Be specific.
A vague brief produces a vague engagement. We rewrite the scope until it would survive a finance audit, not a marketing review.
The desk story
We started as the audit team that nobody else wanted to do.
The early engagements were tedious billing audits for subscription businesses too small to have a payments specialist on staff and too large to run on intuition. Nobody else wanted the work, which is how we ended up with a strong opinion about it.
Six years later the practice still revolves around audits. The packages have grown around them: architecture sprints, dunning design, migration programmes. Each one of them began as a chapter of an audit that kept showing up and eventually became its own piece of work.
We are deliberately small.
Subscription payments is a narrow field. The seven consultants on the desk speak to each other every day, which is how we keep the practice consistent. Hiring an eighth would mean changing how we work; we have decided not to, for now.
That choice has a cost. We turn away engagements that would not fit a seven-person desk. We tell prospective clients honestly when the timing is wrong. We refer them to peers in Tokyo, Singapore, and Berlin when we cannot help, and they refer back when the brief is closer to ours.