ISO 9001 consulting that fits how your business actually works.

For a US company with no prior management-system experience, ISO 9001 typically takes four to seven months from kickoff to Stage 2 certification. The variables are: how clearly your current operations are documented, how engaged your team is in implementation, and whether your certification body has audit slots available. We give you a calibrated timeline after the gap analysis — not before.

Yes. ISO 9001 was redesigned in 2015 specifically to work for service businesses and small organizations. The standard scales to your size. A 15-person consulting firm can have a perfectly functional ISO 9001-certified QMS that fits on roughly 20 pages of documentation. The key is designing for your scale, not adopting a generic 200-person manufacturing template.

Engagement scope is the dominant variable. A standalone gap analysis for a small organization is typically in the low five figures. Full implementation from scratch — documentation work, internal audit, certification body liaison — ranges considerably higher and depends on your size, complexity, and how much of the work your team will own. The certification body charges its own fees, and those are not arbitrary — audit days are set by IAF MD 5 against the number of people within your certification scope, so you can check any quote you are given. We show the table and the arithmetic in our certification cost breakdown. We don't publish a rate card for our own work because the rate-card framing misleads more than it informs. Reach out and we'll walk through honest scope.

Neither. As of 26 August 2026 the revision is at ISO stage 60.00, and ISO/TC 176/SC 2 announced on 7 August that publication is scheduled for 16 September 2026 — text final, in production, though that is a committee schedule rather than a published fact and this standard has slipped once already. Certification bodies then need their own accreditation extended before they can audit anyone to it, so the first accredited 2026-edition certificates realistically arrive some months later. Certificates to the 2015 edition stay valid throughout the transition window. What nobody can tell you yet is how long that window is: no accreditation body has published a deadline, and much of what you will read stating September 2029 is an estimate presented as fact. We maintain a tracker of what is confirmed and what isn't, updated when it changes, and a separate page on what a transition engagement actually involves.

Yes, and increasingly we recommend it. Modern QMS design treats your ERP, PLM, and document management systems as the operational backbone. The 'ISO 9001 documentation' is largely structured outputs from those systems rather than separate documents maintained in parallel. We design the QMS to work with your existing infrastructure rather than around it.

Yes. About a third of our work is companies that either hold a different framework certification (AS9100, IATF 16949, ISO 13485) and need to add or transition to ISO 9001, or attempted ISO 9001 with another consultant and need to recover. We bring in a fresh assessment, identify what's salvageable, and design the path forward rather than ripping out everything and starting over.

ISO 9001 is a quality management standard — it governs how you produce consistent, customer-satisfying outputs. SOC 2 is a security and trust framework specific to service organizations handling customer data. They cover entirely different domains. Many clients pursue both because their enterprise customers require both. If you're going down that path we'll scope an integrated engagement that shares evidence and audit coverage where the frameworks overlap.

No legitimate consultant will, and you should be skeptical of any who do. The certification body is independent of the consultant by design — that's what makes the certificate worth anything. What we will guarantee is preparation: we will not put you in front of an auditor until your system can defend itself.