A field report on the stretch where growing companies quietly start to creak — somewhere between the fifth hire and the fifteenth — and the HR leader who spent twenty-five years running people functions for international businesses, then packaged the whole department so smaller companies can plug it in.
Nobody starts a company to run a human-resources department. For the first handful of hires, nobody has to: at six people the company is a group chat with a payroll, and the processes — such as they are — live comfortably in the founder’s head. Then the headcount creeps. Somewhere between the fifth hire and the fifteenth, the people side stops being a background hum and starts eating whole days. A tricky leaver. A manager who, it turns out, cannot manage. The hire who interviewed brilliantly and is not working out, six weeks in, on a probation clause nobody remembers writing. Processes that made sense when there were six of you, and quietly don’t any more.
In Britain the stakes compound, because employment law does not much care how small you are. Every one of those situations — the leaver, the struggling manager, the failed hire — is also a legal process, with steps, clocks and tribunal-shaped consequences. The standard menu at this size is grim: download some templates and hope; hire a lone consultant and inherit one person’s perspective, specialism and diary; or recruit a full-time HR director years before the budget can justify one. Most founders pick the unofficial fourth option — wing it — and acquire the low-grade dread that this month’s operator has heard from a hundred founders and put into words better than any of them: “am I one bad decision away from something I can’t come back from?”
This transmission is about the person on the other end of that worry. She spent twenty-five-plus years inside corporate people functions, the later ones in European and Group-level roles in international business, and then in 2017 left to attack the problem underneath: the judgment that big companies buy with an entire HR department never reaches the companies that need it most, at exactly the size where one bad people call can end the story. Her answer was not to become a consultant. It was to build the department itself, and make it something a twelve-person company can plug in. Readers will know the shape this series documents by now — decades of judgment, encoded into a system. This time the system is made of people.
Rebecca — first names are policy here; she can introduce herself properly — is a chartered member of the CIPD, the UK profession’s chartered institute, with a master’s degree in human resource management and a career that runs from operational HR to the group level of international business. That is the altitude where HR stops being forms and becomes judgment: which risks are real and which are theatre, what a commercial decision costs on the people side, what a people decision costs commercially. It is expensive judgment to accumulate, and big companies pay for it the only way they can — with entire departments.
In 2017 she stopped renting that judgment to large organisations. “Having worked in corporate for 20 years,” she writes in the firm’s origin story, “I decided to take the plunge into consultancy.” The result is HR Ready, an outsourced HR, recruitment and training firm headquartered at the Bradfield Centre on Cambridge Science Park — a fitting address, given the neighbours are mostly companies trying to scale technology and hers exists to scale the other thing. The stated aim from day one has stayed constant: take the calibre of people expertise a large organisation keeps in-house and deliver it to ambitious smaller ones.
It has worked well enough to be measured. A hundred and fifty businesses supported, by the site’s own counter. A client list that recommends her onward — the testimonials are full of accountants and business coaches passing her to their own clients, which is the strongest referral there is. And in 2024, Businesswoman of the Year in the SME category — an award her LinkedIn accepts for exactly one sentence before handing it away: “an award that belongs to the whole team.” Which turns out to be the tell. The whole model is the team.
The standard failure of small-company HR support is that you buy a person when what you need is a function. One consultant, however good, is one perspective and one diary. HR Ready’s answer is a bench: HR directors for the big judgment calls, HR consultants for the daily grind of contracts and casework, dedicated recruiters, trainers and coaches for the managers who have never managed before, and specialist support around them — ten people at the time of writing, with more than eighty-five years of combined experience, working as what the firm plainly calls an extension of your team. A growing company plugs into the whole function and draws on whichever layer the week requires. The department arrives pre-built.
