01
High freq · Low risk
Automate First
Happens every day, cheap to get wrong. These wins stack up fastest.
e.g. invoice chasing · meeting notes · inbox sorting
Greycell Technical · For owner-managed engineering & technical firms
Out of the bottleneck. We work alongside you for a year, turning your senior judgement into a system your firm runs without you. Senior-grade work, without you in every decision.
We run our firm on the systems we sell. You can watch our own numbers, live, before you believe a word we say. Open the live tracker →
The honest version
A £20 AI subscription will not give you your Saturdays back. It will cost you more of them.
You buy the seat. You spend your evenings learning prompts. It works for a week, then plateaus, and the quotes still land on your desk. Six months on you are back to your Saturdays, half-believing AI was overhyped. A chat window does not turn your judgement into a system. It just adds one more thing that only you know how to run.
The difference
Headroom is the system, built with you and handed over. Not another tool for you to learn.
Who this is for
This is built for one specific kind of firm.
Our work is narrow on purpose. If you don't fit, we'll tell you in the first call and refer you on.
This is for you if you run
- An owner-managed specialist engineering or technical firm
- £1m to £10m turnover
- 10 to 50 staff
- One or two senior people carrying every certificate, every bid, every judgement call (or no one senior enough yet, and you feel it)
- Desperate to hire another senior pair of hands, but you cannot quite justify the full-time cost
- Growth gated by senior judgement, not by demand
This is not for you if
- You run a SaaS or product business with no senior-engineering bottleneck
- You want a generic AI consultant selling "transformation" workshops
- You want a chatbot or a tool recommendation
- You are over 50 staff (talk to us about a larger-firm engagement separately)
One filter, stated in the open: we only take firms willing to let work ship without the owner's signature. It is the whole point of the engagement, and the guarantee depends on it, so we ask on the qualification call and we take the answer seriously. If that is not you yet, we will say so and part friendly.
What we ship to
Five owner-managers. Five outcomes. Pick the one that sounds like you.
Same 12-month engagement. Different headline outcome depending on which owner-manager you are.
The Bottleneck
Saturdays gone two years
Your weekends back permanently. Your firm grows faster than before.
Saturday · 11:42The Margin
Your specialist work commoditising
You charge premium pricing because what you ship cannot be commoditised.
The Lost-Bid
Lost a £180k framework to a larger competitor
You punch above your weight and win the frameworks that used to go to firms twice your size.
The Continuity
Two seniors retiring in 24 months
Your firm survives the senior-engineer retirement cliff with no loss of judgement.
The Exit
Firm runs on tribal knowledge
Your firm is worth more at sale, because the judgement an acquirer is buying lives in systems they keep, not in a head that can walk out the door.
What we hear
What owner-managers tell us in the first call.
"Every senior decision still flows through me."
"The firm slows when I'm out for a week."
"AI is everywhere, but I can't see what to do with it from where I'm sitting."
The usual fix
Hire another senior chartered engineer. £95,000 to £120,000 a year fully loaded (base salary plus car, health, pension). 18 months to recruit. If they leave, the judgement walks out the door with them.
Source · 2025-26 UK senior chartered engineer salary bandsEngineers.scot citing Jobted (senior 10-20 yrs, £91k mean) · Matchtech UK Energy Salary Guide 2025 (HV T&D £55-85k typical) · IET 2024 Skills & Demand in Industry Survey · Hays UK Salary Guide 2026 · National Grid / SSE / Scottish Power published bands. Plus £10-20k for car, health, pension.
What Headroom does instead
Turns the senior judgement you already have into a system the firm runs without you. £2,100 a month for the first three engagements, over a twelve-month build. Yours to keep.
Anti-froth proof
Most consultants tell you they use AI. Watch ours running.
A read-only window into the production automations Greycell runs daily inside its own firm. Hosted on a separate domain. No internal data is exposed.
Automations on the tracker
36
31 active · 3 in development · 2 broken
Senior time saved per week
28.2hrs
Active automations only
Named agents running them
9
Autonomous Agents
Active workloads
Live
CRM enrich
LinkedIn drafts
ATR scan
Markets brief
Inbox triage
Override quote
Standards audit
Board scorecard
Diagnostic
+ 27 more
Read-only view · separate domain · no internal data exposed
Open the live tracker in a new tab →
Prefer the proof in writing? Read Case Study 01: Same Login, Two Outcomes → Thirteen weeks measured inside a real firm, on one subscription.
