strategic and legal weight off the person who never asked to carry it, and make them great at the parts they keep.
A PEO processes; we lead. PEOs are excellent at payroll and benefits administration at scale. They will never sit in your Monday meeting, redesign your org chart, or tell you a hire is a mistake. That’s our job — and we play well alongside a PEO if you have one.
Embedded retainers start around $6,500/month and flex with days-per-week; projects are scoped flat. But the real conversation starts with your goals, not a rate card — we’ll quote a number once we understand what you’re trying to move.
Usually the opposite. We arrive as their senior partner, build the systems, and coach them up. When we eventually hand the function back stronger than we found it — that’s the plan working.
Last step
Let’s grow,
together.
Thirty minutes. You talk about where the business is going; we’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right thing to plant beside it.