Fourteen people is a choice. It would be easier to grow — our pipeline has been ahead of our capacity for three years now — but we keep turning down work because the economics of our size are the economics that make the work good.
Here is the math. A fifty-person studio has roughly thirty-five billable people and fifteen people managing those thirty-five. Out of the thirty-five billable, maybe eight are senior. The other twenty-seven are juniors and mids that the senior eight are reviewing, supervising, or handing work off to.
When you hire a fifty-person studio, you get a senior project manager and a senior designer in the pitch, and a mix of mids and juniors doing the actual work. That is fine. That is how big agencies work. But it means the senior craft you saw in the pitch is diluted across every deliverable.
A fourteen-person studio with zero project managers works differently. The person who sells the work is the person who does the work. There is no handoff. There is no "let me check with the team" — the team is two other people and they are in the same Slack channel. Decisions that take a week in a fifty-person studio take ninety minutes with us.
The trade-off is obvious: we do fewer engagements at once. We turn down work that does not fit. We do not have bench capacity for a sudden fourth engagement. We are not the right choice for every problem.
But for the work we do take, the math is favourable. Senior-only teams ship faster per hour, need less oversight, and produce output that does not need to be fixed by the senior eight later. That is why clients who have worked with both sizes keep coming back to us.