What kinds of problems we take on
Four capabilities, one engagement, one fixed price. What matters more than the category is whether the result can be read out of a system you already run — because that's what decides how much of our fee rides on it.
AI Consulting
Every business is being told it needs AI. Very few are being told where it will actually earn its cost. We start from the work your team does today, find the places a machine genuinely does it better, and implement those — while being equally direct about the places it doesn't.
In practice that's automating customer communication, taking manual steps out of an internal workflow, or building AI-assisted tooling for a team that's drowning. What it isn't is a pilot that impresses a board and changes nothing.
Typically measured by: minutes per transaction, exceptions per thousand records, share of volume handled without a human touch — read from the system that already runs the process.
Fee behind it: usually yes. These are efficiency metrics with a short chain between our work and the number, which is the cleanest case for putting fee at risk.
How we decide what carries fee →vCIO Advisory
Growing businesses reach a point where technology decisions get expensive to get wrong. You're evaluating vendors, managing IT spend, making security calls and trying to work out where AI fits — with no dedicated technology leader in the room.
S4 Solutions takes that seat: setting the strategy, managing the vendors, overseeing the environment, and making sure every dollar of technology spend has a job. Priced as a fixed monthly fee with defined inclusions, so the advice you need most in a bad month doesn't come with a bigger bill.
Typically measured by: control coverage against a named framework, incidents per period, mean time to detect, spend against plan.
Fee behind it: sometimes. Compliance coverage is often binary and readable from an audit log, so it can carry fee. The retainer itself doesn't — its scope is deliberately open, and there's nothing honest to measure open scope against.
How we decide what carries fee →Custom Apps
Sometimes the right tool doesn't exist. When a workflow, a process or a customer experience doesn't fit anything you can buy, we design and build the application that does.
The background here is solution architecture across CRM, business intelligence and enterprise platforms — which mostly shows up as integrations that hold, and a system your team can still run in three years.
Typically measured by: cycle time through the workflow the application replaces, error and rework rates, volume handled per person per period.
Fee behind it: usually yes, on the process metric the application is built to move. Not on what you do with the capability afterwards — that part is yours.
How we decide what carries fee →IT Operations
Technology should be an accelerator, not a bottleneck. We get the foundations right: infrastructure, vendor relationships, security posture, and the operational processes that decide whether any of it survives your next fifty employees.
If your setup currently feels held together with duct tape, we'll help you build something solid — without over-engineering it into something you can't afford to run.
Typically measured by: ticket resolution time, repeat-incident rate, patch and backup coverage, unplanned downtime per period.
Fee behind it: sometimes. Coverage and resolution rates read cleanly from your ticketing system. "Outages avoided" doesn't, so we won't quote it as a saving or stake fee on it.
How we decide what carries fee →The category isn't what you're buying
Most engagements need parts of several of these, which is why we price the engagement rather than the category: one scope, one fixed fee, defined inclusions, no hourly true-up. What the work is called matters a good deal less than whether we can measure it.