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.
Trusted by the early stage, venture-backed tech community
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 and strategic support that is needed to achieve their missions.
We focus our efforts on supporting early stage companies, predominantly (but not exclusively) in deep tech, tech and biotech space with People Strategy Consulting and Fractional People Support.
Tackling culture debt…
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
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.
How we help
We support early stage companies from pre-Seed to Series B, as well as 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.
Our work spans several categories and includes but is not limited to:
Team Alignment - Re-organisations, cultural operating system development (‘values’), levelling frameworks and goal-setting approach implementations
Reward - Options scheme advisory, reward strategies and sales incentives plans
Talent - Board appointments, Founder coaching, career page design, manager capability building and access to our talent network
Sensitive - Founder separations, investigations and independent employee relations cases
Compliance & Tech - HRIS implementation, SOC-2 certification support, process design, policy and contract development
Services
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We provide experienced People leaders and operators on a fractional basis, flexing with your company’s stage and needs.
We offer two levels of support:
1) People Operations (Executional and Process Focus)
Handling your people ops admin and process delivery to keep your people function running smoothly. This includes HRIS updates, extending contracts and offer letters, onboarding and offboarding compliance actions and policy admin.
2) People Director/VP People (Strategic & Advisory Focus)
Partnering with founders and senior teams to shape strategy, org design, and culture for growth, pivots and exit.
This is ideal for founders who “don’t know what they don’t know”. Our Fractional leaders provide advice, guidance and wisdom.
Fractional People leaders typically provide Leadership coaching, structure and scaling support, culture codification and implementation, introduce performance frameworks, build people strategies for fundraise and develop reward strategy.
Each leader works in a way that is bespoke and custom to the company - not off the shelf.
All fractional clients get access to Peepsio, our AI platform for employee relations, supporting managers and People ops to deliver PIPs, grievances, investigations and disciplinaries.
* Note - Hands on delivery of Employee Relations cases are out of scope for our Fractional support services. Independent ER cases are delivered under separate consultancy engagements. -
This service should be used when you need targeted, expert-led support on defined people initiatives. This service is perfect if you already know the problem or goal and need specialist delivery.
Examples of our consultancy work include:
Independent employee relations work - investigations, disciplinaries, grievances
TUPE transfers to facilitate exits
Manager Capability Building programmes
Downsizing and re-structures
Building career paths and levelling frameworks
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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.
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We offer ready-made tools, templates and resources to help you scale your people practices confidently and compliantly.
Products include:
Employee handbooks
Policy and contract libraries
Manager training and playbooks
Early Stage Kick Starter Package (employment contract, employee handbook, HRIS implementation and compliance-focussed onboarding templates)
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
