Build the organization your growth plan requires.
Farrell Consulting Group helps private equity sponsors and growth-stage companies assess leadership, integrate teams after acquisition, and build the people infrastructure required to deliver the value creation plan.
- Operating experience
- 20+ years
- Companies served
- $20M–$1B
- Functions built or rebuilt
- Nine
- Operator perspective
- CHRO + CEO
After an acquisition, or before the first hundred days begin
Diligence can describe the organization without proving that the management team can deliver the plan. We identify leadership, structure, and retention risks at or near close, then turn them into a sequenced people plan.
- 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
When growth has outpaced the people function
For a company that needs senior people leadership before it needs a full-time CHRO, or while it searches for one. We build and run the function, strengthen the team, and leave it ready for internal ownership.
- Building the people function, or rebuilding one that has outgrown its design
- 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
Four clear ways to engage.
Each scope has a defined objective, timeline, and decision-ready deliverable. Most relationships begin with the management capability read, then expand only when the findings require it.
Management capability read
A structured read of the leadership team against what the plan actually requires, done person by person rather than through an engagement survey. Where capability is genuinely constrained, where it only appears to be, and which managers are the leverage points.
First hundred days people plan
Retention secured on the people the thesis depends on, and the repairs to comp, structure and reporting that get more expensive every quarter they wait. Built against the value creation plan, not a calendar year.
Fractional and interim CHRO
The people function built and run until the company can run it without me. 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 through a transition.
AI workforce measurement design
Built before the tools go in, or retrofitted onto deployments already running. Every deployment gets tied to an outcome the board already tracks, instead of reporting an adoption rate and calling it a return.
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.
Measure what AI changes, not just who uses it.
We help leadership teams determine where AI changes work, headcount assumptions, skill requirements, and operating costs. Then we connect each deployment to a business outcome the board already tracks.
If AI removes work from a function, the workforce plan and value creation model must change with it.
What it absorbs
Identify the tasks and capacity genuinely changed by each deployment, then update the hiring plan before outdated assumptions compound.
What it actually costs
Capture software, retraining, workflow redesign, and management time so the full investment is visible instead of scattered across departments.
What it returned
Measure cycle time, quality, margin, or another outcome the board already uses. Adoption is an input, not the return.
This capability can stand alone as a short engagement or be built into post-acquisition integration and fractional CHRO work.
Decision-ready people infrastructure.
The work produces decisions leaders can act on: where to strengthen the team, which talent to retain, what to measure, and what infrastructure to build. Client names are withheld because the engagements are confidential.
A chart with a name in every box is not a plan. It is a wish.
Successors identified for every critical role and assessed against the requirements of the target role rather than against their current performance, then placed on a readiness horizon: ready now, ready in one to two years, ready in three to five. Each named successor gets a documented gap and a plan built to close it inside that window. Where no viable internal successor exists, we say so.
A resignation is a lagging indicator.
By the time the letter arrives, the decision was made months earlier. We build pattern analysis that flags flight risk and burnout before either becomes visible, drawing on engagement data, tenure, workload, manager relationships and the sentiment inside open-ended feedback.
In a portfolio company, this is not an HR nicety. It is the difference between planning a succession and reacting to one during a hold period, on somebody else's timing.
An annual review produces a rating. A trend line produces a decision.
Performance data built into trending analytics: how each person and each team moves across review cycles, where ratings cluster in ways that signal leniency or an avoided conversation, which leaders consistently develop people and which ones do not, and how performance correlates with retention, promotion and quality of hire.
Practice that behaves like the real thing.
Every leadership workshop ends the same way. Pair up, one of you be the manager, one be the employee, and perform for the room. Nobody learns anything. The colleague playing the employee is being polite because they have to work with you on Monday.
We replace that with AI role-play where the counterpart responds like an actual employee. It gets defensive. It goes quiet. It says the raise was promised last year. It compares itself to a coworker. A new manager can run the same conversation six times, take a different approach each time, and see what happens when it goes badly, with no peer watching. The same structure applies to interviewing, with feedback on question quality, legal exposure, and how much of the interview the manager spent talking.
Taking a people function from transactional to strategic at $1B scale, in two years.
A privately held company operating across four markets and scaling toward $1 billion in revenue had an HR team built to process transactions, not to inform decisions. The mandate was to build the infrastructure to carry that growth while the business kept running.
- HRIS replacing a small business platform, integrated with the company's ERP payroll system
- Continuous engagement measurement, and a full company survey reaching 83 percent participation
- The company's first formal People and Organizational Health report to its board, followed by an integrated deck combining financial, operational and people data
- 360 assessments across the top forty leaders, aggregated into themes, and a custom executive education curriculum delivered onsite by a top-tier university business school across two cohorts
- A career leveling framework for frontline operations leadership, benchmarked against regional competitors, giving that population a defined path where none existed
Michelle Farrell
Michelle Farrell has advised leadership teams from the CHRO seat and led a portfolio company from the CEO seat. She has carried a P&L, worked on the operator side of board conversations, and made the decisions her clients are facing, not simply advised on them from outside.
Across more than twenty years, she has built or rebuilt people functions in consumer products, construction, apparel, travel, aviation, and manufacturing. She spent 19 years at OSRAM Sylvania, then a $2.5 billion business owned by publicly traded Siemens, building deep experience inside a large, complex global organization. Her later experience spans portfolio businesses from $20 million in revenue to a privately held company scaling toward $1 billion.
Michelle 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. Her approach combines operating judgment, organizational measurement, and the discipline to leave each company with systems its own team can run.
Tell me what is changing.
The first conversation is short and free. Tell me what is changing in the business and where the organization may not be ready.
Or reach me directly at michelle@farrellconsultinggroup.com