We care a lot about the people we work with (our clients and our team). Connection, empathy, and support are the foundation of our work, and we make sure to infuse those values in every interaction we have. Our clients have entrusted us with their big dreams for their career—and we honor that trust by providing the very best experience possible.

Our clients are accomplished and tenacious early career researchers. But grantsmanship is a separate skill set. And because so few institutions offer adequate support and training related to grantsmanship, most faculty are left to figure this out on their own—when the stakes are tremendously high. We start with the assumption that our clients’ research is brilliant and impactful, and our job is to highlight that brilliance so that reviewers are just as enthusiastic as we are. We give editorial feedback with love, care, deep attention, and encouragement (and Oxford commas). We know this isn’t the norm.

We know that writing successful grants means getting reviewers excited about the research…and we must generate that excitement within ourselves first. When you’re up against deadlines and a million other commitments, it’s easy to lose sight of why you chose a career in research in the first place. Which is why we do our best to encourage you to remember why you love this work. It makes your research more enjoyable, and it comes through in your writing. Enthusiasm is contagious.

Nothing is more important than physical and mental health. As a person living with a progressive disease and a disability, Sarah knows firsthand how challenging it is to prioritize health and wellbeing in academic spaces. That’s why our team takes our downtime seriously, and it’s why we always preach quality over quantity.

We reject the toxic, abusive academic culture that encourages productivity at the expense of an individual’s health and relationships. We’re humans, not robots. We enthusiastically endorse setting boundaries to create time and space to think, reflect, rest, and refine—and we know that doing so creates higher-impact research. You can’t do good science when you’re running on fumes.

But right now, that’s an aspirational idea rather than the reality. To make academia more diverse and inclusive, we need to make sure that women, BIPOC, queer, and disabled researchers are getting hired & promoted, reviewing grants, making hiring decisions, and leading departments...and being supported to do so, not actively undermined. As a company, we’re helping individual researchers advance their careers so that they can do the work they love and become the leaders and mentors that academia needs. We’re also committed to using our outside-the-ivory status to make change at a systems level.