Welcome to the Future of Work: The Successor Corp
- ERIC BOROMISA
- Dec 22, 2025
- 6 min read
Estimated Read Time: 6 minutes
Imagine a workplace that combines ultimate flexibility with a focus on productivity, autonomy, and purpose. The “Successor Corp” is designed for a modern, distributed workforce that values personal freedom, purpose-driven work, and efficiency. Here’s how the Successor Corp structure redefines what it means to work, collaborate, and succeed.
1. A Smaller, More Nimble Company
The Successor Corp keeps its structure lean and agile. By avoiding the traditional corporate hierarchy, it enables quicker decision-making and greater adaptability to market changes. Instead of large teams with overlapping roles, each contributor is uniquely valuable, filling specific needs with a focus on efficiency and accountability.
2. Everyone is a Self-Sovereign Contractor
In the Successor Corp, every contributor is a self-sovereign contractor, empowered with autonomy and supported with resources to work independently. Here’s what this looks like in practice:
Individual Incorporation Assistance: For contributors who aren’t yet incorporated, the company provides guidance to help them set up a legal entity, giving them greater financial control and tax advantages.
Client and Resource Support: Contributors are encouraged to maintain a portfolio of clients. Successor Corp helps its team members secure additional clients if needed, ensuring diversified income streams for enhanced stability.
Customized Benefits: Rather than a one-size-fits-all benefits package, each contributor receives help finding health care, child care, and other critical benefits tailored to their location and personal needs.
At Numbers & Letters, by design, every person at the company, save for me - Eric - the founder, that is currently here or has been in the past, is a contractor that runs their own business, has other clients and is hired for their expertise and cross-functionality, not necessarily for a particular role.
This gives everyone more agency to take on contrarian points of view, identify and fix bottlenecks without waiting for approval, take time off (and we’re pretty good about letting people know) justify an increase in pay when business is improving, and take on more interesting work and outsource or automate themselves for the work that is repeatable and no longer interesting.
More importantly, they see the business and its health through the eyes of their own business as an owner, so it creates a win-win/alignment. That resilience of income from other clients, gives everyone more agency and less risk. Conversely, hiring employees in a zero-to-one (to potentially zero) step function, usually with a clear job description/posting, and incentivizing people and organizations to think more flexibly about the person and not the role can be difficult. That worked in the 19th and 20th centuries where roles were relatively fixed, but not in today’s world.
3. Fully Remote with Periodic Onsite Events
Successor Corp embraces a fully remote setup, but with strategic in-person gatherings to foster collaboration and team cohesion:
Remote-First, With Global Flexibility: Contributors are free to live anywhere, accessing local co-working spaces like WeWork whenever needed. A dedicated IT and home office budget supports productivity from any location.
Office spaces are expensive to administer, incredibly difficult to locate in a desirable location and Return to Office / RTO / RTW (whatever you want to call it) is effectively a quality of life tax on each existing employee — particularly those that aren’t directly involved in product development. There are certainly benefits to in-person offices, especially for young companies (or new employees) or highly technical companies where a whiteboard a two engineers can solve a problem more quickly, but for 80-90% of the workforce of a midsize to large company, in our experience at Numbers & Letters, reduces productivity at out clients and causes your A-players to immediately look for the exits. “Our great culture” is no longer a an attractive marketing item that any potential hire takes seriously anymore unless you’re on a Top 50 best places to work list or have several hundred 4-5 star Glassdoor reviews.
Offsite Training and Team-Building: In place of the traditional office, the company hosts annual offsites in unique, inspiring locations for training, team-building, and strategy sessions. These events allow for deep collaboration, hands-on learning, and strengthening team connections.
Back when I first joined Accenture back in the early 2010’s, they had all new hires/new promotes go for 1-2 weeks to the Q Center, usually in the summer — a huge training center about 40 mins west of O’Hare that had space and housing for at least several hundred fellow newbies, their instructors, plenty of break out space for happy hours, outdoor and team-building activities. While not as posh as say Malaga or Porto Vallarta, it was still an enjoyable and memorable experience and did a great job of instilling a fairly cohesive culture across offices.
To this day, while Accenture has offices all over the world, it is still one of the most remote first companies on the planet. Consultants are on the road a lot and only dip into the office on Fridays to network, meet with their career counselors/practice partners, file expenses and check the mail.
4. Asynchronous, Virtual-First Communication
A key tenet of Successor Corp is asynchronous communication, reducing the need for synchronous meetings that often disrupt workflows:
Virtual Meetings as Needed: Meetings are held virtually and are recorded for those who can’t attend. Real-time meetings are reserved for problem-solving sessions or for fostering team social cohesion. Video on as default to be able to see expressions and engagement. If people start dropping or turning off their camera, you’re losing them and should probably switch to status updates, with one person (or AI) in charge of reminding people.
Communication via Text and Recordings: Text-based and recorded communication allows contributors to work in their own time zones, avoiding the stress of constant availability. Team members can consume information when it’s convenient and revisit recordings as needed for clarity.
In our experience with growing clients, usually synchronous meetings work for at most 3-4 offices, provided they are within 6 timezones of each other. Otherwise, someone is getting shafted with that standup. This means intelligent hand-offs at End of Day, SOPs and checklists and shared docs so that people can comment and pick up the work as others sign off. It’s slightly slower than being synchronous, but if you can master the handoffs, you’ll have less churn than expecting a project manager to constantly take 5am or 8pm calls. This is the only way to effectively expand to offices across an ocean without a lot of employee churn.
5. Efficient, Recorded Trainings and Standard Operating Procedures
Training at Successor Corp is designed to be efficient, self-paced, and evergreen:
Recorded Trainings: All training sessions are recorded and accompanied by transcripts that become the basis for the company’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). This approach ensures that knowledge is easily accessible, documented, and consistent across the organization.
Continuous Improvement of SOPs: Contributors are encouraged to suggest improvements to SOPs, ensuring that processes evolve with the company’s growth and learning.
6. Automation and Outsourcing for Repeated Tasks
In the Successor Corp, efficiency is paramount. Tasks that are repeated more than twice are either automated or outsourced:
Automation for Repetitive Tasks: Routine tasks are automated using the latest tech solutions, freeing contributors to focus on high-value activities.
Outsourcing to Specialized Contractors: For tasks outside of core competencies, the company outsources to vetted contractors, ensuring that each contributor’s time is maximized.
7. Innovative Compensation with Fixed + Variable Pay
Each contract includes both fixed and variable pay, aligning contributors’ compensation with the company’s performance. This approach not only provides stability through a guaranteed base but also incentivizes contributors to meet company goals. When the company succeeds, everyone benefits—a true shared-success model.
8. Measuring Success: Revenue Per Contributor
The Successor Corp has redefined metrics of success, moving beyond traditional performance indicators. The primary metric? Revenue per contributor. This metric reflects each team member’s impact on the company’s bottom line, fostering a performance-driven, yet flexible, workplace.
The Successor Corp: A Blueprint for the Future
As we look toward the future of work, models like the Successor Corp illustrate how a company can be built around flexibility, autonomy, and purpose. With remote-first policies, outcome-based compensation, and asynchronous communication, this model offers an inspiring alternative to the traditional office structure, paving the way for a workforce that’s as adaptable as it is empowered.
Are you ready to embrace the future of work? Share your thoughts and experiences with us or schedule a call to learn how we can help implement this work model.
Disclaimer/Full Disclosure (You made it!): This blog post was generated with the assistance of AI, with N&L human oversight ensuring accuracy and insight. The thoughts and opinions expressed are our own.
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