Five phases with a set rhythm. You know the scope, the fee and the end date before anything starts, we meet regularly while the work is live, and I come back afterwards to check it still holds.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation. Bring the problem rather than a brief. I will ask what you have built, what decision is stuck, who disagrees about it, and what happens if nothing changes.
By the end one of three things is true: there is a scoped engagement worth doing, there is a smaller version worth doing first, or I am not the right person and I say so. The third outcome is common and it costs you half an hour.
I take one engagement at a time, alongside a full-time role. If I am already running something, I will tell you on this call when I am next free rather than take your work on top of it and under-deliver on both.
Within two business days you get a one-page proposal: what I will do, what you will receive, when it lands, and what it costs. A fixed fee wherever the outcome can be defined up front, which covers most of this work, and an hourly rate where it genuinely cannot. Either way the number is agreed before anything starts.
If the scope changes mid-engagement, the fee conversation happens then, not in an invoice at the end.
And, more usefully, what is not.
Described well enough that you would recognise it, and specific enough that your team can act on it.
A delivery date and a number, with contracting terms set out in the same document.
This is not a brief, a disappearance, and a reveal at the end. I work to a regular cadence with you and your team, because the answer is better when I can keep asking questions and you can keep asking them of me. Expect a standing session each week, access to the people who hold the context, and a direction you can see forming rather than one that arrives finished.
Usually weekly, 45 minutes. Not a status update. It is where I test what I am finding, you push back on it, and we both leave knowing more than we did.
Conversations across the team, not only the person who hired me. Engineering, sales and support usually know things the roadmap does not reflect.
You see the thinking as it forms. By the time anything is final it should confirm what you already know, not introduce it.
Handover is a working session, not a file drop. We go through the decisions, the reasoning behind them, and what happens next, with whoever has to live with it. Where the engagement produces something your team will keep using, a prioritisation model for instance, that session is about running it without me.
There is no renewal to actively cancel and nothing ongoing to opt out of. If you want a short call after the fact to talk something through, ask, but the engagement itself is finished at handover.
The measure of a good engagement is that your team can carry it forward without me. If you need me permanently, something has gone wrong with the handover.
Work that made sense at handover can drift. Priorities move, someone leaves, a competitor does something unexpected, or a decision turns out to be harder to action than it looked on the page.
So the engagement does not end at handover. I come back once or twice in the weeks afterwards for a short call: is this still relevant, did anything change, is the team acting on it or has it stalled, and does anything need adjusting in light of what you have learned since.
Thirty to forty-five minutes each, in the weeks after delivery.
What has changed since, and whether any of the reasoning needs revisiting.
Part of the agreed fee. Not an upsell, and not a renewal conversation in disguise.