Every startup rebuilds the same administrative machinery badly. Running it once, centrally, is less interesting than the product work and worth more than most of it.
A new venture spends a surprising share of its first year on things no customer will ever see: payroll, contracts, insurance, filings, time tracking, the question of which entity pays for what. It is rebuilt from scratch each time, usually by whoever is least busy, and it is usually wrong in small expensive ways.
iBrothers holds that machinery once and lends it to each venture. The people stay with their venture; the administration does not have to be reinvented alongside them.
A shared service has to earn its place. If a venture could do something faster or more cheaply on its own, it should, and the parent stops providing it. Sharing the machinery never means sharing customers, customer data or credentials between ventures.
The advantage here is not glamorous and does not compound quickly. It is simply that the same mistake stops being made five times.
