Fractional CIO / CTO · $10M–$100M Businesses
You shouldn’t be the most senior
technology decision-maker
in your own company
A full-time CIO is overkill for where you are. Going without one means the vendor calls, the build-or-buy questions, the security worries, and the board’s question about AI all land on your desk. Bantam Digital puts a technology executive in your corner on retainer, from $4,500 a month.
Outsourced IT asks
“Is your technology working?”
We ask
“Is your technology working for you?”
The Real Cost
Every technology decision routes through you. That is the bottleneck.
The vendor calls, the build-or-buy questions, the security worries, the board’s question about AI. They land on the same desk and get answered in the margins between everything else a CEO does in a day. Not badly. Just late, one at a time, with no architecture behind them.
Most companies call me at one of three moments.
Growth outran the systems
What worked at $8M does not work at $30M. The spreadsheets held until they didn’t. Now every new client adds hours of copying, reconciling, and chasing, and headcount is the only lever you have left.
The implementation that never landed
You bought the ERP, the CRM, the platform. Six figures and eighteen months later your team still runs the old process alongside the new one. Nobody’s job was finishing it.
The person who knew everything is leaving
Your IT manager, your operations lead, the developer who built the thing. The knowledge leaves with them. You find out what was undocumented the week after.
The Engagement
One person, on retainer, who owns technology direction
From $4,500 a month. Three levels of presence, depending on how much of the wheel you need someone else’s hand on. Your AI roadmap is part of the job, not a separate engagement and not a separate invoice.
AI Readiness Assessment
Not ready for a retainer. Where AI actually pays in your business and, just as usefully, where it does not. The fee credits in full toward a retainer if you engage.
See the assessment →AI on Purpose
Why most companies are getting AI by accident, and what deploying it deliberately actually takes. Read this first if you are not yet sure the problem is worth paying to diagnose.
Read the argument →In the Work Right Now
What the problem turned out to be
Most engagements start with a stated problem and turn on a different one. Here are two, in progress, described the way the client would recognize them.
A golf operator in Northern California
They came to me sure they had a marketing problem. Their own estimate was a million dollars a year left on the table across four revenue streams: rounds played, club memberships, food and beverage, and events. All four mattered to the business. Their website sold one of them. The other three were effectively invisible to anyone searching Google.
The bigger find was in the tee sheet. Thirty-five thousand contacts, accumulated over years of bookings, sitting inside an operations system nobody had ever treated as a marketing asset. The audience they were paying to go find was already in the building.
The work: an assessment of their search visibility and membership program, a plan to make three invisible revenue streams findable, a marketing database built out of the tee sheet, and an email platform to actually reach the thirty-five thousand people they already had.
A specialty manufacturer in petroleum services
Their ERP implementation had been stalled for four years. Four years of a project that would not start, restarted more than once, with every diagnosis pointing at the software or the vendor.
It was never a software problem. Their data was not in a condition any ERP could accept, and nobody had been given the job of getting it there. Underneath that sat the three operating problems the ERP was supposed to solve and could not: no real visibility into lead times, no reliable way to prioritize work in progress, and no plan for getting the rest of the organization to actually use it.
The work: put the data in order first, sequence the rollout around those three problems rather than around software modules, and treat adoption as part of the project instead of something that happens after go-live. Go-live is close.
Both engagements are in progress. I would rather show you the diagnosis than a number I cannot yet stand behind. If you recognize your own business in either of these, that is the conversation worth having.
Twenty years running global technology operations. Forty-person team, seven offices, a CRM implementation adopted across all of them, and AWS migrations that cut cloud spend by 30%. That experience is why the diagnosis above took weeks instead of years.
Who We Partner With
$10M–$100M businesses with something to protect
Financial services, professional services, member organizations, design and creative firms, industrial and manufacturing, golf and club operations. The common thread is not industry. It is a leadership team that has outgrown ad-hoc technology decisions.
Next Step
Start with a conversation
Thirty minutes, no deck. Tell us where the friction is and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth engaging on, including when the answer is no.