Growing faster than you're designed for.
We help you make the difficult organizational calls — and stay to carry them out.
Roles that no longer fit. Decisions that bottleneck. A reorg that keeps waiting. A change that stalled again. UpSphere works with scaling companies on the specific problems growth creates — redesigning how work and operations run, and leading the change with you.
The problems we're brought in to solve.
Most clients don't come to us for "consulting." They come with one of these. If one sounds familiar, that's the conversation worth having.
Things that used to be simple aren't anymore.
Hiring, decisions, knowing who owns what — the basics have quietly become slow and effortful, and they're consuming your week.
A reorganization keeps getting postponed.
It involves people you genuinely care about, so it waits — while the cost of waiting compounds quietly.
Your first ops or HR hire is stretched past the role.
Not a failing on their part — the job outgrew the role, and important things are starting to slip through.
The plan assumes an organization that doesn't exist yet.
The commitments are made; the structure, roles, and processes to deliver them aren't built.
An important change has stalled more than once.
A new operating model, new systems — announced, started, and quietly reverted to the old way.
People you can't afford to lose are leaving.
Each regretted exit is a hiring bill, a knowledge gap, and a signal to everyone who stays.
The work behind each issue.
Five practice areas, one method — strategy and execution together, designed and implemented with your team rather than handed over.
Work & Organization Design
Redesign roles, reporting lines, teams, and operating models so the organization fits the next stage instead of straining against the last one.
Operational Scaling & People Infrastructure
Stand up the systems, processes, and workflows that let a lean team run like a much larger one — reducing risk and freeing leadership time.
Transformation & Change Enablement
Lead your organization through reorgs, new operating models, and new technology so the change lands and holds. Not a tool vendor — we redesign how work runs as technology shifts, and bring your people with it.
People Strategy & Org Effectiveness
Align structure, roles, and priorities to where the business is heading, turning ambition into an operating model that delivers.
Leadership Development & Coaching
Build the management layer scaling depends on, so performance, retention, and decision speed improve where it shows up in the business.
Senior, hands-on, and accountable from start to finish.
Every engagement begins with a diagnostic and ends with something your team runs without us. You work directly with the principal throughout — through design, implementation, and the adjustments in between. The method is the same on every engagement; that repeatability is part of the proof.
Diagnose
Find the real constraint on scaling — in the data, not the noise.
Design
Redesign the roles, structure, and operating model to fix it.
Build
Stand up the systems, processes, and infrastructure to support it.
Embed
Lead the change so it holds — capability transferred to your team.
Measure
Track the metric we agreed on, and show the work paid back.
People and operations are where scale is won or lost.
Every engagement is built to move a specific business metric — chosen with you before we start, and tracked to the end.
We agree the target up front — then measure and report against it.
Good plans have never been easier to get.
AI can produce a credible org chart or change plan in minutes — and we use those tools ourselves. In our experience, though, the plan was rarely what determined whether a transformation succeeded.
Judgment
Sound decisions that weigh your cash position, your people, and your culture — with a senior professional standing behind the recommendation.
Presence
Someone senior staying through implementation — the difficult conversations, the mid-course adjustments when the plan meets reality.
Accountability
A metric agreed before work begins, written into the engagement letter, and reported against. Results your team keeps after we leave.
How ready is your organization to grow?
A two-minute diagnostic across the six things that decide whether growth goes smoothly or gets expensive — direction, structure, process, infrastructure, change capacity, and planning. See your result instantly; no email required.
Prefer to talk it through? Bring your result to a complimentary 30-minute working session — you'll leave with one clear next step. Or leave your email and we'll reach out to schedule.
Where UpSphere fits.
A focused practice built on one thing: designing how work runs, and leading organizations through the change.
Design and operations, not handbooks
We do work and org design, operational scaling, and change execution — the strategic, business-facing side of people, not compliance paperwork.
Senior, boutique, and hands-on
You get a seasoned practitioner who executes the change alongside you — not a strategy deck handed off to a junior team.
The layer that lasts
Software and AI can produce the plan; our work is how the organization is structured and how people adapt — the part that determines whether the plan takes hold.
Five things every engagement runs on.
Business-first
People decisions serve the business, not the other way around.
Evidence over opinion
We measure, then decide — assumptions get tested.
Capability transfer
We build you to run without us. That's the point.
Straight talk
Honest counsel, even when it's not what you hoped to hear.
People are the point
Dignity and performance aren't a trade-off.
Kaelina Dargis
Kaelina has spent nearly 15 years designing and running people operations and transformation at enterprise scale — director-level operations at large energy companies, leading org and systems change, from HRIS and payroll to operating-model redesign, that had to work on day one. She trained through Wharton's CHRO Program and holds the SHRM-SCP and PROSCI change-management certifications. The through-line: designing how work runs, and leading organizations through change — now brought to scaling companies at their stage.
Tell us the issue you're facing.
Describe it plainly — a reorg that keeps waiting, a first ops hire who's stretched thin, a change that stalled again. We'll come back with a straight read on how we'd approach it. No obligation.