Fractional CHRO, HR architecture and AI-native People Ops builds for PE-backed, growth-stage and Fortune 500 organizations. Led by a 3x CHRO with a law degree and a working AI engineering practice: the rare operator who ships both the talent strategy and the systems that run it.
Including Fortune 500 HR operating model work, PE-backed portco transformations, AI model training programs and trusted advisory for CPOs facing AI-era talent shocks.
Between AI reshaping every job in the building, PE timelines compressing, multi-geography hiring and quiet attrition hiding in plain sight: the legacy HR playbook has quietly become a liability. The companies that already figured this out are compounding. The ones that haven't are watching their best people leave to join them.
HRTS exists for operators who refuse to let that happen: CEOs, Boards, PE operating partners, founders and CPOs who need the thinking, the execution and the tooling in one trusted pair of hands.
And the replacement pipeline is a LinkedIn search. No succession map. No internal mobility strategy. No idea what the counter-offer ceiling looks like.
The broker sent a deck, leadership signed it and nobody modeled the three-year cost curve against retention data you didn't know you had.
Every function is piloting its own tools. No policy, no security review, no skills map, no training budget. Legal is nervous. The Board is asking.
Org charts are out of date, comp philosophy is verbal, HRIS is a mess of spreadsheets, and the exit narrative requires "scalable people infrastructure." You have one quarter.
The pulse survey says "fine." The 1:1 notes say otherwise. Middle managers are burned out, rewriting their own JDs, and the CEO is the last to know.
You don't need a full-time CHRO yet. You need a senior operator who has done this three times, can hold the seat, build the muscle and hand it off clean.
Most firms send you a deck and a 26-year-old. HRTS sends you the partner who built the strategy, coached the leaders, designed the tech stack and wrote the policy. Senior work, senior hands, senior accountability.
Hold the seat, build the muscle, hand it off clean. For growth-stage companies and PE portcos where a full-time CHRO is 12 months away but the decisions can't wait.
Targeted 60 to 120 day interventions that rebuild one part of the People function end-to-end. Scoped, priced and delivered against a fixed outcome.
What most firms are selling as "AI readiness" is a slideshow. HRTS designs, builds and rolls out the real thing: policy, skills, tooling and measurable output gains: for everyone from the CEO to the contact center rep.
CEO, CPO and C-suite one-on-one work. 2,300+ executives coached. Specialized in the transitions that matter: first-time CEO, first-time CHRO, post-funding, post-acquisition, post-AI shock.
HRTS runs a sister practice: Portfolio Leverage Company. A portfolio of seven AI-native products built, trained and deployed in production, spanning HR, talent, career architecture, fundraising, diligence and executive coaching.
This is the moat: when we advise you on AI in HR, the advice is written by someone who architected, coded and shipped the tooling himself. Trained by Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI to improve their own AI models. No abstraction. No outsourced "AI capability." Ask us to build you a custom People Ops agent and it'll be live under your domain in 6 weeks.
The AI HR chatbot for 50 to 500 person companies. Policy triage, manager coaching, compliance guardrails and ticket classification: priced where SMBs can actually deploy it.
Executive coaching companion for first-time CEOs and CPOs. Claude-powered, trained on 2,300+ coaching engagements.
AI career vulnerability assessment. Used in corporate AI upskilling programs: measures where every employee is actually exposed.
AI-native PE/VC due diligence: risk scoring on target companies, executive team audits, deal memo drafting in minutes.
Transforms a book or internal IP library into an AI-powered academy. Deployed for thought leaders and L&D departments.
AI-native donor CRM. Email drafting, prospect research, moves management: $12M/5-year pipeline active in production.
Primary research on the 56% income divide between AI-leveraged and AI-displaced professionals. Book, report, speaking engagements.
Three named engagements, three distinct problem shapes. Each shows the HRTS model in action: senior operator, deep HR fluency, full-stack execution. Full detail and a fourth flagship AI product build on the case studies page.
HealthFlex had grown from a family business into a 200-staff, 300-clinician home-health operation with an HR function that was two people and two years of combined experience. Leadership was overextended. Onboarding was piecemeal. Performance reviews happened once a year. The CEO and COO had no time for strategic work.
HRTS ran its full SDMI process (Strategy, Design, Motivation, Implementation): executive coaching for the CEO and COO, a from-scratch Employee Handbook, a 100-day executive onboarding program, a complete job-architecture rebuild (descriptions, benchmarks, career pathways, promotion guidelines, HRIS configuration), Airtable-powered project management for HR and operations, a monthly internal newsletter and a business succession plan.
The US arm of the French cookie brand (95% owned by Danone, $55M revenue) needed the CEO out of the weekly ops grind. HRTS rebuilt the benefits stack and payroll infrastructure through a Justworks partnership: upgrading health, dental, vision, 401(k), LTD/STD and life insurance while cutting the health-insurance renewal bill 18%.
Result: $100K+ saved on the annual health insurance renewal, 10+ hours of CEO calendar time recovered every week, 500+ hours annually back in the CEO's week (estimated $75K in manpower value), $175K+ in total documented savings.
Elite Healthcare needed to build the HR function from the ground up, streamline recruiting, improve retention, create career pathways and salary bands and fix an employer brand showing up as a 2.7 Glassdoor rating.
