Two practices for companies in motion. Selective by design.
I'm Dave DeMarco. 9990 Partners is my practice.
Most spend-optimization work bends the cost line and stops there. I treat the stack as an EBITDA lever - through four levers, not one.
Most integration work either airlifts an army of consultants who leave nothing behind, or hands over a deck and walks away. I do the work end-to-end - and I leave the operating machine in place so your next deal lands faster, without me.
I'm Dave DeMarco. 9990 Partners is my practice. Thirty-plus years leading enterprise software delivery, M&A integration, operational turnarounds, and business technology at scale.
Most recently SVP at Carta for eight years, scaling Delivery Services from $30M to $500M+ ARR, leading an eleven-month Fund Administration operations turnaround, leading M&A integrations on the buy side (up to three concurrently through close and post-close), and running concurrent vendor portfolio management across the business — 25 enterprise software negotiations delivering $5.2M in combined value at 48% average reduction versus vendor proposals.
Before Carta, a sequence of senior leadership roles that built the range a senior-operator practice requires - Xant (multiple concurrent VP roles across Engineering, Professional Services, Technology Operations, and Internal Business Applications), eBay Enterprise (Head of Webstore Product Development, Head of Omnichannel Fulfillment, R&D Chief of Staff for a 275-person organization; three filed patents in omnichannel ecommerce), SunGard Availability Services (VP Product Development), an independent consulting practice, and ten years at Accenture from campus hire to Senior Manager leading project teams of 50-100 across the US, Europe, and Asia.
The thread is range at depth - delivery, engineering, product, business technology, fund operations, M&A integration, vendor portfolio management. When work crosses six or eight functional domains in three months, that range is what it actually requires.
The fixed-fee philosophy is deliberate. Hourly billing caps the upside of AI-leverage, invites line-by-line scope scrutiny, and reproduces the consulting-pyramid dynamics this practice was built to be different from. Fixed-fee, phase-gated, with exit clauses between phases - gives the CFO an easy yes and a clean exit, and gives the operating partner clean numbers to underwrite.
Selective by design. I take a small number of engagements at a time - not because I'm capacity-constrained, but because depth and AI-leverage compound when attention isn't fractured. A senior-operator boutique works differently from a consultancy. That's the point.
I take a small number of engagements at a time, by design. If you have a company in motion - approaching or past a deal, or with a technology stack that's leaving EBITDA on the table - start a conversation.