Approach
Listen first. It is astonishing how rarely anyone does.
Six steps, in this order, on every engagement. The order is the method.
Listen
Interviews across every level and every shift — not a survey, and not just the leadership team. People will tell you exactly what is wrong if you ask them somewhere their manager is not standing.
Read
Every people document in the building, read the way a hostile lawyer would read it. Handbook, offers, job descriptions, the policy that only exists in somebody’s sent folder.
Measure
Turnover by manager and by tenure. Time-to-useful. Overtime concentration. Promotion velocity. Four or five numbers, honestly calculated, will tell you more than any engagement platform.
Show you
A findings session where we say the actual thing. Not a deck that softens it across forty slides. If the problem is a person, we will say so in the room, to you, first.
Build
The structure gets written: roles, levels, pay bands, policy, decision rights. In plain language. In the languages your people read.
Hand over
Your managers are trained on it and it belongs to you. No dependency, no licence, no platform you have to keep renting from us.
A promise about bad news
If the problem is a person, we will say so in the room, to you, first — not on slide 34.
Questions we get asked
Straight answers.
Are you a PEO, a staffing agency, or a broker?
None of the three. We do not lease you employees, we do not fill your roles, and we take no commission from any benefits carrier or broker — which is stated in writing in every proposal. We are paid by you, for advice and for built work, and that is the only money in the room.
Do you replace our employment lawyer?
No, and you should be suspicious of anyone who says they do. We build structure and write policy; your counsel reviews anything that carries legal exposure. We work alongside your lawyer routinely and will tell you plainly when a question is theirs rather than ours.
We are 60 people. Are we too small?
No. Forty to six hundred is the range where this work pays for itself fastest, because the company has outgrown improvised HR but cannot yet justify a full people department.
How fast can you start?
A Sound Check usually begins within two to three weeks of a signed scope, and takes three weeks to run.
What does it cost?
Every engagement is a fixed fee agreed before it starts, against a named deliverable and a date. Indicative bands are published on the pricing page. We do not bill by the hour, because billing by the hour rewards taking longer.
Do you actually work in languages other than English?
Yes, and it is a line item rather than an upsell. Duluth has roughly a hundred and fifty international companies from twenty-seven countries inside the city limits, and more than a hundred languages are spoken across Gwinnett. A handbook that exists in one language, in a building where eleven are spoken, is not a policy. It is a rumour.
Will you tell us something we do not want to hear?
That is most of what you are paying for. It gets said to you first, in the room, before it is written down.
Find out what your company actually sounds like.
A Sound Check runs three weeks for a fixed fee: interviews across every level and shift, a teardown of every people document in the building, and a ranked plan with costs attached. You are not obliged to buy anything after it.