Both sides of the table
Q4 2026Every advisory relationship has a quiet structural question underneath it: what does the advisor need to be true? A consulting firm needs the engagement to extend. A vendor needs the answer to be their product. An agency needs the scope to grow. None of this makes anyone dishonest, but incentives are load-bearing, and pretending otherwise is how companies end up with prescriptions that look suspiciously like their advisor's inventory.
I structured my practice as two-sided specifically to get out of that trap.
One side is the clients: founder-led companies at their ceiling, scale-ups whose operations turned into a mess, enterprises running on years of tech debt and duct-taped process. What they have in common is a problem that resists being solved from the inside, and a need for outside perspective with operational depth. What they get is diligence-grade thinking with a single point of accountability. They deal with me, and the outcome is on me.
The other side is the toolset: technology, process redesign, and a curated network of partners. SaaS and AI systems where they fit. Dev shops and implementation specialists where they don't. Senior independent operators, people with fifteen and twenty years of doing the actual work, staffed per engagement, sitting on my side of the table.
The two-sided structure matters because of what it removes. I carry no inventory. There is no platform I need the diagnosis to justify, no bench I need to keep billable, no partnership margin steering the recommendation. When the answer is a tool, we buy the right tool at the right price. When the answer is process and no tool at all, that is the prescription, and it has been more than once. The most honest sentence in advisory work is "you don't need to buy anything for this," and it is only sayable when your economics don't punish you for it.
The operator network is the other half of the argument. The standard agency model staffs engagements with whoever is available, wraps them in account management, and bills the client for the coordination overhead of managing its own people. I staff the other way around: the engagement defines the need, and the need selects specific senior people from a network built over years of seeing who actually delivers. No bloated agency. No vendor-management mode, where the client ends up supervising the help. The people who show up are people I would stake the outcome on, because contractually and reputationally, I am.
There is a version of this essay that sounds like every firm's "we're different" page, so let me make it falsifiable. The structure produces observable behaviors. Prescriptions that name what not to buy. Engagements that end on purpose, because the measure of the work is whether the team keeps it running after I am gone, and an advisor optimizing for extension would never write that sentence into the model. Commercial terms that lean toward success-aligned advisory, so the engagement only wins when the client does. A partner list that changes based on delivery, not margin.
Both sides of the table exist in every deal whether you name them or not. Someone is thinking about your problem, and someone is thinking about what they have to sell you. The whole design of this practice is to make those the same person, sitting on your side, with nothing in the truck.