Sara-Gene Curtis

Sara-Gene embeds with 25 to 250 person companies that have outgrown informal HR, often multi-state or multi-entity businesses with hourly teams, multiple worksites, and weekly payroll. Usually, there is no dedicated HR leader in the seat yet, so payroll, benefits, compliance, and employee relations have landed on the desk of an office manager or controller alongside their actual job, with critical processes living in one person's head. Sara-Gene steps in alongside the team to map out where the real risks are, untangle what is broken versus simply unwritten, and resolve the open issues herself while building clear, documented workflows so the same fires do not resurface next quarter. In her experience, most HR headaches are really ownership and documentation gaps: companies rarely stumble because someone had bad intentions, but because nobody wrote down how a decision works or who owns it next time. She never stops at handing over a recommendation; she is both the trusted advisor in the morning leadership meeting and the hands-on partner making sure payroll runs cleanly that afternoon.

What Sara-Gene Does Best

• Stabilizing day-to-day HR operations: When payroll, benefits, employee records, vendor relationships, and compliance have become fragmented or manual, she resolves the immediate backlog, reconciles the data, documents the processes that used to live in one person's head, and sets clear ownership that holds up through growth and turnover.
• Building HR structure for growth and transitions: She helps growing companies formalize HR as they add headcount, expand into new states or countries, navigate mergers, or roll out new HRIS and benefits platforms, putting practical handbooks, I-9 workflows, job documentation, and multi-state compliance in place.
• Performance and manager enablement: She builds clear review cycles, self-evaluations, trackers, and performance improvement plans, then coaches the managers who run them. She pairs that coaching with steady, well-documented employee relations support covering investigations, accommodations, corrective actions, and separations.

Recent Engagements

• Multi-entity transportation and logistics organization, 175 employees across 3 entities in Washington and Oregon • Total HR / Extend HR • 9 months, ongoing: The organization needed embedded HR backup across weekly multi-entity payroll, benefits administration, employee relations, and Pacific Northwest labor compliance while transitioning HRIS service models. Because critical processes had depended on a single person's institutional knowledge without documentation, payroll and benefit errors were often caught only after they affected employees. Sara-Gene ran and audited weekly payroll across all three entities (covering wage and hour reviews, overtime, garnishments, deductions, and final pay), resolved benefit carrier feed discrepancies, managed 401(k) and leave administration, supported workplace investigations, and guided the HRIS transition through data validation. Recurring errors stopped repeating, process ownership is clear, and the company's core HR workflows are now documented and transferable.
• Arizona-based professional employer organization, 30-person internal team • Total HR / Extend HR • 9 months: Leadership needed an embedded HR partner to modernize outdated internal policies and help managers lead performance consistently. Sara-Gene audited and refreshed the employee handbook, drafted clear leave and remote work policies, reviewed FLSA classifications and multi-state compliance, and built an end-to-end performance review process complete with self-evaluations, manager assessments, tracking tools, and hands-on manager training. The team launched its first consistent performance review cycle, giving leadership a repeatable framework for coaching, policy, and compliance decisions.
• 120-person technology company with U.S. and international employees • Project HR • 6 months: While preparing for open enrollment and evaluating benefits brokers, the company was dealing with unresolved carrier and COBRA discrepancies alongside compliance questions around employees working abroad. Sara-Gene tracked down and resolved the carrier and COBRA issues across the broker, carriers, Rippling, and the company's EOR provider, prepared a clear side-by-side broker comparison for executive decision-making, and wrote practical policy guidelines spelling out payroll, benefits, and tax implications for international travel. Leadership gained vendor accountability and a clear written framework instead of fielding one-off questions.
• New Zealand technology company establishing U.S. operations • Project HR • 4 months: An international technology company needed to hire and pay its first U.S. team members with no U.S. HR infrastructure in place yet. Sara-Gene evaluated PEO and EOR options to help leadership weigh the trade-offs, set up compliant U.S. onboarding, employment agreements, and I-9 workflows, drafted U.S. handbook policies, and launched payroll and benefits through the chosen provider. The company hired and onboarded its first U.S. employees compliantly from day one with a clear playbook ready for future state expansion.

Experience

• Office Manager / HR Administrator • Multi-Office Legal Practice (Petersburg, VA): Owned HR and operational administration across a multi-office law firm, managing recruiting, onboarding, payroll, employee relations, performance reviews, policy development, scheduling, monthly profit-share bonus calculations, and IT workflow automation alongside a full paralegal caseload.
• General Manager • Multi-Property Hospitality and Hotel Management Group (50+ employee hourly workforce, central Virginia): Led full property operations and in-house HR for a 50+ person hourly team, overseeing hiring, training, performance management, employee relations, labor and payroll budgeting, and city, state, health, and safety compliance inspections.
• Assistant General Manager • Multi-Property Hospitality and Hotel Management Group (central Virginia): Managed daily hotel operations and workforce scheduling, training, employee coaching, and financial controls after earning a promotion from Guest Service Representative.

Systems & Education

• Administrator-level experience across UKG, Rippling, Worklio, and QuantaHCM, including implementation, configuration review, and data validation, plus deep hands-on experience managing PEO, EOR, and benefits broker partnerships
• A.S., Richard Bland College of William & Mary • 2009

Outside Work

Sara-Gene lives in the Richmond, Virginia area with her family and their three dogs. Most weekends are a mix of tackling a home improvement project, spending time outdoors, and tending to a houseplant collection that has happily outgrown what she originally planned for.