The Fractional Desk

Tools for people who left the org chart.

Practical material for independent HR and People executives — the transition playbook, three prompt libraries, and ready-made Claude Projects. Everything is a download. Nothing is a course, a subscription, or a webinar.

Created by Trellis Usher — author of WORK. REWRITTEN. and the HR. REWRITTEN. field guide. Twenty-five years inside enterprise HR, and years outside it doing this the hard way.
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Field guide · 15 pages

The First 90 Days Solo

What to do, in what order, when the structure that carried you for twenty-five years is suddenly gone.
$27
PDF · instant download
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What's inside

  • What to do while you still have a paycheck — including the clauses that bite HR people hardest
  • Days 1–30: entity, money architecture, the insurance you now buy yourself
  • Days 31–60: why your network is full of people who can't hire you, and the four buyers who can
  • Days 61–90: first revenue, scoping, and the recruiting trap
  • The things nobody tells you — identity, the empty calendar, why month four is the hard one
  • A working 90-day checklist

Who it's for

  • Senior HR and People leaders who have just gone independent, or are about to
  • Anyone six months in and wondering why it feels harder than expected

Not for you if you want motivation. This is administrative, sequenced, and occasionally uncomfortable.

Prompt library · 10 prompts + guide

The Solo Consultant's AI Stack

Ten prompts covering the actual work of a practice — from the first call to the follow-up that wins the second engagement.
$37
ZIP · PDF + text files
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What's inside

  • Discovery call prep, scoping a vague request, proposal drafting
  • Findings synthesis, recommendation sequencing, the executive summary
  • Pricing rationale, delivering the uncomfortable finding, workshop design
  • Turning client work into publishable thinking — with a disclosure check
  • A 6-page guide on the guardrails: what never goes into a model when you work with people data

Who it's for

  • Independent HR advisors who want a better first draft, not a replacement for judgment
  • Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — nothing is model-specific

Not for you if you want two hundred prompts. This is ten, built around the jobs that actually recur.

Prompt library · 7 prompts + guide

The Deliverable Accelerator

For the artifacts clients actually pay for — and the review pass that stops them ever seeing a first draft.
$47
ZIP · PDF + text files
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What's inside

  • Board deck structure — headlines as assertions, not topic labels
  • Findings report, one-page executive brief, options analysis
  • Risk register, and the single slide that carries the recommendation
  • The review pass — arguably worth the price on its own
  • A house standard: every recommendation names a decision and an owner; every number carries a fidelity

Who it's for

  • Anyone producing board-level or executive deliverables alone, without an editor
  • Consultants who suspect their AI-drafted work reads like AI-drafted work

Not for you if you want templates to fill in. These produce arguments, not formats.

Configurations · 6 projects + guide

Claude Projects for Consultants

Stop re-explaining your practice every morning. Six ready-made project configurations, set up once.
$47
ZIP · PDF + config files
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What's inside

  • Per-client engagement project — one per active client, archived at the end
  • Business development, deliverable production, thought leadership
  • Practice operations, and a research desk with strict labelling rules
  • Each one instructs the model to push back rather than agree — and to flag when you're about to quote below your floor
  • Confidentiality guardrails built into the configuration, not left to memory

Who it's for

  • Claude users who want infrastructure rather than one-off prompts
  • Ten minutes of setup each; five are permanent

Not for you if you don't use Claude. The configurations are specific to Projects.

Prompt library · 6 sequences + guide

The Research Co-Pilot

Pre-meeting intelligence, without the confident errors. Six research sequences and a verification pass.
$29
ZIP · PDF + text files
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What's inside

  • Company brief before a first conversation, with every claim labelled by confidence
  • Sector pressure scan — economics, labour picture, and the vocabulary insiders use
  • Stakeholder map, reasoned from role and incentive
  • Reading public filings for workforce signal
  • A verification pass that splits output into "safe to use" and "verify first"

Who it's for

  • Anyone walking into a room where a wrong number is expensive
  • Independents who lost their research function and haven't replaced it

Not for you if you want the model to do the thinking. This is built to stop it inventing things.

The Independent Practice Bundle

All five. The transition playbook, three prompt libraries, and the Claude Project configurations — everything on this page, in one download.

$187 separately
$127
Save $60
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Before you buy

Three things worth knowing.

These are files, not courses

You buy, you download, you own it. No login, no drip, no community, no upsell sequence pretending to be a curriculum.

Written for HR specifically

Not generic consulting advice with the word "talent" inserted. The examples, the guardrails, and the buyer problems are the ones People executives actually hit.

Refunds, no argument

If something isn't useful, reply to your receipt within 30 days and I'll refund it. You keep the files — chasing them back would cost more than the refund.

Not sure where to start?

Try the free rate calculator first. It takes two minutes, it will probably tell you you're underpricing, and it's the fastest way to see whether this material is written the way you think.