About Preside

Our Perspective.

There is a kind of company we are built for. Its leadership has looked at what technology is doing for the business and decided it should be doing more. The goal is value that shows up in margin, in growth, and in what the business is worth to an investor or a buyer.

If that is not how you think about technology, we are probably not the right firm for you, and we would rather say so on this page than discover it three months into an engagement.

Much technology work in the mid-market is maintenance. Keep the systems up, fix what breaks, manage the vendors already under contract. That work has to happen and someone has to do it well. It does not by itself improve the value of the business. We do the other kind of work.

Finished work in two to six weeks.

When a company takes on a piece of technology work, the usual route is a process that runs for months before anything changes. Scope the problem, write the requirements, bring in vendors, sit through the proposals, negotiate, and only then begin. By the time a recommendation arrives, the business may have moved on and parts of it may be out of date.

We deliver finished work in two to six weeks. Examples include a Technology P&L, a security posture report with gaps ranked by estimated cost, a board technology governance framework, and an architecture review with a prioritized roadmap.

We can do this because we do not rebuild the method each time. It draws on experience across the founders' careers, so we know what matters, what to skip, and how to reach an answer that holds up.

The reason it matters is timing. The companies we work with often face a fixed date. Typical examples are a sale process opening in 60 days, a compliance deadline that will not move, a board meeting where the CFO needs an answer, or a PE operating partner who needs the technology side of the 100-day plan moving before the first portfolio review. We built the way we work around those dates.

A common trap is timing.

Here is a sequence that is easy to recognize. A company evaluates a platform, picks a vendor, and signs for three years. Eighteen months in, the fit is clearly wrong. The architecture no longer matches where the business has gone. The systems around it do not connect the way they were supposed to. People in the business units have quietly built workarounds that have hardened into the way things are done. Everyone knows it is not working.

Then the renewal comes up, and they renew anyway.

Now the company is committed for another three years. No one planned the exit while there was still time to plan it. And it is often more than one contract. The integrations, the adjacent systems, the data that lives inside the platform, the people trained on it, and the supporting vendors whose renewals fall on different dates all extend the commitment further. By the time the company looks up, the remaining options are expensive.

This is what locks organizations in place. It is also avoidable, but only before the renewal closes the window. The work has to start while there is enough room to evaluate properly, design the right thing, and move the business onto it at a pace the organization can absorb. That last part is where many technology projects run into trouble. A new system can be technically sound and still fail because the business units were not ready, the culture pushed back, or the rollout assumed an adoption speed the organization was never going to hit.

If you are already inside one of these cycles, we can help you find the way out. The earlier you start, the more options you have.

Spending less can improve quality too.

There is an assumption built into most technology budgets that cutting cost means accepting less. That assumption is often wrong.

Many mid-market technology environments carry waste. Technology gets accumulated rather than designed. A tool gets bought for a problem that later changes. Two platforms end up doing overlapping jobs and never talk to each other properly. Infrastructure stays sized for a version of the business that no longer exists. A contract renews on its own because no one looked at it before the date. Manual processes grow up around systems that were supposed to make them unnecessary.

When that waste gets cleaned up, the cost can come down and the quality can go up at the same time. The environment gets simpler and more coherent. Integrations that used to break can start holding. Data people did not trust can become reliable. Work that was being done by hand because two systems would not connect can be automated once they do.

For a company heading toward a transaction, this matters in a specific way. Buyers often look at technology cost, risk, and documentation when they set a price. Lower cost can raise EBITDA, and clearer architecture can reduce the discount a buyer applies to risk it cannot see.

We meet companies at three moments.

The engagement looks different at each of these moments. What we are after is the same in all three. Technology that performs, holds up to scrutiny, and adds to what the business is worth.

We are as careful about who we take on as you should be about who you hire.

Not every company is ready for the kind of work we do, and taking on a company that is not ready helps no one.

The companies we do our best work with have a few things in common. Leadership has decided that technology needs to operate differently, and not just agreed that it would be nice. There is a senior person who owns the outcome and is accountable for it, not just curious about it. The company is prepared to invest in changing things rather than continuing them. And there is enough lead time to do the work properly, including the slower work of moving the business onto something new without breaking what already runs.

We are a poor fit for a company that wants the cheapest way to hold the current state together, a vendor to run the existing environment without review, or the appearance of technology leadership without acting on it.

We say this because engagements go wrong when the fit is missing, the readiness is weaker than it looked, or the appetite for change is smaller than the conversation suggested. We would rather find that out in the first meeting than manage the consequences later.