SERVICE · BUSINESS SYSTEMS CONSULTING
30+ years combined experience. 15+ production systems under maintenance. Wesfarmers, Homes NSW, WHMA, Quickway, Corporate Bodies.
Most consulting decks tell you what to buy next. We do the opposite. We tell you what is wrong with what you already have, what would actually fix it, and what it should cost.
Mid-market businesses tend to accumulate software the same way garages accumulate tools. Each tool was bought to solve a specific problem at a specific moment. Nobody planned the toolkit as a whole. After ten years you have a CRM nobody fully trusts, a finance system tied to the original founder’s preferences, two reporting layers that do not agree, and a senior team that has stopped asking why.
The problem is rarely the individual tools. The problem is the seams between them, the data that lives in only one head, and the workflows that exist only because nobody has had time to redesign them. A bad CRM is fixable. A bad system of systems is what eats $300,000 a year in staff time without ever appearing on a single line of the budget.
A real systems audit names those problems on paper. It surfaces the workarounds nobody admits to in meetings. It identifies the two or three changes that would unlock the most leverage. And it gives you a written, defensible plan you can take to the board. The plan stands on its own. Whether you act on it with us, with your internal team, or with another shop is your call.
The honest moment most consultancies skip: sometimes the audit finds nothing actionable. Sometimes your stack is good enough, and the bottleneck is process or people. We will tell you that directly and refund the back half of the engagement. We have done it twice. It costs us nothing and it earns the kind of trust that decks cannot buy.
If your gut tells you something is structurally wrong with how your business runs, call 02 8964 5333 or book an audit below.
You probably do not need a full consulting engagement. You need an audit when you start recognising yourself in the following patterns.
DIAGNOSTIC
If you recognise three or more, an audit will pay for itself inside the first quarter. We can usually identify $50,000 to $300,000 in annual cost out of the audit itself.
Every engagement starts with a written audit. Whether you act on it with us or with someone else is your call. We treat the audit as the work, not as a sales tool. There are four pieces.
We spend two to five days talking to the people who actually use the systems. Operations, finance, sales, customer service. Not just the CIO. Workarounds live in the operator layer, not the executive layer. If we only talk to leadership, we will miss the real findings. Interviews are structured but conversational. We bring the questions; the operators bring the truth.
We document every system in your stack, every integration between them, every workaround in between, and every report that flows out. The map is usually a shock the first time you see it. Most clients have never seen their stack drawn on one page. You cannot fix what you cannot see. The map becomes the artefact every subsequent conversation refers back to.
For the two or three processes that matter most (lead-to-cash, order-to-fulfilment, employee onboarding, compliance reporting, whatever your business actually lives on) we trace the data end to end. Where it originates, where it gets transformed, where it gets duplicated, where it gets lost. This is where most of the actionable findings come from. It is also the piece most generic consulting engagements skip because it requires engineers who can read code, not just analysts who can read decks.
We rank every problem we find by business impact and effort to fix. You get a sequenced plan with three to six initiatives, each with a fixed-scope quote and a recommended order. The plan is technology-vendor neutral. We have no licence resale relationships and we are not in a partner programme that pays us to recommend Salesforce. If we name a vendor, it is because it fits your case.
We structure consulting engagements one of three ways. All three produce a written deliverable you can act on without us. None of them include rolling retainers, hidden scoping fees, or advisor seats nobody asked for.
Not sure which shape fits? Call 02 8964 5333. A 20-minute conversation usually settles it.
Three recent audits. Named clients. Real outcomes. Most are happy to take a reference call.
You work directly with a senior systems analyst from the first meeting. No discovery handover to a junior consultant. No deck-driven pitch from someone who will not be on the project. The person you interview with is the person who writes the report.
Nicolas Wendell
MANAGING DIRECTOR
Nicolas has been building custom software since leaving school, bringing a lifelong passion for development to every project. Before founding Paladine Systems, he ran his own video game studio and earned multiple accolades in network engineering. Known as a driving force in the custom software world, Nicolas combines deep technical expertise with visionary leadership – guiding Paladine in delivering innovative, enterprise-grade solutions.
Mark Morcom
SENIOR SYSTEMS ENGINEER
Mark is a young prodigy in software development, bringing 5 years of experience to Paladine. Equally at home on the front end and back end, he crafts clean, scalable solutions that power complex applications. Mark’s sharp problem-solving skills and passion for innovation make him a driving force behind Paladine’s most advanced projects.
An audit is not a six-month engagement. It is a focused two-week piece of work that produces a written deliverable you can act on.
Week one is interviews and system access. Week two is analysis, mapping, and drafting. You see the draft before we deliver the final version. If we missed something or misread a finding, we fix it before sign-off. The handover is a working session, not a one-way presentation. You walk out of the final meeting with a document you understand and can defend to your board.
The deliverable is one document, 20 to 40 pages, with an executive summary, a system map, a list of named problems, and a prioritised roadmap with indicative pricing for each initiative. Plus the raw interview notes if you want them.
We are engineers, not consultants who outsource the build. Every recommendation in the audit comes with a fixed-scope build quote that we can deliver ourselves if you want us to. The recommendations have to survive contact with reality. That keeps them honest. The other practical difference is cost. A Big Four discovery engagement starts at six figures. Ours starts at $3,000 for a focused audit.
Yes. Many of our audits look at one workflow, one department, or one integration. The audit scales to the scope. A targeted audit takes one to two weeks. A full operations review takes four. We will recommend the right shape during the initial conversation.
No. The audit is a standalone deliverable. About 70% of clients commission us for the build because the team that did the audit is the cheapest path to the solution. The other 30% take the audit to their internal team or to another shop. We have no problem with either outcome.
Sometimes. More often we recommend better use of what you already own. We have no licence resale relationships. We do not get a kickback when you buy Salesforce or NetSuite. If we name a vendor, it is because it fits your case. If we recommend you keep what you have and fix the integration layer, that is also fine.
Most audits start within two weeks of the first conversation. Urgent cases (failing rollouts, compliance issues, vendor lock-in panics) can start inside a week. The audit itself takes one to four weeks depending on scope.
Yes. NDAs in place from day one. The report is yours. We do not publish findings or use specifics in case studies without written consent. Every case study on this page was published with the client’s sign-off.
It has happened twice. Sometimes the stack is good enough and the real bottleneck is process or people. When that happens, we tell you, we refund the back half of the engagement, and we offer to refer you to a partner who specialises in operational and process consulting. The engineering rule is to do no harm.
Call 02 8964 5333 or book an audit through the form below. The first conversation is free and is run by a senior engineer, not a salesperson. We will tell you whether an audit is the right next step. Sometimes it is not, and we will say so.
