£180k saved on vendor consolidation
Northgate Legal
A 90-day stack review identified four overlapping SaaS contracts and one in-flight build that could be killed. Annual cost saved more than the engagement many times over.
Strategic Services
Senior technical leadership, without the full-time hire.
A Fractional CTO engagement gives growing businesses the senior technical judgment they need — strategy, vendor selection, team leadership, due diligence — at a fraction of the cost and commitment of a full-time CTO.
Make confident technology decisions. Hire and lead a stronger team. De-risk every major spend.
Common challenges
If any of these sound familiar, we should talk.
You're making £100k+ technology decisions without senior input.
Hiring developers, choosing platforms, signing software contracts, scoping projects. One bad call costs more than a year of senior advice. A Fractional CTO sits across all of it.
Your engineering team needs leadership you can't afford full-time.
We act as a working CTO — running standups, reviewing architecture, mentoring leads, setting standards — for the days a week you actually need it.
You're about to invest, acquire or be acquired.
Technical due diligence done properly: code, team, infrastructure, security, scalability, risk. Done by someone who has built and bought the things being reviewed.
You don't have a real technology roadmap.
We build a 12–24 month roadmap tied to commercial outcomes — what to build, what to buy, what to retire, what to hire — and we revisit it quarterly.
Our approach
How we solve it.
01
Technology strategy & roadmapping
A clear, commercially-grounded roadmap for everything technology touches: product, ops, marketing, data and AI.
02
Vendor & tooling selection
We sit on the buy-side of your stack — running selection processes, negotiating contracts, killing zombie subscriptions.
03
Team leadership & hiring
Hiring, interviewing, technical leadership, performance, standards. We can run your engineering function until you're ready to hire a full-time leader — and help you hire them when you are.
04
Technical due diligence
Independent, deep technical due diligence for investments, acquisitions, partnerships and major contracts.
What we deliver
Fractional CTO services.
Technology strategy
A clear long-range plan tied to commercial outcomes.
Vendor selection
Run RFPs and selection processes properly.
Team leadership
Working CTO support for your engineering function.
Roadmapping
12–24 month rolling roadmap and quarterly reviews.
Technical due diligence
Independent diligence for investments and acquisitions.
Our process
Discover → Design → Build → Launch → Optimise.
- 01
Fit call
A no-cost conversation to confirm shape, cadence and outcomes.
- 02
Onboarding
Two weeks of context-building: people, products, contracts, codebases, commercials.
- 03
Operate
Weekly cadence, monthly reporting, quarterly strategy. We're embedded enough to be useful and external enough to be honest.
- 04
Hand-off
When you're ready to hire a full-time CTO, we help you hire them and run a clean transition.
Results
Outcomes our clients can point to.
Hired a strong CTO in 14 weeks
Meridian Wellness
Ran the engineering function during a critical growth phase, then designed and ran the search process for a permanent CTO — including interviewing finalists.
Pre-acquisition diligence
Lumen Studio
Technical due diligence on a proposed acquisition that uncovered a major dependency risk and resulted in a 22% adjustment to the offer price.
Frequently asked
Questions we get a lot.
Free audit
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Fractional CTO
Need senior technical judgment?
Book a no-cost fit call. We'll talk through what's on your plate and whether a Fractional CTO engagement is the right shape — or whether you actually need something else.
Testimonials
What founders say about working with us.
4.9 / 5 across 60+ reviews
"Lucida rebuilt our website and our enquiry pipeline tripled in three months. They feel like part of our team."
Hannah Roberts
Founder, Wren & Bell Interiors
"Their AI automations now handle quoting, onboarding and follow-ups. We've reclaimed twenty hours a week."
Daniel Okafor
Director, Northgate Legal
"Strategic, calm and rigorous. The kind of agency you wish you'd hired three years earlier."
Priya Shah
CEO, Meridian Wellness