This is the process we run on every engagement: the stages, the gate between them, and the things we refuse to do. We publish it because a three-person studio has nothing to sell but judgement, and judgement you cannot inspect is just a claim.
The assessment: two to five days, fixed price, fixed scope. Nobody enters the embed that follows without a written decision.
Day zero, before we arrive
Credentials, a systems inventory and a stakeholder map.
The first days on site
A record of how the work actually happens, taken from the people doing it, not the people describing it.
Running alongside the shadowing
A gap map: how the business runs against how it says it runs, with every line tied to a name or a file.
Every engagement, at every length, including two days
A working system, built against your real data, not a mockup of one.
The last day
A ranked list of what else is worth building, and a written decision on whether to continue.
At the end of the assessment we write a go or no-go, answering five questions with evidence rather than impression. A file reference or a quote answers each one, or the answer is no.
The principal who was not on your engagement reviews the decision and writes their own sentence, not a signature. The two people who spent days inside your business, and are proud of what they built, are the worst placed to judge whether to leave. Walking away is an expected outcome, not a failed one: the assessment was paid for, something ran on your data, and you were told something true.
If the answer is yes, the embed runs for roughly twelve weeks, with three dated guardrails: the first integration working inside 14 days, production inside 90, and handover in week twelve. Disengagement is scheduled at kickoff, not negotiated at the end.
No hours-spent field, no utilisation figure, no billable ratio, anywhere. The moment that number exists, someone attaches a target to it, and an engineer optimising for hours is a consultant, whatever the title says.
A principal who was not on your engagement reviews the gate and writes their own sentence, not a signature. The two people who spent days inside your business, and are proud of what they built, are the worst placed to judge whether to leave.
What counts as finished is written into the agreement at kickoff, not negotiated once we are inside. A longer engagement is a separate decision, with its own scope and price, made after this one is done.
Everything in a document we give you is tied to a name, a quote or a file, or it is marked an assumption with an owner against it. Never neither.
We sell assessments and embeds. When we tell you your business needs one, that conclusion earns us money, every time we say it. If a consultant has ever told you what you wanted to hear rather than what was true, you already know why that matters here too. Weigh what we say with that in mind.