I’ve been feeling reflective today, so I want to write about something that doesn’t come up much in the day-to-day grind of running a company: why we actually do this in the first place.
The easy answer is that we want to work for ourselves. Nobody wants a boss breathing down their neck, nobody wants to watch someone else get the credit for their ideas, nobody wants to sit in a job that caps out their earning potential and their ambition at the same time. That’s true, and it’s a good enough reason on its own. But if you scratch beneath it, I don’t think it’s the real reason. Not for me, anyway.
For me, it’s about legacy.
When I started Rebox HR seven years ago, it wasn’t because I had a burning desire to “be my own boss” in the abstract. It was because I kept seeing the same problem play out for small businesses, over and over. Traditional HR consultancies weren’t built for them. They were built for volume — stack them high, sell them cheap. A business owner would call in with a genuinely difficult, often deeply personal problem, and get passed to whoever was next in the queue at a scripted call centre. No continuity, no relationship, no understanding of their business, their people, or the pressures they were actually under. Just advice pulled from HR Script 101, delivered by someone who’d never spoken to them before and might never speak to them again.
That’s not support. That’s a transaction dressed up as a service.
The business owners I spoke to during the early design of Rebox HR weren’t asking for anything unreasonable. They wanted someone who knew their business. They wanted advice that accounted for their sector, their team, their commercial reality — not a generic policy lifted from a template library. They wanted a human being who understood that a redundancy conversation or a difficult disciplinary isn’t just a compliance exercise, it’s something that keeps an owner up at night. Those conversations, the pain points people trusted me with, became the foundation of the business. Rebox HR exists because of what people told me was missing, not because I had a grand vision I imposed on the market.
Seven years on, we’re still trying to shake up what the consultancy space should look like. And if anything, the case for doing it properly has only got stronger. The economy is uncertain in a way that makes every hiring and headcount decision feel higher-stakes than it used to. Employment law keeps shifting under people’s feet. The tribunal system is backed up, which means the cost of getting something wrong — in time, in stress, in money — has gone up even as the risk of disputes arising has too. And employee expectations have changed enormously; people want more from their employers than they did a decade ago, and rightly so. For business owners, that’s a lot to hold at once. For small businesses without an in-house HR function, it’s even more. They need real, hands-on support more than ever, not less — and definitely not a script.
That’s what I mean by legacy. It’s not about building something with my name on it for the sake of it. It’s about building something that outlasts the immediate transaction — a way of working that other people can point to and say, that’s how it should be done. It’s about the small business owner who called us in a panic about a grievance and got someone who actually knew their team, not a case number. It’s about proving that “hands-on” and “commercially aware” aren’t buzzwords, they’re a choice you make every single day, in every single client interaction, especially when it would be easier not to.
I think that’s true of most people who start businesses, if you ask them honestly. Somewhere underneath “I wanted to work for myself” is usually something closer to “I wanted to fix something I kept seeing broken” or “I wanted to leave something behind that mattered.” The independence is the mechanism. The legacy is the point.
Seven years in, I’m still working on it. I suspect I always will be. But that’s the job, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Natalie Ellis HR 