Why we built our practice around the Paraguay-Mercosur gap

This is a short note about why the firm exists, and why we made the unusual strategic choice to build a practice around the Paraguay-Mercosur gap rather than around any of the more obvious advisory positionings available to us. It is the question we are most often asked in introductory calls - why this region, and why now? - and a written answer seemed worth publishing for prospective clients who reach the firm before reaching the conversation.

The observation

The observation that led to the firm is simple to state and harder to act on. Three constituencies that ought to overlap, in the Paraguay-Mercosur context, do not actually overlap:

The first is the global consulting industry. The major strategy firms, the Big Four advisory practices, and the specialist trade-consulting boutiques cover Latin America with offices in São Paulo, occasionally in Buenos Aires, rarely in Santiago, and effectively never in Asunción or Montevideo. Their Mercosur coverage is, in practice, Brazil coverage with regional adjacencies. Paraguay is a footnote in their reports and rarely a focus of their engagement work. This is not a criticism of the firms; the economics of large-account consulting do not support permanent investment in markets the size of Paraguay's. It is just an observation about market coverage.

The second is the regional consulting industry itself. There are competent regional consultancies in Asunción, in Buenos Aires, and in Montevideo. They serve their local clientele well. What they less often do is communicate fluently with foreign founders and operators in the cultural register that those founders are used to - neither in writing, nor in working method, nor in the implicit expectations about how an advisory engagement is structured and paced.

The third is the universe of foreign founders and operators considering business in or through the region. This group reads English-language consulting output as a default; it tends to assess a region's investability through the lens of available written analysis; and it tends, in our experience, to make initial market-entry decisions based on anecdote - usually from a single founder who has been to the region, or from a single advisor who has been there. The decision quality of these initial calls is, predictably, mixed.

The gap between these three constituencies is the gap our practice was built to address.

The choice not to expand the geography

A reasonable variation of our practice would cover Latin America broadly - São Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and the smaller markets as adjacencies. We deliberately chose not to build that practice, for two reasons.

The first reason is that a generalist Latin American practice is what the larger firms already deliver, and they deliver it well within the segment of the market they serve. Building a smaller version of an existing competent offering is not a meaningful improvement on the alternatives available to a prospective client.

The second reason is operational integrity. The depth of operating knowledge that makes an advisory engagement valuable does not scale linearly across countries. Knowing Paraguay genuinely - the commercial network, the sector dynamics, the operating cadence, the second-tier cities, the partner ecosystem - is a multi-year project. The cost of attempting to do the same in three additional countries simultaneously is that none of them ends up known to the depth that the work requires. We would rather be the best advisory firm in a narrow geographical band than a competent advisory firm across a broader one.

This is also why the practice extends in the directions it does. The natural cross-border engagements for our existing clientele are toward the United States (where Wyoming, Delaware, and selected operating questions in US market entry sit as natural extensions of our base) and toward the European Union (where the founders we serve typically originate). Mercosur south and Europe north form a corridor we genuinely know; the practice is shaped accordingly.

The choice not to broaden the service line

A second variation of our practice would extend the service line into adjacent professional services - into legal-services intermediation, into tax-structuring, into M&A transaction-support, into immigration and residency advisory. We chose not to do that.

Some of these are regulated activities in the jurisdictions where our clients operate. Practicing those activities without the right license is not the kind of mistake we are willing to make, regardless of the commercial logic that might support it. Some of the other adjacent services - passport advisory, residency procurement, "tax-haven" structuring - are activities we have explicitly declined to associate with the firm, because the population of operators offering those services in the region includes a meaningful share of providers whose business practices are not ones we want to be associated with by proximity.

The decision to be a narrow professional-services firm - advisory only, written deliverables, no regulated overlap - is a commercial choice. It is also a positioning choice and an identity choice. The firms whose work we admire most in the global market have tended to be the firms that were unambiguous about what they did and did not do; the firms we admire least have tended to be the ones that drifted into adjacent revenue streams as a response to slow quarters. We would rather have slow quarters.

The choice to be small

A third variation of the practice would grow the headcount aggressively, accept investor capital to do so, and build the firm into a regional brand. We have chosen, for now, the opposite path: small, slow, deliberate growth, with the founder personally involved in every client engagement.

This is partly a quality control choice. The economic model of a small advisory firm with high principal involvement is forgiving of slow client acquisition and unforgiving of variability in deliverable quality. The economic model of a larger firm is the inverse - it requires faster client acquisition and tolerates more variability in any single engagement. We think the smaller-firm model is the right one for the work we do and the clients we serve; the larger-firm model is a different business, with different trade-offs, that we are not building.

It is also a relationship choice. The advisory work that creates durable value, in our experience, is the work the principal does directly with the client. Delegating advisory work to junior team members is sometimes commercially necessary in a larger firm; it is also one of the most reliable predictors of declining client outcomes over time. As long as the firm can be structured so that the principal does the principal's work, we would prefer to keep it that way.

What this means for prospective clients

For a prospective client reading this and considering whether to engage:

If your question is about Paraguay, Mercosur, the broader Southern Cone, or about cross-border activity between Europe and Latin America (in either direction), this practice is positioned to do that work seriously.

If your question is about a market we do not cover, or about a service line we do not offer, the honest answer is that you should engage someone else, and we will tell you that in the introductory call rather than after the engagement letter is signed.

If your question is unclear - if you are not sure yet whether the region or the question is the right fit - the introductory call is free, and the conversation is useful regardless of whether an engagement follows.

That is, in short, the firm. It is meant to be one of the smaller, more focused practices serving cross-border operators in this corridor, and to be the right choice for the clients whose questions fit our actual coverage. The choice not to be a bigger or broader firm is deliberate, and it is the choice we expect to keep making.