Smart Willow Works
Owen Ollerton started Smart Willow Works in the spring of 2018 after eight years inside large consulting firms. The work was good, but the model bothered him. Clients were paying for teams of twelve when they needed one person who would stay long enough to understand the problem. He left in February of that year, took three months to think, and opened a sole-practitioner practice with a deliberate limit: no more than four active clients at any time.
The name came from a notebook. Owen had been sketching decision trees on a long train journey and wrote 'smart willow' in the margin. Willows bend, they don't break, and they grow near water, which is where things tend to get complicated. It stuck. The first client was a regional housing association that needed help restructuring its development pipeline. That engagement ran for eleven weeks and produced a framework the organisation still uses. The second client came through a referral from the first, and that pattern has held ever since.