There are good reasons a closely-held company might not want a sixty-person consulting firm in the building. We were built for those reasons. One or two senior operators, on the inside, for the length of the problem.
We are not trying to be every kind of firm. The constraints below are not branding — they are the shape of the work we know how to do well.
We cap at four to six active engagements across the firm. That's a deliberate ceiling: it is the number at which we can keep the founder personally in every relationship without it becoming theatre.
No analysts, no leverage model. We bill a monthly retainer for senior time. You see a calendar, not a project plan. When we run code we own the bug, when we sit on a board we own the vote.
Engagements under six months tend to be reports, not change. We rarely take them. The shape we are good at is six to eighteen months — long enough to see the second-order effects of the first decision.
About a third of our engagements end with us holding a small position — board seats, advisory shares, occasionally a majority. We say so up front, we do not surprise founders, and we never trade independence for upside.
Pick the one that fits where you are. We will tell you honestly if none of them do, and there is no charge for the conversation.
We come in with one engineer and one senior operator and ship the production system. RAG over your own data, agentic pipelines, in-house models where they are warranted. We leave a system your team owns, not a deck.
Independent board seats with closely-held companies and family offices. Strategy, fundraising support, governance. Annual retainer plus, occasionally, a small equity position when interests are clearly aligned.
For founders running a closely-held business who want a second set of eyes. A monthly day-and-a-half, in your office, working on whatever you have decided is the biggest thing this month. Often the lightest of the three, often the most useful.
Twenty-two years of work has produced a clear pattern. These are the places where our combination of operator experience and applied AI has compounded into something a client can use.
The deliverable, every month, is a working system and the same two people who built it last month.
A first conversation is forty-five minutes, on a call or in Paalasmaa. We sign an NDA before it, we tell you honestly whether we are the right firm, and we recommend someone else if we are not.