Almost everyone we meet has. Here is what usually goes wrong, and what we do instead.
Most people who call us are already fed up with somebody. By the time we get the call, hardly anyone opens by asking what we charge. They want to know why we'd be any different.
Most of the trouble starts with how the IT company makes money and handles calls. If they make money selling products, that affects what they recommend. If every call goes to a queue, you rarely get the same person twice.
What went wrong
You used to call a person. Then the provider grew, added a portal, and put a queue between you and the work. Now you describe your own network to a stranger every time something breaks, and the person who finally reads the ticket has never seen your server.
How we work
You get a cell phone number. Whoever answers has worked on your environment before.
What went wrong
The local company you trusted sold to a larger one, which sold to private equity. The owner you knew is gone, the technicians turned over twice, and the service you signed up for doesn't exist anymore. Nobody asked you.
How we work
Same family since 1989. We are not private equity backed. The next generation already works here.
What went wrong
A lot of providers earn margin on the hardware, software, and licenses they recommend. That's a normal way to run the business, and it leaves you working out whether a recommendation was what you needed or what paid best. The invoice won't tell you.
How we work
We do not resell the things we recommend. We do not take vendor commissions. We make money by doing the work. If the right answer is do not buy it, that is what you'll hear from us.
What went wrong
When a provider has a number to hit, findings start arriving with a product attached. After a while you can't tell which warnings are real, so you start ignoring all of them.
How we work
We'll tell you when you don't need something. We've talked clients out of renewals and out of software that wouldn't have paid for itself.
What went wrong
The documentation lives in their system. The licenses are in their name. The domain is registered to them. Nobody wrote down how anything works. Whether they planned it or not, leaving means starting over.
How we work
Your domain and your licenses are registered to you, not to us, and your documentation is yours whenever you ask for it. We carry the renewals so nothing quietly expires over a weekend, but the asset is yours and it leaves when you do. We have clients who have been with us for decades. People don't stay that long because leaving would be hard.
What went wrong
A provider that treats the symptom keeps the phone ringing. The same printer, the same login, the same slow machine, month after month. Ticket volume starts to look like evidence that somebody is working hard, when it's usually evidence that nothing has been fixed properly.
How we work
Some days nobody calls us at all. That's the goal, not a slow week. Problems get solved at the root the first time, so the calls go down over the years rather than up. We have no ticketing system because nothing needs to sit in a queue.
What went wrong
You only heard from them when you called. No one noticed the backup had been failing for four months, or that a former employee still had access, or that an outside vendor was sitting on administrator rights.
How we work
We look without being asked. We tell you what we find even when it's inconvenient, and especially when there's no billable work in it for us.
For about a decade Billy ran the enterprise IT backend data center for an eight billion dollar company, reporting straight to their CTO. One person, the whole operation. Partway through it was acquired into a Fortune 100 group and he stayed and kept it running. He left a step ahead of the CTO on his way out, and heard later they hired eight people to cover his work. Some of what we look after is still international, across a big time difference, with nobody local to lean on.
That matters to you for one reason. Whatever is going wrong in your office, we've almost certainly seen a larger version of it. If the remote model holds up on the other side of the world, and the discipline holds up in a data center that size, your network isn't going to be the thing that surprises us.
We've never paid for advertising. The one exception was a Grand Prairie Chamber of Commerce listing in 2003, done in trade, which cost us nothing. Nearly every client came from somebody who already worked with us and told someone else, and a good many of them have been with us for more than twenty years.
A lot of good local providers have been bought in the last few years, often by a larger firm and then by an investor. Clients usually find out afterwards. We are not for sale. We have never taken outside money. The next generation is already here doing the work.
Ask anyone whose provider changed hands.
You don't have to take any of this on faith. Ask who answers when you call at 4:45 on a Friday. Ask who owns your documentation and how fast you could have a copy. Ask whether we get paid by anyone whose products we recommend. Ask what we've talked a client out of buying lately.
Ask the same questions of whoever you talk to next.
Who answers at 4:45 on a Friday, who owns your documentation, and what we have talked a client out of buying lately.
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