The CTO you cannot afford to hire, on retainer.
$2,500 a month. 8 hours of AI-fluent strategic guidance plus 1 dedicated build day each month. Six-month minimum, then month to month. Like a fractional CTO, but one who actually ships, not just one who advises.
SMBs are stuck between three bad options.
Every operator we talk to runs into the same three traps when they need real tech leadership but cannot justify a full-time hire. The retainer is built to skip all three.
Hiring a real CTO costs $250k-$400k loaded.
Real CTO talent in the AI era is expensive, and the math does not work for a business doing under $5M. You end up either overpaying or hiring a senior developer and pretending they are a CTO. Neither one is the leadership the business actually needs.
Pure advisors give you a deck, not a working system.
The typical fractional CTO engagement is 90 minutes a week of advice. You leave each call with a list. Nobody owns shipping the list. Three months in you have a beautiful roadmap and zero new working systems. The advice was right; the execution gap killed the value.
Flying blind on AI, vendor, and architecture calls.
Make versus Zapier. GHL versus HubSpot. Which AI model. Which CRM. Self-host or buy. The wrong call here costs you a quarter and a five-figure migration to undo. Without a tech leader in the room, every one of these is a coin flip.
A weekly cadence with one build day baked in.
Real strategic rhythm plus committed execution time. The build day is what separates this from every other fractional CTO offer on the market.
30-day discovery and audit
Month one is mostly listening. We audit your stack, talk to your team, map the active fires and the strategic gaps, and write a 90-day roadmap you actually agree with.
Weekly sync, ad-hoc access
One 60-minute strategic sync each week, plus Slack and SMS for anything urgent in between. Decisions land in days, not in next quarter's offsite.
One build day every month
Scheduled in advance, scoped at the start of the day. We sit down and actually ship something - a workflow, an integration, a fix - that would have otherwise stayed on the backlog.
Quarterly strategy review
Every three months we step back and rewrite the roadmap based on what we have learned. The doc is a living artifact, not a one-time deliverable that goes stale by month four.
Strategic leadership plus a dedicated build day.
Most fractional CTO services stop at strategy. This one ships work too. Here is what is in the monthly retainer.
What clients say about the working relationship.
Jim has been awesome to work with. His knowledge of automation and AI is impressive, and he made setting things up easy. Communication was excellent and he delivered exactly what we needed.
ZapFlowMatic actually delivers on what they promise. As a consulting firm that has seen a lot of overhyped automation experts, we were impressed: fast setup, clean systems, and everything worked as described.
One retainer. Flat monthly.
No tiered seat counts to keep track of. One price, one structure, one decision.
Includes the weekly strategic sync, ad-hoc Slack and SMS access, the living 90-day roadmap, the quarterly strategy review, vendor and architecture support, AI tooling guidance, hiring and contract review, and one dedicated build day every month for execution work.
Book a fit callNeed more execution capacity than one day a month? Stack additional build days at a retainer rate when a project warrants it.
In-person strategy session at your office anywhere in the DMV. Useful for kickoff, annual planning, or a team-wide tech reset.
2-hour live AI tooling workshop for your team. Prompt patterns, evaluation methods, and how to ship faster with AI in the loop.
Not sure if a retainer is the right shape? See the AI Automation builds as the one-time alternative, or book a fit call and we will tell you which fits.
What operators ask before signing on.
Skip the $300k hire. Keep the leadership.
Book a 15-minute fit call. We talk through your business, your stack, and where the strategic gap actually is, and we both decide if the retainer is the right shape for the next six months.