People and Culture for World Changing Startups, Scale ups and Growth companies.
We are a specialist people and culture consultancy, 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).
By leveraging our insight and experience, we provide advice and solutions that span the full spectrum of people, talent and culture, to create real results in the context of a company’s strategy.
Growing pains
In the early days of building business and during growth, the people component can lose focus. This can result in companies experiencing a common set of growing pains, all of which directly affect their people and culture 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 help our clients get to the root cause of these problems and take the steps to avoid them too.
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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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 with clients to establish and build the bespoke, size-appropriate approaches, processes and policies required to meet their goals at the relevant times. Through this offering, we help our clients avoid the common people and culture growing pains by proactively and confidently planning for growth and scale.
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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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Through our consulting 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, 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 people and culture services to VC funds, accelerators and venture builders.
Our Operating Principles
Our Operating Principles describe how we work together and with our clients:
Bespoke
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.
Flexible
In the broadest sense - the how, when and where we support our clients.
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. We are proactive and will help you reveal opportunities that may further your goals.
Progressive
We don’t believe in old school HR. 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 oriented
We don’t do things for the sake of it. Everything we do has to deliver real value and impact so 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.
Testimonials
We asked some of our current and previous clients what they thought about working with us. Here’s what they said…
“The background & experience of the team at Innovo Hr speaks for itself; when we need timely, cost-effective HR support for ourselves and for our portfolio companies, Sarah and the team consistently deliver a high quality reliable service”
- OWEN THOMPSON, CEO / CAMBRIDGE FUTURE TECH“Sarah has provided essential and personalised support as we build our team and plot our growth. She has been genuine, warm and a pleasure to work with and clearly cares about our company.
As a first-time founder, knowing that we’re not only doing everything right with our HR but also taking the best possible care of our employees is invaluable.
Innovo HR has helped me with everything from employee handbooks, contracts, hiring and disputes to working with me to define our company culture and how we want to be seen by the world and our employees.
The impact has been to take some significant pressure from my shoulders whilst helping me to grow a company from the ground up that I can be proud of."”
- Andrew Hodgson, CEO & CO-founder / stembond technologies“Blecon needed to quickly understand options for implementing a first global hire. Sarah quickly understood our needs and delivered us the analysis that enabled choosing the right short term option whilst helping define our longterm global employment strategy”
- Simon Ford, CEO / Blecon“Innovo HR's impact on our organisation has been remarkable, and much credit goes to Sarah's expertise. Her knowledge, proactive mindset, and responsiveness make her an incredible asset. I wholeheartedly recommend Innovo HR to any organisation seeking top-tier HR solutions.”
- Managing Director / privately owned small company
