PARTNER ON A PROJECT
When the People work needs your full attention
Some work can't happen in the margins.
Building a proper pay framework while also handling three other priorities means it never gets done properly. Manager development deserves more than a quick monthly check-in. Your leadership team dynamics feel off but you can't pinpoint why.
This is where projects come in - dedicated focus on one thing until it's built right.
Whether you're already working with me and need extra capacity, or you just need one specific thing done well, we scope it together and I lead the build.
Your People plan, upgraded.
Not everything fits inside a monthly scope. Some work needs dedicated focus - a proper pay framework, a real performance cycle, manager development deserving of more than a monthly check-in, an offsite that does more than fill a room.
Whether you're already working with me and need extra capacity, or you just need one specific thing done well, we scope it together and I lead the build.
People systems & frameworks
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Starting at £6k
Every salary conversation shouldn't feel like a negotiation you're losing. You're making offers based on what people ask for and what feels fair-ish. Someone asks "what's my career path here?" and you freeze. Two people doing similar work are paid differently and you can't quite explain why.
This builds the foundation that makes pay decisions fair, consistent, and defensible. We define what roles actually exist, what each level means, what the market pays, and what progression looks like. Then we create salary bands that work for your budget and promotion pathways people can actually see.
Includes discovery, framework design, benchmarking guidance, rollout support, and communication materials.
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Starting at £5k
Most performance reviews are performative - stressful for managers, unhelpful for employees, and disconnected from how work actually happens. You need something that drives growth without creating bureaucracy.
This designs your performance rhythm from scratch: how goals get set, how feedback actually happens, what reviews look like, what ‘good’ performance even means, and how it all connects to progression and pay. Then we manage one full cycle with you to make sure it lands properly.
Built for your stage - not borrowed from Google.
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Starting at £3.5k
Someone asks "what's our holiday policy?" or "how do grievances work?" and you realize you've been making it up as you go. You have unwritten rules that work fine until someone new joins and doesn't know them. You're asking Claude about employment law at 11pm because something came up and you're not sure what you're legally required to do.
This captures how you actually work - the policies you need, the culture you've built, the stuff that's currently just "how we do things" - in a handbook that's UK employment law compliant without reading like a legal document.
Written in your voice, for your stage. Not a template from someone else's company.
Includes discovery, build, team rollout, and update guidance. Multi-country handbooks scoped separately.
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Starting at £4k
Someone in an interview asks "what’s the growth path for the role?" and your team all give different answers. Your hiring messaging sounds like every other startup. Your best people struggle to articulate why they actually stay - they just know they like it here.
This figures out why people actually join you, stay with you, and recommend you. Not generic statements about culture, but real insights: what's genuinely different here, what you offer that others don't, what makes someone right for you (and what doesn't).
It becomes the foundation for everything: hiring messaging, onboarding, how you talk about yourselves, retention decisions.
Includes discovery workshops, EVP articulation, messaging frameworks, and application guidance.
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Starting at £4k
Your values are probably some version of "integrity," "innovation," and "teamwork." These aren't bad values - they're just hygiene factors. Every functional company has them. They don't help you decide anything difficult.
Strong values show up in moments of tension - when you have to choose between two good options and need to know which one is more "us." When you're hiring and someone's great on paper but something feels off. When things are hard and you need people who'll share in the sacrifices because they actually believe in what you're building.
This work figures out what's genuinely different about how you operate, then turns it into values that guide real behaviours.
Includes facilitated workshops, theme synthesis, values-in-action statements, and communication assets.
Leadership & development
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Starting at £8k
Your managers are drowning - promoted for being good at their job, now expected to manage people with no training. They don't know what they don't know. Meanwhile, you're spending hours trying to get them to see what you see - your mental models for how management should work here, what "good" looks like, how you want situations handled. You're essentially trying to download your brain into theirs, one conversation at a time.
This programme builds a shared management framework so everyone's working from the same playbook. They learn how to manage well AND how to manage in a way that fits how you operate - without you having to be their constant sounding board.
A structured development journey for first time or scaling managers. Includes psychometric profiling with individual debriefs, multi-session workshop programme, practical toolkit, and ongoing resources.
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£175 per session
1:1 coaching for managers or leaders navigating specific challenges - a difficult performance conversation they're dreading, restructuring their team, managing a tricky dynamic, preparing for a promotion, figuring out their leadership style.
Available as monthly ongoing support or 4-6 session focused engagements.
(Manager coaching is typically included in retainer work, so this is for additional capacity beyond retainer scope or standalone engagements only.)
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Facet5: £550 per person | Hogan: Starting at £600 per person
Most people problems aren't actually people problems - they're mismatched expectations. Understanding how someone naturally works - what motivates them, what derails them under pressure, how they make decisions - cuts through months of friction.
Your debrief isn't just walking through the report - it's applying it to the actual situation you're dealing with. Hiring for this role, managing this person, understanding why this team keeps clashing.
Includes assessment setup, comprehensive reports, individual debrief sessions (60-90 mins), and application guidance. Team workshops available as add-on. All publisher fees included.
Workshops & offsites
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Starting at £3k
Most offsites are a waste of time - generic team-building that everyone tolerates but doesn't actually shift anything. The real work happens when you tackle the tensions you've been avoiding: the strategy disagreements no one's naming, the team dynamic that's quietly breaking things, the hard prioritisation you keep deferring.
This designs and facilitates full day sessions built around what actually needs addressing - strategy offsites that surface real disagreement, team health workshops that name what's stuck, planning days that force hard choices, leadership development that deals with your specific challenges.
Includes session design, facilitation, and post session synthesis so insights don't disappear.
These People projects stand alone, or slot into existing work. Think of them as your People-function power-ups ⚡
she is truly an exceptional people person - great people are rare finds at the best of times, but HR folk that can also think commercially and strategically are particularly rare.
We kicked off with a fixed project around pay and as a result now have:
A RWE pay philosophy
A process for benchmarking data annually
A guide for managers in how to have pay conversations (and we’ve done a few workshops)
A role-levelling framework with salary bands
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Natasha Guerra, Founder + CEO, Runway East
Talk People to me
Already know this makes sense? Let's talk about your situation and figure out the right structure.
Not sure what you need yet? Discovery gives you a clear read on where to start.
The people patterns that don't show up on an org chart.
Every startup is haunted: past decisions, habits, founding stories and memories that quietly shape how teams work. Some ghosts hold us back. Some keep us grounded.
Organisational Ghosts is where you’ll learn to spot them early, understand the patterns driving your team, and avoid the traps that stall growing startups.