IT Leadership
The IT director your business needs, for a fraction of the cost of employing one.
Strategic IT leadership on a retained basis — for businesses that need director-level decisions several times a year, not five days a week.
This is for you if…
- You're past about fifteen or twenty people and have no senior IT leadership
- Your IT is handled by a provider, and you have no independent way of judging them
- You've got an internal IT person or team who are good technically but not making strategic calls
- IT spending happens reactively, and nobody can tell you what it will be in three years
- You're being asked about security, compliance or resilience by customers and insurers, and the answers are uncomfortable
- A project has stalled and nobody seems accountable for restarting it
What an IT director actually does
The job isn't fixing things. It's deciding what to build, what to buy, what to retire, and who to trust — then making it happen.
Direction
A three-year view of where the technology is going, tied to where the business is going. What gets replaced and when, what it costs, and in what order.
Holding suppliers to account
I've run IT companies. I know how they price, where the margin sits, what's genuinely difficult and what's being made to sound difficult. When a renewal or a proposal lands, I read it the way the person who wrote it does.
Making decisions your team can't
Good technical people often can't make strategic calls — not through any lack of ability, but because they don't have the commercial context or the authority. I give them a decision-maker to work with.
Governance, risk and delivery
Security posture, compliance obligations, business continuity and where your real exposure sits — reviewed properly rather than assumed. And projects that finish, with reporting that says what's actually happening.
How it works, and how you're billed
Ongoing and retained, with an agreed number of hours each month — billed in advance, with a statement every month showing exactly what you used. If your usage consistently outgrows the estimate, we look at the statements and agree a new figure.
A typical month covers a regular session with you or your leadership team, direct contact with your IT provider or internal people, attendance at supplier reviews and renewals, a rolling technology roadmap kept current, and availability when something needs deciding quickly.
If you need judgement occasionally rather than continuously, the Pay As You Go IT Director arrangement covers the same ground by the day.
Why an outsider is better than a hire
A full-time IT director at this level is an expensive appointment, and in a business of forty or sixty people there is rarely enough director-level work to justify one. What tends to happen instead is that the role gets absorbed — by the MD, the finance director, or a capable technical person promoted beyond their remit.
Bringing someone in solves three problems at once. You get the seniority without the salary. You get somebody with no history in the business and no loyalty to the incumbent supplier. And you get thirty years of pattern-matching across many organisations rather than deep experience of one.
What changes
Within the first quarter, most clients get three things: an honest assessment of where their IT actually stands, a plan with costs attached, and at least one supplier conversation that goes differently than it would have.
Over a year, IT spending becomes predictable, projects finish, and the security and compliance questions from customers stop being uncomfortable.
30+years in IT leadership, consultancy and technical delivery
7years consulting for Exxon Mobil
TMBKey driver in its growth into a leading UK hospitality IT company
2industry awards for IT support and managed services
Based in Poole, working across Dorset and Hampshire in person, and remotely across the UK.
Tell me what's going wrong.
No charge for the first conversation, and no obligation afterwards.