$ what we ship

Six types of advice.

Six consulting products, each fixed-price and fixed-scope. Every engagement ends with a written report you can hand to your team, board or investors — not just a call and a vibe.

01

Tech-stack auditDeep-dive into your existing codebase, hosting and vendors — with a written risk register, cost-cutting plan and a hire/keep/replace call on every tool.

02

MVP scopingTurn a rough idea into a buildable brief. Feature MoSCoW, user stories, wireframe sketches, week-by-week plan and a fixed AUD build quote from us or any agency.

03

Cost & TCO modellingFive-year total-cost-of-ownership model — build vs buy, custom vs SaaS, in-house vs outsourced. Real AUD numbers, sensitivity analysis, break-even chart.

04

Hiring & team planWhat roles to hire, when, in what order, at what AU/NZ salary bands. Includes JD drafts, interview scorecards and a fractional-hire strategy for the gaps.

05

Vendor RFP & selectionWrite the brief, run the RFP, review the responses, sit in on shortlist calls. We're on your side of the table, not the vendor's.

06

Fractional CTOMonthly retainer — 1 or 2 days a week embedded with your team. Architecture calls, code review, hiring, vendor decisions, roadmap planning.

$ our process

From question to clarity — six phases, every engagement.

Consulting engagements are shorter than builds but run the same disciplined shape. Fixed scope, fixed price, written deliverables — no billable-hour surprises.

01

Intake & context
Days 1 – 2

A short intake form — where you are, what you've tried, what's actually keeping you up at night. We read every document you send before the first call, so you don't spend the workshop bringing us up to speed.
- Intake questionnaire (15 min to fill in)
- Async doc review — codebase, contracts, prior audits, roadmaps
- Stakeholder map: who cares about the answer, who owns the decision
- Kickoff email with the agenda for the workshop
02

Deep-dive workshop
Week 1

A 90-minute working session — in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne or Auckland if you're nearby, over video otherwise. Recorded and transcribed so anyone on your team can catch up later.
- Live whiteboarding in Miro — problem tree, options tree, decision matrix
- Walk-through of your current stack / process / plan
- Trade-off discussion with real AUD numbers, not hand-waves
- Full recording + transcript delivered within 24 hours
03

Analysis & benchmarking
Week 1 – 2

The unglamorous middle. Cost models built in Google Sheets, tools evaluated head-to-head, salary bands benchmarked against Seek/LinkedIn data for Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Auckland.
- Vendor / tool comparison matrix (weighted scoring)
- Five-year TCO model with switchable assumptions
- Reference calls with 2–3 comparable teams (with your permission)
- Salary + market benchmarking against live 2026 AU/NZ data
04

Written report
Week 2 – 3

Not a slide deck — a real written document you can share with your board, investors, or future hires. Assumptions, sources, and reasoning are all visible so you can push back on any bit of it.
- Executive summary (1 page) + full report (10 – 30 pages)
- Recommendations ranked by ROI and implementation risk
- Every assumption traceable to a source or a stated judgment
- Editable versions in Google Docs + a locked PDF
05

Read-out & Q&A
Week 3

A 60-minute call to walk your team through the findings, defend the recommendations, and get pushback. If we're wrong about something, we'd rather find out now than after you've acted on it.
- Live walk-through with slides drawn from the report
- Q&A with your engineering, product and finance leads
- Adjustments to the report captured in v1.1 within 48 hours
- Recording + updated PDF shared to your whole team
06

30-day follow-up
Week 3 – 7

One month later we check in — what did you actually do, what changed, what's stuck. If a recommendation needs re-scoping, we re-scope. Included in every engagement, no extra invoice.
- 30-minute check-in call at the 30-day mark
- Async Slack / email support for follow-up questions
- Optional continuation into fractional-CTO retainer if useful
- Honest referral to specialists if we're not the right fit

$ what you own

What lands in your inbox.

Consulting is intangible — so every engagement produces artefacts you can hand off. All editable, all yours, no confidentiality strings.

Written report (PDF + Doc)

10–30 pages, executive summary up front, sources and assumptions visible. Editable Google Doc + branded PDF.

Financial model

Google Sheet with every assumption toggleable. Break-even chart, sensitivity table, 5-year cash-flow view.

Vendor / tool matrix

Weighted-scoring spreadsheet comparing every option we shortlisted — with links to pricing pages and reference customers.

Whiteboard / Miro board

The live workshop board, cleaned up and annotated. Great for onboarding a new hire to how the decision was made.

Recorded read-out

Loom or Zoom recording of the read-out call, with searchable transcript. Share with anyone who missed the meeting.

30-day check-in note

Short async written check-in a month later — what changed, what stuck, what to revisit. Free of charge, always.

$ toolkit

How we work.

Deliberately boring, deliberately shareable. Every artefact lives in a tool your team already has — no proprietary consulting portals to buy access to later.

Workshopping

Miro
FigJam
Whimsical
Zoom

Modelling

Google Sheets
Airtable
Causal
Excel

Writing

Google Docs
Notion
Coda
Markdown

Data & research

Seek
LinkedIn
G2
Ahrefs

Roadmapping

Linear
Jira
ProductPlan
Notion

Comms

Slack
Loom
Grain
Email

$ timeline & investment

Rough shape of a consulting engagement.

Actual pricing depends on scope — but these bands land the right ballpark. Ninety-nine of a hundred quotes come in inside them.

Typical timeline

0–0 weeks

Short audit: 1–2 weeks. MVP scoping or TCO model: 3–4 weeks. Fractional CTO: ongoing monthly.

Investment (AUD)

$0k – $0k

Fixed price per engagement, milestone-billed. Fractional CTO from AUD $8k/month, 3-month minimum.

0+

Audits delivered

0 min

Avg first reply

0 days

Follow-up included

0.0★

Client rating

$ questions

What everyone asks before the workshop.

Straight answers. If yours isn't here, ask on the free discovery call — no sales pitch, no obligation.

Are you actually independent — or will you always recommend building with you?

Actually independent. About 40% of our audits recommend building with someone else — a specialist agency, an internal hire, or occasionally "don't build this at all." If we always said "hire us", the report would be worthless. We've written that referral email plenty of times.

What if the recommendation is "don't build this"?

We tell you. Sometimes the honest answer is "SaaS X already does 90% of what you need for AUD $200/month — buy that, save AUD $80k." We'd rather deliver that report and lose the build than take a big project we don't believe in.

Do you sign NDAs?

Yes, before the intake form. Standard mutual NDA covering everything you share with us. If you have your own template, we sign that. Nothing about your business appears in a case study without your written consent.

Can you audit a codebase you didn't build?

That's most of our audits. We read the code, run the tests, spin it up locally, review the deploys, talk to the current team. You get a written technical debt inventory, a security-posture note, and a rescue-vs-rewrite recommendation with real AUD numbers.

What's the difference between an audit and fractional CTO?

Audit = a fixed-scope deep-dive that ends with a written report (2–4 weeks). Fractional CTO = ongoing 1–2 days a week embedded with your team, on a monthly retainer, for at least three months. Audits often lead into fractional retainers — but they don't have to.

Can you help us hire in-house engineers?

Yes — role definition, JD drafting, screening rubric, interview panel, and technical assessment design. We can sit on the interview panel for senior hires (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Auckland or remote). We don't take recruiter commissions — flat fee, our incentive stays aligned with yours.

How does payment work?

Fixed-price engagements: 50% at kickoff, 50% at the read-out. Fractional CTO: monthly retainer, invoiced on the 1st, 14-day terms. No trailing timesheets, no billable-hour disputes.

Not ready to build? Let's talk first.