Black Sheep SystemsAPPROACH
Why the black sheep.
The name is not decoration. It is the working method, and it is not for everybody.
The answer is usually unwelcome
The honest assessment is rarely the one that flatters the last three decisions. You get told what the environment actually looks like, including the parts that will cost money to fix, and including the times the right answer is that you don't need what you asked for. Decide from there.
Fix it rather than farm it
The easy business model is to take the broken thing away and bill for it monthly. This one is the opposite: work out why it is broken, change it with the people who have to live with it, and leave them able to run it. Nearly three decades on the desk means the work still gets measured the way the people using it measure it — did the thing get fixed, and did it stay fixed.
The engagement is designed to end
Every engagement has a written definition of what should be true when it finishes. Consulting that quietly becomes permanent has usually stopped being consulting, and a fractional role without an exit turns into an expensive full-time one by accident.
Your data stays yours
Software gets built to run locally where it can — including AI features, using models on your own hardware rather than an API bill and a third-party retention policy. In a regulated environment that is not a preference, it is the requirement.
Small on purpose
No account manager between you and the person doing the work. Engagements are scoped to what one experienced operator can genuinely carry, and turned down when they aren't. A yes that cannot be delivered is worth less than a no.
Write it down
Undocumented work is a dependency on one person, and that person is eventually unavailable. Procedures, findings, and source code are handed over as a matter of course, so you are never locked in by ignorance of your own systems.
Where this comes from
Nearly thirty years of contract work means walking into environments somebody else built, being handed the problems that had already been escalated twice, and having no political stake in how they got that way. That is a useful position to work from, and it is the one this business is built on.