Forty to four hundred people, and a founder still in the building.

The size band, and why it is narrow

Below about forty people, there is no system to fix. There are four relationships and one of them is difficult, and the founder already knows which. Our engagements would be a way of paying somebody to say it out loud. We will tell you this on the first call and it takes about fifteen minutes.

Above four hundred, you need a people function with permanent muscle, not a two-person studio arriving for eight weeks. At that scale our work would be absorbed by an existing HR organisation and diluted by it. The right answer is usually to hire a serious head of people and let them build, and we are happy to help write that job description without invoicing for it.

In the band between, decisions still travel fast enough that a change made in October is visible in January. That is the only window in which our kind of work is honest about its effect.

Where our clients are

We work across Pune and the corridor around it, on site, which means geography genuinely matters. IT services and product firms in Baner, Balewadi and Hinjewadi Phase 1 and 2. Product and captive teams in Kharadi and Magarpatta. Design, media and D2C companies around Koregaon Park and Kalyani Nagar. Engineering and auto-component groups in Chakan, Talegaon and Bhosari, where a good part of the work happens in Marathi, the standing orders on the noticeboard carry more weight than any framework, and the person who most needs manager craft is a shift supervisor with nineteen years of service and no formal training.

We take work in Mumbai and Bengaluru occasionally, when a client can commit to blocks rather than scattered days. We do not take work we would have to run entirely over video.

The conditions we ask for

• A founder or CEO in the room. Not a sponsor who joins the last review. Culture work delegated entirely to HR arrives dead, because everything we recommend eventually requires somebody to change what they reward.
• Permission to talk to leavers. If we cannot call people who resigned in the last six months, we are working with a censored sample and the diagnostic is worth much less.
• Access to the last two appraisal cycles in full. Including the overturns and the disputes. Especially those.
• Willingness to name people. Our findings have names in them. A leadership team that requires everything be phrased as a systems issue is asking for a document, not a change.
• One point of decision. A committee of six that must agree before anything moves will consume the entire engagement in scheduling.

If we cannot help, we will say so in the first conversation and tell you who to call instead.

Who we say no to

Companies where the brief is to produce evidence for a decision already taken — a restructure, a termination, a rating that needs justifying. Boards who want quarterly culture reporting as a governance artefact. Firms wanting a values statement before a Series B diligence process, which is a communications job and there are people in Pune who do it well. Organisations where a co-founder conflict is the real subject; we will find it in week two and we cannot fix it, so it is fairer to decline in week zero. And any client who wants a fixed headcount of consultants on site, because we do not have a bench and building one would change what we are.

What clients say the work felt like

Two things come back consistently in the ninety-day check. The first is that the diagnostic was uncomfortable in week three, when the interviews had happened and nothing had been said yet. The second is that the useful artefact turned out not to be the memo but the two paragraphs of rating governance, which several clients have kept unchanged through three cycles and two rounds of hiring. We will take that.