Clarity about what we decline is part of the offer. Each of these is a firm position — stated plainly, so you know what you’re buying.
We don't keep your IP.
The work created for the engagement is yours. The foreground IP transfers to the customer on acceptance and payment of the relevant milestone — keyed to the firm's 5-business-day acceptance window (silence past it is deemed acceptance), not to a later negotiation. The firm retains only its own background IP, licensed to the customer on standard terms.
We don't rent you bodies.
No bodyshop. Staff augmentation, when it happens, is a named-consultant retainer with one-month notice — specific people the customer can name — or it doesn't happen. We don't sell anonymous headcount.
We don't sell strategy decks.
If it doesn't reach production, we didn't do the job. Advisory and design exist to get a capability running and owned, measured against a number the customer chose — not to hand over a slide deck.
We don't compete on being the cheapest.
We price to the value of the outcome and hold a gross-margin floor; we won't win on lowest price and won't pad scope to inflate one. A buyer shopping purely on rate wants a different firm.
We don't take work outside our practice.
We decline work outside the firm's practice areas — we do the work we can stand behind and staff with senior people who stay, not engagements we'd learn our way into on the customer's budget.
We don't default to time-and-materials.
Milestone fixed-price is the shape of the work — scope, dates, and acceptance committed up front. T&M is an exception requiring partner approval and a premium, because billing by the hour removes the scope discipline the customer is paying the firm to hold.