IT leadership

There is an awkward stage most growing businesses pass through. IT has outgrown the person who has been handling it between their other jobs, but it is nowhere near a full-time role, and hiring for it would mean paying full time for judgement you need for half a day or so a month.

The usual answer is to hand the whole thing to a provider. That works for the running of it and does nothing for the deciding of it, which is the part that compounds.

When people come to me for this

Usually when the decisions start outpacing the person making them. A provider proposal arrives and there is nobody internal qualified to challenge it. The technology budget is really a list of last year’s invoices with a percentage added. Or something broke that everyone assumed somebody else was watching.

What you can buy

What actually happens

Think of it as a standing appointment rather than a project. Typically half a day a month, more when something is in flight.

We keep a real roadmap, so spending is planned against what the business is doing rather than assembled reactively after a failure. I manage the vendor relationships from your side, which changes the tone of those conversations considerably. And I sit in on the decisions that are expensive to reverse, which is most of the ones involving a contract.

I am not your helpdesk, and I would not want to be. If you need day-to-day support as well, that is a separate arrangement, and often the right shape is your existing provider doing the running while I do the deciding. Those two jobs being held by the same company is how a lot of businesses end up over-serviced.

Where to start

This one is hard to scope over email, because the useful version depends on what is already in motion. Book a 20-minute technology conversation and we can work out whether a standing arrangement makes sense or whether you just need one decision looked at.