About
CircleRight is an HR strategy and operations partner that builds the people systems, structures, and governance frameworks required for businesses to scale with clarity and control.
We work with three categories of organizations: Indian family businesses navigating professionalization and generational transition; founder-led SMEs and funded startups that have outgrown informal people management; and global companies entering India that require strong on-ground HR expertise to set up and operate compliantly.
Our work is deeply embedded within the business. We partner directly with founders and leadership teams to design HR architecture, institutionalise compliance, build performance systems, and guide the people decisions that ultimately determine whether a business scales sustainably or stalls.
Why We Exist
HR that works for the business, not the other way around.
Most growing businesses don't fail because of strategy. They fail because the organization underneath the strategy isn't built to execute it.
CircleRight exists to fix that designing the HR architecture, governance frameworks, and people systems that let founders lead, managers manage, and teams perform.
01
Founder-Level Access
We work directly with decision-makers not HR teams or middle management. Every engagement starts and stays at the top.
03
Built for Your Stage
We don't apply enterprise HR thinking to 40-person businesses. Every solution is designed for your stage, your constraints, and your next six months.
Values
02
India-Specific Expertise
Deep knowledge of Indian employment law, statutory compliance, labour codes, and the people dynamics specific to Indian business culture.
04
Outcomes, Not Reports
CircleRight engagements are measured by what changes in your organization not by the thickness of the document we leave behind.
Building the HR Backbone Behind Scaling Businesses
Harrsha Poojary is the Founder and Principal Consultant at CircleRight, an HR strategy and operations partner for scaling businesses.
With almost two decades of experience across family businesses, founder-led SMEs, and global organizations operating in India, she brings both strategic depth and execution capability to every engagement.
CircleRight was built on a clear conviction that businesses don’t fail due to a lack of strategy but due to the absence of a strong organizational foundation to execute it. She works directly with founders and leadership teams to design HR systems, structures, and governance frameworks that enable sustainable scale.
Her work spans HR architecture and organization design, fractional CHRO advisory, compliance structuring, performance systems, POSH governance, and leadership alignment. She has particular experience supporting Indian family businesses through professionalisation and global companies setting up and stabilising their India HR function.
How We Work
Step 1
Founder Diagnostic
We start with a focused conversation understanding your business, your growth stage, your people challenges, and where the gaps are. No forms, no proposals upfront. Just a direct, honest conversation.
Step 2
HR Assessment
We map your current HR state against what your stage of growth actually needs auditing structure, compliance, documentation, and people practices to identify the highest-impact gaps.
Step 3
Roadmap & Design
We build a prioritised action plan: what needs to be fixed immediately, what needs to be built, and what can wait. You get clarity on the path before any work begins.
Step 4
We work with you directly to implement designing org structures, building frameworks, establishing compliance, and embedding the systems your business needs. You get a strategic partner through the whole journey, not a report at the end.
Embedded Advisory & Execution
Client Engagements
Client details are kept confidential. These are anonymised snapshots of real engagements.
Culture Reset, LegalTech Firm, Mumbai
A Mumbai-based LegalTech firm was technology-forward on paper but culturally frozen. A cohort of long-tenure employees had become the dominant force in the organisation, resistant to change, hostile to new talent, and deeply embedded in a favouritism-driven culture where relationships mattered more than results. New hires with energy and capability couldn't survive the environment. The founder had been convinced that if these individuals left, the business would collapse. In reality, they were slowly hollowing it out, creating a cavity in the system that was quietly costing the organisation its best people and its forward momentum.
CircleRight began with a full HR audit to surface what was actually happening beneath the surface, mapping the cultural fault lines, the performance gaps, and the dependency the founder had built around people who had made themselves seem indispensable. The findings met significant resistance, both from the entrenched employees and from the founder who had invested years in these relationships. CircleRight held the line. Structured performance check-ins were introduced to replace the informal favouritism system with objective accountability. Conversations that had never happened before, about expectations, contribution, and consequences, became a regular part of how the organisation operated. The groundwork was laid for a new team culture where tenure gave nobody immunity and contribution determined standing.
This engagement reflects CircleRight's HR audit and culture transformation work with founder-led businesses in Mumbai.
