Heads up: I'm not your typical HR person.
I'm Melissa Murphy. I built Corel Consulting because small businesses deserve HR that feels like a partner, not a policy manual.
A career in HR, three kids, and one company built from a blank page. Here's the whole thing.
Pick a time that works for you.
“Balancing empathy with accountability, so teams can thrive.”
— Melissa Murphy
Somewhere along the way, HR became the principal's office. It isn't. And it isn't a gold-star chart either. Good HR protects the organization and understands the people in it — and that balance is exactly what an outside partner can hold better than anyone sitting inside the org chart.
All slaps on the wrist
Policy as punishment. Compliant on paper, and quietly bleeding good people out the back door.
In the middle, on purpose
Neutral by design. We can lean into hard calls or into culture, because we're not beholden to either side of the table.
All gold-star charts
Culture with no guardrails. Everyone feels good until the day a decision has to hold up in writing.
Corel is my kids. That's not sentiment — that's the whole reason it works.
The name is my children's initials. Not a keepsake — a commitment. Winning at this was never about me. It's about the future I'm building for them, and the fact that quitting was never one of the options on the table.
I used to leave the name unexplained. Then I learned what those last two letters meant and it stopped being a coincidence. My faith is what carried me through the hardest stretches — the years I couldn't see how it would work out, the seasons I was holding up my family and this business at the same time. I didn't get through those on optimism. I got through them by refusing to give up.
Everything I put into this is meant to build something greater than me.
It's right there in the name. It always was.
My son taught me what resilience actually looks like.
Oliver coded in his first three hours of life. Sixteen surgeries before he was three months old. Ninety-nine days in the NICU — ECMO, a stroke, dialysis — lived minute by minute. He overcame every obstacle put in front of him.
He'll need lifelong intervention, and nurse visits, meds, and procedures are simply part of our rhythm now. But we are stable — a word that became our greatest blessing. He's the toughest person I know: playing baseball, running his own treatments, lighting up every room. His testimony became a big part of my why.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it I made him a promise: whatever it takes, I make this work. His care, his future, his sisters' future — that's what this company is for.
He's my miracle. He's my why.
I was six years old, drawing the office I'd run one day.
I told everyone I wanted to be a pediatrician. What I actually did was fill a notebook with the office — the floor plan, the room layout, the color-coded doors so the front desk knew exactly where to send each kid.
I liked the idea of helping people. What I didn't like was the science class that wanted me to dissect things. Turns out I could help people a completely different way — I never wanted to be the doctor, I wanted to build the practice. The system, the structure, the thing that makes the whole place run.
That's what I get to do now, over and over, for other people's businesses. Someone hands me a company that's grown faster than its processes, and I get to design it from the blank page.
"We really need structure. We need processes. We need infrastructure."
It's the first thing I hear from almost every founder who's never had HR. And it's the most fun call I take all week — because a blank slate isn't a problem to us. It's the whole reason we exist.
The original blueprints. Color-coded rooms and everything.
I'm a single parent raising three kids. So I figured — let's build a company too.
I started this company in the season when I was carrying all of it myself — three kids, one of them with lifelong medical needs, and a business to build. That stretch taught me that persistence isn't a personality trait. It's a skill you build because the alternative isn't available to you.
I'm not telling you this for grace. I'm telling you so you know who's sitting across the table. I'm highly independent, and if there isn't a way through I'll go find another one. I've built a strong support system around me, and I'm still the one accountable for all of it — the kids, the clients, the company. That's the same weight the founders I work with are carrying, which is exactly why we understand each other.
There's nothing a single parent can't figure out.
I want my kids to watch their mom build something — and make other workplaces better while she did it.
I show up as myself — goofy glasses, tattoos out. You get the same person on an easy Tuesday and on the day a hard decision has to be made.
In under two years we've built a full HR practice, a payroll platform, and a client roster that keeps growing. I'd rather talk about what's next.
A client's new hire asked us: "So how long have you worked here?"
We're their fractional HR partner. She assumed we were in-house — because we knew the team's names and their dogs' names, we knew the inside jokes, and we knew the real reason the last person left. Most of our clients' employees don't know we're a third party. That's not a trick. That's the entire point.
We don't go cold
Not a vendor who appears once a quarter with a report. Not a consultant who drops a 40-page playbook and disappears. We're in your Monday weekly and your all-hands, in your systems and your tools, executing daily.
Fully remote, fully embedded
The question we get most before someone signs is "how can you do this if you're not here?" We've built the processes to answer it. One client's honest words at ninety days: he wasn't expecting it to go that well.
We get small business
We're a small business too. So is half our team. We know what it means when one seat holds three jobs and HR is the hot potato passed to whoever has bandwidth this week.
Yes — our teams bring their dogs on the calls sometimes, so we get to meet them too.
I hired a room of experts.
I'm not the smartest person in the room, and I don't want to be. I built Corel with seasoned HR practitioners — decades of combined experience across compliance, benefits, payroll, talent, and employee relations — because a single point of view is exactly what gets small businesses in trouble.
Diversity of thought, on purpose
Different backgrounds, industries, and instincts at the same table. Recommendations get pressure-tested before they ever reach you.
Every voice contributes
Your dedicated HR manager owns the relationship, but hard calls get the whole team's read. Nobody on our side works a problem alone.
Neutrality you can't hire in-house
One internal HR person can't stay fully neutral — their paycheck rides on the same decisions. A team balances one another and names the blind spots.
The best answer in the room wins. It doesn't have to be mine.
Your admin isn't HR.
Your operations manager isn't HR.
And your payroll software definitely isn't HR.
To be fair: we do the admin. We post the jobs, process the paperwork, and run payroll when it needs running — because that work is what moves the strategy forward. Being in the day-to-day is how we stay proactive instead of reactive, and it's how a small business gets both at once. But the admin isn't what HR is.
If your HR still feels like paperwork, you're missing the point. It isn't more checklists. It's smarter people strategy, executed daily.
Aligning your people with where the business is actually going
Holding compliance and culture at the same time, without trading one for the other
Asking the hard questions leadership avoids — before they become expensive ones
Building infrastructure that holds when the team doubles
Giving your team back the seat HR was quietly borrowing, so they can go grow
Bring us your HR nightmare. We have truly heard it all.
The termination you've been putting off. The I-9s nobody can find. The handbook nobody has opened since 2019. The employee everyone is quietly complaining about. Whatever it is, we've handled a version of it before — and nothing you say is going to shock us.
Thirty minutes, no pitch deck, no judgment about the state of your files. We'll tell you straight whether we're the right fit.
No judgment. We've untangled worse.