How long it takes.
Roughly eight weeks from a signed engagement to a first production statement. Most of that is not my work, and the three things that control the schedule are the three I cannot compress.
3 min readEight weeks, and why it is not four.
You will see shorter timelines quoted. Treat them the way you would treat any other number chosen to be attractive rather than accurate.
The work I do occupies a small fraction of the elapsed time. The rest is manufacturer lead times, facility capacity windows and shipping. None of the three respond to urgency, and the stages that can genuinely be rushed are the contract review and the diligence on where your machines are going, which are the last two you would want rushed.
The stages themselves are set out in what a deployment looks like. This page is about how long each one takes and what makes it slip.
Week by week.
Week one
Discovery call and, if it fits, the strategy session. This is the only stage that moves as fast as you want it to, because it is just two people and a calendar.
Weeks two and three
Hardware identified, quoted and ordered, and facility capacity confirmed. Both have to land together. Ordering machines with nowhere confirmed to put them is the most common way a deployment stalls.
Weeks three and four
Shipping and receiving. Units are counted, serials logged and inspected for transit damage before anything is racked.
Weeks four and five
Racking, power and network configuration. Energisation dates recorded per machine.
Weeks five and six
Commissioning under load. Machines that miss specification are found here, which is the entire reason the stage exists.
Week six
Production begins.
Week eight
First full monthly production statement, covering a complete period rather than a partial one.
The three things that make it slip.
When a deployment runs long, it is almost always one of these rather than anything in the middle stages.
Manufacturer lead time
In stock units move in a week or two. Back ordered units can run considerably longer depending on the queue, and the queue lengthens in the fourth quarter when everyone is trying to energise before a year end.
Facility capacity
Power and rack space have to exist before machines can go anywhere. Capacity is booked ahead, and a window missed is a window waited for. This is the real constraint on how fast a position can grow.
Your own decisions
Approving hardware, signing the facility agreement, funding the purchase. Not a criticism: these are decisions that deserve time. But a week spent thinking is a week in the timeline, and it is worth knowing that in advance.
If you are aiming at a year end.
The deduction attaches to the year a machine is energised and ready to produce, not the year you paid for it. A unit sitting in a warehouse on the thirty first of December is next year’s deduction.
Working back from that, eight weeks means an engagement signed by roughly the end of October to be comfortable, and the fourth quarter is exactly when manufacturer queues are longest because every other buyer is doing the same arithmetic. If you come to me in December wanting hardware energised by year end, the honest answer is usually that it will not happen, and I would rather say so than take the order and miss.
None of which is a reason to rush. A deployment that lands in January is a deployment in January. The tax year is a scheduling constraint, not a reason to skip the diligence.
What you spend on it.
Your own time across the whole of it is small: half an hour on the discovery call, an hour on the strategy session, some time reviewing hardware and reading the facility agreement properly, and a conversation with your accountant.
I want to be careful how I put that, because low involvement is not a selling point here. It is a fact about the schedule, and it is also exactly the fact that makes the material participation question worth asking your accountant early. Less of your time is not automatically better, and on the tax side it can be worse.
Work backwards from your date.
Thirty minutes on your capital, your timeline and your entity. If your target date is not reachable I will tell you on the call, and the next window is usually the better plan anyway. You can also read what a deployment looks like and what can go wrong.
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