I'm Jaipal. STRJ is me.

In my own words

Why I started this

I spent twenty years as a business analyst on large technology programmes — power stations, the electricity interconnectors, Jaguar Land Rover, Royal Mail. The kind of work with steering committees, multi-year timelines and budgets that would buy a street of houses. It was genuinely interesting, and the discipline underneath it was the valuable part: before anyone builds anything, find out what the current way of doing it is costing.

What struck me was that nobody applies that discipline to small businesses. A firm with eight staff gets sold a website like it's a decorating job — pick a colour, here's a price — when the actual question is what the thing is supposed to earn and whether the business can handle the work if it succeeds.

Meanwhile the standard experience of hiring for this work is dismal. People pay a thousand pounds a month and can't get anyone on the phone. They're handed reports full of graphs written by software. They find out at the worst possible moment that their agency owns their domain name. Almost everyone I speak to has a version of this story.

STRJ is a fairly simple reaction to that: do the work properly, tell people exactly what you're doing, charge a fair fixed price, and let them leave whenever they want.

What I'm good at

Working out what's actually wrong. Most people arrive convinced they need a new website when the real problem is that their contact form is broken, or that they're invisible for the three search terms that matter. I'd rather find that out and charge you for an afternoon than sell you a rebuild you didn't need.

Building things properly — sites and stores that load fast, work on a phone, are usable if you can't see the screen well, and don't fall over when something updates. I'm not wedded to a platform. WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, a marketplace listing, or something plainer than all of them: the right answer depends on what you sell and who has to maintain it after I've gone.

And the other half of the practice: turning a regulatory framework into something an organisation can actually act on. CAF, NIS, CIS Controls. Most of that work is translation — between the framework text, the engineers who have to live with the controls, and the commercial and legal people who own the supplier contracts. It is the same skill as the small business work, applied where the consequences are considerably larger.

What I'm not

I'm not a designer of the award-winning, deeply animated variety. If you want something that wins design prizes, I'll bring in a designer or point you at a studio. My sites are clean, quick and built to convert, not to be looked at. I'm also not a penetration tester or a managed security service — I'll organise testing and turn the findings into a plan, but somebody else should hold the tools.

I'm not the cheapest. And while I can bring in specialists when a job needs them, I'm not an agency with a bench of people sitting idle — if you need volume delivery next week, I'm the wrong call and I'll say so on the phone rather than after you've paid a deposit.