Fractional CTO + Platform
Technology leadership for your business, with the platform to run it.
A senior technology leader on your team part-time, and EmpireVault set up, migrated, and run with your people. The platform is included for the full engagement. When it ends, you keep the system.
Who This Is For
Owner-led businesses of roughly five to fifty people with no technical leader on staff, where customer-facing work still runs on a mix of spreadsheets, a shared inbox, a scheduling link, and a couple of point tools. Professional services, trades, agencies, clinics, and the firms in between. If you have an engineering team, our Fractional CTO tiers are the better fit.
Sound familiar?
- Leads sit in an inbox that nobody owns, and some get answered days later or never.
- Quotes are built in Word, sent by email, and chased by memory.
- Bookings take three emails each and still get double-booked.
- You have three tools that do not talk to each other, and a spreadsheet that ties them together.
- You are the IT department, and every software decision lands on your desk.
What changes
- Every lead lands on a customer record and gets an answer inside fifteen minutes, automatically.
- Quotes go out the same day, get signed online, and turn into contracts and invoices without retyping.
- Customers book themselves against your real availability.
- Email, chat, tickets, quotes, and history live on one record per customer.
- Someone senior owns the technology decisions, and it is not you.
What You Get
Two things at once: the leadership a growing business needs, and the operating platform to act on it. The platform is included at no additional charge for the full engagement.
Leadership
- A technology plan tied to your business goals, not to a vendor’s roadmap.
- Vendor, software, and IT decisions made with you, with the reasons written down.
- A security baseline: single sign-on or MFA, backups, and an access review.
- A weekly working session and a monthly leadership review.
- Hiring and outsourcing decisions when the business needs technical people.
Platform
- EmpireVault, every module, for your whole team, for the full term.
- Configured for how you actually work: your pipeline stages, your quote templates, your service levels.
- Your contacts, deals, and history migrated, with a data-quality report you sign off.
- Website chat, lead forms, and a booking page live on your site.
- Your team trained and running it before we step back.
The 90-Day Plan
Every engagement starts with the same twelve-week rollout. It is the playbook we used to build EmpireVault itself, and it is the reason a Launch engagement can commit to outcomes rather than hours.
Weeks 1 to 2
Discovery and design
How work flows today, what to keep, what to replace, and the plan in writing.
Weeks 3 to 5
CRM and inbox live
Contacts and deals migrated, customer email on the record, the team using it daily.
Weeks 6 to 8
Website and scheduling
Chat, lead forms, and the booking page live on your site, every lead answered automatically.
Weeks 9 to 11
Quotes, helpdesk, automations
Quotes and e-signature, support tickets on a service level, the first automations running.
Week 12
Handoff and training
Written operating guide, admin credentials with your named admin, team trained.
Read the build story: how we took EmpireVault from concept to production in 90 days.
What We Commit To
Every Launch engagement is complete when these are true, and we keep working at no additional charge until they are.
- Every web lead gets a response within fifteen minutes in business hours, automatically, and lands on a customer record.
- Every customer email for your named mailboxes sits on the customer’s record, next to their chats, quotes, and tickets.
- Bookings run through your own scheduling page. No back-and-forth email.
- Your contacts and open deals are migrated, with a written data-quality report you have signed off.
- The people you name can add a contact, log a call, send a quote, and find a customer’s history without asking us.
We do not promise revenue, lead volume, or growth. Those depend on your market and your team. We promise the system that makes them possible is live, used, and yours.
Three Shapes
Same playbook, three sizes. All three include EmpireVault, every module, for your whole team, for the full term. Term lengths match our standard three, six, and twelve-month contracts.
90 days · about 20 hours a month
Launch
One system of record, live and used daily.
- CRM, unified inbox, website chat and forms, scheduling
- Data migrated from up to two sources
- Two automations, team trained, written operating guide
- Weekly working session
At the end: Care Plan or subscription.
6 months · about 40 hours a month
Operate
Customer operations running end to end on one platform.
