We don’t drop a binder and leave.
We built EmpraxisHQ with long-term partnerships in mind. That means we’re in it with you—training, measuring, adjusting, and building the kind of culture that doesn’t evaporate when the consultant leaves.
Built for owners and operators who carry the weight.
You’re not looking for a motivational speaker or a color-coded personality system. You want something that works on a random Tuesday—when a manager is struggling, when a good employee is quietly checked out, when you can feel the culture slipping and you don’t know exactly why.
You lie awake thinking about the people depending on it.
That’s who the HQ Method is built for.
We contract for a year at a time.
We’re built for as long as you’re in business.
And our company doesn’t grow until yours does first.
A minimum of twelve months isn’t arbitrary. It’s how long it takes to build real traction — to move from learning the tools to living them. Most companies start seeing changes in the culture long before the year is up. But the compounding happens over time, and we’re here for the long game.
At the end of year one, clients who want to continue working with us have their monthly fee adjusted based on how much their business has grown in the previous twelve months. That’s not a loyalty discount. That’s the model.
Some companies reach a point where they feel confident running the HQ Method without us. We celebrate that. That’s the system working exactly as intended. You get to keep and use all the materials we’ve given you forever. But for companies who want ongoing counsel, continued training, and access to our ever-growing library of tools—37 and counting—we’re designed to grow with you.
The First Year: What the work actually looks like.
measure · diagnose · practice · prove · improve
Welcome to the path from “we think our culture is fine” to a measured, practiced, improving one. Here is every step of a roughly twelve-month arc.
A note on the shape of the work: We diagnose before we prescribe. Nobody hands you the same five exercises they hand everyone else. What you practice is built from what your measurement reveals.
Step 0 · Onboarding & setup
Roster, roles, and your private Newsfeed. The groundwork that makes the math fair and the practice visible from day one.
Step 1 · Baseline measurement
Every employee takes the HQ Score and answers The Five. Anonymous, role-weighted, one sitting. Your baseline number, and your first look at The Shadow.
Step 2 · The Reveal
We sit down with leadership and walk the results: the Shadow, your highest and lowest scores, the themes your people surfaced. Diagnosis before any treatment plan.
Step 3 · Foundation Phase
Two moves with leadership: the Uncovery surfaces your Four Beacons, and we form your Small Groups. Who you are, and the rooms where it gets practiced.
Step 4 · The Induction
The Beacons meet the whole company. Then, inside Small Groups, your team writes the observable behaviors that make them real. People support what they help build.
Step 5 · The Tool Rotation
One Tool at a time, sequenced by your Shadow, no idle gaps. A weekly rhythm of the Toolshed, Small Groups, and the Farm. This is where the culture changes.
Step 6 · The Proof
About six months in, everyone takes the HQ Score again. Same people, same instrument. We measure how far the Shadow moved. Proof, not a feeling.
Step 7 · The Year & The Annual Review
The rotation continues, resequenced to your updated Shadow. The year closes on site: a durability re-score and a reset for year two.
How we price this
You’ve just seen the whole machine, and you can get an intensely-detailed version down below.
So here’s how we price it. We charge a one-time, upfront fee to uncover, diagnose, and set up your system, then a small monthly fee to help you implement it. We review that monthly fee together once a year, and for as long as we work together, the only way for that monthly fee to grow is for you to grow first.
This may sound unusual for what is typically characterized as team-building. HQ is infrastructure, not an event. You’re installing a system and a way to measure it, run inside the rhythm of real work. What shapes the upfront and the monthly is straightforward: the size of your company, how many Small Groups you run, the length of the engagement, and whether you start with the whole organization or a single team.
Most companies start with a conversation. Some start with a Pilot Program: one team, one location, one branch, run for a single Season with its own HQ Score at the start and the end. You see your Shadow inside a real boundary, watch it move, and decide what a full rollout looks like with evidence in hand instead of a promise.
The comparison that matters isn’t our fee against zero. It’s our fee against what a disengaged culture already costs you, in turnover, lost momentum, and the service failures that follow. See what that’s costing you.
Start with one team.
You don’t have to believe us. You have to believe your own second HQ Score.
