People & HR

How to set compensation bands as Professional Services Founders

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're setting comp bands for a 12-person consultancy without a Head of People, an HR system, or a salary benchmarking budget. You pull numbers from Levels.fyi in one tab, a comp survey PDF your accountant forwarded in another, and your Paylocity or ADP payroll export in a third. You don't know if your senior consultant is paid 15% below market or 5% above because you've never had time to build a defensible framework. Retaining the people you've trained is existential — losing one senior is losing $300K in billable capacity — but you're also watching margin per project every week and can't afford to over-correct blindly.

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People & HRFor Professional Services Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A compensation band model that maps every role in your firm (associate, consultant, senior, principal, director) to a salary range anchored to external benchmarks and your actual payroll data from Paylocity or ADP

A live dashboard showing where each employee sits within their band, how headcount costs map against your quarterly budget, and what a 5% raise cycle would do to your utilization-adjusted margin

A scenario model that stress-tests a planned hire or a round of raises against your current Stripe revenue and Plaid cash position — so you know whether the band is fundable before you promise anything

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Budgeting Scenario Analysis Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your ADP payroll data on a schedule (employees, pay statements, org units) and your Plaid transaction and balance data on a schedule. Connect Stripe from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your scenario models run. Connect QuickBooks or Xero from Starch's integration catalog for invoice and bill history if you want to layer in project-level margin data. Public salary benchmark sites (Levels.fyi, Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment tables, any paywalled survey PDF you upload) are reachable through browser automation — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a compensation band dashboard for a 12-person professional services firm. Pull our actual salary and headcount data from ADP. Create bands for five levels: associate, consultant, senior consultant, principal, and director. For each level, show the band floor, midpoint, and ceiling, where each current employee sits as a percentile within their band, and total annual cost at the midpoint. Let me toggle between billable and non-billable roles.

Create a scenario that shows what happens to our runway and monthly burn if I move everyone currently below the band midpoint up to midpoint. Pull our current cash position from Plaid and monthly revenue from Stripe. Show me break-even impact and how many months of runway we lose.

Create a compensation policy page in our Knowledge Management wiki. It should document our five-level band structure with ranges, our philosophy on where we target candidates relative to the band (50th percentile on hire, review annually), and our raise cycle cadence. Make it something a new hire can read on day one without asking me to explain it.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect ADP or Paylocity as a scheduled-sync source. Starch pulls your current employee roster, titles, pay statements, and org structure automatically — this becomes the ground truth for where every person sits today.

2 Pull public benchmark data. Tell Starch to automate your browser to pull occupational wage data from the BLS OES tables or Levels.fyi for your relevant roles — management consulting, IT consulting, financial services — so your bands are anchored to external market rates, not just internal gut feel.

3 Define your five levels in plain language. Type your role ladder into Starch (associate through director, or whatever your firm uses) and describe how you think about each level: years of experience, billable rate range, client-facing responsibility. Starch maps your ADP titles to these levels.

4 Build the band structure. Tell Starch: 'Set band floors at the 40th percentile of market, midpoints at the 60th, and ceilings at the 80th for each level, using the benchmark data we pulled.' Starch generates the ranges and overlays your actual ADP salaries on top so you can see every outlier immediately.

5 Open the Budgeting app and wire in your headcount costs. Connect QuickBooks or Xero from Starch's integration catalog so total compensation expenses are visible against your quarterly budget. You'll see how your current payroll sits relative to your plan — and where a raise cycle breaks the budget line.

6 Run a raise-cycle scenario in Scenario Analysis. Tell Starch to model what happens if everyone below midpoint moves to midpoint. It pulls your Plaid cash balance and Stripe MRR to calculate runway impact, burn rate change, and the month you'd need revenue to hit to absorb the cost.

7 Run a new-hire scenario. Add a planned senior consultant hire at the band midpoint and tell Starch to show you the utilization rate you'd need that person to hit to be margin-neutral within 90 days, based on your current average bill rate.

8 Identify compression risks. Ask Starch: 'Show me any associate or consultant whose salary is within 10% of the band floor for the level above them.' These are your flight risks — people whose comp hasn't kept pace with their effective scope.

9 Document the framework in Knowledge Management. Publish your band table, the philosophy behind it (market positioning, percentile targets, review cadence), and the escalation path for exceptions. This stops every comp conversation from becoming a negotiation with you as the only point of reference.

10 Set a recurring review. Tell Starch to flag you every January when ADP shows a pay statement cycle starting, so you review bands against updated benchmark data before raise letters go out — not after someone gives notice.

11 Export the output. Pull a clean summary of the band structure and each employee's position within it into a format you can share with your accountant or bring into a board conversation about headcount planning.

