About
Small on purpose
You'll get the same person every time — someone who remembers your business, your people, and what we tried last spring.
I spent years building software and running engineering teams — at big tech companies and at startups, where the problems were messy operational ones dressed up as technical ones. That work was mostly the same question over and over: where is this process leaking time, and what's the simplest thing that fixes it? Big companies pay a lot of money for people who can answer that. Most small businesses have nobody.
What I kept noticing was that the shops, clinics, and family businesses I knew were stuck doing things by hand that could have been sorted in an afternoon — they just didn't have anyone to ask. So the same experience that went into untangling systems for companies with hundreds of employees now goes into getting your Tuesday back.
So that's what Cottage Lane is. Not an agency, not a help desk with a ticket queue. Just someone who'll come sit with you, watch how a normal Tuesday goes, and start with whatever is wasting the most of your time. You'll know what it costs before we start, and you'll understand what I'm doing while I do it.
Some of what I do is genuinely technical — writing software, wiring systems together, weighing in on a contract you're not sure about. But you shouldn't have to care about any of that. You don't need to know what technology you need. You just need to know what's wasting your time — I'll help figure out the rest.
We'll speak plainly
If I can't explain it to you over coffee, I haven't thought it through yet.
Priced for a small business
A real number up front, sized to your budget — not to somebody's sales target.
Yours to keep
I write everything down and hand it over. Stay because you want to, not because you're stuck.