About Sharkitect Digital

No hype. We teach you how it works.

We're an AI transformation consulting firm. If you've been looking at a fractional COO or an operations consultant, you're in the right neighborhood. Same work, except we build the systems instead of becoming one more person the business depends on.

Most agencies grow by selling you more. We'd rather make the thing you already have work. That means our best month is one where we recommend less than you expected.

Book the Architecture Assessment See the proof

$250. After the session, we send you a written report: what's slowing you down, what it costs, and what we'd fix first. The $250 credits in full toward the first work you hire us for.

What's the catch?

We charge because a free session has to end in a pitch to pay for itself.

Some of what we find, you can do yourself. We'll show you how. It's your system. You deserve to understand how it runs. What's genuinely beyond you, we build, and the $250 credits toward it. If you'd rather not touch any of it, we'll handle the whole thing.

Comic in three panels. A salesman wheels a tower of software boxes up to a tired owner at her desk. Then Chris sits beside her and sketches her week as a simple flowchart while the boxes sit unused. Then she explains the same chart to her own team on a whiteboard while Chris heads out the door, smiling.

The founder

Christopher Sharkey spent a decade finding what was broken in hospitals.

Christopher Sharkey, Founder and CEO of Sharkitect Digital — Christopher Sharkey, Founder & CEO

Before Sharkitect Digital, Chris worked for about ten years as a healthcare Performance Improvement Specialist. The job is exactly what it sounds like: go into a working operation, find where it's failing, and fix the root cause rather than the symptom everyone is complaining about.

Hospitals are an unforgiving place to learn that skill. The processes are complicated, the people are busy, the stakes are real, and nobody has time for a consultant with a slide deck and a theory. You learn to watch how work actually moves, not how the manual says it moves, and to tell the difference between a problem and a symptom of one.

During that decade he contributed to a documented interpreter-services improvement that produced significant efficiency gains and cost savings, and helped earn the hospital the 2014 HIMSS Davies Award, a national recognition for using health IT to measurably improve outcomes.

Contracting businesses turned out to have the same disease as hospital departments: good people, working hard, inside a process nobody designed on purpose. The industry changed. The job didn't.

The Good Doctor rule

Imagine a doctor who prescribed before examining you. You'd leave. It would not matter how good the medicine was.

That is how most of this industry sells software. The diagnosis is a sales call with a diagram at the end, and the prescription was decided before you walked in, because the vendor only sells one thing, so the answer is always that thing.

We run it the other way, which is why every engagement starts with an Architecture Assessment and why there's no buy button anywhere on this site. We map how your business actually runs, find where work leaks, and prescribe the smallest fix that closes the biggest gap. Sometimes that's a system we build. Sometimes it's two settings in software you already own, and we tell you that and go home.

That has happened. We count it as a win, because the alternative (selling a business a system it didn't need) is the specific thing this company exists not to do.

How we work

Assess

60 to 90 minutes mapping how your business runs today. Afterwards, we send you a written report of what's breaking and what we'd fix first, yours whether or not you hire us.

Build inside your workflow

We plan the fix with your team, then build it into the tools they already use. Replacing software that already works is expensive.

Fix one thing at a time

The first build goes live 30 to 45 days from signing, sometimes sooner. We look at the numbers together as each fix goes live, and the next fix starts once the last one is working.

Stay until it runs without you

We stay through the hard part, when real work turns up cases nobody planned for. Your team learns the system as we build it, until the business runs without you, then without us.

An educated client makes the best partner.

This is a belief, not a marketing line, and it has a practical consequence: we explain things we could have kept opaque.

An owner who understands how their business and its systems work makes better decisions. When we suggest the next improvement, you can see for yourself why it would work, and you decide with the full picture instead of taking our word for it. Over time you stop needing us for the things your team can now do. That is a worse short-term business model and a much better long-term one.

It's also why our writing gives away the method. If you read our guides and go fix your own bottleneck without hiring anyone, that's a fine outcome. You'll know who to call when the next one is bigger than a weekend.

What we will tell you that others won't

When you don't need us. If the Assessment finds a working operation, the report says so and lists the settings worth turning on in software you already own.
When a cheap tool beats a custom build. Sometimes the right answer is an off-the-shelf product for a small monthly fee. We'll name it. That costs us a build and keeps your money where it belongs.
When the problem isn't the one you came in with. Most businesses convinced they need more leads discover the leads they already get go unanswered for hours. Cheaper to fix than a marketing budget.
When a partnership doesn't fit you yet. We work best with owner-run businesses of 5 to 30 people and $1M to $10M in revenue. If a partnership doesn't fit you yet, we'll tell you, and there is still a path: start with the Task Sorter and the guides, and grow into it.