ElleBe LLC builds the people infrastructure, operating systems, and AI-enabled workflows that let growth-stage companies, PE-backed portfolios, and mission-driven organizations scale with clarity — and lead on their own terms.
15+
Years leading People & Ops
26K+
Employees supported globally
4
Fortune 500 & top tech tenures
12
Weeks to transformed systems
What We Do
Three practices. One operating philosophy.
Exceptional operations are the foundation of lasting impact. Every engagement builds durable systems — not dependency.
01 — People
Fractional HR & People Systems
Embedded HR Business Partner leadership for organizations too big for chaos and too lean for a full People team.
HR compliance, policy & contractor classification
Onboarding, performance & compensation systems
Executive search & talent acquisition
02 — Operations
Operations & Fractional COO
Executive-level operating leadership that turns strategy into cadence, accountability, and measurable execution.
Operating model & org design
Financial infrastructure & KPI frameworks
AI & automation enablement
03 — Leadership
Executive & Team Coaching
Culturally fluent, data-informed coaching that strengthens executive presence, decision-making, and trust.
360° discovery & stakeholder feedback
Weekly coaching with applied tools
EQ-i 2.0, Hogan & Leadership Circle assessments
AI-Enabled by Design
Modern operations run on intelligence.
We apply AI where it actually improves operations — automating HR workflows, surfacing workforce insights, accelerating reporting, and freeing your team for the work only humans can do. Every systems build includes an automation opportunity assessment, workflow optimization, and pragmatic tooling strategy.
A deep assessment of how your organization runs today — executive diagnosis, key gaps, financial deep dive, and a prioritized roadmap.
Step 02
Systems & Infrastructure Build
Design and implement the financial, HR, and operating systems that drive performance and scale — with AI woven in from day one.
Step 03
Fractional Executive Leadership
Embedded COO or CHRO-level leadership to drive execution, own the operating rhythm, and build durable capability. Premium engagement, 3–12 months.
Client Feedback
Lofty goals. All of them met.
Everything stayed true to the proposed timeline and that forced us to keep moving forward toward our goal. Working with Lynette was easy — she took time to really get to know and understand our organization, and we felt like she was truly invested in our success.
Client leadership · Grant-funded nonprofit in leadership transition
10/10
Likelihood to recommend ElleBe to a colleague, in the client's post-engagement review.
What they own now
Policies and procedures. Their first employee. A contracted HR team. And a plan for growth moving forward — built with their staff, not around them.
Featured Engagement
Twelve weeks to a fundable, hireable, scalable nonprofit.
How ElleBe rebuilt financial systems, led an end-to-end Executive Director search, and delivered a growth playbook — all inside one quarter.
Practice 01 — People & HR
People infrastructure that scales with you.
Fractional HR Business Partner and CHRO-level leadership — built for organizations that need enterprise-grade people systems without enterprise headcount.
Introducing
KEEP by ElleBe — Keep Employees Engaged & Performing.
It cost you to hire. It costs more to rehire. KEEP is our fractional HR partnership productized around the gap in between — the onboarding, feedback, performance management, and training systems that protect your people investment from offer letter to anniversary.
Hire
Land the investment — offers, compliance, consistency
Grow
The middle — onboarding, feedback, performance, training
Keep
Engagement, culture & recognition that retain
The Fractional Model
An embedded partner, not a vendor.
Engagements typically run 25–30 hours per month: a blend of prioritized project work and standing availability for the employee questions, decisions, and issues that never arrive on schedule.
People systems honed at Visa, Google, Epic Games, and Goldman Sachs — where the cost of getting HR wrong is measured in millions.
AI-accelerated
Every HR system we build is designed for automation: intelligent workflows, self-serve knowledge, and analytics that surface risk before it becomes a problem.
Right-sized
You get exactly the leadership altitude you need — HRBP execution, VP-level strategy, or CHRO advisory — without carrying the full-time cost.
Practice 02 — Operations
From reactive execution to durable systems.
Operational strategy, systems build, and fractional COO leadership for PE-backed companies, growth-stage ventures, exiting organizations, and nonprofits.
Support model optimization — in-house, BPO, hybrid
CSAT, resolution time & cost-to-serve improvement
Intelligence Layer
AI & automation, applied where it counts.
Most organizations don't need more tools — they need the right ones, connected. We run automation opportunity assessments across your workflows, build Voice-of-Customer and insight pipelines into product and operations, and design a tooling strategy your team will actually adopt.
