Dear Kharwal,
Yours is a nascent organization and as such the employees might be of a mixed group of people i.e., a combination of fairly experienced and freshers on the same or similar job profiles.. Therefore, your present salary structure would be more or less on par with Market Labor Wage Structure prevailing for your industry as a whole. The need for revision of the existing salary structure within a short span of time since inception of the organization might have been prompted by different reasons such as enhancing the competitiveness of the Company by motivating the present work force as well as attracting new talents, removing certain anomalies in the existing salary structure, introducing Potential Performance Appraisals with a view to retention of star-performers and the like.
The advice of your experienced HR friend is, though signalling caution based on frugality, as it seems to me, based on his misconception of salary hike vs salary revision.
Salary hike is incremental based on the performance appraisal of a certain periodicity or mere passage of a predetermined time duration like six months or one year depending upon the practice followed by the employer. The employer is the sole judge for this. Simply put, it is the same percentage of hike in any one component in the salary structure mostly a hike in the basic only.
Salary Revision, on the contrary, is modification of the entire salary structure including all primary components. To distinguish, 15% of increment relates to 15% of hike in any one component of the salary structure mostly the Basic whereas the same 15% of salary revision implies 15% hike in all components. The mismatch between the current pay/wage structure and the Market labor wage structure acts as the general determinant of salary revision. In case of unionized or bargainable category of employees, salary revision is determined by Collective Bargaining.In other cases of employees, periodical study of the pay scale patterns of similar job profiles in the market is undertaken by the employers and the salary structures are carefully designed or modified accordingly. At times, in order to reward and retain senior employees kept frozen in the maximum scale, "longevity increase" or "stagnation increment" is also provided for in the salary revision.
By and large, you can go in for the salary revision of your employees not withstanding the fact that your firm is less than one year old. What is important is your ability to pay and the employees' sustained contribution to the growth of the Company.