Fractional HR Services for Small and Mid-Sized Businesses

Nimble Advisors — Miami, FL • Serving companies nationwide

New to the model? Start with our complete guide: What Is Fractional HR?

You Probably Don't Need a Full-Time HR Person. You Do Need HR.

Most companies between 10 and 250 employees are stuck in the same gap.

You're too big to keep running HR out of the founder's inbox. Employee questions are landing on your desk. Your handbook is out of date. You're hiring in a second state and nobody's entirely sure what that triggers. Someone needs to be let go and you're not confident you're doing it right.

But you're not big enough to justify a $140,000 HR manager — and honestly, a single mid-level HR hire wouldn't solve half of it anyway. What you need isn't a person to process paperwork. It's someone with judgment.

That's the gap fractional HR fills.

What Fractional HR Actually Includes

Fractional HR isn't a software subscription and it isn't a call center. It's an experienced HR leader embedded in your business on a part-time basis, who builds context over time and can act on it.

At Nimble, that typically covers:

Compliance and risk

Worker classification, wage-and-hour compliance, I-9 and E-Verify, multi-state registration and obligations, handbook and policy development, HR audits. This is the work that's invisible until it isn't. (See our HR Compliance guide for SMBs for the full picture of what this involves.)

Employee relations and the hard conversations

Performance problems. Terminations. Complaints and investigations. Conflict between people who have to keep working together. These are the moments where getting it wrong is expensive and getting it right requires someone who's done it a hundred times before.

Manager development

Most people problems in a growing company are actually manager problems. Your best individual contributor got promoted and nobody taught them how to lead. We build the structures — onboarding for new managers, one-on-one cadences, feedback frameworks, clear performance expectations — that make managing sustainable. (This is also the focus of our Performance Coaching work.)

Hiring and onboarding

Job descriptions that attract the right people. A hiring process that's consistent and defensible. Onboarding that gets someone productive in weeks instead of months.

Performance and retention

Review processes that people don't dread. Compensation structures that hold up as you scale. Understanding why people are actually leaving — before the pattern becomes expensive.

People strategy

Org design. Headcount planning. What the company needs at 50 people that it didn't need at 20. The stuff that's easy to defer and expensive to fix retroactively.

When You've Outgrown DIY HR

You don't need a formal assessment to know. These are the signals:

• The founder has become the default HR contact. Every employee question, complaint, and awkward situation routes to you. That's time not spent on the business.
• You're hiring across state lines. One remote employee in a new state can trigger registration, tax withholding, workers' comp, and a stack of state-specific obligations from day one. (Here's what that actually involves.)
• You've crossed 15 employees. Title VII, the ADA, and the PWFA all attach at 15. Most owners don't notice the day it happens.
• You're approaching 50. FMLA and the ACA employer mandate attach here. So does a meaningful step up in complexity.
• Your handbook predates your last two rounds of hiring.
• You've had turnover you can't explain. People are leaving and you're guessing why.
• You have "contractors" who look a lot like employees. (This is the single most expensive mistake SMBs make.)
• Someone asked you an HR question and you weren't sure. And you Googled it. And the answer was worse than you expected.

If two or more of those are true, you're already paying for the absence of HR — you just haven't been invoiced yet.

What It Costs

Most fractional HR firms won't tell you this until they've got you on a call. We'll just tell you.

Project-based work — an HR audit, a handbook rebuild, a multi-state compliance cleanup, a compensation benchmarking study — is quoted as a flat fee against a defined scope.

Where that sits in the market

We'll be direct: we are not the cheap option, and we're not trying to be.

Fractional HR hourly rates run roughly $75 to $250 an hour. The bottom of that range buys you a generalist. The top of it buys you a senior HR director or CHRO-level practitioner. We're at the top of it, and that's the point.

You are not buying hours. You are buying the judgment that fills them. An HR generalist at $85 an hour will happily spend six hours researching a question that a senior practitioner answers correctly in fifteen minutes — and the cheap answer is the one that's wrong in a way you won't discover for three years.

