Growing a business means building two things at once: what you sell, and the company that delivers it.
I help founders and leadership teams with the second — how people are managed, how performance works, how new starters get up to speed and the systems that hold it all together as you grow.
Your managers keep bringing decisions back to you.
You’re not sure whether they need more support, clearer ownership or simply more context to make the call themselves.
Performance issues are coming up later than they should.
You have reviews and 1:1s, but the important conversations still aren’t happening early enough.
Good hires are taking too long to get going.
Onboarding exists, but managers are spending too much time coordinating it and new starters aren’t becoming effective quickly enough.
You’ve got the systems, but the chasing hasn’t stopped.
There are processes and tools in place, but people are still following up, duplicating work and finding their own workarounds.
Don’t add an HR process until you know what problem you’re solving.
Take managers bringing decisions back to you. It might be a confidence or capability problem. But it could just as easily be that nobody has made it clear what they can decide, they don’t have enough context to make the call, or they’ve learnt that their decisions will be overridden anyway.
I’d rather work out what’s actually happening before deciding what needs fixing.
01
See what’s happening
02
Find the cause
03
Remove what’s unnecessary
04
Build what’s needed
05
Put it into use
Where do you want to start?
You don’t need to know which HR service you need. Start with what you already know.
Something isn’t working, but I’m not really sure why.
You can see the symptom, but you’re not sure what’s sitting behind it.
“The candidate experience has been really smooth too, which matters a lot when you're competing for great people. We've made two strong hires recently and the process felt effortless on our side.”
Seed-stage founder · Recruitment support project
“Abigail has produced work of very high quality and already been a steady hand for me and the leadership team through these dynamic stages of our being acquired.”
Series B founder retained support
THE DESIGN STANDARD
Designed deliberately. Used naturally.
If something only lives in a document, or only comes out when something goes wrong, it hasn’t really done its job.
The things we build should become part of how work actually happens.
MEET ABIGAIL
Hello, I’m Abigail.
I’ve spent my career inside growing businesses, from hands-on People Operations through to People Partner and People Lead roles. I’ve worked across performance, progression, manager support, onboarding and the systems behind all of it.
The bit I’ve always loved most is getting under the skin of how a business actually works. What are managers finding difficult? Where are people getting stuck? What’s taking far more effort than it should?
That’s why I started Aster. I wanted to do more of that work: getting into the detail with businesses and building practical things that make a difference beyond the day they’re introduced.
DESIGNED DELIBERATELY.
