Prepared for Krystina Roman

Monday starts built.

You have already seen the dashboard working. Here is the whole of it, what each piece costs, and the order it gets made in.

Four pieces, and each one is finished before the next begins.

The brand: $1,500
The website, five pages: $1,000
The dashboard, five screens: $3,500
The portals your clients sign into: $2,500

Together

$8,500

Paid in three parts, each one due when the thing it pays for is in your hands.

First

The brand everything else is built on.

Your site and your dashboard both inherit this, so it gets settled before either one is made. You approve it before anything is built on top of it.

$1,500

The wordmark: Your name set as type, with the spacing, weight and rule worked out, and the files in every format a printer or a sign shop will ask you for.
Colour: A working palette rather than a mood board. Six colours with the hex codes and a note on where each one belongs.
Typography: A display face and a body face that hold up in a contract, an email and a handbook, sized large enough to read comfortably.
Imagery: What your photographs should look like and what they should never look like, so anything you add later still looks like you.
Voice: How you sound in writing, with the phrases you use and the ones you avoid, drawn from how you already talk about this work.
The guide itself: One document holding all of it, that prints clean and that you hand to any designer, printer or assistant you ever work with.

The mark is a wordmark, your name set as type and worked out properly. If you decide later that you want a drawn emblem alongside it, that is its own conversation and I will point you at someone who draws.

Second

Five pages on the new brand.

$1,000

Home: The first thing a business owner sees, on your brand, saying what you do and who you do it for.
About: Your story and your credentials, built around you. HR is bought on trust, and right now the site does not name a single credential.
Services: All five of them, open enrollment included, which the current site only mentions inside the form.
The Root Cause: Your blog carries over with its posts intact, so nothing you have published loses its place in search.
Let's talk: The intake form comes across still asking budget and start date, so a lead arrives already qualified.

Third

Five screens, and your clients are in all of them.

Every screen you clicked through becomes yours, running on your own roster instead of sample companies. Open it again whenever you want, because it stays up.

Where you start every Monday

The Week

Monday opens already built and confirmed. One page, printable, sized so it copies into your planner in about three minutes.

Thresholds

Which client is about to cross a headcount line nobody warned them about. Fifteen, twenty, fifty, one hundred.

The Advice Log

What you recommended, the day you recommended it, and whether they acted on it. Dated and yours.

Money

Hours in, billable out, invoiced, owed, and an export your bookkeeper can open without asking you anything.

Mine

The quiet list that has nothing to do with clients, so the things that are yours stop falling to the bottom.

Fourth

Your clients get a portal nobody else offers them.

The other side of the same system, on your brand. Your client signs in and sees their own business, which is the part of working with you that no other HR consultant in town can hand them.

Where they stand

Their headcount against the next line that changes their obligations, so nobody crosses fifty without knowing what fifty means.

What is due

The I-9s, the new hire filings and the enrollment windows that belong to them, with the day they are due on.

What you told them

Your recommendations, dated, with whether it is done. The same log you keep, from their side of it.

Their handbook

The version they are on, who has signed it, and who still has not.

$2,500

Builds the client side, brands it as yours, and opens your first accounts. What you charge for it, or whether you fold it into what you already charge, is entirely yours to decide.

You run a real week on it before anyone calls it finished.

Six steps, in this order, and nothing starts before the one above it is signed off.

Phase One

The brand comes first

Everything after this is built on it, so it gets settled before a single page or screen is made. You approve the wordmark, the colours and the type before anything else starts.

Phase Two

The website goes up

Five pages on the new brand, your blog carried across with its posts intact, and the intake form still qualifying a lead before it reaches you.

Phase Three

Your clients go in

Your roster, your retainers, your states and entities, your real deadlines. The demo runs on invented companies. This is where it stops being a sample.

Phase Four

The engine gets wired

Headcount thresholds, new hire clocks, eligibility dates and handbook versions all start calculating off your actual data instead of standing still.

Phase Five

You run a real week on it

You use it for a week while it is still easy to change. What you hit in that week is what gets adjusted, so nothing ships that you have not actually run.

Phase Six

Your clients get their own way in

Their portals open on your brand. From there the hosting, the backups and the threshold updates as the law moves are mine to watch, so what stays on your plate is the client work.

You never pay ahead of something being delivered.

$2,500: To start, covering the brand and the site
$3,500: When your dashboard goes live
$2,500: When your clients' portals open

Someone watches it so you never have to think about it.

Care plan

$450 a month

Month to month, with no contract to sign.

Covers your site, your dashboard and up to ten of your clients' portals. Past that it is $650 a month up to twenty-five, so signing a new client never costs you anything extra.
Hosting, backups, security patching and uptime, watched rather than waited on.
Employment law thresholds reviewed and updated when the rules move.
Small changes as you need them: a new client, an adjusted threshold, a field you wish existed.
You send a message and a person who built it answers.

The two things it will not do.

It will not do your books

I am not an accountant and this is not accounting software. It takes you from hours to billable to invoiced to owed, and it hands your bookkeeper a clean file. The dreaded part becomes twenty minutes.

It will not give legal advice

It tracks the dates and the thresholds and tells you what is coming. The judgment on any of it stays yours, because you are the one qualified to make it.

Whenever you want it

Learn to build your own.

Two hours, one on one, and you leave each session with something running in your business that was not there that morning.

Sessions never expire and reschedule on a day's notice, so a week that gets eaten by a client fire costs you nothing. It sits outside the build above and starts whenever you want it.

$250 a session

Down to $205 on a bundle, and a free fifteen-minute call comes first.

Everything here belongs to you.

The software is yours: The code, the accounts and the domain are in your name from the day it launches. Nothing about it depends on you staying with me.
The brand is yours: The wordmark, the files and the guide belong to you outright, with no licence and nothing to renew.
The records are yours: Your clients' employee data sits in your own database, under your own account. No other business shares it, and no one else's clients are in there with yours.
The care plan is month to month: Stop it whenever you want and everything keeps running. I hand over every account and walk you through it, at no charge.
The money: Three payments, each one due when the thing it pays for is in your hands. Nothing is owed today.

What running this yourself would involve

All of it is doable on your own. Here is the honest shape of it.

What you would pay

Hosting, about $20 a month once it has real users on it.
Database and backups, free to start and about $25 a month at your size.
Your domain, roughly $20 a year, which you pay either way.

What you would need to know

How to model client, employee, document and signature so the thresholds can actually calculate.
How to lock one client's employee records away from every other client's, which is the part that matters most here.
How to keep the federal and state thresholds current as the rules change.
How to restore the whole thing from a backup on the day you need to.

If you ever want to take it over, I hand you every account and walk you through all of it, free.

Say go and the brand starts this month.

Nothing is owed until you decide. When you are ready I will send the agreement and the first invoice, and we start with your name.

Kate Parker, She Thrives Software Consulting