Revenue rose 18% in the first year, but the founders say the real change was in who stayed. Attrition at Northfold fell by half, and referrals now account for most new clients. None of that was in the plan when the studio stopped billing by the hour.
For a decade, the story of hiring was a story of scale. Large firms paid more, promoted faster and offered the kind of name that looks good on a CV. Small firms took whoever was left, trained them, and then watched them leave for a bigger logo.
That story is quietly reversing. In a survey of 400 firms with fewer than 50 staff, 58% said they had filled their last senior role with someone who took a pay cut to join. The reason they gave, again and again, was the work.
The end of the timesheet
Northfold’s founders, Priya Rahman and Ben Achebe, dropped timesheets in January 2024. Every project is now priced as a fixed fee, scoped in a single meeting and delivered by a team that owns it end to end. Nobody reports hours; everybody reports progress.
Margins are a design problem before they are a finance problem.
The change was not painless. The studio turned away two retainer clients who wanted weekly hour reports, and a third left within the quarter. Rahman estimates the move cost them £140,000 in the first six months.
What candidates actually want
Ask the people who joined and the answers are specific. They wanted to see a project through. They wanted to be in the room with the client. They wanted fewer layers between their idea and the finished thing. Big firms, for all their benefits, rarely offer any of those to anyone under director level.
The model is not for everyone. It demands ruthless scoping and a willingness to say no to work that does not fit. But for the firms that manage it, the talent war looks less like a war and more like a queue.