The Pilot Program runs the full HQ Method inside one real boundary. A single team, one branch, or one location, with its own manager: a slice of your company, never the whole thing, and never volunteers gathered from across it. It stays small enough that everyone inside it practices, one or two Small Groups of six to twelve people. It opens with an HQ Score and The Five. It closes with both again, plus a readout with your leadership: here is your Shadow, here is what moved, and here is precisely what a company-wide rollout would look like.
Then you decide. Four doors, and one of them is walking away with all of your data and trained Facilitators you keep. If you do roll out within six months of your readout, your pilot foundation fee credits in full toward the larger engagement. The trial pays for part of the thing it proved.
We wrote the whole thing down: the structure, the Season week by week, what you provide, what you receive, and all four doors. No email address required. It’s yours either way, which is sort of the point.
We love our people who need details. We need them. They’re good for us. This version of a year in the life of our partnership is for them. If you want to see the whole machine before you trust it, you are in the right place.
step
ZERO
Onboarding & Setup
Before anything is measured, we get the foundation in place: the agreement, your team roster, and your private space.The roster matters more than it sounds. We need every employee classified by role — full-time frontline, part-time, manager, executive — because the HQ Score is role-weighted. That’s how a five-person leadership team can’t accidentally outvote two hundred frontline voices. Then we set up your Newsfeed—your company’s private community space—and walk your team through adding it to their home screen on day one. That small ritual is the first signal that this is a practice, not a memo.
Q: What do we need to have ready before we start?
Two things: a complete employee roster with each person’s role, and a short heads-up to your team that they’ll be asked to weigh in honestly. We’ll draft that message with you.
Q: Why do you need everyone’s role?
So the math is fair. The Score weights frontline experience the heaviest, because they live the culture you’re trying to improve. Without roles, leadership’s optimism drowns out the people you most need to hear.
step
one
Baseline Measurement
Every employee takes the HQ Score — 57 questions, a six-point scale from Never to Always, covering teamwork, leadership, culture, retention, and engagement. Separately, they answer The Five: five anonymous, open-ended questions about what’s working, what’s broken, what’s missing, what’s blocking their best work, and anything else on their mind.Together these establish your baseline number and reveal The Shadow — the measurable gap between how leadership scores the culture and how the frontline scores it. The Shadow is the single most useful thing we’ll show you, because it isn’t our opinion. It’s your own people, measured, telling you where the picture differs.
Is it really anonymous?
Yes. The Five is fully anonymous, and Score results are suppressed for any group smaller than five people, so no individual or small team is ever identifiable. That protection is what makes the answers honest.
How long does it take each person?
The Score takes most people 8-10 minutes. The Five takes a few more. It’s one sitting, once every six months.
Will leadership see who said what?
No. Leadership sees patterns and themes, never individuals. The moment people believe otherwise, the data stops being true.
What if not everyone responds?
We aim for strong participation because thin response rates hide the Shadow rather than reveal it. We’ll help you drive turnout, and the day-one Newsfeed habit makes it easier.
step
two
Reveal
We sit down with you and your leadership team and walk the results: the Shadow, your highest- and lowest-scoring items, and the themes that surfaced in The Five. This is the diagnosis before any treatment plan, and it’s where most owners learn something about their own company they genuinely didn’t know.What will we actually learn?
Where the gap is widest, which specific things your people experience differently than you assume, and what’s quietly costing you trust, engagement, and retention.
What if the number is bad / our Shadow is wide?
Then you’ve just been handed the most valuable thing in the room. A wide Shadow isn’t a verdict on you; it’s a map. You can’t close a gap you can’t see, and most companies never get to see theirs at all.
step
three
Foundation Phase
Two things happen here, and they happen with leadership before anything rolls out to the wider team.First, the Uncovery — surfacing your Four Beacons: Purpose, Vision, Values, and T3 Rewards (your commitment of Time, Talent, and Treasure to the world beyond your bottom line). We don’t manufacture these; we uncover the real ones you already have. Vision uses a 10/20/30 structure — a ten-year destination, a twenty-month target for what has to be visibly true for that destination to feel inevitable, and a thirty-day focus — paired with an honest naming of the obstacle most likely to stop you.
