A senior architect on your team, a few days a month.
Most companies do not need a full-time architect. They need someone senior in the room for the decisions that are expensive to get wrong, and gone again before the payroll line starts to hurt.
That is the job. I set technical direction, review the risky calls, keep a migration honest, and help your team ship without painting itself into a corner. Regional and mid-sized companies included; you do not have to be a Fortune 500 to get my attention.
A standing day or two a month, or a block of time around one specific decision.
On-site around metro Atlanta, or remote. Both work fine.
A short call. Tell me what is going on; I will tell you if I can help.
The kind of thing I get pulled into.
Hands on the actual problem.
I am not the kind of consultant who shows up, runs a workshop, and leaves you a slide deck. I get into the real system: the code, the database, the decisions already made and the ones still open.
Day to day that means setting direction your team can actually follow, reviewing the changes that are hard to undo, sitting in on the calls where the expensive decisions get made, and now and then talking someone out of rebuilding a thing that works fine.
Sometimes you do not need someone ongoing. You need a straight read on what you have: what is actually at risk, what to fix first, what to leave alone. I do that as a one-off too, and I do not sell the rebuild, so I have no reason to tell you that you need one.
Either way, the arrangement should get smaller over time, not bigger. If your team is not handling more of this without me by the end, I am doing it wrong.