A licensing consultancy helps food businesses and others obtain and renew licences. Staff juggle applications, inspector visits and renewal dates for many clients, and a lapse in one file becomes a problem for the client.
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Share your requirementsA licensing consultancy helps food businesses, restaurants, caterers, small manufacturers and shops to obtain registrations and licences, prepare for inspector visits and renew on time. The team has a principal consultant, application executives who prepare forms and documents, field staff who visit client premises, document and portal desk staff, and client coordinators. Each client has dates for renewal, returns and inspections, and the total across the client list is large. Clients are small business owners who are slow with papers and often do not understand what is needed. Rules and portals change, and a lapse can stop a client's trade. Field executives travel to many sites. Knowledgeable executives are sought by food companies for their quality teams. See also HR for professional services.
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 FSSAI and licensing 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.
Hundreds of clients have different dates, kept in phones, diaries and sheets, and a lapse is found when the client complains.
Small owners send partial documents and ask for urgent action, and coordinators bear the pressure.
A call that an officer will visit the next morning sends field staff scrambling to a site they may not know.
Long days, mixed notes and no common checklist lead to uneven quality in what they report.
One executive reads the notice, others do not, and a client gets conflicting advice.
Staff say a licence will be granted by a date, which they cannot control, and the client blames the firm.
A quality team in a manufacturer offers a steady salary, and the consultancy loses its most knowledgeable people.
Hygiene advisors build their own decks and vary in quality, with no record of who was trained for which client.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Employee Administration; Learning and Development; Retention and Attrition Management. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
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.
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.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a FSSAI and licensing consultants business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Every client, licence, due date and responsible executive in a single shared record, with reminders sent ahead of time.
Every client, licence, due date and responsible executive in a single shared record, with reminders sent ahead of time.
A clear list at intake by business type, with a date by which papers are due, and a record of chases.
A clear list at intake by business type, with a date by which papers are due, and a record of chases.
A checklist field staff use at short notice, including common observations and items to check.
A checklist field staff use at short notice, including common observations and items to check. Combine with workplace health, safety and wellbeing practice for visits.
A short note on what changed, who read the notice and which clients it affects, taught through the learning and development process.
A short note on what changed, who read the notice and which clients it affects, taught through the learning and development process.
A written line between advice and guarantee, in role notes under the HR documentation process.
A written line between advice and guarantee, in role notes under the HR documentation process.
Stages from executive to senior advisor to lead, with pay steps linked to skills in compensation benchmarking.
Stages from executive to senior advisor to lead, with pay steps linked to skills in compensation benchmarking.
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.
Role notes that state what staff may promise and how client papers are handled.
A routine to spread rule changes and train hygiene advisors consistently.
Pay that holds against offers from food company quality teams.
Safe, planned field visits for staff who travel and enter food premises.
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
Payroll says one joining date, the personal file says another and the manager remembers a third. How to establish a single trustworthy employee record and keep it that way.
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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.
Hold every date in one shared diary with an owner, send reminders early and review the next sixty days weekly.
Give a checklist at the start, set a paper-due date, log chases and tell clients what delay will cost them.
Explain what is in your control and what is not. Avoid promising a grant date, because an officer decides.
Assign someone to read notices weekly and share a short note. Check that every executive has read it.
Give them a defined path, pay linked to skills and a role in training and audits. Be honest that some will move on.
The renewals diary habit, field kits, promise rules and an advisor path are common starting points. We begin by hearing how a recent renewal or inspection was handled. Scope, timing and fees are agreed in writing.
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