Your Values get derived from the actual character of your company using… unusual exercises… and written as instructions a person can act on, not nouns on a wall. (“Measure it or don’t claim it” is a value. “Excellence” is wallpaper.)
And purpose? Purpose is your North Star, your unwavering constant and commitment, and the way we help you articulate it will surprise and delight you. It’ll also screw you up for the rest of your life. You’ll never be able to look at anyone’s mission statement the same way again.
You’ll notice we don’t include Goals. That’s deliberate. Goals are activity, not identity, and they already live inside the 10/20/30 Vision. The foundation answers who are we; goals answer what will we do this quarter. Mixing them is how most companies end up confused about both.
Second, we form your Small Groups — six to ten people each, capped at twelve. That size isn’t arbitrary. Below six, a group is too brittle for real disagreement; above twelve, people start to hide and the room turns into a performance instead of a conversation.
We already have a mission statement and values. Do we throw them out?
Not necessarily. If they’re real, we sharpen them. If they’re aspirational wallpaper nobody uses in an actual hiring or firing decision, we find the ones underneath. The Uncovery surfaces what’s true, not what sounds good.
Why Small Groups instead of one all-hands?
Because culture changes in conversations, and conversations need the right number of people in the room. Small Groups are where candor and ownership actually happen.
step
four
The Induction
Now the Beacons meet the whole organization. Everyone hears them, and then, inside their Small Groups, employees identify and co-author the observable behaviors that show what those Beacons look like in daily practice. Leadership doesn’t hand down the behaviors. The team writes them.Why have employees write the behaviors instead of leadership?
Because people support what they help build. A value handed down from above is a poster. A behavior a team wrote itself is a commitment. The buy-in is the whole point.
step
five
The Tool Rotation
This is the practice that changes the culture day to day. We run one Tool at a time. Each Tool runs a Cycle: typically between 4 and 13 weeks—it opens with an integration session, continues with short, focused, weekly facilitator training and 18-minute small group lessons and closes with an RAO Toolshed Session in the bye week before the next begins. Nothing runs back to back without a beat to learn from it. The sequence of Cycles, the rotation, is built from your Shadow, what your measurement said you need most, so two companies rarely run the same rotation in the same order.Between each Tool comes a bye week, and the bye week is not idle. Your Cultivator and your Small Group leaders meet in a Toolshed session to run the RAO Loop: Review how the Tool landed, Analyze what the room and the early signals are telling you, Optimize what comes next. That loop is why the rotation adapts to your company instead of marching through a fixed curriculum. Each Cycle teaches us how to sequence the next one.
Most rotations open with Shine A Light, because noticing—the habit of catching people doing things right—is the foundational muscle everything else builds on. From there, the rotation is shaped by your gaps. Each client’s toolset will likely be different.
Our other tools include:
- Feast Days — celebration and ritual
- Shower Shoes — decoding your unwritten rules
- What Would Dolly Do? — judgment and decision-making under your values
- Huh? — listening and curiosity
The logic underneath is the part that matters: no single Tool installs a habit. The rotation installs the culture. Each new Tool reopens curiosity, varies the practice, and quietly reinforces the ones before it, which is exactly how human beings actually build durable habits.
What a week looks like
A Tool isn’t a workshop you attend once; it’s a rhythm you run for several weeks. Three things move together inside each week:
The Toolshed (midweek). Your Cultivator from our team meets the people who lead your Small Groups (your Facilitators) to review how last week landed, walking through the coming session and its Contentpoles, and clearing every question before it reaches the floor. Each session is recorded, so no leader is ever caught flat-footed, and the questions raised feed how we coach you next.
Small Groups (later that week). Your leaders run the session with their own teams: six to ten people, real conversation. The practice itself, led from inside the company rather than from a podium.
The Farm (all week). Your Newsfeed keeps the Tool alive between meetings. Contentpoles — recurring prompts tied to the week’s practice — invite quick, low-friction participation, so the work doesn’t evaporate the moment a session ends.
