A decade of multi-cloud and security-led delivery for regulated UK public-sector and enterprise organisations, now available as fractional CTO leadership for growing businesses.
A full-time CTO costs £170k-£250k+ a year once salary, National Insurance, pension and recruitment are included. This buys the same calibre of judgement, scaled to what your business actually needs, on 30 days' notice.
Each tier is designed to lead naturally to the next. Start with a diagnostic, then move to an ongoing seat at the table.
Start here. A 5-day cloud, security, AI-tooling and technical-debt audit, with a written report, prioritised recommendations and a 60-minute walkthrough call.
A senior technologist on your leadership team, covering roadmap ownership, vendor governance, board briefings and AI tooling security review, without the overhead of a full-time hire.
Embedded leadership for a transformation programme, technical due diligence on a fundraise or acquisition, or covering a genuine leadership gap.
Clients buy outputs, not a list of activities.
Executive technology dashboard
Live risk register
Rolling 90-day roadmap
Board-ready briefing, when needed
Vendor & contract review
AI tooling security & compliance review
Every serious buyer runs through the alternatives, so it's better to answer these directly.
A full-time CTO costs £170k-£250k+ once salary, National Insurance, pension and recruitment are included, before the 6-12 month search. Most businesses under £10m turnover don't have five days a week of CTO-level work to justify that. A fractional arrangement buys the same calibre of judgement, scaled to the actual demand.
An MSP keeps systems running, handling device management, helpdesk and licensing. That's a different job from setting technology strategy or assessing the risk of AI tools you've already adopted. The two are complementary, not substitutes.
A generalist consultant scopes a project and hands over a report. A retainer is an ongoing seat at the table, accountable for the roadmap actually being delivered and available for the judgement calls that come up in between.
In most cases, it isn't a fit. The exception is where the board wants an independent, external perspective for a specific decision, such as fundraising due diligence, an acquisition target, or an AI tooling risk review, without disrupting the internal reporting line.
No lengthy onboarding and no unnecessary layers, just a clear path from problem to plan.
A free, no-obligation 30-minute conversation about where your business stands.
A focused 5-day audit that surfaces the 2 to 3 issues that matter most, with a written report.
A retainer or interim engagement, scoped to what the findings call for.
Plain-English articles on technology strategy, cloud cost and AI governance for growing UK businesses.
Most businesses between £1m and £20m turnover are still running on technology decisions made when the company was a fraction of its current size. Nobody sat down and chose to do it this way. It happened gradually, one reasonable short-term call at a time, until the accumulated weight of those calls started showing up as cost, risk, or both.
Here are five patterns that come up again and again once someone senior actually looks.
Cloud bills tend to grow quietly. Instances get provisioned for a launch and never resized. Reserved capacity discounts go unused because nobody has time to plan twelve months ahead. Old environments stay running because switching them off feels risky when no one is quite sure what depends on them. None of this is negligence, it is simply what happens when infrastructure spend has no senior owner asking "does this still make sense?" on a regular cadence.
Security and compliance often get delegated entirely to whoever manages IT, with the assumption that antivirus software and a firewall are enough. GDPR exposure, access control, and incident response readiness are business risks with real financial and reputational consequences, not just technical settings.
Teams are adopting AI tools faster than most businesses can govern them. Individually these feel harmless. Collectively, they create exactly the kind of data governance exposure that regulators and, increasingly, investors ask about directly.
Software and infrastructure contracts tend to auto-renew unless someone actively intervenes. A vendor and contract review, done properly, routinely finds savings that pay for themselves.
Fundraising, acquisitions, and major platform decisions all involve technical questions a non-technical leadership team can't fully evaluate alone. Without an independent technical perspective, businesses either make these calls on incomplete information or delay them until the cost of indecision starts to bite.
Most growing businesses start out with technology handled informally: a developer here, an IT support contract there, decisions made by whoever is available at the time. That approach works fine at a certain size. It stops working quietly, long before anyone officially decides it has stopped working.
Developers are busy, delivery is happening, and yet nobody could tell you with confidence whether the current roadmap actually serves the business's priorities for the next twelve months. That gap between activity and direction is usually a leadership gap, not a talent one.
Rising cloud bills are common. What matters is whether anyone senior is regularly asking why, and whether the answer is satisfying.
If the response to "what's our AI strategy?" is a list of tools individual staff have started using on their own initiative, rather than a considered position on risk and opportunity, that gap needs closing before it becomes a bigger problem.
Investors and acquirers conduct technical due diligence as a matter of course. Starting that process only once diligence has begun is usually too late.
None of this requires a full-time hire. It requires someone senior enough to own the technology decisions properly, on a schedule that matches the actual size of the problem. That's the specific gap a Fractional CTO retainer is built to fill.
AI tool adoption inside most businesses is running well ahead of any formal decision to adopt it. Staff sign up for tools individually, paste in whatever gets the job done faster, and nobody above them has necessarily made a considered call about what that means for data protection or client confidentiality.
Under UK GDPR, a business remains responsible for how personal or client data is handled, regardless of which tool an individual employee happened to use. That is a genuine compliance exposure, not a hypothetical one.
The businesses that run into trouble are rarely the ones using AI deliberately and carefully. They're the ones where nobody senior has looked closely enough to know what's actually being used day to day. Visibility is most of the battle.
Straight answers to what most people ask before getting in touch.
Pricing depends on the level of involvement needed. The Technology Health Check is a flat £2,500. Ongoing Fractional CTO retainers range from £2,750 to £6,750 a month depending on days per month required. Interim CTO and strategic advisory engagements start from £9,000 a month. All retainers run on a rolling 30-day notice, with no lock-in contract.
A Fractional CTO provides ongoing, part-time strategic leadership, typically a few days a month, designed to be sustainable long-term. An Interim CTO provides full-time temporary coverage, usually during a leadership transition or a specific transformation programme, for a fixed period. Most clients start with a fractional retainer and move to interim support only when a project genuinely needs full-time attention.
Common signals include an engineering team that feels underperforming or hard to direct, cloud costs that keep climbing without a clear reason, board pressure to adopt AI tools without a plan for the risk involved, an upcoming fundraise or acquisition that needs technical due diligence, or simply making significant technology decisions without a senior technical voice in the room.
It is a focused 5-day engagement covering six areas: cloud and infrastructure, AI tooling and data governance, security and compliance, engineering team and culture, technology debt and roadmap, and vendor and supplier governance. It ends with a written report, prioritised recommendations, and a 60-minute walkthrough call.
Yes. All retainers run on a rolling 30-day notice with no lock-in contract. Scope can be adjusted as your business needs change, and any request outside the agreed monthly scope is simply quoted separately before work begins.
Only enterprise-grade AI tooling is used, with client data never used for model training. A mutual non-disclosure agreement is standard practice before any system access or sensitive discussion, not just on request.
Chris Evans Consulting is led personally by Chris Evans, a multi-cloud specialist (AWS, Azure, GCP) with a decade delivering technology strategy, cloud architecture and security-led delivery for regulated UK public-sector and enterprise organisations.
Track record includes a 25% infrastructure cost reduction and ISO 27001/GDPR-aligned security delivery for a UK local authority, alongside multi-cloud platform work for global enterprise clients. Chris leads every client relationship personally, from the discovery call to the findings and the board-level briefing, with no work handed to a subcontractor without your knowledge.
Full track record, named references, and professional indemnity insurance details available on request.
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