The method is the part worth stealing. Ask how they advise and the firm refuses the industry’s favourite move — one prescribed answer, delivered as the only one. The promise instead is the full picture: “the low-risk path, the high-risk path, the commercial trade-offs,” and then the founder makes the call — “because it’s your business, not ours.” Anyone who has bought compliance advice knows how rare that is. The industry default is fear, one path, priced in dread. Options with trade-offs treat the founder as what they are — the person responsible for the decision — and clients notice: one managing director who arrived with a tricky dismissal reports precisely that experience, every option explained clearly and then the right legal and practical steps taken; another calls the business-first approach “a breath of fresh air.”
Two more pieces complete the system. The firm refuses to wait to be asked — they drive the people agenda forward rather than answering tickets — which converts HR from an ambulance you call into infrastructure that runs; the cheapest employment problem, after all, is the one that never becomes a case. And the judgment is partly written down where anyone can touch it: a free Employer Risk Check that surfaces a company’s people risks in minutes, and an HR Toolkit of eighty-plus ready-made policies and documents kept current with legislation. There is a nuance here. The firm’s own copy says “we don’t do templates” — meaning the support is built around your culture and your plans — while the toolkit is nothing but templates. Both are true, and the resolution is the whole philosophy: the documents are standardised precisely so the judgment doesn’t have to be.
Notice, for the fourth time in this series, the shape. Decades of accumulated judgment about where companies break — gathered in boardrooms rather than codebases — encoded into something that dispenses it on demand. Readers met the same move in recent transmissions, in very different trades; the medium is the interesting variation this time, not software but a team, a method and a toolkit. The free risk check plays the role open source played in our last dispatch — trust arrives before the invoice. The lesson underneath is identical: expertise scales when you stop selling hours and start building the thing that contains them.
Strip away the HR specifics and the rules travel to any founder whose headcount is climbing:
The people function exists whether or not you build it. Somewhere between hire five and hire fifteen your company acquires one — the only question is whether it is designed or accidental. Accidental ones are built out of precedents you set while distracted.
Buy options, not answers. An adviser who hands you a single path has quietly taken the decision away from you. Insist on the full picture — low-risk route, high-risk route, commercial trade-offs — then make the call yourself. It is your business, not theirs.
Rent the function, not a person. Between templates off the internet and a full-time director there is an intermediate technology: a shared bench with director-level judgment at the top and daily-grind capacity underneath. Most growing companies need the function years before they can justify the headcount.
Don’t wait for the grievance. Reactive HR is an ambulance; proactive HR is infrastructure. The people problems that cost the most — the tribunal, the slow exit, the manager everyone worked around — were all cheap once, earlier, when they were still conversations.
Standardise the paperwork, never the judgment. Write the repeatable parts down until they are templates, so that human attention is spent only where the situation is genuinely yours. A firm that does it the other way round — templated advice, bespoke paperwork — has it exactly backwards.
What actually changes when the department plugs in is mostly invisible. The leaver is handled properly, so there is no second act at a tribunal. The struggling manager gets coached before the team underneath votes with its feet. The founder’s Sunday evening stops featuring employment law. HR Ready’s own copy names the real deliverable with unusual honesty — not compliance but headspace: the hours and attention burned on people chaos, returned to the work of actually growing the company.
And the quiet worry — one bad decision away — gets answered the only way it can be: not with reassurance but with a department. The worry was never irrational. At fourteen staff, one badly handled dismissal really can eat a year, and a founder’s nerve with it. What was irrational was the industry’s arrangement, in which growing companies face processes that assume a department, without one. Nine years in, a hundred and fifty companies supported, an award she keeps crediting to her team: Rebecca’s firm is the counter-argument, in operating form.
So if your company is somewhere on the stretch between the fifth hire and the fifteenth — if the people side has started eating your days and a version of that worry has moved in — the department you are missing already exists, staffed and ready, at hrready.co.uk. The firm’s overview line compresses the whole trade into nine words, so we will let them have the last ones: “You value your people; we take care of them.” The fifteenth hire was never supposed to be the one that broke you.
— END TRANSMISSION 04X
We publish roughly once a month. One email when it lands, if you ask for it.
Ask for the one email →