Built on the belief that People strategy is business strategy.
Jason Surmaceviz
FounderI've spent my career on the People side of growing organizations: HR, People Operations, performance management, leadership development, and the infrastructure that holds all of it together. The same gap kept showing up, company after company: organizations that had clearly outgrown informal, ad hoc People practices, but weren't ready, or didn't want, to build out a full internal People executive team just to fix it.
That gap is expensive, and it rarely shows up on a balance sheet. It shows up as a manager who was never taught how to manage, avoiding their fourth uncomfortable conversation of the month instead of having it. It shows up as a comp decision made ad hoc because there's no framework, then quietly resented for a year. None of this is anyone's fault. It's just what happens when growth outpaces the systems meant to support it.
I started Pillar to close that gap directly. Not as a staffing firm, not as HR outsourcing, and not as a large consulting practice running the same playbook regardless of client. Pillar sits with leadership teams and builds the specific structure a given organization needs, which is rarely identical to what worked for the last company down the street.
The name is intentional. A pillar holds weight so the rest of the structure can do its job. That's the role I want Pillar to play for the organizations we work with: the foundation underneath the people who are building something.
That perspective was built inside real organizations, not case studies: Fortune 500 environments, healthcare, retail, nonprofit, and privately held businesses alike. Some of it happened inside organizations with 900 or more employees; some of it was leading professional development initiatives reaching roughly 200 people across multiple locations. The common thread wasn't any one employer's size. It was operating across People Operations, employee relations, performance management, leadership development, talent acquisition, benefits, compliance, HR systems, workforce planning, and organizational effectiveness, in environments where accountability was real and getting it wrong was expensive.
900+
Employee-organization experience
200+
Employees supported through professional development initiatives
Multi-site
People Operations experience across multiple locations
SHRM-CP
Certified People professional, People & Business Leadership Essentials Certificate
The foundation underneath the people who are building something.
Leaders at organizations that are growing faster than their People infrastructure.
Pillar typically partners with CEOs, founders, COOs, CFOs, and People leaders at organizations in the 50 to 250 employee range: big enough that the founder can't personally settle every People question anymore, not yet big enough to justify a full internal People executive team.