Managed IT Support
The person who answers already knows what you have.
A flat monthly arrangement for organizations that would rather not think about any of this. No ticket queue, no tiers, no script being read back to you.
What you are actually buying
Support is usually sold by the hour, and the hour is not the valuable part. Anybody can bill you for an hour.
What costs you money when you call somebody new is the first forty minutes, while a stranger works out what you have, how it is connected, who everybody is, and why the equipment in the closet was wired that way by somebody who left in 2019. You pay for that discovery every single time. And you pay for it at the worst possible moment, because nobody calls for help on a good day.
A monthly arrangement is simply a way of doing that part once.
You are not really buying hours. You are buying the fact that somebody already knows.
What a month looks like
Watching the quiet things
Backups finishing rather than merely starting. Disks filling up. Certificates about to expire. Updates that stopped applying in March and never said so. None of these will ever generate a complaint, which is exactly why they are the ones that ruin a week. More on why that matters.
Updates on a schedule
Patching that happens deliberately, at a time chosen by somebody who knows what your Tuesday mornings look like. Applied steadily rather than all at once in a panic, and never on the machine that runs payroll on the day payroll runs.
Being the first call
Including the calls that are not really about me. The internet provider, the accounting software company, the people who lease you the copier. A fair amount of support is simply being the person willing to sit on hold and then speak their language when somebody finally picks up. That is not skilled work, but it is work, and it should not be yours.
Knowing what changed
A short written note each month: what was done, what I am keeping an eye on, and what I think will need money and roughly when. Written in language a board can read without somebody technical sitting beside them translating. Nothing about your own organization should arrive as a surprise.
Ten clients, and why that is the number
The limit is not scarcity marketing. It is the only condition under which the sentence at the top of this page is true.
Nobody can hold forty organizations in their head. Past a certain number you stop knowing clients and start looking them up, and the moment that happens you need a ticket system, and then tiers, and then somebody junior reading your account details back to you while the actual problem waits. Every part of that exists to make a large number of clients survivable. None of it exists to make your Tuesday better.
So the number stays small on purpose. When I am full I will say so and point you toward somebody good, which I would rather do than take your money and become the thing I have just described.
How it is priced
A flat monthly figure, agreed before anything begins, so it becomes one predictable line in a budget that a board can approve once a year and then stop thinking about. Predictability is most of the point. An IT bill that varies wildly from month to month is difficult to defend to a finance committee even when every number in it is fair.
Projects sit outside it. A move, a migration, a new office, replacing something that has genuinely reached the end — those get quoted on their own, and quoted beforehand. You should never open an invoice from me and find a number in it you have not already seen and agreed to.
And the arrangement should be easy to leave. Anything that has to be locked in for three years is being sold to you rather than chosen by you.
You might not need this
If there are five of you, everything lives in Microsoft 365, and nothing much changes from one month to the next, a monthly arrangement may be more than your situation calls for. Call somebody when something breaks. That is a legitimate way to run a small organization and it is not a lesser option, it is a different one.
The monthly arrangement starts earning its keep when there are enough moving parts that somebody has to be keeping track of them, or when a bad day would cost you enough that you would rather it were prevented than repaired.
If the first description fits you better, PC support is the page you want, and I will say so on the phone rather than letting you sign up for the larger thing.
Not sure which one fits?
Describe what you have and how many of you there are, and I will tell you which arrangement makes sense — including when the answer is neither one yet. That conversation is free and it is not a sales call in disguise.