Build a thriving team without slowing your growth
People operations for for founders who see People as core infrastructure.
Your ability to scale depends on more than “the right people in the right seats”.
What matters is how decisions are made, information flows, and problems get solved without you.
Hiring more people without a clear operating system only adds complexity, cost, and more fires for you to fight.
As a fractional Head of People, I design and implement a People Operating System with your team that fits your company instead of being copy‑pasted.
The result is a thriving team that runs without you, so you can lead the business instead of constantly firefighting people issues.
About
I’m Steph. Early in my career I learned that when you treat adults like adults and give them the right structures, everything improves: customer satisfaction, profit, retention, and morale. I got there by breaking rigid rules that treated people like children and building a culture where my team could use their judgement to solve problems. The pattern was clear: happier customers, better numbers, lower turnover. If you don’t design your people operations on purpose, you don’t hit your goals consistently.
I’ve spent almost 30 years building and running teams, and the last several focused on startups. People are a startup’s greatest asset and its greatest risk. Most founders underestimate how much their own behaviour and their people systems shape delivery, engagement, profitability, and whether they can ever get out of the weeds. You cannot scale a team effectively by accident and mismanaging that process can quietly kill the business.
My work is to take that weight off the founder by designing and implementing the inner architecture of how the company works: ways of working, People ops, communication rhythms, and the behaviours that make “how we do things here” real. I treat people as core infrastructure, not admin, and I use values as a wiring diagram for behaviour, not as slogans.
As your fractional Head of People, I design and implement the people systems and team architecture you need for your next phase of growth, with one clear focus: a thriving team that can run without you, so you can step out of the weeds and actually lead.