The practice on Sample Road

Why the grove

The name is literal. Early clients brought folders of printed financial reports—Apple periods, Google earnings, advertising settlements—and stacked them on a long table like a small grove of files. We kept the habit. Screens are fine for export; the reading still happens on paper, with a pencil in the margin.

Farah Lim started the practice after years inside a Penang studio that shipped a language-learning app. Each month the store “proceeds” and the studio’s bank credit told slightly different stories. The gap was rarely fraud. It was timing, withheld tax, a refund wave after a broken pack, or a price tier that had been edited in only one country. She began offering the same sitting to neighbouring publishers, then rented a room on Level 11.

Arjun Menon joined later, bringing advertising settlement sheets from a previous role buying placements for a casual game. He sits only when ads are part of the revenue mix; otherwise Farah reads alone.

How we work

We take few sittings. Two full revenue readings a month is the usual ceiling. The letter after a sitting is written in plain sentences: what moved, what is a delay, what is a genuine change in buyers. We do not decorate the letter with graphs that cannot be tied to a line in a store file.

George Town is the home room because both readers live on the island and because visiting publishers can walk from the harbour hotels. Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru clients often come for the two-day reading and leave with the printed stack in a folio.

Values we actually keep

We will stop a thread rather than invent a missing export. We will name a mild disagreement in the letter if the publisher’s memory of a price change does not match the store history. We will not speak to the stores for you, and we will not claim a reading replaces an accountant.

If you want a sitting, write to us with the app name and the months you care about.