Today we’d like to introduce you to Taryn Kline.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Like many entrepreneurs, my journey began unexpectedly. If you had told me in college that I would one day own and lead a successful consulting business, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. My freshman year at college, I received my first ever C in Business 101, and in my entrepreneurship course, the professor openly suggested that entrepreneurship wasn’t really a path for women.
Fast Forward, to March 2020, just as the world was shutting down during the global pandemic, I accepted a new position and returned to my roots in Human Resources. Two days later, I found myself unemployed.
What initially felt like a setback became the catalyst for Taryn M Consulting. I reached out to former colleagues and professional contacts, taking on projects ranging from job descriptions and employee handbooks to strategic HR consulting.
Those early opportunities quickly grew into serving as an Interim HR Director, developing compensation programs, leading workplace investigations, facilitating organizational change, and partnering with organizations across Oregon and Washington on their most complex people challenges.
Today, I partner with leaders to build stronger workplaces through practical, strategic HR solutions—and I’m grateful that an unexpected turn led me here. I look forward to the opportunity to partner with you.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
TMC wasn’t built on a straight line. It was built through relationships, experimentation, hard-earned confidence, a few pivots, and a willingness to keep refining what good partnership looks like.
The first year was bumpy. When I started TMC, I didn’t think it would become my future. It was a stopgap—a way to bridge one chapter of my career to whatever came next. That first year, I barely made $13,000. I certainly wasn’t sitting down with a polished business plan or a vision for what TMC would look like six years later.
But year after year, it continued to evolve.
I had to expand my professional credibility in new ways. I had to learn how to market myself—something that felt entirely foreign after spending my career inside organizations where my work and reputation largely spoke for themselves. Suddenly, I had to explain not only what I did, but why someone should hire me to do it.
Over time, the work increasingly came through relationships, referrals, and repeat engagements. That was incredibly validating, but it also created a new set of questions: How much do I take on? What kind of work do I actually want to do? What am I worth? And where do I want this business to go?
Those questions became even more real as my personal life changed. I became pregnant with our first son—a beautiful surprise that also forced me to rethink what building a business could look like. Suddenly, the question wasn’t simply whether I could make TMC financially sustainable. It was: How do I build a meaningful career and a business while raising a baby—sometimes quite literally with him on my hip?
There have been plenty of bumps underneath the growth: questioning my pricing, navigating uneven workloads, learning which opportunities to pursue and which to decline, figuring out which clients are worth the capacity they consume, and balancing consulting with family and life. There has also been the ongoing question of whether TMC should grow into something bigger or remain intentionally small.
And, of course, there have been moments when I’ve wondered: Is this actually working?
Six years later, I think the answer is yes—but perhaps not for the reasons I would have expected when I started.
What strikes me most is that TMC hasn’t grown primarily by becoming bigger. It has grown by becoming more credible, more specialized, more selective, and more valuable.
I’ve learned that growth doesn’t always mean adding employees, taking every opportunity, or chasing the biggest revenue number. Sometimes growth looks like knowing your value. Sometimes it means saying no. Sometimes it means choosing the work and relationships where you can make the greatest difference. And sometimes it means building a business that fits the life you want to live—not building your life around the business.
The road hasn’t been smooth. But increasingly, it has become mine.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
At its core, Taryn M Consulting is about partnership. I work alongside leaders and organizations to navigate the people side of their business—sometimes during moments of growth and opportunity, and sometimes during the really hard stuff.
My work spans fractional HR leadership, workplace investigations, compensation and pay equity, organizational assessments, employee engagement, performance management, policy development, leadership coaching, and strategic planning. I work primarily with small to mid-sized organizations, public agencies, utilities, and nonprofits that need experienced HR leadership but may not need—or have access to—a full-time executive-level HR professional.
Over the years, I’ve become particularly known for stepping into complex or sensitive situations and helping leaders find a practical path forward. That might mean navigating an employee relations issue, conducting an investigation, helping a board evaluate an executive, rebuilding a compensation structure, or simply being the person a leader can call and say, “I have a situation. Can we talk this through?”
I think what sets TMC apart is that I don’t approach consulting as someone who drops in, delivers a report, and disappears. I want to understand the organization, its people, its culture, and the realities leaders are working within. My goal is to become a trusted extension of the team while still bringing an outside perspective and the willingness to ask difficult questions when needed.
I also believe good HR should be both people-centered and practical. Compliance matters. Policies matter. Documentation matters. But so do relationships, trust, communication, and understanding the human beings behind the issue. The best solutions usually live somewhere in the intersection of all of those things.
What am I most proud of? The relationships.
Many of my clients have been with me from year one and we’ve never even met in person. Much of TMC’s growth has come through referrals, repeat engagements, and people who have experienced my work and trusted me enough to recommend me to someone else. As a consultant, there may be no greater compliment.
I’m also proud that I’ve built a business where success isn’t measured solely by how big it becomes. I’ve become more selective about the work I take on and more intentional about where I can add the most value. TMC has grown by becoming more experienced, more specialized, and more deeply connected to the organizations I serve.
At the end of the day, I don’t want clients to feel like they hired a consultant. I want them to feel like they gained a partner—someone who will sit beside them in the complicated moments, celebrate the good ones, and help them build workplaces where both people and organizations can thrive.
What’s next?
The future of TMC is something I’m thinking about differently these days. For a long time, growth meant building credibility, finding the next client, and creating a sustainable consulting practice. Today, I’m less interested in simply making TMC bigger and more interested in expanding its impact.
I want to continue doing the work I love—partnering directly with leaders and organizations through complex people, culture, and workplace challenges. But I also want to take what I’ve learned from years of sitting alongside leaders and find new ways to help people lead.
This fall, I’ll begin an internationally accredited executive leadership coaching program. It feels like a natural evolution of the work I’m already doing. So much of HR consulting isn’t really about having the perfect policy or knowing the right answer. It’s about helping a leader slow down, see a situation differently, make a difficult decision, have the conversation they’ve been avoiding, or become more intentional about the kind of leader they want to be.
I’m also developing an e-book, Culture Over Comfort, based on a philosophy that has become increasingly central to my work: strong cultures aren’t built by keeping everyone comfortable.
They’re built through clarity, accountability, trust, honest conversations, and leaders who are willing to address difficult things rather than work around them.
Together, these pieces represent where I see TMC heading. I don’t envision building a large consulting firm. I envision building a deeper practice—one that combines strategic HR partnership, executive coaching, leadership development, and practical resources that allow the lessons from my consulting work to reach beyond the organizations I personally serve.
I also don’t have a perfectly mapped-out five-year plan, and I’ve learned to be okay with that. TMC wasn’t built from a perfect plan in the first place. It evolved through relationships, curiosity, opportunity, and a willingness to keep asking, What’s next?
Six years in, I’m still asking that question.
But I have a much clearer sense of what I want the answer to be: meaningful work, strong partnerships, courageous leadership, and a business that continues to make an impact without losing the personal connection that made it successful in the first place.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.tarynmconsulting.com
- Instagram: @tarynmconsulting
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tarynmconsulting
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taryn-johnsonkline
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/tarynm_consulting/