Automation opportunity assessmentVoice of Customer infrastructureInsight pipelines to Product & EngWorkflow optimizationTooling & vendor strategy
Executive Leadership
Fractional COO / Operating Partner
Premium embedded engagement · 3–12 months. Executive-level leadership to own operational strategy and drive execution.
Leadership & Strategy
Embedded operational leadership at the executive level
Cross-functional alignment across teams and functions
Execution & Scale
Team performance management & accountability
Operating rhythm design & execution oversight
Scaling infrastructure for high-growth environments
Practice 03 — Leadership
Coaching that turns insight into impact.
Values-driven, culturally fluent executive coaching for C-suite leaders, rising executives, and teams — rooted in real feedback, applied between sessions, and measured against outcomes.
The Arc of an Engagement
Discovery first. Growth always.
Phase 01
Discovery
A rigorous intake — 360° feedback review, exit interview analysis, and structured conversations with your manager, People team, and approved colleagues to ground coaching in reality, not assumption.
Phase 02
Weekly Coaching
Focused sessions on the highest-leverage themes: deliverables and immediate impact, manager and peer relationships, personal brand, and rebuilding trust within the organization.
Ongoing
Real-Time Course Correction
Between sessions, share 1:1 agendas, meeting plans, and live concerns for asynchronous feedback — so growth happens in the flow of work, not just in the coaching hour.
What Clients Work On
Goals we coach toward
◆ Strategic thinking & decision-making in high-stakes environments
◆ Executive presence & influence with Boards, peers, and teams
◆ Communication effectiveness & cross-functional collaboration
◆ Resilience & agility through change and uncertainty
◆ Aligning personal leadership style with culture and strategy
What's Included
Every engagement delivers
Customized coaching plan aligned to strategic goals
Session summaries & tools for applied learning
Assessments — EQ-i 2.0, Hogan, Leadership Circle
Midpoint & final coaching review reports
ICF / EMCC ethical & confidentiality standards
In-person on-site days for multiple executives
Quarterly anonymous trend recaps for team cohorts
Case Study — Nonprofit & Mission-Driven
Rebuilding the engine of a mission-driven organization — in one quarter.
ClientGrant-funded nonprofit in leadership transition
Duration12 weeks · virtual engagement
ScopeFinancial systems · ED search · HR infrastructure
RoleFractional operating partner
The Challenge
A departing Executive Director. Fragile funding. No systems to hand over.
The organization faced a perfect storm: its Executive Director was transitioning out, financial practices lived in spreadsheets and institutional memory, grant renewals lacked a tracking system, and the board needed confidence that the mission could survive the change. There was no succession plan, no documented ED role, and no infrastructure to onboard whoever came next.
The question wasn't just "who will lead next?" — it was "what will they inherit?"
The Approach
Four workstreams, one integrated engagement
01
Discovery & Alignment
Weeks 1–4
Reviewed every financial document, grant, and renewal timeline. Interviewed leadership, board members, HR vendors, and partners. Aligned priorities and launched ED search planning.
02
Systems & Search
Weeks 5–8
Built the annual operating budget with reusable templates, a grant tracking and compliance system, and a funding diversification plan — while driving full-cycle ED recruitment.
03
Implementation & Onboarding
Weeks 9–12
Implemented financial tools and trained staff and board. Completed final ED interviews with a board recommendation packet, onboarding guide, stakeholder map, and 90-day plan.
04
Growth & Activation
Extension
Designed a signature fundraising initiative, built the board fundraising playbook and case for support, and activated board members as strategic ambassadors.
Inside the Work
Succession wasn't a document. It was a system.
The succession plan mapped every ED responsibility to interim owners based on staff interviews about capacity and priorities — then established a reporting rhythm so progress rolled up to the board without the ED in the room. A communication map kept every staff member informed through the transition.
The new Executive Director role was designed from four inputs: the outgoing JD, organizational feedback (what helped and what hurt), staff interviews on the leadership they needed, and board requirements. The result: a candidate profile the whole organization recognized — and a selection process with defined competencies, a measurement scale, and structured feedback to keep evaluation consistent and fair.
The organization entered its leadership transition with documented financials, a tracked and diversified funding pipeline, a vetted candidate slate with a board-ready recommendation, and an onboarding system that made the new ED's first 90 days a plan — not a scramble. In the client's own post-engagement review, every goal the project set out to hit was met: a leadership transition plan designed and implemented, the executive director role clarified and filled, a growth roadmap built, HR processes developed, and funding diversified.
