About
Small on purpose
Xstep is deliberately not an agency, not a body shop and not a reseller. We are a small senior practice that does the work between your vendors, and finishes it.
The slice between the slices
Every growing business ends up with strong partners who each own a piece. A Shopify partner. A creative agency. An accountant. Software vendors. Each one is good at the part they own, and nobody owns how the parts fit together.
That gap is where the frustrating problems live. The contracts, the data model, the integration spine, the AI governance, the operating model. The work that is hard precisely because no single vendor owns it. That is the work Xstep does. We do not compete with your existing partners. We make sure they all add up to one business.
Michael Tran
Michael has spent around thirty years in technology, leading engineering and delivery inside large Australian enterprises and high-growth companies, and building businesses of his own. He works hands-on in every Xstep engagement: solution architecture, AI strategy and operational transformation.
Xstep also draws on a small bench of senior specialists, including deep Microsoft 365, Copilot, Azure and integration expertise, brought in when an engagement needs them.
We take our own medicine
We run our own business through the same AI pipelines we recommend. Our contracts go through an AI legal review with human sign-off. Our proposals, research and delivery tooling are AI-assisted with a person accountable for every output.
Founder-led, and at the inflection point
We work with Australian founder-led or family-owned businesses, typically with twenty to two hundred staff, often multi-site or multi-entity, and often in regulated or compliance-sensitive industries. They have strong vendors and agencies, but no CTO by title, and they have reached the point where per-site IT and per-vendor thinking stops working. If that sounds like you, we should talk. If it does not, we will say so early.
Start with one conversation
If you are founder-led, between twenty and two hundred staff, and the per-vendor model has stopped working, we should talk. If that is not you, we will say so early.