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Worked example

Q2 2026 Comp Review — Ardent Advisory Group (12 people)

Sample numbers from a real run

Associates (2) — current avg salary	72,000
Consultants (4) — current avg salary	95,000
Senior Consultants (3) — current avg salary	128,000
Principals (2) — current avg salary	158,000
Director (1) — current salary	195,000
Total current annual payroll	1,387,000
Cost to move all below-midpoint to midpoint	54,000
Projected annual payroll post-adjustment	1,441,000

Ardent Advisory is an 12-person strategy consultancy. The founder connects ADP as a scheduled-sync source and asks Starch to pull BLS OES data for 'management analysts' in their metro via browser automation. Starch sets band midpoints at the 60th percentile: Associates $76K, Consultants $101K, Seniors $134K, Principals $163K, Director $198K. Overlaying the ADP actuals reveals that two of the four consultants are sitting below $93K — under the band floor — and one senior consultant at $122K is within 8% of the consultant band ceiling (a compression flag). Running the midpoint-adjustment scenario in Scenario Analysis shows the $54K annual cost increase reduces runway by 1.1 months on current Plaid cash of $410K and Stripe MRR of $187K. The founder decides to move the two below-floor consultants immediately ($18K total) and schedule the senior compression fix for the next quarter when two retainer renewals are expected to close. The entire band structure and the decision logic get published to Knowledge Management so that the next time a consultant asks 'where am I in the band,' the answer is a link, not a 30-minute call.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Band penetration rate — percentage of employees at or above their level's midpoint

Payroll as a percentage of gross revenue (target band: 45–55% for a professional services firm at this size)

Compression ratio — number of employees within 10% of the ceiling for the level below them (flight risk indicator)

Runway impact of next raise cycle in months, calculated against current cash and MRR

Average bill rate per level versus average fully-loaded cost per level (margin by seniority)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Levels.fyi / Glassdoor + manual spreadsheet

Benchmark data is free but you're copying numbers by hand and the model lives in a spreadsheet that's stale the moment you close it — no connection to your actual ADP payroll or cash position.

Carta Total Comp or Radford surveys

Credible market data for VC-backed startups, but the pricing and persona skew toward tech companies with equity comp — less useful for a fee-for-service consultancy benchmarking against Big 4 feeder roles.

Rippling or Gusto (built-in comp bands)

Comp band tooling requires you to migrate your HR system to their platform; if you're already on ADP or Paylocity and don't want to switch, you're paying twice for overlapping functionality.

Kantata / Projector PSA

Includes headcount planning but is priced and architected for 100+ person firms; a 12-person consultancy will spend more time on implementation than the tool saves in the first year.

Notion or Confluence comp band doc

Good for documenting a band structure you've already built, but does nothing to connect that structure to live payroll data, cash position, or raise-cycle scenarios — you're still doing the math manually.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — quarterly budgeting, scenario planning, knowledge management all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch pull my actual employee salaries from ADP or Paylocity, or do I have to enter them manually?

Starch syncs your ADP or Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, pay statements, and org units. Your current salaries come in automatically. You don't enter anything by hand; you just tell Starch how to use the data it already has.

Where does the benchmark data come from? I don't have a subscription to Mercer or Radford.

Starch can automate your browser to pull publicly available benchmark data — BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, publicly accessible comp aggregators, or any page you can navigate to yourself. If you have a PDF from a comp survey your accountant or industry association sent you, you can upload it and Starch will extract the relevant ranges. No API needed for any of this.

I use QuickBooks, not ADP. Can I still build a payroll cost model?

Yes. Connect QuickBooks from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries your bills, vendor payments, and journal entries live. You won't get the employee-level roster detail that ADP or Paylocity provide, but you can build a cost-by-category model using your payroll expense line. If you're on Gusto or Rippling, those are reachable through browser automation if a direct integration isn't available.

Is this the right tool if I also need help with equity comp or option grants?

Starch is well-suited for cash compensation bands and the financial modeling around them. If equity comp — option pool sizing, strike prices, vesting schedule modeling — is a core part of what you need to set, you'd want a cap table tool like Carta alongside it. Starch can connect to or automate tools in your stack, but it's not a cap table system.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm dealing with salary data for my whole team.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your clients or your own internal policies require certified data handling for HR data, that's worth factoring in. It's on the roadmap. For a founder-run firm managing your own team's data, most operators make that call themselves.

Can I share the band structure with my team without showing everyone each other's salaries?

Yes. The Knowledge Management app lets you publish the band ranges and policy — what each level means, where the firm targets candidates relative to the midpoint, how the review cycle works — without exposing individual pay data. Individual salary positions stay in the dashboard you control.

How often should I update the bands?

Most professional services firms at this size review bands once a year, usually Q4 before raise season. Starch can remind you when ADP shows a new payroll cycle starting, and re-pulling updated benchmark data takes minutes rather than a research project — so there's no reason to let it go stale for more than a year.