Studio Principles · Non-negotiable
Eleven rules the studio does not bend.
Every consultancy has a deck. We have a short list of operating rules that decide what we take on, how we transform a practice, and what we refuse - including good money, when the fit is wrong.
01
Sequence over speed.
Name, systematise, automate - in that order, without exception. A firm that skips ahead to automation gets faster chaos, not a faster practice. We refuse transformations that want to start at step three.
02
Six firms a year, no more.
A transformation is a working relationship, not a workshop. The founder and the team behind him cannot honestly serve more than six firms in a year at the depth the work demands. So we don't.
03
The matter is the container.
Not the inbox. Not the folder. Not the partner's memory. Every action, deadline, participant, document and note attaches to a matter. If you cannot state a matter's complete state in ten minutes, we start there.
04
No off-the-shelf resale.
We do not white-label anyone else's product. What we deliver is a set of primitives your firm owns, running on tools you can swap out later without us.
05
Evidence, not eloquence.
Every assertion carries its anchor. Every draft can be traced back to source. Hallucinations are not solved by better prompts; they are solved by a standing rule that unanchored claims do not ship.
06
Delegation is the technology.
AI is safe to deploy only where doer, reviewer, and decider are already named. We build the team primitive before we deploy a single agent.
07
Fixed price where possible.
Hourly billing taught the profession to record time rather than manage it. Where our own work can be priced flat, it is. We hold ourselves to the model we run.
08
Contained on purpose.
We are a studio, not an agency, not a consultancy, not a platform. One founder, a focused team, deep involvement, no account manager between you and the work. This is the ceiling; there is no growth plan.
09
Refuse BigLaw.
We do not sell to firms whose economics depend on billable-hour leverage. The operating model we run is structurally incompatible with the model that pays for their building. We would waste each other's time.
10
Ship in weeks, not quarters.
Every engagement produces working artefacts within the first fortnight - a matter template live, an action playbook in use, one drafting agent in production. If it isn't in the practice by week two, we are doing consulting, not transformation.
11
Leave a firm that runs without us.
The success test is not retention. It is whether the practice can run the operating model, extend it, and improve it after we leave. We measure ourselves on the day we become unnecessary.
Things we do not do
A shorter list, held just as tightly.
- ✕RFPs, procurement portals, or vendor onboarding
- ✕Innovation-committee pilots with no owner
- ✕Firms that want a demo before a conversation
- ✕White-label reselling of anyone else's product
- ✕Any engagement that starts with 'can you also just…'
- ✕BigLaw, in any form, without exception
If those rules read like your practice
You are the firm we are looking for.
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