Lodestone People ConsultingA founder came to us with an ambitious vision: a venture studio designed to launch an ecosystem of integrated companies tackling major global problems, beginning with healthcare. When I began working with the founding team in March 2026, they had the vision but little of the HR infrastructure needed to hire, pay, or manage people.
As Executive Advisor and fractional HR executive to the founder and founding team, I worked with the team to implement employment and contractor agreements for each person, then partnered with Sequoia's Peopleloop PEO to employ staff compliantly across 8 states while offering benefits and retirement programs competitive enough to attract talent used to the financial services industry. We designed roles, policies, and practices for assessment, selection, and hiring, and put in place onboarding, goal setting, performance management, and employee relations support — the fundamentals a fast-growing startup needs but rarely has time to build. Alongside Lodestone colleagues, we led the founding leadership through executive assessments and Executive Team Effectiveness facilitation using our Knowing Me Knowing You Human Capital Science framework, aligning them around a shared purpose, objectives, operating rhythms, and ways of working.
Six months into the engagement, the company has a functioning executive team operating from that shared framework, a PEO partnership employing people compliantly and competitively across 8 states, and HR fundamentals running end to end, from assessment-driven selection through onboarding and performance management. The company now has the people foundation to scale into the multi-company studio its founder envisioned.
