Purex Limited

With a legacy spanning nearly four decades, Purex is a unique provider of fume extraction solutions. But behind the scenes, HR was eating into the leadership team’s time. Managing Director Andy Easey was personally handling all HR issues, sometimes more than half his working week, and the business was relying on solicitors for advice, which was both slow and extremely expensive.

Holiday tracking was still on a paper system. Documentation was scattered. And without a proper HR partner in place, the leadership team had little time left to focus on running and growing the business.

We started with a joint HR audit, sitting alongside the Purex team to understand exactly what the business needed and when. From that audit, we built a clear plan: prioritise the highest-impact changes, modernise the day-to-day systems, and gradually shift HR ownership across the company so it wasn’t all sitting on one person’s shoulders.

We also introduced Purex to the Breathe HR platform, a single, easy-to-use system to manage everything HR-related, replacing the paper-based holiday process and consolidating records in one place.

Just four months into the partnership, Purex has issued a brand-new employee handbook, completed initial management training, and rolled out a modern HR platform replacing the old paper systems. HR ownership is now distributed across the company rather than sitting solely with the MD, and Humber HR People is on hand to support the team whenever they need.

Most importantly, Andy has his time back to focus on running the business.