FAQ

What makes you any different to your competitors?
The range of technical skills and experience at Coalesce are comparable with those of a team you might get if you went to the large technical consultancies, but at the price range that you might find at smaller design houses and consultancies. Of course you don’t always get a good team when you go to the larger consultancies but you can be sure of paying higher fee rates!

Aren’t you too small to take on large projects?
Not at all. We maintain a core of product development expertise in an efficient, focused team. This keeps us lean and agile and allows us to provide a first class service at competitive prices. We have a network of associates – other experienced product developers and some specialists (physicists, chemists, electronics and software experts) – who can bolster our team as and when required. We don’t want to compromise our ability to excel so, if we’re too busy to take on a large project , we’ll happily recommend companies that may have the capacity to help.

How do you deal with the risk of over-run?
At the quotation stage we use a familiar time x rate model in order that our clients can compare our costs with those of our competitors. However, this is where the comparison ends. Once timescales and costs have been agreed, the Project Manager’s primary focus is ensuring that project milestones are achieved and that deliverables meet or exceed the client’s expectations. If this means that from time to time we spend more effort than anticipated on a project, then our innovative and flexible internal accounting systems can cope with this. We take this approach because we believe that optimising client satisfaction leads to mutually richer, and more productive relationships.

What are your fee rates?
Precise fee rates are always related to the size of the project and the associated risks and always subject to some negotiation. However a good rule of thumb is that we are about two-thirds of what you’d expect to pay at a large technical consultancy. We can operate profitably at these rates because of our optimised structure. By ensuring that we are not ‘top heavy’, our clients get excellent value.

So you don’t all work in the same office, isn’t this a huge barrier to effective collaboration?
We’ve all worked in office environments and it’s true that they can sometimes be stimulating hot houses of innovation. It’s not always the case though. They can also be distracting, expensive to run and difficult to get to. These days we spend virtually no time in traffic and this benefits our quality of life and crucially the quality of our work. We use cutting edge digital collaboration tools and all of our data sits on a professionally managed server with very high levels of encryption and daily backup, so we have no concerns over security. But the best thing is that it is really fun and hasn’t hampered our working practices one bit. Aren’t you jealous?

Can you show me some of your work?
Many of our clients are understandably very protective of their emerging technologies so it can be years before we are able to talk openly about some projects or show images on our website. We recognise this as an issue whilst we are becoming established but it needn’t be an insurmountable hurdle. You can see some examples of recent projects in the news and articles section and we will endeavour to keep this regularly updated. Of course, we would love to come and talk to you about projects that we have contributed to over the years and show you some of our work which pre-dates Coalesce but is now in the public domain. This will give a very strong impression of our expertise. We can also talk you though the kind of projects Coalesce has been working on but we cannot reveal sensitive or specific information. We hope that you will find this refusal to transgress the terms of our confidentiality agreements reassuring!

What about my IP?
Our service agreements ensure that the rights to all IP generated during a project, by Coalesce staff or its associates, are automatically assigned to the company and thence, via contracts to the client. We would only ever consider changing this clear approach to intellectual property where a client specifically wanted to negotiate a reduction in rates for a share in IP. To be absolutely clear, exploiting IP is not part of Coalesce’s business model and is another of our differentiators.

I’m skint, can you do some work for nothing?
If you have a genuinely altruistic, revolutionary idea then we’d love to hear about it and help you! However, if you have a business idea that needs our expertise and no funds to pay us with then we are still interested to hear it. We’re open to shared risk approaches but we will always need to balance the proportion of our resources we commit to these endeavours with more straight forward, fee earning work. We’ve all got kids to feed.