The question put to the court: A six-person agency at full capacity, $720k a year, the owner as the bottleneck: hire two and go upmarket, raise prices 40 percent at renewal, or productize the brand sprint?
Nine years in, the studio runs at capacity and the owner runs past it: selling, managing fourteen accounts, and billing fifteen design hours a week on top. Two and a half months of cash, no outside money, and three doors that all route through the same person's calendar.
CASE FILE № 2 · CONVENED JULY 15, 2026
The question put to the court: A six-person agency at full capacity, $720k a year, the owner as the bottleneck: hire two and go upmarket, raise prices 40 percent at renewal, or productize the brand sprint?
Nine years in, the studio runs at capacity and the owner runs past it: selling, managing fourteen accounts, and billing fifteen design hours a week on top. Two and a half months of cash, no outside money, and three doors that all route through the same person's calendar.
Kill the hire, reprice the book at renewals, and run the cheap version of the sprint test alongside. Quote the raise at the first two or three renewals with a scope-hold fallback for anyone who balks, and keep your three anchor clients out of the first cohort entirely. Before a single design hour moves off your desk, run a one-week time audit of the other five people. By October 13 the renewals will have graded the whole plan with real money.
| Option | Why it lost or won |
|---|---|
| A · killed on cash | Two loaded salaries burn about $52.5k during ramp against two and a half months of cash, before any bigger retainer could possibly close. Even the attacker hired to break this verdict conceded the kill. The door back has one lock: a signed upmarket retainer worth $280k a year or more. Signed, never pipelined. |
| B · wins, goes first | The year-one money lives here, and the arithmetic is checked: the raise stays revenue-positive as long as the clients who walk carry less than about two-sevenths of the book, and at expected churn it adds roughly $58–65k. What nobody knows is whether clients swallow the number, which is exactly why the first renewals are the test, the anchors are protected, and a scope-hold offer catches anyone who balks. |
| C · probe now, build on deposit | Eleven paid runs in two years say the demand is real; the historical pace says it is a nice check, not an engine. So it runs as the cheap probe: read the last four scope docs, one fixed-price page, five pitches, ten to fifteen owner-hours. Full productization waits until someone pays a deposit. It also holds the only structural answer to the owner-bottleneck, which is why it stays in the plan at all. |
| attacked · demolished | Forfeits the year-one money, burns a one-time seven-month renewal window, and leaves every unknown a permanent guess. The court's second attacker took it apart on the merits; nothing about waiting makes any of this cheaper. |
The final review cut the court's confidence where the attack landed: the raise does not free the owner's calendar, and the probe was priced too optimistically.
Honored You called your own churn guess a pure guess, and the court honored the honesty instead of papering over it: the entire plan is built to convert your guess into graded, real-money evidence within ninety days.
Vindicated Your own margin sheet, tight-scope sprints running far richer than custom work, is the evidence that templating can work. The court used your numbers, not industry folklore, to keep the sprint alive.
Upheld Your read that you are the bottleneck survived everything, including the trial's biggest concession: even a perfect reprice does not free your calendar, and the verdict now says so in plain words.
Every line above carries a receipt in the run record. This court affirms claims, not egos; when it says you were right, it is because the claim survived the trial.
The kill is unanimous and the sequencing dispute is settled by a dated test, not by the loudest seat. The one thing nobody can know in advance is whether your book absorbs the raise, and the plan is built so the first renewals answer that with real money while your anchors stay protected.
Strength is set by the weakest surviving assumption, not the average. Easy calls do not come to court, so verdicts here live mostly in the 40s to 60s, and movement means more than level. The raw number for this run stays on the record: stable 2/2 · 65%. The court's own final review cut this number before it ruled, movement in the uncomfortable direction, with the reasons on the docket in the web record.
The hire kill: ramp burn against the cash cushion, unanimous across seats and both attackers, the safest finding in the record. The renewal window as a free, real-money experiment: the raise tests itself on the first cohort without betting the book. Her own margin sheet as the sprint's best evidence: tight scope runs far richer than custom, which is the templating thesis in her own handwriting.
One seat holds the sprint product, not the reprice, should lead: the product is the only path that structurally frees the owner, and the reprice spends the renewal window on a number clients may refuse; sequencing flips if the first renewals stall at the full raise while the scope docs show a genuinely repeatable template, at which point the freed hours go to sprint delivery and the raise retreats.
The full trial, with every attack and its answer, is below in the record.
Several independent models argued this, each assigned a different way of thinking, their arguments stripped of names before a judge model ruled. The seats genuinely split on sequencing, the product or the price first, and the court sequenced instead of averaging. Every load-bearing number was checked live, an adversary model forced three concessions into the plan, a second one demolished the do-nothing alternative, and the final deliberation ran twice from scratch, agreeing both times.
