Founders don’t need an HR function. They need someone who understands that their business isn’t a business to them. It’s everything. And that changes everything.
I want to tell you about the moment I understood what working in a founder-led business actually meant.
An employee handed in their notice. Good employee, reasonable reasons, nothing dramatic. In most organisations I’d worked in, this would have been managed: a conversation, a handover plan, a leaving card. Done.
But this wasn’t most organisations. The founder took it as a personal betrayal. Not a performance issue. Not a talent risk. A betrayal. And in that moment, something clicked for me that no CIPD module had ever taught me: in a founder-led business, the organisation and the person who built it are not separate things. You cannot treat them as if they are.
“The single biggest mistake HR people make when they walk into a founder-led business is underestimating how personal it all is.”
We arrive with our frameworks and our policies and our carefully worded scripts for difficult conversations and we wonder why the founder looks at us like we’re speaking a different language. We are speaking a different language. We’re speaking Corporate. They’re speaking something rawer and more urgent than that.
Founders will tell you they want someone to take the hard conversations off their plate. And they mean it. But what they’re actually asking for is someone who will handle those conversations with the same level of investment they would, if only they weren’t too close to it. They don’t want a professional distance. They want a trusted person who is as in it as they are, but clear-headed enough to act where they can’t.
That’s a completely different job description to the one most HR people think they’ve been hired to do.
The HR person who walks in and starts building processes: tick. The one who schedules the appraisal cycles and writes the handbook: tick. The one who sits with the founder at 9pm trying to understand why a team that was thriving six months ago is fracturing, and helps them see their own role in it clearly enough to act: that’s rarer. That’s the person founders actually need.
If you work in a founder-led business, or you want to, ask yourself this honestly: are you treating it like a job, or are you as invested in this as they are? Because they’ll know the difference. They always do.
And if you’re a founder reading this: the HR person you need isn’t the one with the longest policy suite. It’s the one who loses a little sleep over your business too.
Until next time,
Jacquie Moeller
Founder, M:Brace HR | Senior People & Culture Leader