The Small Room: Why I Chose Thirty Clients, Not Three Hundred

I didn’t set out to build a small business. I set out to build the right one.

A restaurant with thirty covers can know every table. A restaurant with three hundred is serving portions, not plates.

Every musician I’ve ever loved made the same choice.

Janiva Magness plays rooms of a hundred people. There are five hundred outside who can’t get in. She doesn’t look at that queue and think I need a bigger venue. She looks at the room and thinks this is where the music works. The intimacy isn’t a limitation. It’s the product.

Prince could fill any stadium on earth. He chose to do residencies in clubs. After the arenas, after the fame, after fighting Warner Bros for years to own his own masters - he went back to the small room. Because the small room is where you hear every note.

Guy Clark wrote songs that other songwriters studied like blueprints. He never had a hit. He didn’t need one. The people in the room knew what they were hearing. That was enough.

Courtney Marie Andrews toured in a van for a decade, sleeping on floors, making records for nobody. Then May Your Kindness Remain landed and people acted like she’d appeared from nowhere. She hadn’t. She’d been in the small room the whole time, getting better.

The stadium flattens everything. You can’t play quiet. You can’t play subtle. You can’t look someone in the eye from the back of Wembley. So the songs get louder, the arrangements get broader, the edges get sanded off until it works for everyone and moves no one.

That’s what I’m building. Not a consultancy that serves everyone passably, but one that serves thirty people properly. Where I know the business, know the industry, know what’s working and what isn’t - because there aren’t so many clients that they blur into a spreadsheet.

The Standard

Bowie reinvented himself every three years. Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, Berlin. Each one fully committed, each one real. But the quality never changed. The thread underneath every transformation was the standard. That’s the bit people miss about reinvention - it’s not about novelty. It’s about refusing to repeat yourself while refusing to drop the bar.

I’ve been doing this for twenty-six years. The tools have changed, the platforms have changed, the algorithms have changed. What hasn’t changed is the work. Good copy is good copy. A clear message is a clear message. A website that helps someone find what they need and trust who they’re buying from - that’s the same job it was in 1999.

The difference now is I’ve stopped pretending the big room is the goal. The big room was never the goal. The work was always the goal, and the work is better in the small room.

The Table

Marco Pierre White won three Michelin stars and handed them back. The stars were never the point. The kitchen was the point. The plate leaving the pass was the point. He didn’t cook for the inspectors. He cooked for the table.

Thirty covers. Real songs. No encore unless you’ve earned it.