Behind the build
Fifteen years of files, one working brain
Before I build a business brain for anyone else, I built mine. Here is the shape of it.
The problem is familiar to anyone who has worked for more than a few years. The good stuff is everywhere and findable nowhere. In my case: PwC frameworks from two countries, six years of university project files, policy research, templates, psychometrics, notes, spread across a laptop, a cloud drive and an old PC that still had the files from 2015 on it. About 1.5 GB and fifteen years.
I wanted one place that both I and an AI could operate as peers. Not a folder of PDFs the AI could search, but a structure it could file into, reason over and keep tidy without me telling it twice.
The structure
An entity layer: a page for every person, company, project and concept that matters, each with a compiled summary at the top and a dated timeline underneath, so nothing gets lost when context moves on. Domain pillars where the work actually happens: my company, the consulting practice, the rest of life. A filing rulebook the AI reads before it touches anything, so new information lands in the right place by default. A schema for every page type. And the whole thing versioned in git, so every change is recoverable and nothing is ever silently overwritten.
The migration
A day. Everything brought in, every non-text file given a plain-text twin the AI can read (600 and some documents converted), an inventory generated, and the personal material distilled into a canonical profile the AI reads before any writing or positioning work. The files bigger than a few megabytes stayed on the PC. Everything else is now searchable, linkable and operable.
What it does now
It runs the consulting practice: engagement charters, interview synthesis, opportunity registers and reports get drafted inside it from my own templates. It runs the content: every post starts from a voice guide and a proof bank that live there. It runs the company: product knowledge, policies and support articles are maintained in one place and pushed out from it.
Why I am telling you
Because the brain I install for clients is the same architecture, the same rules and the same workflow. I am not describing a theory about owned, compounding knowledge. I am operating one every day, and when a founder asks what theirs will look like in six months, I open mine.