What managed IT means when we say it
Managed IT is a flat monthly agreement under which we take responsibility for your technology working: every workstation, server, firewall, Wi-Fi access point, Microsoft 365 account, printer, phone, and the vendors behind them. We monitor it all continuously, patch it on a schedule, secure it by default, answer your staff when something's wrong, come on site when hands are needed, and sit down with you every quarter to plan what's next.
The alternative most Southwest Florida businesses live with is break-fix: something stops working, someone calls someone, an hourly invoice arrives later. Break-fix pays the provider when your business is down. Managed IT pays the provider to keep it up. That difference changes the incentives for everyone involved, and it's why we don't offer break-fix at all.
Why this matters more in Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties
Businesses here run lean. A 20-person dermatology practice, a 40-person dealership, or a 12-person law firm rarely employs anyone whose job is IT, which means the office manager is the IT department until the day something breaks badly enough to call for help. Layer on hurricane season, a seasonal workforce that swells every January, and offices spread between Sarasota, Lakewood Ranch, Venice, Englewood, and Port Charlotte, and "we'll call someone when it's down" stops being a plan.
There's also the compliance angle that's specific to the businesses we serve. Medical practices answer to HIPAA. Dealerships and anyone arranging financing answer to the FTC Safeguards Rule. CPA firms answer to IRS Publication 4557. Every one of those frameworks assumes somebody is monitoring access, enforcing multi-factor authentication, keeping systems patched, and testing backups. Managed IT is how a small business meets that assumption without hiring for it.
What's included
Everything below is in the one plan. There is no "basic" tier that leaves security out, because a managed network without security isn't managed.
Support and management
- Unlimited help desk, remote and on site, for every user on the plan
- 24/7 monitoring and alerting on every workstation, server, and network device
- Patch management for Windows, macOS, browsers, and the common business applications, scheduled around your hours
- Microsoft 365 administration, security baseline, and quarterly license review
- Backup monitoring with scheduled recovery tests, not just job-completion checks
- Vendor management: we open the ticket with your EHR, DMS, carrier, or software vendor and stay on it
- Procurement support, with equipment arriving configured and encrypted
- Quarterly vCIO strategy and budget reviews
- A client portal showing every ticket, asset, and recommendation
Security, built in
- Endpoint detection and response on every device, with automatic isolation of a compromised machine
- Email security and phishing filtering
- Multi-factor authentication rolled out and enforced
- Security awareness training with phishing simulations
- Managed WatchGuard firewall with current firmware and logged rules
- Dark web monitoring for leaked credentials on your domain
- A documented incident response process
- Cyber insurance questionnaire support
Common problems we fix in the first 30 days
Almost every environment we take over has a version of the same list. None of them are exotic. All of them are the kind of thing that becomes an outage or a breach on a random Tuesday.
- Backups that report success and have never once been restored
- Workstations months behind on updates because someone decided "updates slow things down"
- A shared login at the front desk, the service bay, or the F&I office that every employee past and present knows
- A firewall still running the configuration from whoever installed the internet circuit
- Former employees with live email, VPN, and line-of-business accounts
- Guest Wi-Fi for patients or customers on the same network as the server
- No inventory of what the business owns, what it's licensed for, or which vendor supports what
- Admin passwords in a spreadsheet, a sticky note, or one person's head
We document the environment, close the urgent gaps first, and get monitoring and backup live, typically within two weeks. Full onboarding, including the first quarterly plan, is complete within 30 days.
What a typical month looks like
Monitoring runs around the clock. When a disk starts failing, a backup misses, a server runs out of space, or an endpoint flags suspicious behavior, we know before your staff do and usually fix it before they notice. Patches go out on the schedule you approve, overnight or on weekends. Your staff open tickets by phone, email, or the portal and hear from a technician in under 15 minutes on average during business hours. Most tickets close on the first contact. The ones that need hands get a local technician, typically the same or next business day.
Every recurring problem gets root-caused rather than reopened. If the same printer fails every Monday, we find out why and fix that. Ticket trends feed the quarterly review, so the problems that cost your staff the most time are the ones that get engineered away first.
Fully managed or co-managed
Fully managed: we are your IT department, end to end. Your staff call us, we handle everything, and you get a quarterly plan and a monthly invoice.
Co-managed: you have an internal IT person or an office manager who's comfortable handling the day-to-day, and we provide the layers one person can't: 24/7 monitoring, the security stack, backup, after-hours coverage, projects, and a senior partner for planning. Same plan, same tools, same portal, priced for the users and systems you hand us.
What it costs
One flat monthly price per user, with security included. No per-ticket charges. No hourly billing for on-site visits within Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte counties. No separate security package. Compliance support for HIPAA and FTC Safeguards is the only add-on. Project work, like an office move or a server replacement, is quoted and approved in writing before it starts.
We don't publish the per-user number because it depends on your user count, servers, locations, and whether compliance applies. After a free assessment, you'll have a written quote within one business day. See exactly what's in the plan.
How we're different from a national provider
A national provider can be perfectly competent. What it can't be is here. Our office is in Englewood. Our technicians live in the communities they support and route through Sarasota, Venice, Bradenton, Lakewood Ranch, and Port Charlotte on a regular schedule. When a hurricane is coming, we check in with every managed client before the storm and are on the phone the moment it's safe afterward. When a technician needs to be in your server closet, that's a drive, not a scheduled dispatch from another state.
The other difference is process. Every client goes through the same five steps: assess, onboard, stabilize, optimize, plan. Every environment is documented so nothing depends on one person's memory. Every ticket, asset, and recommendation lives in the client portal, so you always know what we're working on and why. Here's how the process works.
Who it's for, and who it isn't
Managed IT fits businesses with roughly 10 to 200 employees that need reliable, secure technology and don't want to build an internal department to get it. It fits especially well where compliance applies, where downtime costs real money by the hour, and where the owner would rather have IT handled than discussed.
It isn't a fit for a company that already has a fully staffed, well-resourced internal IT team with no gaps. If that's you, we'll say so during the assessment.
Getting started
The first step is a free IT and compliance assessment: about 30 minutes with whoever knows your systems best, read-only access to review the environment, and a written report of what we found, what to fix first, and what the plan would cost. No obligation, and the report is yours to keep either way.