The shape of an agency is a pyramid. A few partners at the top, a layer of mid-levels, and a wide base of juniors who do most of the typing. The economics depend on the base — billing the senior, delivering with the junior, and hoping the gap is smaller than the client thinks.
We run an inversion. Twenty-two senior engineers and designers, no juniors, no offshoring, no resource pool. The person who scopes your problem is the person who ships your code. The economics work because the multiplier is on the output, not on the headcount.
What this costs us
We turn down work. We do not staff three projects in parallel from one principal. Our pipeline is shorter than it could be, and our calendar is fuller than we would like. We do not have the optionality of a bigger firm, and we do not pretend to.
- No more than five active engagements at a time.
- Every project is led by a partner, named on the contract.
- The studio meets together every Friday — all of it, not a leadership team.
- We will not double our headcount. We have said this in writing, repeatedly.
The reason to keep the studio at this size is not romantic. It is operational. Above thirty people the meetings start to subdivide, the Friday review breaks into tracks, and the thing we are selling — the unbroken line from problem to ship — starts to fray. We have watched it happen at firms we admired. We are not going to do it here.