Late last year we made a strategic pivot at Focus HR.
Not because the business wasn’t working. But because it was.
In many ways, we had (and still have) a great little consulting business. We were working with good clients, doing meaningful work, and helping solve real problems every day. Our team was engaged, client feedback was strong, and demand for our services continued to grow.
Objectively speaking, things were going well. And yet something wasn’t sitting quite right.
Much of the work we were doing involved helping businesses navigate difficult people situations, like performance issues, misconduct, complaints, terminations and compliance questions. These are real problems that leaders need help with, and we’re proud of the way we support clients through them.
But over time we started to notice a pattern. Most of the work we were doing was treating the symptoms of deeper organisational issues.
We would help resolve the immediate situation, the difficult employee, the complaint, the conflict, but the underlying systems that created those problems often remained untouched and unchanged.
In many cases, it felt like the HR equivalent of putting a band-aid on something that needed surgery.
And that created a tension for us.
Our moonshot goal is to have a positive impact on the working lives of 100,000 people. That kind of ambition can’t be achieved by simply resolving individual HR issues one at a time. If we are serious about that goal, we need to do more than help businesses manage problems. We need to help them build better workplaces in the first place.
When we stepped back and looked at the work we were doing, it became clear that our work fell into two distinct categories.
First, the reactive work: the moments when a leader calls because something has gone wrong in their workplace and they need practical advice quickly. This is often why our phone rings.
Second, the deeper, proactive work of helping businesses build better people systems, stronger leadership capability and healthier workplace cultures.
That insight led us to a simple, but not simplistic, strategy. In 2026, we are focusing the business on two core plays:
1. Our Workplace Support Hub: a dedicated team providing high-quality HR and IR support when businesses face difficult people issues. Rather than treating this work as background activity, we are investing heavily in it and bringing it front and centre.
2. Our Workplace of Choice work: working with businesses to build and implement best-in-class people systems. This includes the leadership, culture and structures that allow a business to scale while remaining a great place to work.
The aim is not to remain involved forever. Our goal is to help businesses build the right foundations and then hand the systems over to an internal HR champion or leadership team to manage.
In simple terms, we help build the machine and then hand over the keys.
Strategy often sounds like grand visions and bold ambitions. In reality, it’s usually about something much simpler: deciding what not to do.
Right now, this shift feels a little chaotic. We’re bringing new senior people into the business, building out the hub team, and narrowing our focus to the work that will create the greatest long-term impact (stay tuned for some exciting new team member introductions very soon).
That’s the nature of real strategic change. It rarely feels neat in the moment, but the clarity has been energising.
For the first time in a while, it feels like every piece of work we are doing is moving us in the right direction.
And that’s ultimately what good strategy should do, not make the work easier, but make the path forward clearer.