Solutions

Decide it, build it, grow it

Three pillars and one team. Consultancy for the decisions that are expensive to get wrong, software for the things you cannot buy off the shelf, and digital marketing for putting the result in front of the right people. Most of what we do crosses at least two of them, which is rather the point.

See the three pillars →

01

One team, three pillars

The same people advise, build and market, so nothing gets handed over a wall and quietly dropped.

02

We run what we recommend

Most of what we build is hosted and maintained by us, which keeps the advice honest.

03

Small enough to reach

You deal with the people doing the work rather than an account manager relaying it.

Capability

Three pillars, by one team.

How it fits together

Three pillars, and most jobs cross two.

Very little arrives neatly labelled. A conversation that starts as a marketing problem turns out to be a website that cannot be updated. A software brief turns out to be three systems that were never meant to talk to each other. Someone asks about AI and the honest first answer is that their backups have not been tested since 2019.

Splitting that across three suppliers is how the interesting parts fall between them. The agency blames the platform, the developer blames the brief, and the consultant has already invoiced and left. We would rather hold all three, because it means there is nobody else to point at when something does not work.

It also means the advice costs us something. We are usually the ones who have to host it, patch it, and answer the phone about it in two years time, so recommending the impressive option over the sensible one is a bill we end up paying ourselves.

For example Road XS, our own transport platform

Consultancy worked out that it needed to exist and what it had to do. Software built it and still runs it every day. Digital marketing is why community transport schemes across the UK have heard of it. Three pillars, one project, and nobody to hand the difficult part to.

Built, hosted and marketed  ·  by the same team

This is the normal shape of the work, not the exception

How it runs

One conversation, then a plan you keep.

01

Talk

Half an hour on what you are actually trying to do, before anybody proposes anything or quotes for it.

02

Look

At what you run now, what it costs you, and what is quietly holding the rest of it together.

03

Write it down

The route, the order, the cost and the parts we think you should skip. Yours to keep either way.

04

Do the work

Whichever of the three pillars it needs, by the same team, with access to it throughout.

05

Stay

We host and run most of what we build, so the advice has to survive us being here in three years.

Straight answers

Things we will probably talk you out of.

We sell all three of these, which is exactly why the list below matters.

  1. All three because we offer all three

    Most organisations need one of them properly rather than three at once. We would rather do the one that moves something and be asked back.

  2. A strategy nobody has to deliver

    A document that ends at the recommendation is easy to write and easy to be wrong in. We would rather be on the hook for the delivery.

  3. A rebuild when a repair would do

    An audit and a month of fixes often gets you further than a new build, at a fraction of the cost. We will say so before you have spent anything.

  4. Software for a problem a process would solve

    Some of the best outcomes we have been part of involved writing no code at all. Custom software is expensive to own, not just to build.

  5. Marketing something that is not ready

    Spending to send people to a site that does not convert or a product that is not finished makes the problem more expensive rather than smaller.

Insights

Technology moves fast. We write down what actually matters.

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