Full live access (with internal data) is part of the Headroom engagement, not a public surface. Greycell's internal CRM and prompt library stay private by design.
The easy first step
See your own bottleneck, in 90 seconds.
The 90-Second Unlock is a short self-assessment. No call, no pricing, no pressure. It tells you exactly where your senior judgement is the choke point, and what the right next move is. That is the whole ask.
Take the 90-Second Unlock →
Prefer to talk it through? Book a 30-minute Discovery Call instead.
Free · no pricing on this step · no obligation
Want the detail first?
Below is the whole offer, laid out in the open.
If you would rather see how it works, what it costs, and the proof behind it before you take the 90-Second Unlock, read on. Then take the Unlock when you are ready.
What we do
Five steps up. One mission. The firm runs without you by month 12.
The whole ladder, in the open, prices included. Two rungs are free. Start wherever is true for you, stop wherever you like, and keep what you paid for at every rung.
00The 90-Second UnlockFree
01Introduction WorkshopFree
02Agent MOT£450
03The five-jobs survey£497
04First Agent£2,997
05Headroomfrom £2,100/mo
Start here · Free
See where your firm leans on you most
Ninety seconds, no cost. Answer five questions and find out which part of your firm still routes through you. Then book a call and a chartered engineer tells you what to do about it.
Take the 90-Second Unlock →Free
Step one · Free · Live, once a month
Meet us first, at the Introduction Workshop
A 45-minute live group session, once a month on a Thursday at 2:30pm UK, capped at ten seats so it stays useful. We walk you through what we do, how we decide where AI belongs in a technical firm, and what it is doing inside our own firm every day. No hard sell, no commitment. Come, watch it work, ask anything.
It is run by Ian Griffiths, and the premise is simple: you can watch our own AI running, live, before you believe a word we say.
Next session: once a month, on a Thursday, 2:30pm. Seats are limited to ten.
Reserve your seat →Not ready for a live session? Take the 90-Second Unlock instead
Free
Step two · £450 · For firms that already built their own
Agent MOT. Built your own agent? Get it inspected.
Plenty of firms have already built an AI agent. A workshop, a weekend, a capable engineer and a £20 subscription. The instinct is right. The risk is one engineering already understands: the easy version is confidently wrong, and a confident answer with nothing checking it is how mistakes ship.
The Agent MOT is a chartered engineer's inspection of the agent you built. Where it is right, where it is confidently wrong, what it can see that it should not, and where it needs a human gate before the consequences are real. You get a written verdict in MOT language: pass, advisories, and any faults to fix before you trust it with real work.
Workshops charge about this much to build a raw agent in a day. This is the other half of that money: finding out whether the one you built can be trusted.
Read about the Agent MOT →£450
Step three · £497 for the first three firms, then £747
The five-jobs survey
Every firm runs on five jobs: Marketing, Sales, Money, Operations, and Customer Support. In one two-hour call we survey all five and find the one most stuck on you, the work that always routes back to your desk.
Then we prove it, live. Bring one real open enquiry or tender, the one sitting on your desk right now. We put it through a live AI read in the room: what it is asking for, where the risk sits, what a first-pass answer looks like, with the reasoning shown at every step. Your own work, not a demo.
You leave with two things. The map: which of the five jobs to automate first, and why, in writing. And the proof: you have watched the method work on a live piece of your own business, before you have spent anything on a build.
To be clear about the line: £497 buys the survey and the live read. It does not buy an agent. The build is the next rung, First Agent.
Our promiseYou leave knowing exactly which job to automate first, having watched your own enquiry read live, or you do not pay.
Run by Ian Griffiths, CEng, 30 years in HV power systems and a member of British Standards development committees for earthing and lightning protection.
Book your survey call →Bigger firm? When one call cannot reach every workflow, we go wider with the Bottleneck Audit: five to eight structured interviews across the firm, written up in two weeks (£1,500-£2,500). Best for firms toward 50 staff.
