Spend that accumulated quietly
Tools bought for one project, licences for people who left, cloud commitments made against a forecast that never happened. Nobody decided to waste it — it simply stopped being anybody’s job to look.
AI due diligence · IT business consulting
Know exactly what
your operation
costs you.
We evaluate the technology and operations behind a business — before you buy it, or before your next budget cycle — and come back with waste identified, savings quantified, and a plan your team can actually execute.
- Vendor independent — no commissions
- Fixed fee, agreed up front
- Findings reconciled to your ledger
Assessment scope
What we review
- Software & SaaS portfolio seat-level utilisation
- Cloud & infrastructure commitment vs. consumption
- Vendor & licence contracts renewal leverage
- Telecom & connectivity circuit inventory
- Process & manual effort automation candidates
- Support & service model root-cause burden
- Security & risk posture control baseline
Scope is set with you before the engagement starts and priced as a fixed fee.
The problem
Margin rarely disappears in one place.
It leaks in small amounts across dozens of decisions that were sensible at the time. By the time it shows up in the P&L, nobody can trace it back.
Process built around workarounds
Work moves between systems by hand because integrating them was always next quarter’s project. The cost shows up as headcount and errors, not as a line item anyone can point at.
An AI plan with no floor under it
Boards and buyers now ask what the AI strategy is. Answering with a pilot is not the same as answering with a capability — and the difference is worth real money at a valuation.
What we do
Six ways we get to the number.
Pre-close diligence for investors, and operating improvement for the companies they own — the same discipline applied at different points in the lifecycle.
Pre-close · Investor grade
AI Due Diligence
Test the AI story before you underwrite it.
Learn morePre-close · Investor grade
IT & Technology Due Diligence
Know what you are buying before the wire goes out.
Learn morePortfolio & operating companies
Operational Assessment
Find the waste that everyone stopped noticing.
Learn moreValue creation
EBITDA Improvement
Turn findings into margin.
Learn moreOperating improvement
AI Readiness & Adoption
Put AI where it pays, not where it demos.
Learn moreOngoing advisory
Fractional CIO
Senior technology judgement, without the seat.
Learn moreHow we work
Four phases. No surprises in the invoice.
Scope and fee are agreed before anything starts. You know what you are getting, when you are getting it, and what it costs.
- 01
Scope
A short working session to agree what is in bounds, what data we need, and what a useful answer looks like. Fixed fee, agreed before we start.
- 02
Evidence
We collect the contracts, the invoices, the tenant exports and the tickets, and we talk to the people doing the work. Findings come from records, not from opinions.
- 03
Quantify
Every opportunity gets a number, a confidence level and an owner. Anything we cannot size, we say so — a range beats a guess dressed as a fact.
- 04
Execute
You get a sequenced plan you can hand to your team. Where you want it, we stay on and drive the negotiations and consolidations ourselves.
Why Novado
Advice you can check.
Most consulting output is impossible to audit — which is exactly why so little of it gets implemented. We work the other way round.
Independent by design
We take no vendor commissions, referral fees or resale margin. The recommendation is the recommendation.
Everything carries a number
Findings are tied to invoices, contracts and usage data — and reconciled to your general ledger, not to a benchmark deck.
Built to a deal clock
Diligence work is sized to the timetable you actually have, not the one that would be comfortable.
Your team stays in the room
We work alongside the people who run the operation. They own the plan afterwards, so they help build it.
Questions
The things people ask first.
If yours is not here, ask it directly — we answer these on a call without a discovery process.
How quickly can you turn around a diligence report?
Most AI and IT diligence engagements run two to four weeks from kickoff to final report. When a deal timetable is tighter than that, we scope to the days available and are explicit about what a compressed review does and does not cover.
What do you need from us to get started?
Read access to your vendor contracts and invoices, an export of your Microsoft 365 or Google tenant, your cloud billing detail, and about four hours of time across the people who run finance, IT and operations. We work from your records rather than asking your team to build new reports.
Are you going to try to sell us software afterwards?
No. We take no commissions, referral fees or resale margin from any vendor. Our only revenue is our fee, which is agreed before the work starts and does not vary with what we recommend.
How is this different from what our MSP or IT provider tells us?
Your provider is a supplier reviewing spend that partly flows to them. That is a structural conflict, not a criticism. We look at the whole picture — including the provider contract — with nothing on the other side of the table.
Do you work with companies that do not have a dedicated IT team?
Often. Owner-operated businesses tend to have the widest gap between what they pay for technology and what they get from it, precisely because no one internally has the time to audit it.
What size of company do you typically work with?
Mid-market operating companies and the sponsors that own them — generally organisations with enough complexity that spend has spread across multiple systems, vendors and business units.