Technology strategy
Multi-year platform roadmaps, vendor evaluation and selection, build-vs-buy analysis, legacy-stack assessment, and portfolio-level technology reviews for family offices.
Licorne Consulting LLC
Fractional CTO for mid-market operating companies and family offices.
Licorne is the technology function for companies that need a CTO's judgment without committing to a CTO's salary. The person doing the architecture is the person writing the code, evaluating the vendors, defending data-driven decisions in the C-suite, and answering the call when something breaks at 2 AM. Most consulting firms split strategy from execution. Licorne closes that gap.
What we do
Strategy and execution from one senior practitioner.
Architecture and integration
REST and webhook integrations, ETL design, schema modeling that survives vendor changes, Salesforce platform development (custom objects, Apex, LWC, Flow), and the operational discipline to keep these systems running once deployed.
Custom software
Modern web applications (Next.js, React, TypeScript), mobile-first field tools, data pipelines, GIS workflows, and AI/ML applications including computer vision and human-in-the-loop labeling pipelines.
Financial modeling
Multi-year ROI models with named ranges and sensitivity analysis, vendor pricing analysis, peer benchmarking against industry IT-spend ratios, and investment-grade business cases for board or owner approval.
Change management
Phased deployment plans calibrated to a company's real change capacity, training that respects the user, and the political work of bringing reluctant gatekeepers — operational staff, IT admins — along as owners rather than obstacles.
Family office work
Discretion as a default, comfort with multi-generational decision-making, and fluency moving between principals, professional managers, and operating-company leadership in family-office portfolio engagements.
Who we work with
A specific kind of client.
Mid-market operating companies — typically $20M to $500M in revenue — where a full-time CTO is premature but ad-hoc IT is already a constraint.
Family offices managing operating-company portfolios where technology decisions cross principals, professional managers, and operating-company leadership.
Family-owned and founder-led businesses where decisions cross technical and personal lines.
Our work concentrates in operations-heavy industries — construction, manufacturing, field services, logistics, healthcare operations — where the value lives in fleet, field, and floor data that legacy systems were not built to surface.
How we engage
Five ways to work together.
01
Discovery and build-out
First 60–90 days at $125/hr while scope is being discovered and trust is being built. All categories of work — strategy, development, modeling, meetings — billed the same. No tier games.
02
Monthly retainer
Once core systems are live, a fixed monthly retainer covers ongoing strategy, light development, integration maintenance, and stakeholder support. Typical scale is 10 to 20 hours per month.
03
Project-based
Fixed-price engagements with written statements of work for defined deliverables — a specific integration, a CRM build, a financial model, an AI pilot.
04
Advisory-only
Short-form engagements of 5 to 15 hours for companies with internal dev capacity who need outside judgment on strategy, vendor selection, or architecture review.
05
Family office advisory
Portfolio-level engagements: holding-company technology audits, evaluation of cross-portfolio shared services, vendor selection for operating companies, or fractional-CTO placement embedded in a specific holding. Always under NDA.
How we're different
Four principles that shape the work.
Same person, both jobs
The strategist and the engineer are the same person. Decisions in one inform the other immediately, without the translation losses of a strategy-then-handoff model.
Senior-only
We move fast because we are small, but every recommendation is calibrated to total cost of ownership and the cost of being wrong over a five-year horizon.
Calibrated honesty
Clients see what we know, what we are still verifying, and where the model is sensitive. Uncertainty is named rather than smoothed.
Discreet by default
We do not list clients publicly, do not publish case studies without explicit permission, and treat NDAs as the start of the relationship, not a hurdle.
Contact
Most engagements begin with a single conversation.
If you are weighing whether a fractional CTO fits your situation, send a short note describing what you are trying to accomplish. We respond within two business days.