£497first three firms£747 after
Step four · £2,997 · Credited in full against Headroom
First Agent. Your first agent, built.
One job. One agent. Built properly by a chartered engineer, on an AI account you own, tested on your real work, documented, and handed over so your team can run it without us.
It is deliberately small, which is what keeps it affordable and quick. Usually it is the job the five-jobs survey found, though you can come straight here if you already know where you are stuck. A human gate goes wherever the consequences are real: the agent drafts, a named person approves. It fails safe, the way your engineering already has to.
Stop here and you keep a working agent doing a real job. Go on to Headroom and the full £2,997 comes off the fee, so the bridge cost you nothing.
Read the First Agent page →£2,997credited in full
Step five · The full build · 12 months · From £2,100/mo for the first three firms, then £3,750/mo
Headroom
A full year, side by side, until the firm runs without youTwelve months working next to your team. We turn your senior judgement, the calls only you can make, into a system the firm runs without you. AI does the first pass. The chartered engineer corrects it on the page. Your client sees both.
A senior chartered engineer costs around £95,000 to £120,000 a year and takes about 18 months to find. Headroom is roughly a quarter of that, and you keep everything we build.
The guaranteeBy month 12 your firm ships senior-grade work without you signing it, or the final quarter is free.
Prefer to start with three months? Begin with a 90-day Pilot at £2,100/mo, then carry on into the full build.
Read the Headroom product page →From £2,100/mofirst three firms£3,750/mo after
The one credit on the ladder
First Agent is the only rung that credits. Go on to Headroom and the full £2,997 comes off the fee, so the bridge costs you nothing. Every other rung is priced as exactly what it is: the Agent MOT buys the inspection report, the survey buys the map and the live read, and both are yours to keep whatever you decide next. Nothing we build is rented.
Free → Free → £450 → £497 → £2,997 → from £2,100/mo · start anywhere, no obligation
Hyperscale operator or large infrastructure client, where high-voltage is the binding constraint? That is a different scope on a different track. Talk to us.
When to automate
Not everything should be automated.
Two questions place any task on the map. How often does it happen? And what does it cost if it goes wrong?
02
High freq · High risk
Automate the Legwork
AI does the prep. A person checks it and signs it off before it goes anywhere.
e.g. quote drafts · client emails · report first drafts
04
Low freq · Low impact
Leave It Alone
Hardly ever happens and barely matters. Not worth building.
e.g. one-off admin · rare paperwork · annual renewals
03
Low freq · High risk
Keep It Human
Rare, and costly if it goes wrong. Senior judgement territory. AI assists at most.
e.g. pricing a complex job · hiring · design sign-off
The rule
AI takes the repeatable work. People keep the judgement calls.
How the work flows
Custom agent first pass. Engineer override. Client sees both.
No black box. The chartered-engineer corrections sit on the page next to the AI draft, signed and dated. The reasoning is the credibility surface.
Step 01 · Custom agent first pass
Draft on the standards.
The agent reads the brief, pulls the relevant standards, and produces a working draft of the quote, the calculation, or the section. Fast. Searchable. Cited.
Step 02 · Engineer override
Correct on the page.
The chartered engineer reviews, annotates, and signs every override on the same document. Where standards differ, the engineer names which one applies and why. Visible to the client.
Step 03 · Client final
Both layers shipped.
The deliverable shows the AI draft and the engineer corrections side by side. The client sees the working, not just the answer. Replaces a normal HV bid response that hides the reasoning under the bonnet.
What's in the box with Headroom
Four things you keep, even after the engagement ends.
Bonus 1
Your First Quote, On Us
We take one of your real quotes, the one stuck on your desk right now, and finish it for you in week 2. No charge. You get the finished quote out the door, your client gets a fast answer, and you see the method working on a real piece of your business inside the first month.
Bonus 2
The Quarterly Score for Your Fellow Directors
Every three months, we write a one-page score for the people who own and run the firm with you. Two numbers, no more. Senior-engineer hours saved this quarter. What the firm would be worth at sale today versus three years from now. We walk your board through it for an hour, in normal money words.
