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What we build is scoped to you. How we work is not

The scope gets written before anything starts, and once it is written it does not move without your say-so. Everything on this page is the part that is the same for everyone, including the parts that are not flattering to us.

01The clock

  • From the first conversation to a written scope with a fixed price against it is normally inside five working days.

    It costs nothing and there is nothing attached to it. If working out what is wrong is itself the job, we say so in that same conversation, and that piece of work is Plan.

  • Something of yours is live and doing work inside the first month.

    Which thing depends on what we find. That it is one working thing rather than a plan for six does not.

  • Where that lands is public.

    Plan from €999, credited against a Build. Build from €7,490. Run from €1,999 a month. The written scope carries the actual number.

02What never varies

Everything else varies. This does not, and it is in every proposal we send.

In every proposal we sendIN WRITING

  1. A written scope, agreed before anything starts.

    Not a document describing an approach. A list of what will exist when we are finished, specific enough that you could hand it to somebody else to build. It names who agreed it, on your side and on ours. And it includes the refusal list: the conditions under which the system will not act, written down before it is built, because no vendor tells you what their thing will not do and it is the first thing a careful buyer asks.

  2. One fixed price against that scope.

    In the proposal, before you commit to anything. Not a day rate, not a range, not an estimate that firms up later.

  3. If the work turns out to be bigger, you hear it before we do it.

    We stop, we tell you what we found, and you decide whether it is in or out. No change order arrives after the fact. And the price is fixed against the data as you described it: if the bid history turns out to be 40 PDFs and one estimator's memory, we tell you inside the first week what it now costs or what we would drop to hold the price. What we will not do is find it in week six and put it on the invoice.

  4. The clock starts when we have the data, not when you sign.

    Three weeks after the export lands, not three weeks after the contract does. Whoever administers your systems is the honest variable in that, and they are yours rather than ours. We would rather say so now than argue about it in week five.

  5. Everything is in your name, from day one rather than at the end.

    The accounts, the data, the configuration. Where we wrote software, the code is in your repository from the first commit. You own what we build for you. You do not own the toolbox we built it with, and where we reuse something we already had you get a permanent licence to keep it, change it, and have somebody else change it.

  6. Nothing we build stops working the day we stop.

    It runs in your systems, under your logins, and none of it calls us. What it will not do is keep itself right. Sources change shape, your product ships, and the rule that fitted in March is wrong by November. That decay is what Run is for, and it is why the alerts and the documentation are addressed to your people and not only to us.

  7. Monthly afterwards, and you stop at the end of any month.

    No minimum term, no notice period, no exit fee, and no setup fee arriving behind the first invoice. Our side is deliberately not symmetrical: if we ever end a Run engagement, you get 60 days and a documented handover. You should not find out on four weeks' notice that the thing feeding your pipeline has no owner.

  8. One of us leads it and keeps leading it, named in the proposal.

    You are never handed to somebody you have not met. Two of us are on the first call; the one named in the proposal is your contact from then on, and the work is done by all three of us, each on the part that is theirs: the selling, the message, the software. Where the work needs a specialist we bring one from a network we have used for years, named in the agreement before they touch anything, on the same confidentiality terms as us. They are our subcontractor and not your supplier: we stay answerable for their work as if we had done it ourselves, you get one invoice and one person to call, and their access ends the day their piece does.

We have no bench to keep busy, which means we say no when we are full. If we cannot start when you need to start, you hear it on the call rather than in month two. And because everything sits in your accounts and gets written down as we go, what you are buying does not depend on the three of us still being here. That is what clause 5 is for.

What that buys you: a system that tells your team who to call this week, and why

03Where we stop

What we will not do, and where we stop.

  • We will not own your number.

    We build the thing that produces it. A firm that takes the number takes your pipeline decisions with it, and we will not pretend that is the same job as building the system underneath.

  • We will not run a system we did not build.

    To stand behind something you have to know why every rule in it is there, and there is no way to learn that from outside. If you have something running and want us on it, the route is a Plan against the system you already have.