These were some lofty goals — and with the support of this project we were able to meet all of them. Our organization has policies and procedures, our first employee, a contracted HR team, and a plan for growth moving forward.
Client leadership · Post-engagement review
Case Study — Growth-Stage & Mission-Driven Finance
Designing the organization a five-year strategy actually needs.
A bold new fund strategy — and a structure built for the last chapter.
Equitable Facilities Fund — a nonprofit lender that helps high-performing charter schools access low-cost facilities financing — was finalizing an ambitious Fund 2 strategy for 2023–2027. The ambition was clear; the organizational structure and compensation model underneath it were not. Roles had accumulated over time, the org chart no longer matched where the strategy was heading, and compensation lacked the benchmarked bands a scaling organization needs to hire and retain fairly.
A five-year strategy can't run on a structure designed for where you've been.
The Approach
Strategy first, then structure, then pay — with the team engaged throughout
01
Priorities & Strategy
Weeks 1–4
Deep information gathering with leadership to understand current structure and workflow, then drafting the organizational priorities and high-level strategies for 2023–2027 — with a survey and focus-group guide to bring the team's voice in early.
02
Benchmark & Design
Weeks 5–9
Organizational structure benchmarking against peer funds, synthesis of team feedback, and a high-level org structure with impact and org-health goals — refined through iterative leadership and team input.
03
Detailed Structure
Weeks 9–12
A detailed org chart with primary responsibilities, role types, and years-of-experience requirements — engaging leaders and the people in potentially-shifting roles through differentiated, respectful conversations.
04
Compensation
Weeks 12–14
External role and compensation benchmarking, compensation bands for every role, key messages for the compensation work, and implementation considerations to guide rollout.
Inside the Work
Change people can see themselves in.
Restructuring is where trust is most easily lost. The engagement was designed around engagement, not announcement: team surveys and focus groups shaped the priorities before any structure was drawn, and the people in roles most likely to shift were brought into differentiated conversations rather than finding out at an all-hands. Your staff is brilliant, capable, and knows the organization best — so the design was built with them, not delivered to them.
Compensation followed the same discipline. Rather than imposing bands, the work benchmarked every role externally, built defensible ranges, and prepared the key messages leaders needed to explain the "why" — turning a historically anxious conversation into a transparent one.
A structure and pay model built for the next five years.
5-yr
Strategy the structure now supports
100%
Of roles benchmarked & banded
10
Deliverables across strategy, structure & pay
Equitable Facilities Fund emerged with organizational priorities aligned to its Fund 2 strategy, a detailed structure the team helped shape, and benchmarked compensation bands with the messaging to roll them out — the operational foundation an ambitious five-year plan requires.
Case Study — KEEP by ElleBe · Fractional HR
Protecting the people investment — from offer letter to anniversary.
Hiring costs money. Rehiring costs more. The gap is everything in between.
A growing company had made the investment every growing company makes: recruiting, offers, and onboarding new people. But the systems that protect that investment — the onboarding that lands a hire, the feedback that develops them, the performance rhythm that keeps them growing, the training that keeps everyone compliant — lived in individual heads and good intentions. Every departure meant paying the hiring bill twice. What was needed wasn't a recruiter; it was the infrastructure of the middle: everything between the offer letter and the work anniversary.
It cost you to hire. It costs more to rehire. We build what keeps people in between.
The Approach
Build the employee lifecycle as one system — not a pile of policies
01
Hire Right
Land the investment
Consistent job descriptions across every role, offer letters prepared and standardized, I-9 / E-Verify and reference checks systematized, contractor relationships reviewed for compliance, and a confidential document repository established.
02
Land Well
The first 90 days
An onboarding checklist with named roles and responsibilities, a 30/60/90 roadmap for every new employee, and training requirements determined and tracked — employees and contractors each getting what their status requires.
03
Grow Deliberately
Feedback & performance
A performance review policy set, managers equipped with tools and guidance, reviews completed on a calendar that holds, and a compensation policy with structured review for new hires and pay increases.
04
Keep Intentionally
Engagement & exit
Culture and morale programs with rhythm — birthdays, anniversaries, recognition — benefits questions answered with authority, unlimited-vacation transition planned with a communication strategy, and an offboarding checklist that closes the loop with dignity.
Inside the Work
Project queue plus standing hours — the fractional model working as designed.
The engagement runs on the two-part structure ElleBe builds every fractional partnership around: a prioritized project queue, re-ranked together each month, and standing hours reserved for the employee questions, decisions, and issues that never arrive on schedule. One month that's an unexpected employee situation; another it's advising on the org chart or a compensation decision for a new hire. The projects build the systems; the standing hours protect them.
