One year of vmh partners

Exactly one year ago today, we founded the firm.

One year on

We started without knowing exactly how this first year would unfold. What we did learn quickly, though: entrepreneurship does not consist of a precise plan. It consists of many small and large decisions, of responsibility, of uncertainty, of setting priorities and adapting – and of the resilience to hold on to a goal, to work at it every day with heart, and to consciously celebrate the small successes too.

Looking back on this first year, there were many topics, many conversations and many situations in which we were able to talk with very different counterparts and experience HR from their respective perspectives. Three larger projects from our business unit vmh HR Advisory show particularly well which questions accompanied our work with organisations in that first year:

• Supporting the organisation-wide transformation of a hospitality and retail company, with the aim of redesigning collaboration, responsibilities and steering mechanisms and anchoring them for the long term.
• Interim HR management for a fashion retailer with more than 80 shops in Switzerland, focusing on the development of a salary tool compliant with collective agreements as well as the analysis, improvement and digitalisation of time management processes.
• Supporting an HR tool selection process for an IT services company, with the emphasis on HR processes, roles, interfaces and an implementation that works in practice, rather than purely on technical system requirements.

The common denominator: HR between aspiration and everyday reality

In practice these topics hang together far more closely than they are usually discussed, and they rarely answer just a single HR challenge.

Why do new structures often change less than expected? Why does HR stay tied up operationally, even though its strategic role was formulated long ago? Why do good concepts sometimes fail not because of the idea, but because of unclear responsibilities, a missing translation into day-to-day work, or processes that in the end create more loops than direction?

Yet the real value of HR lies not only in creating additional services, but in reducing avoidable costs: through lower turnover, digital end-to-end processes with the business, legally sound personnel administration, sensible decision-making paths, clean and complete employee data, and targeted management of capabilities on the basis of workforce planning.

Welcome to our newsletter

We have written about these and other topics here on LinkedIn over the past year, covering among other things HR operating models, AI in HR, workforce readiness, skills, payroll, collective agreement and minimum wage requirements, cross-border commuter questions and many issues that genuinely affect HR day to day and that regularly occupy the C-level.

After a year we no longer want to share these thoughts only now and then in individual posts, but to set them out more regularly and in a little more depth.

That is why today we are starting The HR Insight by vmh.

Once a month we write about topics that occupy our clients, about current developments and trends in the market, and about use cases from our projects. In doing so we look at HR challenges from different perspectives: from the C-level, from HR, from employees, and from the outside – for instance from applicants, other companies or developments in the market.

A look at a problem that led to an idea: collective agreement and minimum wage requirements – why we are working on a web app

We are glad to give you a preview of something we are already working on:

Out of one of our projects, in which we worked intensively on collective agreement and minimum wage requirements for companies in Switzerland, a new solution has emerged. We are currently developing a web app that supports HR functions in implementing collective agreement and minimum wage requirements simply and compliantly. Alongside the automatic creation of salary offers, the tool provides the minimum wages applicable in each region and thus supports safe and efficient salary processing.

⏳ More on this soon

And we keep growing: alongside vmh HR Advisory, in our second year we look forward to vmh Expansion Advisory

With this next big step we are launching the new business unit vmh Expansion Advisory in autumn 2026.

With it we broaden our advisory offering to include a field that is closely bound up with organisation, growth and the ability to deliver in many companies: entering new markets, building structures that hold, and the question of how expansion is not only planned strategically but implemented operationally.

For us this is an important step in the development of vmh partners. So alongside HR questions we will in future also look more closely at market, growth and expansion questions.

There will be a dedicated format for that too: The Market Insight by vmh. This newsletter is still to come and will deal specifically with topics around market entry, expansion, growth and international business development.

A look ahead to the next insights

Resignation during the probation period: why do employees leave companies within the first few weeks? Is it recruiting, onboarding, leadership, the wrong expectations – or the fact that organisations notice too late that role and reality do not match?

The HRBP myth: what actually is the famous HR business partner, and why does this role fall short of its aspiration in many companies? Is the HRBP a strategic sparring partner, an escalation point, an operational problem solver – or all of these at once?

Cost centre no. 1: why is HR still seen in many organisations as nothing but a cost centre, even though poor HR structures, unclear responsibilities and weak processes create very real costs elsewhere?

And perhaps the most important question: who actually is the right person to talk to when HR does not deliver the output the company needs? Is that an HR topic? Or is it in the end a CEO topic, because HR can only be as strong as it is positioned, enabled and held to account within the company?

Together with my team, I look forward to exploring many more questions in our second year, in person and in digital exchange.