The conversations we are called into

An owner has been pitched three times this quarter. One quote is $40,000 and eleven pages long, one is a licence reseller, one is a nephew. None of them can be judged from the inside, because judging them requires knowing which parts are genuinely hard. Meanwhile twelve Copilot licences were bought in March and nobody has opened one since April.

The most expensive AI mistake a small or medium-sized business makes is not choosing a bad vendor. It is building the right-looking thing for a job that did not need it.

What we solve for

• Whether to build at all.
• Reading someone else’s quote.
• Which job goes first.
• ChatGPT Teams, Claude, Copilot, or nothing.
• Customer data and the Privacy Act.
• Sequencing and budget.
• Build or buy.

How to choose an AI consultant

We charge for this, and it is the cheapest thing we sell. A free session is a sales call and both sides know it — the advice bends, quietly, toward the thing the adviser builds. Ninety paid minutes buys an answer we have no reason to steer. Four things to ask of whoever advises you, with what each one costs when we do it:

The fee is credited, so the incentive is visible.

If you go on to build with us within three months, the advisory fee comes off the first invoice. That means we are not trying to sell you a second session. The cost: you pay before you know whether we are any good.

Half of what we say is “not yet”.

A job that happens ten times a month is cheaper done by a person for years. Data spread across three systems with no owner will defeat any agent, regardless of who builds it. Both of those go in the written page, in those words. The cost to us is obvious and we would rather write it down.

Bring the other quote.

We will read a competitor’s proposal and mark which lines are real engineering, which are licence resale, and which are margin. Sometimes the answer is that their quote is fair and ours would be higher. That has happened.

One page, not a deck.

A forty-slide strategy document is a way of charging for volume. You get one page: the three jobs ranked by hours saved, what each needs in place first, a rough number, and which one to do in the next sixty days. The cost: it does not look like much work. It is.

How the engagement runs

• 90 minutes, fixed fee. At your place or online. Bring whoever actually does the work, not just the owner.
• A written answer in two working days. One page. Yours, whether or not you ever call us again.
• Credited against a build, in full, for three months.
• Your numbers stay yours. Nothing recorded, nothing used as a case study without asking.
• Monthly advisory afterwards, if useful: fixed hours a month, ask anything, from the same retainer pool as upkeep.

If the answer is build

Every build follows the same four steps, in the same order, whatever the size of the job.

The full terms are on How we work; the other nine offerings are on Offerings; who owns the data is on Data ownership.