Your HR is running. But is your people strategy working for your business?

Picture this. You've got 25+ people. Someone handles the contracts and the onboarding admin. You've got an employee handbook. Payroll runs on time, and when something difficult comes up, you deal with it. By most measures, HR is sorted.

Then you start talking to investors. Or you appoint your first non-executive director. Or you decide it's time to scale seriously, and you realise your leadership team is stretched, your org structure has evolved organically rather than deliberately, and nobody has thought carefully about what the business needs to look like in 18 months.

HR, it turns out, wasn't sorted. It was just operational.

HR support vs people strategy

Operational HR is the essential foundation. It covers everything your business needs to run legally and smoothly from a people perspective: employment contracts, policies, handbooks, onboarding, offboarding, disciplinaries, grievances, payroll, right to work checks, compliance. This is the work that has to happen, and it has to happen correctly.

But it's not the same as strategic HR.

Strategic HR is about connecting your people decisions to your commercial goals. It asks questions like: what does the business need to achieve in the next two years, and what does the organisation need to look like to get there? When should you hire, and into which roles? Should that function be built in-house or kept flexible? What does your leadership team actually need to be capable of, and are they? How do you retain the people who are critical to growth, and what do you do when you realise you have someone in the wrong seat?

These aren't HR admin questions. They're business strategy questions that happen to live in the people space. And most businesses, when they reach around 20 to 30 people, start to need both types of support rather than just one.

Why the gap matters more as you grow

In the early stages, operational HR is enough. Your team is small, your structure is simple, and most people issues can be handled with reasonable judgment and the right documents.

As you grow, that changes. The decisions you make about people become more consequential and harder to reverse. Hiring at a senior level into the wrong structure costs you time and money when it doesn't work out. Promoting internally without thinking about whether someone is actually ready for the next level creates management problems that ripple through a team. Letting culture drift because you're focused on growth creates retention problems that take months to show up in your data and years to fix.

The businesses that navigate growth well tend to have someone helping them think about these things in advance, not after the fact.

What strategic HR support actually looks like

At board or leadership level, HR strategy involves a few things that look quite different from day-to-day HR operations.

Workforce planning. Looking at where the business is going commercially and working backwards to what the organisation needs. How many people, in what roles, on what timeline? Where are the critical dependencies, and what happens if one of them leaves?

Org design. As businesses grow, their structures often don't. Reporting lines that made sense at 10 people create bottlenecks at 30. Thinking deliberately about how the organisation is structured, where decision-making sits, and how teams are grouped is genuinely strategic work.

Leadership capability. A common growth challenge is that the people who got you here are not always the same people who will get you to the next stage. That's a difficult thing to address, and it requires someone with the experience and the objectivity to have the conversation.

Culture as a commercial asset. In industries where talent is competitive, the quality of your culture directly affects your ability to hire and retain. For businesses going through investment or acquisition, it also affects due diligence. Great Place to Work accreditation, structured engagement data, and a clear employee value proposition are no longer just nice things to have.

Pre-investment and pre-exit preparation. Investors and acquirers look closely at people risk. Gaps in contracts, undocumented processes, key person dependencies, and cultural issues all show up in due diligence and can affect valuation. Getting ahead of that work requires someone who understands both the HR detail and the commercial context.

Maven's approach

Before co-founding Maven, Louise was VP of People & Culture at Elucidat, leading the people function through a period of significant growth and eventually through to the company's acquisition in 2025. During that time she worked directly with the board on people strategy, led the business to multiple Great Place to Work certifications, and managed the people-side of organisational change at every stage of the growth curve.

That experience means she can operate at both levels: the operational work that keeps a business running, and the strategic conversations that shape what it becomes. For most of the businesses Maven works with, that combination is exactly what they need.

If your business is at a stage where HR decisions are starting to feel like business decisions, it's worth having a conversation. Book a free 30-minute call to talk through where you are and what kind of support would actually make a difference.