Petronella Inner Circle

What is the Inner Circle?

The Inner Circle is a small, annual advisory membership. Not a course. Not a mastermind. Not a quarterly deck with stock photography.

Each year, Petronella Technology Group accepts up to eight members. Every member gets one 45-minute direct call with Craig Petronella per quarter, a private Discourse tier where members talk to each other and to Craig, a written quarterly threat-briefing memo, priority queue for incident response when something real breaks, and first-look invitations when the firm releases a new AI agent or forensic tool.

That is the whole product. There is no bigger package behind it, no upsell to a platinum tier, and no implied promise that the Inner Circle fixes anything on its own. It is quiet counsel, on retainer, for people who want a trusted technical voice on call.

A few things the Inner Circle intentionally is not. It is not a mastermind with group coaching sessions and accountability partners. It is not a certification. It is not an insurance product or a fixed-SLA incident response plan. It is not a way to buy influence over our product roadmap. And it is not a shortcut to discounted managed services. Those are different conversations with different structures.

What it is, in one line, is the shortest path between a question you cannot answer internally and a technologist who has probably seen that question land on his desk before.

Who is this for?

Three groups, specifically.

• Existing Petronella clients at the $25,000-plus engagement level who already know our work and want ongoing quiet counsel between bigger projects. You have earned the relationship and want to keep it warm without opening a new statement of work every time.
• Referral advisors: attorneys, CPAs, and insurance brokers who regularly bring Petronella Technology Group into regulated-business deals. The Inner Circle gives you a structured way to stay current on CMMC, HIPAA, forensics, and private AI so you can advise your own clients with confidence. See the MSP Partners program for the formal referral side of the house.
• Founders of regulated businesses in defense, healthcare, legal, financial services, or engineering who want a technical advisor on call but do not need a managed services contract. You have your own IT team. You want a second opinion from someone who has done forensic work on the bad days.

If you are in one of those three groups and you like working with people who do not waste your time, this page is probably for you.

Who this is NOT for

Equally important, because this page is designed to self-filter.

We say this out loud so nobody wastes anybody's time. If the Inner Circle is not your fit, we will happily point you to the right door.

Annual investment

From $15,000

Annual commitment. Twelve-month prepay. No monthly billing, no tiers, no haggling.

Invoiced once per year after your application is accepted. Scope and pricing are confirmed in writing before any invoice is sent, and the starting investment reflects the standard seat. Specialized scope may adjust the figure upward, always in writing, never by surprise.

Compared to buying the equivalent from Petronella Technology Group at standard engagement rates, the membership is priced to reward relationship over transaction. One quarterly call at our usual hourly rate, a bespoke written briefing, first-look access to new product releases, and priority queue access would add up to more at transactional pricing. We do not belabor that math on the page because it is not the point. The point is that the people who buy an Inner Circle seat are buying the relationship, not the unit economics, and the pricing is set accordingly.

Payment is by Stripe invoice, wire, or check. Annual renewal is at the same figure unless scope has materially changed, and any change is discussed in writing before the renewal invoice goes out.

What's delivered each quarter

The cadence is intentional. Quarterly is long enough that you have real questions to bring, and short enough that the relationship stays current. Most members end up using their call for one of five things: a forensic question the internal team cannot answer alone, a compliance scoping sanity check before writing a vendor a large check, a review of an AI build or automation project, a second opinion on a proposed security investment, or a board-level risk conversation where an outside voice matters more than an internal one.

The threat briefing is written by Craig directly, edited lightly, and sent to all members on the same day. It runs three to four pages. No slides, no stock photos, no filler paragraphs explaining what ransomware is. Past briefings have covered regulatory shifts in CMMC assessments, recent patterns we have seen in pig-butchering and SIM-swap cases, a practical review of what voice-agent adoption is doing to front-desk social engineering, and a short list of the questions regulators are asking that were not on the list the prior quarter.

The priority incident response line matters most the one time a year you need it. Most members will not trigger it. The members who do tend to remember for a long time that a two-hour callback happened when the rest of their vendor list was still on hold.

The private Discourse tier

Members get a gated tier inside our community at community.petronellatech.com. This is where you post a question between quarterly calls, compare notes with peers in other regulated verticals, and get a direct reply from Craig or from another member who has solved the problem before.

It is deliberately tiny. There is no crossover with the main community, no marketing noise, and no Monday-morning icebreaker threads. The room is small because the value comes from the fact that the room is small.

Quiet, regulated-business peers talking shop. That is all it needs to be.

Members have a shared, searchable archive of prior conversations, so a question someone else asked in February is still findable in November. Threads stay up unless a member specifically asks us to scrub one, which occasionally happens when a post references an active incident or a sensitive client scope. Nothing leaves the tier. No content from the Inner Circle Discourse is used for marketing, reposted on blogs, or fed into training data for any Petronella Technology Group product.

The expectation is simple. Post what you would say out loud in a trusted room. No NDAs required because there is no public audience to leak to, and no anonymous lurkers because membership is directly tied to a paid seat and Craig reads every post.

How to apply

1. Email sales@petronellatech.com with the subject line Inner Circle Application.
2. Include three short lines: who you are, why you want in, and a sentence on your regulated-business scope.
3. Craig reviews within five business days. You will get a yes, a no, or a clarifying question. No sales-sequence follow-ups.
4. If accepted, we schedule a thirty-minute onboarding call to confirm scope and exchange context, then send a Stripe invoice for the annual figure.

Why cap at 8 members?

Honest answer. Craig holds a hard two-hour-per-week live-commitment cap across the entire business. Eight members at one 45-minute call per quarter works out to six hours per quarter, or twenty-four hours across the year. That fits inside the cap with room for the occasional mid-quarter member exception.

Raise the cap higher and the quality drops. Craig either starts reusing canned answers, pushes calls to junior staff, or the calendar collapses and everybody gets rescheduled. None of those versions of the Inner Circle are worth fifteen thousand dollars to anyone.

Eight is the number where the math works and the quality holds.

If every seat fills, the Inner Circle caps at a manageable annual commitment for the firm and keeps Craig's calendar sane enough that his other work, forensics casework, compliance engagements, and internal AI builds, does not suffer. If a seat does not fill, we leave it empty rather than backfill with someone who does not quite fit. Empty seats are cheaper than wrong seats.

Frequently asked