HR for Small Business: The Owner's Playbook to Hire, Onboard, Manage, and Fire Employees Without an Department

Nobody told you that you're the HR department. But you are, and you have been since your first hire.Every job posting written at 10pm. Every PTO dispute, payroll question, and no-show Monday. Every hard conversation you've been putting off. In a small business, it all lands on the owner's desk, without training, without a system, and at a cost most owners have never actually calculated.David Lentz has calculated it. An accountant by training and an operator by trade, he runs HR decisions every week across a group of trades companies, and sees the restaurant and brewery side through the bookkeeping firm he built serving hospitality clients. HR for Small Business lays out the complete people system for owners with no HR department, built from real hires, real terminations, real payroll mistakes, and real dollar figures, including the one week when seven accepted job offers produced a ghost, a liar, and a three-thousand-dollar insurance surprise.Inside the playbook: - What an employee actually costs you, and what a bad hire and an empty seat cost more- A hiring system that catches problems at the cheap stage: scorecards, structured interviews, skills verification, and the pre-offer checks most owners learn about the expensive way- Onboarding that wins the first 90 days, where retention is actually decided- The short employee handbook you'll actually use, and the enforcement test that keeps it honest- Reviews, raises, and discipline without drama, backed by raise math your P&L can defend- Firing clean: the decision, the checklist, the ten-minute meeting, and what never to say- The 20 percent of compliance where small businesses actually get killed- A 90-day plan to build the whole system, and hand it to someone who isn't youWritten for owners in any industry, with its deepest examples from the trades, restaurants, and breweries, this is HR the way an operator would build it: documented once, delegated deliberately, and measured in the hours it hands back.Stop improvising. Build the system once.