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.

At our core, Quorum1 is a professional collective built to give experts and aspiring experts a place to connect, learn, work and grow.

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:

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.