How we work
Ten working days to a costed plan. Then you choose what happens next.
Every stage is small enough to finish and be judged on its own. Nothing larger is agreed until the stage before it has proved itself.
Stage one
The ten-day diagnostic
Long enough to see what is really happening, short enough that you are not funding discovery for a quarter. If your pain is narrow, it takes less, and we charge less.
Days one and two
We sit with the people who do the work and follow one assignment from booked to billed, including every workaround that keeps it moving.
Process walkthroughDays three to six
We go into the systems themselves. Configuration, automation, integrations, and the data as it really is rather than as the documentation claims.
Systems reviewDays seven and eight
Each problem gets written up with its cause, what it costs you now, what fixing it involves, and what it is worth.
CostingDays nine and ten
We walk you and your team through the list, answer the challenges, and hand it over. You own it either way.
HandoverWhat lands on your desk
- A written findings document, in plain language, not a slide deck
- Each change as its own line item with effort, cost and business impact
- A recommended order, with the quick wins separated from the structural work
- The risks of doing nothing, stated plainly
- Anything we think you should not spend money on, and why
Payable on completion. If we reach day ten and cannot show you more value than the fee, do not pay it.
Book the first call →Stage two
You pick the items. We build them.
This is the part most firms get wrong. You are not asked to accept a bundle. Take three items, take the lot, or take the document to your own team and build it yourselves.
Pick and choose
Each item stands alone and is priced alone. Approve what you want and leave the rest on the list for later.
Your timeline
We build to your release calendar and your quiet weeks. Peak season is not when we ask you to test things.
Handed over properly
Built in your systems, on your release process, documented as we go. No dependency on a login only we hold.
Automation and AI
Where it fits, and where it does not
We include this in the diagnostic rather than selling it separately, because the answer depends entirely on how clean the process underneath is.
Pointed at a broken handover, a model produces mistakes faster. Pointed at a clean one, it takes real work off people who are doing it by hand at ten at night.
What we look for
- The steps a person repeats every week, and what each one really costs in time
- Whether the data needed to automate it exists and can be trusted
- Which parts are a simple rule, which need a model, and which need neither
- Where an error would be expensive enough that a person must stay in the loop
Engagements
Three shapes this usually takes
The diagnostic
Ten working days, fixed at USD 3,500, ending in a costed list of changes that you own.
Fixed feeBuild the items you picked
One workflow or several, taken end to end with the edge cases handled rather than deferred. Priced per item from the diagnostic.
Most commonSpecialist subcontract
For consultancies delivering a build where the difficulty is the domain rather than the platform. Your contract, your client, our name off the page if that suits.
By arrangementBefore you ask
The questions that come up first
Why is the diagnostic priced at all? Most firms do it free.
A free assessment is a sales call, and both sides know it. Because you pay for ours, the findings are yours outright, including the items we think you should take to somebody else or to your own team. It also means we can afford to spend ten days on it rather than ninety minutes.
What if we only want the list and not the build?
That is a perfectly good outcome and it happens. The document is written so that any competent team can work from it, including yours.
How small is too small?
If your whole operation runs on one spreadsheet and ten contractors, the honest answer is that you do not need us yet. We will say that on the first call rather than after invoicing you.
We already have an implementation partner.
Often the better arrangement. We work behind consultancies as a specialist subcontractor when a build turns on domain logic rather than platform skill, under your contract and your standards.
Our systems are not Salesforce.
The domain problem is usually the same one. Rates, approvals, time capture and the join to finance behave alike wherever the record sits. Where a platform is genuinely outside what we can be useful on, we will tell you in the first conversation.
How do you charge for the build work?
Fixed price per item, quoted from the diagnostic, with the assumptions stated. Day rates only for subcontracted and ongoing work where fixed scope does not make sense.
Who do you usually work with inside a business?
Operations, finance, and the person who ended up owning the system by accident. Occasionally IT, though the problem is rarely an IT problem.
Ten days from now you could have the list
The first call is twenty minutes and costs nothing.