Design partners
The Design Partner Program
A limited number of firms per quarter get our engineers embedded in their practice, systems built to their exact workflows, and founding terms that never change. Any firm, any size, any service line.
Why a design partner program instead of a product launch
Off-the-shelf tools
How design partners build
What you get
Forward-deployed engineers
The people who scoped your workflow are the people who build it, inside your firm, with your staff reviewing output weekly.
Systems built to your workflows
Your templates, your indexing, your software stack, your review standards, for whichever service lines you run.
A pilot in the form that fits
A built workflow running in your practice, a consulting engagement with our engineers embedded, or both. Fixed scope, one measurable outcome agreed before work begins. Scope and terms are set together on your assessment call.
Founding terms, locked
Design partners keep their founding terms as the platform grows. The specifics are part of the call.
Roadmap priority
What we build next is what design partners need next. Quarterly roadmap sessions.
Everything the platform ships
Early access across all service lines as new capability lands during the program.
Optional visibility
Named and quoted, or strictly anonymous. Reference participation is never a condition.
How it starts
- 01
The workflow assessment
45 minutes, no charge, with the people who do the work. You receive a written map of where your hours go and which workflows carry the highest automation value, with an hours estimate for each. Both sides decide fit. If we are not the right answer, we say so in the session.
- 02
The pilot
One workflow, fixed scope, one measurable outcome agreed in advance, in the form that fits your firm. If the outcome is not met, we say so plainly and you owe nothing further.
- 03
The program
Engineers embedded continuously, extending into adjacent workflows and service lines, with founding terms locked from the pilot onward.
What we ask of you
- One person who knows the workflow, about two hours a week.
- Access to representative files under your confidentiality terms.
- A baseline measurement in week one, so both sides know whether the outcome was met.
- Candid weekly review. Telling us what is wrong is the mechanism, and politeness is what makes pilots fail slowly.
Fit
Any size, any service line, with at least one workflow the owners can name as a time sink. Solo practices, local firms, regional firms, national platforms. The engagement is scoped to the practice. The one situation we do not fit: a standard need a platform already serves well. If that is your situation, we tell you in the assessment and point you at the platform.
Questions
Asked by partners we meet.
Seven: tax, audit and assurance, client accounting (CAS), advisory and CFO, valuation and forensic, transaction advisory, and practice operations. Each has its own page under the Services menu, listing the workflows we automate inside it and what your firm keeps. Transaction advisory is where we started, so it goes deepest: quality of earnings, net debt, net working capital, and the supporting analyses.
Timing
Cohorts are capped because forward-deployed engineering spends real engineer time per firm. Firms that start between now and November enter busy season with the system running. Firms that start in December do not. That is the honest constraint.
The assessment is the application. There is no separate form.