At thirty people the founder still knows everyone’s name and decides every hire. At a hundred and fifty that same instinct quietly becomes the bottleneck, attrition climbs, roles blur, and nobody can say who owns what. We build the people structure that lets the business grow past the founder’s memory, without turning into an HR bureaucracy nobody respects.
HR in most growing Indian firms is payroll, leave records, and whoever the founder trusts to handle exits. That works until it doesn’t. The good people start leaving for reasons nobody documented, two managers think they own the same function, and a promotion gets made on loyalty because there was no other basis to make it on. None of that is a software problem. It’s a structure problem.
We don’t run your HR department and we don’t sell you an HRMS. We build the layer above the admin: a workforce plan tied to the actual business plan, an org structure where every role has one owner, a leadership bench that isn’t three deep on the founder, a performance system people take seriously because it’s tied to something real, and the engagement work that keeps your best people from quietly updating their CVs.
If you’re restructuring after a funding round, integrating a team post-acquisition, or professionalising a family-run business so the next generation inherits an organisation rather than a set of personal relationships, this work is the spine of it. Better to design the structure deliberately than to discover it the day a key person resigns.
If three of these describe your last six months, the people setup has outgrown the one that worked when you were forty people.
Attrition is climbing in the roles you can least afford to lose, and the exit interviews say “personal reasons” because nobody asked the real question earlier.
Two managers think they run the same function, three things have no owner at all, and the org chart is whatever the founder remembers that week.
Take the founder or one or two key leaders out for a month and the business stalls. There is no second line and no plan to build one.
Reviews happen once a year, everyone gets “meets expectations,” increments are flat, and the form has no bearing on who actually gets promoted.
Roles get filled by referral and pay set by negotiation, so two people doing the same job sit two bands apart and nobody can explain why.
A funding round, a merger, or a cost reset means the structure has to change, and there’s no view of what it should become or how to get there without losing the wrong people.
Typically fourteen to twenty-two weeks, with your HR lead or the founder’s right hand inside the work from week one, so the structure doesn’t leave when we do.
We map the real org against the real work, who owns what, where attrition concentrates, where the bench is thin, what the appraisal actually drives. Interviews, not a survey tool.
Workforce plan tied to the business plan, a role map with one owner per seat, a competency and pay framework, and a leadership bench plan. Built for your business, not a template.
KRA framework, a review cadence people take seriously, hiring and onboarding standards, and the engagement rhythm that surfaces problems before the resignation does.
We train your HR lead or hiring manager line to run it, help you hire an HR head if you need one, and step back to quarterly check-ins once the system holds on its own.
Working frameworks your team runs every cycle. Nothing here is a one-off report, and nothing depends on us being in the room.
Headcount mapped against the business plan, twelve to twenty-four months out, with the roles to build, the roles to hold, and the cost of each.
A structure where every function has one accountable owner, with job descriptions and reporting lines that match how the work actually flows.
A read on where you’re one person deep, who the credible successors are, and the development path to make the second line real.
Goals that ladder to the business, an appraisal cycle managers can actually run, and a rating scale that means something when increments are decided.
A grade structure and pay ranges so two people doing the same job sit in the same band, and you can defend any number to anyone.
What’s actually driving your best people out, the few changes worth making, and the listening rhythm that catches the next one early.
“We thought we had a salary problem. Apxe showed us we had a structure problem, three people reporting to nobody and a second line that didn’t exist. Fixing that did more for retention than any increment ever had.”Result: Regretted attrition down 40% in three quarters
We can’t fix people structure in a business that hasn’t found its model, and we won’t run an HR department for you indefinitely. These two lists should help you decide.
The five questions every founder or HR head asks before a people engagement. Straight answers below.