What is Quorum1?
A lot of people think that Quorum1 is a consulting firm. We certainly do run a full-service consultancy, but that’s not what we are.
So what are we really?
Quorum1 is a living experiment to test a completely different way to run a company, a way which we call the Quorum Model.
The Quorum Model aspires to be a business operating system for a new generation of ethical companies — where learning, entrepreneurship, sustainability, fairness, flexibility, transparency, autonomy and democracy are all built directly into the corporate operating model.
Our experimental nature means that Quorum1 can be described in many different ways. Below are a few of the roles that we see the quorum serving.
Note: This is a cross-post from the Quorum1 Wiki. Original link here.
Quorum1 is a Network
At our core, Quorum1 is a professional collective built to give experts and aspiring experts a place to connect, learn, work and grow.
🤝 Rather than focus on a particular professional discipline, our network is centered on a particular type of client: technology-centric companies focused on growth and operational excellence.
The Q1 network is in a state of constant expansion. Our network was founded by Salesforce and business systems experts specifically. But as we grow we are bringing in professionals from just about every practice area relevant to cutting edge technical business operations and modern high-growth companies.
Q1’s organizational structure is designed to capitalize on the network effects of a diversified membership. We offer our clients a wide variety of professional services without getting bogged down by the bureaucratic overhead of traditional, heavily centralized consultancies.
Currently, our primary practice areas are:
- Business Systems Engineering
Salesforce Customization, Low-Code/No-Code Development, Marketing Automation, Business Intelligence, Customer Success, Finance, ERP, Data Pipelines, Enterprise Integrations, etc - Web Application & Website Development
Ruby on Rails, Python, NodeJS, PHP, React, Web Components, Static Site Generation, CMS Implementations, eCommerce, etc - Dev Ops
Enterprise Blockchain, AWS, GCP, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, Microservices, ESBs, etc - Design & Brand
UI/UX Design, Brand Strategy & Design, Website Design, Copywriting - Finance
Bookkeeping Process Design & Operations, Invoicing Automation, Finance & Accounting Management, Commissions Infrastructure & Management
Quorum1 is a Consultancy
Quorum1 is not an expert marketplace. We offer a full service consultancy where each client engagement is tackled by a team of at least two people. Every Q1 member is supported by our shared infrastructure for ongoing learning, market research, collaborative problem solving, design review, testing and more.
We think that consultant marketplaces, though often well intentioned, can contribute to the exploitation and commodification of workers. Workers should not be products in an online store. People do their best work when they’re part of a strong team, supporting and challenging each other to perform at the highest level.
We are proud of the strong personal and professional relationships we have built within our network of members. We tackle everything as a team. When you hire one of us, you hire all of us.
Quorum1 is also not a traditional consultancy. Legacy consulting firms are powered by layers of bureaucratic management which drive away top performers. Legacy firms allocate huge shares of their margin to enriching their executives, maintaining fancy offices and making vanity investments.
In fact, many of our members came to Q1 from the big consultancies in large part to escape the stifling & exploitative work cultures they experienced there.
At Quorum1, we allocate our margins equitably amongst our membership and we offer our members autonomy and creative agency in all of their projects. We believe that if you want to work with the best, you have to give them the flexibility, respect, and support that they deserve.
Quorum1 offers a wide variety of engagement models, from flexible hourly rates to monthly retainers to fixed-bid milestone-based projects. We have experts in dozens of specialties across all of our practice areas, from Salesforce engineers & blockchain architects to copywriters & UI designers.
You can see a full breakdown of the types of services we offer here.
Quorum1 is a Think Tank
One of the core unifying forces within Quorum1 is our shared desire to perform at the cutting edge of our professions and to help push the boundary of possibility forward.
Our founding members came from business systems engineering backgrounds. Their formation of Q1 was motivated in large part by the desire to work together to map their constantly evolving skill areas, research new tools, establish best practices, share successful design patterns and help avoid potential pitfalls.
As we’ve diversified our membership we’ve seen that this desire is universal. All professionals want the opportunity to work together to move things forward for their industries. But we are often siloed away from one another, encouraged to hoard knowledge and work in isolation from our colleagues at other companies.
