Startup consultants guide founders through registration, funding papers, pitch decks and early operations. Their clients are small, hopeful and short of cash, so the team juggles many light engagements with uneven pay and heavy emotional load.
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Share your requirementsA startup consultancy helps founders turn an idea into a registered, funded business. The team has a principal adviser with experience in starting companies, business analysts who write plans and financial models, designers who prepare pitch decks, registration and compliance assistants who handle paperwork through outside professionals, and client managers who keep founders on track. Clients come in large numbers and pay small fees, often in instalments, and many disappear when money is short. Founders change direction, ask for a new deck every week and expect round-the-clock replies. Staff must know a little about everything, from company forms to investor questions. Success stories bring referrals, but failures are common and affect morale. Junior staff learn broadly and are tempted by start-ups of their own. 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 startup 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.
Time is spread across dozens of founders, and each one expects the attention of a premium client.
A founder asks for one more deck, one more model and one more call, and the team says yes.
Work done last week is thrown out, and analysts see their effort wasted.
Instalments stop, and staff keep working on files that will never be paid.
One person is asked about company forms, tax, funding and branding, and they guess.
Many ventures close within a year, and the team rarely speaks about what to learn.
Accountants, lawyers and agents are used on client files without clear handoffs or checks.
After seeing many founders, a bright analyst decides to do it themselves.
Start with the topics that matter most here: Organisation Design; Career and Succession Management; HR Operations and Governance. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for professional services, not in general.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
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.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
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.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
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 startup consultants business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Fixed offerings with defined deliverables, number of revisions and payment steps.
Fixed offerings with defined deliverables, number of revisions and payment steps. Keep them in documentation.
Payment checkpoints with work paused when instalments lapse, applied the same way to all.
Payment checkpoints with work paused when instalments lapse, applied the same way to all.
A skills sheet showing who can handle which topic, and a rule to refer questions beyond it to a qualified professional.
A skills sheet showing who can handle which topic, and a rule to refer questions beyond it to a qualified professional.
Names, role, fees and files handled, with a handoff note for each.
Names, role, fees and files handled, with a handoff note for each. Add to your records.
A monthly session on a few clients: what worked and what did not.
A monthly session on a few clients: what worked and what did not. See learning plans.
A route from assistant to analyst to adviser with new responsibility at each stage, reviewed against pay benchmarks.
A route from assistant to analyst to adviser with new responsibility at each stage, reviewed against pay benchmarks.
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.
Service packages and scope notes that stop unpaid growth.
Records of skills and outside professionals in one place.
Regular reviews that turn client outcomes into team learning.
Pay and growth steps that keep sharp juniors longer.
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
A founder's guide to building job grades, titles and billing levels for a growing IT services firm, with a step-by-step method and a grade description outline.
6 min readRead article
A two-hour exercise that names the roles you could not fill quickly, who could cover them, and what readiness would actually require.
7 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 articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Define deliverables and revisions in writing and price extras on the spot. Founders accept limits that are stated early.
Agree payment checkpoints and a pause rule at the start, and apply it consistently. Staff should not carry unpaid work.
Make a skills map and tell people to refer legal, tax and funding-law questions to a qualified professional. Guessing harms the client.
Review each failure for lessons, celebrate small wins and be open about what you can and cannot influence.
Give them real ownership, a visible path and fair pay. Some will go anyway, and a friendly parting keeps referrals alive.
How packages are scoped, how clients are paid and paused, who knows which topic and where juniors see their future. A package sheet, a skills map or a junior path is a likely start. Scope, timing and fees are put in writing after that talk.
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See all HR topics for professional services, or another industry.
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