I’m Sanni Lyytinen
Leadership & culture advisor for founders and CEOs
I created Alku HR because I kept seeing the same pattern in growing companies: performance depends on how people work together, but support for leadership, culture, and the human side of building a company often comes too late. My work is to make experienced leadership and culture support easier to access early: clear, practical, fit for your stage, and grounded in real-life company-building pressure.
Why Alku HR exists
A company’s performance depends on how people work together: how decisions are made, how ownership is shared, how feedback happens, how tension is handled, and how clearly people know what is expected.
There is plenty of support available for strategy, funding, product, sales, and marketing. But the human side of building a company is too often left to trial and error: leadership, trust, roles, communication, culture, feedback, decision-making, and the everyday ways people work together.
I help founder-led companies build leadership and culture foundations that make growth lighter: clear priorities, strong ownership, honest debate, and a team that can keep moving forward together.
The goal is simple: to help companies grow without everything depending on the founder’s energy, memory, and improvisation.
This is not outsourced operational HR. It is advisory-led support for founders, CEOs, and leadership teams who want to build these foundations before growth makes them heavy to fix.
Why me
I’m not coming from a traditional consulting background. My roots are in hands-on People and HR work inside growing companies, alongside founders, entrepreneurs, and leaders, often building the basics from scratch.
Today, my work through Alku HR goes far beyond traditional HR, and I don’t offer operational HR outsourcing. But that background still matters. It keeps my work practical, grounded, and close to the realities founders and CEOs face.
Through this experience, I’ve become convinced that building leadership and culture intentionally from the beginning can be a major growth driver for founder-led companies.
The Finnish word alku means beginning, so the name Alku HR reflects both what I believe and where I come from. In that sense, the company name is also a tribute to how I got here.
I feel at home close to builders
I’m especially drawn to founder-led companies because I like working close to people who are building something they deeply care about.
Founders and entrepreneurs often carry a strong sense of ownership, energy, and responsibility for what they are creating. I find that inspiring.
I also understand the pace, the pressure, the ambiguity, and the emotional weight of building something that matters.
I know what it feels like when nothing is ready yet
I know what it feels like when roles are unclear, leaders carry too much, feedback is delayed, hiring decisions feel risky, and people topics keep landing on the CEO’s desk.
Over time, I’ve seen the same pattern again and again: When people don’t know how to work together, performance starts to suffer. Decisions slow down, feedback gets avoided, roles blur, and leaders carry too much alone.
But when leadership teaming, company identity, execution rhythm, and people leadership are built early and in the right order, everything becomes lighter.
Execution improves. Hiring gets easier. Conversations become more honest. And people know how to move things forward together.
I help make the real issue visible
One of my strengths is seeing quickly where the real tension sits in how people work together, and making it clear, discussable, and solvable.
That is the work I do with founders, CEOs, and leadership teams.
How I work
I’m drawn to the part of leadership that often gets missed in business conversations: what happens between people.
How honestly people talk.
How clearly they decide.
How they handle tension, ownership, expectations, and trust.
How much invisible friction gets created when these things stay unclear.
I help leaders slow down enough to see what’s really going on, name it honestly, and build the structures and conversations that make progress possible.
My work combines structure and human depth. We make concrete decisions, routines, and tools. But we also work with trust, honesty, relationships, and the conversations that make those structures actually work.
What matters to me
Truthfulness
Reality over wishful thinking. No quick-fix promises.
Depth over surface-level scale
Meaningful dialogue and fundamentals that last. Not performative culture work or one-off inspiration.
Human-centered leadership
Honest, accountable, and grounded in real-world pressure. Leadership can be clear and human at the same time.
Sanni Lyytinen - Founder of Alku HR
What you can expect when working with me
My work is advisory-led, but not advice-only. I combine facilitation, coaching, training, frameworks, and practical tools depending on what the situation needs.
Yes, we build structures. But we also build the trust and relationships that make those structures work.
Clarity without fluff
We focus on what matters most right now, and what to build first.
Practical structures
Decisions, habits, rhythms, and lightweight systems that fit your stage.
Real conversations
The work is human. We don’t avoid what’s hard. We work through it productively.
A pace you can sustain
We build what you can actually implement, step by step.
A trusted outside perspective
Someone who can help you see the pattern, say what needs to be said, and turn it into something concrete.
Book a 45-min Intro Call
If you’re building a company and want leadership and culture to support execution, not drain your energy, start with a 45-minute Intro Call.
We’ll clarify your situation, identify which leadership or culture bottleneck is currently slowing execution, and choose the most sensible next step.
Case: Turning early culture-building into something concrete
Context
Lars was a third-time founder building a bootstrapped early-stage company. He wanted to build culture intentionally from the beginning and avoid repeating past team-building mistakes, especially around early hires, co-founder alignment, and values fit.
What we worked on
Advisory support around People & Culture, hiring, and early culture-building. This included sparring on recruitment and practical tools such as a Culture Canvas, which the team used together to clarify their target culture and later turn into a culture handbook.
What changed
The work helped turn culture from an abstract ambition into something concrete the team could discuss, shape, and use together. The culture handbook created shared expectations for new and existing team members and gave Lars a clearer foundation for leadership decisions, including difficult ones.
What the client said
“Sanni has been our trusted People & Culture advisor from the time we started building our team. Her support has been concrete, practical, and timely, especially when we needed to make difficult leadership decisions. She helped us turn culture from an abstract idea into something we could actually discuss, shape, and use as a team.”
— Lars Mulà, Founder & CEO, BookMe
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