To the principal.
A private house is built in the calendar, not in the room. The meeting you sit in is the smallest unit of the work. The unit that compounds is the Tuesday that arrives, every other week, for two years, with the same people, the same folders, the same written questions in the same order, and the same quiet expectation that nothing in the room has to be re-introduced. That is the work the desk is actually paid for, and it is the work a quarterly retainer cannot buy.
The first season of a mandate is mostly a season of translation. The household learns how the desk asks questions, and the desk learns which questions the household treats as personal and which it treats as policy. Most of the work in that season is, frankly, a tax. The work only starts to compound in the second or third season, when the Tuesday begins to run on a page the household has seen before, and the desk can answer a question by reference rather than by re-explanation. The time saved is not the point. The continuity is the point.
Continuity is what makes the long horizon possible. A policy that survives a change of counsel, a move of custody, a new advisor in the room, or the principal's own absence for a season, is a policy that was written into the calendar, not into a single document. The document is the artefact. The calendar is the operating system. A household that meets the desk on a written cadence, with a written agenda, and a written record, can lose any single person in the room, including the principal, and the work continues on the next Tuesday without a restart. That is the cheap form of succession, and it is the only form the desk recommends before the more expensive forms are needed.
Most of what the desk learns in a long mandate cannot be written down, and is not. It lives in the texture of the conversation on a Tuesday morning in a quiet quarter, when nothing on the screen is on fire, and the desk still meets the household because the Tuesday is on the calendar. That is the part of the work the principal cannot see on a page, and is the part of the work the principal is paying for. The trades, when they come, are the side effect. The Tuesday is the side effect. The long horizon is the work.
The desk.