Why we don't retain — and what we offer instead.
Retainers reward attendance, not outcomes. Here's the alternative we run with every owner — fixed-price builds, ninety-day stabilisation, full handover.
Read the note →Skip to main contentNotes · the firm, in writing Method
Notes from the floor.
Short essays on diagnosing service businesses, building the owner-side software, and writing the smallest code that closes a leak. No newsletter pitch. No takes.
Recent notes.
The audit before the build: a two-week checklist.
Twelve points, two weeks, one shared sheet. Every leak gets a number with a reason next to it. The checklist we use, opened up.
Read the note →What a real P&L tells us about a service business.
Most owners read the P&L for tax. We read it for the row that's bleeding. A short walk-through of the lines that matter — and the ones that don't.
Read the note →Why most agency websites fail at conversion.
Beautiful, on-brand, and quietly broken. The structural mistakes that cost service businesses bookings — and the cheap fixes that recover them.
Read the note →The honest case for owning your own stack.
Vendor lock-in is a polite phrase for paying rent on your own data. What ownership actually looks like — code, database, accounts — and why it's cheaper.
Read the note →
How a note becomes a build.
From the page to the practice.
Every note here started as something we said three times in a row to three different owners — and then realised we should write down. The audit checklist. The P&L walk. The handover doc.
We don't publish on a schedule. We publish when there's a pattern worth pinning down. If you read one and want to talk about your own numbers, the audit is the next step.
No newsletter, no funnel.
Notes live here. There's no Substack, no weekly digest, no drip. If you want to know when a new one lands, the LinkedIn feed is the cleanest signal — or just check back.
“Write the thing once, properly. Link to it from every conversation. That's the whole strategy.”
Read enough?
The notes are the warm-up. The audit is the work.
Run the first audit