Why We Left the Big Firms and Started 2cnot2

There's a moment most senior consultants recognise. You're deep in an engagement, something complex has surfaced, you know exactly what needs to happen, and you're watching it not happen. Not because the problem is unsolvable. Because the firm's playbook doesn't cover it, the junior assigned to the work hasn't seen it before, and the escalation path leads to someone who'll schedule a call for Thursday.

Aneesh and I have both been in that moment more times than we'd like to count. Different firms, different clients, same pattern.

We started 2cnot2 because we got tired of watching solvable problems get mishandled by people who were credentialled but not experienced. And honestly, because after years of delivering the hard stuff for other people's businesses, we wanted to build something of our own.

What "complex" actually looks like

When we say complex Digital Workplace transformations, we mean specific things.

Identity complexity isn't deploying Entra ID. It's managing 200,000 identities across a federated environment with SailPoint governance, SuccessFactors lifecycle integration, and legacy on-premises applications that still rely on Kerberos because nobody's touched them in six years.

Migration complexity isn't moving mailboxes. It's a cross-tenant Exchange migration mid-merger while maintaining calendar sharing between entities and the legal team is still negotiating the divestiture of a third subsidiary.

M&A complexity isn't setting up guest access. It's Day-1 provisioning for 3,000 acquired employees across 12 countries, in 48 hours, with no degradation to the parent organisation's security posture.

These are the scenarios that show whether a consulting firm has depth or just a logo.

The big firms win the work, staff it with graduates following a methodology, and somewhere around Phase 2 the complexity reveals itself. The project stalls. The client is frustrated. And the practitioners who actually know how to fix it are either not in the room or not empowered to act.

Why we left

Between us, Aneesh and I have spent the better part of our careers inside large MSPs and system integrators. That experience is genuinely valuable, we're not dismissing it. You learn how large environments operate, how enterprise procurement works, how to navigate organisations that move slowly by design.

But you also learn what gets lost at scale. The senior practitioner gets pulled toward oversight and account management. The technical depth that won the client gets replaced by process. And the consultant who could solve the problem in a day spends three weeks writing decks about solving the problem.

We wanted to get back to actually doing the work. Writing the PowerShell, configuring the policies, running the cutovers ourselves. Not managing someone else doing it.

How we work

One of the things we were both clear on from the start: we weren't going to replicate the model we left. Cookie-cutter outputs, generic templates, deliverables that look like they came off a production line.

We've built our own system for how we design, document and deliver. Our own templates, our own standards, our own way of structuring an assessment or a migration runbook. Every client deliverable looks and reads the way we want it to, not the way a corporate style guide from 2019 dictates.

That matters more than it sounds. The quality of what you put in front of a client reflects whether you take the work seriously. We do.

What's coming

Over the coming months we'll be sharing what we've learned from the field. Technical guides, architectural patterns, honest takes on what works and what doesn't. The stuff that doesn't make it into vendor documentation.

If you're working through a complex identity modernisation, a tenant migration, an M&A integration, or something messier than any of those, we'd like to talk.

Connect. Secure. Transform.

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2cnot2 is a practitioner-led enterprise IT consultancy founded in 2026. hello@2cnot2.com