HR that gets into the weeds with you
Most companies don't buy HR. They get it thrown in.
It arrives as an add-on from a payroll provider, a PEO, an insurance broker, a CPA firm — a line item bundled alongside the thing you were actually buying. And because it was never the point, it gets staffed like it was never the point. One representative covering a hundred companies. A ticket queue. A callback window.
That model isn't badly intentioned. It's just built to support a different sale. Which is fine right up until the Tuesday you have a problem that won't fit in a ticket.
TrueCollab HR does HR as the whole job.
Who we built this for
Somewhere around 15 employees, HR stops being a folder of PDFs and starts being a job. Nobody announces the moment. What happens instead is that it quietly lands on whoever seemed closest to it.
We work with founders, CEOs, executive directors, CFOs, COOs, general managers and controllers at companies from 0 to about 150 people.
Sometimes there's no HR function at all, and everything from onboarding to a manager dispute lands on the finance lead between board decks. Sometimes — usually past 85 people or so — there's a capable HR team already, and what's missing is senior depth the budget can't justify as a full-time hire.
Both of those are us.
What we're not
We're not a benefits broker, a payroll vendor, or a PEO.
We're not a management consulting firm either. We don't arrive, find the holes, present the strategic overhaul, and leave you the implementation. There's a version of HR advice that stays permanently six inches above the ground, and we'd rather do the work.
And we're not here to run your company. We've watched HR try, and it goes badly every time — a function that was meant to help ends up as a layer that has to approve things. Your job is to run the business. Ours is to make that easier, take the people work off your plate, and be straight with you about what we see. HR should be fuel, not friction.
How we work
We plug into what you already have
No payroll migration. No change of benefits broker. No system to implement before we're useful. We work with the partners and platforms you have today, which means the first month goes on your problems rather than on a transition.
One retainer, no clock
Monthly, based on the bandwidth we expect the work to need. Not hourly, not by project. Nobody on your side should be deciding whether a question is worth the six minutes it'll cost. Expect to lean on us heavily early — that's the shape of it — and expect it to level out as the foundations hold.
30 days' notice, always
No annual lock-in, no exit penalty, no paperwork built to make leaving expensive. If we're worth keeping, you'll keep us.
Talk to us before you hire us
Bring a question you're stuck on and we'll answer it. Partly because someone did that for us once. Mostly because you'll learn more watching us work a real problem than from any proposal we could write.
We'll help you replace us
We took one client from 0 to 200 employees across multiple states, then helped them hire the HR Director who took over. We counted that as a win. We still do.
Two worlds, and we work in both
Most fractional HR people come out of one of those worlds and quietly hope the other never calls. The compliance exposure is different, the manager training is different, and a handbook built for a software company will not survive contact with a Saturday shift.
We've run HR from California to New York and most places between.
Where we stop
We work alongside employment attorneys, benefit brokers and fractional finance firms, and we're clear about which of those we are. When something needs a lawyer, it gets a lawyer — early, while it's still cheap.
Where you already have those relationships, we work with them rather than around them. Often we're the one making sure your attorney hears about something before it becomes the reason you're calling your attorney.
Leadership
Glen Wilson
Managing Partner
I started out as a recruiter, and what I liked about it was the matching: finding someone a job that actually suited them. What pulled me deeper was everything surrounding the job — the systems and conditions that let people do well, and the ones quietly stopping them.
I care about what happens when people get stuck. Someone in the wrong role that nobody noticed. A team failing at communication and calling it a personality problem. That’s usually fixable, and it usually doesn’t get fixed.
Most companies under 150 people put their first HR hire into recruiting. That’s the right call — you can’t deliver on the plan without the people to do it. But it leaves nobody watching the wider picture: the downstream consequences of a decision made this quarter, and whether the way you work at half a dozen people still works at six dozen.
That gap is why TrueCollab HR exists, and why I wanted somewhere other HR people who care about this work could do it for businesses that couldn’t otherwise afford them.
We’re tech-forward, and I’m genuinely excited about what AI can do. The best of it clears away the mundane and leaves people room for what they’re actually good at — reading a room, handling a hard conversation, noticing what isn’t being said. Which is why I’ll always bet on people.
And I’m not on your payroll. Which means I’ll tell you the thing the rest of your team won’t.
- MS, Human Resources Management — University of Maryland
- BA, Political Science — Ursinus College
Start with a question, not a contract
Tell us what's on your plate that shouldn't be. If we can help, we'll say how. If you need someone else, we'll say that too.