Bonus 3
Plain-English Notes on the Standards Your Work Depends On
A written set of notes, in normal English, on the standards your work turns on, the same treatment we give our own. In HV earthing and lightning that means EN 50522, EN 62305, IEEE 80, ENA TS 41-24 and the rest, written by an engineer who sits on the British Standards development committees for earthing and lightning protection. Yours to keep, even if you walk at month 12.
Bonus 4
A Front-Row Seat to How We Run Greycell
A login to our live AI-tracker. You watch every automation we run inside our own firm, what they do, when they break, when they save us time. Most consultants tell you they use AI. We let you watch ours actually working.
The guarantee
By month 12 your firm ships senior-grade work without you signing it, or the final quarter is free.
That is the promise the whole engagement stands behind, and it is the one worth repeating to your fellow directors. One condition, stated up front: we can only deliver it if you are willing to let the firm ship work without your signature. That is a question we ask on the qualification call, not a surprise in month 11. If you cannot get there, we will tell you straight in month 3, while your 90-day walk-away still stands.
The detail, for the lawyer-brain
The 90-day walk-away
Any time in the first 90 days, you can walk. Full refund of the unused balance. No questions, no exit interview, no notice period.
The milestone schedule
Three concrete things happen on three dates, or money back pro-rated:
- Day 14: your first AI-augmented quote goes out the door, signed off by you.
- Month 6: AI scaffolding produces at least 50% of first-draft senior-grade output.
- Month 12: the senior-knowledge agent kit is handed over, yours forever.
The back-of-envelope numbers
What does relieving your senior bottleneck actually save?
Move the sliders. The ratio at the bottom is the answer.
Your firm
Senior engineers in your firm
2
123
Senior engineer hourly rate
£120
£80£140£200
Hours per week you and your seniors spend on bottleneck work
12
51525
Year-1 value freed
Senior hours recovered~480 hrs
Senior-time value freed£57,600
Extra revenue if you win one mid-size bid assumption£100,000
Total year-1 value£157,600
Headroom, £2,100 a month (about £25k a year), is1/6 of year-1 value created
Honest comparator
What you're really comparing us against.
Option
What you get
What it costs
Why we're different
Another senior chartered engineer hire
One more body
£95-120k/yr fully loaded · 18-month recruit
A quarter of the cost. No 18-month recruit. Asset, not headcount.
IET CPD courses
Episodic credentialed training
Per-course
Trains people. We train the firm.
Big 4 transformation consultancy
Slides
£100-500k
We understand the standards your work is judged against and answer for them as chartered engineers under professional indemnity. They ship slides.
Generic AI consultancy
Decks and chatbots
£20-100k
No real standards depth, no chartered-engineer override, and no professional indemnity behind the advice.
Specialist tools (XGSLab, ETAP)
Software
Per-licence
Tools need senior judgement to wield. We sit one layer up.
Owner-manager absorbs the bottleneck personally
Saturdays
Years of weekends
Looks free. It's the most expensive option on the list.
5-question diagnostic
Got a quote stuck on your desk right now?
The one that needs your eye before it goes out, and has needed it for a week. That quote is the bottleneck made visible. Bring it to a Discovery Call. We will look at it with you and show you where AI does the first pass and where your judgement still has to land.
Book a Discovery Call →Q1Is there a quote on your desk older than 14 days?
Q2How many senior-engineer sign-offs gate the bid?
Q3Which standards govern the design?
Q4Is the client a hyperscale operator or utility?
Q5Date you'd want this off your desk by?
2 of 5 answered~70 seconds left
Why us
If your work is judged against standards, this section reads like home.
The proof below is written in the language of BS EN 50522, IEEE 80 and the committees where standards are drafted, because that is where we come from. If your firm answers to a different technical stack, the method is the same: we learn the standards your work is judged against, and the same four reasons hold.
Read at native level
30+ years HV electrical engineering
So your design is checked against the exact standards it will be judged on, not a generic best-practice guess. Native fluency across BS EN 50522, BS EN 62305, ENA TS 41-24, ENA EREC S.36 + S.34 and IEEE 80/81, across UK, EU and US grounding standards.
Written, not just read
Sits on British Standards development committees
So when two standards disagree on your job, you get the ruling from someone in the room where they are written. An active member of the British Standards development committees for earthing and lightning protection.
