Either you don't have a people function yet, or you have one that stopped fitting.
KK Guess makes it fit — from nothing, or from what you've outgrown.
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Who this is for
No senior people function yet.
Founder-led, or about to make a first HR leadership hire. Payroll and benefits happen; the rest is improvised by whoever has an hour. Compliance is a guess, managers are untrained, and the first serious people problem will arrive before the function does.
A function that's been outgrown.
An HR team that plateaued at a size the company has left behind. A new CHRO who inherited a function built for half the headcount. A board asking questions the team can't answer. The people are usually capable; the design is old.
How I work
Every engagement starts with the numbers you already have, and ends with the ones your board will ask for.
The senior people seat, without the full-time hire.
Strategy, structure and the decisions that need a CHRO in the room — on a cadence that matches the company's stage.
For the people making the calls.
CEOs and their teams, working through the decisions that are really about people: who to hire, what to change, what to stop.
When the culture question is a governance question.
Compensation, succession, executive performance and the questions a board should be asking before it has to.
A responsibility program that's part of the strategy, not beside it.
Certification, stakeholder governance and impact measurement — built to survive a change of CEO and to hold up when a customer, a candidate or an investor asks.
The receipts
I certified the company as a B Corporation in 2016 and recertified it three times through 2025; when the certification lapsed, I designed and ran the in-house Impact Institution that replaced it.
What colleagues say
“You walked into a mess, and patiently built both HR and our institution into a Best Place to Work.”
“The institution quadrupled in size in seven years; her HR expertise allowed for that growth to be manageable — and even fun.”
“Employees consistently cited her manager development program as one of the most impactful investments the organization had made.”
About
SPHR, SHRM-SCP
I build the people function a company actually needs — and rebuild it when the company outgrows it.
I was the first HR hire at a national, fully remote higher-education institution, with no department, no team and no playbook, and I built the function from nothing to more than 800 people across 40+ states. Then I rebuilt it, more than once, as the company grew past each version. The culture that came out of it earned USA TODAY's Top Workplaces five consecutive years running, decided entirely by the people who worked there.
That is the work I do now: strategy first, then the structure that makes it real — hiring, manager behaviour, incentives and the rhythm of communication.
Culture is what your managers do when nobody is watching. At 40 states, nobody is watching — so it had better be measured. Retention, time-to-hire, manager effectiveness, engagement: the numbers that tell you whether the culture is real or just well described.