The accordions above are the curated story. This is the full docket: every hit both adversaries landed, what the court did about each, and how it was disposed. Nothing is cherry-picked; where a hit was conceded, the tag says conceded.
| # | The attack | The court's answer | Disposition |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wave 1 · every claim checked live An independent checker re-verified the record before any attack: ten claims confirmed, the owner's thirteen declared facts taken as hers, ten held as unverified direction, zero fabrications. | |||
| W1·1 | The record drew heavily on social-media chatter about agency pricing and productized services. | Quarantined by the checker: the load-bearing arithmetic was confirmed independently, and the social material was held as direction-only. Nothing unverified carries weight in the ruling. | Quarantined · direction only |
| W1·2 | The plan's dates and thresholds could have been vibes wearing decimals. | Checked: the ramp burn, the churn break-even, and the ninety-day date math were each confirmed by calculation. Zero fabrications and zero refutations in this record. | Confirmed · held |
| Wave 2 · the attack on the verdict An adversary model attacked the winning plan's soft tissue: the calendar, the probe's price tag, the anchor exposure. Its best hits were conceded and became gates in the plan. | |||
| W2·1 | The reprice, even if it works perfectly, does not get the owner out of her own calendar. | Conceded in full and written into the verdict in plain words. The structural fix lives in the sprint template, and the time audit gate keeps the paper-capacity assumption from silently becoming a plan. | Conceded · gated |
| W2·2 | The sprint probe's advertised cost was too cute: real pitching and page-building does not fit in ten hours. | Conceded: revised to ten to fifteen owner-hours, and the probe was cut to its cheapest honest form, one page and five pitches, with full productization gated on a paid deposit. | Conceded · repriced |
| W2·3 | A hard quote to an anchor client risks two-fifths of revenue on a cushion that cannot absorb the miss. | Adopted as a hard rule: anchors are excluded from the first cohort, and an anchor renewal arriving early gets deferred or opened at a gentler number. | Adopted · anchor rule |
| Wave 3 · the counter-attack on the alternative A second adversarial pass tested the quiet alternative, waiting, and demolished it on forfeited money, a one-time window, and permanent ignorance. | |||
| W3·1 | The safe move was waiting: renew everyone quietly and revisit next year. | The second attacker tested it and broke it: waiting forfeits the year-one money, spends a one-time renewal window, and leaves every unknown a permanent guess. Sitting tight lost on the merits, not on temperament. | Landed · waiting fell |
The seats genuinely split on what goes first, the product or the price. The court sequenced instead of averaging, and October 13 settles the argument with receipts.
| When | Gate |
|---|---|
| This week | Pull the renewal schedule and confirm who comes up in the next 60 days. If an anchor is first in line, the sequencing changes before anyone gets quoted anything. |
| Before any hours move | One-week time audit of the other five people. The team's paper capacity has to be proven real before a single design hour transfers off your desk. |
| First 2–3 renewals | Quote the raise with a scope-hold fallback: same dollars, less scope, for anyone who balks. Anchors excluded from this cohort, no exceptions. Alongside: the cheap sprint probe, one page, five pitches, ten to fifteen hours. |
| October 13, 2026 | Grade the test: renewals taken clean, churn and downsells counted, sprint deposits or silence. The results, not the seats, decide what accelerates and what dies. |
ramp cost for two loaded salaries over three months, against a cash cushion of two and a half months: the kill everyone agreed on, attackers included
expected year-one gain at survivable churn, on her own book's numbers: the only door with real money behind it this year
paid runs in two years, with tight-scope margins far above custom work: demand is proven, engine-scale is not, which is why it probes before it builds
The court refused to pretend anyone knows how this book responds to a hard raise, because the owner herself called it a guess. So the plan is built as a ladder of cheap tests: the renewal schedule first, because an anchor at the front changes everything; the time audit before any hour transfers, because paper capacity is usually vacation and admin wearing a spreadsheet; the first renewals as the real-money experiment, anchors protected; and the sprint probe running alongside at the cost of one page and five pitches.
Pre-registered: by October 13, 2026, the first renewal cohort is graded. Clean acceptance at the full raise accelerates the reprice and demotes the sprint. Churn and downsells past roughly one client in five halts the raise, retreats to a gentler number, and moves the freed hours into sprint delivery. Either way the guess is dead and a graded fact stands in its place.
Every council verdict makes dated, checkable predictions. This one grades itself October 13: renewals taken or walked, audit run, sprint deposits or silence. The scorecard fills in either way.