Leadership that outlasts the engagement
Fix the architecture but ignore the team, and nothing ships. Restructure the team but skip the process, and quality collapses. Anvil Systems aligns people, process, and product to make technology predictable, reliable, and ready for what's next.
Engagements fall into three categories. Leadership engagements are ongoing relationships, providing presence, judgment, and accountability. Delivery engagements are hands-on, building and maintaining your platform. Assessment engagements are scoped, with a defined deliverable and a clear endpoint.
Ongoing technology leadership on a part-time basis. Embedded inside your team working on the problems that matter to your business. Best for companies that need ongoing technology leadership without a full-time CTO.
Full-time technology leadership providing coverage and continuity during a CTO transition. Focused on stabilizing the team, hiring, and onboarding a new CTO, then handing off smoothly. Optional transition to Strategic Advisor after handoff.
A trusted technical voice for boards, leadership teams, and founders offering seasoned guidance on technology strategy and critical decisions without the hands-on commitment of a fractional CTO.
Greenfield builds, platform refactors, and legacy modernization. Architecture is part of the engagement because the right platform starts with the right foundation. Every build is designed for scale, long-term maintainability, and a clean handoff to your team.
Dedicated engineering hours to keep an existing platform running, current, and improving, whether we built it or your team did. We handle bug fixes, small enhancements, dependency and security updates, and urgent issues when things break, without the cost of a full-time team.
An independent technical assessment for investors evaluating an acquisition, or startups preparing for investor scrutiny. Scoped and agreed upfront, then delivered as a written report covering architecture, team, risk, and technical debt.
A structured multi-day working session for teams facing major technical obstacles or needing architectural guidance on compliance, complexity, or other critical decisions. The engagement ends with documented recommendations your engineering team can execute.
Every engagement starts with a minimum commitment. Month-to-month is available after the initial term. Every engagement ends with a clean handoff: documentation, context, and a plan for what happens next.
John Kellar is a technology and business operations executive with over 25 years of experience driving innovation, operational efficiency, and strategic growth across startups and enterprises. He has a proven track record of scaling teams, launching products, integrating acquisitions, and optimizing revenue for high-impact organizations.
John has operated across multiple industries, including Healthcare & Healthtech, Financial Technology, Travel & Hospitality, Luxury Real Estate, and Enterprise SaaS. He has extensive experience in highly regulated environments, having built HIPAA-compliant platforms and navigated PCI compliance requirements.
Anvil Systems also offers tools for engineering teams, including LeanTo, a Kanban board for teams who actually run Kanban.
In a word, predictability.
A retainer reserves hours. The number is agreed upfront, so your budget is predictable and there are no surprise invoices.
A retainer reserves priority. Your hours are carved out in advance, so the work is scheduled rather than queued.
A retainer reserves capacity. When nothing is urgent, that time goes to building context on your systems, your constraints, and your risks, which makes every later hour more effective.
If you only need a few hours of help once, we will say so on the discovery call.
No pitch deck. No sales pressure. Just an honest conversation about what you need.