How I help founders connect their business plan to a people plan
At the start of this year, I had a strange problem for someone who works in “people”.
I couldn’t clearly explain what I do.
If you’d asked me then, you’d have got a long answer about my background in sport and coaching, years in tech recruitment, scaling a startup from 50 to 350 people across seven global sites, moving into people operations and systems, building manager training programmes…
All true. None of it helped a founder decide why they should work with me or when to call me.
I’d finish my explanation and people would look at me politely and ask:
“So… you do recruitment? HR? Training? What are you actually looking for?”
When the person asking is confused, that’s one thing.
When you are confused about your own positioning, that’s something else.
This is the story of how I moved from that fuzziness to a clearer answer:
I help founders connect their business plan to a people plan:
the right hires, the right people systems, and the right manager habits -
so they can scale without burnout, people debt, or wasted money.
And how that shows up in the way I work today.
Version 1: “people debt” and the limits of a clever phrase
A bit of context.
I’ve always sat at the intersection of performance and people.
Sport and coaching gave me an early obsession with development and habits.
Recruitment taught me how companies actually hire, not how they say they hire.
At Onfido, I saw what happens when a company goes from 50 to 350 people with a matching people strategy.
In consultancy, I co-developed a manager development programme for startup managers – practical, real-world, not corporate training theatre.
So when I went out on my own as a fractional people person, I knew my experience was broad. I could:
design and improve hiring processes
build progression and levels
improve performance and retention
develop managers in early-stage environments
But “I do lots of people things” is not a positioning.
My first attempt was to build around a concept I still believe in: people debt.
Tech founders understand tech debt. Everyone understands financial debt.
People debt is the equivalent in the people space: when your company scales, but your people strategy doesn’t scale with it.
My first line became something like:
“I help founders minimise or pay back people debt.”
People liked the phrase. It got a reaction. Then came the next question:
“OK, interesting… but what is people debt?”
Once I explained it, the idea landed. But it didn’t answer:
What problems do I actually solve?
What services do I offer?
When is the right moment to bring me in?
It was a good concept, but on its own it didn’t help anyone buy.
The October moment: referrals are not a strategy
I’ve been fortunate that most of my work so far has come from referrals.
People who’ve worked with me – as partners, as colleagues, as clients – know how I operate and what I care about. They’ve seen the impact. They’ve been generous in recommending me.
But there was a moment, towards the end of October, that shifted something for me.
I’d just finished a project doing job evaluations, building job descriptions, levels and progression for a client. It had gone well. I sat down and thought:
“What’s next? I’ll take a break… and then hopefully something interesting turns up.”
And that was the problem.
The only work I could see in my future was work I didn’t know about yet – work that might, or might not, arrive via someone else’s inbox.
I had no engine. Nothing I could go and hunt. No clear message my network could use on my behalf.
Around the same time, I joined a new group – Orion Network Extenders – and started having honest conversations with other specialists about two simple questions:
What work do you do?
What work do you love to do?
Answering those out loud forced me to confront something:
My favourite work wasn’t “anything in people and talent”. It was much more specific.
The work I’d happily do on repeat
When I really looked at it, there was one thing I kept coming back to:
Developing startup managers and giving them practical protocols they can use immediately.
I built a programme called Scaling Smart – a manager development programme designed specifically for first-time managers in startup environments.
It brings together everything I’ve done so far:
people operations
recruitment and hiring
performance, feedback and development
real-world habits and rhythms that actually fit scaling teams
Running that programme is the thing I’d happily do on repeat. The feedback is strong, and I enjoy it.
But there was a tension.
If I positioned myself only as “the Scaling Smart manager training person”, it would ignore two other big areas of value:
helping founders make the right hires in the first place
putting in simple, scalable people systems that support performance and retention
Most of my real client work isn’t one neat box. It’s a journey.
One anonymised example:
A founder came to me for help hiring a senior commercial role.
We scoped the role properly, partnered with a specialist recruiter, and filled not just that role but several others.
