Questions people ask before they call.

Your IT provider or managed service provider keeps things running: support, patching, hardware, uptime. That is a different job from deciding what you should be running in the first place, and most providers are not structured to do it impartially because they usually sell or support the thing being evaluated. We work alongside your existing provider rather than instead of them, and a good outcome often means handing them a much clearer brief.

Most of our clients run between roughly ten and two thousand people. Below that a discovery sprint is often still worthwhile but a long engagement rarely is. Above that we usually work with a single division or function rather than the whole enterprise. If we think you would be better served elsewhere we will say so before you have spent anything.

Then we can go straight to scoping and building it. We will still spend an hour testing the assumption, because that hour occasionally saves a great deal of money, but if the reasoning holds up we get on with the work. Having a clear specification usually makes an engagement shorter and cheaper, not longer.

Yes, and it is common. We are often brought in to give an internal team senior backup, to review an architecture before it is committed to, or to hold a vendor to what they sold. We are not there to replace anyone, and we say that plainly to the team at the start, because an engagement that feels like an audit to the people being interviewed produces worse information.

No. AI is one capability among several and it is the right answer less often than the market currently implies. A large share of our work is unglamorous integration, reporting, vendor selection and process design. We are glad to build an AI system when the economics support it, and equally glad to tell you that a two-hour automation would save more money than a model ever will.

Both, deliberately. Advice from people who do not have to live with the consequences tends to be optimistic. We build software, integrations, automations and AI systems, and the people who make the recommendation are the people who implement it. We are also happy to hand a recommendation to your team or another firm to deliver, and that is a perfectly good outcome.

Mainstream, widely supported ones, chosen so that another firm or your own team could take over. In practice that means standard web and API stacks, the major cloud platforms, relational databases, and the established AI model providers accessed through documented interfaces. We avoid niche frameworks and proprietary platforms that would make you dependent on us specifically.

Then that is what the report says, with the reasoning and the conditions that would change it. Roughly one engagement in six ends this way. It is not a failure and you are not charged less for it: knowing that a six-figure project is unnecessary is usually worth considerably more than the fee that established it.

No. Day-to-day support is a genuine specialism and managed service providers do it better than we would. We will happily help you choose one, hold it to its service levels, or maintain software we built for you. What we do not do is answer password resets.

It depends on the shape of the work, so we scope before we quote. Discovery sprints are fixed-scope and fixed-fee. Projects are quoted against an agreed definition of done and billed by milestone. Retainers are a flat monthly fee. Genuinely open-ended work is billed hourly at our standard rate, which we will give you plainly on the first call. You will never receive an invoice for work you did not agree to in advance.

Because an hourly number quoted before anyone understands the problem tends to produce the wrong engagement at the wrong price for both sides. It is not a negotiating tactic and we are not coy about it on the phone: ask on the first call and you will get the figure immediately, along with an honest view of whether an hourly arrangement is even the right structure for what you need.

No. We hold no reseller agreements and accept no referral fees, finder's fees or revenue share from any vendor. Our fee is identical whichever way an analysis lands, which is the only arrangement that makes an independent analysis worth paying for. If that ever changed we would disclose it in writing before the engagement began.

On a fixed-fee discovery sprint, nothing: if it turns out harder than we estimated, that is our risk and the price does not move. On projects, any change to scope is written down and priced before it is incurred, and you approve it. The failure mode we design against is the invoice that arrives with work on it you never agreed to.

A first call is usually available within a few days. Discovery sprints typically begin within two to three weeks of a signed scope, and sometimes sooner. Because we are small we will tell you honestly if we are booked rather than starting you late and running slowly.

Most work is remote and works well that way. We are based in [[Your City, ST]] and are on site locally without fuss; further afield we will usually propose one or two visits at the points where being in the room matters most, typically the initial interviews and the final walkthrough. Travel is agreed in advance and billed at cost.

Yes, before the first detailed conversation if you would like. We can work from your document or provide a short mutual one. We also do not name clients publicly without written permission, which is why this site has no logo wall.

You do, on payment, and it is written into the engagement agreement. Source code lives in your repository under your organization's account, infrastructure runs in your cloud accounts billed to you, and credentials are issued in your name. Reports and analysis are yours to circulate, publish or hand to another firm.

You can. Engagements are structured in phases with defined exits precisely so that stopping is a normal option rather than a dispute. You pay for completed milestones, you keep everything produced up to that point, and we will spend a session handing over cleanly rather than leaving you to work out where things were left.

With the minimum necessary. We ask for the least access that lets us do the work, prefer read-only and time-limited credentials, and return or destroy client data at the end of an engagement on request. Where an engagement involves regulated or sensitive data we agree the handling rules in writing first, including which systems and AI services the data may and may not touch.