People & Culture for World Changing Startups, Scale ups and Growth companies.
We’re fractional people and culture operators, focussed on enabling innovative start ups and growing companies to scale up, deliver their strategy and create competitive advantage.
About us
We believe that startups and small businesses have a higher chance of success if they invest deliberately in their people and culture from day one.
We are passionate about ensuring that more world-changing and ground-breaking companies have access to scalable, cost-effective and strategic support that is needed to achieve their missions.
We focus our efforts on supporting startups and scale ups that cannot justify or afford a People Director or People Team by providing People Strategy Consulting and Fractional People Support (with and without retainers).
Growing Pains
In the early days of building business and during growth, culture and the people experience can take a backseat in favour of execution, finding product-market fit and speed to market.
This can lead to a common set of growing pains including:
Key people are getting bogged down working on the wrong things
HR processes suddenly feel manual and resource intensive
It feels different in the office or lab after a recent recruitment drive
Managers are feeling burnt out and exhausted by their workload
New recruits are struggling to get up to speed
There’s no time to work on the important but not urgent tasks
We work proactively with our portfolio to help them see around corners and take the steps needed to ensure they have intentional and deliberate approaches to people, talent and culture.
Our Services
We offer a variety of services that respond to the evolving needs of startups and small businesses.
We support startups from early stage / pre-Seed all the way through to Series B and high growth privately owned companies with typically less than 100 people. We believe that once passing these key milestones, it is time for you to build a different People & Culture function for your organisation, so we help you do that.
If your requirement does not fit neatly into one of these offerings, please get in touch to discuss your needs with us.
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Once organisations grow to a certain point, there may be a need to recruit a role with some People or HR accountabilities. However, we find that often these roles do not have the space for thought leadership and the subject matter expertise to support senior leadership and the board to make strategic people decisions that support their goals. Our Fractional People Director offering enables companies to receive this support in a cost-effective and scalable way. In this model, we embed into your organisation, acting as a natural extension of your management team.
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Coming soon...
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We find that many of our clients have similar needs depending on their stage of funding or growth.
Using our blueprint for growth, we work through a structured project engagement with our portfolio companies to build the approaches, processes and policies that are needed to meet their goals.
This typically includes handbook design and implementation, hiring strategy, and creation of tools and templates such as offer letters and contracts.
Through this offering, we help our clients avoid the common people and culture growing pains by proactively and confidently planning for growth and scale.
More generally via our consultancy model, we support organisations with specific people and culture projects. Examples of projects include Employee Relations cases, creation of culture and values definition and reward benchmarking reviews.
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As a VC fund or Venture Builder, we understand there are often discussions about the challenges portfolio companies face, how best to support their efforts to grow and scale, and perhaps even attract startups to select you as their lead investor through additional value-add capabilities. Through our Talent Platform offering, we provide bespoke people and culture services to meet the goals of the fund or venture studio.
Our Operating Principles
Our Operating Principles describe how we work together and with our clients:
Built meaningfully for you
We understand your business and apply solutions that are relevant and meaningful to you. We believe that a strategic approach to people and culture cannot be bought off the shelf or delivered simply by policy.
Invested in you
We care deeply about driving your business and team to success. We act as an extension of your team to enable this and pull out all the stops when it matters most. We are proactive and will help you reveal opportunities that may further your goals. We link you into our trusted and credible network of investors, suppliers and operators.
Progressively minded
We don’t believe in old school HR or command-and-control approaches to leadership. Instead, we believe that people and culture founded in positive psychology breeds better results for business and for people. Our solutions and advice are developed with this in mind.
Impact and outcome driven
Everything we do has to deliver real value and impact. If we believe we cannot achieve this for you, we’ll tell you. We are happiest when we make our clients curious - and even excited - about the potential of people and culture for their company. We have the hard conversations when they are needed.
Testimonials
