My firm has a staff of twenty-five, and I am the only person in it. Claude Code runs the staff: twenty-five advisors on ten teams, twenty-nine skills that fire on my own vocabulary, seven jobs that run on their own schedules. This page is the map. The full manual sits behind every section, and the packaged system, assembled for your firm, is $297.
Claude Code is the version of Claude that reads and writes files on your own computer instead of chatting in a browser window. Programmers use it to write software. I use it to run a firm: a consulting and research practice, a book, a website selling research to executives, a pipeline of prospects and bids. The tool follows whatever you decide it is for. This page shows what mine became over eight months, and the manual behind it shows the reasoning for every piece.
| What's on staff | April (v1) | July (v2) | August (v3) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advisors, one-page job descriptions each | 0 | 11 | 25, across ten teams |
| Skills you trigger just by talking | 6 | 18 | 29 |
| Jobs that run themselves on a schedule | 0 | 4 | 10 defined, 7 active |
| Rules the system enforces automatically | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| Short files shaped like maps (knowledge graphs) | 6 | 11 | 12 |
| Notes in memory | ~24 | 118 | 257 |
The April and July editions are preserved unchanged, so each column can be checked against its own record rather than taken on trust.
| Part | The question it answers | Full detail |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | What does the firm know when nothing is happening? Four colored folders, twelve one-page maps, 257 memory notes read before every session, a 320-page book made answerable. | Manual, §01-05 |
| Action | What happens when I say something? Twenty-nine skills triggered by ordinary vocabulary, plus four rules enforced by plain software whether or not anyone remembers them. | Manual, §06-08 |
| Staff | Who does the work? Ten teams, twenty-five advisors, each one a one-page job description that drafts, checks, or argues and decides nothing. | Manual, §09-17 |
| Flow | How does a working day move? Short sessions, one door for status updates, a closing ritual that files what was learned, and a weekly job that mines old sessions. | Manual, §18-22 |
| Rules | What never got built, and what decides what does? The gatekeeper, the one-fact-one-file rule, the list nobody may touch, and the backup that trusts no log line. | Manual, §23-28 |
An advisor is a one-page job description: a role, what it optimizes for, and a fixed list of what it may touch. Hiring one costs one short file, so the staff grew to fit the work that actually showed up. None of them acts on its own authority, and nothing leaves the building without my sign-off.
| Team | What it does |
|---|---|
| Executive | Me. The only seat that decides anything. |
| Chief of staff | Holds the priorities and the decision queue; filters everything toward the top three. |
| Strategy board · 6 seats | Debates real decisions; one seat exists only to argue against the plan. |
| Marketing & product · 4 seats | Makes whatever already got a yes actually sell: buyer, funnel, page, price. |
| Account team · 4 seats | One consequential relationship, one dedicated map, one writer, several readers. |
| Legal QA · 3 seats | Reads an agreement the way the other side's lawyer will, before it gets signed. |
| Bid review · 3 seats | Scores, fact-checks, and package-checks a drafted bid before it gets submitted. |
| Systems · 3 seats | A gatekeeper before anything gets built, a fixer while it runs, a separate checker after. |
| Standing specialists · 2 | Security audits of the operation and the site; coaching read on meeting transcripts. |
| Executive assistant | Avery: briefs, calendar, tracking, email drafts. He drafts. He never sends. |
The full org chart, with what every seat may touch: the manual, §10
On the systems team's first night, the advisor that fixes broken plumbing handed back a complete, confident report on two jobs it had been asked to look into: invented log entries, a file location that did not exist, not one actual check run. A separate, reads-only checker failed every claim in that report. The real state of the system, checked directly, was mostly fine. Three standing rules came out of that night: every claim shows the actual check it ran, "I could not find it" is always an acceptable answer, and no report reaches me as fact until a different advisor has confirmed it.
The whole story, and the gatekeeper added since: the manual, §15
Every few weeks I talked myself into one giant searchable index of every file I own. I scoped it more than once and even named it: the Personal Knowledge Atlas. I never built it. Twelve small hand-written maps and one routing table deliver the value it promised, for a fraction of the work. I build only what the friction in my own working sessions calls for. Nothing else gets built.
Build the small thing that works, not the big thing that impresses.
The full argument: the manual, §23
Four colors, four jobs. The automatic rules key on the colors, so nobody has to remember which folder means what.
A file readable in one breath stays in Claude's mind for the whole conversation. A folder it has to dig through becomes something it keeps losing track of.
Never an instruction you hope gets remembered. A rule enforced by plain software holds even in a long, drifting conversation.
Jobs that can actually send things carry a second safeguard that halts the run the moment the approval behind it has gone stale.
I bring today's truth in through one door, on my schedule, and every piece gets filed into the one file that owns that kind of fact, with a receipt.
All sixteen, with the reasoning behind each: the manual, Part V
Every skill, every team, every rule, and the reasoning behind why each one is shaped the way it is: Setup, wiring, staffing: a working Claude Code environment (v3). It runs about an hour. The April and July editions are preserved unchanged as the record of where it started.
The RBD. Firm Operating System is this same environment, packaged so you can run it on your own firm: the staff, the skills, the memory and routing architecture, and the rules for what to build and what not to. It gets assembled for your firm from three questions about how you actually work, and delivered by email within one business day. Early buyers keep this price as the system grows.
Purchases are governed by the Terms of Sale and Refund Policy. Want it fitted to your practice in a live working session instead? That is the Build Session, $750.