Compliance Audit, UK-Headquartered IT Firm, India Operations
A UK-headquartered IT firm operating out of India had significant HR compliance exposure that nobody inside the organisation could see. CircleRight conducted a three-day deep-dive audit that uncovered payroll records that didn't match filings, incorrect PF and ESIC deductions, overtime being worked with no records and no pay, and employment contracts that failed state-specific compliance requirements, including women's working hour protections under Gujarat law. The POSH framework was so weak that managers couldn't identify basic risk flags.
During the audit itself employees opened up about a situation that required immediate handling, which CircleRight resolved before the formal engagement even began.
The organisation was facing serious statutory exposure across multiple fronts. CircleRight rebuilt the compliance framework from the ground up, correcting filings, restructuring contracts to meet state requirements, establishing proper overtime tracking and pay, and setting up a functioning POSH committee with trained managers who understood their responsibilities.
Beyond compliance, the organisation had no reliable HR infrastructure to sustain what had been fixed. CircleRight took on the consulting partnership for their HRMS implementation, personally overseeing the configuration, sitting with the team through the entire setup process, and ensuring the system was correctly built and fully operational before signing off. The organisation moved from a manually managed, compliance-exposed operation to one with a functioning HR technology backbone that could sustain its growth.
This engagement reflects CircleRight's statutory compliance audit, POSH advisory, and HRMS implementation consulting work for global companies operating in India, covering PF, ESIC, state-specific labour law, employment contract structuring, and HR technology setup.
HR Build from Scratch, 4th Generation Manufacturing Business
A fourth-generation family-owned manufacturing business had reached a critical inflection point. The incoming leader was ambitious and ready to scale, but the organisation under him was still running entirely on the methods of a previous era. Processes were paper-based, records were incomplete, and there was no HR infrastructure to speak of. Cultural loopholes had created quiet but consistent financial leakage that nobody had formally identified. The workforce, many of whom had been there for decades, had no framework for accountability, no visibility of expectations, and no mechanism to raise concerns.
CircleRight was engaged for a one-year change-management sprint with a clear mandate to build the HR muscle from scratch. The work was systematic. A full audit identified every gap, every loophole, and every individual whose behaviour was costing the organisation. The HR playbook was rewritten from the ground up. Core HR processes were automated to eliminate paper dependency. A grievance mechanism was designed specifically for a combined factory and office environment where frontline workers and office staff had very different needs. Training sessions were built to equip long-tenure employees rather than threaten them, giving people who had operated without structure for years the confidence and capability to work differently. A POSH committee was established, and CircleRight remained as an external member after the retainer concluded, ensuring the governance held long after the engagement ended.
This engagement reflects CircleRight's HR transformation and change management work with family-owned manufacturing businesses in India, covering HR architecture, compliance structuring, and workforce development.
Fractional CHRO & Strategic Scale, IT Hardware Company
What began as a one-day diagnostic workshop with a second-generation IT Hardware business became CircleRight's deepest and most sustained engagement. The founder was intuitive, forward-thinking, and clear-eyed about what the organisation needed, and gave CircleRight the trust, access, and time to operate as a true strategic partner. Over the course of the engagement CircleRight moved from HR advisor to Fractional CHRO, embedded in weekly boardroom meetings and shaping people decisions at leadership level. The work covered a complete HR restructure across all verticals, scaling the HR function from one person to a three-member team that CircleRight now mentors, identifying and closing process and compliance gaps, building succession planning frameworks, and recognising and rewarding high-performers to anchor retention.
The defining decision of this engagement was the deliberate choice to identify training gaps and build internal capacity rather than replace people. Instead of cycling out underperformers and hiring externally, CircleRight mapped where capability was missing, designed targeted interventions, and invested in the existing team's growth. This bet, backed fully by the owners, proved to be the strongest decision of the engagement. The people who were once the weakest links became the most invested contributors. The result was a leaner, stronger organisation built on retention, capability, and a growth mindset rather than volume.
This engagement reflects CircleRight's Fractional CHRO and strategic HR advisory work, covering embedded leadership, org design, succession planning, and people infrastructure for scaling Indian businesses.