Ten Tables

The Case For Staying Small On Purpose

In 2010 I took my parents to dinner in Jamaica Plain to meet Amy, my then-and-now partner. I don’t remember how nervous I was. Reason says I should have been sweating, but both Amy and my parents are wonderful, so maybe I was at relative ease.

But I do remember the restaurant was called Ten Tables. It had ten tables.

The light in the room was at a low level, and it felt small and intimate, befitting a place named for its small size. We sat close enough to the party beside us that I could hear their conversation without making out specifics. I don’t recall anything we ate, though in my memory it was a toothsome meal. I’m pretty sure you could see into the kitchen from the floor, and the staff seemed comfortable and happy.

Sixteen years later Amy and I are still together. Ten Tables served its last dinner on New Year’s Eve.

Krista Kranyak opened the place in 2000, when farm-to-table restaurants were a pretty new concept. Ten tables was the literal number of tables, with the sign visible from Centre Street before you ever opened a menu. Announcing the closing twenty-five years later, Kranyak described what she had spent more than two decades doing as “cooking simply, seasonally, and as close to the farmers and makers as possible.” The quote captures what this piece is about, which is that you cannot be that close to the farmers if you expand to fifty tables.

Every table you add shifts your attention from the food and the people to the apparatus required to deliver it. Fifty tables entails a produce supplier, a delivery schedule, and someone whose whole job is managing those relationships. With ten tables, you can be at the market yourself on a Saturday morning picking out the seasonal veggies for the menu that evening. Fifty tables means hiring, training, scheduling, and a big payroll, so big some people will always be strangers to you. Ten tables means you know what is going on in everyone’s life.

That doesn’t mean the small room is the right room. Salim Shariff built Radicle Digital into what he calls a collective of solopreneurs, and when the two of us wrote about the solo-versus-team crossroads, he made a persuasive case that scale puts more people in contact with what is in your head. Each client gets a smaller slice, but it reaches further. In our sector, the constraint is almost never good ideas and almost always the capacity to act on them. So growing your consulting business is an important consideration for social impact entrepreneurs.

The Solo vs. Team Crossroads

But for me, after more than a decade in a very big nonprofit restaurant, as it were, I just wanted my hands on the food when I started consulting.

The Ten Table Practice

A ten table practice is a business deliberately capped below the size at which you would have to spend time managing the apparatus instead of just doing the work. Most independent consultants are already running one (hence the “independent”), and also most of us have already left a fifty table restaurant on purpose.

As a proprietor of one, here are three things that have had to be true for me to run a ten table practice.

The first is precision. You need one thing you can describe in a sentence that is specific enough that not many other people do it. When I talked with Jamie Cerretti last summer about how she found her niche, she had landed on state charity registration filings for organizations that wanted to work with an individual instead of a corporate firm. She told me she found the process weirdly fascinating, which let her go narrow enough that almost nobody else does that exact thing for the exact organizations she supports. The market for compliance paperwork is small, but that is kind of the point of a ten table restaurant: you need only enough people who want your particular thing. Clients hire consultants to solve specific problems, whereas the generalist who can do a bit of everything is often someone already on staff.

The second thing a ten table practice needs is regulars. The reason comes down to math. I have never had more than three engagements at once, and that has always been two large anchor engagements and one smaller project running alongside them. Most of the time, I have had one more in the pipeline, but never more than that. Losing an anchor would take out almost half of my capacity, and deep engagements have long sales cycles, so I cannot backfill on demand. A forty-person firm can absorb a client engagement ending because somebody else is out there selling. I am the only one selling, and I am also the one delivering.

This is also where the restaurant comparison stops being useful. A small restaurant turns a waitlist into an asset, like how the rides with the longest lines at the amusement park get the most demand. For Ten Tables, being hard to get a reservation was part of what people were paying for. In total contrast, nobody has ever hired me because I was booked up. There are always other consultants. The only protection is clients who keep coming back because they want my ten-tables focus. I’m proud that I have had four different anchor clients engage me multiple times over the years. That is not unusual, incidentally: when we surveyed this community last summer, 40% of engagements had already led to more work with the same client, and another 35% looked likely to.

The third thing you need is long engagements. With three slots, the only variable I can control is what each slot is worth, which pushes me toward fewer and bigger engagements rather than a steady churn of small projects. Our own survey data bears this out. Among the consultants we surveyed earning more than $150,000 a year, the majority had fewer but higher-value contracts, with anchor clients providing the stable base.

One example. A friend referred me to the CEO of a social impact organization that was considering becoming more of an impact video production studio. They were pivoting to a self-sustaining revenue model and needed someone to help them on the business side. The engagement started as a strategic review. I interviewed stakeholders, researched competitors, and wrote a long assessment. The engagement then turned into building a business plan and a unit economics model for producing social impact video under branded partnerships. They enjoyed their spring tasting menu, but then when summer rolled around, they wanted to see what I could do with stone fruit, tomatoes, and corn!

This client’s scope at the start looked quite different from how it ended. What I take away from that experience (and others) is that nobody ever hired me cold to build a unit economics model in month one. But by month five, I was the only person who could have built it, because I had spent four months learning where the money in that business actually moved. The courses that justify the length of the contract and the price only make sense after the ones that came before them, and ten tables cannot carry a flourishing independent consulting business if the people sitting at them order a single appetizer.

Reservations Only

I have never let a table go empty by accident. When one sat open, it was because I left it open to work on something of my own. I have spent more of my solopreneur career turning work down than looking for it, which is more luck than design, though not entirely luck.

Turning down work still kind of turns my stomach, though. That same impact video studio came back a couple of years later wanting help on a new business plan. I really liked them, and a mission-driven company trying to work out how it actually makes money is a puzzle I find interesting. But I said no, because at a ten table restaurant you cannot seat a walk-in.

Ten Tables expanded to Provincetown and Cambridge. Both of those outposts closed in the 2010s. The original ten-table room on Centre Street outlasted its own offspring by a decade before serving its last dinner this past New Year’s Eve, twenty-five years in.

But twenty-five years of full tables is a long run, and it ended anyway. My own tables have been booked so consistently for so long that I have started to treat it as a fact about the world rather than a condition I have to keep working to maintain. Precision, regulars, and long engagements require tending.

I still cannot remember what we ate, but I remember that everyone working there looked like they wanted to be there.