Need HR advice but don't have HR? The cheap stack for small business

Most small-business owners hit the same wall around 8-15 employees. The CFO is doing the payroll. The owner is doing the contracts. Someone googled their last warning letter at midnight. There's no HR person. There's no real HR system. And there's a vague unease that something will eventually blow up.

The trap is thinking the only options are hire a $120k HR generalist or keep winging it. Neither of those is the answer. Here's the stack that actually works for 5-50 staff.

Run every basic compliance check via free calculators. You don't need a consultant for this:

• Award Finder — which Modern Award covers each role
• Industry pay rate guides — base + casual + penalty rates per award, updated 1 July annually
• Redundancy Pay Calculator — NES weeks by service
• Notice Period Calculator — minimum notice on termination
• Superannuation Calculator — current 12% SG rate
• Leave Entitlements Calculator — annual + personal + LSL by state
• Payslip Compliance Checker — what must legally appear on a payslip

If you can run these for every role, you've covered ~60% of where small businesses actually fall over.

For the questions that don't have a calculator answer — "is this reasonable additional hours?", "can we make redundancies after hiring contractors?", "what's a defensible response to this casual conversion request?" — you need research, not a number.

This is where FairWork Mate AI for Business sits. $499/mo, 300 questions, employer-framed answers, document upload, every answer cites the specific FWC decision or section of the Fair Work Act.

One AI subscription replaces the first-line research that most small businesses pay a fractional HR consultant $2,500-$4,000/mo to do. The math is one-sided.

For everything written, use a defensible template rather than starting from scratch:

• Redundancy Notice
• Warning Letter (first/second/final)
• Casual Conversion Offer
• Casual Conversion Request
• Underpayment Enquiry Letter
• Bargaining NERR Notice

Each generates a Fair Work Act-compliant PDF in under five minutes. Lawpath and similar gate this content behind $79/mo subscriptions; we don't.

For the moments where you need a human — performance management conversations, dismissal investigations, complex disputes, restructure planning — buy hourly from an HR consultant on a pay-per-incident basis.

Australian HR consultants charge $150-$350/hr. A typical incident is 8-15 hours of consultant time. Budget $5,000-$10,000/year for 1-3 incidents. You won't use them every month — that's the point.

This is half the cost of a fractional retainer that pays for time whether you use it or not.

For anything that's heading to the Fair Work Commission — unfair dismissal claim filed against you, general protections action, EBA negotiation, complex contract drafting — go straight to a workplace lawyer.

Workplace lawyers charge $300-$500/hr. Most disputes resolve in 5-15 hours of advice. You don't need a retainer; you need a relationship with one firm so they can step in fast when needed.

Most small businesses go years without using their lawyer. That's correct. The lawyer is the safety net, not the day-to-day.

For a 10-30-staff business with no full-time HR:

• Calculators + templates: $0
• FairWork Mate AI for Business: $5,988/year ($499 × 12)
• HR consultant on call: $5,000-$10,000/year
• Workplace lawyer (rare): $2,000-$5,000/year average
• Payroll software (Xero, MYOB, Employment Hero): $3,000-$6,000/year

Total: $16,000-$27,000/year for a fully-functional HR-equivalent capability.

Compare: a fractional HR retainer alone is $30-72K/year, and a full-time HR generalist is $100-170K loaded.

It works up to about 50 staff. After that, you need someone whose full-time job is HR — recruitment cadence, performance frameworks, retention, culture, succession planning. AI doesn't replace a Head of People at scale; it replaces fragmented compliance and research at small scale.

If you're 5-50 staff and reading this, the stack above is probably what you should be running.