How we work.
The shape of an engagement, the terms we work under, and the work we do not take. This page is for the colleague you forwarded the site to and for the procurement lead who needs to know we are a real firm to transact with.
The shape of an engagement
- 01
Discovery call
Thirty minutes. You tell us what is broken or what decision is in front of you. We tell you whether we can help, what shape the engagement would take, and roughly how long it would run. No deck, no pitch, no follow-up sequence. If we are not the right fit, we usually know who is.
- 02
Scoped proposal
A written proposal describing the engagement, the deliverables, the timeline, and the project fee. One page for small engagements, three or four for larger ones. We do not negotiate scope inside hourly rates. The proposal is what gets signed.
- 03
Engagement
NDA and statement of work signed. Access to the systems and people we need. We start. Cadence depends on the shape: weekly for advisory and fractional, daily for tiger team, scoped phases for architecture review and training. Senior operators only. We do not hand off to juniors.
- 04
Handoff
Written deliverables. Live readouts where they help. A post-engagement window for the questions that surface once your team is running with what we built. We leave when the work is done. No retainer creep, no surprise invoices.
What we will need from you
The same access list applies to most engagements, scaled to the depth of work.
- Architecture documents, ADRs, and recent design work
- Read access to the relevant repos and the cloud bill
- A standing slot with the engineers closest to the system
- Whatever existing diagnostics, runbooks, or dashboards you already keep
Most of what we need is already written down somewhere in your org. The first scoping call is partly about figuring out where.
What we don't do
The work we say no to, so the work we say yes to means something.
- Staff augmentation. We are not a body shop. Every engagement is led by a senior operator with decades in production data systems.
- Greenfield application development. We work on the data and AI infrastructure layer, not the business logic on top of it.
- Pure security audits. We will flag obvious issues, but security audits are a separate discipline and you want a firm that does only that.
- Open-ended retainers without a defined deliverable. Retainers we offer are scoped to a quarter and renewed deliberately.
- Generalist digital transformation. We are not the firm for that. We are happy to refer you to one.
- Engagements where the senior operator does not stay involved. If the work is not the right shape for the bench we have, we say no.
Working with us
The terms a procurement or legal lead will want to see before a contract goes out.
- Mutual NDA
- Standard mutual NDA, signed before the first working session. We work under your NDA template or ours. Either is fine.
- MSA and SOW
- Engagements run under an MSA plus per-engagement statement of work. We will work under your enterprise MSA where required, or under ours for smaller buyers.
- Insurance
- Professional liability insurance in place. Certificates available on request before contract.
- Conflicts policy
- We hold one engagement per direct competitive lane at a time. We disclose existing relationships on the first call. If a conflict is too close, we say so before the proposal goes out.
- Intellectual property
- Work product is yours under the engagement. We retain rights to anonymized methodology, generic patterns, and the things we already knew before we walked in. The line is drawn in the SOW.
- Data and security
- We sign DPAs where required and work inside your security perimeter when the engagement asks for it. Client laptops on request for fractional engagements. We do not retain client data after engagement close beyond what the contract requires.
- Entity
- McFadin Data and AI Advisory is a California S-corporation. Operating from California, available in US business hours, willing to travel for cutover and onsite work.
- Payment terms
- Net 30 by default. Project fees billed at engagement start and milestones. Retainers billed monthly in advance. We do not invoice in arrears for work outside an SOW.
Anything not covered here, ask on the first call. We would rather answer the procurement question early than get to a signed proposal and discover a process mismatch.
Let’s look at it together.
If the shape works, the next step is the same as every engagement: a 30-minute introduction call. Bring whatever you are wrestling with. We will tell you whether and how we can help.