A Few HR Horror Stories I’ve Cleaned Up:
The Shady Contractor Who Cost $50K
Slack access. No contract. Still billing. Six months later? Misclassification fines, back pay, no IP agreement, and yes, still in the AWS.
The Manager Everyone Avoided
Public Slack shaming. Quiet attrition. Team-wide burnout. The KPIs looked fine… until key people left.
Nothing Documented
Vibes > contracts. Until the "contractor" claimed employee rights and sued. You don’t scale culture with handshakes.
The Intern No One Off Boarded
They finished their summer. But not their access. A rogue email reply nearly tanked a client relationship.
Seen Enough?
If even one of these made your stomach drop, it’s time. Let’s catch what’s quietly breaking before it becomes your horror story.
You're not running a summer camp. You're building the next Succession (minus the lawsuits... hopefully). If your People systems can’t scale, neither can you.
And yet, most founders don’t think about HR until something breaks or someone walks. I’ve seen too many brilliant startups derailed not by product failure, but by people dysfunction.
So I built something fast, founder-safe, and bullshit-free, The Snapshot.
What’s the Snapshot?
A 3-day HR diagnostic designed for early-stage teams. Think of it like a pressure test for your compliance, culture, and clarity without the fluff.
You get:
- A no-jargon HR risk scorecard (compliance, culture, clarity)
- Your top 5 issues, ranked by urgency + risk
- A 1:1 debrief with zero TED Talk energy
I look at:
- Employment classifications (yes, your 1099s count)
- Onboarding/off boarding trails
- Role clarity, burnout, bottlenecks
You don’t get:
- Pastel PDFs no one reads
- A 12-month retainer
- Advice that sounds like it came from ChatGPT
Lisbon-based, U.S.-experienced. Olivia Pope precision. Kim Wexler ethics (at least in the beginning). Logan Roy urgency.
#StartupLife #FractionalCHRO #HRThatHitsDifferent #FounderSupport #NoFluffHR
