How Felicia Heward Built Lake Effect HR Consulting, a Pay-As-You-Need HR Practice for Growing Businesses

Most HR consultants sell hours. Felicia Heward sells judgment. The difference shows up in who hires her, why they call, and what they walk away with.

Felicia Heward is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Lake Effect HR Consulting, a pay-as-you-need HR practice built for growing businesses that occasionally need an experienced HR partner rather than a full-time hire. When a critical project surfaces, an employee issue gets complicated, or a leadership team needs fractional HR support, Felicia steps in.

"I'm the People Problem Solver, and I'm passionate about helping business leaders achieve their growth goals by creating workplaces where people thrive and work is aligned and inspired by the organization's purpose and strategy."

That positioning did not arrive on day one. It is the result of a pivot, a few too many calls about payroll, and a clear-eyed look at what Felicia is actually built to do.

The First Version of the Business, and the Pivot

When Felicia first launched Lake Effect, she imagined the business as an HR "bouquet," taking on whatever HR tasks her local West Michigan community needed. The market had other ideas.

"I quickly realized that the depth of my HR experience didn't align with how many local small business owners viewed the function of HR," she says.

The tell was the calls. One too many of them were asking her to process payroll, work she could do but knew was not where she added the most value. So she pivoted.

She leaned into her established strength, solving employee issues, and rebuilt the marketing around that single thread. The repositioning did two things at once. It clarified who Lake Effect was for, and it freed Felicia to serve clients well beyond West Michigan. She now works with US-based fast-growth companies who need her brand of HR for their remote teams.

The Background That Earned the Pivot

Felicia did not build that judgment overnight. She built it inside the new product and fast-growth teams of multiple Fortune 100 companies in aviation and manufacturing, then carried that experience into the startup world when she joined Tesla.

That trajectory matters. The pattern she developed across F100 environments was not generic HR. It was HR for organizations that were moving fast, hiring quickly, and dealing with employee situations under pressure. By the time she walked into the startup world, she had already practiced the muscle a smaller, less resourced company is most likely to need on short notice.

When growing businesses now hire her, they are getting an HR partner who has seen the same problem at three different scales.

Why She Took the Leap

For years, Felicia joked with colleagues that she might one day become a consultant. There were a lot of consultants in F100 environments. She just did not think she would have the courage to set up her own business someday.

The leap happened when something else pulled harder.

"I stepped away from in-house HR when I needed more flexibility in my career and life, to care for my elderly parents and to be more present with my husband and three children," she says.

Turning her HR expertise into a consulting business gave her that flexibility. It also did something she did not fully expect. It deepened her ability to support founders.

"I now understand the full weight of starting and running a business," she says, "including the roles that fall outside my HR background, because I've lived them too."

The consultant her clients call today is not just an HR expert. She is a founder who happens to be one.

Who Lake Effect Serves

Felicia is specific about who Lake Effect is for. Her clients are growing businesses, especially companies at Series B and Series C, where headcount is climbing, complexity is climbing faster, and the founders need an experienced HR voice in the room without committing to a full-time hire.

The pay-as-you-need model matches the way those companies actually consume HR. A critical project. An employee situation. A leadership transition. A fractional HR seat at the table until the company is ready to bring the function in-house.

That structure means a client can use Felicia heavily for two months, pause, and come back six months later when the next thing surfaces. The continuity of having one HR partner who already knows the business is the value, not the contract hours.

The Accomplishment That Means the Most

Ask Felicia about her proudest accomplishment in the business and she does not point to a client win or a revenue number.

"I am most proud of making the time, space, and financial sacrifices needed to invest in my personal development as a founder so I could establish my own HR consulting business," she says, "and in doing so be a role model to my daughter as a female founder."

That answer is consistent with everything else about how Felicia is building this business. The work is the work, but the why under it is bigger than the work.

A Global Audience and a Book in Progress

A recent professional win has stayed with her. Felicia was invited as a guest on a global podcast hosted by Teamflect, the performance management and employee engagement platform. The audience was HR professionals and people managers around the world.

"It was an honor to be recognized globally as an employee relations expert, and incredibly fun to teach others through my real-life HR experiences," she says.

The podcast appearance is part of a larger arc. Felicia began her journey as an author this year, publishing her first online article and working toward a book within the next twelve months. The throughline is the same as the consulting business. She has a body of HR stories worth telling, and she is finding more platforms to tell them on.

The Interview Question That Surfaces What Matters

When Felicia is hiring, she leads with a question that does double duty.

"If I could craft the perfect job for you here, what would you own and do every day because it energizes you, and on the flip side what work would you cringe at when asked to help with?"

She is not just asking about preferences. She is asking the candidate to be honest about energy. The answer reveals whether someone has done the self-knowledge work to articulate what they want to do versus what they think they should say.

For an HR consultant, that filter is the work itself.

The Tools That Run the Practice

Felicia runs Lake Effect on a deliberately small stack.

Her calendar is the thing she cannot live without. As a consultant juggling client work, family responsibilities, and her own development, the calendar is the operating system underneath everything else.

Canva is her favorite business tool, partly because it is easy to use and partly because she can apply it across so many parts of the business. For a consulting practice that lives or dies on clear visual communication, that range matters.

Her Approach to a Workday That Is Never the Same Twice

Felicia's relationship with work-life balance is honest in a way that is unusual to hear from a consultant.

"Every day I have a different plan and expectation for how much energy I will be putting into working and how much I will have saved for my life roles, mother, wife, daughter of an elderly mother who has dementia," she says. "I base this on what I know needs to happen that day and what I want to have time for."

She has learned that she cannot have a set amount of time for work, no fixed forty or eighty hour week. Instead, she sets an expectation and a goal, and stays flexible when life intervenes.

"I've taken ownership of what a workday looks and feels like, and am at peace when life has other plans," she says.

That sentence, taken seriously, is also her HR philosophy. The way you protect your own time is the way you teach a team to protect theirs.

The Community She Wishes She'd Found Sooner

Felicia is direct about a regret.

"I wish I had known about this community sooner," she says of Entreprenista. "I would have loved to have access to this bench of experts and advice during my first six months as a founder. I would have struggled less and been more impactful for my business sooner with this type of community cheering me on from the starting line."

For an HR consultant whose entire business model rests on people knowing where to find experienced support, that comment lands with extra weight. A community of women founders is its own form of fractional expertise.

What She Would Tell Founders Building Their Network

Felicia is also clear on what good networking actually looks like.

"Don't just build a list of names as you network," she says. "Offer value to the conversation, and the connections you make will be deeper and truly become part of your network."

That is the same principle she runs Lake Effect on. The relationship is the asset. The transaction is just the entry point.

What's Next for Lake Effect

The roadmap for Lake Effect is split between the consulting work and the writing.

On the consulting side, expect continued focus on growing businesses at Series B and Series C with remote teams that need experienced HR judgment without a full-time hire. On the writing side, expect more online articles and the eventual book, both built around the real-life HR stories Felicia has been collecting through years of work inside F100 companies, startups, and now her own clients' businesses.

The underlying bet is the same on both tracks. Experienced HR judgment, told well, helps people build healthier companies.

If Felicia's approach to building with clarity, judgment, and a clear point of view on what HR actually does resonates, the Entreprenista League is a community of women founders who value connection, shared experience, and practical business insight as they grow.