About
Your engagement is led by the person who builds it.
Arclength is deliberately small. The number of firms under active build is capped at what can be held to the standard, which is what keeps the same person on your engagement from the first working session through to the reviews a year later.
References
Where a firm has agreed to it, we will put you in touch with the principal. Where one has not, we will say the engagement exists and leave it there.
How the work is staffed
Four commitments about who does the work.
Capacity
The number of firms under active build is capped at what can be held to the standard, and when it is full the next engagement gets a start date rather than a subcontractor.
No handoff
The consultant who runs your assessment is the one who designs and builds the systems. Nothing is passed to a delivery team you have not met, and there is no account manager between you and the work.
Continuity
Every workflow, automation, and naming rule is written down in plain language as it is built, so your systems do not depend on any one person, at your firm or at ours.
If we are unreachable
A build is not finished until the people who run the process day to day can run it in a week we are unavailable, and that is the test we hold ourselves to.
Who you deal with
You work directly with the consultant who builds your systems.
You deal with one person from the first working session to the review a year later. They see how your firm actually operates, so nothing has to be explained twice and no decision gets made by somebody who was not in the room.
The commitments above are written into the engagement letter rather than left as a promise on a website.
From the founder
Why I started this.
Advisory firms outsource compliance and they outsource finance, and operations is the one they are still doing themselves after hours. That is the whole reason I started this.
The reason it stays that way is that nothing has punished it. Revenue has grown with the market for a long time, so a firm can run a process that only one person understands and still add clients every year, and the weakness never shows up in the numbers. It shows up when that person leaves, or when somebody is looking at the firm to buy it, and by then it is expensive.
More software is not the answer either. Most firms I look at have already bought good platforms one at a time and never designed the relationship between them, which is where the work actually is. I would rather remove a failure point than add a system, and I would rather build the boring version that holds than the clever one that needs me around for it to keep running.
The part I enjoy is the design, and specifically working out which small number of changes actually matter. There is always a version of this that touches everything, and it is almost never the right one.
I also spend real time on the part nobody puts on a website, which is that every firm already has somebody who owns the process today. A system that takes something away from that person without giving them anything back will not survive the first quarter. That is a design problem rather than a personality problem, and I treat it as one.
I build the systems myself rather than managing somebody who does. Before Arclength I did the same thing inside my own company, designing the intake, the filing, and the automation between them. The industry is different and the problem is not: information arrives, it has to end up in more than one place, and somebody is doing that by hand.
The method is published on this site in full, and the assessment is a fixed fee that produces something you can act on whether or not you build anything with me. Those are the two things I would judge it on.
Next
Start with the assessment.
Scoped to your firm, and the findings are yours whatever you decide afterwards.