Internal platforms, productization roadmap, vendor consolidation for 20–100-person consulting, recruiting, accounting, and legal firms. $5,499/mo Advisory, $9,499/mo full.
- Audit
- Architect
- Scale
monthly retainer
Who this is for
You are a partner or managing director at a 20 to 100-person B2B professional services firm. Your firm builds or maintains proprietary tech — a customer portal, a delivery platform, a billing tool — but no one person owns it. Tech decisions land on your desk by default, and you did not sign up to be the CTO. That is the problem I solve.
The pain today
- Internal platforms grow without an owner and start breaking at the worst moments
- Productization potential is visible but no one has the mandate or time to pursue it
- Vendor costs compound quietly — CRM, PM, time-tracking, billing, document management
- Partners making architecture decisions outside their expertise
- A full-time CTO hire is premature but doing nothing is getting expensive
The outcome you get
- A named technical owner for every platform and tool at the firm
- Internal platform strategy and consolidation with a 20–40% vendor cost target
- Productization roadmap if the IP evaluation shows a viable path
- Hiring plan to build permanent technical capability over 12–24 months
- Fractional CTO coverage from $5,499/mo, without a $300K full-time salary
What a fractional CTO for B2B services actually covers
B2B professional services firms have a technology problem that is distinct from startups. The goal is not hypergrowth — it is operational leverage. Every hour a senior consultant spends troubleshooting a broken CRM or chasing a vendor for an SLA response is an hour not billed. That gap is what fractional CTO work is for.
Three areas dominate the engagement. First, internal tools: delivery platforms, customer portals, billing automation, reporting dashboards. Most firms have more of these than they think, and very few have an owner for any of them. I audit what you have, cut what duplicates, and stabilize what matters. Second, vendor strategy: stack audits typically surface 20 to 40 percent in redundant or underused SaaS spend. Third, productization: firm-developed IP — methodology, proprietary data, repeatable tooling — that could generate revenue beyond customer work. I evaluate whether that path is worth pursuing before anyone spends a dollar on it.
For most firms in the 20 to 100-person range, the Advisory tier at $5,499/mo covers strategy, decision-making, vendor management, and a hiring plan. The full Fractional CTO at $9,499/mo adds active team leadership and platform build oversight.
A named technical owner for every platform and tool at the firm
The trigger: when the cost of not having a CTO becomes visible
There is usually a specific moment. A customer portal goes down the morning of a big presentation. A vendor doubles their price at renewal because you have no alternatives evaluated. A developer you hired two years ago makes an architecture decision that now means a six-month rewrite. Or you realize a competitor just launched a product that uses the same methodology your firm has been packaging in slide decks for a decade.
Those are the moments partners call me. The engagement starts with a 30-day audit — what is running, what is breaking, what it costs, and what the firm actually needs technically to hit its business goals for the next 18 months. That audit has prevented several expensive misfires with customers who were about to sign a $200K platform build without scoping it properly.
120k+: Properties indexed and searchable.
Stack consolidation: the first lever
A services firm with 40 people often runs 15 or more SaaS tools with overlapping functions. CRM, project management, time tracking, invoicing, document management, internal knowledge base, reporting, customer communication — and at least three of those tools have a feature that could replace one of the others.
I run a structured vendor audit: map every tool, what it actually does, what it costs, and where the usage drops off. Then I model the consolidation options and score them against switching friction. Typical result is 20 to 40 percent vendor cost reduction plus a smaller, more integrated stack that consultants actually use. For firms where delivery quality varies by team, consolidation also means more work happens in shared systems — which tightens consistency without a management intervention.
Productization: from methodology to revenue
Services firms build proprietary IP constantly. A recruiting firm develops a matching algorithm that customers keep asking about. A management consultancy builds an assessment tool it uses internally. An accounting firm automates a customer reporting workflow that took 20 hours a week to run manually. In each case, the question is: is this defensible, is there a market, and is the firm able to fund and staff a product track without cannibalizing delivery margin?
