Smart Labs is one person, and that is the whole point.
I am Mark Franco. I build the sites, I answer the emails, and when something breaks at an inconvenient hour there is nobody for me to escalate it to.
How the working relationship runs
- Who does the work
- Mark Franco, start to finish. No account manager, no junior building it behind a senior's name, no offshore team you were not told about.
- Capacity
- A few builds at a time. I would rather say a start date is four weeks out than take a deposit and let the job drift.
- Ownership
- The code, the content and the domain are in your name from the day it ships. No mandatory retainer.
- Communication
- Email, directly with me. No ticket queue, and nothing you have to log into to reach a person.
- Responsibility
- What I hand over is mine to put right if it does not do what we agreed, whether or not the brief spelled it out.
I spent fifteen years building digital products inside large organisations, on systems where a bad deploy is a headline rather than a bug report. That teaches a specific discipline: assume it will break, assume someone unfamiliar will inherit it, and write it so both are survivable.
Smart Labs is that discipline applied to firms too small to have a technology department and too serious to be handed a template. The names and dates are on the track record. This page is about what it is like to work with me.
The trade you are making
The person who writes your quote writes your code and picks up when you call about it in eighteen months. The cost of that is capacity: one engineer can only run a few builds at once, so I turn work down. If you need a team of six by Monday, I am the wrong choice and I will say so in the first email.
How decisions get made
You see a free concept of your actual site before anything is payable, because arguing about a real page beats arguing about a description of one. Price and scope are discussed well before that; what the concept buys you is seeing the work before committing to it. Scope is agreed in writing, and if it changes we re-agree it rather than quietly absorbing or quietly billing it.
When I think you are asking for the wrong thing, I say so once, plainly, with the reason. Then it is your business and your call, and I build what you decided. I will also tell you when the answer is not a website at all, because some problems are a pricing or a follow-up problem and no amount of design fixes those.
Where responsibility sits
You own the assets. Declining a care plan does not switch anything off, and I will not disable a site you have paid for. Hosting, the domain and any third-party services still have to be paid for by someone, and after handover those accounts are yours directly rather than rented back from me.
I own the standard of what I hand over. If something I built does not do what we agreed, that is mine to put right, and a slow page or a form that silently drops an enquiry counts. What I cannot stand behind is what the site becomes after other hands change it, or an outage at a hosting or third-party provider. Where that line is unclear on a job, I would rather agree it in writing at handover than argue about it afterwards.
Based in Sydney, working with firms around Australia. The best first message tells me what the business does and what is not working. I will reply personally, and I will tell you what I would build first.
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