AI strategy & implementation
Find the handful of AI use cases that pay for themselves, prove them with a small pilot, and put governance around them before they reach customers.
Business & technology consulting
Straight answers about the technology your business actually needs.
Ottotell helps small and mid-sized organizations decide what to build, what to buy, and what to leave alone — then delivers it. That includes AI, when AI is genuinely the right tool and not just the loudest one in the room.
No pitch, no obligation — and no charge for the first conversation.
What the first conversation looks like
Thirty minutes, on a call. Here is what actually happens.
- You describe the problem in your own words. No technical vocabulary required.
- We ask the questions that separate a symptom from a cause — usually four or five of them.
- You leave with at least one concrete next step, whether or not you hire us.
- If we are not the right fit, we say so on the call and point you toward someone who is.
Why people call us
You are probably here because of one of these five things.
None of them are really technology problems. They are decision problems that happen to involve technology — which is why the usual answer, “get a quote from a vendor,” so often makes them worse.
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A vendor is quoting six figures and you have no way to judge it
You need someone who has sat on both sides of that table, understands what the line items actually cost to deliver, and has no financial stake in the answer.
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Everyone is asking what you are doing about AI
Most AI proposals solve a problem the business does not have. A few are genuinely transformative. Telling them apart quickly — before you have spent anything — is a skill.
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Your systems work, but nothing talks to anything else
Data gets re-keyed by hand. Spreadsheets hold the business together. Reporting takes a person two days a month. Every one of those is a fixable integration problem.
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You have outgrown off-the-shelf, but building feels risky
Build-versus-buy is answerable with numbers, not opinions. We do the analysis, show our work, and tell you which way it points — including when the answer is “keep what you have.”
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You need senior technical judgment, not a full-time CTO
A roadmap, an architecture review, a second opinion before you sign, someone to run the vendor relationship. A few days a month, not a salary and equity.
What we do
Four practices, one job: better technology decisions.
Most engagements start in one of these and end up touching two. We do not artificially separate strategy from delivery — the people who make the recommendation are the people who implement it.
Custom software & automation
Internal tools, integrations and workflow automation built to fit how your business already works — rather than bending the business to fit the software.
Technology selection
Structured, vendor-neutral evaluation. Requirements, a real shortlist, scored comparisons, and a build-versus-buy answer you can take to a board.
Fractional CTO & advisory
Ongoing senior technical leadership on a monthly retainer: roadmap, architecture, budget, vendor management and a straight answer whenever you need one.
What makes us different
Consulting that is willing to tell you not to spend money.
The consulting industry has a structural conflict of interest: the longer the project runs and the bigger the platform, the more everyone gets paid. We built Ottotell to sit on the other side of that.
Business first, technology second
Every engagement starts with what the business is trying to achieve and what it costs today to not achieve it. Technology choices come after that, and they have to justify themselves against it.
Vendor-neutral by design
We do not resell software, hold reseller agreements, or take referral commissions. When we recommend a platform, the only thing we get out of it is being right.
Senior people, start to finish
The person who scopes your engagement is the person who does the work. Nothing is sold by a partner and delivered by whoever was on the bench that month.
Everything in writing, everything yours
Findings, decision criteria, architecture, source code, credentials, documentation. You own all of it, and it is written so your team can act on it without us.
AI-capable, not AI-obsessed
We build with modern AI where it earns its place — document handling, classification, drafting, search, support triage. Where a database query and a rule would do the job for a hundredth of the cost, we will say so.
No lock-in, ever
We build on standard, widely-supported technology and hand over clean documentation so that another firm — or your own team — can pick it up. Retention through results, not dependency.
The process
Five stages, and you can stop after any of them.
A deliberately unglamorous sequence. Each stage produces something you own and can act on independently — including taking it to a different firm to implement.
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Understand
How the business makes money, where the friction is, and what it costs. We talk to the people doing the work, not only the people who own the budget.
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Assess
What you already own, what it is capable of, what is genuinely broken, and which constraints are real versus inherited.
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Recommend
Options with costs, risks and trade-offs written down — including the option of doing nothing, which is sometimes the right one.
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Deliver
Build it, configure it, integrate it, or oversee the vendor doing it. Milestones, demos, and no surprises at the end of the month.
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Hand over
Documentation, training and access, so your team runs it confidently. We stay on only if you want us to.
The uncomfortable one
Roughly one engagement in six ends at “Recommend” with us advising the client to keep what they have and fix a process instead. We would rather write that report than bill for a rebuild nobody needed — it is also, reliably, where our referrals come from.
How engagements work
Three ways to work with us.
Nearly everyone starts with a discovery sprint. It is the lowest-risk way to find out whether we are useful to you, and it produces something valuable even if you stop there.
Discovery sprint
A short, bounded engagement that ends in a written recommendation you own outright. Ideal when you know something needs to change but not yet what.
- Stakeholder interviews and current-state review
- Options analysis with costs and risks
- A prioritised, sequenced recommendation
- A walkthrough session with your team
Project engagement
Implementation work with an agreed scope and definition of done — a build, a migration, a system selection run end to end, or an AI pilot taken into production.
- Scoped and quoted before work begins
- Milestone billing, not open-ended hours
- Demos at every milestone
- Documentation and handover included
Advisory retainer
Fractional CTO capacity for organizations that need senior technical judgment continuously but nowhere near full-time.
- Standing time each month, used as you need it
- Roadmap ownership and architecture review
- Vendor and contract oversight
- Direct access between sessions
We publish how we work rather than a rate card, because the right structure depends on the problem. You will always have a written scope and a number before anyone starts. More on fees and scoping.
Who you would be working with
A small team of people who have run the systems, not just advised on them.
Ottotell is deliberately small. Everyone here has spent [[YEARS]]+ years building, integrating and operating business systems — in-house and on the consulting side — across industries that had nothing in common except a need for things to work.
That range is the point. We are strongest in IT and applied AI, but we are not bound to them; a good part of the job is recognising when the real fix is a process, a contract, or a conversation between two departments that have never had one.
- [[YEARS]]+ years across IT strategy, software delivery and operations
- [[CERTIFICATION 1 — e.g. AWS Solutions Architect]]
- [[CERTIFICATION 2 — e.g. CISSP]]
- [[CERTIFICATION 3 — e.g. PMP]]
- Based in [[Your City, ST]] — working with clients nationwide
- Comfortable signing your NDA before the first detailed conversation
Common questions
The things people ask before they call.
Your IT provider or MSP 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, not instead of them, and a good outcome often means giving them a clearer brief.
No. AI is one capability among several, and it is the right answer less often than the market currently implies. Plenty of our work is unglamorous integration, reporting, vendor selection and process design. We are happy to build you an AI system when the economics support it — and equally happy to tell you that a two-hour automation would save more money than a model ever will.
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. Anything genuinely open-ended 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.
Most of our clients run between roughly 10 and 2,000 people. Below that, a discovery sprint is often still worth it but a long engagement rarely is. Above that, we tend to 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 spend anything.
Tell us what is not working.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation. If there is a fast answer we will give it to you on the call — and if there is not, you will at least know what question to ask next.