The model was never the problem. The org chart was.
Farrell Consulting Group works with private equity sponsors and growth-stage operators on the part of the thesis that gets written last and breaks first: whether the company has the right people, in the right seats, running at the capability the plan assumes.
- Building people functions
- 20+ years
- Revenue scale
- $20M to $1B
- Organizations scaled
- Nine
- Also served as
- Portfolio CEO
Post-acquisition people integration
The diligence told you what you bought. It rarely tells you whether the management team can carry the plan. We come in at or near close, read the organization at the level where work actually happens, and build the people side of the value creation plan against the hold period, not against a calendar year.
- Management capability read, individual by individual
- Org design against the value creation plan
- Retention risk on the people the thesis depends on
- Integration of HR systems, comp structures and policy across entities
- What AI absorbs, and what that does to the hiring plan
- Reporting the board can act on, not a headcount slide
Fractional and interim CHRO
For companies that have outgrown an HR administrator and cannot yet justify a full-time chief people officer, or that need a senior hand in the seat during a transition. Not advice delivered from outside. Someone who builds the function and runs it until the company can run it without me.
- Building the people function from nothing, or rebuilding it
- Multi-state and multi-site compliance
- Compensation architecture and incentive design
- Leadership development and succession depth
- AI measurement design, built before the tools go in
- Board and sponsor reporting
Read
Four to six weeks. Where capability is actually constrained versus where it appears to be, and which managers are the leverage points.
First 100 days
Stabilize retention on the people the thesis depends on. Fix what is broken in comp, structure and reporting before it compounds.
Build
Org design, leadership development and the systems underneath them. Built to be run by the company, not by a consultant on retainer.
Exit readiness
A management team a buyer underwrites without a discount, and documentation that survives diligence.
Everyone is measuring adoption. Almost nobody is measuring what changed.
Portfolio companies are buying AI into recruiting, service, finance and the back office faster than anyone is measuring it. When a sponsor asks what the investment returned, what usually comes back is a usage rate. That is not a return. It is a receipt.
The people layer is where AI shows up in the model first, and it is the layer nobody is modeling.
What it absorbs
Most workforce plans still assume headcount scales with revenue. Increasingly it does not. If AI takes real work out of a function, the hiring plan inside the value creation model is already wrong.
What it actually costs
Tools get bought at the department level and never roll up. The retraining, the workflow rebuild and the management time to run them sit in nobody's budget line.
What it returned
Every deployment gets a measurement design before it goes in, tied to a business outcome the board already tracks rather than to adoption rates or seat counts.
This is not a separate engagement. It runs through both offers above, because the question of what AI changes in a workforce is not an IT question. It is an org design question, and it lands on the people plan first.
Michelle Farrell
Michelle has run a portfolio company, not just advised one. While serving as EVP and Chief Human Resources Officer of E&A Companies, she simultaneously held the chief executive seat at Lyssé New York, one of the firm's portfolio businesses. She has carried a P&L, sat on the operator side of a board conversation, and made the calls that people advice is usually given about from a safe distance.
Across twenty years she has built or rebuilt the people function in several industries: consumer products, commercial construction, apparel, outdoor products, travel, aviation and manufacturing. At E&A she scaled three operating companies in the $20M to $35M range through growth. Most recently she served as Chief Human Resources Officer of a commercial construction group scaling toward $1B in revenue across three offices, where she led the adoption of EOS.
She holds a B.S. from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, an executive management credential from Cornell, and completed Kelley's Leading with AI Strategy program in 2026. The measurement approach above is not theoretical. At her last company she built people analytics that connected engagement results to individual leadership coaching plans, so improvement was visible while it was happening and development spending had an outcome attached to it.
Start with the constraint, not the scope.
The first conversation is short and free. Tell me what the plan assumes about the people, and where you suspect it is wrong.
Or reach me directly at michelle@farrellconsultinggroup.com