Three of us, not nine.

The first thing we tell a new client is the team size. There are three of us. The two founders, and a producer who runs the social work day to day. That’s the whole studio.

It surprises people in two directions. Some hear it as a constraint, “only three?”, and start mentally adjusting the scope of what we can take on. Others hear it as a feature and lean in immediately. The clients who lean in tend to be the right fit.

Why we don’t scale the team

It would be straightforward to add three more producers, a junior strategist, an account manager, and turn the studio into an agency at ten or twelve people. We’ve done the math. The economics work.

We don’t do it because the moment the team grows past three, the thing we’re actually selling, the founders’ attention, starts to dilute. The conversation moves from a working call into an account review. The strategy gets handed off to the producer. The client meets the principal at the kickoff and then once a quarter. That model is the agency model. It’s a fine model. It’s just not what we built.

What three-people-deep actually looks like

The day-to-day reality, written out so it’s not a slogan:

• Both founders are on every working call. One leads, one takes notes, both contribute. Nothing happens in a meeting that one of us only hears about later.
• The producer runs operations, not the brand.She schedules, captures footage, ships posts, keeps the inbox warm. She doesn’t set tone or strategy. That’s the founders’ job.
• We have a hard cap on active engagements.Four retainers, plus one or two Spark projects at a time. When the queue fills, we add a waitlist; we don’t add headcount.

The trade-off we’re making

The cost is that we say no a lot. Not because anything is wrong with the work, but because we’re full. Most agencies would call this a problem to fix; we treat it as the shape of the studio.

The benefit is that when you hire us, you’re hiring the people whose names are on the door. Not a flavor of them.

Sababa. Three of us, on your work.