Most consultancies will take any work that can be invoiced. We won’t — and we think you deserve to know where the line is before we ever get on a call.
Here’s the thing about AI right now: every bad-fit engagement we take taxes the next ten clients. One project we shouldn’t have built makes you doubt the next one we ship. So we’d rather be straight about what we refuse, and why. The refusals are the offer.
The work we decline
We don’t do AI theatre
If what you want is a chatbot bolted onto the website so the business looks modern, we’re the wrong firm — and we’ll tell you so in the first ten minutes. We fix what’s actually broken first. Sometimes that means saying the AI isn’t your problem at all; your systems just don’t talk to each other yet.
We won’t sell you tools you don’t need
A fair number of our discovery calls end with “you don’t need us for this yet.” We’d rather lose the invoice than wire up automation that adds complexity you’ll spend the next two years paying to maintain. Fewer moving parts, working properly, beats a clever system nobody can run.
We don’t build what we can’t make stick
No lock-in is a promise, not a slogan. If your team won’t be trained to run what we build, we won’t build it — because a black box that depends on us forever isn’t transformation, it’s a hostage situation. We turn down clients who want the keys kept on our side.
We don’t pretend to be an industry specialist we’re not
We specialise in the problem, not the sector: systems that don’t talk, growth that’s outrun the process, compliance drowning good people. If your problem isn’t one of those shapes, we’ll say so — and point you to someone better placed rather than stretch to fit.
We don’t take work that bores us into mediocrity
We deliberately chase the hard problems — the tangled ones, the “this has been broken for years” ones. Vanity dashboards and box-ticking retainers get a polite no, because work we can’t do brilliantly is work that lowers the standard for everyone who came before you.
What you get instead
A higher floor
We’re not promising every recommendation is flawless or that we’re a temple of taste. We’re promising something simpler and rarer: you won’t get ripped off, and you won’t have to inspect nine versions of the same AI pitch to find the one that’s real.
Tracy has spent 35 years reading enterprise systems from the inside — she can usually see where it breaks before you’ve finished describing it. Dennis has spent 40 years pulling apart how computers think, and can build the thing that proves the recommendation holds. Between them, the bad options are already off the floor before you walk in.
The test for everything we do: does dealing with us lower the load in your head, or add to it? If it adds, we’re just more noise — and we know it.
If your problem is the shape we work on, let’s talk. If it isn’t, we’ll tell you honestly — that conversation is free either way.
Book a free discovery callNo pitch, no pressure. See the standard we hold ourselves to in How we work, then test us against it.