Senior networking, by the hour and the month.

What retaining actually gets you

The monthly retainer is not a support contract with a helpdesk behind it. It buys continuity: engineers who already have your network in their heads, documentation kept current, monitoring on the gear that tends to fail quietly, and the ability to get something scheduled quickly when you need hands on it.

Everything beyond that — projects, call-outs, cutovers, cabling — is billed at published hourly rates or quoted fixed. You are not paying a flat fee to insure against your own bad luck; you are keeping specialists on the hook and paying for the work you actually use.

The number most people have not run

Published Chicago averages for a senior network engineer in 2026 sit between $117,690 and $167,360 depending on the source. Take $125,000 as a conservative middle. Add employer payroll taxes, health insurance, workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance and paid time off and the loaded figure lands near $160,000 — before the laptop, the lab gear and the certifications you would be funding to keep them current.

Retaining costs $650 a month plus the hours you use. At 10 hours a month that is about $30,000 a year, and those are senior hours rather than a junior first line with somebody experienced somewhere behind them.

The break-even lands around 69 hours a month. Below it, retaining wins comfortably. Above it, hiring starts to make sense and you will be told so.

Why the work happens in the evening

Because that is when network work belongs, not because of anybody’s diary. A core switch replacement or a firewall migration takes the network down while it happens. Run it at two in the afternoon and you have stopped the business; run it at eight in the evening and nobody notices.

Downtown that logic is sharper still. Freight elevators and loading docks are rationed and often only bookable outside business hours. Building engineers are easier to reach for riser access once the tenants have gone. And a cutover that goes wrong at nine at night has a whole night to be rolled back, which is the difference between a late evening and an incident.

Daytime providers either work around all of this or bill a premium for the out-of-hours window. Here it is simply the normal working pattern, at the standard rate.

What is in the retainer

Monitoring on switches, firewalls and access points, with alerting on the failures that otherwise go unnoticed — a dead PSU in a stacked switch, a failing SFP, an access point that has been rebooting nightly for a month.

Firmware and patch review on network equipment, applied in a scheduled window rather than whenever a vendor advisory frightens somebody.

Documentation kept current: topology, VLANs, addressing, firewall rules, and what every port actually does. It lives with you, not with us. The point is that you are never hostage to one person’s memory, including ours.

Priority scheduling for evening and weekend work, and a quarterly look at what is ageing and should be in next year’s budget.

The most expensive part of a support call is remembering

Watch a tech on an unfamiliar network: the first twenty minutes go to archaeology. Which port feeds the conference room, what the guest VLAN was numbered, where the circuit account number lives, which PDF has the reset procedure for that particular firewall. On hourly billing you pay for every minute of it — and the system stays down while it happens.

We document every client site as we work it — equipment, circuits, VLANs, port maps, building access — in a system our engineers can query in plain English, alongside the manufacturer manuals for the gear you actually own. Mid-job, from a phone in your server closet, “what’s the gateway on the voice VLAN” or “factory reset procedure for this switch” is an answer in seconds, not a search through folders.

What that buys you is boring and valuable: less billed time spent re-learning your own network, faster fixes because the fix starts immediately, and no dependence on whatever one person happens to remember. The documentation is yours, it is kept current on every visit, and it is why the second call to your site is always faster than the first.

What is not in it, said plainly

There is no helpdesk. If your staff need somebody to ring about a password or a printer, that is a different service — you want an in-house person or a generalist MSP for it, and we work alongside those regularly.

There is no first-line helpdesk. Somebody is on call around the clock and a real outage gets picked up whatever time it starts — but that is for problems, not for a stream of password resets and printer queries from twenty desks. A generalist covers that better and more cheaply, and we work alongside one happily.

And the firm is deliberately small: two senior engineers, with specialists brought in for work outside networking. That is why there is no first line and why you never re-explain your setup. It is also why, past about 69 hours a month, we will point you at hiring instead.

Where this fits badly

If your network genuinely needs more than about 69 hours of attention a month, employ someone. If you are in a regulated environment that requires a named on-site engineer during trading hours, employ someone. If what you actually want is somebody your staff can ring all day, you want a helpdesk rather than a network specialist.

Those cases are real and they come up. Being told which one you are on the first call is worth more than being sold a retainer that quietly does not fit.