Build everything from scratch

Most consultants don’t own any IP, so they typically start every project from scratch. This also helps them maximize billable hours. E.g., To build a SOC 2 compliant architecture, they’d have to build everything: landing zone, networking, orchestration, data storage, CI / CD, etc. And then do all the work to make it pass compliance requirements.

Build on top of existing products

Any consulting we do is on top of the Gruntwork IaC Library, so we typically have to build a lot less to achieve the same result, as we’re able to leverage over 300K lines of battle-tested and proven infrastructure code and tests. E.g., To build a SOC 2 compliant architecture, we’d start with our Reference Architecture, which already includes a landing zone, networking, orchestration, data storage, CI / CD, etc, and all of it is already compliant with CIS, so we would only need to implement the delta between CIS and SOC 2!

Monolithic

The incentive for most consultants is to keep you paying as long as possible (billable hours), which means they often hold back the finished work as long as possible, and only deliver value at the very end, after all bills have been paid.

Incremental

Just about all of Gruntwork’s profit comes from long-term subscriptions to our product, so our incentive is to improve that product as quickly as we can. We only do consulting projects that (a) improve our product and (b) where we can break the work up into 2-week sprints, with the requirement that we can deliver something of value to all of our customers every single sprint. This benefits everyone: you get value early and often, you get to provide feedback earlier so we can course correct constantly (so there are no surprises at the end), and if for some reason things aren’t going well, you have the option of stopping the work after any sprint, while still ensuring you got something of value from all the previous sprints.

Getting paid for consulting

A consulting project is successful if the consultant got paid for their time, as all of their profit comes from billable hours. Whether their work actually made the customer successful is secondary.

Improving our product

Our consulting projects are only successful if they have improved our product for all of our customers. Our profit comes from customers being subscribers for a long time, so if we don’t deliver what you need in the consulting project, you cancel, and we don’t make the profit we’re looking for. Therefore, our success is 100% tied to your success.

None

For consultants, they get profit from billable hours on the initial work; any work after that typically reduces their profit. Therefore, most consultants dump the code and run. They almost never stick around to see if what they did worked, iterate on their work to make improvements, or provide on-going support and maintenance.

Commercial support & maintenance

Just about all of Gruntwork’s profit comes from long-term subscriptions to our product, so everything we do is designed to last and work over the long term: we write docs; we write extensive tests; and we provide ongoing maintenance and support for our code, iterating on it constantly to make it better and better over time.