Vendor breakdown
They have stopped delivering, and you cannot verify what was handed over.
Rescue
An independent read when a project is in trouble.
For a build that has stalled, a vendor who has gone quiet, or numbers that no longer work. We start with a phone call inside a few days, establish what happened, and set out what can still be recovered.
A project in trouble · First call within days · Recovery Letter
Who it is for
When this is the right one.
IP uncertainty
You cannot establish who owns the design, the code or the tooling.
Funder pressure
A milestone is about to be missed, or diligence has raised a question you cannot answer.
Cost and supply
Unit cost has overshot what the market will pay, or a critical component is unobtainable.
What you get
The deliverables.
Triage call
Booked within days. You tell us what has gone wrong, what your hard deadline is, and what has already been tried. We tell you at the end of it whether a Rescue is the right instrument for your situation.
Recovery Letter
What we understand happened, what is salvageable, two or three recovery options with indicative cost and time, our recommended path, and an honest note on what we could not establish.
How it works
Step by step.
- Triage callA short call, booked within days. A mutual NDA is signed before it, because the first ten minutes usually cover contracts and vendor relationships.
- Evidence packYou send whatever exists, including contracts, correspondence, drawings, code, bills of materials, quotes and test reports. It does not need to be tidy. Incomplete records are part of what we are diagnosing.
- Failure analysisWe reconstruct what happened. The reported cause and the real one differ often enough that we treat your account as a starting hypothesis, not a conclusion.
- Feedback sessionWe walk you through the reconstruction and the options before anything is written down, and you correct us where we have read the evidence wrong.
- Recovery LetterWritten up and delivered.
An engineering opinion, not a legal one
We describe the technical position and what to do about it. We do not assign fault and we do not prepare evidence for a dispute. If what you need is a lawyer or an insolvency practitioner, we say so at the triage call and do not take the fee.
Where it leads
The next step.
Most Rescues identify work worth doing properly, whether that is a Discovery Phase to rebuild on a sound footing, a remedial scope of work for a bounded fix, or fractional CTO support where the root cause was a gap in technical leadership. Where the honest answer is that the project should not continue, you hear that from someone with nothing to sell you next.
Risk Review
For a project about to get expensive. An independent techno-commercial read on what could go wrong, with a recommendation against each risk and a view on whether deeper work is warranted.
Read more →Discovery Phase
The full definition exercise. Requirements, functional specification, system architecture and a development plan, ending in a fixed-price statement of work you can commit to with confidence.
Read more →If this is not quite your situation
Then tell us about the project anyway.
They exist so that starting with us is small and low-risk, and they are not the limit of what we take on. This one is a starting point, not a boundary. Describe what you are trying to build and we will scope something that fits it, or say plainly that we are not the right people for it.