The translation tax
In most agencies, strategy hands to design, design hands to engineering, and engineering hands to a support desk that was not consulted. Each handover loses intent, and the losses are invisible until something is live and wrong.
We organise around that problem. The engineer who will build a flow is in the room when it is designed, and the person who will maintain it is in the room when it is architected.
Three divisions that share a brief
Websites & commerce covers the sites and storefronts. Apps & software covers product engineering. Platform & support covers everything after launch — speed, security, accessibility and maintenance.
Most engagements draw on two of the three. They sit under one brief and one accountable lead precisely so nobody has to broker between them.
Senior only, deliberately small
We do not run a pyramid. There is no junior layer being funded by your project, and there is no account manager between you and the person doing the work.
That limits how much work we can take, which is a constraint we accept because the alternative changes what the work is.
What you own
Code in your repositories. Infrastructure in your accounts. Domains in your name. Documentation good enough for another team to take over.
The test we hold ourselves to is whether you could leave cleanly. If you can, staying is a decision rather than a consequence.
What this costs us
Being senior-only means we cannot leverage a pyramid, so we take fewer projects and turn work down more often than is commercially comfortable. Refusing brand, media and SEO retainers means we lose engagements to full-service agencies that will nod at everything.
We think the trade is right. The alternative — growing quickly, staffing thinly and selling adjacent services we are merely competent at — is how studios end up with a portfolio they cannot explain and clients who cannot tell what they bought.
Questions people ask about this
Frequently. We embed in your repositories, follow your review standards and pair where knowledge transfer matters. Some engagements are structured explicitly so your team ends up owning the product.
Documentation, a handover session and — where useful — a maintenance retainer. The test we hold ourselves to is whether you could leave cleanly, because that makes staying a decision rather than a dependency.