Five rules we do not bend

Rules are easy to publish and hard to keep. Ours survive because each one has a price we have already agreed to pay: a sponsor turned down, a chair left empty, a request declined. Here they are, with the price attached.

01 · No seat is for sale

Sponsors fund the room; they never fill it. The guest list is decided before any money is discussed, which occasionally costs us a partner and always saves the room.

02 · The chart is the product

Two weeks on a seating plan for twenty-four people is normal here. It is not perfectionism; it is the whole job. Anyone can fill a room. Few can compose one.

03 · Nothing leaves with names

No recordings, no guest list, no photos of the room. Ideas travel; attribution does not. It is the reason people say in our rooms what they will not say on a stage.

04 · Small on purpose

Thirty-four seats is not a constraint we regret. Past sixty, a table stops being a conversation and starts being an audience, and audiences are a different business, one we are not in.

05 · We say no more than yes

Four in five requests are declined, usually with a better evening suggested instead. The no is not a rejection; it is the reason the yes means something.

Ninety-two per cent of members return the following year. We think it is because of the rules, especially the ones that cost us.