  • We will not treat tuning as a way to add scope.

    Tuning means making the agreed thing work. If what you want changes, we price the change before we build it, and you see that price before anybody starts.

  • We will not take the work when we cannot start.

    We have no bench to keep busy. When we are full we say so on the call and give you a date, rather than taking it and thinning ourselves across it.

  • We will not take a commission, referral fee or revenue share from any tool or data provider.

    Which is also why we are able to tell you when you already own the answer, and why roughly three of our four possible recommendations cost you nothing to implement.

  • And we will tell you not to do this at all, on the call rather than in a proposal, in four situations. If no one person can decide, the scope takes longer to agree than the build takes to run. If the thing costing you money is a hiring problem or a product problem wearing a go-to-market costume. If you need it live three weeks from signature and your systems are administered by somebody with a six-week queue. And if what you want is a firm to own the number.

Fig. 1What stays yours, and where we stop.

Written foryou are buying a system rather than a personone person can decidesomething specific is costing money now

04Week by week

The number of weeks moves. What happens in them does not.

  1. 1

    Before week one · the call, then the scope.

    25 minutes. If there is something here, a written scope with one fixed price against it, normally inside five working days. It costs nothing, nothing is attached to it, and you can take the document anywhere.

  2. 2

    Week one · access, and the week the price is confirmed or revised.

    A read-only export and about two hours from whoever administers your systems. This is when we find out whether the data is what it was described as, which is why the revision arrives now rather than in week six.

  3. 3

    Weeks two to four · one working thing, live.

    Not a plan for six things. Which thing depends entirely on what week one found.

  4. 4

    Then the tuning weeks · usually six to ten, written into your scope before you sign.

    Every system like this is wrong in week one. During these weeks we operate it ourselves, so what breaks breaks in front of us.

  5. 5

    Halfway through them · one page from us, saying whether it will pass and what is standing in the way. If the delay is ours, we keep going and it costs you nothing.

  6. 6

    The end · you call it, not us.

    The test in your scope was written in your words before you paid, and it is a thing you can check without us.

Fig. 2The number of weeks moves. Here is how much, and why.

Where it stops, and who decides that it has

05Where it stops

We do not hand over at go-live.

Every system like this is wrong in week one. The first dormancy run finds 200 customers, not 12. The first version over-alerts and the people who were meant to use it quietly stop opening it by week five.

That is not a bad build. Real data only arrives when a system meets real people. Week one is not a delivery. It is the first draft of one, and what turns it into something your team trusts is the weeks after it.

So the build includes running it live, and the number of weeks is written into your scope before you sign. Usually six to ten. During it we operate it ourselves, so what breaks breaks in front of us.

The test that ends it is written into the scope before you pay, in your words. Not "when we think it works". A thing you can check without us: the system has done the job unattended for a set stretch, the person who will run it has run it, and the refusal list has been tested against real cases. You call it, not us.

Halfway through, we send you one page saying whether it will pass and what is standing in the way. If the delay is ours, we keep going and it costs you nothing. If it is the data, or the person who has to decide, you get that in week seven with time to do something about it rather than in month three as an excuse.

And if it cannot be made to pass, you stop paying, you keep everything built to that point, and you hear that from us before you have to ask.

Recognise the shape? 25 minutes is enough for both of us to know whether there is a build here.

Request a Fit Call

06How we decide what to build

We look for the cheapest answer first, in this order, and stop at the first one that works.

  1. 1

    Delete it.

    A report that took somebody a day and a half every week. We traced who opened it. Nobody had, in seven months. It existed because of a decision made in 2021 by a person who left in 2022. We deleted it and gave a day and a half a week back. That was the whole engagement that month.

  2. 2

    Switch on what you already pay for.

    A company asked us to build something their own system already did, two tiers below what they were paying for. It had been there two years and nobody had been shown where. We turned it on, wrote the page that explains it, and trained the four people who need it.

  3. 3

    Connect two things you already own.

