Side by side
For sessions over an hour, you sit at the keyboard, we sit beside you. You drive. We narrate. You finish the session knowing how to do the thing yourself, not having watched us do it.
About Us
How we actually work
Pair sessions, public learning, weekly time at the Repair Cafe, and a dog who attends most meetings.
The shape of the team
A two person studio
We are Mike and Joe. Two co-founders, two desks, one shared brain on a good day. Most jobs are sized so that one of us takes the lead and the other is reachable on Slack within minutes.
The deliberate small size keeps our overheads tiny, which keeps your prices fair, which keeps the CIC honest about who it serves. Scaling up is the easy default, scaling carefully is the harder one.
The default mode
Pair sessions are standard
No silent fix
We do not "just sort it" without explanation. If you would like a written summary of what we did so you can refer back, we send one within 24 hours.
Voice notes welcome
If typing is awkward for you, send a voice note. We will reply in whatever format suits you best, voice, text, or a quick phone call.
You can stop us
"Slow down" or "go back" are honoured immediately, no eye roll. We have a stop word agreement at the start of every first session.
Where the CIC bit shows up
One Saturday a month at the Repair Cafe
We volunteer at the Hebden Bridge Repair Cafe on the first Saturday of every month. People bring laptops, phones, e-readers, and the occasional washing machine. We fix what we can, explain what we cannot, and never charge.
It is the most useful part of our month. We meet people who would never otherwise hire a tech consultant. We hear what is actually breaking in the village rather than what the marketing says is breaking. We build relationships that turn into proper paying clients about a quarter of the time, on the customer's terms, never ours.
Transparency is structural
We work in public
The CIC asset lock means we have to say what we do with the money. We took that further. The blog logs what we are working on, the jargon translator is updated by readers, and the AI Facts page is what we actually believe rather than what would sell.
When we make a decision that affects clients, we publish the reasoning. When we pivot, we say so. When something fails, we write about it. The blog has a tag for that.
The honest disclosure
One last thing
There is a dog. Her name is Rosa. She attends most internal meetings, ignores 90 percent of them, and occasionally provides emotional support during the harder ones. If you visit our office and you are nervous around dogs, please tell us in advance and Rosa will spend the visit elsewhere.
She does not bill her time.
Want to see how it feels?
A first session is the easiest way to find out whether our way of working fits yours.