Managed IT
What the monthly fee actually covers
A flat fee per person, per month, and we take responsibility for the technology they use. Here is what sits inside that, what gets quoted separately, and how the money works.
A reply from Keaton or Kurt, usually the same working day.
What “managed” means, in plain English
The way most small offices grew up doing IT is to call someone when something breaks and pay by the hour. That arrangement quietly pays your provider more when your equipment is unreliable, and it puts your staff in the position of deciding whether a problem is expensive enough to report.
Managed IT runs the other way around. You pay a fixed amount each month per machine, and we carry the outcome. Once that’s the deal, every hour we don’t spend fixing something is an hour we keep, so preventing the problem is in both of our interests. That’s why most of the work below happens before you would have noticed anything was wrong.
In more detail
The parts of the job people most often want to read about on their own.
Cybersecurity
Endpoint protection on every machine on every plan, and on Secure and Full Suite a security operations team watching around the clock.
Network support
Internet, switches, Wi-Fi, router, firewall and the servers behind them. When any part of it stops, you call us rather than working out whose problem it is.
Microsoft 365
Email, files, accounts and licensing, along with the security settings that Microsoft leaves switched off until somebody turns them on.
Backup and recovery
Included on every machine we cover on Full Suite, and added per machine on the other plans. Either way, each one gets a real test restore every month.
Hardware
Laptops, desktops, servers, switches and firewalls, sourced and set up for you, with nothing added to the price.
Phone systems
Business phone service through our partnership with OIT VoIP, set up and supported alongside the network it runs on.
We work across every industry, and there are three where we’ve done this often enough to know the shape of it before we arrive.
What runs on every plan
None of this is an upgrade or an add-on. It’s the floor, on the entry plan.
Watched around the clock
Every workstation and server reports in continuously, at every hour, including the ones when nobody is in the building. A drive starting to fail gets flagged while it's still a scheduled replacement, rather than the morning nobody can open the schedule. The same watch catches a server running out of space, or a machine that has been rebooting itself all week.
Patched and protected
Operating systems and approved applications are updated daily, and endpoint protection runs on every machine. The updates your staff keep clicking away get handled without anyone clicking anything. Most break-ins at businesses your size come through a gap that was fixed by the manufacturer months earlier, on a machine where nobody ever installed the fix.
Microsoft 365 and printers
Licences, mailboxes, shared calendars, and the security settings Microsoft ships switched off until somebody turns them on. Printers are covered as well, because nobody should need a separate company for the one that jams by the front desk.
Your network, end to end
Internet, switches, Wi-Fi, router and firewall. When any part of it stops, you call one number instead of working out whose problem it is and getting told by two companies that it belongs to the other one.
Accounts opened and closed
New starters get set up before their first morning. People who leave get shut off the same day, which sounds obvious and is one of the most common gaps we find during an assessment. Old accounts belonging to people who left years ago are still a live way into a business.
Support without a meter running
Unlimited remote support is on every plan. Your staff call or email as often as they need to. Nobody counts the minutes, and nobody at your end has to decide whether a problem is worth the cost of reporting it, which is the quiet damage hourly billing does.
See how the three plans differ, and the response times, which are identical on all three.
What sits outside the monthly fee
Four things get handled separately. We’d rather you read it here than find out on an invoice.
Projects with a start and an end
A server replacement, an office move, a migration onto new software. These get scoped and quoted before anything begins, at the rates written into your agreement, and you approve the number before we start.
Hardware
You buy it at what we pay for it. We don't add a margin to a laptop, and there's no requirement to buy through us at all. Most providers do mark hardware up, which is worth knowing when you compare quotes. It also decides whose interest is served when someone tells you a machine is due. We have nothing to gain either way, so the answer is just the answer.
On-site visits
Billed by the hour on Essential and Secure, with no travel charge anywhere in our area. Full Suite includes three on-site hours a month, and On-Site Care makes on-site work part of the monthly fee on any plan.
Backup
Included on every machine we cover on Full Suite. On the other two plans it's added per machine, because plenty of machines hold nothing worth backing up and charging for them anyway would be dishonest. Whatever is backed up is listed on your service schedule, with a test restore every month.
Who this fits, and who it doesn’t
It works best for businesses running somewhere between ten and fifty machines in and around Lansing. That’s the range where a full-time IT person is hard to justify and going without one has started to hurt.
Below about ten machines, a monthly plan is often more than you need, and we’ll say so rather than sell you one. Above fifty, you’re at the size where an in-house person plus a provider behind them usually beats either on its own. Both of those conversations are free, and we have them fairly often.
We cover Lansing, East Lansing, Okemos, Haslett, Holt, Grand Ledge, DeWitt, Mason, Charlotte and St. Johns, along with the surrounding communities.
Questions we get asked
- What does unlimited remote support actually mean?
- Exactly what it sounds like. Your staff contact us as often as they need to about the machines on your plan, and no part of that is billed by the minute. It covers the computers, the software you run day to day, and the network they sit on. Training a new hire on your practice management system isn't support, though in practice we usually help anyway.
- Is there a setup fee to become a client?
- No. There's no onboarding fee and no charge for getting your machines on our system. The only per-machine setup charge is when you buy a new computer and we deploy it, and it never applies to the machines you already own.
- How quickly do you respond?
- Critical issues carry a 30-minute response commitment during business hours, and that's written into every agreement on every plan rather than being an aspiration. In practice one of us is usually answering inside fifteen minutes. Lower-priority items have their own committed times, and those are the same on every plan too.
- Do we have to buy our hardware through you?
- No. When you do buy through us you pay what we pay, with nothing added on top. When you'd rather buy it yourself, that's genuinely fine and we'll tell you what to get.
- We already have an IT provider. Is switching a hassle?
- It's the situation most of our clients came from, and the work sits mostly with us rather than with you. The setup happens outside business hours where we can manage it, and we run the handover conversation with your previous provider so you're not stuck in the middle of it.
- How is it priced?
- A flat fee per person, per month, covering two devices each. Servers are priced separately because they carry more and their failure costs more. Tell us how many people you have and we'll put a real number in front of you the same week.
Find out what it would cost you
Tell us how many people you have and roughly how many machines. We'll put a real monthly number in front of you the same week and walk you through what's in it.