How busy CEOs & founders use CharlieHR to take care of HR admin overwhelm
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We picture a CEO’s day involving plenty of strategy, meetings, and decision-making. But the reality is that for many small business founders every day is filled with admin tasks that take up time and wear you down.
For busy CEOs and founders, taking care of HR can feel like you’re drowning in admin. And when you’re overwhelmed, it’s almost impossible to find a fix for the problem.
We know how common it is to lose valuable time handling HR admin and worrying about compliance. This guide will help you find a better way to manage HR, with insights from our own customers and our CEO and co-founder, Ben Gately.
Why is it difficult to look after HR as a founder or CEO?
Small business founders and CEOs have so many functions to take care of. You’re overseeing the strategy, finances, marketing, and more. And although you’re responsible for hiring, growth, and culture, it’s hard to find the time and energy to focus.
When there’s no real time to dedicate to the strategic and practical side of HR, things fall through the cracks. It’s easy to make a mistake if you’re not a HR expert, are juggling too many tasks, or not sure what to do.
When we spoke to our customers, they told us their main challenges were:
- Spending time on HR tasks instead of business strategy, product development, and growth
- Trying to handle HR manually, with inefficient and error-prone processes
- Lack of understanding of employment law and best practices
- Trying to keep up to date with legislation changes
- Wanting to handle HR more professionally, but not knowing where to start
These problems are normal in a small business when you’re the one that’s also responsible for HR. Change is possible though, and there are a few ways you can achieve it.
James Chessum, Founder @ Red5 people
“Before Charlie, we were like sitting ducks with HR. I now feel so much more in control of what happens at the company, and it’s all automated.”
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Taking care of HR: Your 4 realistic options
Every business has HR needs, no matter how small you are. You need to handle contracts, onboarding, time off management, and policies — and those are just the basics.
There are realistically four ways you can manage your HR:
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Hire an in-house HR manager
- Outsource to a HR consultant or agency
- Deal with everything yourself
- Use HR software
Let’s take a look at your options and the pros and cons of each.
1. Hire a HR professional
When HR becomes too much to handle, many founders and CEOs automatically jump into hiring an HR expert to join their team. This can be a good move if you’re growing rapidly or you want to delegate all your HR tasks to one team member, but most small businesses don’t need an HR hire at this stage.
Pros
- Delegate HR responsibility to one person
- Easy communication with in-house team
- Useful if you’re growing fast and need more HR capacity
Cons
- Expensive for a small business
- Might not be enough work to fill a full-time role
- Will take time to onboard them to your company and culture
2. Outsource to a consultant or agency
When HR becomes too much to handle, many founders and CEOs automatically jump into hiring an HR expert to join their team. This can be a good move if you’re growing rapidly or you want to delegate all your HR tasks to one team member, but most small businesses don’t need an HR hire at this stage.
Pros
- Access specific HR advice from experts, rather than a generalist
- Benefit from their wider experience
- Good if you want to keep your headcount low and team lean
Cons
- Can be very expensive for a small business
- Working with a larger team can feel impersonal vs. one expert
- May be overwhelming if your HR needs are small
3. Deal with everything yourself
Until you’ve built a larger team, the responsibility for HR falls on you — which is why so many CEOs and founders end up stuck in endless HR admin. This setup can work at the start, but as your team grows it quickly becomes chaotic.
Pros
- Complete control over the way you manage your HR
- May be more affordable than alternatives
- Easy to stick with if it’s become your default
Cons
- Manual HR processes are inefficient and open to error
- Leaves a poor impression on your team members — especially new hires
- Expensive way to manage HR if you consider your hourly rate or salary
Ben Gateley, CEO and co-founder @ CharlieHR
“It can be very tempting to take care of everything yourself, but being a burnt-out founder doesn’t help anyone and ultimately gets in the way of what you’d like to achieve. Be smart about exactly what you want to focus on, so you can contribute as much as possible by investing your energy with purpose.”
4. Use HR software
Dealing with HR manually isn’t sustainable, but you don’t always need to hire someone or seek out an agency. We find that the right HR software can make a huge difference — saving you time and money, compared to managing HR yourself or bringing in an expert.
Pros
- Free up time to focus on strategic decisions
- Simplify the way you manage HR for everyone
- Introduce a more professional experience for employees
Cons
- Costs more than a spreadsheet (but not when you compare against your hourly rate)
- May still need an HR expert (which is where Charlie Advice comes in)
- Might be a learning curve (but not if you choose the right software, like Charlie)
Sticking with what you’ve always done might be the easy route, but there are much more effective ways to manage your HR. Before you search for an agency or HR hire, consider what the right HR software could do for you.
Want to find out what CharlieHR can do?
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3 quick wins that CharlieHR can help you with
There’s a lot you can do with Charlie, but let’s focus on some quick wins. These are the challenges our platform can help you with straight away — giving you time back to think more strategically about not just HR but the business overall.
1. One-click time off management
Email threads to book holidays and confusing calculations to update annual leave are a thing of the past. With Charlie, you set the policies and then time off management happens in the background:
- Self-serve platform for time off requests
- One-click approvals
- Automatic calculations for time off allowances
- Employees can easily see their own leave balances
Managers and employees enjoy a smoother experience, and you can go back to focusing on other things.
2. No more messy spreadsheets
Your HR system might have been held together by spreadsheets until now, but it’s time to say goodbye. Move everything to Charlie for a more simple and secure way to handle data:
- Employees can add and update their own data
- Professional, modern interface
- All your employee data in one place
- Built-in employee directory
- Store data and documents
- Secure and GDPR compliant platform
- Cyber Essentials and ISO27001:2013 certified
You can finally delete those spreadsheets and rest easy knowing that all your employee data is safe and secure within Charlie.
