High-Level Technical Strategy for Redding Businesses.
You're losing margin to bloated software and manual work that could be automated. I find where the waste is, eliminate it, and build systems that actually make you money.
Local. Not Remote. Not Outsourced.
When your systems are wasting time or money, I can sit down with your team, see the process firsthand, and help fix the actual problem.
Bottlenecks Get Diagnosed Fast
When a workflow is breaking, I can sit with your team, map the failure points, and identify what is process, what is tooling, and what is bad integration. You get a clear diagnosis, not generic advice.
Waste Gets Quantified
I find where money and time are leaking: duplicate software, manual handoffs, broken reporting, rework, and bad vendor scope. You get a prioritized plan tied to ROI so your team fixes what moves the business first.
Execution Has an Owner
I do not hand you a PDF and disappear. I help scope the fix, oversee implementation, and stay accountable until the workflow is stable, measurable, and doing what it should for your business.
What Is a Fractional CTO?
A Fractional CTO is a senior technology executive who works with your business part-time - giving you the strategic horsepower of a full-time tech leader at a fraction of the cost. No equity, no six-figure salary, no learning curve. Just clear answers to hard technology questions, from a seasoned technology expert who has been a software engineer for over a decade and has led multiple successful technology initiatives.
Most local businesses are bleeding margin in predictable places: duplicate software licenses, staff re-entering the same data across multiple systems, slow lead follow-up, and reporting that takes days instead of minutes. I find those leaks, show the real cost in hours and dollars, and deliver a prioritized execution plan your team can run.
Traditional IT Support
- Primary focus: keep devices, networks, and email running
- Success metric: uptime and ticket resolution
- Usually reactive to incidents and support requests
- Limited ownership of business process design
- Rarely accountable for software ROI or vendor strategy
- Often scoped around infrastructure and help desk tasks
Redding CTO
- Primary focus: align technology with revenue, margin, and capacity goals
- Success metric: measurable business outcomes, not ticket volume
- Proactively finds bottlenecks before they become expensive failures
- Designs and manages automation to remove repetitive manual labor
- Evaluates vendors, contracts, and architecture through an ROI lens
- Provides executive-level reporting in clear business language
What I Do
Every engagement is scoped to your situation. No packages, no upsell pressure - just the work that needs doing.
Custom AI Assistants & Automation
I build custom AI assistants and automations that simplify how your team works every day. Reduce repetitive labor, speed up handoffs, give staff instant access to the right information, and keep operations moving with fewer manual steps and fewer bottlenecks than off-the-shelf tools allow.
- Smart document search & knowledge systems
- Custom workflow automation
- Personal AI assistant for your team
- Integration with your existing systems
The "Second Opinion"
A high-level look under the hood at your software architecture and vendor dependencies to ensure your IT strategy aligns with your business goals. This is not about fixing printers or resetting passwords. I identify where technical debt is creating bottlenecks and whether your current systems are built to scale - or are quietly becoming a liability.
- Architecture & infrastructure review
- Vendor dependency assessment
- Technical debt identification
- Scalability evaluation
Custom Software Development
When your workflow is unique, forcing it into generic software usually creates more overhead than it saves. I design and deliver right-sized internal tools, automations, and integrations built around how your team actually operates.
- Internal tools built for your real process
- Automation of repetitive multi-step workflows
- API and system integrations across your stack
- Clear specs, staged delivery, and business-first QA
The Tech Rep
I act as your technical representative when dealing with developers, web firms, or software vendors. I translate your business objectives into technical requirements and vet the resulting code and infrastructure - so what gets built is secure, functional, and worth the investment. You don't have to manage the technical details.
- Translate business goals to tech specs
- Vet code, vendors, and deliverables
- Protect your investment from bad builds
- Keep projects on scope and on budget
Compliance & Regulatory Integration
If your business operates in a regulated space - FFL verification, age gating, state-specific shipping restrictions - I audit your existing workflows and make sure nothing is falling through the cracks. If you need custom logic built into your checkout or database to stay compliant, I scope it, spec it, and manage the build.
- Compliance workflow audit
- Gap analysis against current regulations
- Custom solution scoping & vendor management
- Regulatory audit readiness
System Tune-Ups
This is about fixing the digital plumbing that runs your business. Subscription billing cycles, complex checkout flows, data pipelines that choke under load - I evaluate and rebuild the high-stakes processes to make sure they are efficient, error-free, and ready for whatever volume you throw at them.