An employee experience that runs on systems, not memory.
12+
People systems built & owned in-house
4
Lifecycle stages covered — hire to exit
25–30
Hours/month — senior HR without the executive payroll
Every hire now gets the same first week. Reviews happen on a calendar, not "when we can." Contractor relationships stand up to scrutiny. And the company's hiring investment is protected by the thing that actually protects it: a consistent, engaging employee experience from offer letter to anniversary — with a senior partner on call for everything in between.
Free Diagnostics
Where do your systems stand today?
Three focused assessments, drawn from the same frameworks we use inside client engagements. Answer honestly, get an instant maturity read, and see exactly where to focus next. Takes about three minutes each.
Our upgraded HR diagnostic — spanning strategy, compliance, the talent lifecycle, and the intelligence layer most assessments ignore.
How your organization actually runs — operating model, financial infrastructure, execution cadence, and automation readiness.
Built for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations — funding resilience, board engagement, leadership continuity, and people infrastructure.
VisaGoogleEpic GamesGoldman Sachs
Co-Founder & Principal
Lynette W. Barksdale
People & Culture executive. Scale architect. Executive coach. Trusted advisor to CEOs, boards, and the leaders in between.
Lynette Barksdale has spent 15+ years building and scaling the people and operating systems behind some of the world's most demanding organizations. At Visa, she stewarded culture and organizational health strategy for 26,000+ employees globally — advising the CEO and C-suite on workforce strategy while designing the enterprise KPIs that informed board-level reporting. At Epic Games, she built a 38-person employee engagement function from the ground up during hypergrowth, implementing the performance management and OKR frameworks that kept a global games company aligned. At Google Cloud, she led inclusion and culture strategy across a 35,000-person organization; at Goldman Sachs, she embedded people practices into the operating plans of regional centers scaling 50%+ year over year.
Her range runs the full altitude of the People function: as a Google staffing lead, she engineered a talent acquisition engine that improved placement efficiency by 189%; at Target, she ran HR operations across 50+ stores and trained more than 150 managers on fundamentals and compliance; at Teach For America, she advised Executive Directors on people strategy across multiple regional offices. That span — from I-9 verification to board advisory — is exactly what makes fractional leadership work.
As Co-Founder of ElleBe LLC, Lynette partners with founders, executives, and boards to build high-performing organizations through strong people systems, disciplined operations, and AI-enabled workflows. Recent engagements include leading end-to-end Executive Director searches for mission-driven organizations, rebuilding nonprofit financial infrastructure in a single quarter, and serving as fractional CHRO for growth-stage companies navigating their first real people systems.
She is a frequent speaker on leadership, culture, and the future of work. She holds a B.S. in Business Management from North Carolina State University, is a German Marshall Fund Fellow, and serves on the Poole College Board at NC State and the Advisory Board of Mainspring Schools.
Duke UniversityNonprofitEducationFinancial Services
Co-Founder & Principal
Latricia Barksdale
Organizational strategist. Talent & operations leader. Executive coach. Two decades transforming how mission-driven organizations are built.
Latricia Barksdale has devoted her career to increasing educational and career opportunities for people of color by transforming organizational strategies, systems, and culture. Over the last two decades, she has held senior leadership roles at national nonprofits and consulting organizations, overseeing internal strategy, talent, operations, finance, and programmatic efforts across the nonprofit, education, and financial services sectors.
She has led client engagements focused on strengthening talent systems, building organizational capacity around diversity, equity, and inclusion, and improving leadership team culture and effectiveness. As a coach for senior executives in team management and DEI, Latricia supports organizations with strategic clarity and planning, designing leadership bodies, improving decision-making processes, and implementing change management efforts.
Latricia graduated from Duke University, where she majored in Public Policy Studies and Economics and minored in African and African American Studies. She serves on the board of the Black Teacher Collaborative and is a member of the Junior League of Atlanta.
Values We Work By
The beliefs behind the practice
Your team is brilliant
Your staff knows your organization best. We work as facilitators, not experts-for-hire — mining the brilliance of the group to co-create strategies that stick.
Safety enables growth
The best learning happens at the growth edge — a space of healthy discomfort built on psychological safety. Comfort is not a proxy for success.
Systems outlast us
Every engagement is designed to make itself unnecessary. We build durable capability and documented infrastructure — not dependency on a consultant.
