What an engagement looks like.

Before any paid work

Two free steps come first.

Nothing on this page about pricing or scope applies until both of these have happened. Neither one costs you anything.

1. A 30-minute call. Free, no slides. We talk through which of the patterns from the Method page you are seeing, whether the gap probably belongs to a vendor or to me, and whether the next step makes sense. If it doesn’t, I will tell you on the call. Schedule one here.
2. A 1-hour on-prem walkthrough. Free, by my invitation after the call. If the call gives me a strong read that there’s a real fit, I offer to come to your facility and walk the floor — the COA pipeline, the label render, the Metrc reconciliation, the procedure. The walkthrough is observation: I see your operation, ask questions, and tell you broadly whether a paid engagement is warranted. A formal diagnostic with specific findings, written recommendations, and resolution paths is part of a paid engagement, not the walkthrough. If I conclude on the floor that paid work isn’t the right fit, I will say so and you owe me nothing.

The minimum and pricing below apply only to the paid engagement that may follow these two steps. They do not apply to the call or the walkthrough.

Pricing

How pricing works.

Pricing for a paid engagement is scoped after the on-prem walkthrough, not before.

The frame I work in is “what does one recall cost you?” Six- to seven-figures plus brand damage plus license risk. Whatever scope an engagement takes, the price is sized against the cost of the failure being prevented — not against the inventory of my hours.

Paid engagements are billed hourly against a scoped estimate. You get a written estimate before any work begins — the work covered, the rate, and an hour range tied to the scope. Smaller, narrower scopes fit the same way: a focused diagnostic, an audit-prep review, an hourly sanity-check on a specific pipeline question.

New-client minimum: $5,000 for any paid engagement. Once we’ve done the free call and the free walkthrough and we’ve agreed paid work is the right next step, the first paid engagement with a new client is invoiced at $5,000 minimum — regardless of how few hours the work ultimately takes and regardless of what the fix turns out to be. The minimum exists because the structured diagnostic, the documentation pass, and the framing of the work to your team are part of the value, and they happen on every engagement whether the eventual fix is a vendor escalation, a procedural change on your floor, an SOP rewrite, a configuration tweak, a mechanical adjustment, or a custom-built integration. Returning clients (anyone I’ve been paid to work with before, on continuing, intermittent, or maintenance work) have no minimum — we work in whatever cadence the situation actually needs.

If the scope changes mid-engagement — new failure modes surface, the situation expands, you ask for additional work — we agree on the new scope, the new estimate, and the new hour range together before that work starts. Hours are tracked, and the invoice reflects the work performed.