There’s a flavour of AI consultancy doing the rounds in the North East at the moment where the entry price is £25k. You pay £15k upfront, another £10k on "successful delivery", and what you get is a strategic engagement. An audit. A roadmap. A lot of clarity.
Which is lovely — if you’re a business big enough to need clarity more than you need actual working automations.
For most of the North East SMEs we talk to every week, it isn’t the right shape of help.
What £25k Actually Buys You
Let’s be honest about this. A £25k strategic AI engagement, at the going market rate, typically delivers:
- A written diagnostic of where your operations are leaking
- A prioritised roadmap of what to fix first
- A lot of founder-level conversations about "reducing dependency" and "reclaiming time"
- A handover that says "now go and build this"
- You’re turning over £5m+ and the founder’s time is the bottleneck
- You have an operations leadership gap you’re not filling imminently
- You want a roadmap owned by a named advisor who can defend it in a boardroom
- You have the in-house capability to actually execute whatever the roadmap says
- £25k is a rounding error on your tooling budget
It’s not a scam. It’s a real service that real clients genuinely get value from. Specifically: businesses turning over £5m+ where the founder’s time is so valuable that £25k to save them 40 hours of mental load on "what should we be doing with AI" is a sensible trade. If you’re hiring a McKinsey grad to think for you for three months, you’ll pay five times that and not blink.
But if you’re a £400k turnover plumbing business in Seaham, or a £1.2m restaurant group in Newcastle, or a £650k professional services firm in Durham — the shape of help you need isn’t 25 grand of thinking. It’s a hundred quid a month of tools, a day of somebody setting them up properly, and the phone number of someone who’ll fix things when they break.
The Problem With "Strategy First"
We’re going to be uncharitable for one paragraph and then stop.
The problem with the “buy strategy first, build later” model is that it sells the most-valuable-sounding bit of the work (the thinking) while deferring the hardest bit (the doing). The client walks out with a roadmap. Three months later they haven’t built any of it, because building is harder than buying a document, and the strategic engagement didn’t come with an implementation team, and now they need to hire one, and that’s another conversation, another quote, another invoice. The roadmap sits in a Notion page and the original problem is still there.
It’s not malicious. It’s just a structural mismatch for most SMEs: you’re not short of ideas, you’re short of shipped work.
What We Do Instead
At Northern we run a three-step ladder that starts free and doesn’t require anybody to drop £25k before seeing anything work.
Step 1: Free Automation Audit (£0)
20 minutes with Dave. You tell us what’s eating your time. We send back your top three automation opportunities, each with a pound figure attached — how many hours a week, what they’re worth at your team’s rate, which one you should do first. No slide deck, no sales pitch, no follow-up spam. Most of our conversations start here. Book it.
Step 2: Deep-Dive Audit (£1,200)
When the free audit points at something meaty and you want proof before you commit. Two weeks. A 15–25 page written report with pound figures on every finding. A working prototype of the three highest-impact workflows — not slides of what we’d build, actually built and running in a test environment. A Loom walkthrough from Dave. A 90-minute live review call.
That’s 5% of a £25k engagement. And you finish it with a working thing you can watch running, not a Notion page to hire someone to implement. Deep-Dive details.
Step 3: Pro+ Managed (£1,500/month) or Automation Lead (£2,500/month)
When you’re ready to run a real stack. Pro+ Managed is our done-for-you automation tier — we build, run and tune your workflows every month. Automation Lead sits above it for businesses turning over £2m+ who want a fractional head of automation with strategic ownership, not just a managed platform.
Over a year, Pro+ Managed is £18k. Automation Lead is £30k. Both get you an actually-working stack, not a plan to go build one. See the tiers.
When the £25k Strategy Engagement IS the Right Call
We should be fair. There are businesses where a premium strategic AI engagement genuinely is the right answer:
If that’s you, buy the £25k strategy engagement. Seriously — the people selling it are good at what they do, and we’ve got nothing against them. Different tier of the market.
But if you’re under £3m turnover, own the business yourself, and your real problem is that your CRM doesn’t talk to your booking system — please don’t drop £25k on a clarity conversation. Drop 20 minutes on a free audit, then £1,200 on a deep-dive if you like what you hear, then £1,500 a month to have the thing actually running. That’s the right shape of help.
The Unglamorous Truth About Automation
The unglamorous truth about automation is that the hardest bit isn’t the strategy. It’s the maintenance. Workflows break. APIs change. Staff leave. Integrations drift. The stuff that’s saving you 15 hours a week in month three is saving you nothing in month seven because the trigger stopped firing and nobody noticed.
That’s what a good managed retainer actually solves. Not "what should we automate?" — most people already have a pretty good intuition about that after 10 minutes of honest conversation. But "who’s going to make sure this is still working next quarter?"
£25k buys you a lovely roadmap. £1,500 a month buys you someone on the other end of a Slack channel when something breaks. Different problems, different prices, different buyers.
Pick the one that fits your business. And if you’re not sure which one that is, start with the free audit. 20 minutes and we’ll tell you straight — including, sometimes, that the £25k engagement is genuinely the right call for you. No hype, no pressure, no tool we won’t admit doesn’t fit.
