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Innovation
Some problems need better delivery. Others need something built.
We work with strategic partners on bespoke solutions for clients, and we develop our own tools where we keep running into the same gap and nothing on the market fills it.
Our approach
Innovation is a means, not a positioning statement
We are wary of the word. Most of what gets called innovation is a technology looking for a problem, and it usually leaves the client with something expensive that nobody maintains. Our interest is narrower: problems that already exist, that people are working around today, and that nothing available quite solves.
- 01
Bespoke, with partners. When a client problem needs specialist capability we do not hold in house, we bring in a strategic partner and remain accountable for the whole.
- 02
Our own tools. When we meet the same gap across several engagements and nothing on the market fits, we build it, use it ourselves first, and then consider whether it is worth offering to anyone else.
- 03
Buy before build, every time. Building is the last option, not the first. If something suitable already exists, we would rather configure it well than write something new for you to own.
Strategic partners
We are not trying to be a firm that does everything
A network model only works if you are honest about its edges. There are disciplines we do not claim, and rather than stretch to cover them we work with a small set of specialist practices we know and have worked with before.
Partners are chosen for the problem rather than for convenience, and you always know who is doing what. We do not hand work on quietly and put our name on the invoice.
Talk about a partnershipWhat we build
Tools that came out of doing the work
Everything here started as something we needed ourselves, or something a client needed and could not reasonably buy. We run most of it in our own business before it goes anywhere near yours.
Engagement and operations platform
The system we run the consultancy on: associate records, engagements, timesheets, approvals and invoicing, with separate views for associates, managers and clients.
Client onboarding portals
Secure client facing spaces for a live engagement: the plan, the phase playbook, the artefacts and the decisions, in one place rather than across a mail thread.
Small business CRM and publishing
Contact management, a simple pipeline and social publishing in one place, aimed at owners who cannot justify a separate subscription for each of those things.
AI assisted content and drafting
Tooling that drafts and structures content at volume, with the client holding their own API keys and the output always reviewed by a person before it is published.
Integration and automation
The connective work between systems that were never designed to talk to each other, built as small components rather than one large piece nobody can unpick later.
Data quality and reporting
Profiling, matching and reconciliation tooling built during migration work, reused whenever the next client turns out to have the same underlying problem.
How we decide
The test something has to pass before we build it
Most ideas do not get past the second step, which is rather the point of having one.
We keep meeting it
A single client asking for something is a requirement. Several clients working around the same gap is a signal worth acting on.
Nothing suitable exists
We look properly at what is already on the market first, including the option of configuring something well rather than writing something new.
Smallest useful version
We build the least we can get away with, use it on real work, and let that decide whether it goes any further.
Maintainable, or dropped
If it needs us permanently to keep it alive, it has failed its own test. Things that cannot be handed over get retired rather than carried.
Where we are looking
Areas we are actively working in
- 01
Applied AI with guardrails. Triage, drafting and knowledge assistance where a human stays in the loop, the output is logged and the cost is visible. Interesting to us precisely because it is so easy to do badly.
- 02
Data quality at source. Catching problems at the point data is created rather than cleaning them up during a migration three years later.
- 03
Automation for very small businesses. The admin load on a sole trader is proportionally worse than on a large organisation, and far less well served by the tools available.
These are areas we are working in, not product announcements. If something here is relevant to a problem you have, the conversation is more useful than the roadmap.
How to read this sectionCommon questions
What people ask us about this
Mostly from clients wondering what they would be committing to, and from firms wondering how partnership works.
Are you a software company?
Who owns the intellectual property in bespoke work?
Can we license one of your tools?
How do you choose strategic partners?
Can my firm become a partner?
Start here
Bring us the problem nobody has built a product for.
If it turns out something already exists that solves it, we will tell you what to buy. That is usually a better outcome than a bespoke build, and we would rather say so.