Quorum1 works to provide a platform for this sort of expert collaboration around emerging and evolving professional disciplines. We conduct vendor analyses, write white papers, establish best practice guides, develop libraries & templates, lead online trainings, maintain a learning library, and engage in many other activities aimed at helping make our professions better.
And through the Quorum1 Wiki, we strive to make this work free and public.
Quorum1 is a Working Academy
Quorum1 believes in the apprenticeship model of professional learning. The best way to learn is by doing. And the best time to be learning is always.
Quorum1 has developed client engagement models which maximize the quantity, quality and velocity of learning for our members, our clients, and our larger professional communities.
For us, learning is not an afterthought, it is at the core of everything we do. We practice infinite upskilling through a wide and growing array of programs — internships, apprenticeships, co-mentorships, learning workshops, online learning libraries and more. Every member is encouraged to participate and financially rewarded for doing so.
For experts, we offer an opportunity to grow and learn from their peers while helping guide the next generation. For novices and intermediate-level workers, we offer the fastest possible path to growing their skills, experience, and earning power.
This deep investment in learning infrastructure helps us attract and engage the best of the best. This model also helps us produce new experts, nurturing and supporting workers through the full cycle of their professional learning journey.
For Quorum1, every client project is an opportunity for learning:
- The easy projects are an opportunity for our experts to train & mentor novices.
- The challenging projects are an opportunity to establish best practices and train intermediate-level contributors.
- The leading edge projects are an opportunity for all of us to push ourselves beyond our comfort zones and discover what lies beyond the horizon.
Quorum1 is a Laboratory
At Quorum1, we believe that the Quorum Model itself is our most valuable product. In order for humanity to reach the next phase of our collective growth, we need new ways to structure and organize our companies — ways which optimize for external factors like sustainability & resilience, along with internal factors like choice, fun, fairness, cooperation & authenticity.
We are working to develop an operating model for cooperatively-organized companies with detailed specifications for every aspect of the entity structure from incorporation documents to revenue allocation formulas to team management processes.
In service of this goal, we are constantly experimenting with new, old, and better ways of organizing a company and collaborating around important work.
Some of the many experiments we’re running include:
- Q-Credit Model — One of our most ambitious experiments is our internal economic system, called Q-Credits. Q-Credits are an internal currency used to quantify the benefit each member has produced for the collective in order to equitably allocate authority, profits, and other benefits. While this model shares many concepts with DAOs and will eventually be implemented on the blockchain, we believe that the human-centric processes must be developed first and must take precedence over the technical implementation details. The underlying framework and specifications are in a constant state of experimental evolution.
- Liquid Leadership — We are developing a unique structure for appointing and cycling leadership roles within the organization, built around the mapping of peer-to-peer trust networks. Our model derives inspiration from Liquid Democracy, Circle-Based Process, the Stigmergic Designs of Heather Marsh, as well as many other sources.
- Fractional IP Ownership — We are working to establish a clear alternative to the hoarding of intellectual property within corporate silos. Our fractional ownership model allows individuals and member companies to receive credit for their contributions to the development of a particular bucket of IP. This credit translates into equitable distribution of later benefits generated by that IP. This model also aims to facilitate more effective collaboration between early-stage startups and professional service organizations like Quorum1.
- Smart Bonds — Our cooperative design principles mandate that “ownership” of Quorum1 must be earned and cannot be purchased. This means that, unlike a traditional firm, we are unable to sell shares of company stock to raise money. Even the sale of governance tokens via an ICO or other offering could be problematic as it would still offer control of the quorum to the highest bidder. To resolve this we are developing a smart-contract-based mechanism to facilitate external investment by tokenizing future profits and allocating a portion of future appreciation back to the quorum.
That is a basic introduction to what Quorum1 is and what we do. If you’d like to know more, we encourage you to reach out to one or more of our members and start up a conversation.
🔥 As you read this you may find yourself driven to learn more, to tell us what we’re missing, or to propose different ideas altogether. If so we would invite you to join us!
Quorum1 is an open collective and the Quorum Model needs more perspectives and minds to help it evolve.
