The senior data and AI head you can't yet justify hiring. Fractional, mentorship, a fixed sprint, or hands-on build support. Pick the shape that fits where you are.
Pick the shape that matches where you are. All four sit alongside my enterprise work and bring the same rigour at founder scale.
For founders who need a senior data head, not a full hire.
I sit inside the business part-time and ongoing: in the key meetings, on the tooling, on the AI calls you're not sure how to make. Better decisions from the numbers you already have, and a team that knows what to do with them.
2 to 4 days per month · Minimum 3 months
For founders making data, systems and AI calls on their own.
A monthly conversation with someone who's led this work before. Which tools are worth the money, what the numbers are telling you, reporting your team will actually use, and where AI fits at your stage.
Monthly sessions, with support between calls.
For founders who need an answer fast.
Four to six weeks on what you've got, what's missing and what's worth doing next. You leave with an ordered list of moves and a clear place to start. Keep me on after, or take it and run.
4 to 6 weeks · Fixed scope.
For founders with the plan who need it built.
Tool choices, build oversight, migration, keeping suppliers honest. I work next to your team so what ships is what you agreed. Same standard as the enterprise work, sized for you.
Scoped to the build.
For founders with one decision to settle.
90 minutes · £150 · For Founders, business & Leaders with a specific data, systems or transformation decision. Pre-read, recorded session, written follow-up.
Single session · Book direct.
Six calls you'll need to make in your first year of scale. Short and direct, written for founders who'd rather decide once than dither for a quarter.
Drop your email. The PDF will download straight away and I'll email you a copy too.
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Founders come to me when they're trying to make sense of messy or siloed business data, choose and implement the right tech stack for their stage, or build reporting and dashboards that actually drive decisions.
We work through where AI adds real value versus where it's noise, how to create data processes that scale with the business, and how to prepare data infrastructure ahead of funding rounds or audits.
I've worked with founders across tech, creative, professional services, e-commerce, health and social impact. A few of those in practice.
A property data product growing fast with no data strategy underneath it. Information across five tools, no agreed source of truth, no view on whether AI mattered here.
Mapped what they had, found the gaps costing real time, left them a 90-day plan they could run themselves. They stopped chasing tools.
A boutique consultancy going into a funding round unable to answer investor questions on revenue by service line, retention or pipeline.
A four-week sprint: audit, gaps, prioritised roadmap with costs. They went in with a credible data story for the first time.
Revenue across newsletters, events and brand partnerships, with no view on which stream was worth backing. Every call came down to instinct because nobody trusted the numbers.
Defined the metrics that mattered, pulled audience and revenue into one place, built reporting that made the business legible to them and to partners.
A founder-led product brand selling well with scattered data. Shopify, email and paid all ran separately, so budget calls were guesswork.
Scoped and oversaw a unified analytics build. One view of where customers came from, what they cost, and which products drove repeat purchase.
Stack · BigQuery, Looker Studio
An early-stage health platform heading into a Series A with messy data and no way to produce the metrics investors kept asking for.
Built the reporting infrastructure from scratch: data model, reporting layer, a metrics framework their team could own. They closed the round.
Stack · Dynamics 365, Power BI
A fast-growing agency with plenty of operational data and no way to use it. Profitability, resourcing and client reporting all in spreadsheets nobody trusted.
Fractional AI and data lead for four months. Systems audited, everything in one reporting environment, dashboards the team used. No full-time hire needed.
A four-module platform so residents could be heard and organisations had the data to act on what they heard.
Owned the full product strategy from blank page to submission. The bid secured £285,000 from the Social Housing Innovation Fund.
A SaaS founder who knew AI belonged on the roadmap but couldn't say what to build, or when.
An AI readiness audit across product, operations and data. A short list: build now, park, leave alone. They got back to shipping.
I run Stratford Ellis, a small UK consultancy that gets brought in when the data or the systems matter, and the project can't afford to fall over. Most of that work is with bigger organisations: messy migrations, regulated change, the kind of thing a board is watching.
The founder work sits alongside it. Smaller, often quicker, and honestly the part I enjoy most. The decisions are real, the budgets are tight, and you see the change land in weeks rather than quarters.
I've built AI-backed platforms, written the kind of specs that get funded, and walked teams through data problems most people would rather not touch. That's what comes into the room when we work together.
I take on a small number of founder clients at any one time to protect the quality of the work. If you're a founder trying to figure out your data, your systems or your AI strategy, and you want someone who's done this at scale and can translate it for your world, I'd like to hear from you.
Current availability · Limited spots
Fractional leadership, fixed-scope resets, advisory and independent reviews. For organisations of any size with a system to choose, a migration to land or a number that won't add up.
A handful of notes from leaders, founders and chairs I've worked alongside.
Barbs walked into a programme that had been stuck for nine months and had us all reading off the same page inside a fortnight. The plan we left with was the one we actually ran.
She tells you what she thinks. No fluff, no vendor agenda. Our board got a read on our data we could finally act on, and a short list of fixes we could start on Monday.
Having Barbs in the room changed how we made the call. She knew the context from month two and saved us from at least one expensive mistake on the systems side.