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An advisory firm owner told me something a few weeks ago that has been stuck in my mind ever since: "Kyle, most firms are aircraft carriers. They're too slow. We're more of a pirate ship."
He was joking, mostly. It took me a moment to understand where he was coming from. But I realize he came up with a clever way to describe the argument that everyone in our profession seems to be having: whether the next decade will belong to the big firms or to the small ones.
You can make either case, and both arguments will sound good.
Case for large firms
The case for the large firm is about resources. They have the budget for technology, the data to build on, and the outside capital behind them. A 10-person shop cannot afford to hire someone just to figure out what comes next — but a 400-person firm can.
Case for small firms
The case for the small firm is about weight. No committees, no consensus, no 17 partners each needing to be comfortable before anything happens. At a small firm, you have the ability to change how you work on a Tuesday because you decided to on Monday.
I've sat through both arguments many times at firms I work with. I find myself nodding in agreement each time. That's usually a tell that the question is wrong. Because if you look at what separates the firms pulling away from the ones falling behind, it isn't about size. It's about something size only happens to correlate with. Once you name it, the whole big-versus-small debate stops being interesting.
A pirate ship is still a ship
Here's what I think my friend got right and what he got wrong with his nautical analogy. He was correct that a massive aircraft carrier can't turn on a dime. He was incorrect in thinking that a smaller, faster boat like a pirate ship is the answer. A pirate ship still has one hull, one captain and one direction. It's faster than a carrier, but it works the same way. Everyone aboard goes where the ship goes, whether that direction turns out to be right or wrong. Somebody must settle on the direction before anyone goes anywhere at all.
So, it's not a question about which type of ship to be; it's about whether the answer is a ship.
Here come the drones
Think about what's happened in warfare in recent years, because it's a great analogy for what's happening in our profession. Drone swarms have changed how militaries think about scale. They're cheap, they're fast, and losing one doesn't cost you much. More importantly, a swarm doesn't require unanimous agreement to move. Each unit goes on its own, and collectively the group covers more ground than any vessel could ever hope to reach.
That's the difference between a ship and a swarm. It isn't about speed. It's about how much agreement is required before any unit or person is allowed to move.
That difference between a ship and a swarm shows up everywhere once you start looking for it. For instance, it shows up as pace. If a firm requires all 11 partners to be in alignment, the firm only moves at the speed of the slowest partner. But at a three-person firm, where people who don't need permission to act, they can move the same week if not the same day. The ship vs. swarm difference also shows up in the amount of ground covered. At a traditional aircraft carrier-like firm, where everyone must head in the same direction, you can only try one new thing at a time. At a higher-performing swarm firm, however, 20 small teams can try 20 different things and keep the three that work best. The ship vs. swarm difference also shows up when it comes to the costs of being wrong. When you're wrong on a ship, it means turning around the entire ship. That takes time. Being wrong in a swarm means one unit peels off and everybody else keeps going.
What's actually being measured
Putting size aside, let's talk about speed. How long does it take your firm to learn something new and put it to use? Not how long it takes to hear about something. How long does it take you to go from "we should look at this" to somebody using it in the firm on a Tuesday morning? For most firms, the honest answer is fiscal quarters, because the path goes through a committee, then a partner meeting, then a standard, then a rollout, then training. By the time you've standardized on the thing, the thing has changed twice beneath you.
But a firm built like a swarm runs that same loop in a week. Think about what happens when a swarm runs that loop week after week for a year. If it's a competitor, they'll go from slightly ahead of you to way ahead of you because they've learned 40 new things during the time that it took you to learn four. No amount of capital closes that gap because the gap was never about capital.
This is why I think size is a red herring. Scale gives you more resources and fewer degrees of freedom, and in a period when the ground keeps moving, freedom is the scarcer of the two. Scale used to be the moat. I think scale has quietly become the anchor.
This is about learning, not about gambling with your clients
Here is where I lose some of you, and fairly, because the honest objection is that we are a licensed profession and this is not a place where you let everyone improvise. You can't have 40 people trying things on a client's return, you can't rebuild the client experience every 20 minutes, and standards exist for reasons that were paid for in other people's mistakes.
Below the waterline, be a ship. The signature, the tax position, the client's data, and the standards you're held to all get one direction and full agreement. They should be slow on purpose. Nobody experiments down there, and I'm not suggesting they should.
Above the waterline, be a swarm. How you draft, how you review, how you prepare for a meeting, how you word the email, which tool three people try out this month. Small teams, real authority, a short clock and no permission required. The client never sees the experiment, they only see what you learned from it, and that's what above the waterline has always meant.
