Written and reviewed by the Green Arrow Consultancy team, led by Darren Tyler, founder and chief executive.
Plenty of suppliers rent a desk in a serviced building so a map pin appears in the right postcode. We would rather tell you the truth in the first line and spend the rest of the page explaining how the work actually gets done.
We do not have a London office. Green Arrow Consultancy is an AI agency and digital consultancy in Cardiff that works with London clients remotely, and travels to London when a meeting genuinely needs a room. We build production AI systems and websites, and run privacy, analytics and accessibility programmes for financial, legal, professional services and consumer brands.
There is a standard move in this industry. A firm takes a mail-forwarding address or a hot desk in a serviced building, publishes it as a London office, and lets the reader assume there is a team behind the door. Sometimes there is not even a desk, only an address on a contract. We are not going to do that, for three reasons.
The first is legal. The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 gives the Competition and Markets Authority direct enforcement powers over misleading commercial practices, and creating a false impression about the nature or location of a trader is the kind of thing it is aimed at. Implying premises you do not have is a real risk in exchange for a map pin.
The second is practical. If you hire a supplier because they are round the corner, then discover the delivery team is somewhere else entirely, the relationship starts with a discovered untruth. That is a poor opening position for a two-year retainer.
The third is that it is unnecessary. We have run digital estates for clients in the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific since 2014, when we took over more than thirty Energizer websites across the UK and EU. By 2022 the managed portfolio had passed two hundred websites, roughly half the client base in the United States. A supplier who can run a hundred websites in another hemisphere can run a project in Zone 1 without renting a chair there. The about page has the detail.
So the honest position is this. One office, in Cardiff, which you can visit. A delivery model that assumes distance and is built to work anyway. Travel to London whenever a meeting genuinely needs a room, agreed and priced in the open. If proximity is your deciding criterion, hire someone in London and we will not be offended. If capability, continuity and honest pricing matter more, keep reading.
Six of the nine services we offer. A London engagement usually starts as one and grows into two.
Retrieval assistants, document AI, internal search and agents that take a logged, reversible action. Grounded in your own content, built to cite sources and to refuse rather than invent.
Builds, rebuilds and rescues, with Core Web Vitals, WCAG 2.2 and consent handled during the build. Often the work is inheriting a site from a relationship that has run its course.
UK GDPR records of processing, cookie audits, data flow mapping and consent platform work. Osano and OneTrust are the two platforms we deploy most often, and Securiti.ai turns up in larger estates.
WCAG 2.2 AA against EN 301 549 and the European Accessibility Act, using axe alongside manual testing, with a fix list ordered by user harm rather than by ease.
Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager rebuilt so measurement is defensible, including server-side tagging where the alternative is a client-side setup that consent quietly breaks.
EU AI Act readiness, ISO/IEC 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework turned into controls a team can operate, plus red teaming against the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications.
Six habits. None are clever, and together they separate remote delivery that works from remote delivery people quietly resent.
The first fortnight is spent getting into the systems: repositories, hosting, tag manager, consent platform, analytics, DNS. On almost every engagement this is the slow part, and doing it first means it happens while we are cheap rather than while we are billing a full team.
The scoping session is worth travelling for, because whiteboards and interruptions surface things that a video call does not. We come to you, usually for a day. After that the default flips to remote and stays there unless there is a reason.
A short written update on an agreed day covering what shipped, what is blocked and what we need from you. Three minutes to read, and it replaces the standing call everybody joins late. Calls still happen when a decision genuinely needs a conversation.
Work lands in short increments on an environment you can open. If the direction is wrong you find out in week two, when changing it is a conversation rather than a change order.
You get the mobile number of the person doing the work. No ticket queue, no first-line triage. This is a genuine advantage of a small team, and one of the first things a growing supplier loses.
A review in person, in London, against the measure agreed at the start. If the numbers do not support continuing, that is the meeting where we say so rather than rolling the retainer over.
Three ways to buy the same capability. Each column is a legitimate answer to a different situation.
| What you are comparing | A large full-service agency | A specialist firm of our size | An in-house hire |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost structure | Blended day rate covering premises, sales, account management and utilisation targets | Day rate or fixed scope, with travel itemised separately rather than absorbed | Salary, employer costs, tooling and recruitment fees, spread over a year or more |
| Who does the work | Usually a delivery team you meet after signing, structured by seniority and availability | The practitioners who attended the first meeting | The person you hired, subject to what else lands on them |
| Continuity of the team | Dependent on staff turnover and internal reassignment across accounts | Small enough that the same people stay on an account for years | Total, until they resign, at which point the knowledge leaves with them |
| Response time | Governed by a service level agreement and a ticket queue | A direct line to the person working on it, with no queue in front | Immediate, within the hours of one person |
| Breadth on tap | Wide, including media, brand, creative and production capacity you can surge | Narrow and deep: AI, web, privacy, analytics and accessibility only | Whatever that individual happens to know |
| Where it goes wrong | Your account becomes small relative to their larger ones | Capacity is finite, so a sudden large programme is a genuine constraint | One person cannot cover engineering, privacy and accessibility properly |
This is a general comparison of engagement models. It is not a claim about any named agency, firm or individual, and it is not evidence about the performance of any particular supplier. Your own experience of any of the three models may reasonably differ.
