Company
The person you meet is the person on the work.
XONIK is a group. Four services, four platforms of our own, and three businesses selling packaged work. What holds across all of it is that senior people scope your work and stay on it until you own it.
Read something we published →XONIK is a group rather than a single firm. Four services sold and delivered by the same senior people, four platforms built out of what kept recurring across engagements, and three independent businesses selling packaged work at published prices. Founded 2006, working across North America, Europe, MENA and Asia-Pacific.
How the firm is built
Concentrated by design, and senior all the way down.
The structure follows the work rather than the other way round.
Most of an engagement is judgement — what to build, who will own it, and what a regulator will ask for eighteen months later. That judgement does not transfer to somebody who joined in week three, which is why large delivery pyramids struggle with exactly this kind of work.
So we run it differently. The practitioner who scopes an engagement leads it to handover, and the specialists who join are named, senior, and known to us before they start.
That scales further than people assume. A programme with several workstreams runs the same way — a senior lead on each, coordinating directly rather than through an account layer that translates between you and the people doing the work. Size is not the constraint. Whether the work is the kind we do well is.
What it does not do is put junior people on your problem and charge you for the learning.
What this costs us. The ability to bid on volume. We price on the shape of the work rather than bodies in seats, which loses us the tenders scored on headcount and wins us the ones scored on who is actually in the room.
What the group is
Three ways the same work reaches you.
The discipline is identical across all three. What differs is how the work is bought and who delivers it.
Services
Advisory, research and delivery. Scoped in writing, quoted before anything starts, and led by the person who scoped it.
Products
Four platforms, built out of problems we had already solved by hand more than once. Each runs inside real work before it ships.
Ventures
Three businesses selling defined work at a published price. No scoping call, no proposal. It starts this week.
Who leads it
The person you meet is the person on the work.
Not a leadership page. This is who you will be dealing with.
Most of what I do now is not technical. It is the part before the build: who accepts the output, what they need in order to, what happens to a case when they refuse, and what a regulator will ask for eighteen months later.
That work is unglamorous and it is where deployments actually stop. I spent long enough watching capable teams build correct systems that nobody would sign for to be fairly certain the problem is rarely the technology.
I write the field reports and the research here myself, including the ones that conclude a client should do less than they were planning. Those are the ones worth writing.
The record
What you can check.
A firm that only lists its strengths is a firm whose claims you have no way to calibrate.
Field reports and research, written here under our own names, each with its method and its limits stated. The clearest way to judge whether we think usefully about this work is to read one and disagree with it.
Anonymised engagement detail — what the situation was, what we did, what it cost, and what did not work. Given on a call in enough detail to be useful and not enough to identify anyone.
Client references. Much of our work sits inside operations that would rather not be described publicly. We ask, and where a client is willing we introduce you directly.
Independent citation — the strongest signal there is, and the one nobody can buy. We are building it the only way it can be built: by publishing work other people find worth citing.
How we work
Four things that do not change.
Stated identically on every engagement page, which is the only way to know they are real.
Senior people, from scope to handover
The practitioner who scoped the work leads it. Nobody is introduced to your problem after the contract is signed.
Everything runs on your accounts
Your commercial keys, under zero-retention terms. No client data passes through our infrastructure and nothing trains a public model.
Full ownership on completion
Into accounts you control. Nothing is held elsewhere and nothing is engineered to require us afterwards.
We say when something is not worth doing
Including when the honest answer is that your team can handle it, or that the tool you need already exists.
Where we are. We work across North America, Europe, MENA and Asia-Pacific. Time overlaps are arranged around your team, and on-site where an engagement calls for it.
Worth saying
We turn down work we could do, when it is work that should not be done.
A decision already made and looking for validation. A system nobody in the organisation will own. A rewrite that would take eighteen months and did not need starting.
All of those are engagements we are capable of running and would be paid well for. Saying so on the first call costs us the fee and saves you the quarter, and it is the judgement you are actually hiring.
Elsewhere in the company
Four things this page does not cover.
Partners
Working under your name, or alongside you. No referral fees in either direction.
Investors
What is being built, what it would take, and what would prove the thesis wrong.
Careers
No open roles today. What we look for when there are.
Contact
One person reads everything that arrives.
Frequently asked
What people ask first.
How large is the team?
Deliberately concentrated and entirely senior, with named specialists brought in where an engagement calls for them. You are told who is on your work and why before they start.
Can you handle a large programme?
Yes. A multi-workstream programme runs the same way a single engagement does — a senior lead on each stream, coordinating directly rather than through an account layer. Scale changes the number of streams, not the model.
Who will actually do our work?
The practitioner who scoped it, from scope to handover, with specialists named in advance. There is no bench you meet later and no handover from the person who understood the problem.
Who owns the work?
You do, in full, into your own accounts on completion. Nothing is held back and nothing is built to require us afterwards.
Can we speak to a past client?
Where a client has agreed, we introduce you directly. Otherwise we walk through an anonymised engagement in detail on a call, including the parts that did not work.
Where are you based?
We work across North America, Europe, MENA and Asia-Pacific, remote by default, with overlaps arranged around your team and on-site where the work calls for it. The registered entity and its address are on the Trust Center.
Tell us what needs to happen.
Thirty minutes with the person who would lead the work. You describe the situation; we tell you what it would take, who would be on it, and what we would do first.