Beside everydecision.
Most founders do not need more advice. They need one person who knows the numbers, stands beside them, and signs what they say.
One person beside the decision.
The founder takes every engagement and answers every note. No team, no handover, no one learning your business on your time.
Nothing unsourced, nothing unsigned.
Every figure is traced to the document it came from. Machines draft and check; a person decides, and signs.
Built from inside the finance function.
Eighteen years inside other people’s finance functions across India and the Gulf, turned into five houses a founder can rely on.
WHY THE NAME
The counsellor stands beside the throne.
A wazir is the counsellor: the piece that stood beside the king. Our mark is that pair.
A chess set attributed to Nishapur, in today’s Iran, made in the 12th century and now held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The king is a throne; beside it stands a smaller throne.
In that game the piece beside the king moved just one square. It was the weakest piece, and the closest. Its value was never power; it was position. Europe later turned it into the queen.
Arabic and Persian players still call that piece the wazir: the counsellor who carries the weight of office. The word reached English as vizier. We took the name, and the original job.
WHERE THIS COMES FROM
| Claim | Source | To check it |
|---|---|---|
| The set, its date and its place | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chess Set, 12th century, attributed to Nishapur, Iran | metmuseum.org, object 1971.193a–ff |
| The counsellor, its move and its name | H.J.R. Murray, A History of Chess, Oxford, 1913 | Any library edition |
| The counsellor becoming the queen | Marilyn Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen, 2004 | Any library edition |
| The vizier and the court | Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Neẓām-al-Molk” | iranicaonline.org |
A position, taken early.
Why a chessboard on a finance practice's website? Because the five houses are not a menu of services bought one at a time. They are a position — put in place before the decision arrives, so that when it does, everything reliable is already sitting next to it. The game the name comes from was designed around exactly that idea.
That is the argument of this practice, and it is what the board below shows: a position, taken before anything has happened.
Four pieces developed around the throne, and the counsel beside it. Rest on a square to see what stands there; click to open its house. The houses in their order are on the Houses page — a position has no reading order, so the order lives there instead.
Open house 01The throne holds d4 and the counsel stands beside it at e4 — the fifth of the five, and the only one without a house of its own, because it is the seat. Two pieces stand forward at c6 and f6, where the work meets the world: the deal and the number. Two hold the base at a3 and h3: the filing and the word. In this game the elephant starts on c1 and f1 and leaps exactly two squares diagonally, over anything in its way, which lands it on a3 and h3 — so the base really is built by the elephants. Two ranks stand empty above and two below. Every square answers to its own name.
The house names are drawn from the old court of Nishapur’s century. One house was retired when the practice was set in order — the supreme council, because that chamber belongs to a client’s board and not to us.
Read the full story, with every source and correction
The set.
Our mark begins with a chess set attributed to Nishapur — twelfth century, stonepaste, molded and glazed in turquoise and manganese — held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Pfeiffer Fund, 1971; 1971.193a–ff) and described by the Museum as one of the earliest extant examples in the world. Sixteen turquoise pieces face fifteen purple; the set is one pawn short of complete. The shah is a throne. Beside it stands a smaller throne: the counsellor.
The counsellor
In the medieval game that set was made for, the piece was called the firzan — Persian farzin, from farzana, "wise" — literally a counsellor. It moved a single square diagonally: the weakest mover on the board, standing closest to the king. Its value was never reach. It was position. Only centuries later, in Europe, did that square become the all-powerful queen; and in modern Arabic and Persian play the same piece is called the wazir — the vizier. We took the modern name and the original job.
The word
Arabic wazir. The derivation most often given is from wazara, to bear a burden — the one who carries the weight of office — though the philology is contested, and an older Persian root has been argued for just as long. We give the common account and flag the dispute rather than settle it. The word travelled with the work: Persian vazir, Ottoman vezir, English vizier (first recorded 1562), Hindi and Urdu wazir, Swahili waziri. Half the world still calls its ministers by it. And when the game ends, the old Persian phrase survives too: shah mat — not "the king is dead," as the Arabic reading has it, but the Persian: the king is helpless. Which is precisely the condition good counsel exists to prevent.
The court
The court that played on boards like this ran the realm through named houses — the Great Seljuk chancery of the eleventh and twelfth centuries: the supreme council (Divan-i A’la) presided over by the wazir, and beneath it the great bureaus of chancery (Insha), treasury (Istifa), audit (Ishraf) and the army’s muster (Arz). Our five houses are arranged as a nod to that court — not a census of it. One of the old houses, the supreme council, we retired on purpose: that chamber belongs to a client’s board, not to us. In the audience halls of that world, nearness to the ruler marked rank, and the right hand was the side of honour; the counsellor stood nearest the throne.
The archetype of the seat studied in the mark’s own city: Nizam al-Mulk — vizier to two Seljuk sultans from 1064 to 1092, educated in Nishapur, endower of a Nizamiyya college there — often called the good vizier of Islamic history. He wrote the Siyasatnama, the Book of Government: fifty chapters on how a realm is actually run. Nine centuries before the modern governance handbook, the counsellor’s manual already existed.
The riddle
Persian tradition says chess arrived as a test. The Shahnama tells of an Indian raja sending the strange board to the Persian court as a riddle: decipher it, or the tribute stops. It was not the king who solved it — it was his counsellor, Buzurjmihr, who sat with the pieces until they gave up their logic. The first recorded act of the counsellor’s trade: a hard problem, solved quietly, beside the throne.
SOURCES
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chess Set, 12th century, attributed to Iran, Nishapur — object 1971.193a–ff, Pfeiffer Fund, 1971 (catalogue record and educator resources).
H.J.R. Murray, A History of Chess, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913 — on the firzan, its move, and its naming.
Marilyn Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen, 2004 — on the counsellor’s later transformation.
A.K.S. Lambton, "The Internal Structure of the Saljuq Empire," in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5, 1968; C.L. Klausner, The Seljuk Vezirate, Harvard, 1973 — on the Divan-i A’la and the bureaus.
Nizam al-Mulk, The Book of Government (Siyasatnama), trans. Hubert Darke, 1960/1978; Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Neẓām-al-Molk" and "Bār i" — on the vizier, Nishapur, and the order of the audience.
Corrections we adopted from the record: the medieval piece was the firzan, not "wazir"; the set is attributed to Nishapur; the five-house arrangement is a nod; Nizam al-Mulk institutionalised the madrasa network rather than inventing it; shah mat reads "helpless," not "dead." We would rather cut a beautiful line than publish a false one.