About
Rich Fayette
Nearly thirty years in operations, technology and program management. Twenty of them as a general manager, head of operations and chief of staff, running change management, digital transformation, automation and now agentic projects inside an enterprise, on teams that behaved like startups.
Where this started
I tried buying it first.
We ran the evaluations. We bought the platforms. And we kept hitting the same wall: the product was built around how some other company works, not around how we worked or how we went to market. Configuration got us most of the way there and then stopped.
The vendors sent good engineers. They just didn't know our business, so they built what we asked for instead of what we actually needed, and every round of that cost a quarter. Whatever shipped arrived after the thing it was meant to fix had already moved.
So I started building it myself. Tools first, then applications, then platforms. Not because building beats buying. Because we had genuinely exhausted buying. That distinction still decides what I recommend on a first call.
Why StillSharp exists
The problems are the same. The budget isn't.
Working that out took years and an enterprise budget. I could afford the evaluations that went nowhere, the vendor engagements that ran long, and the time to build something better afterwards.
Smaller companies have the same problems and none of that runway. The quote still waits on one person. The policy still isn't findable. The report still gets rebuilt every Monday from four exports. They just never get past the evaluation, because the products are priced and packaged for companies ten times their size and the custom work is priced like an agency.
I've felt those bottlenecks and I've owned fixing them, the ones that capped growth and the ones that turned into long hours for people who had better things to do. I started StillSharp to do that same work for companies that were never going to get there on their own.
Why the background is the product
A dev shop will build exactly what you ask for.
That's the problem. The expensive mistake isn't bad code. It's building the right thing for a workflow nobody actually has.
I've been the person waiting three days for a quote, and the person who couldn't find the policy everyone swore existed. So the first conversation isn't about technology. It's about where the work actually backs up, which is rarely where the org chart says it should.
You won't spend the first three meetings explaining what your business does.
What I ship
Two of my own products are on this site.
The AI Career Score and the Resume Rebuild are mine. Live, running, and paid for by real people.
Worth saying out loud, because a consultant who has never shipped their own thing is describing a job they've read about. These are the same stack, the same hosting and the same decisions I'd make on yours.
What I'm not
Not an agency, and that cuts both ways.
StillSharp LLC is one person. No employees, no subcontractors, none planned. That's a real limit. I take a small number of builds at a time, and I turn down more than I take on.
It's also why there's nobody between you and the person writing the code, and why nobody you haven't met touches your documents. Technology errors and omissions coverage, certificate on request.
If something happened to me, your repository, your database project and your hosting account each transfer natively, and any competent developer can pick up standard React and standard Postgres. The exit is engineered rather than promised.
Twenty minutes is usually enough to tell.
Describe what's slowing you down. If it isn't worth building, that's a useful answer too, and you'll get it on the first call rather than in month five.