How it’smade.

Most of my work has been scoped milestone builds. You know what each piece costs before it starts, and you see it working before we move to the next one. Here’s how that goes.

Start with an audit

Before I build anything, I look at what you have. For an app, that’s the Software Audit. For a business running on paper, spreadsheets and tools that don’t talk to each other, it’s the Operations Audit. Either way, you get a ranked list of what to fix and roughly what each fix costs. The list is yours to keep, whether or not you hire me to do the work.

A fixed price for each milestone

I take the top of that list and turn it into a written quote for the first milestone, usually a few weeks of work. The price is fixed. If something new comes up halfway through, it goes into the next milestone’s quote, so the number you agreed to doesn’t move.

If you hire me to fix what the audit found, the audit fee comes off the first milestone.

Built one milestone at a time

You hear from me every week, in a short call or a written update, whichever you prefer. Each milestone ends with something working that people can actually use.

Before I write code for a piece, I work out where it can break: how much it can handle, what happens when a connection drops, and who needs to hear about it when something goes wrong. It’s the habit I picked up from hardware, where you can’t patch a circuit board after it ships.

Everything in the data flow has known limits, known delay, and known ways to fail. Or it isn’t done yet.

Launch, and after

I’m on call for launch. For the first 30 days after it goes live, I fix anything that breaks at no charge.

After that it’s your call. You can take the code and the notes on how it all works and run it yourself, or hand it to someone else. If you’d rather keep someone technical in your corner, that’s what Crew Chief is for.

• process
• audits
• milestones
• business