About Prosody Consulting

The Pros from Dover.

Remember the Pros from Dover in M*A*S*H — the specialists who flew in, fixed the case nobody else could, and flew out? That's the model. Senior people, no bench to hide behind, based in Kansas City and Boston and on the road wherever the project is.

Prosody is a senior advisory firm anchored in two practices — Charles "Bob" Brettell's Capital Strategy & Project Development, and Howard Blazzard's Strategic Technology Advisory. Twenty-plus years of project development meets twenty-five years of senior technology leadership. The two practices reinforce each other in the work, and we keep the structure deliberately small so the people on your project are the people you hired.

What we don't do

What we don't do.

We don't do fluff, and we won't oversell you. We'd rather tell you what we don't know than pretend otherwise — and we think hard about what's actually right for your project before we say a word about what we'd do.

We show up, do the work, and tell you what's actually true. When the right call is to bring in someone whose specialty isn't ours — an engineer, transaction counsel, a specific kind of operator — we say so, and we help you find the right person. The bench is two partners and the network we've built across twenty years. That's the design.

Meet the principals

Meet the principals.

Charles "Bob" Brettell

Managing Partner · Capital Strategy & Project Development

Charles “Bob” Brettell is the Managing Partner of The Prosody Group and leads Prosody Consulting’s Capital Strategy & Project Development practice. His 20 years of project development, revitalization, and resolution experience includes site selection and negotiation, government affairs, debt and equity financing, due diligence, merger integration, and compliance support for projects valued at over $20 billion.

Beyond client engagements, Prosody has deployed its own capital and personnel into operating businesses: a recent divested equity interest in MAP Energy Solutions, a multi-state solar development entity for which Prosody provided commercial origination, structuring, and management services; and an investment in and revitalization of Brooklight Place Securities, a registered broker-dealer.

Prior to founding The Prosody Group, Mr. Brettell co-founded Energy Asset Advisors (EAA) and Energy Asset Solutions (EAS), where as Managing Director he led due diligence, financing, and development of renewable energy and technology projects, alongside investment banking, commercial origination, and project management services for a diverse client base. As Senior Director with Tyr Energy, he led asset acquisition, M&A integration, and crisis management for renewable and conventional power generation companies, supporting investment banking, lender, and private equity clients. At Aquila, his work spanned strategy, competitive intelligence, business development, legal, regulatory, and human resources across multiple wholly-owned subsidiaries.

Mr. Brettell has also worked as an attorney in private practice on business and litigation matters and holds multiple securities licenses. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Maryland, a joint Juris Doctor and Master of Business Administration (Finance) from the University of Kansas, and a Master of Laws (Tax) from the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

Expertise

Howard Blazzard

Partner · Strategic Technology Advisory · Prosody Labs

Mr. Blazzard leads Prosody Consulting’s Strategic Technology Advisory practice and runs Prosody Labs, the firm’s AI fluency sub-brand. His 25 years of technology leadership span digital strategy, marketing technology, e-commerce platforms, secure AI implementation, and the operating discipline that turns AI into real leverage rather than novelty.

For five years Mr. Blazzard served as the Boston and Detroit capability lead for the Technology practice at Digitas, a global digital agency. He held a $50M annual revenue responsibility, sat on the regional Executive Leadership Team, and managed 40+ onshore engineers and 100+ offshore. His work spanned new business pitches, multimillion-dollar client engagements, and the strategic direction of the technology capability across both offices.

Prior to capability lead, Mr. Blazzard led technology for a Fortune 100 e-commerce account on a $14–16M annual budget. He owned the platform and product roadmap for the first direct-to-consumer offering in the tire industry, including daily operations, retail-sales-cycle responsiveness, and compliance with SOC 2 Type 2 and PCI-DSS.

Mr. Blazzard also served as a team lead for Digitas AI, an in-house platform that gave clients secure, LLM-agnostic Retrieval Augmented Generation against their proprietary data, with API-driven support for agent, image, and voice implementations. That work is the foundation of Prosody Labs.

Mr. Blazzard started as an engineer in the University of Virginia computer labs during the dot-com boom and has built his career at the intersection of digital technology and human creativity. He earned a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Virginia, is a US Army veteran, and is an Assistant Scoutmaster for his son’s Scout troop in Rockport, Massachusetts.

Expertise

How the two practices reinforce each other

Why pick a two-practice firm?

The honest answer: the practices compound. Bob's project development and capital work happens to be exactly the kind of high-stakes, document-heavy, deadline-driven work where AI fluency multiplies senior judgment. The grant writing that funds our clients' projects increasingly runs on the same AI-fluency discipline Howard's practice would build for a client directly.

You can hire one practice without the other. Most clients do. But when both practices show up on the same engagement — a federally funded technology buildout, a project with secure AI capability baked in, a Labs-enabled approach to capital deployment — the result is a tighter, faster, more defensible piece of work than either practice could produce alone.

Examples already live: the PIDP federal funding dashboard was built by Howard's practice on data Bob has spent years collecting. The methodology that won federal awards on the PIDP rebuild and terminal modernization came out of the same Labs work.

How we work

How we work.

Lead with the problem.

We don't show up with a solution looking for a use case. The work starts with what's actually going wrong, or what's actually at stake. The right structure, the right capital stack, the right tool — those come after.

Tell you what's true.

If we think your plan won't fly, we'll tell you. If you need someone whose specialty isn't ours, we'll say so and help you find them. The relationships we build aren't based on what we sold yesterday; they're based on what we delivered.

Senior people, every engagement.

The two partners are the people on your project. Not associates, not subcontractors, not a junior team you'll meet for the first time at kickoff. The firm is deliberately small so this is sustainable.

Work it together.

The work is collaborative by default — inside the firm, with your team, and with the outside specialists a project needs. When something is hard, we get the right people on the same call and stay on it until it's solved, rather than trading documents back and forth for weeks.

Stay until close.

Projects don't always end at signing or submission. When you want us there, we stay through the parts most consultants disappear for — award negotiations, draw schedules, compliance support, post-deal integration, whatever the project actually needs. Sometimes that means handing off once the award is won; sometimes it means staying through commercial operation.

Want to work together?

Tell us what you're trying to build. We'll tell you what we'd do — and if it isn't ours, who to call instead.