Consulting is an unusually easy business to be vague in. This page is the antidote: our operating principles, the actual sequence of an engagement, what we need from you, and how fees are set. Read it before you call and you will know whether we are your kind of firm.
Operating principles
The first questions are about revenue, cost, risk and people — how the organization makes money and where that gets harder than it should be. A technology conversation that begins with products is a sales conversation wearing a disguise.
Every recommendation comes with the criteria, the alternatives considered and the assumptions it rests on. If an assumption turns out to be wrong later, you can see immediately which part of the conclusion moves.
Recommendations include the strongest argument for the option we did not choose. A report that reads as though there was only ever one answer has usually skipped the hard part.
Scope grows on its own. We counter it deliberately: bounded phases, explicit exits, and a bias toward finishing rather than extending. You should be able to stop working with us at any milestone and still be better off than when you started.
The most useful hour of most engagements is spent with whoever actually operates the process — because that is where the workarounds live, and the workarounds are the real specification.
Standard technology, plain documentation, credentials in your name, code in your repository. If it would be painful to replace us, we have designed it wrong.
The sequence
You can stop after any one of them and keep everything produced up to that point. That is not a courtesy — it is the mechanism that keeps us honest about whether the next stage is worth doing.
Interviews with leadership and with the people operating the process. What the business is trying to do, what gets in the way, and what that friction costs in hours and dollars.
An inventory of what you already own and what it can do. Which constraints are real, which are inherited habits, and which are contractual rather than technical.
Options with costs, risks and sequencing, written for a reader who was not in the room. Includes doing nothing, and includes what we would do in your position.
Build, configure, integrate, or oversee the vendor doing it. Fortnightly demos, milestone billing, and a written status note you can forward without editing.
Documentation, runbooks, training and access transfer. We stay involved afterwards only if you decide there is a reason to.
Your side of it
Engagements fail for predictable reasons, and almost none of them are technical. These four things are what separates the work that lands from the work that stalls.
If you cannot commit to them right now, that is worth knowing before we start — sometimes the honest answer is to wait a quarter.
Someone with the authority to say yes, and to say no. Not a committee that must reconvene to approve every step.
A few hours of their time, early. This is the single strongest predictor of whether the recommendation will be any good.
Budget ceilings, political landmines, a contract you cannot exit, a system nobody wants to touch. Tell us at the start and we design around it. Tell us at the end and we have wasted your money.
Sometimes the answer is that the project should not happen, or should not happen yet. If that answer is unwelcome regardless of the evidence, we are the wrong firm.
Engagement models
Nearly everyone starts with a discovery sprint, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether we are useful to each other — and it produces something you keep either way.
A bounded engagement ending in a written recommendation you own outright. For when you know something needs to change but not yet what, or when you need an independent read before committing to a vendor.
Implementation with an agreed scope and a written definition of done: a build, a migration, a system selection run end to end, or an AI pilot taken into production.
Fractional CTO capacity for organizations needing senior technical judgment continuously, but nowhere near full-time. Typically two to four days a month.
We do not publish a rate card, for a reason that is more practical than coy: the right commercial structure depends on the shape of the problem, and quoting an hourly number before understanding the work tends to produce the wrong engagement at the wrong price for both sides.
What we will commit to in writing:
The most expensive engagements we are asked to rescue are almost always the ones that began as the low bid. If budget is the binding constraint, the right move is usually a smaller piece of work done properly rather than a large one done cheaply — and we are happy to help you scope that down.
During delivery you can expect a short written status note each week, a working demonstration every two weeks, and a named person who answers email the same day. Meetings are booked against an agenda and cancelled when there is nothing to decide. You will not be invoiced for internal status meetings you were not part of.
We are comfortable signing your NDA before the first detailed conversation, and we do not name clients publicly without written permission. We hold no reseller agreements and accept no referral commissions from any vendor we may recommend — our fee is identical whichever way an analysis lands.
We also decline work where we would be evaluating a system we built ourselves. If that situation arises, we will tell you and help you find an independent reviewer.
Half an hour costs you nothing and usually produces at least one thing you can act on this week — whether or not it involves us.