I spent most of my twenties working inside large technology organisations, first at a managed services firm in Manchester where I learned that most infrastructure problems are actually contract problems, and then at a mid-sized SaaS company in Edinburgh where I watched a well-intentioned platform migration consume eighteen months and a significant portion of the engineering team's goodwill. I left that second job in the autumn of 2018 with a notebook full of observations and no particular plan, which is, I think, the only honest way to start something like this.
There is a particular kind of document that arrives in a client's inbox looking like a proposal but functioning as a commitment. I have been thinking about how to read these more carefully, and what slowing down actually costs.
I changed the format of the one-off strategy session in April. The intake questionnaire is new. Here is why I added it, and what difference it has made to the calls themselves.
A brief account of three books I have read in the past few months that have been useful to the consulting work, and one that has not been useful at all but was worth reading anyway.
The most direct route is email. I read everything and reply to most things within two working days. If you are not sure whether what you need is something I do, describe it anyway and I will tell you honestly.
Email: marcus@techvaultpulsewave.com · +81 72-268-0236
Reading it slowly because every chapter gives me something to argue with for a week.
“Marcus read our vendor proposal more carefully than we had, and the counter-brief he produced changed the entire negotiation. We renewed on substantially better terms.
Head of Digital, regional housing association · Audit client, 2023
“The monthly retainer arrangement is the thing I would recommend to anyone. Having someone available who already knows your context is worth more than it sounds.
Operations Director, professional services firm · Retainer client since 2022
“He wrote a board briefing on our proposed cloud migration that our CTO said was the clearest explanation of the risks he had seen. The board approved the revised plan, not the original one.
CEO, independent media company · Briefing document client, 2024
A structured review of your current stack, contracts, and vendor relationships. I look for the places where complexity has quietly accumulated and where the next renewal is going to cost more than it should.
A fixed monthly arrangement where I am available for calls, document reviews, and the occasional late-Friday question that cannot wait until Monday. Most retainer clients have been with me for more than a year.
I write detailed explainers, white papers, and internal briefing documents for organisations that need someone to translate a technical argument into prose that a board can actually read.
I help organisations build evaluation frameworks, run structured RFP processes, and avoid the particular trap of choosing a platform because the sales engineer was charming.
Every autumn, give or take, a stack of renewal proposals arrives on my desk — PDFs, DocuSign links, the occasional printed binder from a vendor who still believes that weight confers authority. Most of them are dressed up to look like formalities, like the kind of paperwork you sign at a car dealership while someone hovers with a pen. And most of the people I work with, across sectors as different as mid-size logistics companies and regional NHS trusts, treat them exactly that way: a quick scan, a signature, done. What I've come to understand, after years of auditing these agreements after the fact — after the price increase has landed, after the seats have ballooned, after the auto-renewal has quietly fired — is that a SaaS renewal proposal is not a formality. It is, in the driest possible sense, a negotiation that one side has already prepared for and the other hasn't. This piece is about changing that.
Read more →I have sat in a lot of rooms where a technology audit was being "presented," and I have noticed a particular silence that settles over those rooms about twelve slides in — not the silence of concentration, but the silence of people who have quietly stopped following and are now waiting for the conclusion. The slide deck has become the default deliverable of the consulting world, and I think it is a genuinely bad default, one that flatters the presenter and obscures the work, and nowhere is that more costly than in a technology audit, where the findings are dense, the dependencies are non-obvious, and the stakes of misunderstanding tend to compound over the following eighteen months. I want to make the case, as plainly as I can, for the written report — not as a nostalgic preference, but as a structural argument about what audit findings actually require in order to be understood and acted upon. This is not a polemic against slides as a medium; it is a specific argument about the mismatch between what a technology audit produces and what a slide deck can hold.
Read more →There is a moment in almost every enterprise procurement process I have been part of — usually somewhere between the third stakeholder workshop and the first draft of the requirements document — where I notice something quietly wrong. The language of the RFP has begun to mirror the language of the incumbent vendor's own marketing collateral. A capability described in suspiciously precise numerical terms. An integration requirement that exactly matches one proprietary API. An evaluation criterion that rewards years of installed-base experience in a way that no challenger, however capable, could honestly claim. It is rarely deliberate sabotage. It is rarely even conscious. And that, I have come to think, is precisely what makes it so durable and so hard to correct. The incumbent advantage in procurement is not a conspiracy; it is a structural feature of how large organisations gather information, and understanding it as such is the only way to do anything useful about it.
Read more →Answer three questions and I will point you toward the service or resource that is most likely to be useful. This is not a lead form. There is no sales call at the end.
Marcus Hale began his career at a managed services firm in Manchester, where he spent five years working on infrastructure contracts before moving to an Edinburgh-based SaaS company as a senior technical programme manager. He left in late 2018 and founded TechVault PulseWave in 2019. His consulting work focuses on technology audits, vendor selection, and the kind of written analysis that helps non-technical decision-makers understand what they are actually being asked to approve. He reads widely in the history of technology and organisational behaviour, keeps a paper notebook for every active client, and is currently working through a long project on the economics of software lock-in. He lives and works remotely.