Proven on live work now
£1.5m of active hyperscale design services
So the method is proven on live, high-stakes work this year, not a slide from three years ago. Currently delivered across four major hyperscale data-centre operators, twelve continuous years, with a Prime Client Engineer transition inflight at one of the world's largest colocation operators.
Watch it, don't take it on faith
36 automations on the auditable tracker
So you can open the tab and watch the AI running before you trust a word we say. Self-built, running daily, saving 28.2 hours of senior time a week, all logged in one place. View the public read-only tracker →
The four credentials are not rare alone. The combination has not been built into a single firm before. That combination is Greycell Technical.
FAQ
What owner-managers actually ask.
Weighing ChatGPT against Claude for your firm? The four differences worth caring about, on one page.
Will you actually understand the technical standards my work depends on?
Yes. The engineer doing the override pass on every Headroom deliverable sits on the British Standards development committees for earthing and lightning protection, and contributes to UK pipeline standards. Reading a technical standards stack at native level is the baseline here, not the upsell, and that same rigour applies to the standards your work depends on.
How does the override-tracing actually work in practice?
A custom AI agent does the first-pass technical drafting. The chartered engineer then reviews, annotates, and signs every override on the page itself. The deliverable shows both layers, the agent's first pass and the engineer's corrections, side by side, visible to the client. The engineer's reasoning is not hidden under the bonnet. It is the credibility surface. A normal HV bid response shows only the final text. Ours shows the working.
What if my fellow directors block this?
Bonus 2 (the Quarterly Score for Your Fellow Directors) is built for exactly this. Every three months we write a one-page score in plain money language, walk your board through it, and frame the engagement as asset formation rather than expense. If your directors will not approve £2,100 to £3,750 a month against a documented reduction in senior bottleneck and a documented uplift in firm value at sale, the conversation we need to have is different from the one we're having now.
What happens at month 12 when the engagement ends?
You keep the senior-knowledge agent kit, the standards notes, the quarterly board scores, and the audit trail of every override produced during the year. The system runs in your firm without us. We are hired to make ourselves unnecessary, not to embed permanently.
What if I want out?
By month 12 your firm ships senior-grade work without you signing it, or the final quarter is free. That is the headline promise. Behind it: walk any time in the first 90 days for a full refund of the unused balance, and a three-date milestone schedule (Day 14, Month 6, Month 12) with money back pro-rated if we miss one. The detail is in the guarantee section above; the sentence at the top is the one to hold us to.
Are you delivering this for any other firms in our space?
Greycell can run three Headroom engagements concurrently. The first three owner-managers to sign get the early rate. We will be transparent in your Discovery Call about which engagements are running and where, subject to NDA on specifics. We do not take two firms in direct head-to-head competition at the same time.
What's the £3,750/month standard rate after the first three owner-managers sign?
Once three owner-managers have signed at the early rate of around £2,100 a month, the rate steps up to around £3,750 a month for everyone after. Same engagement, same deliverables, same guarantee. The step-up is not arbitrary: by then we will have published case studies from the first three engagements, which the standard rate is anchored against.
What if my firm has no current delayed quote?
You do not need one. The five-jobs survey works either way: in one call we survey the five jobs, find the one most stuck on you, and put one real open enquiry you bring through a live AI read in the room. If you do have a quote stuck on your desk, bring that: it is exactly the kind of work the live read is for. For larger firms, the Bottleneck Audit goes wider with five to eight interviews across the firm.
3 owner-manager slots open
Ready to talk?
Three owner-managers. Three slots. Then the rate steps up.
Headroom is a year-long engagement, working alongside you, that helps owner-managed engineering and technical firms turn your senior judgement into a system the firm runs without you. The first three firms to sign get the early rate of around £2,100 a month. From the fourth firm onward, the standard rate of around £3,750 a month applies. Either rate includes four bonuses you keep, the guarantee, and the senior-knowledge kit yours forever. We can run three engagements concurrently while delivering at the override-quality bar the offer requires.
By month 12 your firm ships senior-grade work without you signing it, or the final quarter is free.
Take the 90-Second Unlock →Free, 90 seconds, no obligation. Prefer to talk? Book a 30-minute Discovery Call. If we can't help, we'll tell you in the first call and refer you on.