The practice
About
Northgate & Co. is a forty-one person professional services firm working with organisations that have outgrown improvisation but have not yet built the machinery to replace it. We plan, design, build and support the systems our clients run their operations on.
Since 2009
How the firm got its shape.
Advice that survives contact with your operations.
Northgate began in 2009 with three people, one shared desk in a converted print works, and a single conviction: that most organisations are not short of ideas but short of the sequencing that turns an idea into something staff can actually operate on a Monday morning. The first engagement lasted eleven weeks, ran two weeks over, and taught us more than the fee covered. We kept that client for nine years.
The practice grew slowly and on purpose. We added a research function in 2013 because too many recommendations were being argued from anecdote, a build team in 2016 because handing a strategy to a third party lost half its intent in translation, and a support group in 2020 because the work that matters is the work still running three years later. Forty-one people now, four disciplines, one shared method.
We are deliberately mid-sized. Large enough to put a research lead, a strategist and two engineers on the same problem in the same week; small enough that the people who sold the work are the people who deliver it. We publish our rates, we scope in writing before anyone starts, and we say no to roughly one enquiry in four when we are not the right firm for it.
People
The people who sell the work deliver it.
Forty-one of us across four disciplines. These four carry the practice.
Priya Raghunathan
Founded the practice in 2009 after eleven years in operations at a logistics group. Sits on every engagement at the framing stage and nowhere near the build, which she maintains is the correct arrangement for everyone involved.
Tomas Lindqvist
Trained as an ethnographer and spent six years in public service delivery before joining in 2013. Responsible for the house rule that no recommendation reaches a client without evidence of where it came from.
Amina Diallo
Runs the build and support teams and owns the release calendar. Joined in 2016 from a payments platform and has kept the two-week cadence intact through every engagement since, including the two that nearly earned an exception.
Hiroshi Tanaka
Writes the parts nobody else wants to own: migrations, integrations, and the code that has to survive a decade. Has led technical handover on forty engagements without a single emergency callback.
Method
One method, four disciplines.
Frame
We agree what decision this work exists to serve, and we write it down. That single paragraph settles arguments for the rest of the engagement, and it is the thing we point at when someone proposes scope that would be interesting rather than useful.
Evidence
Interviews, observation, and whatever data you already hold. We look for the gap between how the work is described in meetings and how it is done at the desk, because that gap is almost always where the cost is hiding.
Build
Small releases, each one measured, each one stoppable. You see working software in the third week rather than a deck in the third month, and anything that fails to earn its place gets removed instead of defended.
Hand over
Your team leads while we sit behind them, and then we leave. We write the runbooks, record the reasoning behind decisions someone will question in two years, and agree what support looks like before anybody needs it.
Clients
They found the problem in our estimator, not in our software. Quoting went from nine days to under one, and we are now pricing three times the volume with the same four people.Martin OkwuosaOperations Director, Belvoir Precision
The first thing they did was tell us which third of our plan to delete. Our referral backlog cleared inside a quarter, and two of our intake staff now work on patient follow-up instead of retyping forms.Helen VasquezClinical Lead, Riverbank Health Partnership
We had been told for years that a 78 per cent abandonment rate was normal for our sector. Three weeks after the rebuild it was 52, and nothing about our pricing or delivery had changed.Sofia BergmanHead of Ecommerce, Kestrel & Vine