The HR Expert Who Wants To Get Fired

Most people don’t build businesses designed to make themselves obsolete.

Mary Southworth did.

Her company, The Shiftly, helps small and midsize businesses clean up their HR and payroll systems—so clean, in fact, that she doesn’t need to stick around. That’s the goal.

“Our whole motto is HR that wants to get fired,” Mary says. “We go in, clean it up, get it organized, hand it back to you, and leave.”

She’s not selling complexity. She’s selling simplicity—processes that are so intuitive, anyone on the admin team can follow them, with total clarity on compliance and responsibility. And if a client scales or something changes? They can call her. But the idea is to create real independence.

“There are so many tools out there that small businesses can leverage,” she says. “They just need someone to set them up right.”

And no one’s better suited to do it than Mary—because she’s been earning people’s trust her entire life.

The signs were there early.

At five years old, she was writing and selling tickets to her own backyard performances. By fifth grade, she’d started a business called BAM—Beads and Bookmarks, with her best friend Amber—and donated her profits to a shelter. By middle school, she was running a neighborhood operation offering everything from pet-sitting and yardwork to mail collection and errand-running. She even created brochures and went door to door pitching herself. Most kids were shy at that age. Mary was too—until it came to business.

“I couldn’t walk up to someone in a store and ask where something was,” she says. “But I would knock on strangers’ doors with a pitch. I had the keys to everyone’s houses. I had all the codes. They trusted me.”

That trust turned into real work. She helped staff a med spa, assisted an antique shop owner, and even covered maternity leave at a law firm—at sixteen.

“I loved it,” she says. “I worked twelve- to fifteen-hour days every summer. I had money. I was learning how people ran their businesses.”

It wasn’t just about earning money. It was about seeing behind the curtain—watching small businesses up close and learning how they worked from the inside out.

After college, Mary took a job managing household staff for a billionaire family. It was high-pressure, high-systems work. And she thrived.

“They ran it like a hedge fund,” she says. “Manuals for everything, systems for every department. I cleaned it all up.”

That became her pattern: she’d join a company, build systems, improve processes, and eventually outgrow the job she’d built for herself. She climbed through small businesses with teams of 50, 100, then 150 employees—always reporting directly to founders or executives, always inheriting a mess, and always leaving behind something better than she found.

“I basically created jobs I didn’t want anymore,” she laughs. “Once it was clean and simple, I was ready to move on.”

Which is exactly how The Shiftly was born.

For years, Mary was the informal go-to for HR and payroll transitions. People would come to her through backchannels—asking for help migrating benefits, switching platforms, or handling compliance across multiple states.

She became the person people called when they were stuck between a pushy software salesperson and the terrifying responsibility of messing up someone’s paycheck.

“Salespeople will help to a degree,” she says. “But at the end of the day, you’re the one who hears it if someone doesn’t get paid.”

She saw how underserved small businesses were—and how often they were taken advantage of.

So in 2024, she began formalizing The Shiftly. And in January 2025, she made it official: full-time founder.

Leaving her corporate role was a big deal. She was on the path to VP-level leadership, earning good money. But something was missing.

“I saved one company over a million dollars,” she says. “And that was great. But the impact I had at small companies? It meant more.”

Because the small businesses she worked with weren’t just looking for cost savings. They were trying to grow their people. They needed a system that worked, and someone they could trust to help build it.

Now she helps five clients, gets fired, and moves on to help five more.

“Even if I only save a business $5,000 or $10,000, it adds up. The impact compounds. And it hits real people in real ways.”

And while The Shiftly’s core service is consulting, Mary’s also started experimenting—launching merch, building her social presence, and offering no-strings guidance to business owners who just need a quick recommendation.

“A lot of what I do, I don’t get paid for,” she says. “And that’s fine. I just want to help as many small businesses as possible.”

She’s a couple months in. It’s intense. She works more than she did before. But she’s clear. She’s focused. And she’s happy.

“My head’s way clearer,” Mary says. “I’m doing things that actually make a difference.”

She hopes to bring on one more employee this year—but only when it makes sense. Until then, she’s doing exactly what she built The Shiftly to do.

Making herself unnecessary.

One client at a time.

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