Four steps to live, and you see the system before step two.
Most of the risk in a software project sits in the gap between what you described and what got built. We close that gap by showing you a working version of your business before you have spent anything.
Timeline overview
The four steps in detail
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01
Demo
Free · 48 hours · no obligationWe build a working demo of your business in a real system. Your products, your workflow, your terminology. Not a slide deck, not a generic product tour, not a video of someone else's warehouse.
You get a login. You click through it. You put it in front of the person who does purchasing and watch whether they recognise their job in it.
What we need from you: a 20-minute call and, ideally, a product list or a spreadsheet you already use. That's it.
Why we do this: it's the only honest way to prove the timeline claim. If custom software still took a year, we could not hand you a working version of your operation in two days.
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02
Discovery
90 minutes · on site where we canWe map how your business actually runs, which is never quite how the org chart says it does. Modules, workflows, integrations, reporting, and the rules nobody wrote down.
We want the person who does the purchasing, the person who runs the floor and the person who chases the numbers on a Friday, not just the owner. The private spreadsheet somebody keeps beside the ERP is usually the most useful document in the building.
What comes out: a fixed-price proposal with a scope, a date and a staged payment schedule. Fixed before any work begins, and it does not move because the build turned out harder than we judged.
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03
Build
30 to 60 daysWeekly progress and a demo every Friday. Not a status email. A link you open, in your own environment, with your data in it.
You see it taking shape the whole way through, which means course corrections happen in week two when they're cheap, rather than at handover when they're a fight.
Payments are staged against delivery. If a stage isn't delivered, it isn't invoiced. You're never paying ahead of the work.
Data migration runs in parallel, not at the end, so the system you're reviewing on a Friday has real products and real customers in it rather than test records.
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04
Go-live
Plus 30 days of hands-on support, includedWe're on the tools for go-live. Not on a call, on the tools, with your people, on the day the business starts running on it.
Then 30 days of hands-on support at no cost. Edits, fixes, changes, calls, whatever it takes to make it work in real use. Nothing about a system is fully understood until fifteen people are using it at once on a busy Tuesday.
Ownership transfers here. On final payment the code, the database and the whole system become your property, outright.
Why 30 to 60 days, and what decides it.
Two things set the date, and we'll be straight with you about both before you sign.
The first is the shape of your build. A single-site operation with a clean product list lands near 30 days. Multi-site, multi-level bills of materials, production scheduling and a customer portal sits closer to 60.
The second is us and you, together. We only take on what we can build properly, so the date depends on our capacity at the time, and we'll tell you what it is rather than promise a slot we can't hold.
It also depends on how quickly information comes back from your side. Discovery answers, data exports, the rules nobody wrote down, feedback on what we've shown you. When that flows, we move. When it takes a fortnight to get an export out of your current vendor, that fortnight is real and we'd rather name it now than blame it later.
We don't pad timelines and we don't let them drift. We move promptly and we get it right. If something is going to move, you hear it from us first, not on the deadline.
What we need from you, honestly
Roughly a day of your team's time across the whole build, spread out. The discovery session, a Friday review most weeks, one round of data questions, and a person who can make a decision without convening a committee.
That's genuinely all. Every implementation horror story you've heard involved a client team being asked for vastly more than that while being told upfront it would be less.
What actually goes wrong, and what we do about it.
The old system won't give up its data
This is the most common delay by a distance. Some vendors export cleanly. Others hand over something technically complete and practically useless.
We start data extraction in week one rather than week five, so if there's a fight to be had we're having it early, while there's still room in the schedule.
Someone's job changes and they don't want it to
A system that removes a manual reconciliation removes part of somebody's day, and people are rarely thrilled about that in advance.
We handle it by building around how they already work rather than imposing a vendor's idea of a process, and by involving them in discovery instead of presenting the result. It doesn't eliminate the problem. It makes it much smaller.
Scope grows during the build
It usually does, because seeing a working system makes people think of things. That's healthy, and we don't want to discourage it.
Small items get absorbed. Anything genuinely outside scope gets quoted and agreed in writing before work starts, or parked for after go-live, where small development is turned around in 48 hours anyway. What never happens is a surprise invoice.
The date moves
Sometimes it does, and when it does it's usually because information came back slowly or a third-party integration behaved unexpectedly.
Our commitment isn't that a date can never move. It's that you hear about it from us, as soon as we know, with a new date and the reason, rather than discovering it on the day it was due.
Start at step one. It costs nothing.
A working demo of your business, in a real system, in 48 hours. No proposal, no obligation, no salesperson calling you for a quarter.