How the pool works, from the side of the person in it. Including the three things it does not give you.
Tenhaw delivers through a pool of senior associates rather than a salaried bench, and the route in is narrow: associates are people the founder has already delivered alongside, selected because he has seen their work. That constraint is the quality mechanism: nobody is recruited after a client commits, and the people on an engagement are not substituted without the client's written agreement. If we have not worked together, the useful thing is a piece of work in common, not an application. What follows is the whole mechanism: how someone reaches the pool, the screening every associate completes before touching a client estate, what an engagement looks like from your side of it, what we select for, and the three things this arrangement does not give you.
Tenhaw is James Rooney plus a pool of associates: senior AI builders he has worked with directly and would put in front of a client without hesitation. Each is someone whose work he has seen at first hand, selected for one thing above all, which is that they ship. Every associate on your engagement is screened to BS7858 standard before they touch your estate, and contracted under the same confidentiality and data-handling obligations as an employee. The people on your engagement are not substituted without your written agreement.
Every associate is someone we have delivered alongside. We do not go to market once a statement of work is signed, which is the practice that makes a small firm risky: nobody on your engagement is recruited after you commit.
The pool is weighted towards builders who get things into production, not towards people who present well. The two-week proof of concept on our live insurance engagement is the standard of pace we hire against.
BS7858-standard screening covering identity, right to work, employment history and criminal record checks, completed before any client access. Same confidentiality, data-handling and no-sub-contracting terms as employees.
Associates are engaged for your work rather than carried between engagements, so there is no utilisation gap priced into your rate. That is a large part of why the rate card is what it is.
He leads every audit personally and provides oversight on everything else, including programmes we do not build. He is accountable for the outcome and he is the escalation route, not a partner who appears at the kickoff and the closedown.
In the order it happens.
If we have not worked together, an application is a weaker signal than a piece of work in common.
Six things, and only one of them is a technology.
The same terms the client is shown, in the same words.
The same confidentiality, screening and data-handling terms, with no onward sub-contracting without the client's consent. Confidentiality survives the end of the engagement indefinitely, and on our current insurance engagement it means the client is not named anywhere, including here.
Access is requested against the principle of least privilege and time-boxed, with a documented offboarding step on exit rather than an email afterwards. Our default on a proof of concept is to work locally against mocked services, or in a dedicated environment on synthetic data.
Where a client has an approved enterprise tenancy we work inside it rather than bringing our own. Tenhaw does not resell or mark up models, platforms or licences, so nothing you specify becomes revenue for us and there is no reason to design anything larger than the job needs.
James provides partner oversight on every engagement and leads the audits personally. He is accountable for the outcome and he is the escalation route. If an engagement is going wrong, the conversation is with him and it happens early.
The screening, access and contractual position are published in full on our security and assurance page, including the assurance we hold today and what is still in progress. The delivery method is published on The Tenhaw Way, and the engineering handbook behind it is open on GitHub.
Three things the arrangement does not give you.
Not a covering letter. A system you built, who used it, and what you would do differently. If we have delivered together, say so first and skip the rest. We read everything and reply to less than we would like.
General enquiries, including anything commercial, go to hello@tenhaw.com.
In practice, by having delivered alongside James Rooney already, or by being referred by somebody who has. Tenhaw does not go to market for people after a client signs a Statement of Work, because that is the practice that makes a small supplier risky, and it is the reason the people on an engagement are not substituted without the client's written agreement. If we have not worked together, an application is a weaker signal than a piece of work in common, so make the work the introduction. There is no application form, no take-home exercise and no panel. If you want to start the conversation anyway, email us and expect it to be longer and more sceptical than it would be for someone we have delivered with.
BS7858-standard screening covering identity, right to work, employment history and criminal record checks, completed before any client access, with the same standard applied to associates and employees alike. It is evidenced during the client's supplier onboarding. Alongside it, associates are contracted to the same confidentiality, data-handling and no-sub-contracting obligations as an employee, confidentiality survives the end of the engagement indefinitely, and access to a client estate is granted against the principle of least privilege and time-boxed, with a documented offboarding step on exit.
Small, senior and visible. Delivery teams are two or three senior people, and you are not substituted without the client's written agreement. The cadence is a monthly production increment the team commits to and reports against, and a month with nothing in production is reported as a failed month rather than explained away. The build method is AI-engineering-first: requirements become structured markdown, a model interrogates the whole corpus for gaps and contradictions before any code is written, and the build runs against the full requirement set with a security review roughly every fifth prompt, pair-programmed with the client's own engineers throughout. Partner oversight is on every engagement and the escalation route is a person.
Associates are engaged for specific client work rather than employed, and there is no bench. That is the trade in both directions: a client is not paying for utilisation between engagements, and we cannot promise an associate a pipeline. Joining the pool is not an offer and does not come with a start date. If you need continuity of income, this is the wrong arrangement.
Six things, and only one of them is a technology. That you ship, with something a person can look at and a story about what broke. That you can build with AI as the primary tool, not as autocomplete, because our published method treats the requirements as the source code and the model as the compiler. That you will pair with the client's engineers, since a proof of concept nobody internal can reproduce is a demonstration rather than a capability. That you will recommend against a release when it is not ready, which we have done at least once on every engagement we have run. That you find the constraints of a regulated estate interesting. And that you will tell a client exactly where the evidence stands: working proofs of concept built in regulated estates, with productionisation in progress.
No, and we tell clients the same thing. No names, no published CVs and no headcount for the pool. The model supplies senior people for each engagement rather than a salaried bench, so no utilisation gap is priced into the rate, and our comparison pages say when a larger firm is the better buy.
Everything Tenhaw has delivered runs on Microsoft Azure, including Azure OpenAI, with delivery through GitHub, and the build method itself is Git, markdown and a model at maximum reasoning rather than a framework. Beyond that, the useful skills are the ones that transfer across clouds: retrieval and permission-aware knowledge access, tool calling and integration, evaluation harnesses and ground-truth sets, and the identity and access design that decides whether any of it clears a security review. The site lists the platforms we have a view on and no delivery behind, which includes Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, Google Vertex AI, Kubernetes, Terraform and Apache Airflow, so an associate who has delivered on one of those brings something the firm does not have.
The 30-minute discovery call is the same one every other page offers. We will cover where your organisation sits on the agentic curve and which rung to start on, and you will leave with a rough scope whether you engage us or not.
Most organisations start with a fixed-price Agent-Readiness Audit · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks