For owners of $2-20M industrial, distribution and service companies

Your company has outgrown its systems. Someone has to own what comes next.

I embed as the technical brain of owner-led companies that have no technical leader. I design how technology should work across the business, then I build it or steer the people who do. You keep selling and running the company.

Book a 30-minute callA video call, no preparation needed.

Sound familiar?

Every one of these costs money you cannot see on a single invoice.

The quote for the new ERP came in at three times what you expected, and nobody around you can tell you whether it is right.

Orders are re-typed from one system into another, and every hire in the back office is a hire you should not have needed.

Your integrator decides your roadmap for you, one licence at a time.

The web agency, the ERP reseller and the IT company each own a piece. Nobody owns the whole.

You cannot tell whether the next system will help the company sell more, or just cost more.

Your competitors quote in an hour and deliver in a day. Your team is still on spreadsheets and email.

A technical director on a retainer, without hiring one

The role is called fractional CTO. In practice it means one person who owns the technology side of your company the way your finance director owns the numbers.

Technology strategy and a 12-month roadmap you can read.
Architecture: which system is the source of truth, how data moves, how systems connect.
Build-versus-buy and vendor decisions, negotiated on your side of the table.
Steering of external developers and integrators, and input on technical hires.
Delivery: I build it myself, AI-assisted, or guide your team through it.

I build. I do not only advise.

Eighteen years running a software company, and I still ship the software myself. No slide deck handed to someone else to implement.

CEO altitude, not plumbing.

Strategy, build-versus-buy, lock-in, margins. Not the network, the printers or the laptops.

Nothing to resell.

No licence, no hosting, no agency behind me. The only thing I sell is my judgment, so it stays on your side.

How it works

Every relationship starts with a scoped project. It deepens when you ask it to, not on a calendar.

Project

A scoped, time-bounded piece of architecture and implementation: an integration, a system replacement, a platform decision made and executed.

Roadmap

I own your 12-month technical roadmap. A monthly check-in, everything documented. The first retainer.

Governance

Roadmap plus vendor oversight, steering of your external developers, and a say in technical hiring.

Async by defaultOne call a week at most, a written backlog in between, no ad-hoc pings.

Three companies at a timeYou are hiring a person, not a studio. My attention is the product.

Honest first callThe first conversation is a video call. If I cannot help, I say so on that call.

Who I am

I founded Belighted in 2008 and ran it for eighteen years: a Belgian software studio of twenty people that shipped web applications for companies across Europe and North America. I have sat on the vendor side of hundreds of technology decisions made by owners who had nobody technical in the room. That is the seat I now take, on their side.

Today I embed in owner-led companies in manufacturing, distribution and services, on the decisions that decide what the next five years cost: which systems to keep, which to replace, what to build, and who to trust to do it.

Let's talk about your company

Thirty minutes on video. Bring the decision you are stuck on; I will tell you how I would approach it.

Book a 30-minute call

Not ready for a call? I write about these decisions on LinkedIn.