Straight answers on HR, IT, and security.
Phocion Strategies helps organizations of every size, from a founder working alone to teams of 100 and more, protect their people, their data, and their revenue. Independent advice, with nothing to sell you but the work.
Common reasons clients call
- An important customer sent a security questionnaire, and the deal is waiting on it. It asks for policies, records, and evidence you don’t have on paper yet.
- Your cyber insurance renewal is full of yes-or-no security questions. Checking “yes” when the honest answer is “mostly” can cost you coverage when you need it.
- You're about to hire employee number 15, 50, or 100. Each of those numbers quietly switches on new legal obligations, and nobody sends you a notice when you cross the line.
- Someone left the company. Their email is shut off, but you're not sure about the shared passwords, the software accounts, or the files on their personal phone.
- One person knows how everything works: the passwords, the vendors, the renewal dates. If they're out for a month, or out for good, the business is guessing.
What Phocion does
Admin & Operations
Stop paying for tools nobody uses and processes only one person understands. Clean systems, documented work, and vendors that deliver what you pay for.
IT & Security
Win the contracts that require proof of security, keep insurance affordable, and stop the email scams that drain bank accounts. From the fundamentals to SOC 2 readiness.
HR & Compliance
Avoid the fines, lawsuits, and turnover that come from getting people practices wrong. Handbooks, policies, and processes done right before you need them.
Fractional Leadership
Senior operations, HR, and IT judgment at a fraction of the cost of a full-time executive.
Why Phocion
12+ years of hands-on experience.
More than twelve years running the work itself, often several parts of it at once: people operations and HR compliance, IT administration and access, information and facility security, and operations leadership. You get advice from someone who has done the job.
One advisor across HR, IT, and security.
Hiring one person touches payroll, laptops, accounts, and building access. When three vendors each own a piece, things fall through the gaps, and the gaps are where expensive mistakes happen. Phocion owns the whole picture.
No commissions. Ever.
Phocion takes no commissions, referral fees, or reseller margins from any software, vendor, or auditor it recommends. Every recommendation is made for your benefit and no one else's.
Private by default.
Phocion collects only what the work requires and protects what it holds. This website doesn't use cookies or track you.
How working with Phocion works
- 1. Intro call. A free 20-minute conversation about what's going on. If Phocion isn't the right fit, you'll hear that plainly, often with a referral to someone who is.
- 2. Start small. A short discovery phase, billed hourly with a cap you approve, under a one-page engagement letter in plain language. Nothing starts until you sign.
- 3. A real plan. Discovery ends with a written assessment you keep and a proposal priced for the work: a fixed fee, a monthly arrangement, or continued hourly, whichever fits.
- 4. The work. Regular updates, itemized invoices, and documentation your team can use long after the engagement ends.
Every engagement is scoped in writing, with the rate and an estimate, before work begins. No surprise invoices.