After selling my first MSP business to my partner, I was planning to take a bit of time off and focus on Grad School. As luck would have it, a few days after being temporarily retired my phone rang. It was a recruiter with a Head of Infrastructure role for a mid-size international firm. I was thinking how to respectfully decline when he said something unexpected: ‘the new Global CIO there needs help. IT is in a failed state. Oh and his name is Bill, I think you know him from Company X.
I did in fact know Bill and liked him, so I took the meeting. It was a meeting not an interview during which Bill told me the entire environment is a mess, Exchange has been down for a week, and the staff he inherited is struggling.
A short time after starting, I started calling my friends from consulting days. ‘Hey, I need to greenfield a datacenter network stack with public BGP. How long would it take you? Two days to build and two to test as long as we get AS number? Ok’. “Hey man, just talked to N, he can build out the network. Can you build me a new Exchange Stretched DAG and test migrating into it? Cool, so a week from the day we get VM Hosts? Ok.’
Since my background was pretty broad, I rebuilt AD, stood up new EMC SANs, switch fabric, and VMWare hosts myself in about a month, soup to nuts. Revamped internal process, added new asset management and helpdesk platform, and created SoPs for regional offices in about another month. In six months we were in steady state and getting an average of 4.9 out of 5 on internal user surveys.
None of this is intended as bragging. People who are true consultants are people internal IT can never compete with. Consider the modern day, Public Cloud enabled company of 1500 people or so. You have a few people on helpdesk, a network engineer, and a pair of Sys Admin guys who’ve been with the company for a while. They never embraced the Cloud mindset because change is hard, its human nature to resist it, and they’ve no incentive to do so. They have only a working knowledge of Cloud and from a resiliency and security perspective, no one really knows how competent they are inside to firm. You just hope that if one is on vacation the other one doesn’t get sick.
Now contrast it with a team like ours. We have guys who know everything, from Active Directory design to Azure Virtual Desktop, Data Lake, Defender, etc. But they also specialize. We have guys who’ve been doing Intune design for eight years and have completed over a hundred implementations. We have folks who come from data analytics firms and have consulted dozens of customers. There’s even a guy who’s been a consultant for so long, he can often tell you the root cause of the issue by just listening to the symptoms the Client is reporting (we call him ‘Industry Prophet’) They’re would never take a corporate job. Not just because they’d be bored, but also because Corp IT budgets cant compete with their compensation; they make more because they’re more efficient at producing results. They’re used to working at midnight and on weekends and rarely go on vacation. They live to ingest new technologies, like AI. They are masters at solving complex, multidisciplinary problems like security breaches or designing roadmaps for clients. They’re the professional athletes of IT.
Yet, they’re a phone call away. If your staff is properly allocated, they’re already busy and have no time to spare. Let us help. We can validate, recommend, design, or even implement. We play well with others and bring a tremendous amount of technical knowledge paired with deep experience.
