A practice of one, stated plainly.
Aude is not a firm with a bench. It is one operator with twenty years of scar tissue and a great deal of machinery. That is the offer, not a caveat to it.
I have spent twenty years in insurance, insurtech, fintech, and mobility, mostly on the operating side rather than the advising side. I have led corporate strategy, innovation and corporate venture capital for a top-three US personal lines insurer, run a $6bn business unit as a general manager before that, turned round a carrier-backed insurtech that was losing money on every policy it wrote, and founded companies of my own. The through-line is that I have usually been the person who had to make the plan work, not the person who wrote it and left.
Aude was founded in 2009. Its current phase is a deliberate narrowing: rather than selling advice broadly, it sells execution in the places where my operating record is genuinely load-bearing. Insurance distribution and pricing. Go-to-market for technology selling into carriers and MGAs. Growth functions that need to be built rather than optimised.
Why the two brands are separate
I also hold non-executive and advisory positions, and I do commercial due diligence for funds. That is judgment work: you are buying a view, and you are buying it from a named person with a reputation attached. It is sold under my own name at hadenkirkpatrick.co.uk.
Aude is the other half. You are buying delivery, and what you get is an artefact or a function rather than a view. Keeping the two apart means neither pretends to be the other, and it means I will tell you honestly when a brief belongs to the other side of the line. Sometimes a brief needs both, in which case it is split into two pieces of paper rather than blurred into one.
How the practice actually runs
The reason a single principal can hold this much work is agentic systems. Every engagement runs on a purpose-built harness: role-scoped agents over a shared, version-controlled knowledge base, with hard walls between clients and a gate that blocks anything client-facing from leaving without clearance. It is the same architecture I will build for you if you want it, and it is why the fourth offer on the work page exists.
The machinery is not a productivity trick. It is the reason the economics of a one-person practice work at this price and this quality.
What it does not do is invent capacity out of nothing. I take a small number of engagements at a time, and if the calendar is full I will say so rather than taking the work and delivering it late.
The corporate bit
Aude operates two entities so that clients contract in their own jurisdiction and currency. UK and EU clients contract with Aude Consulting Services Ltd, registered in England and Wales. US clients contract with Aude Consulting, LLC, an Indiana limited liability company. Full registration details are in the footer. I am based in London and work across both markets.
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