HRTS stepped in as interim CHRO and led a 12-month HR Digital Transformation consolidating HR, recruiting, benefits and payroll into one coherent operating system, alongside Leadership Development programs and team communication workshops. Internal communications and physical workspace were improved in parallel to reinforce the employer-brand reset.
Case metrics drawn from named client engagements. Additional references available on request under NDA.
See all case studies, including AI HR Pilot build
Yuri is the operator most HR consultants pretend to be. He's held the CHRO seat three times at real operating companies. He's advised Fortune 500 boards, PE operating partners, Series A-to-exit founders and global L&D functions across four continents. He holds a JD from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (class of 2009) and a BA in Anthropology and Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania.
Then he learned to code, and that's where the moat opens up. Over the last 24 months Yuri has shipped seven AI-native products to production, been hired by Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI to train their next generation of AI models, and written a book on the AI Wage Gap. That combination: CHRO authority, legal rigor and working AI fluency, is what lets HRTS do in a single engagement what most firms spread across three vendors and two budget cycles.
Yuri is Top 5 Global HR Thought Leader on Thinkers360, a sought-after speaker on AI and the future of work, and a career architect for 2,300+ senior executives. Most work is remote, with occasional travel within the US and internationally as engagements require.
HRTS engagements are scoped to a specific outcome, sequenced so you see value early, and structured so the work transfers cleanly to your team when we're done.
A structured two-week diagnostic: interviews with your C-suite and key managers, audit of HRIS / ATS / comp / performance data, review of current AI posture, and a written findings document with the specific leverage points and a proposed scope of work. Fixed fee, transparent, no slide theater.
You get a written engagement architecture: objectives, milestones, decision rights, executive sponsor model, escalation path, reporting cadence and a week-by-week plan through the first 90 days. Scope is locked in writing. Change orders are named and priced.
The engagement runs alongside your existing People function, not on top of it. We build in public with your leaders, document every decision, install the frameworks as living documents, deploy the AI tooling under your domain and transfer the skill.
The engagement ends with a written transition doc, a trained internal owner and a 90-day post-engagement support window. Many clients keep HRTS on a lightweight monthly retainer for board-prep, crisis HR and AI-era pivots.
Monthly strategic counsel for CEOs, Boards and PE operating partners. Standing seat at your people table without the FTE cost.
From $9K / mo · 6 mo minimumFractional CHRO, HR Transformation Sprint or AI Enablement program. Scoped outcome, fixed timeline, senior hands on the work.
$85K–$220K · 60–360 daysLeadership offsites, board retreats, annual kickoffs, industry keynotes on AI, HR and the future of work.
From $15K / engagementIf you don't find it here, the discovery call is where the real questions land anyway.
Three ideal-client shapes: PE-backed portfolio companies (50 to 2,000 employees) facing diligence, rapid growth or AI-era workforce shifts; Fortune 500 HR functions running transformation inside a specific business unit or region; and venture-backed growth-stage SaaS companies that need senior HR leadership before the full-time CHRO hire. Occasional engagements with mission-driven nonprofits and high-growth professional services firms.
Three things. First, the work is done by a senior operator: no pyramid, no junior intermediaries, no "we'll staff a team." Second, the AI fluency is real: HRTS ships production AI products and trains frontier models, which means the advice is calibrated to what actually works in 2026 rather than what sold well in 2022. Third, there's a JD in every engagement: employment law, risk and compliance don't get punted to outside counsel at the worst possible moment.
Both. The AI Enablement practice can either (a) stand up one of HRTS's existing production products (AI HR Pilot, Career Beast Mode, Commander in Chief AI) under your domain, or (b) design and build custom AI-native People Ops tooling from scratch. We've shipped seven production AI products in the last 24 months. We're not outsourcing the build.
Diagnostic engagements run $18K to $28K over ~2 weeks and are credited against any follow-on work. Full engagements typically land between $85K and $220K depending on scope: Fractional CHRO starts around $18K per month, AI Enablement programs run $114K to $180K over six to nine months, and HR Transformation Sprints are fixed-fee against a defined outcome. Board/CEO Advisory retainers start at $9K per month.
HRTS holds intentionally limited capacity: typically 3 to 4 concurrent engagements and a small number of advisory retainers. Diagnostic work can usually begin within 2 to 3 weeks of signed SOW. Full engagements start the month after diagnostic. Crisis HR (sudden attrition, executive departure, investigation) can be accommodated faster when needed.
Most work is remote, with occasional travel within the US and internationally possible, depending on the nature of the engagement agreed to with the client. Travel cadence and any onsites are scoped and priced into the engagement up front, no surprise travel invoices.
Every engagement ends with a written transition document, a trained internal owner and a 90-day post-engagement support window. The frameworks we build are installed as living documents inside your systems of record, not PDFs in a SharePoint folder. Many clients keep HRTS on a lightweight monthly retainer for ongoing counsel after full engagement wraps.
HRTS is not the right fit for everyone, and we keep the client roster intentionally small. If your organization is navigating an AI-era talent shock, a diligence cycle, a PE portco mandate or a full CHRO-seat transition: this is exactly the conversation we should have.