A senior HR partner, embedded inside your company.
For founders making people decisions they can't afford to make on instinct. Strategic HR and organizational design — not compliance, not payroll, not benefits.
Why founders end up with the wrong HR.
Most companies between ten and a hundred employees end up with one of these:
- An office manager or COO doing HR on the side, because someone has to.
- A junior HR coordinator hired too early, reporting to a founder who doesn't know what to ask of them.
- A payroll or benefits vendor masquerading as an HR partner.
- A generalist HR consultant on a one-time project that ends before the real decisions are made.
- The founder, doing it all on instinct, learning by getting it wrong on senior hires.
None of those is a senior thinking partner.
What founders actually need at this stage is someone who has run senior HR in a complex organization, who knows what bad people decisions cost, and who can sit alongside them when the next $300K hire, restructure, exit conversation, or leadership-team blow-up shows up.
That's what this is.
The two tiers.
Essential Advisory
$6,000
per month
For founders who don't yet need a thinking partner full-time, but who can't afford to keep making senior people decisions on instinct.
What's included
- One full day per month — strategic HR work, on-site or virtual, your call.
- Unlimited email access between sessions for the questions that come up between days.
- One team or leadership assessment per quarter — a data layer on the people decisions you're making.
- A quarterly business review call — a structured look at the people side of the business.
- Strategic HR advisory across hiring strategy, org design, comp philosophy, performance management, and the senior decisions you can't delegate.
Strategic Growth
$10,000
per month
For founders running a company that's actually growing — hiring senior leaders, restructuring teams, navigating the people side of a fundraise or acquisition.
What's included
- Three full days per month — embedded inside the leadership team and the work, not on the sidelines.
- Full embedded advisory access between sessions, with priority response on urgent issues.
- Two team or leadership assessments per quarter — paired with active hiring, restructuring, or leadership work.
- Monthly and quarterly touchpoints with the leadership team, structured to keep momentum on the people side.
- Strategic HR advisory across the same topics as Essential Advisory, with the time and access to actually run the work, not just consult on it.
What this is — and what this isn't.
This is strategic HR and organizational design: hiring strategy, performance management, org structure, comp philosophy, exit conversations, leadership-team dynamics, the people side of a fundraise or acquisition. Senior thinking on the decisions that shape what your company becomes.
This is not compliance work. Not payroll. Not benefits administration. Not running individual employee performance reviews. Not the kind of HR that sits inside a binder labelled "policies."
If what you need is a compliance audit, a payroll switchover, or a benefits broker, BlueChip will tell you that directly and point you toward someone who does that work well. The retainer is built for the people decisions a founder cannot delegate — and stays out of the work a founder shouldn't be paying senior advisory rates for.
Why BlueChip.
A founder making senior people decisions needs a thinking partner who has actually done senior HR — not a general business coach who's read a book about it.
An undergraduate degree in education and a Master's in coaching, for the developmental side of working with founders and senior leaders. Senior HR background — training and development, recruitment, investigations — for the functional work that comes up week to week. Public sector administration experience, for understanding how decisions land inside complex organizations. Twenty-five years in high-stakes competitive environments, for the people decisions founders make under pressure, where the cost of getting it wrong shows up on the bottom line within a quarter.
That cross-domain background matters because the people side of a small-to-mid-sized company is rarely a single-discipline problem. It's hiring, retention, comp, performance, conflict, structure, founder dynamics, and risk — often in the same week, sometimes in the same conversation.
The logistics.
Minimum engagement: six months. Twelve-month engagements are available where the relationship needs that runway to do real work — most senior people projects don't unfold in a single quarter.
Pricing is published. $6,000 per month for Essential Advisory. $10,000 per month for Strategic Growth. No haggling, no per-employee math, no hidden surprises in the proposal.
Tier switching is allowed at the six-month mark. If Essential Advisory is too light or Strategic Growth is more capacity than the company actually uses, the tier can flex at the renewal point.
Travel is a separate line item. BlueChip is based in Edmonton; on-site days outside the Edmonton area include travel, broken out in the proposal.
Not sure where to start?
If you're not sure whether Essential Advisory or Strategic Growth fits, start with a Clarity Call. Thirty minutes. We talk about the people side of your company, the decisions on your desk in the next six months, and which tier matches the actual work — or whether a one-off assessment or governance evaluation is the better entry point.
Or, for a free starter: take the Org Pulse — a 5-minute organizational health audit you can do before booking the call.