3. Growth without bottlenecks
As the founder or CEO, you want to see the company grow and succeed. What you don’t want is to end up slowing down the onboarding process when it does. Charlie makes it easy for you to streamline the onboarding flow, giving new hires the best first impression:
- Send one invitation and employees can self-serve the rest
- Create checklists and assign tasks to team members
- Get notifications and reminders on task progress
- Stay organised throughout the onboarding process
New hires experience a better introduction to your small business, and you take back some of your time for those high priority tasks.
Why Charlie is the right choice now and in the future
HR software like Charlie helps you save time, become more organised, and take care of compliance without the need for an HR expert — both now and as you scale.
Investing in the right foundation enables growth, prevents delays, and gives you more confidence as your team size increases.
When you first start out, Charlie can help you manage time off, onboarding, and core HR. As you grow, you can also benefit from features like:
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Performance management and reviews — Attract employees and retain existing talent by focusing on career progression
- Employee engagement — Learn what your team wants and monitor employee happiness with polls and surveys
- Employee benefits — Introduce employees to rewards, discounts on brands, and cinema ticket deals with our built-in Perks at Work
Charlie comes with all the HR features you need as you start and grow, but you can also enhance the experience with our add-ons like Charlie Recruit and Charlie Advice. That’s what Ben Wharfe, Chief People Officer at Fiit, did.
Ben Wharfe, Chief People Officer @ Fiit
“With HR Advice, it’s like having an extra member on your team. You have that kind of expertise you can lean on and tap into whenever you need it, without needing to hire someone in the business.”
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Instead of trying to navigate the fast-changing world of UK employment law, Ben instead invested in the support of our expert HR advisors. Our team helped set up HR policies and frameworks to achieve compliance.
Ben Wharfe, Chief People Officer @ Fiit
“Being able to understand what policies you need in place to be legally compliant was vital. Getting those policies off the shelf, revised and reviewed by Charlie, enabled us to free up our headspace and our thinking time to focus on the things that were more strategically important to us — such as our team’s growth and development.”
Build the right foundation for growth
For founders and CEOs, growth is always on the horizon. Every new team member brings you a step closer to your goals, but before they can get there you need to hire and onboard them. Manual processes just won’t cut it any longer.
It’s not just hiring and onboarding that becomes a challenge. The time you spend on HR admin will only increase as your headcount does, taking you further away from your priority work — until you switch to a HR platform that saves you time and improves the employee experience.
You don’t need to wait until you’re bigger. With the right software you can get started straight away. Take Valentina Milanova, CEO & Founder at Daye, for example. As soon as the company grew beyond one person, she invested in Charlie and has stuck with it ever since.
Daye used Charlie to onboard new hires, centralise company policies, manage time off requests, and much more.
Valentina Milanova, CEO & Founder @Daye
“We use all of Charlie’s functions – and we find them very valuable for our business. We can save a lot of valuable time from admin tasks. Our HR team is very happy, and our employees enjoy receiving and providing regular feedback through the platform.”
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There’s so much you can do with Charlie. Book a demo with our sales team and they’ll show you the platform and answer any questions you might have. After that, enjoy a no-commitment free trial and get to know the software yourself. When you’re ready, signing up takes minutes, and you can start adding team members right away.
Build the right HR foundations today
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Written by:
Jenny Tattum
Jenny is a Senior Product Manager at CharlieHR. She has years of experience with product planning and development, and user research too – she put together this guide by collecting data and information on competitors so we could improve our product and tailor it to small business owners.
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FAQs for CEOs and founders
Everything about Charlie is designed to save you time and effort — from the way the platform handles time off management to how easy it is to get started in the first place. Explore some of our most frequently asked questions from users below:
Yes! If you start using HR software from the very first hire, you’ll build a strong foundation and good habits and workflows that’ll make it even easier to increase your headcount as you grow. Investing in software now allows you to onboard new hires with the right processes already in place.
James Gill, CEO at GoSquared
“Charlie’s value increases exponentially. The more people you have, the more you realise you need it. And I think it's much easier to have it there before you add more people to the team.”
Yes! You can add Charlie Recruit to your plan to enjoy both HR and hiring in one, easy-to-use platform. Not only does this make hiring and onboarding easier for your in-house team, but it allows you to create a seamless experience for new team members too.
Yes, absolutely. Charlie was designed to be compliant with UK employment law, with features and settings that make compliance easier for UK small businesses. If you need extra support, our expert team at Charlie Advice can help.
Our customers often tell us that team members love using Charlie to manage HR.
Caitlin Price, Office Manager at Bloom & Wild
“With Charlie, I’m in control of who can see what information. I can decide exactly how much different people can see, which gives me a lot of peace of mind."
For small businesses, yes. You don’t need to hire an in-house HR expert straight away — instead, you can use Charlie to automate your HR admin and take care of the strategy and people-focused work yourself. When the time comes to hire someone, having Charlie in place will make the transition even easier.
Charlie makes it easy for non-experts to handle HR and avoid common mistakes. As the platform is designed with UK employment law compliance in mind, it has all the features, settings, and details you need to confidently manage time off, onboarding, performance, and engagement.
Yes, of course! If your business grows faster than expected, having Charlie in place already makes the whole process easier. Charlie is easy to set up and quick to master, so whether you want to onboard one new hire or twenty at once, you’ll be able to handle it confidently. Charlie works well for teams of all sizes, so you won’t need to switch to another HR software for a while.
One of our customers’ favourite things about Charlie is how quick and easy it is to get started. Book a demo with our sales team and they’ll walk you through everything, explain how our no-commitment free trial works, and how you can sign up in minutes once you know it’s the right software for you.
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