Companies as neighborhoods

A Company is the biggest box in askTheodor — the team, work, and knowledge for one little business, all in one place.

What you’ll learn

• What a Company contains and why you group workers into one.
• How a Company shows up on the Village map.
• When to spin up a second Company instead of stuffing everything into one.

A neighborhood on the map

Everything else — workers, tasks, goals, projects, routines, and a knowledge Library — lives inside a Company. On the Village map each Company reads as a neighborhood, and its workers are the residents who live there. Open one and you see only its things; work and knowledge never leak between Companies unless you choose to share.

You can have as many as you like. A solo consultant might keep one Company per client; a founder might run “Marketing”, “Engineering”, and “Ops” side by side.

What a Company holds

1. Identity — a name, a one-line mission (“why we exist”), and an avatar. The mission isn’t decoration: it’s fed to manager workers as background when they hand out work, so delegation stays on-message.
2. An optional client framing — set a “for {client}” name and the header re-frames as a client engagement. Handy for freelancers billing several clients from one app.
3. An org chart, its own work, and its own knowledge — roles, tasks, goals, projects, routines, and a Library section, all scoped to that Company.

Start with one

You don’t need a sprawling org chart on day one. One Company, a couple of workers, and a clear mission is plenty. Add structure only when the work asks for it.

How people actually split their Companies

The right split is the one that matches how your work is actually separated. Three patterns that hold up:

One Company per client (freelancers and agencies). Each client’s Library holds only their material, so a worker drafting for Client A cannot accidentally quote Client B’s pricing or reference their roadmap — not as a matter of care, but because the knowledge isn’t in scope. With the “for {client}” framing, the header reads as that engagement. This is the strongest reason to split: confidentiality that’s structural rather than remembered.

One Company per function (a founder running everything). “Marketing”, “Ops”, “Product”. Workers, tasks and knowledge stay in their lane, and you get per-Company budgets — so you can see that Marketing spent four times what Ops did, which is a genuinely useful thing to learn.

One Company per business (portfolio owners). If you run two unrelated businesses, they get two neighborhoods. Different brand voices, different compliance rules, different vendors, no bleed. Switching between them is switching context completely, which is the point.

The test for splitting

Split when two bodies of work should never see each other’s knowledge, or when you want to know what each one costs separately. Don’t split just because a job feels different — a second Company you don’t maintain is worse than one Company with clear tasks.

Recap

A Company is a self-contained team — a neighborhood holding its own people, work, and knowledge. Next, learn the house rules that steer every worker inside it.

📖 Reference in the docs: Companies (screen) · Companies (concept)

➡️ Next: Company OS: brand, compliance, vendors