Fair questions. Answered honestly.
Straight answers about the Business Architect seat: what it covers, what it costs, how the assessment works, and how the exit works. If your question is not here, the 15-minute conversation is free.
Nobody reads an FAQ for fun. You are deciding whether to trust us.
So these are the real questions: the ones people raise on calls, roughly in the order they raise them. What the seat is. What it costs. Who approves the spending. What happens when you want out. Including the ones that are uncomfortable to ask a firm about itself.
They are answered the way we would answer them on a call, which means a few of them end badly for us. If you already have strong technology and marketing leadership in house, you should not buy this seat and the answer below says so. An advisor who cannot tell you when to walk away is not much use to you when the stakes are higher.
Everything prospective clients ask. Grouped by what you actually want to know.
For the deeper treatments, see how the seat works, the plain-English explainer, and the comparison with an MSP and a full-time hire. Where a short answer is not enough, the board briefs and guides take the same questions further.
What is the Business Architect seat?
One accountable seat on your leadership team, held by a firm rather than a single person, covering technology, data, growth, programs, and risk for a flat monthly fee. It starts from the outcome you need and works back to what the organization has to be able to do. You already have people who run the network, the website, the database, and the books; every one of them does their box well. Nobody starts from the outcome you actually need and works back across all of it. That is the seat. Decisions, not tickets; direction, not production.
How can one seat cover five domains?
Because a firm holds the seat, not a person, and because the seat is fixed at four questions deep in every one of them: what should we do, what should it cost, who should do it, and is it working. That is executive judgment, and it is a different job from doing the work. Anything deeper is a project or a specialist, and we will tell you which.
Isn't this just a generalist?
The specialty is the seams. Your IT provider is excellent at the network and structurally cannot care whether it fits your CRM. Your agency is excellent at the campaign and will not ask what it writes into your client record. Somebody has to hold the whole, and that is a discipline, not a shortage of one.
We already have an IT company and a marketing agency. Why would we need this?
Keep them. We are the one who manages them, checks their bills, and holds them to the work. The seat sits above your providers, not beside them. You can replace any of them without ever touching us.
Where does an engagement start?
With the Business Architecture Assessment: a fixed fee, quoted before work begins, no overages. It looks across all five domains and ends in the architecture map, a ranked risk register, a systems, provider, and channel inventory, and a prioritized roadmap your board can act on. From there, every engagement moves through the same arc, Assess, Transform, Lead, and stops wherever you want it to: fixed-scope Transform projects execute the findings, and the recurring seat keeps them current.
Do we have to buy anything after the assessment?
No. The assessment stands alone, and sometimes its finding is "you are fine, buy nothing." It is priced so that answer never costs us anything, which is exactly what makes the findings worth trusting.
Who approves spending and changes?
You do. We recommend; your leadership approves. No dollar is spent and no system is changed without your say-so, and any recommendation you decline is written down as a documented, accepted risk, so responsibility always tracks authority.
What does the seat look like month to month?
A standing cadence: a monthly working session with your leadership, a quarterly board-ready Executive Brief, an annual budget build and re-assessment, and decision support when a contract is up, a vendor is pitching, or a board question needs an answer. On paper, you get what the engagement actually calls for rather than a fixed package: for most that begins with the architecture map, a ranked risk register, and an integrated roadmap, with a provider and spend ledger and an executive brief added where they earn their place.
Does the seat handle help-desk tickets or emergencies?
No tickets. The seat is decisions, not maintenance. That work belongs to your IT provider, and we hold them to it. For emergencies we hold an escalation protocol, not a pager: in a business-threatening incident, your Business Architect coordinates the response and the communication while the operational hands do the work.
What does the seat cost?
A flat monthly retainer, quoted as one number after the assessment. The assessment tells us what the seat must actually govern: how many systems, how much data, how large a constituency, what compliance exposure. The retainer reflects that. It is not an hourly rate, a block of hours, or a menu of services. Every engagement includes the entire seat; what varies is the size and complexity of the organization being governed.
Why not hire a full-time director instead?
You could, and you would get one discipline at mid level. The seat is five at executive level, with no benefits, severance, or search fee, working in weeks instead of after a months-long search, and endable in 60 days. If you already have strong technology and marketing leadership in house, you should not buy this seat, and we will say so.
That is a lot per month. How do we justify it?
It is a fraction of the executives it replaces: covering a full-time CIO and CMO, plus any data or AI leadership, runs comfortably north of $450,000 a year. And one prevented mistake, whether a bad renewal caught, a breach avoided, or a system bought that nobody could use, can cover a large part of the year.
Why is the website, or any other build, billed separately?
Because the seat is judgment and a build is production. An architect decides what the building should be, specifies it, and inspects the work; the construction crew is a separate cost. Folding production into a flat monthly fee would either balloon the fee to cover work you may not need or turn your advisor into a bottleneck. Keeping them separate keeps the monthly fee honest, and every project is fixed scope, fixed fee, and yours outright when it ships.
How do we know your advice is independent?
Because it is a written policy, not a promise, and we show it to any client who asks. We accept no referral fees, commissions, rebates, or incentives from any vendor, agency, or tool we recommend. On marketing: no media commissions and no markup on advertising spend, ever. And a recommendation is never contingent on us doing the work. You can implement with VCS, an outside provider, or your own team.
Why is the engagement designed around a year, and can we end it?
Because executive governance needs enough time to establish a baseline, implement a roadmap, and measure the outcome. We plan around a 12-month horizon, but either party may end the engagement with 60 days' written notice, at any time, and you keep everything, because you owned it all along: data, accounts, systems, brand, domains, and documentation, in your name from day one. A full-time executive cannot be dismissed that easily. The exit is the proof we are not taking over.
What happens if our Business Architect is unavailable?
The knowledge lives in artifacts, not in one person's head. The architecture map, the roadmap, the decision log, and the registers are documents a successor can pick up, which is exactly the continuity risk you already carry with any single in-house hire.
We just lost our only technology or marketing person. How fast can the seat start?
Within weeks, and the vacated seat is one of the most common ways clients arrive. A 15-minute conversation, a fixed-fee assessment quoted before work begins, and the seat established at the readout, if you choose it. Executive leadership restored at a fraction of the cost of the hire you just lost, without the months-long search or the six-month ramp.
Are you eligible for government set-asides, and where do you work?
Yes. V Consulting Services is an SBA-certified WOSB, WBENC-certified, SAM.gov active, and City of Atlanta FBE/SBE certified, eligible for federal set-aside awards and open to teaming with prime contractors; the Government page has the details. We are headquartered at 1 Concourse Pkwy, Suite 800, Atlanta, GA 30328, serving metro Atlanta in person and the United States remotely.