Between each tool comes a bye week, and the bye week is not idle. Your Cultivator and your Small Group leaders meet in a Toolshed session to run the RAO loop: Review how the tool landed, Analyze what the room and the early signals are telling you, Optimize what comes next. That loop is why the rotation adapts to your company instead of marching through a fixed curriculum. Once you’ve completed a tool, it’s yours to use again and again. The RAO Loop helps us help you improve it for future hires. Also, each tool informs us how to choose, tweak, or slightly customize the next one.
None of it rests on heroics. The structure carries the practice, so your people can carry the culture.
How much time does this take my team each week?
For most of your team, about eighteen minutes of focused time, plus a little light participation on the Farm — the dose the science supports, not a compromise. The people who lead your Small Groups carry a bit more: their session, plus The Toolshed. That’s by design — they’re the leaders this work is meant to grow, and we don’t send anyone into a room unprepared.
You measured us, so why might our Tools differ from another company’s?
Because the rotation is built from your Shadow. The whole point of measuring first is that you don’t get a generic curriculum, you get the practices aimed at your specific gaps. The weekly Toolshed sessions and the RAO (Review, Analyze, Optimize) Loop conducted at the end of each tool session contribute to a continuously clearer understanding of the next tool’s requirements.
Who actually leads this week to week, and are our people left to figure it out alone?
Your own people lead the Small Groups. Culture has to be carried by the company, not by a consultant at the front of the room, that’s the whole point. But they are never left alone: The Toolshed prepares them every week, it’s recorded for anyone who needs a second pass, and the questions raised there sharpen how we coach. It’s the same structure we run on ourselves: our Cultivators are coached the same way before they ever coach you.
Why one Tool at a time, and why does it take months?
Because that’s how habits form. A behavior takes roughly two months of repetition to become automatic, and short, spaced, varied practice beats one long workshop every time. We’re working with how people actually change, not against it.
What happens between Tool Cycles?
A bye week, and a Toolshed session built around the RAO Loop: Review, Analyze, Optimize. We look at how the Cycle landed, what the signals say, and how to sharpen the next Tool. It’s how the rotation stays built around your company rather than a script.
step
six
The Proof
A Season runs about six months. Inside it, your company completes three to five Tool Cycles, each one closing with an RAO Toolshed before the next begins. You will feel movement along the way, in the texture of your Small Groups and the life on the Farm. But the indicators inside each Cycle are signals, not proof. We space the full re-score deliberately. Real, defensible movement in an organization-wide number takes a full Season to compound.At the close of the Season, every employee takes the HQ Score a second time, and we measure how far the Shadow has actually moved. This is the unarguable result. We then run RAO on the results: Review the movement, Analyze which behaviors closed the gap and which did not, and Optimize the next Season and your new Tools around what is still open.
Why wait six months — can’t we just measure sooner?
You could, but it would not mean much. Inside each Tool Cycle we give you ways to read effectiveness, but those are indicators, not measurements. An eight-week bump is mostly the effect of attention, not change… moving it for real takes a full Season to compound. Six months is where the number gets honest.
What counts as success?
A narrowing Shadow, and visible movement in the items that scored lowest at baseline. We compare like to like — same survey, same anonymity, similar participation — so the comparison is clean.
step
seven
The Annual Review
The first proof isn’t the finish line. The rotation continues — now sequenced to your updated Shadow — and the year closes with an on-site annual review: a durability re-score that proves the gains held, plus a reset of what the next year focuses on.That’s the honest truth about culture. It isn’t a project that ends; it’s a practice that continues. What changes is that by now it runs on habits your people built and own, not on anything we’re holding up for them.
What happens after the first proof?
The work keeps going with new tools and advanced leader training, but it will begin to feel lighter and more self-sustaining. The rotation adapts to where you are now, and the annual review keeps it honest year over year.
Does this ever just… end?
The engagement could. The practice shouldn’t. By the annual review, the goal is that the habits are yours — that your culture keeps improving because your people run it, not because we do.
From slogans to systems.
From policy to practice.
From noise to clarity.
From compliance to commitment.
From loneliness to belonging.
From burnout to breakthrough.
Every partnership
starts just like this.
We’ll talk about where you are, what it’s costing you, and whether The HQ Method is the right fit. No pitch. No pressure.
Measure what matters.
Model what works.
Reward what improves.