What you're actually comparing it to

¹ U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, median annual wage for Human Resources Managers.

At the Focused level, you're paying about a third of what a full-time HR manager costs, for someone considerably more senior than you'd be able to hire at that salary.

Fractional HR vs. The Alternatives

vs. a full-time HR hire

A full-time HR manager gives you 40 hours a week of one person's experience. Fractional gives you the experience of someone who has seen the problem you're facing many times before, for the hours you actually need. Below roughly 100 employees, most companies don't have 40 hours a week of HR work that requires a senior person — they have 8 hours a week that require a very senior person, and 32 hours of administration a system can handle.

vs. a PEO

PEOs bundle payroll, benefits, and HR admin, and they co-employ your workforce. That's genuinely useful for some companies — especially if you want to access better benefits pricing. But: your cost rises automatically with every hire, and co-employment means giving up some decision rights over your own people. Fractional HR keeps you in control and prices on scope, not headcount.

vs. AI HR platforms

Software is excellent at documents, workflows, and reminders. It is not good at the parts of HR that carry actual risk — the judgment calls, the conversations, the situations where the "right" answer isn't in any handbook. We use good software. We don't pretend it replaces experience.

vs. project-based HR consulting

Sometimes you don't need an ongoing partner — you need one specific thing fixed. That's fine, and we do that too. See our HR Consulting page for defined-scope engagements.

vs. doing nothing

This is the real competitor, and it's the most expensive one. The cost of no HR shows up as a misclassification claim, a wrongful termination suit, a key employee who left because their manager was never trained, or a founder spending 10 hours a week on people problems instead of growth.

Why Nimble

You get a senior practitioner, not a junior account manager.

Every engagement is led by Alex Santos, Nimble's founder — 20+ years in HR, an M.S. in Instructional Systems and an M.B.A., and a background that includes co-founding a payroll company serving hundreds of small employers. He has seen what it costs to get people decisions wrong, from both sides of the employer relationship.

We start with the business, not the policy.

Most HR consultants open the binder. We open with a question: what is this company actually trying to accomplish, and where are people systems either accelerating that or getting in the way? Compliance is the floor. It is not the point.

We build things that outlast the engagement.

The goal isn't to make you dependent on us. It's to leave you with managers who can manage, systems that scale, and a compliance posture that doesn't keep you up at night.

We know Florida, and we know multi-state.

We're headquartered in Miami with deep familiarity with Florida-specific employment law — and we work with companies across dozens of states, which is where most of the real complexity lives.

We're honest about what we're not.

We're not a PEO. We're not payroll. We're not a $99 software subscription, and we're not the cheapest fractional HR firm you'll find — there are plenty of generalists billing at a third of our rate. If price is your only criterion, hire one of them. We're the firm you call when the decision actually matters and being right the first time is worth more than the invoice.

Who We Work With

Companies roughly 10 to 250 employees. We've built industry-specific practices where the people risk is highest:

• Startups & high-growth tech teams — rapid headcount growth, equity-heavy comp, multi-state from day one
• Professional service firms — accounting, legal, consulting, where people are the product and retention drives revenue
• Healthcare & medical practices — licensure, credentialing, and a compliance burden most SMBs never face
• Hospitality & service-based businesses — high turnover, tipped-wage complexity, and thin margins that punish HR mistakes
• Non-profit organizations — mission-driven teams, lean budgets, and board-level accountability

We also work well with multi-state and remote-first teams navigating obligations in states they've never set foot in, and companies preparing for a raise, sale, or due diligence who need clean files and defensible practices.

If you're under 10 employees, you probably don't need us yet — and we'll tell you that. If you're over 250, you likely need a full-time CHRO, and we'll tell you that too.

How It Works

Frequently Asked Questions

Nimble Advisors • Fractional HR for small and mid-sized businesses • Miami, FL, serving clients nationwide