Jelia.nyc

Jelia.nyc / How it works / A conversation

HOW IT WORKS · STEP ONE

Thirty minutes, and an honest answer

You describe what hurts, and I ask questions until I understand it. At the end you will know whether I can help, and if I cannot, who can.

Start the conversation

What it is

A thirty-minute call. No slides, no sales script, and no pressure to decide anything at the end of it. It exists so that we can both work out, quickly, whether there is a problem I am well placed to solve.

I take a small number of engagements at a time, so I would rather spend thirty minutes finding out we are not a fit than spend weeks discovering it.

What to bring

You do not need to prepare a document. The more specific you are, though, the more useful the conversation will be. It helps to have thought about:

  • What hurts. The outage, the bill, the audit finding, the project that keeps slipping. Symptoms are fine. Diagnosis is my job.
  • Roughly what you run. Number of people, main systems, where they are hosted, who looks after them. Approximate answers are fine.
  • What has already been tried. Including what did not work, and why you think it did not.
  • Any deadline that matters. A contract renewal, an end-of-support date, an audit, a move.
  • Who else should be there. Often the most useful person on the call is whoever keeps the systems running day to day.

Please do not send passwords, customer data or anything confidential. I do not need it at this stage.

What happens on the call

  1. You talk first. What is wrong, in your own words, and what a good outcome would look like.
  2. I ask questions. Mostly about how things actually run, who depends on them, and what happens when they break.
  3. I tell you what I think. A first, plain reading of the problem, clearly labelled as a first reading. Advice given without looking at the estate is just opinion, and I will not pretend otherwise.
  4. We agree what happens next. Which is one of the three outcomes below.

Three honest outcomes

It needs an audit. Most problems worth a call are bigger than they first appear, or connected to something else. I follow up in writing with a proposed scope and a fixed price for the audit, and you decide in your own time.

It is small enough to just tell you. Sometimes the fix is a DNS record, a setting, or a conversation with a vendor. If so, I will say what it is. Not every problem needs a consultant.

I am not the right person. If the problem is outside what I do well, I will tell you plainly and point you at the kind of specialist who can help, by name where I can. That is a good outcome too. It saves you time and money, and it is how I would want to be treated.

What it is not

It is not a free audit, and it is not the start of a commitment. Nothing is agreed on the call except what happens next. You will not receive a sequence of follow-up emails, and if you decide not to go ahead, that is the end of it.

Questions people ask

Do I need to be technical?

No. Describe the problem in business terms if that is easier: what stops working, what it costs, who complains. I will translate.

Can our IT person or outside provider join?

Yes, and it usually helps. I am not there to judge their work. I want to understand the estate, and they know it best.

What kind of organisation do you work with?

Ones where infrastructure matters but there is no large team to look after it, and ones with a large team that wants an independent view of a specific problem.

How do I start?

Use the contact page. A few lines on what is broken is enough, and the more specific it is, the more useful the first reply will be.