Services
What I can do for your business.
Not a price list, and not a menu to order from cold. This page explains the kinds of problem business owners bring me, in plain language, with a few real examples of each — so you can see whether your situation is one of them.
If it is, a short call turns it into a defined piece of work with a fixed price. If it is not quite, the call is still the quickest way to find out who should help.
How pricing works
Every piece of work is scoped, priced and agreed in writing before it starts — a fixed fee against a defined outcome, not an hourly meter that keeps running.
What a job costs depends on your business. A review of a five-person office and a fifty-person one are genuinely different pieces of work, so I will not pretend to price either from a web page, or promise a number of hours before I have seen what is actually there. What I can promise is that the price comes before the work rather than after, and that if the job turns out to be different from what we agreed, we stop and re-scope rather than let a bill run.
Cost
Run it for less
Most businesses spend more on technology than they need to, and nobody inside has the time, or the independence, to prove it. As Interim CIO to a contracting group I took 40% out of the IT running costs without the business losing a working hour.
- “I’m fairly sure we pay for software nobody uses.” Someone independent goes through everything you run — what it is, who uses it, what it costs — and comes back with what to keep, what to cancel, and what to renegotiate. Almost nobody comes out of this paying more.
- “A supplier has quoted for a big job and I can’t tell if it’s fair.” An independent read of the proposal before you sign — what it really includes, what it commits you to, and where the price climbs after year one.
- “Our IT bill keeps creeping up and I don’t know why.” Usually it is renewals nobody re-reads and licences bought for people who have left. It is worth finding before you sign off another year of it.
Continuity
Keep it safe
The work most owners never think about until the day it matters — and by then it is an emergency instead of a precaution. Twenty years of keeping one contractor running through failures, including same-day recovery with everything restored inside a week, is mostly about the boring version of this done in advance.
- “I think we have backups, but I’ve never seen one actually work.” A great many businesses discover their backup was not really running on the day they need it. Better to test it on an ordinary Tuesday than find out the hard way.
- “If the office couldn’t open tomorrow, I don’t know what would happen.” A plain-English plan for the bad day — what keeps working, what does not, and how people carry on.
- “I don’t really know who can see what, especially after people leave.” Who has access to what, whether they should, and closing the doors quietly left open. A common finding is an ex-employee who still has a live link.
Documents
Keep the record
If your business runs on documents — drawings, contracts, deal files, project records — this is usually the change that pays back fastest. I have built secure data rooms for capital and advisory firms, and document systems on a Macau resort development.
- “We can never find the current version, and the files are too big to email.” One place where the latest is always the latest, big files open like a normal drive, and the same files work at speed for a team in the mainland.
- “We’re raising money, selling, or being looked at, and our documents are a mess.” A secure data room built so the other side can find what they need without you handing over the keys to everything — which is what actually shortens the process.
- “Drawings, instructions and variations live in one person’s spreadsheet.” For contractors and consultants, a record you can actually produce on the day a claim or an audit lands — not a fortnight later with three people pulled off site.
AI
Make it smarter
AI that your people actually use, not a strategy deck that sits in a drawer. The test is always the same: does it save real time or catch real mistakes? For a contractor, one tender-checking tool identified HK$1.5m of potential costs to be avoided on a single bid.
- “Everyone says we should be using AI and I don’t know where to start.” An honest look at where it would pay in your business, where it would not yet, and what the first sensible step actually is — without the hype.
- “My people spend hours reading documents, tenders or contracts.” A tool that does the reading and surfaces only what needs a human eye — the exceptions, the risks, the gaps.
- “I’d try AI but I’m worried about our data.” The right question, and usually asked too late. I set it up so the AI only ever sees what you allow, and that is written down before anything starts.
Custom builds
Build what is missing
The tool you have been meaning to build for years. AI-assisted development has changed what a small custom system costs, by enough that the price you were quoted a couple of years ago is no longer the price.
- “We run the business on a spreadsheet everyone emails around.” A proper shared system that does the same job without the version everybody keeps their own copy of.
- “I’ve wanted a tool, portal or calculator for years but it looked too expensive.” Worth pricing again. The sort of thing that used to be a six-figure project is often now days of work — and it can make a small firm look a good deal bigger.
- “Two of our systems don’t talk, so my people retype everything.” Joining them up, so the information moves by itself instead of by copy and paste.
- “Our website doesn’t do the business justice.” A site built around what you actually want it to do, not a template with your logo on it.
Not sure any of these is quite it?
This page is a sample, not the whole of it. More than twenty years across business, marketing and technology means most problems that touch how a company runs are somewhere I have been before — and plenty of the best work started with an owner saying “this probably isn’t your thing, but…”
So if your situation is not obviously on this page, call anyway. The worst case is that I tell you honestly it is not one for me, and point you to someone who is better placed — which is worth a phone call on its own.
And the bigger jobs? Multi-week migrations, office moves and larger rollouts are delivered with specialists I have worked alongside for years, brought in under my direction with me accountable to you throughout. It means the scope of what I can take on is wider than the handful of examples above — a two-person job and a much larger one both get run properly.
Recognise your business in any of that?
Tell me what is going on. You will get a straight answer on whether it is something I should do, and a defined piece of work with a price if it is.