Only senior engineers on your problem
There is no pyramid here. The people on the intake call are the people who do the work. We cannot leverage juniors onto your project to improve our margin, because there are none.
A small firm, on purpose.
GreenChemX exists because technically deep problems keep being handed to organisations structured to sell hours rather than close questions. We built the opposite: senior engineers only, fixed scope, and a strong preference for finishing.
Principles
Six commitments we will not trade away.
These are operating constraints, not values-page decoration. Each one costs us revenue in a specific, predictable way, and each one is why clients call us back.
Fixed scope, fixed fee
Every engagement is priced against a written scope before it begins. If we underestimate the work, that is our commercial risk and we absorb it. Scope changes are agreed in writing or they do not happen.
We report the results we did not want
Weekly updates include the measurements that undermine our own leading hypothesis. A consultant who only reports confirming evidence is not doing science; they are doing sales with a microscope.
Your data leaves with you
Raw data, micrographs, spectra and laboratory reports are handed over in full at the end of every engagement. We do not retain leverage by keeping the underlying evidence.
We say when it is finished
When the question is answered, the engagement ends. We do not convert projects into retainers, and we will tell you when the remaining risk is not worth further spend.
We decline work we should not take
Outside our competence, in conflict with an existing client, or where the answer is already available cheaper elsewhere — we refer it on. See the list further down this page.
Weibull · Arrhenius · fault tree — the everyday tooling
The team
Practitioners, not career consultants.
Everyone here spent the first half of their career inside manufacturing, being accountable for a process that had to run on Monday.
That background changes what a recommendation looks like. An engineer who has owned a production line does not propose a corrective action that requires a six-month qualification cycle when the customer needs shipments in three weeks — or if they do, they say so explicitly and price the alternative.
We work as a small core team supported by a network of named specialists — electrochemists, polymer scientists, surface analysts, statisticians — brought in for specific problems. You are told who is working on your project and what they are contributing. No anonymous resources.
- Doctoral-level materials science, chemistry and chemical engineering
- Chartered engineer and chartered chemist status across the core team
- Prior operational roles in fab, plant, coating line and laminating environments
- Peer-reviewed publication and patent record in the sectors we serve
Engagement terms
What you can hold us to.
The commercial terms in plain language. The signed contract governs, but it says the same things in longer sentences.
Before we start
NDA, then scope
Mutual NDA before the first technical call. Conflict check before we accept. A written scope, timeline and fixed fee before any chargeable work begins.
During
Weekly written updates
Every Friday: what was measured, what it showed, what it ruled out, and what happens next week. Including the results that were inconvenient.
If it changes
No silent scope creep
If the evidence takes the investigation somewhere the scope did not cover, we stop and agree a variation in writing. We never quietly overrun and invoice.
At the end
Full handover
Report, raw data, laboratory records and a live debrief with your engineers. Foreground IP assigned to you. Ninety days of follow-up questions at no charge.
Boundaries
Work we turn down.
A consultancy that never says no is telling you something about how it prices its own credibility.
Conclusions specified in advance
We are occasionally approached to produce a report supporting a position already taken — usually in a supplier dispute. We will investigate the question honestly and the answer may well support you, but the conclusion cannot be part of the brief.
Competing clients in the same narrow area
We run a conflict check before accepting any engagement. Where we already hold deep, current knowledge of a direct competitor's process in the same specific technology, we decline and say why — without disclosing who the existing client is.
Problems outside our competence
We do not do structural finite element analysis, electronic circuit design, software, regulatory submissions or market research. Materials adjacency is not the same as expertise, and we will refer you to someone who actually does the thing.
Work that does not need us
Some enquiries are answered by a standard test at a commercial laboratory for a fraction of our fee, or by a published standard the enquirer had not found. When that is the case we say so in the reply and charge nothing.
Still reading? Then you probably have a problem.
Send it over. Worst case, you get a free technical opinion and a referral to someone better suited.