Independent since 2009
Work that holds up under scrutiny.
The idea
One theme. Five faces. No CSS.
Each preset moves palette, type pairing, spacing density and the hero scene together — not just the colour. Try one; the whole page rebuilds.
Corporate
Deep navy and steel. Tight, neutral, restrained — consultancies, law, finance, B2B.
Studio
Warm sand and clay with a serif voice. Editorial and generous — agencies, architects, ateliers.
Tech
Near-black with one electric accent and mono detailing. SaaS, developer tools, product teams.
Soft · active
Light, rounded and airy. Clinics, wellness, coaching, education, nonprofits.
Bold
High contrast, oversized type, one saturated accent. Agencies and brands that want presence.
In a real install this is a single dropdown in the Customizer. Overrides for brand colour, accent, spacing and background scene sit alongside it.
Services
What we take on.
Strategy & Planning
We start from the decisions you actually have to make in the next four quarters, not from a maturity model. The output is a sequenced roadmap, a costed case, and a one-page version your board can read in four minutes.
Research & Discovery
We interview staff and customers, sit with the teams doing the work, and read the data you already hold but have never joined up. Findings arrive as a ranked list of problems with the cost of leaving each one alone.
Design & Build
The same people take the work from sketch to production, so intent is never lost in a handover. Everything ships behind a flag and is measured before it becomes the default.
Ongoing Support
Support is a retained arrangement with a response target in writing, not a rota of whoever happens to be free. Roughly a third of each retainer is reserved for improvement rather than incidents, because a system that only ever gets fixed slowly rots.
Growth & Performance
We instrument the journey end to end, then run a queue of tested changes against one agreed metric. Reports include the variants that lost, because a programme that only ever reports wins is not measuring anything.
Training & Enablement
We run working sessions with the people who will own the system, using their real backlog rather than a sample exercise. Every engagement ends with a written handover and a month where your team leads and we sit behind them.
Selected work
Recent engagements.
Putting a closed archive back in public view
A catalogue of 94,000 objects that only three members of staff could search, rebuilt as a public collection anyone can browse.
Nine days to quote, cut to under one
Rebuilding a quoting process that ran on three spreadsheets and one very patient estimator.
A referral queue that stopped losing people
Redesigning intake for a group of clinics where a fifth of referrals arrived twice, or never.
How we work
A predictable path from brief to launch.
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
Engagements
Clear scopes, quoted up front.
Diagnostic
From $4,800A short, bounded engagement that ends in a written recommendation you can act on without us.
- Two weeks, fixed price
- Staff and customer interviews
- Review of the data you already hold
- Ranked problem list, with costs
- Board-ready summary on one page
Programme
From $18,500A dedicated team taking a defined outcome from plan to production, in increments you can stop.
- Strategist, designer and two engineers
- Two-week release cadence
- Fortnightly demo with your stakeholders
- Tested to WCAG 2.2 AA
- Stop or resize at any month boundary
Retained
From $6,200A named team keeping what exists running, patched and improving once the build is finished.
- A named team, not a shared rota
- Four-hour response on P1 incidents
- Monthly patch and dependency review
- A third of hours kept for improvement
- Quarterly roadmap review
Questions
Before you get in touch.
How do you charge?
Fixed fee for diagnostics, monthly for programmes and retainers. Rates are published and identical for everyone, including the first estimate you receive. We do not bill for the scoping conversation, and we will tell you before we start if we think the budget is set wrong.
What size of organisation do you usually work with?
Most clients have between 50 and 800 staff and one or two systems that have outgrown the way they were originally set up. Below that size our fee is rarely the best use of the money, and we will normally say so rather than take the work.
Can we stop partway through?
Yes, at any month boundary. The increments are designed so that stopping leaves you with something usable rather than a half-built system. Everything we write, design and build is yours from the day it is created, including the repository, the credentials and the documentation.
Do you work alongside our existing suppliers?
Often, and it is usually the cheaper option. We will read the contracts, agree the seams and put the integration points in writing before anyone builds against them. We will also tell you plainly if we think a supplier relationship is the actual problem.
How quickly can you start?
Diagnostics usually begin within three weeks. Programme work depends on which team comes free, and we report that honestly at the point of quoting: if the wait is eight weeks we will say eight weeks, rather than promise four and staff it with whoever is spare.
Tell us what you are trying to do.
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.