Written down so it is a policy rather than a negotiation every time.
The common factor is not sector. It is that being wrong in public would cost something real.
Environments where an AI system must cite its source and refuse to guess, and where a regulator may eventually ask to see the record of processing. This is the shape of our work with Circana.
Document-heavy practices with knowledge trapped in file stores. Retrieval over contracts, precedents and policies, with permission-aware search so an answer is never drawn from a matter the asker cannot read.
The London marketing office is rarely the hard part. The market sites behind it are, each with a different consent regime and tag configuration. We have run this shape of estate since 2014.
Privacy engineering, accessibility remediation, analytics rebuilds and AI components delivered behind or alongside an existing agency relationship. We are used to not owning the client relationship.
One question across HR systems, procurement, policy libraries and file stores, answered with citations. The internal AI request people most consistently underestimate.
The European Accessibility Act, a procurement requirement, or a complaint. Audit, prioritised remediation and a statement that describes the site as it actually is.
A location page that only argues in one direction is a sales page wearing a hat. Here is the other side.
If you need a supplier who can put twenty people on a programme next quarter, we are not that supplier. We are a small team in Cardiff with specialist help brought in where a project needs it, and we would rather turn work down than deliver it late. If you need paid media buying, brand strategy or a television campaign, that is not what we do, and the honest recommendation is a firm that does it properly rather than a subcontracting arrangement you did not ask for.
If your organisation genuinely requires a supplier to be physically present several days a week, hire locally. Some regulated programmes really do need that, and pretending otherwise would waste a year of your time. And if what you want is the reassurance of a large name on a procurement form, that is a real requirement too, even if nobody writes it in the brief.
What we are good at is narrow and specific: production AI that survives contact with a real business, websites that hold up to a privacy and accessibility review, consent and analytics configurations that match what the policy claims, and long relationships where the same people stay on the account. If that is the problem, distance is not the constraint people assume it is.
Darren consistently demonstrated exceptional technical skill and a strong understanding of various jurisdictions' legal requirements.
The questions London prospects ask us most, answered without the sales gloss. The full FAQ goes further on pricing, security and ways of working.
No. Green Arrow Consultancy has one office, at Sophia House, 28 Cathedral Road, Cardiff, CF11 9LJ. We do not rent a serviced desk in the City to put an EC postcode on a website, and we do not list a virtual address as if it were premises. What we have instead is a delivery model built for working with clients we cannot walk to, which is how we have run digital estates in the United States and Asia Pacific for over a decade.
Yes. We travel to London for scoping workshops, steering meetings, launch reviews and anything where being in the room genuinely changes the outcome. What we will not do is bill you for a weekly status meeting that could have been a written update. Cardiff to London Paddington is under two hours, so a morning in your office and an afternoon back at a desk is a normal working day here.
Travel to London is agreed in advance and itemised separately on the invoice rather than being absorbed into an inflated day rate. That way you can see the cost of a trip and decide whether it is worth it. Some clients want a monthly on-site day and budget for it. Others have never asked us to visit. Both are fine, and the second one is cheaper.
A shared backlog you can see at any time, a written update on an agreed day rather than a meeting, environments and repositories you own, a fortnightly release you can look at, and a named person who answers when you call. Decisions that need a discussion get a call the same day. What separates remote work that functions from remote work that frustrates people is whether the written trail is good enough to make meetings optional.
Yes. Green Arrow Consultancy Ltd was founded in Cardiff in 2012 and incorporated in 2020. Company number 12491770, VAT 344486874, ICO registration ZA822868. We are a member of the International Association of Privacy Professionals. There is more about the Cardiff office if you want to see where the work is done.
Yes. Roughly half our client work is in the United States, and we have run programmes across the EU, Asia Pacific, the Middle East, South America and South Africa. For a London business with an international estate that matters, because the awkward part is rarely the London site. It is the market sites behind it, each with a different consent regime and a different tag configuration.
Frequently, yes. A good share of our work is as the specialist layer behind another agency: the privacy engineering, the accessibility remediation, the analytics rebuild or the AI component of a programme that somebody else owns overall. We are comfortable being a subcontractor and comfortable being named. What we ask for is a direct line to whoever makes technical decisions.
Financial and data services, legal and professional services, consumer brands with UK and EU digital estates, and other agencies who need a specialist layer. The common factor is a regulated or reputation-sensitive setting, where an AI system that invents an answer or a consent banner that does not match the policy creates a real problem rather than an embarrassing one.
Sometimes, and we are not going to claim it as a rule, because the honest answer depends on the shape of the work. Our overheads are lower than a central London floor plate, and there is no account management layer to fund. Against that, we are a small team and we price specialist work as specialist work. You will get a written scope with a number in it and you can compare that number against anyone else's.
Written and reviewed by the Green Arrow Consultancy team, led by Darren Tyler, founder and chief executive.
A first call costs nothing and we will tell you honestly whether this is work for us, work for a larger agency, or work for nobody at all. No London postcode required.