Scaling & advisory — The leadership your business needs, before you can hire it.

Very little about the work itself, and a good deal about how it reaches you. We run the technical side directly rather than advising you on it, so your team has someone senior to take decisions to, and you get those decisions back as commercial ones — what it costs, what it buys, and what it rules out later. You should not have to form a view on the database in order to run the business. The short diagnostic at the start is written with exactly that in mind: a plain account of where the technology is, in language you can act on and put in front of a board or an investor.

Earlier than most people expect, they are the same seat. What to build, what it will cost and what it forecloses are one set of decisions, and splitting them across two people before there is enough of either to justify it tends to slow both down. The honest test is where the pain shows: if delivery is late, unpredictable or fragile, you want the technical side. If the team ships steadily but the wrong things — a busy roadmap and a flat set of numbers — you want the product side. We take either, or both, and we would rather tell you which you actually need than sell you the larger version of it.

Both, and they are priced differently. Where there is a team, we lead it. Where there is not — an idea, a prototype, a first version that has to exist before anything else can sensibly be decided — we write the code ourselves. That is scoped and quoted as a piece of work rather than charged as a monthly seat, because it has a defined end. What we will not do is hand you something disposable. A first version built to be thrown away costs more in the rebuild than it saved in the sprint, and most of what makes an MVP expensive later is decided in its first fortnight. It gets built to be handed to a team, because the point is that one day it is.

It varies with what the business needs, and it is agreed up front rather than billed by the hour. A typical engagement is a set number of days each month with a defined remit, reviewed every quarter. Businesses in the middle of a rebuild or a raise usually want more at the start and less once the structure is in place.

Work with them, in almost every case. The team usually knows where the problems are — what tends to be missing is someone senior enough to make the calls and carry the consequences. Where a change is genuinely needed, we will say so early and directly rather than letting it sit.

A fixed monthly fee against an agreed scope, so the cost is predictable and there is no incentive to stretch the work out. The short diagnostic that usually precedes it is priced separately and on its own, so you can stop there if that is all you needed. Build work — a prototype, or a first version — is quoted as a piece of work rather than as a seat, for the same reason: it has an end.

Yes, and often that is the better structure. Advisory for equity puts operating, technical and product leadership into the business in place of cash — or alongside it, where a business wants to reduce the monthly cost without losing the seat. See investment and equity partnerships for how those deals are shaped.

Yes. We are based in Cornwall and have a particular interest in businesses across the South West, but the work is not geographic. Good businesses are not only built within an hour of London.