- Everything in Launch
- Helpdesk, knowledge base, customer portal
- Quotes to contracts with e-signature, email campaigns, reporting
- Security baseline: SSO or MFA, backups, access review
- Weekly session plus a monthly leadership review
At the end: Care Plan or subscription.
12 months · 40 to 80 hours a month
Transform
Your technology function led and operated; the business runs on the platform.
- Everything in Operate
- Integrations: API, webhooks, Slack, telephony
- AI automations, vendor and hiring decisions
- Board-level reporting, technology budget ownership
- Weekly session, monthly review, quarterly plan
At the end: steps down to Advisory plus a Care Plan, or subscription.
What It Costs
Every Fractional CTO + Platform engagement is scoped to your business, so we quote after a free discovery call. As a guide, a typical six-month Operate engagement, about 40 hours a month of CTO time with EmpireVault for your whole team included, runs around $8,200 a month. Launch engagements are shorter and smaller; Transform engagements are larger. Your quote is fixed for the term, billed monthly (Launch bills by milestone), and the platform is included at no additional charge.
When the engagement ends you continue on a Care Plan, typically around $1,200 a month including six hours of our time, or on a standard EmpireVault subscription at $39 per seat per month, locked for a year.
Want to see how the numbers are built? The pricing page has the calculator behind every quote.
What Happens When the Engagement Ends
The end is planned from the start, so nothing is orphaned on the last day.
Sixty days out
We plan the handoff together: confirm who is using the system (every user your team added during the term is included, so this is the first time seats are counted), agree the date, and choose between a Care Plan and a standard subscription.
Thirty days out
Billing details collected, the subscription set up to start on the end date, operating guide and admin credentials confirmed with your named admin.
Care Plan
The subscription plus a few hours a month of our time for configuration changes, new automations, new users, and questions; a quarterly review; and a named person who answers.
Or a standard subscription
EmpireVault at $39 per seat per month, every module, price locked for twelve months. The system, the data, and the configuration are yours either way. If you decide to stop, you get a full export and thirty days of read-only access to take it.
A Word About the Platform
We built EmpireVault. The person leading your engagement knows every screen, and the configuration patterns we work out with you make the platform better for the next business. It also means we have an interest in you keeping it, so you should know two things. The engagement costs the same whether you keep EmpireVault afterwards or not. And if it turns out to be the wrong fit for your business, we will say so and set you up on something that is.
Delivering a platform with implementation is not new for us: Selbytech is also an authorized VergeOS reseller and implementer.
Questions We Get Asked
Can we just buy EmpireVault without an engagement?
Yes. Start a 21-day free trial at empirevault.com, every module included, $39 per seat per month after. If you want help setting it up but do not need a technology leader, Selbytech also offers a two-week setup engagement from $3,000.
What if we already have a CRM?
We look at it during discovery. If it is working, we keep it and connect it. If it is the thing holding you back, we migrate it into EmpireVault with a data-quality report you sign off before anything goes live. Migration from up to two sources is included in every Launch engagement.
What happens to our data if we stop?
It is yours. You can export everything at any time at no charge, you keep thirty days of read-only access after the engagement ends, and nothing is ever copied into a Selbytech system. Your data lives in your own isolated EmpireVault tenant from day one.
Who does the work?
Selbytech is a small practice led by David Selby, who leads every engagement personally: discovery, design, the weekly working session, and every technology decision. Configuration, migration, and training are done by the practice under his direction, to the same written playbook every time.
How is this different from hiring an agency?
An agency builds something and leaves. A fractional CTO is accountable for outcomes and stays for the term, sits in your weekly session, and makes the decisions an owner should not have to make alone. Because the platform is ours, there is no third-party vendor to chase when something needs to change. And the goal from week one is to leave you running it yourself.
Do we need to be technical?
No. This offer exists for businesses without a technical leader. What we need from you is an owner who shows up to a weekly session and makes decisions, and a couple of people who will use the system every day.
Start With a Discovery Call
Thirty minutes, no cost, no obligation. You leave with a written view of what we would build first and what it would cost.