By: Emma Richardson
Ask someone who recently left a large agency to go independent about what happened to their back office, and you may get a version of the same story. The client’s work came with them. The contracts, the invoicing, the procurement paperwork, and the person down the hall who knew how to read a master services agreement all stayed behind.
That is a small instance of something much larger. Over the past few decades, many service industries have moved in the same direction, toward narrower expertise and more of it. Medicine keeps generating subspecialties within subspecialties, accounting firms that once sold general competence now compete on how narrow their vertical focus is, and a single job in software has been split across a dozen tools that each handle one piece of it well. Many of those moves are defensible on their own, because the specialist may be better at the specific thing.
What often gets overlooked is the work of putting the pieces back together. That work does not disappear when an industry fragments. It can get pushed downward, onto whoever has less standing to refuse it, which often means the patient, the client, or the person running a business alone.
Four people in unrelated fields have built businesses around a similar problem, though none of them describes it in the same terms.
Conor Firth spent years on both sides of the divide before it became his business. He came up through galleries and auction houses, opened his own gallery, and launched an early e-commerce platform for contemporary art, selling work into hotels, restaurants, and offices. Then he crossed to the financial side of the creative industry and eventually served as CFO for mid-sized creative agencies with entities in three countries.
Art First Business Services exists because of what he kept watching happen to people leaving those agencies. The support functions around them- finance, legal, procurement- had been built for a firm of a certain size, and independence removes all of them at once.
“Most financial advisors come from finance,” he says. “I come from the creative world.”
Plenty of accountants were available to the people he works with. What they were missing was someone who could hold the financial, commercial, and creative sides of a decision at the same time. Firth points to procurement in particular, where a two-person studio runs straight into a client’s in-house finance team and a process designed for vendors much larger than its size. Those systems, in his words, “can be very intimidating if you have not had experience dealing with them.”
Selling something that sits between established categories has been its own difficulty. “There’s no established category for what I do, so a lot of the work is educating the market,” he says. His own description of the arrangement is shorter: “My pitch is simple: we’ll handle the business side, you focus on the creative.”
Samuel Owers ran into a similar structural issue in a field that looks different from professional services. RYVOLVE, his hybrid training app, is built for people preparing for HYROX and similar hybrid races, where strength and endurance both matter and neither can be neglected.
The easy read is a market story: fitness apps split into running apps and strength apps, and hybrid athletes ended up paying for two. What can go wrong is harder to fix than that. Strength and endurance work compete for the same recovery capacity, so the sequencing questions- what goes where in a week, what gets deloaded, what gets sacrificed eight weeks out from a race- have to be answered by something that can see the whole week at once. Two well-built programs running side by side do not necessarily add up to one effective program. Someone has to arbitrate, and for many hybrid athletes that someone has been the athlete, doing amateur programming on top of an already demanding training load.
RYVOLVE delivers a structured, periodized plan across strength, running, and conditioning as a single program rather than a stack of them. Owers has built hybrid.club and FindRox alongside it, covering the parts of hybrid racing a training plan does not touch: finding events and finding other people doing the same thing.
Dr. Manahil Riaz has spent five years building the clinical version of this. She founded Riaz Counseling in Houston in 2021 and now runs a practice of more than 25 specialists, with offices in the Galleria area and Sugar Land and virtual therapy reaching clients in Spring and The Woodlands.
Mental health care in many American cities runs on solo practitioners in loose networks. A family that needs a trauma specialist for one member, a couples therapist for two others, and someone who works with teenagers may end up assembling that care itself, out of directories and insurance panels and word of mouth, with nobody clearly checking whether the pieces fit together. Riaz’s own work centers on trauma, parenting, and couples therapy, drawing on cognitive behavioral, Adlerian, and attachment-based approaches, and the practice covers individual, couples, family, and group formats for clients from preteens through adults.
Building a multi-specialist practice to a consistent clinical standard is harder than practicing alone, and it may not pay anything extra in the short run. The return is that a referral goes to a colleague someone has actually worked with.
Edward Garcia is dealing with the same thing at the scale of an entire field.
He spent ten years in the federal government, at the U.S. Census, at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under two administrations, and on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s health subcommittee, where he worked on components of the Affordable Care Act. He then went to CareSource, a nonprofit Medicaid managed care plan, built a connection-based mentoring model there called Life Services, and argued successfully in Washington for the federal policy changes needed to pay for it. Getting a relationship-based intervention all the way through to a funding mechanism is uncommon enough that the work still gets cited.
The field he helped build has since filled up. Apps, platforms, wellness products, and new nonprofits have arrived in volume, many of them treating social disconnection as something an individual manages rather than something a system produces, and a number of them duplicating work that already exists somewhere else. Garcia’s diagnosis is that the sector has plenty of activity and limited coordination: no clear coordinating layer that can tell anyone what has already been tried, what the evidence supports, or who is currently doing what. Through the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection (GILC), he has spent years assembling that layer, including a coordinating council that brings the OECD, WHO, and EU bodies into the same room. His own framework for the work, which he calls Social Connection Architecture, organizes it across relational infrastructure, incentive architecture, and civic systems.
None of this is an argument against specialization, and none of these four would make one. Firth is not telling creatives to go back to agencies. Riaz built a practice full of specialists on purpose.
The narrower point is that fragmentation carries a cost, and in many industries that cost currently lands on whoever is less equipped to carry it. The integration work gets done either way. What varies is whether anyone is paid to do it.
