A business compliance consultancy keeps clients on the right side of registrations, renewals and returns. Its staff handle many small deadlines at once, so tracking, handovers and accuracy are the people priorities.
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Share your requirementsA business compliance consultancy helps small and mid-sized companies with registrations, licences, renewals, returns and routine filings across authorities. Executives collect documents from clients, prepare applications, submit them on portals and follow up on queries. Seniors review, answer department questions and advise on what is needed next, while a partner manages client relationships and fees. A single client may have thirty small dates in the year, and the consultancy has hundreds of clients, so the calendar is dense and the cost of a missed date falls on the client and the firm. Most of the work is repetitive and detail-heavy, and clients are slow to send papers. Authorities change forms and portals without notice, and staff must adapt fast. Related reading: HR for professional services. A good executive learns the client's habits and the portal's quirks, and when such a person leaves the firm loses working memory that no manual holds.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
GullyHR runs talent acquisition for permanent roles in business compliance consultants. For each role we agree the job description with you, find and screen candidates against it, and support the offer through to joining. Tell us the role and the number of people, and we start there.
We recruit permanent employees. We do not supply contract or temporary staff.
Every business interviews, but few have a written process that works the same way for every role and every interviewer. GullyHR designs yours, from the role brief to the offer, trains your managers to run it, and can run it for you on the roles you hand us.
We agree what the role must deliver, the must-have and nice-to-have skills, and how each will be scored.
Screening call, assessment, interview rounds and decision points, sized to the role and the number of people you hire.
Structured questions for each role family and a rating guide, so two interviewers judge the same answer the same way.
A short briefing for your managers on what to ask, what to avoid and how to give a clear yes or no.
Who approves, how the offer is made, and how candidates are kept informed from first call to joining.
Each client has many dates, and a missed one is a penalty, an unhappy client and a stressed team.
Executives chase for documents, then do the work in a rush, with errors creeping in.
A new form or a changed portal step catches staff off guard, and each learns it alone.
One executive knows how to deal with a particular office or a client's odd history, and others do not.
Some carry far more clients than others because they are quick or do not say no.
Seniors check at the last moment, and mistakes are found only when a notice arrives.
After a year or two of experience, executives are offered better roles elsewhere.
Slow departments and portal downtime become the firm's problem, with no log to show what was done.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Operations and Governance; Learning and Development; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
The pieces a business compliance consultants business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
All due dates by client, owner and status, reviewed daily, with a weekly look ahead.
All due dates by client, owner and status, reviewed daily, with a weekly look ahead. Keep the process in the documentation process.
A count of clients and tasks per executive, a limit and a rule for reassigning when someone is overloaded.
A count of clients and tasks per executive, a limit and a rule for reassigning when someone is overloaded.
Steps, documents, portal tips and common queries for each registration or return, updated when rules change.
Steps, documents, portal tips and common queries for each registration or return, updated when rules change. The learning process supports updates.
A checklist-based review before submission and a named reviewer, with errors logged and discussed.
A checklist-based review before submission and a named reviewer, with errors logged and discussed.
A dated note of what was asked of the client, what they sent and what the office replied, to protect the firm and the client.
A dated note of what was asked of the client, what they sent and what the office replied, to protect the firm and the client.
Skills, case types and steps for each level, with a review each year.
Skills, case types and steps for each level, with a review each year. See compensation benchmarking for pay views.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
Client calendars, procedure notes and role descriptions in one place.
Updates on rule changes, portal training and an executive to manager ladder.
Measures of accuracy and timeliness, not just volume.
A fair pay view for experienced executives who attract outside offers.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in professional services, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Why associates and managers leave consulting, accounting, legal and advisory firms, and how to ask about progression, workload and partners at exit.
6 min readRead article
Every growing company reaches a point where the founder approving everything stops being speed and starts being the bottleneck. Twelve signs it has happened, and what to fix first.
9 min readRead article
A founder's guide to hiring freshers and running a first-year programme: campus or open drives, a screening round, a training plan by quarter, mentors and checkpoints.
6 min readRead article
What really keeps mobile app and web developers in a small firm: stay conversations, growth paths, fair release rules and a risk sheet an owner can use this month.
6 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
One shared calendar, a daily check, a named owner for each date and a second person who sees the weekly look ahead. Fix the cause of each miss.
Count tasks, weight them by difficulty, set a limit and let the manager reassign. Reward people who flag overload and do not punish them.
Procedure notes for each filing, client sheets and a second person on every client. Update after each change.
A checklist, a second review before submission and a log of errors that is discussed monthly. Use mistakes to refine the checklist.
Pay fairly against the market, give them a clear path to manager and let them lead clients. Ask what they would need to stay.
We would look at the client calendar, the load per executive and the procedure notes. A workload balancing note with a procedure note format is a likely opener. Scope, timing and fee are set out in writing afterwards.
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