Fractional HR practice — Est. MMXIX

One practice,
refracted for
every room you run.

PRISM places senior people operations inside growing startups and law firms — by the day, not by the headcount. The same discipline, angled differently for a founding team and for a partnership.

Book a 30-minute consult → See the service map
140+Engagements delivered
11 yrsMedian partner experience
2 wksFrom consult to embedded
0Long-term retainers required
01 — Practice

Two rooms that rarely
share a vocabulary.
We speak both.

A twelve-person startup and a forty-partner firm have almost nothing in common on paper. Underneath, the failure modes are identical: unclear authority, undocumented decisions, and compensation nobody can defend out loud.

For founders

You hired forty people
with a spreadsheet and nerve.

Placeholder copy. The systems that carried you to Series A quietly stop working somewhere around the thirtieth hire. We install the structure before it becomes an incident — and we keep it light enough that nobody slows down.

  • Levelling, bands, and equity refresh logic that survives a board meeting
  • First-manager training for engineers promoted eleven weeks ago
  • Performance cycles that take days, not quarters
  • Employment groundwork for your second and third country
For partners

Your people function
reports to everyone at once.

Placeholder copy. Firms are governed by consensus and staffed by exception. We give the partnership one neutral desk for the decisions that shouldn't be made in a hallway — and the paper trail to prove they weren't.

  • Associate progression and partnership-track criteria, written down
  • Lateral onboarding and integration through the first two hundred days
  • Compensation committee support and defensible pay review
  • Sensitive matters handled at arm's length from the partnership
02 — Services

The full spectrum,
taken one band at a time.

Engage any single line, or the whole map. Most clients begin with one and expand within a quarter.

01

People Architecture

Org design, levelling frameworks, and role clarity for teams that doubled faster than their chart did.
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02

Compensation & Equity

Benchmarked bands, review cycles, and equity mechanics you can explain to a candidate or a committee.
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03

Hiring Systems

Structured interviews, scorecards, and a bar that stays where you set it after the fiftieth hire.
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04

Employee Relations

Investigations, exits, and difficult conversations run by someone with no stake in the outcome.
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05

Compliance & Policy

Handbooks, multi-jurisdiction employment posture, and the documentation counsel asks for first.
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06

Leadership Coaching

Standing hours for founders, practice heads, and the newly promoted who won't ask for help.
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FIG. 01 Image / clip placeholder — 90-second practice film
16:10 · replace with founder interview reel

In their words

Ninety seconds
on how an engagement
actually feels.

Placeholder copy. Three clients — a Series B founder, a managing partner, and a chief of staff — on what changed in the first sixty days.

Watch the film →
03 — Method

Refraction in
three passes.

No discovery theatre. You get a working document in week one and a functioning system by week six.

Pass one · Weeks 1–2

Incidence

Placeholder copy. We sit in your meetings, read your documents, and talk to fifteen people. You receive a plain-language map of where authority, pay, and process actually live today.

Pass two · Weeks 3–6

Dispersion

Placeholder copy. The map becomes artefacts — bands, ladders, policies, cycles. We build them with your leaders in the room so nothing arrives as a surprise memo.

Pass three · Ongoing

Emergence

Placeholder copy. We hand over, then stay reachable at a fraction of the cadence. Standing hours, quarterly reviews, and a phone number for the week it all goes sideways.

“They arrived on a Tuesday and by the following Friday we had compensation bands the partnership actually voted for. Placeholder copy, but that is roughly how it went.”
PHOTO A. Marchetti Managing Partner · Placeholder & Co.
04 — Engagements

Bought by the day.
Kept by the result.

Every engagement is month-to-month after the first term. Placeholder pricing shown.

Diagnostic

$6k / fixed

A two-week read of your people function, ending in a document your board can follow.

  • Fifteen structured interviews
  • Policy and document audit
  • Risk register with priorities
  • Ninety-minute readout
Start here →
Embedded · Most chosen

$9k / month

Two days a week inside the business, with everything the diagnostic recommends actually built.

  • Named senior practitioner
  • Levelling, bands, and cycles delivered
  • Manager training cohort
  • Employee relations coverage
  • Direct line to your leadership
Book a consult →
Counsel

$3k / month

For teams with the system already in place who need judgment on call.

  • Standing weekly hour
  • Unlimited async questions
  • Quarterly compensation review
  • Escalation within one business day
Enquire →
05 — Questions

Asked before
the first call.

Are you replacing our HR team or sitting above it?

Placeholder copy. Usually neither. We work beside whoever holds people operations today — often a chief of staff, an office manager, or a partner who inherited it — and we leave them stronger than we found them.

How is this different from a recruiter or an HR consultancy?

Placeholder copy. Recruiters fill seats and consultancies deliver decks. We build the operating system and stay long enough to watch it run under load.

Can you work inside a partnership structure?

Placeholder copy. Yes. A meaningful share of our work is with firms between fifteen and eighty partners, including compensation committee support and lateral integration.

What does the first month look like?

Placeholder copy. Two weeks of listening, one working document, and one decision meeting. By week four you have at least one system live rather than a roadmap for one.

Do you sign confidentiality and conflict terms?

Placeholder copy. Always, and we run a conflicts check before the first substantive conversation — particularly for firms operating in overlapping markets.

Next intake — Q4

Bring us the thing
you keep postponing.

Thirty minutes, no deck, no obligation. If we're not the right angle for the problem, we'll say so and point you somewhere better.

Book a consult → hello@prism.placeholder