About xbg.solutions
Makers who think strategically
The problem we're solving
You're drowning in AI hype. Your systems don't talk to each other. Consultants want another extension on your million-dollar transformation project that's still "not quite done."
We see so many small businesses, founders, and executives lost in the supposed opportunities the AI-influencer crowd talks about, but not knowing how or where to start. The more we leant into it, the more we realised that focusing on "AI adoption" and "agents" is like focusing on the ball instead of the game.
The process is process efficiency and automation. The purpose is profitability and scalability. Side benefits of good process design and unlocking data include improved employee engagement and retention.
That's what we focus on. Not the hype, the outcomes.
Our founder's story
I've spent over 20 years seeing business problems from every angle: working in multi-national banks and data companies, product roles across Australia and the US, c-level roles, co-founding a venture in the EU, working inside venture-backed startups and scaleups, engagement management in traditional consultancies.
The pattern I kept seeing: the incentives are misaligned. Consultancies optimise for billable hours. Vendors optimise for lock-in. Everyone's playing a different game than the client thinks they're playing.
The house margin model feels exploitative and disingenuous. Agencies exploit both the customer's willingness to pay and the worker's need to pay the bills, add a margin, and add no value. As the client, you end up paying senior rates and getting more junior staff than you could otherwise afford if you went direct. If you're a startup or cash-strapped business, no matter what advice the consultancy gives, what they're actually doing is eating away your profits and shortening your runway.
Then layer in the virtue signalling of big offices and suits and PowerPoint decks and the posturing of replaying internal knowledge in quadrant diagrams - it all feels thin.
In August 2024, I formalised xbg.solutions to do this differently.
What we're building
We're in the early stages of building our collectivist agency model. What we know for certain:
- We won't operate on exploitative house margins
- We won't prioritise looking impressive over delivering results
- We won't lock you into dependency
- We won't follow methodologies for methodology's sake
- We won't sell you solutions you don't need
We have a network of practitioners ready to work with us. We're pushing the ship out, starting to sail, and seeing where we can go. The ability to balance passion projects of building new ventures alongside helping unlock efficiency, improve profitability and scalability - those are the upsides that make this interesting.
A more honest and higher-integrity model would align the incentives of everyone involved, and do so in a way that maximises the runway of the firms working together - especially the ventures they're working on.
How we work differently
We work in shorts and hoodies, not suits. We have conversations in beer gardens and boardrooms. The work matters, not the wrapping. Suits and status symbols are virtue signalling that doesn't translate to quality output.
We're not handing you strategy decks and walking away. We write the code, configure the systems, stay until it works. Sometimes at 2am debugging an integration, sometimes mapping processes, always focused on outcomes.
Agile isn't always right. Neither is waterfall. We use what works for your specific situation. The world is grey and context changes. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.
We transfer knowledge, document what we built, and make sure you can run it without us. We're not looking for forever clients. Project completion means you're independent, not dependent.
Our business philosophy
We believe businesses should be built for profitability, not for funding rounds.
Think about WhatsApp pre-Meta: 55 employees serving 450 million users. Or OnlyFans: 1,500 employees generating $6 billion in revenue - roughly $4 million revenue per staff member. Most businesses celebrate hitting $200k revenue per staff member. They're missing three orders of magnitude.
The difference isn't luck. It's business model design. It's understanding unit economics. It's building something that scales without linear cost increases.
We like founders who obsess about their cashflow model, who understand their unit economics, who care about revenue-per-staff-member. We respect cockroach mode and bootstrapping more than unicorn hunting.
This doesn't mean we're anti-growth. It means we're anti-growth-for-growth's-sake. Build something people actually want to pay for, then scale it when the maths works. Not the other way around.
Our experience
We've been in the trenches - from building large tech organisations to co-founding ventures. We understand what it takes to make systems serve the business, not the other way around.
On-prem to cloud migration; zero downtime
System transformation, end-to-end systems and data re-architecture
Solutions, Product, Data, Ops, and Sales across many industries
North America, EU, and APAC experience
Cross-domain thinking
The finance problem of "too much data, no insights" is the same problem trades companies have. The hospitality challenge of "manual processes eating margins" shows up in professional services. Different contexts, same underlying issues.
Think about a finance company with transaction data they're not analysing and a trades company with job data they're not using. The technical solution might differ, but the business problem is identical - you're collecting information that could help you make better decisions, but nobody's turning it into insights.
Most consultants specialise deeply in one domain. That's valuable for deep expertise. But it creates blind spots - they don't see solutions from other industries that would work perfectly in yours.
We bring the cross-domain perspective. The trade-off is we're not the deepest specialists in any one field. But we see connections others miss and apply solutions from unexpected places.
Ready for a conversation?
No sales pitch. No obligation. Just a chat about what you're building and where the opportunities might be.