Arsenalia: Rethinking Growth and Ownership in Italian Consulting
In 2019, six entrepreneurs who had each built their own companies decided to combine their efforts under a single vision. The result was Arsenalia, a group created to bring together complementary expertise across digital experience,CRM, ERP, creativity, and cybersecurity. From the beginning, the founders agreed they did not want to reproduce thesame structures they had seen constrain innovation elsewhere.
This blog post is part of 80+ case studies of progressive organizations we created for the ZeroDX awards 2025. These organizations embody the principles of RenDanHeYi in their work structures:
Zero Distance to customer: Decision what to build is based on insights from the marketplace
Autonomy: Small teams with full decision-making autonomy enable speed in execution
Shared Rewards: Everyone in the micro-enterprise participates in its financial success.
Marco Dalla Libera, one of the founding partners, recalled the motivation clearly. “I wanted to create the place where I always wanted to work,” he said. For him and the others, it felt natural to reject a traditional hierarchy and insteadbuild an organization that could stay entrepreneurial and collaborative even as it grew.
Arsenalia started as a federation of legally separate companies operating under a shared brand. Each entity kept itsown steering committee, profit and loss accountability, and way of organizing work. Employees were invited to become partners by contributing modest investments, and profits were distributed each year. This approach allowed the group to remain fully independent, free of venture capital or outside investors.
Over time, the business expanded significantly. By 2024, Arsenalia employed around 1,000 people, with approximately one-third dedicated to creative services, another third to consulting and strategy, and the remainder to technology delivery. The company operated offices in Venice, Milan, Rome, London, Paris, Zug, and Salzburg,generating around 100 million euros in annual turnover.
However, as the business scaled, the limits of the initial structure became harder to ignore. Many large projects increasingly involved multiple companies working together, leading to duplicated processes, slow decision-making, and blurred accountability. The teams also struggled to share research or coordinate the development of new services.
The founders began to see that preserving flexibility required a more integrated model. Their reflections were similar tosome of the principles behind RenDanHeYi, where teams take direct ownership of their business outcomes while staying close to customer needs. Arsenalia’s experience showed that without clear shared mechanisms, decentralization alone was not enough to keep pace with changing markets.
By early 2025, they decided to redesign the organization more fundamentally. Rather than remain a collection ofsemi-autonomous companies, Arsenalia would become a single legal entity with a unified brand and a fresh operating model inspired by the idea of combining self-management with transparent accountability.
The new structure in Arsenalia introduces two core concepts: guilds and domains. Guilds will serve as professional communities where employees build expertise, share practices, and uphold quality standards. Each guild will focus on a discipline, such as technology, strategy, project management, or creativity, and will be responsible for learning pathways and skill development.
Domains will function as flexible business areas that bring together people from across guilds to tackle customer challenges and deliver solutions. Each domain will have its own profit and loss responsibility, echoing RDHY’s emphasis on empowering teams to operate as
micro-enterprises. The ambition is to create a structure where people can move fluidly across domains as market needs evolve, without losing the support of their professional community.
Employees will belong to a guild as their professional home but be assigned to domains temporarily to contribute tospecific goals. This model is designed to replace silos with shared accountability and to encourage a more entrepreneurial mindset, where individuals see themselves as responsible for both delivery and improvement.
The transformation is being carried out through a participatory process rather than top-down direction. A core team established a series of monthly meetings, referred to internally as studios, where progress is reviewed, decisions are aligned, and the work of multiple streams is coordinated. Each stream focuses on a specific topic, including legal consolidation, internal communication, and the design of performance measurement. The aim is to begin rolling out the first elements in the summer of 2025 and complete the transition by year-end.
While part of the motivation is operational efficiency, the redesign is also about renewing Arsenalia’s foundingaspiration to help employees grow into entrepreneurs. In earlier years, the cooperative-style equity model provided a path for people to become partners and share in profits, but as the business grew, this model struggled to sustain cohesion. Partners naturally focused on their own entities, and many employees felt disconnected from group-wide goals.
Dalla Libera described this candidly. “Even if you set common goals or group goals, it is human nature that partners look at their little piece,” he said. The new model is intended to make shared ambitions clearer and to create more visible pathways for contribution and recognition across all locations.
The leadership team also realized that, much like in RDHY transformations, formal structures are needed to balancefreedom with alignment. Simply removing hierarchy does not guarantee innovation. Instead, Arsenalia is designing processes where everyone can access the same information, understand performance transparently, and make decisions with clear context.
Throughout this process, the founders have remained committed to rejecting a traditional pyramid. Yet they also recognized that autonomy must be supported by mechanisms for accountability, continuous learning, and customer focus.
The ambition is to build an environment where, as Marco Dalla Libera put it, people have the space to experiment,make mistakes, and discover better ways of working. “Sometimes the fact that someone is not working the way you expect is not wrong,” he said. “It’s just a different way of doing things. It could be even better.”
Arsenalia’s transformation is still in progress. As the company moves toward a unified model, it does so with the same conviction that inspired its founders to join forces: that work can be organized not only to deliver commercial successbut to help people grow, take ownership, and build something that lasts.
