Solutions · IT Consulting & Advisory
IT consulting that gets you out of firefighting and into strategy.
Stop reacting to tech problems and start planning ahead. Our IT consulting and advisory services act as your virtual CTO - strategizing, planning, advising every step of the way. For SMBs that need senior IT leadership but cannot justify a full-time CIO hire.
What we advise on
Six areas where strong IT advisory pays for itself in the first quarter.
No vague 'digital transformation' decks. Specific decisions you can act on, with the trade-offs explained in plain English.
IT roadmap + strategy
Where you are, where you should be in 12-24 months, what to fund first and what to delay. Quarterly review cadence with your leadership team.
Architecture decisions
Build vs buy, cloud vs on-prem, monolith vs microservices, which database, which auth provider. We give you the right answer for your stage, not the trendy one.
Vendor selection
M365 vs Google Workspace, AWS vs Azure, Snowflake vs BigQuery, Datadog vs Splunk. We have run procurement on all of these and have no vendor kickbacks.
Cost optimization
IT and SaaS bills audited line-by-line. Typical first-quarter outcome: 25-40% reduction with no service loss. Cloud bills usually 30-50% reducible.
Org design + hiring
When to make your first IT hire, what role, what salary, how to evaluate. We help you draft the JD and sit on the interview panel.
M&A IT diligence
Quick-turn IT and security review of an acquisition target. Risk register, integration plan, day-1 readiness. Usually delivered inside a week.
What our IT advisory engagements typically produce
How engagements run
Three engagement models. Pick the depth that fits.
Project advisory
Fixed-scope work for a specific decision: a cloud migration, an M365 rollout, a SaaS-stack audit. Days to weeks; fixed-price.
Fractional CTO
Ongoing retainer. Weekly 1:1 with your CEO / leadership; monthly engineering review; quarterly board-level IT report. Most clients: 8-20 hours/month.
IT strategy workshop
Two-day on-site or remote workshop. We come in, interview your team, audit your stack, and deliver a 12-month roadmap with prioritized actions.
What you walk away with
Advisory that leaves artifacts, not just opinions.
Strategy is only useful if your team can act on it after we leave the room. Every engagement produces concrete documents your leadership and engineers actually use.
A prioritized 12-24 month roadmap
Not a wish list. A sequenced plan of what to fund, what to defer, and what to kill - with the trade-offs written down so the decision survives the next budget meeting.
A risk + cost register
The technical risks, single points of failure, and runaway costs we found, ranked by impact and effort. The line items that usually pay for the engagement in the first quarter.
Decision memos you can forward
For the big calls - cloud vs on-prem, build vs buy, which vendor - a short written recommendation with the reasoning, so the choice is defensible to your board and repeatable later.
Vendor + architecture shortlists
When a decision needs procurement, you get a scored shortlist with no kickbacks behind it - the options that fit your stage, not the ones with the biggest sales team.
Hiring inputs when you need them
When the answer is a person, not a tool, you get the role definition, the salary band, and a partner on the interview panel to evaluate the candidates with you.
A standing line to a senior advisor
On a fractional retainer, the roadmap stays live - revisited each quarter, with someone who already knows your context one message away when a decision cannot wait.
IT consulting + advisory FAQ
How is this different from a regular IT services firm?
Will you also do the work, or only the strategy?
How big does our company need to be?
What does the fractional CTO retainer cost?
Do you sign NDAs and BAAs?
Stop reacting. Start planning.
30-minute scoping call. Fixed-price proposal in 2 business days. Strategy you can act on this quarter.