Fractional CTO
Someone who already knows how your business works.
A standing monthly relationship for businesses that need a technology person, but nowhere near a full-time one.
The expensive part isn’t the work. It’s the explaining.
Most small businesses handle technology by finding someone new every time something comes up. Every one of those people has to be told how your business works before they can be useful, and you are the one who has to tell them.
So the small decisions never get made properly. Is this vendor lying to us? Should we buy that tool? Is this quote reasonable? Those questions are too small to hire someone for and too consequential to guess at, so they sit.
A retainer is us already knowing the answer, because we already know your setup.
What you get, every month
Not a bucket of hours to count down. A rhythm, and things you can point at.
- A standing working session. Same slot every month, already on the calendar. Not “call us if you need us.” The appointment is the point.
- An open channel in between. Email or text, with a response time we actually commit to. Sanity checks, vendor quotes, “is this a good idea.”
- At least one thing shipped. However small. An automation, a template, a workflow cleaned up, a tool finally configured the way it should have been.
- A one-page note. What we did, what it saved, what’s next. The thing you forward to your partner when the invoice comes up.
- A quarterly roadmap review. Reset priorities, look at the next ninety days, decide what’s worth doing.
We’ve worked the weekend so Monday looked normal.
More times than we’d like to count. Something breaks on a Friday, and the accountants, or the front desk, or whoever depends on it, need everything to be exactly where they left it when they come in Monday morning. That is the actual job.
Michael Carico has been building software for over thirty years, and running AbleSpark since 2002. We still build every week, so the advice comes from someone who would have to implement it. And we keep up with this field on purpose, because a recommendation based on how things worked eighteen months ago is worse than no recommendation at all.
What you’re buying is someone who is responsible when it matters, and who already knows your setup well enough to be useful in the first ten minutes.
Most clients land at $1,950 a month.
There’s a lighter tier and a heavier one depending on how involved you want us to be. We’ll work out which one fits on the call, and we’d rather put you in the right one than the expensive one.
If we already host your site, that’s included from here up. It stops being a separate bill.
Where the line is
A retainer covers judgment, access, and small work. If something turns out to be a real project, it’s a real project, and we’ll quote it separately rather than quietly stretching the retainer until it stops being worth it for either of us.
We’ll tell you which one you’re looking at up front. That’s the whole arrangement working properly.
Stop explaining your business to strangers.
Start with a call. If a retainer isn’t the right shape for you, we’ll say so.