An outside read on how your functions actually work together.
Continuity. Someone who already knows how your organisation works, on a standing agenda — so no quarter starts with an explanation, and the hard question has somewhere to go before you commit to it.
The single biggest cost of external advice is context transfer. A retainer amortises it to nearly zero.
Between sessions. Most of the value arrives in the gaps, not in the meetings.
Someone with no stake in the internal politics and no incentive to agree with you.
Who it is for
- Founders who are the most senior technologist in the building and have nobody to check their thinking against.
- Newly appointed CTOs or Heads of Technology in their first eighteen months.
- Leadership teams mid-way through a reorg, a migration or a first data hire.
- A small number of clients at a time. This only works if I actually remember your organisation.
The shape of it
- Format
- Standing quarterly session
- Between
- Async access for hard questions
- Agenda
- What changed, what is stuck, what is next
- Commitment
- Quarterly, reviewed annually
I hold a CTO seat day to day. That is the point: you are not being taught by someone describing a job they left, and the material is drawn from a job I am still doing.
What actually happens
A standing session each quarter on the decisions actually in front of you, with access in between when something cannot wait for the next one.
- A proper start
One deeper first session to build the context that everything after it depends on. Sometimes the health check, sometimes just a lot of questions.
- The quarterly session
A standing agenda with your leadership: what changed, what is stuck, what you are about to decide.
- Between sessions
Send the thing you are unsure about. A considered written answer, not a scheduling negotiation.
- An annual review
Whether this is still worth what it costs. Asked by me, not waited for.
What you leave with
- A standing outside perspective that does not need re-briefing.
- Written positions on the decisions you brought, not just conversations about them.
- Early warning on the organisational problems that are about to become delivery problems.
- First call on delivery dates, which are limited.
What it costs
€2,500 per quarter, excluding VAT. A standing arrangement rather than a per-person charge.
Is this the right thing for your team?
Thirty minutes. You describe what is going wrong; I tell you which of these actually fits, including when the answer is none of them.