CUSTOMER STORY
With Charlie’s HR Advice, you get on-demand support from a qualified HR advisor to help you build your company’s HR processes and policies.
By using Charlie, Fiit were able to scale their business from 14 to 62 people in three years, building a high performing and engaged team.
Fitness tech
London, UK
Fiit was founded in 2017 by three friends with a vision to make exercise a habit for everyone.
With access to more than 650 classes by 30 of the best trainers in the UK, users can track calories, heart rate and more via the Fiit wearable device and connect to a growing community of fitness enthusiasts.
When you’re starting a business, it’s hard to know how to build and scale a team to support fast and steady growth.
“When we first launched, back in 2017, we were trying to figure out what to focus on from a People perspective,” says Ben Wharfe, Chief People Officer at Fiit.
One of the biggest challenges for small business founders is that they need to grow their team, fast — but they don’t have all the people frameworks set up to build and develop a team, as they would in a large and established company.
“In a startup, there's always this constant challenge of having to run your People operations at the same time as building them from the ground up. You have to bring people into the business, get them operational and performing well, get them enjoying coming to work and what they're doing — all this while also figuring out what order to build things in.”
That’s where Charlie came in to support Fiit growing their team:
Read on to find out how Charlie helped Fiit set up their people processes, codify their culture and grow their team.
dedicated HR advisor assigned to your company
live on-demand chat support
a month
With Charlie’s HR Advice, Ben got access to a personal HR advisor to help him set up all of the policies and frameworks they required to be compliant:
All the time Ben saved thanks to HR Advice was time he invested in making Fiit a great place to work. It was like having an extra member of the team — someone he could trust, and with a breadth of HR experience:
“Being able to take something from a partner that you can trust, and knowing that it’s going to be correct and you’re going to follow the right processes, that’s really important.”
If you don’t have an HR background and your business is too small to have an HR team — that’s when you run the risk of making the wrong decisions.
Being able to rely on Charlie’s HR advisors gave Ben the peace of mind of always knowing what to do — both from a human and a legal point of view:
“When we found ourselves in difficult situations, we were able to reach out to the HR Advice team to understand what we needed to do to treat people fairly, and also to be compliant with rules and regulations. We felt reassured we were doing the right thing, the right way.”
Because of their size, Fiit is not planning on having a large HR team anytime soon. Ben explains:
“With HR Advice, it’s like having an extra member on your team. You have that kind of expertise you can lean on and tap into whenever you need it, without needing to hire someone in the business.”
When choosing who to help him scale their business, Ben wanted someone who knew their challenges, who could keep their pace — someone who understood where he was coming from and where he was going:
The team at Fiit are constantly focused on improving their product, on having a positive impact on their customers. In a similar way, Charlie is pushing the boundaries of what making work better for small companies means:
“I think Charlie is really starting to push the envelope, they listen to our feedback and release new features all the time. It’s very important for us to share that vision.”
