About us
Small team. Senior work.
Altitude Consultancy is a boutique practice. Michael Turner leads every engagement personally — from the first conversation through delivery and into the ongoing relationship that usually follows.
The practice has been running since 2014, with experience spanning startups, property, construction, professional services, sports, media, retail, and insurance. That breadth shapes how every engagement is approached: with a clear view of what the outcome actually needs to be at the business level, and the technical depth to get there without unnecessary detours.
Work ranges from go-to-market strategy and startup advisory through to full-stack application development, AI implementation, and ongoing strategic support. Most relationships start with one thing and continue from there.
The thread that runs through all of it is the same: start with the problem, define it properly, build the right thing, and stay close to the work until the outcome is demonstrably there.
The person you speak to is the person doing the work.
Michael leads every engagement personally — strategy, delivery, and the ongoing relationship that follows. Specialist contractors are brought in for specific work, but the strategic and technical lead doesn't change.
That means faster decisions: no waiting for sign-off from someone who needs to be re-briefed. Fewer gaps between what was agreed and what gets built. And genuine accountability — there's no handoff to blame when something goes wrong, because there isn't one.
It also means staying invested in the outcome, not just the output. We stay close after delivery because we built it and care whether it works.
Direct delivery
You work with the people doing the work. Every decision, every review, every delivery checkpoint.
There's no buffer layer translating your requirements into tickets for someone else to build. What you say in the room is what gets built — which means misunderstandings surface quickly, not three sprints later when they're expensive.
It also means the quality bar is personal. There's nowhere to hide when the same people who made the decisions also wrote the code and stand in front of you at the review.
Honest scope
We define what's needed, not what's billable.
Engagements are scoped to the outcome. If a problem can be solved in two weeks, we'll tell you that — we won't pad it to six. We'd rather complete a focused piece of work well and earn a second engagement than drag the first one out past its natural end.
This only works if we're honest when we're not the right fit. If someone else can solve your problem faster or better, we'll say so. The short-term cost of a lost engagement is worth less than the long-term value of a trusted relationship.
Elevated perspective
We zoom out before we zoom in.
Before recommending anything, we try to understand what you're actually trying to achieve at the business level. Sometimes the answer is a different technology. Sometimes it's a process change. Sometimes it's doing less.
We bring commercial and strategic awareness alongside technical depth. That means we can participate in conversations at every level — from board-level investment decisions to architecture choices to code reviews — without losing the thread.
How we think
Four principles that shape every engagement.
Problems before solutions
We don't start with what we know how to build. We start with what you're actually trying to solve, and sometimes the answer is a different technology, a process change, or doing less.
Senior throughout
The people who scope the work are the people who ship it. No handoffs, no re-briefing, no junior delivery hidden behind a senior front.
Honest scope
We define what's needed, not what's billable. If a problem can be solved in two weeks, we'll tell you. We'd rather earn a second engagement than drag the first one out.
Outcomes over outputs
Shipping code isn't the finish line. We stay close until the outcome is demonstrably there — instrumented, measured, and adjusted where needed.
Our background
Built from delivery, not theory.
We've spent our careers building things, not just advising on them.
The foundation is full-stack product delivery — designing systems, writing code, managing releases, and supporting products in production. That means building with an eye on maintainability, not just getting to launch. Code that the next person can understand. Systems that can be extended without being rewritten.
Experience spans web platforms, SaaS products, internal tools, data pipelines, API integrations, and complex integrations between modern and legacy systems. Industries have included property, startups, construction, professional services, sports, media, retail, and insurance — enough variety to know that the hard problems are rarely unique to one sector.
Alongside the delivery work, there's a long track record in technology consultancy and programme governance — environments where the challenge isn't just technical but organisational. Navigating stakeholders with different incentives, aligning teams, keeping complex programmes on track. That experience shapes how every engagement is run: we know the difference between a technical problem and a people problem wearing a technical mask.
AI work has been a growing part of the practice — not as a trend to follow, but because the capability is genuinely useful in the right places. The approach is deliberately conservative: find the applications that create real, measurable value, build those properly, and measure whether they worked. Working with Claude, OpenAI, and RelevanceAI across professional services, construction, and technology businesses.
Industries
Where most of our work sits.
These industries represent the deepest experience — but the approach works wherever founders and business leaders need clear thinking and real delivery.
Startups
Early-stage teams that need to move fast without making decisions they'll spend 18 months undoing. We help founders define the product, the tech stack, and the go-to-market before momentum turns into technical debt and before good ideas get buried under the weight of a codebase built in a hurry.
We've worked with startups from pre-revenue through to Series A — on the product definition, the technology choices, the first marketing site, the first production system, and the data infrastructure that lets founders make decisions with confidence rather than instinct.
Property
Proptech platforms, agencies, and property developers. We build and integrate the systems that make property businesses run — client portals, market intelligence tools, workflow automation, and data platforms that surface the information agents, developers, and investors actually need.
Property businesses often have complex data problems disguised as technology problems. The question is rarely "what platform should we use?" and more often "what are we actually trying to do and who needs to do it?" We're good at separating those two questions and solving the right one.
Development & Construction
Builders, developers, and project managers who've outgrown spreadsheets. We build project management tools, automate quoting workflows, integrate with estimating and scheduling software, and deliver the site reporting that keeps stakeholders informed without requiring someone to manually compile the data.
We understand the operational pressures of construction businesses — tight margins, complex timelines, and multiple stakeholders who need different levels of detail from the same data. We build to fit that reality, not to fit a standard software product that was designed for a different industry.
Small Business
Tradies, contractors, and professional practices who've been undersold by generic software. We build the tools that let small teams operate like bigger ones — job management systems, client portals, quoting tools, and integrations that connect the systems already in use.
We've learned that small business clients need solutions that actually fit how they work, not generic platforms that require them to adapt their workflow to the software. We build to fit. That means spending time understanding the workflow before writing a line of code, and it means building something the team can maintain without needing us on call forever.
Professional Services
Firms navigating technology change under compliance constraints and with senior stakeholders who need plain language explanations. We've worked in legal, insurance, and finance — environments where the technology decisions have real regulatory and operational consequences, and where a poorly communicated change programme can do more damage than the problem it was solving.
We translate complex technology decisions into clear direction and implement without disruption. We're comfortable presenting to a board and to a development team in the same week, and we know how to keep both conversations grounded in the same facts.
Why Altitude
How we compare.
| Large consultancy | Altitude | Freelancer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | Junior team | Same seniors throughout | The person you hired |
| Strategy to delivery | Separate teams | Same team | Delivery only |
| Scope discipline | Billable hours incentive | Scoped to the outcome | Variable |
| Commercial lens | Occasional | Always | Rare |
| Honest about fit | Rarely | Yes | Depends |
Fit matters
We turn away work more often than most consultancies admit.
It's not a policy — it's a consequence of being honest about fit. When we're not the right team for a problem, saying so is the most useful thing we can do. It protects our quality, keeps our focus, and means the clients we do work with get our full attention.
We're likely not the right fit for:
- Projects we're not technically suited for — we'll say so and suggest who might be
- Organisations that need someone embedded full-time as staff augmentation
- Projects scoped primarily to fill a budget rather than solve a problem
- Engagements where the desired outcome hasn't been defined
If we're not the right fit, we'll tell you quickly and point you toward someone who is.
Tell us what you're working on.
We'll work out whether we're the right fit — and be honest if we're not.