Small on purpose. Senior on every visit.

What this is

Senior network engineering available to downtown businesses on retainer and by the hour, instead of at $160,000 a year on your payroll. The work happens evenings and weekends, which is when network work belongs anyway.

It is deliberately narrow. This is not a managed service provider and there is no helpdesk behind it. It is the expertise you would want in the room when the network is the problem — available for the fraction of the time you actually need it.

Why it works this way

Small businesses downtown have two realistic options for senior network expertise, and both are bad. Hire someone at a salary that competes with banks and trading firms, for work that genuinely occupies a few days a month. Or buy a per-seat managed service where the first person who answers is the least experienced one, and anything genuinely difficult gets escalated to somebody you are not paying for directly.

Retaining specialists is the obvious third option and it is oddly rare, mostly because it does not scale into a business anybody wants to sell. That is fine. It does not need to scale to be the right answer for you.

How we work

Prices published

All of them, on the pricing page. If the rates are wrong for your business you should discover that on a website, not four weeks into a sales process.

No hardware markup

Equipment and licences for IT work at cost. Which means there is no financial reason to recommend replacing something that could be repaired, and you can believe the recommendation when it comes.

Documentation is yours

Topology, addressing, firewall rules, passwords. Handed over, kept current, and never used as leverage. Holding a client’s access hostage is how suppliers survive without being good.

No multi-year term

Thirty days’ notice on the retainer. Long lock-ins mostly protect providers from the consequences of their own service.

You will get talked out of things

Off a hardware refresh you do not need. Off a repair when the machine is not worth it. Off the cloud for a workload that should stay put. And off this arrangement entirely if your hours say you should hire somebody.

What this is not

Not a first-line helpdesk your whole staff ring all day about passwords and printers — a generalist does that better and cheaper, and we work alongside one happily. Not a large firm either, and not trying to become one, because the size is what keeps a senior engineer on every visit. If you need people in several buildings at once, you need a bigger supplier and you will be told so.

We are also selective about who we work with. The clients we do our best work for are reasonable, plan ahead and want things done properly rather than quickly and cheaply. We may not be the right fit for you, and that is fine — the first conversation is where we work out what is best for both of us. If it is not us, you will be pointed somewhere better.

A two-way fit

What we ask of you. Tell us a little about your business and why you would make a good client. The ones we do our best work for plan ahead, keep to the schedule we agree together, are straight with us about what is going on, and pay on time. That is the whole list.

What we commit to in return. Everything we promise is put in writing — scope, price, schedule, who does what — so there is never a question later about what was agreed. Work runs to a schedule set up front. And every message, on every matter, gets a reply by the next business day, if not sooner. Taking on only the clients we can serve properly is how we make sure we meet every one of those obligations.

Saying that plainly costs some enquiries. Fewer than promising it and then failing to deliver would.

The straightforward part

Ring (708) 296-3646 and describe the problem in ordinary words. You will get an engineer, not a salesperson, and a number before anyone commits to anything.