About
I'm Neil Brown.
Proven Innovation is a twenty-year specialist software practice for Australian mid-market businesses — bespoke line-of-business applications, system integrations, data platforms, legacy modernisation, ERP customisation. Based in Hobart, working with clients across Australia. Most engagements run for years.
The shape of the practice
Solo in ownership. Not solo in delivery.
I run the practice, I own the code end-to-end, and you deal directly with me. Not solo in delivery: most engagements run alongside a client-side IT lead or services partner, and I bring in subcontract capacity when scope calls for it. The pitch is continuity without the agency layer. Year five of a relationship is where the value shows up — I still know the codebase, I still remember why a particular trade-off was made, and I'm still the one picking up the phone.
The practice is embedded in a cohort of Australian mid-market businesses — aviation, aged care, audio and media production, industrial supply, managed IT services, distribution, horticulture, field-service trades. Several of those relationships run five to ten years.
Continuity
The fair question: what happens if I'm unavailable?
Practical answers. Code lives in your repository, pushed as it's written. Every system has a documented handover. The client-side IT lead is in the picture throughout. A small bench of subcontractors I've worked with for years handles burst capacity and fallback.
Not perfect redundancy. It's what's been tested on real engagements over twenty years, and it's been enough.
How I work
A few things matter most of the time.
-
Root cause over surface fix.
When something breaks in production, I want to know what actually caused it — a missing config section on the prod server, a race condition in a webhook, an off-by-one in a reconciliation step. Null-checks that paper over a symptom are a stalling tactic, not a fix.
-
Honest trade-offs.
I'll separate real concerns from “just confirming it was thought through”. Confidence gets named — “most”, “usually”, “across a decade” — not “always” and “never”. A first-pass heuristic is a first-pass heuristic; an exhaustive audit is something else. I'll tell you which is which.
-
The bar is “most robust, extensible, performant, manageable”.
Four axes at once. Not “good enough”. When one of those has to give, I'll tell you which and why, and we decide together.
-
AI-augmented, craft-led.
The work is AI-assisted end-to-end now — custom local MCP servers, multi-agent workflows, automation reused across projects. Clients get the productivity dividend whether or not they ever mention the word AI. It's a craft practice with AI in the tool belt, not an AI practice dressed up as craft.
What I don't take on
Some honesty about fit.
- Projects where five engineers need to touch the same codebase simultaneously. I lead workstreams; I don't coordinate them.
- Content-managed websites and WordPress builds. A referral, not an offering.
- Stacks I can't still maintain in year three. Novelty isn't a virtue — sustainability is.
Get in touch
The short version is email.
Tell me the shape of the problem and roughly when you need it. I'll come back with a read on fit and what the first steps look like.