Do we have to change payroll or benefits to work with you?

No. We plug into the systems and partners you already have. No migration, no platform switch, nothing to implement before we're useful. The first month goes on your problems rather than on a transition.

What happens when we're ready for a full-time HR hire?

We help you make it — defining the role, sitting in on interviews, and handing over a function that already works rather than a blank slate. We've done it: one client went from 0 to 200 employees across multiple states, and we helped them hire the HR Director who took over.

How quickly can you start?

Days rather than months. There is no recruiting cycle and no ramp, which is most of the point.

We already have someone doing HR part-time. Does this replace them?

Usually not. Often the most useful version of this is supporting someone already doing the administrative work well but with no one to ask when something hard lands. Past roughly 85 people that is the more common shape.

Embedded Fractional HR for Growing Companies

You’ve reached the point where HR is a job. Not a folder of templates — a job, with a queue, deadlines, and consequences when it’s done badly.

What you probably don’t have is forty hours a week of it. A 30-person company has maybe six to ten hours of genuinely high-stakes people work, and the rest is administration that shouldn’t be occupying a finance leader’s afternoon.

That’s an awkward amount. Too much to absorb, not enough to hire for. So it lands on whoever is closest and gets done between other things — which is fine until the week it isn’t.

What a full-time hire actually costs

Worth doing the arithmetic, because most companies haven’t.

Salary.com puts the national average base salary for a Human Resources Manager at $147,200, across all industries and company sizes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics median is $149,280, so two independent sources land within about 1.4% of each other.

Base salary is not what the role costs you.


Base salary	$147,200
Employer payroll taxes — FICA 7.65%, FUTA and SUTA ~1.5%	$13,469
Benefits and insurance — health, dental, vision, retirement match, workers’ comp, disability, PTO	$36,800
Fully loaded	$197,469

That’s before recruiting costs, before the three to four months it takes to hire, and before you’ve found out whether the role was sized correctly in the first place.

A TrueCollab retainer runs $2,000 to $6,500 a month depending on scope — $24,000 to $78,000 a year. Engagements needing a dedicated resource are scoped separately.

Against a fully loaded $197,469, that’s 60% to 88% less. The arithmetic is above; check it yourself, and check the salary figure against BLS, which is free and public.

One honest caveat, because a finance leader will spot it otherwise: you are not buying a full-time person at a discount. You’re buying the hours the work actually needs. For most companies under 150 people that’s the correct purchase — but it is a different thing, not a cheaper version of the same thing.

What we take on

Onboarding and offboarding, run end to end. The day-to-day questions, from you and from your team. The manager who needs a script before a hard conversation. The policy nobody has updated since it was downloaded. The employee issue that arrives at 4pm on a Friday.

You get a named lead who knows your business, and we bring in specialists when the work needs depth.

What this looks like as you grow

Under 15 people — mostly foundation. Classification, offer letters, onboarding that doesn’t depend on one person remembering the steps.

15 to 50 — the volume changes. First manager layer, first performance problems, first termination somebody dreads. This is where the retainer earns itself, because the questions arrive without warning.

50 to 150 — you have an HR function, or you’re about to. Often the work shifts toward building the thing that replaces us: defining the role, hiring the person, handing over something that already works.

What’s included

Onboarding and offboarding, end to end
Day-to-day employee and manager questions
Manager support: documentation, difficult conversations, performance concerns
Policy and handbook maintenance, not just creation
Coordination with your payroll provider, broker and attorney
HRIS review — starting with whether you’re using what you already pay for

On that last point: we begin with what you have. Most companies are paying for features they’ve never switched on, and a system that’s already in the budget and already integrated beats a migration almost every time. If you genuinely need something different we’ll say so, but that’s the second conversation, not the first.

How it’s priced

One monthly retainer, based on the bandwidth we expect the work to need. Not hourly, not by project. Nobody on your side should be weighing whether a question is worth the six minutes.

Expect to lean on us heavily early. That’s the shape of it. Expect it to level out once the foundations hold.

Thirty days’ notice, always. No annual lock-in, no exit penalty, no paperwork designed to make leaving expensive.

Where we stop

We’re not your payroll vendor, your benefits broker, or your attorney. We work with all three — often we’re the one making sure your attorney hears about something early, while it’s still cheap.

Your HR department, without the hire