Industrial Holding

A Right-Sized HR Operating Model for Current Scale

An industrial holding company whose HR function was administered out of finance by a three-person team.

Synergy Nexus built an HR operating model sized to the company's current scale, surfacing a skills gap before it became a hiring crisis.

Person team replaced by a dedicated HR function

Skills gap identified before it became a hiring crisis

HR administration competing for finance's operational capacity

The Challenge

Payroll, benefits, and hiring were administered by a small finance-adjacent team without dedicated HR expertise, leaving strategic workforce priorities — succession planning, capability gaps, organizational culture — unaddressed by any function. The organization had scaled well beyond this structure's operating capacity, placing increasing strain on finance leadership absorbing HR escalations alongside its core mandate.

Our Approach

Synergy Nexus engineered an HR operating model sized precisely to the company's current scale, making deliberate capability decisions — building workforce planning and performance management in-house while continuing to outsource payroll processing. A single HR generalist role was recruited to anchor the function, calibrating investment directly to what the business could justify at its current stage of growth.

Results

Established a dedicated internal HR function with clear mandate and capability ownership, replacing a structure that had outgrown its purpose

Introduced a foundational workforce planning process that identified a developing field-operations skills gap ahead of its impact on hiring

Positioned the organization's HR capability to scale in step with continued growth, closing a structural governance gap at its source