Two HR leaders explain why moving from large corporations to smaller business reshaped their approach to people strategy
Moving from an institution with tens of thousands of staff to a business where every decision is felt immediately changes how HR leaders measure their own impact. That is the experience of two people and culture executives who made that shift: Anne Bastian, chief people officer at Liberty Financial and Daniela Kotevski, head of people and culture at TMRW Music Group.
Both left large institutional employers to help build HR functions inside leaner organisations, and both say the trade-off between resources and influence defines what it means to lead people strategy in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
That trade-off plays out across small business workforces everywhere. In Australia, where both executives are based, small businesses employed more than five million people, 42 per cent of the private sector workforce, according to the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman (ASBFEO).
From banking floor to lean team
Bastian has been with Liberty Financial for 25 years a specialist lender now marking 29 years in business. Before that, she worked in HR at ANZ.
"Being the size of that company, you never really know your value and your contribution," she said of her time at ANZ. "There's no real immediacy of awareness to your impact and influence, both in the HR space and with the business partners and stakeholders you're talking to."
She said joining Liberty, then still a startup lender, offered a different rhythm. "It was very startup mode, but it kind of made sense to me – a startup business rather than an ingrained hundred-year history," she said. "It still felt very startup and has always maintained this active learning, active cycle of cadence, of agility."
For Bastian, the clearest difference is proximity to outcomes. "If things aren't working well with your internal teams, then your customers are impacted by that – so you feel closer to the end person," she said. "Chatting to one individual in a smaller company can have a massive impact, because you're impacting one of few rather than one of tens of thousands."
That closeness cuts both ways, she added, describing small business culture as a "pack" rather than a collection of silos. "You need everybody aligned, everybody calibrated, everybody working out that they can impact and influence other parts, not just their own silo," she said. "You don't work in a silo mentality in small business."
Same outcomes, smaller budgets
Kotevski's career has run largely in the other direction – deliberately. After roles at large employers including Transfield Services (now Ventia) and Qudos Bank, she has spent most of the past decade building HR functions from the ground up at smaller organisations, including Fitness Passport, where she helped take the workplace wellbeing provider through a private equity acquisition and from 30 to 120 employees within 12 months.
She joined TMRW Music Group – the promoter and label group formerly known as Ministry of Sound Australia – as its first dedicated HR leader. "The key difference I've noticed is obviously budgets," she said. "Small organisations have much smaller budgets. However, you are expected to get the same outcomes."
Kotevski said the scale of a business does not necessarily determine how strategic the HR role is. "You'd think because it's a smaller organisation it's very operational, but it's actually quite the opposite – it is a very strategic role," she said. "I'm on the leadership team, I attend all the leadership meetings, and my input is valued. But the budgets are quite lean when it comes to HR. We have to be very creative as leaders in SMEs to try and get the same outcomes but on much smaller budgets."
The role also demands range that larger organisations tend to divide across teams. "You're the touch point for every single function within the HR space," she said. "You're essentially responsible for everything that goes well and everything that doesn't go well."
Building culture from scratch
Both leaders pointed to culture-building as the area where small business HR offers a rare opportunity: shaping an organisation's foundations rather than administering ones already set. Kotevski said one of the most rewarding parts of her roles at smaller companies has been working directly with chief executives to define mission, purpose and values from the ground up – something HR leaders inside large, established organisations rarely get to do.
At TMRW Music Group, that meant adapting corporate HR language to a creative, fast-moving industry. "Being in the music industry, I really had to learn the language of the people who work there and how they present themselves in meetings," she said. "It's very different to being in corporate." She said the resulting values framework has since been reflected in improved engagement survey results.
Kotevski also pointed to a gap in professional support for HR leaders operating alone or in small teams. Speaking earlier this year at a New South Wales HR leadership forum on risk in SMEs, she said she was struck by the response.
"I got a lot of messages from other HR leaders within SMEs who highlighted that there wasn't enough representation," she said, adding that most industry conferences and summits target large corporates rather than the SME cohort.
For Bastian, the reward is less about individual recognition and more about visibility of consequence – seeing directly how HR decisions ripple through a workforce and, ultimately, to customers. Neither leader described one model as superior; rather, both suggested the right environment depends on what an individual HR professional values most, whether that is scale of influence or scale of resources.
As HR leaders everywhere increasingly move between large institutions and smaller, founder-led businesses, Bastian and Kotevski's experiences point to a broader industry conversation about what "strategic HR" looks like when there is no large team, and no established playbook, to fall back on.
That conversation is playing out well beyond finance and music: HRD's own reporting has tracked how solo/small-team HR leadership at lean, mission-driven employers, while leadership highlights how HR impact is increasingly judged on commercial outcomes rather than headcount.
