Build the culture, management capability, and people infrastructure that retains your best people and supports commercial performance.
High-growth businesses and businesses in transition — typically between 50 and 500 employees — where culture, attrition, or management capability are limiting commercial performance.
Fractional HR Director + Fractional COO
People challenges are among the most commercially consequential and most consistently undermanaged in growing businesses.
High attrition taxes every commercial relationship — customers notice staff turnover, delivery quality deteriorates, and the cost of replacement recruitment consumes the margin that commercial performance generates.
Poor management capability creates the attrition: talented people do not leave companies, they leave managers.
And culture challenges — whether that is misalignment of values after a merger, the toxic residue of poor leadership, or the absence of any deliberate culture management — compound over time until they become the most significant brake on growth the business has.
The People First programme addresses these challenges from two directions simultaneously: the HR Director builds the people strategy, culture interventions, and talent infrastructure the business needs, while the COO ensures the operational structures, team designs, and management processes are fit for the next stage of growth.
Together, they deliver the organisational health that commercial performance requires.
People and culture audit: the HR Director conducts a structured assessment of attrition drivers, engagement indicators, management capability, HR infrastructure, and employment risk. The COO assesses the organisational structures, role design, and management cadences that are contributing to people challenges. Joint programme plan agreed with the board — prioritising the interventions with the greatest commercial impact.
Priority interventions live: retention programme designed and implemented for the roles with the highest commercial impact, management development programme underway, organisational design improvements implemented, and HR infrastructure upgraded. People KPI framework established and reporting to the board monthly.
Culture and capability embedded: management capability measurably improved, attrition trending down, the organisational design supporting rather than constraining commercial performance. Culture development programme underway with clear, measurable indicators. Exit from programme with a 12-month people plan agreed and handed to the board.
People First is priced from £4,000 to £7,500 per month for the two-director programme over four to nine months. The return on investment is typically straightforward to calculate: at a mid-market salary of £45,000, a 10-person reduction in annual attrition saves approximately £180,000 in direct replacement costs — representing a full programme cost recovery in year one, and ongoing savings thereafter.
People First is a packaged six- to twelve-month engagement for businesses where culture, capability, or organisational design has become the binding constraint on growth. It combines a fractional HR Director with operations and commercial leadership to redesign the organisation, professionalise the people function, address performance and culture issues directly, and build the leadership bench needed for the next stage of the business.
It is designed for businesses that have outgrown their original people setup — typically when headcount has crossed fifty, a hundred, or two hundred and fifty employees, when the founders or original leadership team can no longer hold culture and capability together personally, or when a recent change in ownership or strategy requires a meaningful refresh of the organisation. It is also valuable after a period of high attrition or in the wake of underperformance.
People First covers organisational design and structure, leadership team composition, performance management, executive and key-hire recruitment, succession planning, culture and engagement, employer brand and EVP, learning and development, reward and recognition, and HR systems and processes. The programme also tackles the difficult specific conversations — underperformance, restructuring, redundancy, and change communication — that businesses commonly avoid.
A Transformation Lead with strong operational HR background leads the programme, supported by a fractional HR Director and additional functional leads as required. The fractional team acts as the senior people function during the engagement, attending leadership and board meetings, leading specific change initiatives directly, and coaching the in-house team toward owning the new operating model.
People First is typically £12,000 to £25,000 per month depending on the scale of organisational change required, the size of the business, and the duration of the engagement. The fee covers the Transformation Lead, the fractional HR Director, and any specialist input — executive search support, employment law, change communications — needed to deliver the agreed scope.
Yes. Where the engagement involves restructuring or redundancy, the fractional team leads the process directly — designing the new organisation, planning the consultation, briefing line managers, drafting communications, supporting individual conversations, and managing the legal and regulatory framework. The team has run multiple restructures across sectors and is comfortable with the difficult conversations that founders and existing leaders typically prefer to avoid.
Book a discovery call to discuss whether People First is right for your business.