Fractional HR & Operations, Explained
Executive-level leadership — without the executive payroll.
Somewhere between 20 and 150 people, every organization outgrows the systems it was founded on. Hiring isn't repeatable, policies live in someone's head, and the founder is still approving PTO. A fractional HR & operations partner gives you a senior executive for a fraction of their time — and builds the infrastructure your team keeps forever.
What Is a Fractional Partner?
An embedded partner, not a vendor.
A senior executive, part-time
A fractional partner is a senior HR and operations executive who joins your leadership team part-time — typically 25–30 hours a month — to diagnose, build, and install the systems a growing organization needs. They sit inside your decisions: hiring plans, org structure, compensation, compliance, and the operational plumbing underneath all of it.
Systems, not recommendations
The difference from a consultant: consultants leave recommendations. A fractional partner leaves working systems your team owns. And the difference from a payroll vendor: tools run your payroll — they don't tell you whether your contractor should be an employee, or how to have the equity conversation. That's judgment.
Why Fractional Matters
Six reasons growing teams choose it.
Right-sized cost
Senior expertise at 25–30 hours a month, not a $200K+ full-time salary.
Systems that outlast us
Everything built is documented, transferable, and owned by your team.
People ops that run without you
Hiring, onboarding, and reviews that happen on a cadence — not when you get to them.
Compliance handled early
Classifications and policies reviewed before they become expensive.
Founders freed
The founder gets out of day-to-day people operations and back to the work only they can do.
A standing sounding board
Someone to call for the issues that don't wait for project plans.
Core Principle
You don't have a people problem. You have a systems problem.
Chaos, turnover, and dropped balls are almost never about effort. They're about missing infrastructure — and infrastructure can be built.
Patchwork HR → Fractional Leadership
What changes when systems replace scramble.
How it usually runs
Founder as accidental HR lead
Policies in someone's head
Hiring reinvented every time
Payroll vendor mistaken for people strategy
Reviews happen "when we can"
Ops knowledge held by one person
With a fractional partner
Executive-level people strategy
Documented, current policies
A repeatable hiring system
Compensation with a real structure
Reviews on a calendar that holds
Playbooks anyone can run
Signs You're Ready
Fractional fits when several of these are true.
You're 20–150 people and still running on founding-era systems.
Leaders spend hours on HR tasks instead of the work only they can do.
Every hire feels like the first one — no repeatable process exists.
One departure would hurt because knowledge lives in people, not systems.
You need HR leadership but can't justify a full-time executive yet.
You're heading into a raise, restructure, or fast growth and want the foundation right first.
Full-Time Executive vs. Fractional Partner
The same seniority, sized to your stage.
Full-time CHRO / COO
$200K+ salary, benefits, equity
3–6 months to recruit
One company's playbook
Requires a full-time need
Leaves with the knowledge
ElleBe fractional
A fraction of the cost, senior from day one
Working inside your business in weeks
Range from 26,000 people to 26
Right-sized: 25–30 hours a month
Leaves the systems behind
How an Engagement Works
Assess, build, transfer — then step back.
1
Assess honestly
A structured review of your HR, operations, or nonprofit readiness — an honest mirror, not a sales pitch.
2
Name the gaps
Findings in plain language, each gap paired with a strength or a first move.
3
Build the systems
Hiring, onboarding, policy, performance, workflows — installed, not just recommended.
4
Transfer & step back
We train, document, and hand over. Standing hours if you want them; independence either way.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A 45-person company planning to double.
Hiring is ad hoc, the handbook is four years old, and two leaders hold most of the operational knowledge. Over a focused engagement, the fractional partner builds a hiring system with structured interviews and scorecards, onboarding that gets new hires productive in weeks, a current handbook with corrected classifications, documented workflows with named owners, and manager foundations for first-time leaders.
The Difference
Growth the systems can absorbLeaders back on leader workKey-person risk retiredNew managers set up to succeedInfrastructure the team owns
The Proof
Fortune 500 rigor, founder-level pragmatism.
15+
Years building people systems
26K+
Employees supported at Visa
150+
Managers trained across 50+ Target stores
38
Person HR function built from scratch at Epic Games
Enterprise-grade people systems without the enterprise headcount. Every ElleBe engagement is designed to make itself unnecessary — you own the playbooks, the policy library, the operating rhythms, and the trained people who run it all when we step back.
Start a Conversation
Let's find out what your organization needs.
Reach out for proposed agreements, engagement structures, and a phased approach tailored to your scope of work. Most conversations start with a 30-minute discovery call.
