About
Hire. Fire. Inspire.
Three things every manager has to do, and nobody gets taught properly how to do it.
HFI Consulting works with small and medium businesses across WA that don't have an HR department to ring. Usually that starts with a conversation somebody has been putting off for months, and it ends with them knowing how to have the next one on their own.
What we
believe.
Most workplace problems are communication problems wearing a policy costume. By the time something looks like an HR crisis, it's usually a conversation that didn't happen months earlier.
Leadership is learned, not switched on. Nobody is born knowing how to tell someone their performance isn't good enough. You get better by doing it, badly at first, with someone in your corner.
Meet people in the middle before you force anything on them. Understanding earns cooperation. Policy on its own doesn't.
Nobody should end up in the too-hard basket. It isn't a business's job to fill someone's whole cup. It is the job to not let a person become the file nobody opens.
Nobody should trade their years and their health to prove loyalty to a system. Work matters. It isn't supposed to swallow a person whole.
What that means for you
You'll get told the sharp true thing, not the safe vague thing. Including when the thing that needs fixing is how you're handling it. If you're not up for that, we're not a fit, and that's genuinely fine.
We lead with the conversation, not the compliance checklist. Legal protection matters. It's the seatbelt, not the destination.
We move at whatever speed the problem needs. Some things need quick thinking on the day. Others need slowing right down and building a proper plan.
We work best with people who want to be part of the fix, not just receive one. If you want the problem taken away and never mentioned again, there are consultants who'll do that. We'd rather you didn't need us next time.
What we stand against
We won't let a real problem sit in the too-hard basket because it's easier to ignore than face.
We won't reach for the legal letter as a first move when a phone call would do.
We won't do the fluff: the politics, the gossip, the time people burn avoiding the honest thing.
We won't treat someone having a hard time as a he-said-she-said file.
And we won't pretend that policy-first leadership is the same thing as good leadership. It isn't. It's usually just fear, dressed up in process.
Meet the person behind it
Hi, I'm Rysha Masters, and HFI started with me.
I've spent my career running HR at senior level in transport, which is about as hard as people management gets. High turnover, blue collar, awards, terminations, acquisitions, and a lot of conversations nobody wants to have. I've also managed a team of my own, so I've had to take my own advice more than once. Some of those went well. A few of them taught me more than the ones that did.
But this didn't start as a business plan.
It started with watching my mum work night shifts in her 50s, navigate hospital politics and small-town gossip, and slowly burn out under a system that never once asked if she was okay, until she decided to become, in her own words, the keeper of her own happiness.
And it started with a kid who wasn't great at school. I got sent to the naughty corner a lot. So instead of sulking, I sat there and learned the one thing nobody was grading me on: how to read a room, find common ground, and get people talking honestly.
That turned out to be rare. And it turned out to be the whole job.
A manager who wants to send the legal letter first isn't protecting the business. They're avoiding a conversation that scares them. A leader who defaults to process over people isn't being professional. They're being a coward, even if nobody would ever say that out loud.
I'd rather have the conversation. Not because it's always easier. Sometimes it's messy anyway. But meeting someone honestly, in the middle, before forcing anything on them, is the only way to do this work and still sleep at night.
Where we're going
HFI is deliberately small right now, and that's a choice rather than an accident. It means you deal with the person doing the work and you get a proper answer instead of a queue.
The plan is to grow, carefully, with people who work the way we do. Anyone who joins will be someone who'd rather pick up the phone than send the letter.