Community threads

How many companies

Michael Iversen · 2026-05-05

I have a main company where I provide consulting services. I also maintain a knowledge base for my notes and a project tool for my tasks.

Additionally, I run a Shiatsu and hypnosis clinic that includes a booking system and follow-up emails I would like to automate.

Lastly, I have a Budo community with several paying members where I create content.

How would you structure Paperclip for a company with three different goals and various projects, or for multiple companies?

Answers

Aron Prins · 2026-05-06

Three goals, several projects, and you're trying to decide whether that's one Paperclip company or three. The short answer: three companies, not one. The slightly longer answer is about why, and how to think about projects underneath.

A Paperclip company is structured around a single persistent goal that the CEO orients every heartbeat around. When you give one CEO three unrelated outcomes — consulting delivery, a clinic with bookings and follow-ups, and a paid Budo content community — it can't build a coherent strategy. Each heartbeat will fragment across the three, and the agents underneath inherit that fragmentation. Cost goes up, output quality goes down, and you end up doing the integration work yourself. There's more on why the goal-per-company shape matters in Task Queue vs AI Company (/guides/concepts/task-queue-vs-ai-company).

A structure that works for what you described:

Company 1 — Consulting practice Goal: sustain and grow your consulting work, with the knowledge base and project tool as supporting systems. Projects underneath: client delivery, knowledge base maintenance, business development.

Company 2 — Shiatsu & Hypnosis clinic Goal: keep the clinic operations running smoothly — bookings handled, follow-up emails sent, no-shows minimised. Projects: booking automation, follow-up sequences, content for clients.

Company 3 — Budo community Goal: produce and ship content consistently to paying members. Projects: content calendar, member communications, possibly a research/curation track.

Each company gets its own CEO, its own goal, its own approval queue, and its own budget. Within each company, projects are how you separate workstreams that share a CEO but have different cadences and outputs — see Projects (/docs/projects-workflow/projects) and Goals (/docs/projects-workflow/goals).

Three practical things that make this manageable rather than overwhelming:

Stagger heartbeat intervals. You don't need three CEOs all running every two hours. A consulting CEO at 4h, a clinic CEO at 6h (or event-driven on bookings), a community CEO at daily — matched to the actual cadence of decisions in each business. Per-agent budgets per company. A runaway agent in the clinic shouldn't be able to drain budget the consulting practice depends on. (Common Mistakes #5 (/guides/getting-started/common-first-mistakes).) Resist hiring upfront. Start each company with just the CEO. Let it propose hires only when the work demonstrates the need. Most of these companies probably never need more than 2–3 agents total.

If you're tempted to keep it as one company "to save on cost" — it almost always costs more, because the CEO spends tokens trying to unify three incompatible contexts every run.