A short list, and an equally deliberate list of what I leave alone.

Every practice already has people telling it what to do. The useful thing a senior partner brings is not another opinion, it is a defined territory and the judgment to stay inside it. So here is exactly where the work lives.

The right hand column is not a list of things I am unwilling to discuss. Several of them come up in almost every engagement, and pretending otherwise would be silly. It is a list of things I will not be accountable for, because they need a different specialist and you deserve one.

Two of them are worth saying out loud, because they are what most people expect when they hear the word marketing. I do not run ad accounts and I do not manage Instagram. Both are real crafts, both are better done by people who do them every day, and neither is usually where a practice’s next stage of growth comes from. A strategist is not the right person to post for you.

What I do instead is work out which of the seven gears will move you forward fastest, and then either build it or brief the person who should. When the diagnosis is right, the execution goes further, because every dollar lands on the gear that matters.

Most practices come in one of four ways. A solo owner who has grown on word of mouth and can feel a gap forming. A multi-location group in a growth sprint with no in-house strategist. An established practice whose polish has not kept pace with a slicker but weaker competitor. Or a fast-scaling practice already spending on marketing, just inefficiently.

The diagnosis is the same in all four cases. What differs is how much of the engine already exists and how much has to be built. That is what the engagements are shaped around.