Insights
Perspectives from our family of firms on leadership, systems, technology, and the practice of building durable companies.
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Holding Company, Operating Firm: Drawing the Line Cleanly
Every multi-entity structure eventually faces the same question, and the answer determines whether the structure becomes an asset or a liability. The question is where authority lives. Not where it lives on the org chart, which is the easy question, but where it lives in practice — in the small decisions that get made every
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Outcomes Over Activity: What We Actually Measure
There is a sentence that every operator should write down and tape to the wall above the desk. The sentence is: what gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed becomes the company. The reason to tape it to the wall is that the implication is unforgiving. The metrics you pick are not a window
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Roll-Up vs. Hold-Separate: The Honest Trade-Offs
The most dangerous moment in the life of an acquisition strategy is the moment you fall in love with one model. Once you have decided that a roll-up is the right answer, every firm starts to look like a roll-up candidate. Once you have decided that hold-separate is the right answer, every firm starts to
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Capacity Planning for Firms Under 25 People
Most small firm leaders believe their problem is demand. It almost never is. The phone rings. The referrals come in. The pipeline is full. The actual problem — the one that keeps the firm from compounding into something durable — is that the firm cannot reliably convert demand into delivered work without breaking the team
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From Heroics to Process: Documenting Work Before You Automate It
There is a moment in the life of every small firm when the founder realizes that the firm cannot grow past her. The signs are subtle for a long time and then suddenly obvious. The work that depends on her judgment keeps showing up faster than she can train others to handle it. The senior
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The 80/20 of Back-Office Infrastructure for a Professional Services Firm
The first time you walk through a small professional services firm with an eye for the systems underneath, the dominant feeling is archaeology. Layer on layer of software accreted over decades. A practice management tool the partner picked when she went solo in 2009. A billing system the office manager added when the firm hit
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Where AI Earns Its Keep in Professional Services, and Where It Quietly Fails
There are two ways to be wrong about AI in professional services, and almost every firm is wrong in one of them. The first is to treat AI as a discontinuity — to assume it is about to remake the profession, displace the practitioners, and reward the firms that bet aggressively on rebuilding themselves around
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Decentralized by Design: Why We Hire Operators, Not Managers
There is a recurring fiction in professional services about how firms get run. The fiction is that someone, somewhere, is making the decisions. A managing partner. A founder. A board. Pull on the thread long enough and you find that the decisions are actually being made by whoever happens to be in the room when
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Deterministic vs. Nondeterministic: Where LLMs Fit in Modern Automation
Every few years, an entirely new primitive arrives that forces operators to rethink how work gets done. The spreadsheet did it. The relational database did it. The web browser did it. Each one looked, on arrival, like a curiosity for hobbyists and a threat to whatever workflow it eventually displaced. Each one ended up redrawing