How we work
What happens, in what order, and what you are left holding
Four stages, with the commercial terms stated rather than implied. The short version: you pay for a discovery, you keep what it produces either way, and nothing after it is committed until you have read the plan.
01
Paid discovery
We watch how the process actually runs — not how the process document says it runs — with the people who do it. Usually one to two weeks. The fee is fixed and agreed before it starts.
You end up with: A map of the process as it really works, an architecture, and a costed plan for building it.
02
A costed plan
The plan is priced from what discovery found rather than estimated from a conversation, so the number you are asked to approve was derived rather than guessed.
You end up with: The plan itself, yours to keep whether or not you continue with us — including if you take it to somebody else.
03
A fixed scope
Work ships in short increments with something you can look at at the end of each one, rather than disappearing for a quarter and returning with a reveal.
You end up with: Working software in your own repositories and accounts, built in increments you can stop at.
04
Handover
Documentation, your accounts, your pipelines, and a build another team could pick up. This is part of the work rather than a favour at the end.
You end up with: Everything needed to run and change it without us. There is no version of this where what we built stops working because you stopped paying us.
What a discovery hands back
The deliverable, and one section of it filled in
A discovery hands back one document. These are its sections, with the second one filled in so you can see the level it is written at.
- 01The process as it actually runs, step by step, including the steps nobody documents
- 02Where the time goes, and which parts are mechanical enough to automate
- 03What should not be automated, and why
- 04The architecture, and how it sits beside the systems you already run
- 05A costed plan, in increments you can stop at
Where the time goes — worked example
Of the eleven steps in this approval, four are mechanical: pulling the purchase order, checking the total against it, confirming the approver by value, and filing the result. Those four are rules, they are checkable, and they are where the automation belongs.
Three steps are judgement — whether an exception is acceptable this once, whether a supplier relationship changes the answer, whether to escalate. Those stay with a person, and the software's job is to put the evidence in front of them rather than to decide.
The remaining four steps exist only because two systems do not talk to each other. They disappear if the systems are connected, which is cheaper than it sounds and is the first increment we would propose.
Illustrative and synthetic. This is not a real client's process and the figures in it were made up for the purpose of showing the format.
What we promise
Each of these either costs us something to keep or is already true. None of them is a sentiment.
- The discovery fee is fixed and agreed before anything starts.
- You keep the plan either way, including if you take it to another firm.
- You own the code, the infrastructure accounts, the pipelines and the documentation, from day one.
- We will sign an NDA before seeing anything sensitive — send yours, or ask and we will send ours.
- If the honest answer is that you should not automate this, that is what the discovery will say.
What we need from you
The expensive part is somebody’s time, and you deserve to know that before you commit rather than after.
- A few hours across the discovery with the people who actually do the work. This is the expensive part, and it is the part that decides whether the result is any good.
- Real examples — exports, screenshots, a handful of documents. Anonymised is usually fine.
- Access later, and only to what is needed. Plenty of discovery happens before anything is connected to a live system.
Your data and your code
You are being asked to let a vendor into your systems
That deserves a straight answer about where we stop, so here it is in writing.
Your data stays in your systems
We build inside your infrastructure and your accounts wherever your environment allows it, and we take no copies away.
Nothing crosses between clients
Your workflows and your process improvements are yours. They do not become the next engagement’s head start.
We do not train models on your data
And we do not use your business as a case study without written permission.
We sign your NDA before the detailed conversation
Not after it, and not once the scope is already on paper.
On price
We have not published rates and we are not going to invent a range to fill the gap. What we can tell you is the shape: discovery is a fixed fee agreed before it starts, and the build that may follow is scoped and priced from what discovery found. Ask us directly and you will get a figure for your situation.
The reasoning behind not publishing a range is on the questions page, along with what happens if we think you should not automate the thing at all.
Bring us one process
A few lines about where the work piles up is enough to start. You do not need a specification, and you will not get a sales sequence.