You should get what you pay for

I received a cold outreach email recently that triggered this piece. The email was friendly enough — at least as friendly as an automated outreach campaign can be — but one sentence really wound me up: "I can see Red Shift is striving to be the fastest and lowest-cost consultancy in London."

No. No, we are not. We sell predictability in software development. We are not in the business of racing to the bottom. If you want exactly what you asked for, delivered when you asked for it, for the price we agreed — that's us. If you want cheap, there are endless consultancies willing to promise you the world at a fraction of the cost in half the time… all conveniently wrapped in an open-ended contract.

So it got my noggin' jogging: why does a significant portion of the market still believe speed and cost should be the primary drivers when building the foundation of their business?

Your core business logic is encoded in your software. If the software is wrong, your business is wrong. If the software breaks, your business breaks. Speed and low cost should not be the priority here — yet the industry has conditioned buyers to believe otherwise.

What building a single house actually requires

To illustrate the absurdity, let's compare this to a mature, predictable industry with real planning standards: residential construction. A typical documentation set for a single residential planning application in the UK runs to roughly 16 separate documents before a single brick is laid — application form, ownership certificate, agricultural land declaration, fee, location plan, site/block plan, existing and proposed floor plans and elevations, design and access statement, sections and site levels, flood risk assessment, tree survey, ecology appraisal, heritage statement, transport / visibility statement and drainage strategy.

And the timeline: client briefing about a week, site survey two to three weeks, concept sketches two to four weeks, design refinements another two to four, specialist reports three to eight, final drawings and DAS two to four, LPA validation one to two. Total: six months of pre-construction planning. Six months of discovery.

Now compare that to enterprise software

For a typical enterprise software build in the UK:

• "Discovery" lasts ~3 weeks
• A quote is produced immediately afterward
• Build costs are often comparable to a house build
• The domain complexity is exponentially higher
• The system is far less predictable than a physical building

Yet buyers accept the premise that comprehensive discovery can be done by a third party in under a month. This, frankly, is delusional.

The environment for a house build is predictable: physics doesn't change, gravity is constant, walls don't suddenly need to integrate with Salesforce. Software is the opposite — entirely dynamic, highly uncertain, and deeply entangled with evolving business logic.

Yet somehow the industry convinces people that three weeks is enough time to understand the business as it currently operates, its implicit and explicit processes, its desired future state, its regulatory constraints, its leadership intent, its system architecture, its integration landscape, its delivery governance — and then produce a fixed price.

One of two things must be true. Either the consultancy has genuinely understood your entire business at a deep technical and organisational level in under a month and produced a fully costed, risk-balanced programme plan — or they are incentivised to get you to sign an open-ended Time and Materials contract first and figure everything else out later. "Agile" indeed.

The paradox of incentives

The client wants a proposal ASAP. The consultancy wants to secure the contract ASAP. Both incentives make meaningful discovery impossible. If you don't understand your system architecture, your business logic, and your own leadership intent at a deep level, how on earth do you expect a third party to grasp it in only weeks?

Real discovery is not a sales tactic. It is a technical investigation. Rushing to a proposal is not a service — it is an abdication.

Clients think they want fast and cheap. Would you want those qualities in your dentist? The result is nonsense proposals, impossible timelines, wildly inaccurate estimates, massive overruns, broken trust — and a quote that may as well have been generated by a dice roll.

A proposal without detail is not a proposal. It is a false promise.