I ran that analysis on my own work before building Instill, an AI knowledge base that productizes repeatable skill patterns. That kind of first-person experience matters when I am sitting across the table from a managing partner weighing whether to commit 18 months to a product track. Productization engagements typically run 18 to 36 months — the period from IP evaluation through validated product to a standalone product team.
Advisory tier vs full fractional: what the difference means week to week
CTO Advisory at $5,499/mo means I attend your leadership meetings, own the technology decisions, review vendor contracts, set the architecture direction, and give your partners a named person to call when something breaks. I am not running daily standups or managing your developers. You get strategy, judgment, and accountability — roughly 10 to 15 hours a month.
Fractional CTO at $9,499/mo adds active team leadership. I run the technical side of a platform build, manage developer relationships, own delivery timelines, and sit in the hiring process for any technical roles. For firms with an active internal platform build, the full tier is typically the right fit for the first 6 to 12 months. Both tiers include a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Case: Imohub — what CTO ownership looks like in practice
At Imóveis SC, which later became Imohub, I came in as CTO to rebuild a real estate portal that had grown past the point its original architecture could handle. The rebuild indexed 120,000-plus properties with sub-half-second query response times and cut infrastructure costs by 70 percent. That engagement is the closest case study I have to what professional services firms face: accumulated technical debt, a platform that is central to delivery, and a team that needs technical ownership rather than another contractor.
For services firms, the Imohub pattern repeats. The platform was not broken in an obvious way — it was slow, expensive to maintain, and limiting the business's ability to grow. Clear ownership, a rebuild plan, and 12 months of consistent decisions fixed all three.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rebuilt a real estate portal at a fraction of the cost
Rebuilt Imóveis SC's real estate portal as ImoHub, a faster, more scalable successor, handling 120k+ properties with sub-second search and drastically reduced AWS costs.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
The day-to-day work falls into three buckets: owning the technology decisions your partners should not be making, managing the vendors and platforms the firm depends on, and setting a hiring plan to build permanent technical capability. For firms exploring productization, there is a fourth bucket — IP evaluation and product scoping. On the Advisory tier, that is roughly 10 to 15 hours a month of direct engagement, structured around your firm's calendar.
A consultant delivers a report and leaves. I stay, own outcomes, and am accountable to what I recommended six months later. The fractional CTO sits in leadership meetings, is reachable when something breaks, and makes decisions rather than advising on them. For a professional services firm, that continuity is the difference between a strategy that gets implemented and one that sits in a slide deck.
The trigger is usually one of four things: a platform breaks at a critical moment and nobody owns the fix; a vendor renewal reveals how dependent you are on a single tool; a competitor launches something built on IP your firm has been giving away in deliverables; or a partner realizes they are spending 10-plus hours a week on technology questions they cannot answer confidently. Any one of those is worth a conversation.
Yes — and I push back hard when it is not. Productization makes sense when the IP is defensible, the addressable market is large enough to justify a separate team, and the firm can fund 18 to 36 months without cannibalizing delivery revenue. When those conditions are not met, I say so. I built my own product (Instill) through that same evaluation, so the framework is practical rather than theoretical.
It starts with a full vendor audit: map every tool, its cost, actual usage, and overlap with other tools. That typically takes two to three weeks. Then I model consolidation options against switching friction and present a prioritized plan. Most firms in the 20 to 100-person range see 20 to 40 percent vendor cost reduction. Implementation runs in parallel with whatever else the engagement covers — it does not require a separate project track.
For internal tools and vendor work, 12 to 18 months is typical — long enough to complete a consolidation, stabilize platforms, and get a hiring plan executing. For productization engagements, 18 to 36 months is realistic from IP evaluation through to a validated product with a standalone team. Both tiers have a 14-day money-back guarantee and cancel anytime after that.
Yes. Several of my professional services engagements start with zero internal technical staff. In that case, the first phase covers vendor rationalization (no development required) and a hiring plan for the firm's first technical hire. If a platform build is needed before a hire is in place, I manage external developers as part of the full Fractional CTO tier.