Advise the board, hold the CTO or CPO seat, stand up the engineering department, or write the code. One senior technology director who flexes to the problem, with a company behind him that delivers more than one person's hours. Most fractional CTOs sell one mode; you get the one your business actually needs, from the same person, as the problem changes. That is how software stops being a risk and starts growing the business.
PIMASI gives founders, owner-led software businesses and their boards one senior technology director in the mode the business needs: the fractional CTO or CPO seat, technical advisory to the board, bespoke software built by the person who made the calls, or an engineering team hired and run. Three service lines, one front door, one senior leader accountable for the outcome.
Technology director, founder of PIMASI
15+ years as software engineer, architect, and engineering leader across FinTech, PropTech, and AI-native tooling, including PrimaryBid, Keyzy and LSEG.
Simon fronts every engagement. Sometimes that is advising the board. Sometimes it is the calls a CTO or CPO makes: architecture, build-vs-buy, what to build next. Sometimes it is writing the code itself. PIMASI's capacity is not limited to his hours: he designs and leads the work, and the company delivers the build and the team management behind him.
He currently holds a technical-adviser seat with a UK software company and is listed in Connectd's portfolio of board advisers and fractional consultants.
Simon on LinkedIn
Owners and founders rarely arrive with a codebase problem. They arrive having lost confident judgement over their software, and every standard response (replacing the team, hiring more, buying more tooling) has failed to restore it.
Headcount has gone up. Contractor invoices have gone up. The roadmap has not. Sprints close, demos look fine, and you have no calibrated reference inside the business for what the team's spend should be buying. AI tooling has widened that gap, not closed it.
Whether to rewrite the codebase. Whether to hire a senior or three juniors. Whether a vendor quote is reasonable. The questions land on your desk because someone has to make the call, and you have nothing inside the business that can tell you the right answer.
You can interview developers. You cannot reliably tell a strong senior from a confident one. The cost of getting this hire wrong is six months and a stalled roadmap, not just one salary.
Your go-to-market is ready. The product is not. Every week the build slips is revenue you cannot recover.
The first version closed the first cohort of customers. The codebase cannot absorb the pivot, the second cohort, or the next investor demo. A rebuild has already been mentioned.
The product works, but it cannot carry the next stage. Performance, downtime, or fragility is the reason expansion plans are on hold.
PIMASI is a technology leadership and engineering company. The front door to all of it is Simon's seat: fractional CTO and CPO, with board advisory as its advisory mode. Engagements run from a few hours of advisory a week to a department stood up and run, never staff-augmentation by the day.
Simon's own seat: technical and product leadership on a fractional basis. Direction, architecture under uncertainty, the roadmap and what-to-build calls, technical due diligence on rebuilds and acquisitions, hiring, and representing technology to the board and investors. Technical advisory to boards is the advisory mode of the same seat: senior technical judgement without an operating role.
Proof-of-concepts, MVPs, production systems. Simon personally writes code in every engagement that needs it, solo if sized for it, alongside the founder or team if not, and PIMASI's build capacity extends past him. Code in the codebase when the fastest way to move the business is to build it, not brief it.
Hiring on signal not CV, structure, practices, and day-to-day management of the engineering function, up to standing up a department from nothing. Simon designs and leads it; PIMASI supplies and runs the capacity. A calibrated read on whether the team is performing and what an AI-augmented team should be producing.
Most fractional CTOs sell one mode. Here the seat, the build and the team come from one company, with the same senior technology director at the front as the problem changes. No advisor-to-builder handoff. No second invoice.
Names withheld. The metrics are exact. Each engagement was a different mix of the seat and the build, sized to the business and the moment. In every one, Simon made the calls and wrote the code.
The founder needed market validation and a working prototype ready for the moment a discovery call turned serious. PIMASI built the entire MVP solo, in parallel with the founder running discovery.
Inside three months: a signed Letter of Intent and a pilot agreement.
Service line: Bespoke build
The roadmap was driven by guesses, not customer signal. PIMASI joined the founder's sales calls, distilled feedback into a roadmap, and worked alongside the founder on the build.
Sellable MVP shipped in six months, with a roadmap drawn directly from buyer conversations.
Service line: CTO and CPO seat, bespoke build
Every engagement starts the same way, whatever mode it ends up needing. You always know what the next step is, how long it takes, and what you walk away with.
Free. Thirty minutes.
No slides, no pitch. One question: is the Technical/Strategic Review the right next step for the decision in front of you. When it is not, you hear that on the call.
Two weeks. Fixed fee, agreed on the call.
One senior technology director inside your codebase, team and roadmap, then a written verdict you own outright. It is useful if you never speak to PIMASI again.
In the mode the Read named. The Read's fee is credited against it.
A proposal that opens on the Read's findings, not a cold document: advise the board, hold the CTO or CPO seat, stand up the department, or write the code. When the Read says you do not need PIMASI yet, that is the answer you get.
Boardroom, hiring panel, or pull request: the same senior technology director is at the front of all of it, with a company behind him for the build and the team. No advisor-to-builder handoff to translate across, no warm bodies by the day.
Every engagement is built to leave the business treating software as a lever, not a risk. Success is defined up front and measured against the business, not the backlog.
If something is the wrong call, including hiring me, I will tell you. The engagements that should not exist are the most expensive ones to discover halfway through.
A fractional CTO is senior engineering leadership without a full-time hire. Here is what the role really covers, and the signals that tell you it is time.
ReadA CTO consultant can be an advisor, a seat, a department build or a delivery team. Four buys under one label, and how a UK owner works out which one to buy.
ReadYou cannot judge an estimate you could not have produced. Evaluate a software development quote on the five things it must name, and what a missing one costs.
ReadThirty minutes. No slides, no pitch. We talk through your situation and whether the Technical/Strategic Review is the right next step.
Book the exploratory callNot ready for a call? Email [email protected]
