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Written to be disagreed with.
Every entry carries a falsifiable thesis — a claim about how the world works that a smart reader could dispute. Publications carry the firm’s research in full; doctrine states what the practice runs on; field notes record what the work is teaching.
Publications — the research, in full
Research reports · sources on request
The firm’s actual research, edited for the public record — each piece is the standard the rest of the site is held to.
Research Trust as a Moat Trust is the one asset AI is driving up in value. Models are commoditizing every artifact in the funnel — except a specific human staking a reputation. That exception is the next decade’s defensible position. Research The 2× Playbook: Eleven Industries A sub-optimized service company with about a million in earnings can plausibly double them inside twelve months — because AI removes a third to half of the labor that is most of its cost, while a modern demand engine captures the revenue it already leaks. We ranked eleven industries by how cleanly that math runs. Framework The Negotiation Method Negotiation is not what happens at the table. By the time the table exists, most of the outcome has already been decided — by position, by preparation, and by who structured the game. This is the method we run on live mandates.
Doctrine — the standing convictions
Our perspective
Commitments, not content. When one stops being true it is revised or retired — never quietly left to age.
- Every Requirement Has a Name The most expensive constraints in any business are not physics. They are decisions — authored by people, for reasons, at moments — and they can be audited like any other decision.
- Selling as Art Firms design their product, their controls, and their brand, and leave undesigned the handful of exchanges where the year is decided — then book the losses to price, fit, or fatigue.
Field notes — from the working practice
Ideas from our work
Notes, frameworks, and teardowns — filed when the work teaches something worth writing down.
- The Leverage Audit Most improvement spending fails because it lands on nodes that were never the constraint. Inventory the seven places leverage lives — labor, capital, code, media, information, relationships, distribution — find the one that binds, and fix that first. Everything else is cosmetic until it is next.
- The Negotiator’s Shadow Dark-personality research says the expensive counterparty is the patient one, whose exploitation switches on when observation lapses. The defense is architecture that keeps observation from lapsing; reading faces runs at a coin flip.
- The Household Veto Past a certain seniority, a job change is a household decision the individual merely announces. The offer that never meets the kitchen table loses to the offer that wins it; the cost shows up as refused relocations, dual-career declines, and pre-start reneges.
- The Treaty Advantage The E-2 treaty-investor visa is the most underused serious door into American business ownership — because its work is split across two professions, and the case is largely won in the business file before an attorney writes a word.
- The Franchise Math A franchisor’s Item 19 is an average across the units that survived to be counted; a buyer lives a single, non-repeatable path with a ruin barrier — so the number that is honest for the system is misleading as your forecast.
- The Intake Leak Law firms lose most prospective matters in the interval between first contact and the first attorney conversation — to unanswered phones, unbooked consultations, and referrals that die as promises. The leak is structural, so exhortation cannot fix it. Staffing, scripting, and measuring intake as a sales function can.
- Donors Don’t Buy Outcomes. They Buy Certainty. A donor can never verify an outcome; they can verify proof that the last gift did what was promised. Organizations that sell that certainty keep their donors — organizations that sell need must replace them every year.
- Auctions Price Out the Second Buyer In the lower-middle market, sourcing is the trade. The buyer who arrives through a brokered process has already conceded the only advantage that was available.
- The Human Gate Automation that touches the outside world needs a person in front of it — not as compliance, but as architecture. Draft-only is a design pattern, and it outperforms autonomy.