What was broken, what we did, what changed.

Fresh funding meant fourteen roles to fill in two quarters, and no hiring system to do it. The founder was the bottleneck on every offer, every level call, every comp decision. Two early hires had already missed, and the team had started to notice.

We built the hiring engine end to end: a role and leveling framework, comp bands by function and geography, structured interview panels with scorecards, and an intake-to-offer workflow the team could run without the founder in the room. We sat in on the first cohort of loops, then handed it off.

The founder stopped being the approval bottleneck on hiring. Offers went out on a defined cadence instead of in bursts, and the team could explain why each level paid what it paid. The framework outlasted the engagement and absorbed the next round of roles without a rebuild.

Approvals, onboarding, and cross-team handoffs lived in people's heads and inboxes. Every exception routed back to two overloaded leaders. New hires took weeks to become useful because nobody could point them at how the work actually ran.

We mapped the real workflows, not the imagined ones, then redesigned the three that caused the most drag and automated the rules-based parts. Approval routing, onboarding sequences, and the operating cadence were rebuilt and documented, with the team trained to run and change them.

The two leaders stopped being the routing layer for routine decisions. Onboarding became a defined path instead of a scavenger hunt, and exceptions had an owner and a rule instead of an email thread. Leadership got its time back for the decisions that actually needed them.

Managers had been promoted from individual contributor seats with no training. Reviews were inconsistent and dreaded, feedback happened only when something broke, and quiet attrition was climbing. Exit conversations kept surfacing the same few themes.

We rebuilt the performance system: a review cycle managers could actually run, a calibration process they trusted, plain-language templates, and a manager-enablement program facilitated over a quarter. We coached through the first cycle live rather than handing over a deck.

Reviews stopped being theatre. Managers ran them without escalating every hard conversation, performance issues surfaced early instead of at exit, and the themes that had been driving quiet attrition got addressed before they became resignations.