Through that work, deeper issues surfaced: performance expectations, progression, messy internal communication, and a grievance case.
We worked through those together, put basic systems in place and began talking about manager development and the founder’s own habits.
By the end of a couple of quarters, they had:
four key hires in place
a resolved grievance rather than a festering problem
clearer performance and communication rhythms
a founder who had stopped trying to personally solve every people issue and was no longer quietly burning out
And, just as importantly for me, we’d built a relationship where the founder felt comfortable calling to sense-check decisions and stay grounded.
That experience – and others like it – helped me see the pattern in my work far more clearly.
Version 2: connecting the business plan to a people plan
Across different clients and projects, the same thing kept happening:
A founder had a clear business plan and product roadmap.
Their people plan was largely hope, heroics and improvisation.
I realised that the entry points into my work were usually one of three:
Hiring – a critical role that needs to be defined, scoped and filled properly (often via trusted recruitment partners, not me doing hands-on sourcing).
People systems – basic foundations for performance, progression, communication and expectations.
Manager habits – helping first-time and stretched managers build the habits that make a scaling organisation work, so everything doesn’t bottleneck at the founder.
So instead of trying to list every possible thing I could do, I started framing my work much more simply:
I help founders connect their business plan to a people plan:
the right hires, the right people systems, and the right manager habits –
so they can scale without burnout, people debt, or wasted money.
That line won’t be the final version forever. Positioning is always a work in progress.
But it’s clear enough that:
I know what I’m optimising for
founders can roughly see where I fit
and people in my network can finally introduce me without needing a five-minute explanation
A more honest view of where my work comes from
Part of this journey has been accepting something simple but important:
A complete stranger is unlikely to see one LinkedIn post from me and immediately decide, “I must work with this person.”
Most of the founders I can help are one, two or three degrees away from me:
a friend of a friend
a former colleague
a founder I’ve worked with before who moves to a new company
The question then becomes:
How can I make it easier for people who already trust me to introduce me to the right founders, with the right words?
Changing my LinkedIn headline and About section, building a new website, and defining clear offers are not “marketing exercises” in isolation.
They’re tools to help my existing network say, with confidence:
“Here’s who ZeShaan is. Here’s what he does. Here’s when you should talk to him.”
In a market where permanent roles are no longer guaranteed security and where founders are understandably cautious, I don’t think the answer is louder promises.
For me, it’s been about clearer positioning, honest conversations, and being very specific about where I can create value.
How I work with founders now
If you strip away the detail, my work with founders usually follows a shared pattern:
We start with what you’re actually feeling.
It might sound like: “I’m burning out”, “We’ve made some mis-hires”, “Managers are struggling”, or “Things feel messy internally.”We diagnose symptoms together.
I’ll ask questions, listen, and reflect back what I’m seeing. I’ll often share a perspective, not a verdict: “Do you want to hear what I think might be happening and why?”We agree practical next steps.
That might be a focused hiring sprint, a people foundations audit and roadmap, or a manager development programme. Always grounded in your context and constraints.We avoid building dependency.
Wherever possible, I’ll encourage you to implement changes as part of your existing rhythms, or delegate internally – with my support. If I do more “doing” at the start, we’ll agree on a plan to make myself redundant over time.We keep an eye on burnout and bottlenecks.
A lot of founders assume, “I’ll just fix that.” Sometimes that’s useful. Often it’s a sign that something in the system needs attention. My job is to help you see which is which.
The work is practical, sometimes messy, and always collaborative.
If you’re a founder (or you know one)
If you’ve read this far, you might be:
a founder who’s scaled product and revenue faster than your people strategy
an operator or advisor who keeps hearing the same people problems from founders
someone in my network who’s worked with me before and wanted a clearer way to explain what I do
Here’s the simplest way to think about it:
If a founder has a business plan but no real people plan – that’s where I come in.
We can start small: a hiring decision, a people foundations review, or a conversation about what your managers are facing.
If that’s you (or someone you know), I’m always happy to sense-check what you’re seeing and share how I’d approach it – no hard sell. Book a free clinic here.