Every engagement starts with the $7,500 data audit. This page is what comes after it — the work the audit points at, and roughly what it costs.
Not a menu to shop from. These are the disciplines an engagement draws on, usually two or three at once, on whichever problem the audit ranked first.
Cloud data platforms on Azure Data Factory and Synapse: ingestion, transformation, and reporting pipelines, schema-drift handling, and T-SQL performance tuning on systems that already carry your business.
Power BI dashboards and reporting built on the data you already have — so leadership stops guessing and starts deciding on numbers that update themselves.
LLM-powered workflows, agentic systems, and custom tooling on Copilot Studio, Azure AI Foundry, and n8n that plug into your existing systems. Only after the data underneath will support it.
Deterministic, high-stakes applications engineered for reliability and precise operational control — where a wrong answer is not an acceptable outcome.
Getting the ERP, the CRM, accounting, payroll, and the pile of vendor portals to agree on a customer, a part number, and a dollar. Usually the least glamorous item in the audit and the one worth the most.
I also build fast, search-optimised websites for local businesses — a smaller line of work than the above, but a real one. See a site I built →
Requirements gathered directly from the people who use the thing, with technical trade-offs explained in plain business language rather than deferred to a document nobody reads.
A rapid proof of concept built against your actual data and workflows, to establish feasibility before either of us commits to a full build.
Iterating in real time on live feedback rather than waiting on handoff cycles. I’m in your office for this part, not on a status call.
Outcomes quantified and presented to leadership — hours recovered, reconciliation breaks eliminated, decisions that used to take a week. Measured against the baseline the audit captured, so the comparison is real.
You’re buying an outcome, not my hours.
| Engagement | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Data audit | Where everyone starts. Two to three weeks: a map of your data, a readiness score, three priced opportunities, and one working thing you keep. | $7,500 |
| Embedded build | I work inside your business for 3–6 weeks and ship the highest-value item from the audit. | $18–35k |
| Single fix | One specific thing, built and handed over. Two to four weeks. | $8–15k |
| Ongoing | One to two days a week, on site. I own your data function the way a full-time hire would, without the hire. | $6–9k/mo |
For context: a competent data engineer in Houston costs $130–170k plus benefits, plus six months to find, plus the risk they leave. This is the version where somebody senior shows up next week.
The whole method depends on being on site — sitting with the person who maintains the spreadsheet, watching the process actually happen instead of reading a description of it. That puts a real boundary on the map.
Houston, Sugar Land, Stafford, Missouri City, Katy, Pearland, Cypress, Spring, The Woodlands, Conroe, and the rest of Fort Bend and Harris County. Somewhere I can drive to on a Tuesday is somewhere I can help.
Most mid-market companies are ready for a small piece of it, not an overhaul. Readiness comes down to two things: whether the data underneath is consistent enough to trust, and whether you have one repeatable, time-consuming process worth automating first. That is exactly what the audit measures, across eight dimensions, before anyone spends money on a build.
It depends entirely on the process, and anyone who quotes you a number before seeing it is guessing. The figure that matters is how many hours a month someone senior currently spends rebuilding a report or re-keying data by hand. That gets measured during the audit and stated in hours, so the payback is arithmetic rather than a promise.
Sometimes — and I won’t quote you a percentage before I’ve seen your data. What the audit guarantees is narrower and more honest: a map of your systems, a readiness score, three opportunities priced against effort, and one working thing built on your real numbers. Most of the value in a first engagement is recovered time and decisions that stop being guesses. Revenue tends to follow that, but it follows it second.
Rarely, and not by preference. The work is built around being in the room, so engagements stay inside Houston, Sugar Land, Stafford, Missouri City, Katy, Pearland, The Woodlands, and the rest of Fort Bend and Harris County. If you’re further out and the problem is genuinely the right shape, ask — but the honest default is no.
Fixed fee, always, at the figures in the table above. No hourly rates, because being fast should benefit both of us rather than costing me money. Nothing is quoted as a range once we’ve scoped it — the ranges above collapse to a single number in the proposal.
If the audit surfaces one clearly defined thing worth fixing, that’s a single fix or an embedded build, and it ends when the thing works. If it surfaces a data function nobody owns, ongoing is the honest answer — a one-off build handed to a company with nobody to maintain it decays inside a year. The readout tells you which situation you’re actually in, and I’ll say so plainly even when the smaller answer is the right one.
I’ll ask what systems you run and where the manual work is. If the audit isn’t the right thing for you, I’ll say so on that call, and it costs you nothing.
I take two audits at a time. That’s a real constraint, not a closing line.
