Most of what I know, I learned building from nothing.
For a lot of my career I've built HR functions that didn't exist yet.
No handbook to inherit. No HRIS. No precedent for how things were done, because nothing had been done yet. Just a growing company, a lot of people whose working lives depended on those decisions being made well, and me figuring out what should happen next.
It's the best training I could have had, and it left me with a bias I've never lost: I don't trust a system unless a busy manager will actually use it on a bad Tuesday. A polished framework sitting in a folder nobody opens is worse than nothing — it gives you the feeling of structure without any of the protection.
So I build things people use. Performance systems, KPI frameworks, policies and the SOPs underneath them — and then I sit with the managers who have to run them until I'm confident they will.
Twenty-odd years in now. The most recent stretch leading the function — as a Chief People Officer, then a Chief Human Resources Officer, in financial technology and commercial real estate. Before that, HR roles in manufacturing and in communications, which is where I learned how the work actually lands on people.
These days I'm in Allen, working with employers around Dallas–Fort Worth. Usually companies somewhere between fifteen and a hundred people — big enough that informal HR has started to creak, not big enough to justify a full-time HR director.
I'm especially glad when the work is with owner-led and family-run businesses, including immigrant-founded ones. In those companies the people decisions and the family decisions are often the same decision, and they deserve more care than a template can give them.