- Workflow & process audit
- Billing and checkout optimization
- Performance & capacity analysis
- Architecture recommendations
The "On-Call" CTO
High-level technical strategy on a fractional basis. I help you navigate the big decisions - selecting core platforms, planning a cloud migration, vetting a potential tech acquisition - with the executive-level insight of a full-time CTO, without the $200K/year overhead.
- Platform & vendor selection
- Cloud migration planning
- Technology acquisition vetting
- Ongoing strategic guidance
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
I design the emergency exit strategy for your business. This is high-level risk management: hardening your codebase against attacks, implementing automated off-site backups, and creating a documented recovery playbook - so your operations survive a system failure or security breach instead of scrambling to figure it out.
- Security hardening & attack surface review
- Automated off-site backup strategy
- Documented recovery playbook
- Risk assessment & mitigation plan
Industry-Specific Expertise
The technical problems are more similar across industries than most owners expect. For some of the verticals I work with most, I've put together a deeper breakdown.
Construction
Estimating in spreadsheets. Dispatching by text. Field and office running on different planets. I audit the tech stack that's costing your construction company real money.
Real Estate
CRM sprawl, broken MLS integrations, leads falling into a black hole. I find the waste in your brokerage's tools and give you a plan to fix it.
Track Record
I don't do case studies full of jargon. Here's what a decade of technology leadership looks like in plain English.
Eliminated $10K/Month in Unnecessary Search Infrastructure
A client was running a bloated ElasticSearch cluster that routed every query from their database to ES and back again. Replaced it by leveraging their existing MongoDB, cutting costs and dramatically improving query speed by removing the unnecessary round-trips.
Centralized Analytics Across 4 Disconnected Services
A client's usage data was scattered across New Relic, S3, CloudFront, and CacheFly with no unified view. Built a centralized database that aggregates per-customer metrics, auto-generates monthly billing reports, and tracks internal usage - replacing a manual process that required chasing down developers every month.
Scoped a Multi-Platform Subscription System Integration
Audited a client's existing subscription infrastructure across multiple app stores and a third-party subscription service. Delivered a full integration scope covering all relevant systems, giving them a clear roadmap instead of guesswork.
Unified a DMV Operation's Fragmented Workflow
A client was using QuickBooks as a makeshift customer database alongside multiple disconnected systems for DMV transactions. Designed a unified interface that dramatically reduced employee error rates, eliminated redundant data entry, and simplified the process enough that specialized DMV knowledge was no longer a prerequisite.
Common Questions
IT support keeps your computers running. A Fractional CTO tells you which computers you should stop paying for, which software is slowing your team down, and what technology decisions will actually move the needle on revenue. It's the difference between a mechanic and a race engineer.
No. If you had a technical background, you probably wouldn't need me. My job is to translate what's happening in your systems into plain business language so you can make informed decisions. Every deliverable I produce is written for a business owner, not an engineer.
Fast. Fill out the form above and I'll prepare a custom technical brief within 24 hours. If it looks like a fit, we can usually schedule an initial engagement within the same week. I don't have a six-week onboarding process.
Anything that runs on people and software - construction, real estate, healthcare, professional services, logistics, retail. The technical problems are more similar across industries than most owners expect. If your business has more than five employees and uses more than two pieces of software, there is almost certainly money being left on the table.
Primarily, yes. I'm based in Redding and I deliberately keep my client base local because face-to-face work produces better results. That said, I'm open to conversations with North State businesses outside of Redding if the engagement makes sense.
You get a clear deliverable - an audit, a plan, a recommendation. There's no automatic upsell or follow-up pitch. If you want to go deeper - ongoing fractional CTO work or a bigger project - that conversation happens on your timeline. Some clients take the deliverable and run with it themselves. That's fine too.
A full-time CTO costs $180,000-$300,000 per year in salary alone, plus benefits and equity. Most businesses at the 10-100 employee stage don't need that - they need senior technical judgment a few days a month, not a full-time executive. You get the same strategic capability at a fraction of the cost, with no long-term employment overhead.
Let's Talk
Tell me a little about your operation, and I'll send you a custom strategic brief.