    The ERP knew what had been ordered. The webshop knew who had logged in, stopped, and searched for something not stocked. Neither had ever been in the same sentence as the other. The work was in the gap and not in either system, and it cost a fraction of building either one.

  4. 4

    Build something that does not exist.

    "We have 4,000 target accounts and sales does not know who to call on Monday." Nothing off the shelf sells that. So we start at the commercial problem, work back to what would have to be true for an account to be worth a call, find where that lives, buy the data if it cannot be derived, and build the decision logic in language your sales director can sign.

Three of those four end without a build.

Fig. 3Three of the four end without a build.

Which raises the obvious question. If three of four answers cost you nothing to implement, how do we make a living. Two ways, and both are on the invoice rather than in the small print. Plan is billed whatever it concludes, which is what makes it possible for us to conclude nothing. And we take no commission from any vendor, so there is nothing in it for us in the answer being a purchase.

We would rather be the firm you call for the fourth answer than the firm that sold you the first three as projects.

The one that ends in a build

07The first month

What usually goes wrong in the first month

The scope is agreed with one person, and a second person turns up in week three with a requirement that was obvious to them and to nobody else. That is not their fault, and it is why the scope names who agreed it.

The export arrives with a field missing and nobody notices until the output looks wrong, which is week two rather than week one, because you cannot see a missing field until you need it.

Somebody assumes three weeks means three weeks from signature. It means three weeks from data. Those have been six weeks apart, and the gap was always somebody's holiday.

And the person who has to own it afterwards is usually not in the kickoff, because they are busy. We now ask for them by name in week one, because handing a working system to somebody who has never watched it break is how it stops being used by month four.

What changes

Each of the four is in the scope before it can happen: who agreed it, the field check in week one, the clock at data, the owner named.

Where it stops, and who decides that it has

08The Alternative

What you are choosing between

Almost never us and another agency. Companies at this point do one of four things. Hire someone into revenue operations. Buy the platform and its onboarding package. Give it to somebody who already has a job. Or leave it and look again next year.

But a hire is capacity, not the answer. Their first six months go on learning what nobody has written down, the same six months you would pay us to write it down, except at the end of ours you have the document. It also takes four months to find them, they are the only person who understands it when they leave, and you cannot stop a hire at the end of any month.

  • The hire is the serious one, and sometimes it is right.

    If this work is permanent, continuous and yours forever, you should hire, and we would tell you that on the call. An agency is the wrong shape for permanent work.

  • The platform is not wrong either, and it is usually not enough.

    It will do what it does very well and it will not know your customers' ordering rhythm, your margin by product group, or which of your three account numbers are one company. That part is not a feature. It is a build.

  • The one to worry about is the third.

    Giving it to somebody who already has a job is how this gets started in most companies, and it is why so many of these systems exist half-finished. It works for five weeks. It does not survive one busy quarter.

Which of the four you are is a 25-minute question

09Before you book

Questions

On our side, one of us is named in the proposal and keeps leading it, and what you are buying does not depend on the three of us still being here because everything sits in your accounts and gets written down as we go. On your side, this is the failure we plan against hardest. A named person on your team watches the system break at least once before we hand it over, which is the whole point of the tuning weeks: a system handed to somebody who has never seen it fail quietly stops being used by month four.

That is common and it is not wasted. It usually means the hard part, working out what should be true for an account to be worth a call, has been partly done by somebody who knows your business better than we do. The route is a Plan against what you have: paid, a few weeks, and at the end a written read on what is working, what has quietly stopped, and what it would take. Either of us can walk away then, and you own the document. What we will not do is take over the running of something we did not build.

Yes. Calls, scopes and the written deliverables in Dutch or English, whichever you work in, and that includes the documentation your team inherits.

With ClarityRev in the Netherlands, under Dutch law. A US entity is in progress.

Fit Call

Twenty-five minutes, and you will know.

Not a demo, not a pitch, not free consulting. Sometimes the next step is nothing. We hold calls in European and US hours, and two of us are on every call. One of the two is your contact from then on, and the work is done by all three of us.

Request a Fit Call

or write to contact@clarityrev.com