Simple Firms

Tools built in the field to simplify complex organizations.

Spans & Layers, Balanced Turnover, and Combined Structure didn't start as a product line. Each one came out of a specific consulting engagement — a real organization, a real problem — and got built because the existing tools weren't quite right for it. Simple Firms is what they became once there were enough of them to need a name.

For years these ran as hosted applications: servers, uptime, patching, all the operational overhead of keeping software live for other people. That's a lot of infrastructure for a solo consulting practice to carry, relative to what it actually added for me or for clients.

That's changed. AI has made it practical to maintain and keep modernizing this software mostly on my own, without needing a team behind it. Today these tools mostly travel with me into an engagement rather than sitting on a server somewhere — run locally, used by the people actually in the room, only for as long as the work requires. A hosted version is still available if a client wants one.

It's a small illustration of something bigger: the judgment an engagement calls for still has to come from a person, but AI is what lets one person's tools keep up with what used to need a team to build and maintain.