You don't need all the pieces at once

My girlfriend and I spent last Sunday assembling an IKEA unit for the kids. We built the frame from pieces meticulously organized on the floor while sipping our old fashioneds and listening to a playlist that included both Chopin and Drake. Yes, I'm aware of the cliché. I'd like it on record that we finished in under two hours and neither of us cried.

I live in a small apartment. In the past two years, I've moved things around more times than I can count, because the space is tight and the people in it keep changing size. I've had to make spaces within spaces. I've repurposed the same pieces three or four times over. I once turned a horizontal bookshelf into a vertical one by changing the direction of its two drawers, which felt at the time like a small act of genius and was in fact just the thing the designers had planned for.

That's the point of IKEA, and that’s why it works in cities. It isn't built to be finished. It's built to fit in a space that keeps changing as your kids get older, as your needs shift, as you move to another rental with different walls.

What makes it scalable isn't the price. It's the modularity.

You buy a four-square cube for baby things. It becomes a bookcase for a toddler. You add four more squares when she's six. Later you split it into two smaller shelves, add drawers, and it holds storage in a basement for another few years. Same components, five different pieces of furniture, across a decade.

The thing I keep building

I love building things. IKEA furniture, organization systems for documentary films, governance structures for art collectives, marketing operations systems for clients.

To most people, those aren't the same category at all. To me, they have one thing in common: they make something bigger out of smaller parts, and the result is qualitatively different from the parts. When they work, they last. They get reused without being reconceived. They grow with whoever is using them.

A good editorial system lets the editor focus on the story instead of on where the footage is. Its whole design points toward one outcome: eventually, it should eliminate the job of the person who built it. That's not a failure. That's the measure.

The best idea we've had as a species for organizing ourselves is democracy, and it's the most equitable version we've found — when it isn't being manipulated — for the same structural reason. It doesn't depend on one person's wishes or one person's solutions.

Modular. Operators and components get replaced. The system stays intact, and sometimes it gets better.

In my last two agency roles, I built systems that kept working after I left. That's not a flex. Well. Slightly. But the actual point is that as a systems person, my job was never to be indispensable. It was to find the flows and clarify the definitions so that things still made sense when I wasn't in the room.

And I didn't know how to run a business until I started running one. Some would argue I still don't. To which I'd say: that's part of the thrill.

Why this matters if you're running something small

Here's what I've noticed about how business support usually gets sold.

It comes as a sequence. Strategy, then brand, then launch: a linear path with a beginning and an end, priced as one thing, delivered over months. You're asked to buy the whole staircase before you've climbed a step.

That model assumes two things that aren't true of most of the people I work with.

It assumes you have the money for all of it at once. And it assumes your needs will stay still long enough for a six-month plan to still be the right plan in month five.

If you're one person, or one person and a couple of others, neither holds. You don't have the cash for a package. You don't have the slack to disappear into a process. And your circumstances will change — a studio lease ends, a big client leaves, a new opportunity appears in a category you hadn't considered — faster than any roadmap can absorb.

So you end up in one of two places. Either you buy the whole thing and find that half of it doesn't apply by the time you get to it. Or, more often, you buy nothing, because the entry price is too high and the commitment is too long, and you keep doing it alone.

That's not a failure of nerves. It's a mismatch between how the help is packaged and how a small business actually moves.

What you need is the cube shelf. Something you can buy one piece of, use immediately, and add to when you're ready, that reconfigures when your situation does, rather than becoming obsolete.

So that's how we built it.

Reeshè is a set of pieces, not a staircase.

There's a free diagnostic, and then three one-day workshops. Germinate turns an idea into a business (what you're selling, who it's for, what it costs). Sprout turns that business into a brand (how people recognize it, what it sounds like, how it looks). Bloom turns the brand into a launch (where it shows up and how it enters the market). And Flourish is a twelve-week residency for when the plan already exists and what's missing is the doing.

Each one is a single day. Each produces its own output. You leave holding the actual work — a defined offer with real pricing, a positioning statement, a go-to-market plan — not notes about the work, and not a document summarizing what we discussed.

Which means you can buy one. Stop after it. Come back in four months. Skip one entirely. There's no contract that swallows a year and no path you have to complete to get value from the first step.

And you don't have to take them in order.

That's the part people find surprising, and it's the part I care most about.

One of our clients came to us with three separate offerings, none of them clearly defined against each other, inconsistent branding across all of them, and a studio move about to compress her timeline. She also needed revenue soon; not eventually.

The textbook order would have been product, then brand, then launch. Months of foundational work before a dollar came in, at precisely the moment she could least afford to wait.

So we ran it backwards. The diagnostic surfaced something nobody had named: part of what she made was already priced and already sellable. It just wasn't reaching anyone consistently. So we started at the end of the sequence and built the go-to-market first, for the things she could sell today. That produced revenue within weeks, which bought room for the slower work: defining the higher-value offering properly, building pricing from what delivery actually cost her.

The brand work came last. By which point she had the money and the creative energy to treat it as creative work rather than as one more emergency.

That order was wrong by every framework I know. It was right for her.

You can only do that with modular pieces. A sequence can't bend. A set of components can.

The kids' room

The unit we built on Sunday wasn't the only thing in there. It joined the pieces already in that room, most of which have been three or four other things.

And somewhere in the rearranging, the room stopped being a room with furniture in it. There's a corner for making things, with the paints and the paper. There's a quiet spot for reading, which my daughter negotiated the terms of at some length. There's a space that is currently, and non-negotiably, a shop.

None of that was designed. We didn't have a plan for a room with three zones in it. We had pieces that could move, a situation that kept changing, and enough patience to keep rearranging until it fit.

That's the argument, really. You don't need all the pieces at once. You need pieces that fit together, that work on their own, and that can be rearranged when the thing you're building turns out to be different from the thing you set out to build.

Which it usually does.

If you're building something and not sure which piece you need first, that's exactly what the SOIL Assessment is for. It's free, it takes a few minutes, and sometimes we'll tell you the answer is someone else entirely.