About
A small firm, by design.
Senior advice, delivered quietly, in Surrey.
Wey Advisory is a one-principal consultancy in Guildford. By design it is small — one senior person gives the advice, takes the meetings, writes the notes and signs the work.
The Founder
Ricardo Gonzales
I'm Ricardo Gonzales. I trained as a strategy consultant at Accenture and spent the middle of my career in senior roles at Nets and Santander, working on payments and change programmes. The work took me across Canada, the United States, Ireland, Norway and Japan — and what I learned, over those years, is the difference between advice that sounds impressive in a meeting and advice that actually lands with the person who has to do the work on Monday.
In 2023 I finished an MA in Art Business at Sotheby's Institute of Art in London. It turned out to matter a great deal: it taught me how rigorous, quiet-spoken senior advice is given in a craft industry where trust is everything, and where no client has ever wanted a forty-slide deck. A lot of how Wey Advisory works is borrowed, deliberately, from that world.
Alongside the consultancy I build and run three working AI products — Art Collector IQ, ArtCheck, and Art Gallery IQ — which are used by collectors, dealers and galleries around the world. This means the advice you get here is not academic. It is from someone who ships AI for a living.
How we work
Five working principles.
- One senior person gives the advice.You are never handed off to a junior. If you have hired us, you have hired the founder, full stop.
- Priced in writing, before we start.A scoping note goes out before any billable work. You know the outcomes and the price on paper.
- Plain English, always.If you need jargon to understand the advice, we have not done our job. You will never be asked to nod along.
- Short over long.Reports are six to twelve pages, not sixty. Meetings start and end on time. We write like journalists, not academics.
- An honest ceiling on client numbers.We take a small number of clients each year — four fractional clients at most, a handful of audits a quarter. That ceiling is deliberate.
The name
Why “Wey”?
The River Wey rises near Alton, passes through Godalming and Guildford, and finally joins the Thames at Weybridge. For most of its length it runs quietly, unfashionably, through the landscape this firm belongs to.
The name is meant to signal two things: where we are, and how we work. It is also, pointedly, a name that says nothing about technology. We are an advisory firm first. AI is the current subject of the advice.
A discreet specialism
The art world.
Alongside our general practice we keep a small, standing specialism serving galleries, collectors and the wider art trade. The founder sits inside this world professionally — an MA from Sotheby's Institute, three working AI products used by collectors and galleries, and an active private network.
If your business is the art world, we can be genuinely useful on provenance research, catalogue-raisonné work, condition-report assistance, and quiet, informed market intelligence. Read more →
Start with a conversation.
Thirty minutes. At our cost. No obligation.