How I work
Diagnose. Build. Run.
Every engagement runs the same way, whether you arrived with a problem you cannot name or an idea you keep describing to people. Here is the whole thing, including the parts most people leave out of a pitch.
The three phases
Find where it actually leaks
I sit with the operation, not the org chart. I watch how a job actually moves from the request to the invoice, where it waits, who re-types what, and what people quietly work around because the system does not fit how they work.
That is deliberately unglamorous. The interesting finding is almost never the thing anyone flagged. It is the twenty minutes per job that nobody counts, the spreadsheet one person maintains, the approval that exists because of an incident in 2019.
Sometimes the honest answer is that you should not build anything. If buying something off the shelf, or changing a process, or doing nothing, beats a build, I will tell you and we stop there.
Production software, not a prototype
Real software you own, on a modern stack, deployed and running under your name. Not a demo, not a no-code patchwork that hits a wall the moment it matters.
Fast, because I use AI-assisted development and I am not coordinating a team. Right, because I have spent twenty years learning what right means once people depend on it: the error handling, the edge cases, the migration that has to run on real data without losing any of it.
You get the code, the accounts and the deployment. Nothing is hostage to me still being here.
Stay until it holds
It goes live, people use it, and reality finds what no plan did. Somebody uses the form in a way nobody imagined. A number is right but reads wrong. That is normal, and it is the part that decides whether the thing actually gets adopted.
I stay through it. I take a limited number of projects at a time precisely so this part is real work and not a ticket queue with a response-time promise.
After that, you can keep me on for changes or take it in-house. Both are fine, and I will help either way.
The paid front door
The Operational Read
Most engagements start here. A fixed-price piece of work, usually two to three weeks, where I go into the operation, sit with the people doing the work, and come back with a written read.
What you get, and this list is the product
- 01Where the hours and the dollars actually go, ranked, with the reasoning behind the ranking.
- 02What is worth building and, explicitly, what is not.
- 03What the fix would take: scope, sequence, rough timeline and cost.
- 04A build plan you can hand to anyone, including someone other than me.
That last deliverable matters more than it looks. A read you can take elsewhere is worth paying for. A read that only works as a sales document for the next engagement is not, and you can tell the difference.
Price
$4,500
Fixed. Credited in full against a build started within 90 days.
Typical length
Two to three weeks
The Read is not something you buy from this page. If it sounds like what you need, book a call and we will work out whether it is.
What the first month looks like
No mystery, no discovery phase that never ends.
I am in the operation. Conversations with the people doing the work, not just the people who own the budget. I ask about the workarounds, because that is where the answers are.
The picture comes together and I test it against you. Where the hours go, what it costs, what I think is worth building. This is where you find out whether I understood your business.
You get the written read: findings, what to build, what to skip, scope and cost. If we go ahead, the Read comes off the build price.
Building. You see working software early and often, not a status report. The first usable version lands in weeks, not quarters.
What I do not do
The work I turn down, and why.
This is not modesty. Being clear about the edges is how you can tell whether the middle is real.
Staff augmentation
I am not a developer you rent by the month to work through someone else's backlog. If the thinking has already been done and you need hands, you want an agency, and I will say so.
Work I hand to someone else
You talk to me and the person who builds it is me. There is no account manager, no junior doing the real work, and no team to expand into. That is the whole offer, and it is also its limit.
Multi-year enterprise programmes
I spent twenty years inside those and I know what they need. It is not one person. If that is your situation, I can tell you honestly what it will take, and it will not be me.
Rescuing a build I cannot see into
I will look at a project that has gone wrong. What I will not do is quote to finish something without understanding why it stalled, because the reason is usually not the code.
One more thing
Web presence
I do build websites, and I build them properly. It is not in the navigation because it is not what most people come here for, and because leading with it sets the wrong expectation for everything above.
If your site is the reason serious buyers are not taking you seriously, that is a real problem and worth fixing. Say so on the call.
See what I've builtThink something is leaking?
Book thirty minutes. We pressure-test it together and you leave knowing whether it is worth doing, roughly what it takes, and whether I am the right person to do it.