Performance4 min read
How to Build Salary Bands for the First Time
The hard part is not drawing the ranges. It is placing the people you already have, and deciding what you will do about the ones who fall outside.
Ana Reis
People & Organisation consulting
Good companies do not manage people by accident.
We help growing companies build better ways to manage people. Performance, culture, careers and leadership — designed on purpose, and implemented until they work.
Who we work with
The company grew faster than the way it is managed
It is almost always the same story. The company went from forty to two hundred people in a few years. What worked when everyone knew each other stopped working, and nobody had time to replace it.
- Every manager manages their own way, and what it is like to work here depends on who you report to.
- Nobody can quite explain what exceeding expectations means.
- Promotions and raises are decided case by case.
- The culture you had at fifty people is diluting.
- And decisions keep reaching the CEO that should never have climbed that high.
None of this is an HR problem. These are management problems that happen to involve people.
What we do
Where we come in
Five projects with a beginning, a middle and an end. And, for companies that need People leadership on an ongoing basis, a Fractional Chief People Officer.
01Performance CycleA consistent way to set expectations, give feedback and evaluate.02Culture & ValuesValues translated into behaviour that shows up in real decisions.03Careers & CompensationLevels, progression and pay with rules you can explain.04Leadership & People Management RoutinesThe same way of managing across every team.05Policies & BenefitsThe written rules of the company, and the benefits that sit inside them.06Fractional Chief People OfficerSenior People leadership, without hiring full-time.Ongoing relationship
Why us
We think like operators, not consultants
Most People problems are also operating problems. What a manager is expected to do, how a decision gets made, what a promotion requires — these sit between how the company is run and how its people are managed.
We work on both sides, and we build the systems until they are running: managers trained, documents approved, and someone inside the company owning them.
We are deliberately small, and senior because of the experience we bring. The people you meet in the first conversation are the people who do the work. There is no team of analysts behind the proposal.
Who we are
Built by people who have been on the inside
Francisco spent his career inside growing companies, not advising them from outside. He was the first employee at Onport and left as COO, after the company grew from around €100k to €2.5M in annual revenue and was acquired by Farfetch. At Rovo and Assembly, as SVP of Revenue & Operations, he led more than forty people across functions and built the commercial structure from scratch.
Ana works on the People side of the same problem: the processes, the evaluations, the implementation — the part of the system that decides whether it gets used or abandoned.
One of us built growing organisations from the inside. The other makes People systems actually work. That combination is the work.
What we think
Your values are not your culture.
A review process nobody trusts is worse than no process.
Managers do not need more training. They need a system.
People Diagnostic
Not sure where to start?
In a few weeks we assess how the company manages people today, identify the biggest problems and risks, and recommend what to do over the next six to twelve months — in what order, and why.
We talk to the leadership team and a cross-section of managers, review what already exists, and hand back a reading the leadership team can agree on. Most of our projects start here, and the diagnostic stands on its own: you leave with an agreed plan for the year ahead.
How we work
Scope and price fixed before we start
We do not sell consulting days. Every proposal states what we will solve, what you will receive, in which phases, what we need from you, how long it takes, what it costs and what is excluded.
- Approved final documents
- Operational templates
- A method for using them
- Internal communication, ready to send
- Manager training where the project needs it
- A defined period of implementation support
Insights
Written for people building companies
Practical writing on performance, careers, leadership and growth.
People Metrics3 min read
The People Metrics a 100-Person Company Should Actually Track
Six numbers, each pointing at a specific part of the system. Not a dashboard project — a way of finding out what is failing before someone resigns.
Francisco Campos
Management4 min read
How to Run a One-to-One That Is Worth the Hour
Most one-to-ones are status meetings with two people in them. The fix is not a better template — it is deciding what the meeting is for.
Ana Reis
Let us talk about the actual problem
Thirty minutes on what is happening in your company. You leave with our read on the problem and a clear view of what we would do about it.