Independent modernization advisory
You have forty systems. Six deserve money.
We find out which six. Then we go home.
We don't build the replacement, we don't sell you a platform, and we don't want the follow-on work. We show up with a clipboard, tell you the truth, and leave.
Every year, the same meeting.
Someone says the invoicing system is a disaster. Everyone nods. It goes on a slide. The slide goes in a deck. The deck goes in a folder.
Next year, same meeting. Same system. New slide.
Meanwhile the thing quietly eating your budget isn't in the deck at all. It never breaks. It just costs four times what it should, and it's been doing that since 2011, and nobody has ever multiplied it out.
Bad systems don't announce themselves. They just sit there being expensive.
We open every cupboard.
Count everything
Not the CMDB version. The real one, including the Access database in accounting that three people depend on and nobody has mentioned in six years.
Price everything
What each system actually costs. Licences, people, downtime, the workarounds, the guy who's the only one who understands it. Especially him.
Judge everything
Keep it, fix it, buy something else, or switch it off. One verdict per system, reasoning attached, arguments included.
Put it in order
What goes first, what can wait, and which door locks behind you once you walk through it.
Nine weeks. Fixed price. No surprises.
- 01
We walk the ground
Two weeks of inventory and interviews. You'll learn something about your own estate in the first three days. Everybody does. It's usually mildly upsetting.
- 02
We put numbers on it
Three weeks. Same criteria for every system, so the comparison is real instead of vibes.
- 03
We fight about it
Two weeks. A room, your people, our findings, and some genuine disagreement. We write down who objected and why. Consensus that fast is usually just politeness.
- 04
We hand it over
Two weeks. A document your board can read without a translator. Then we're out.
We'd love to sell you the rebuild. We can't. We don't do rebuilds.
Ask a builder if you need a new house and see what happens.
We have exactly one product, and it doesn't get bigger if the answer is expensive. So when the answer is “leave it alone, it's fine, spend the money somewhere else,” we can say it out loud.
We say it about one time in five.
Sometimes the verdict is buy something off the shelf and stop pretending you're a software company. Once it was turn it off and absorb the shouting. That one took courage from the client, not us. We just wrote it down.
It's a document. An actual, boring, sixty-page document.
No dashboard. No login. No seat licence for reading your own analysis.
Print it. Email it. Put it in a folder. It's yours.
| Application register | Every system, what it costs, and who actually owns it |
|---|---|
| Disposition and rationale | One verdict per system, with the reasoning attached |
| Five-year financial model | Including the do-nothing baseline, which usually ends the debate |
| Risk register | Concentration, key-person and vendor exposure |
| Sequenced roadmap | Dependencies mapped, one-way doors flagged |
| Appendix of objections | Because whoever disagreed in week seven is often right in year two |
Nobody publishes this. We find that suspicious.
| Systems | Weeks | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Under 15 | 5 | $45k – $70k |
| 15 to 50 | 9 | $85k – $140k |
| 50+, or several countries | 12+ | From $160k |
What pushes it up: systems with no owner, cost data spread across four places, more than one jurisdiction, and the number of things nobody can currently explain. That last one is always higher than the client expects.
You're buying somebody's opinion. Here's whose.
If a firm won't tell you who's doing the thinking, that's the answer to a different question.
Not written yet
Three or four people: name, photograph, and one specific result each. The brief is explicit that this section decides whether the rest of the page works, and a generic bio is worse than none.
Shape to match: “Ran the rationalization for a 14-state insurer. 260 systems in, 91 switched off, nobody noticed 88 of them were gone.”
Field notes
Where the cost numbers, the rewrite-versus-refactor argument and the portfolio work live.
Questions we get
Do you build it?
No.
Can you recommend someone who does?
Yes, and we get nothing for it. Ask, and we'll show you the list.
We already know which systems are the problem.
Everyone says that in week one. Everyone is about seventy percent right. The other thirty percent is the expensive part.
Can you just use our documentation?
We'll read it. We won't believe it. Documentation stops matching reality about eighteen months after someone stops being paid to update it.
How much of our time?
Six to ten people, two hours each, plus whoever can find the cost data. We keep it light. You have jobs.
Find out which six.
Thirty minutes. We'll tell you if an assessment makes sense, and we'll tell you if it doesn't. The second one happens more than you'd think.