Every Client is Different
- Fred Keena
- Aug 19
- 2 min read
I've learned to expect almost nothing to transfer cleanly from one client to the next. Not the tone of a message. Not the level of policy. Not even how much HR a company actually wants from me.
I think that's the biggest thing, recognizing that every single client is drastically different.
Some clients want it all off their plate.
One client, a growth-stage healthcare services company, brought my team in with a simple mandate: take everything HR-related off our hands. There was no easing into it. There wasn't a "let's feel it out and give you things as it goes" period. It was, you tell us we need to take this over now, and you tell us what's next.
That level of trust let us move fast, including recently proposing a shift to more standardized performance reviews after I noticed the process was decentralized and inconsistent. Leadership's response was to ask the managers what they actually need, then build from there. Full autonomy, immediate buy-in, no second-guessing.
Some clients need the basics, and that's fine.
Other clients are nowhere near ready for a full HR playbook, and pushing one on them would be the wrong move. A real estate operations client I work with is squarely focused on one thing: getting new hires onboarded as properties are acquired. No handbook, no policy library, just clean, functional onboarding.
It's not that they're not maturing yet. It's that they need to make sure staff can actually get onboarded. When plans shift last minute, like a closing date moving from a projected Friday to same-day, my job is staying flexible enough to adjust without losing that basic function.
Even how I communicate has to shift.
Perhaps the clearest example: one fast-scaling startup client wants every internal message to feel high-energy. Emojis, exclamation points, momentum. That's not naturally how I write. I'll sometimes run a draft through an AI tool just to add the tone they expect. It's not me, but it's how they message.
Other clients want the opposite. Two sentences, no buildup, nothing extra.
I can't have the same mindset across every client. When you're internal at one organization, you start to merge a little with their culture. You assimilate. I can't do that as a fractional partner working across many companies at once.
Partnership means meeting people where they are.
What separates good HR from bad, in my experience, isn't a specific policy or process. It's recognizing that every client is at a different point in their journey, and adjusting to that instead of applying one standard playbook everywhere.
I try not to just tell people what to do. I'd rather lay out three or four possible options, walk through the pros and cons of each, and figure out together which one actually fits.
