Company OS: brand, compliance, vendors

Every Company carries a small operating system: house rules quietly folded into every affiliated worker’s instructions.

What you’ll learn

• The three parts of the Company OS and what each one steers.
• Where the OS sits in askTheodor’s chain of authority.
• How to find and edit it.

The three parts

Open a Company and go to ⚙️ Company OS (under the Build it tabs). You’ll set:

1. Brand Kit — colors, fonts, tone words, a sample “this is how we sound” paragraph, banned words, and an image style for any pictures workers generate. A worker writing copy inherits this voice automatically.
2. Compliance — pick a preset (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2) or write your own rules; optionally redact personal data and set a retention period.
3. Preferred vendors — your go-to registrar, host, email, payments, and so on, so a worker reaches for the right tool when a task needs one.

It steers every scoped worker

The OS isn’t a settings page workers ignore. It’s stitched into the instructions of every worker affiliated with the Company, so a banned word stays unsaid and the brand voice stays consistent without you repeating yourself in each chat.

The chain of authority

The OS sits in a clear order: a worker’s own character, then the workspace-wide Tribe Doctrine, then the Company OS, then the specific task.

Tribe Doctrine wins

When the Tribe Doctrine and a Company OS disagree, the Tribe Doctrine wins. Workspace-wide rules outrank a single Company’s house rules — keep that in mind when a Company-level setting seems to be ignored.

What to put in it on day one

The OS pays for itself the first time you don’t have to repeat yourself. Three settings worth doing before you hire a second worker:

Banned words, from your real pet peeves. This is the highest-value field in the whole OS and it takes two minutes. Add the words that instantly make copy read as machine-written to you — “delve”, “unleash”, “game-changing”, “in today’s fast-paced world”, “elevate”. Every worker in the Company inherits the list, so you stop editing the same tic out of every draft.

A sample paragraph that sounds like you. Don’t describe your tone — paste two or three sentences of your actual writing and label it “this is how we sound”. A model matches a sample far better than it matches adjectives, and “professional yet friendly” describes roughly every business on earth.

Your vendors, so workers stop guessing. If a task needs a host, a payment provider or a registrar, naming yours means a worker suggests the thing you actually use instead of the market leader. Small setting, and it removes a whole category of subtly-useless output.

Remember the chain of authority

If a Company setting seems to be ignored, check the workspace-wide Tribe Doctrine — it outranks the Company OS. That’s usually the answer when a brand rule mysteriously doesn’t apply.

Recap

The Company OS — Brand Kit, Compliance, Preferred vendors — is the shared context every worker in that Company inherits. Next, give those workers titles and reporting lines.

📖 Reference in the docs: Company profile

➡️ Next: Org roles & reporting lines