About VERA

VERA wasn't built in three weeks. The code was written quickly. The thinking behind it took twenty years.

I've spent my career operating professional services businesses in the $1--7M revenue range — the range where every decision is felt personally, where one lost client reshapes the year, and where the owner is usually the bottleneck they're trying to eliminate. I've made every mistake in the book. I've hired the wrong seniors and lost the right juniors. I've tracked time in spreadsheets that were already lying by the time anyone looked at them. I've run retainers that bled margin for months before anyone noticed.

VERA is the system I wish I'd had. Not a time tracking tool with a chatbot bolted on — an operating system for agencies that encodes the hard-won lessons of running them. Every business rule, every permission boundary, every financial model exists because I learned the cost of getting it wrong.

What makes this different

Most agency tools are built by software engineers who've never run an agency. They optimise for data entry. VERA optimises for the decisions that data should inform — and it puts those decisions in front of the right person at the right time, with the right level of detail for their role.

The team member sees their hours and their plan. The manager sees their portfolio in percentages. The owner sees the money. Not because the others can't be trusted, but because showing everyone everything is how you drown an organisation in noise.

The operating philosophy

The sidebar to the left contains the principles that shaped every decision in VERA's design. They draw on twenty years of practice and the work of people like Greg Crabtree, Peter Senge, David Maister, and Jocko Willink — applied to the specific problem of running a small agency well.

These aren't abstract ideas. Each one maps directly to something VERA does:

• Face the Truth — VERA shows you the numbers as they are, not as you hope they'll be. Real-time P&L, burn rates, and capacity gaps surface the moment they happen.

• The Talent Siphon — The allocation and capacity system is built around developing people through projects, not just filling seats. You can see who's stretched, who's underused, and who's ready for more.

• Command by Intent — VERA's permission model isn't about restricting access. It's about giving each person exactly the information they need to make good decisions autonomously, without drowning them in context that isn't theirs to carry.

• The Daily Bookend — The morning briefing and evening reminder replace surveillance with rhythm. Your team commits at the start of the day and accounts at the end — VERA handles the structure so you don't have to chase.

• Labor Efficiency Ratio — Every financial model in VERA — retainer burn, sprint accrual, T&M tracking, fixed-price margin — feeds back into the fundamental question: is the work your people do generating enough to sustain them?

These principles aren't a sales pitch. They're the lens through which every feature request, every permission rule, and every business rule is evaluated. If it doesn't serve the operating philosophy, it doesn't ship.

Who this is for

You run (or help run) a professional services business with somewhere between 5 and 50 people. You're past the survival stage but not yet at the scale where enterprise tools make sense. You need to know where the hours go, where the money goes, and whether the two are aligned — without building a reporting infrastructure or hiring someone to maintain it.

VERA lives in Slack because that's where your team already is. There's nothing to log into, no app to open, no form to fill out. You say what you worked on, and the system handles the rest.