COMPASS Human Capital Advisors guides lower middle market business founders and owners in building the human capital readiness needed to grow, reduce owner dependency, or exit — on their terms.
Most lower middle market companies have untested assumptions about their people. When a growth event, sale, or ownership change arrives, those assumptions get tested — fast. COMPASS finds the gaps before they find you.
You've built something real. Now the question is whether your organization is built to survive — and thrive — beyond you.
Financial, legal, and operational diligence are standard. Human capital diligence rarely is — until a deal falls apart because the management team can't scale, a key person walks, or an owner can't step back. COMPASS makes human capital a first-class diligence domain, not an afterthought.
Whether you're growing fast, planning an exit, reducing dependency, or transitioning to the next generation — COMPASS builds the human capital readiness that makes it possible.
Scale your organization's people infrastructure to match your growth ambitions — leadership depth, talent pipeline, and management discipline.
Prepare your human capital to withstand buyer diligence — and position people readiness as a value driver, not a risk factor.
Build the structure, leadership depth, and decision-making infrastructure that lets your business run — and thrive — without you in the center of everything.
Whether passing the business to a successor or selling to an external buyer, COMPASS ensures your people infrastructure supports a clean, high-value transition.
The COMPASS Diagnostic is a standalone human capital diligence framework designed for the lower middle market. It isolates people risk across twelve domains — each evaluated against the three fundamental questions of transition readiness.
Every module is scored on a consistent 1–5 scale — translating people risk into business terms.
The COMPASS Diagnostic produces a full suite of professional deliverables — designed for owners, M&A advisors, and potential buyers alike.
Most consultants hand over a report and move on. COMPASS doesn't. After the diagnostic, we remain as your human capital partner — executing the remediation, not just recommending it.
Our additional services address the specific findings that emerge from the diagnostic, as well as standalone human capital challenges your organization faces today.
Discuss Your SituationProject-based execution of the priority actions identified in the COMPASS remediation plan — from leadership restructuring and role clarity initiatives to compensation redesign and HR infrastructure build. We implement what we recommend.
Guidance and hands-on support for complex employee situations — performance issues, workplace conflict, terminations, policy design, and the day-to-day people challenges that pull founders away from building their business.
Market-benchmarked compensation analysis, incentive plan design, and retention strategies that align pay with performance and business outcomes — without creating the equity or cost structures inappropriate for your stage.
Building the recruiting capability, hiring process discipline, and succession bench your growth requires — including support for critical leadership searches and internal talent development frameworks.
Designing the accountability structures, KPI frameworks, and performance review systems that transform a founder-led culture into a management-led organization — without losing what makes your company work.
We built COMPASS because lower middle market companies deserve the same rigor that institutional buyers and PE-backed companies apply — without the overhead, jargon, or report-and-run consulting model.
The COMPASS framework is calibrated specifically for $10M–$100M companies — not adapted from enterprise HR programs or diluted PE playbooks. The risk thresholds, scoring standards, and remediation priorities reflect the realities of your stage.
Every finding is connected to a business consequence: valuation impact, execution risk, or transition certainty. We don't deliver HR opinions — we deliver business intelligence about your most important asset.
The diagnostic is the starting line, not the finish. COMPASS remains engaged to implement the work — building the human capital infrastructure your transition requires, alongside you, at the pace your business demands.
Everything COMPASS produces is designed to withstand buyer diligence, advisor scrutiny, and board review. Your scored assessment and risk heat map aren't internal tools — they're transaction assets.
We understand that the owner is often the biggest human capital risk in the business. COMPASS is designed to give founders clear-eyed visibility into how their own involvement — and eventual absence — shapes the organization's readiness.
The 12-module structure and 1–5 scoring scale produce results that can be tracked over time, shared across advisors, and benchmarked against comparable companies — giving you a credible baseline and a measurable path forward.
A conversation costs nothing. Understanding your human capital readiness — before a buyer, a partner, or a transition moment reveals it for you — can be worth everything.